Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science

[Lordquinton]

12. Actually, there wasn't really a dark ages

It's another canard of the church to make them look better. It was initially a time of strife, Rome had faltered, and the church had splintered, but things were still chugging along like they always had. The complaint was that barbarians were moving in, not learning the language, and people weren't going to church (sound familiar?) This whole thing about science stopping, and forgetting knowledge while the churches preserved what they could was made up in the renaissance. During that time dark meant unknown: they didn't know much about that time (like darkest Africa, they just didn't know what was there)

Constantinople was the capitol of the Roman empire for a long time, people just didn't think of it as the same beast, so they treat it as a separate entity, and the schism feeds into that idea.