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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Oh, lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world
history examined and science explained. This is one day university Welcome.
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This is half hour history Secrets of the Medieval World.
I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. This week we continue with
the early medieval period. Before there were knights and shining
armor at Arthur's round table or tower in cathedrals, there
was Rome. And Rome was the center of everything until
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it wasn't. So what happened? We'll let Chris take it
from here. Well, right away, we have to ask ourselves
did Rome fall? And I have to tell you that
I'm one of those historians who doesn't believe that Rome
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fell because it makes it sound like there was a
light switch. Right, So Rome is going along, everything is fine,
and then along comes the year four seventy six, a
light switch goes off, and then we're in the dark
ages for a thousand years. Doesn't work for me, So
I am more apt to say to my students and
to you that Rome had a certain demise, and that
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Rome transformed from one form into another form. After all,
why does the Roman Catholic Church speak Latin officially? Why
is the city of Rome so important to Catholicism and
to Christianity. There are historical reasons for that, and they're
all tied up with the Roman Empire. It's simply impossible
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to talk about the Roman Empire without talking about Christianity.
So let's take that date of four seventy six and
move back a couple of centuries, and what we begin
to hear, what we begin to talk about, is not
a story of Rome where everything was fine and then
it begins to crumble, and then it crashes, and then
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something else happens. That discontinuity between one period and another
period is really part of an older school of what
we call historiography. Historiography is the history of history. It's
the history of schools of thought. And the school of
thought that I subscribe to is more something called the
late Antique school. Now it's a rather unfortunate title because
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as soon as you say late antique, you think of
the antique road show. And we don't mean that furniture.
We mean the ancient world, antique being another word for
the ancient world. And if any of you are really
interested in Peter Brown's biography of Augustine of Bo, Peter
Brown is an a historian of this period, and he
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tries to look at Augustine of Hippo, who dies around
four twenty or four thirty, as one of these people
who is a late antique character. He's Christian, he's also Roman,
and he's in this transitional period. In fact, he writes
his great work City of God because the city of
Rome had been sacked, and so he wants to talk about, well,
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what's next, what's going on in this transformation of time.
So once we begin to look at this period as
a longer period, the year that kind of becomes very
important is the year two ninety three when a particular
Roman emperor by the name of Diocletian decides that running
an empire the size of if you recall the continental
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United States, it's just too big. And so what he
does is he draws kind of a line in the
sand and he breaks the empire up. It's not quite
a fifty fifty split, it's more kind of like a
two thirds one third split, and he says, we're going
to have two sections. We're gonna have a Western Empire
and an Eastern empire, and the Western Empire is gonna
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stay centered in Rome, and we're kind of looking for
a place to use as a capital for the Eastern Empire,
and that's going to become Constantinople, a new city in
a few decades, and so east and west, and then
around three twelve there's a new emperor by the name
of Constantine the Great. Some people say Constantine, it doesn't matter.
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And Constantine was kind of really fascinated with the Greek
east more than the Latin west. He thought that's where
the energy isn't and I want to build that other capital.
So he takes basically a village called Byzantium and he
builds it up into this huge city that he calls Constantinople.
And this is very, very kind of arrogance because Constantinople
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is his name, Constantine and the word polus, which means
city state in Greek, and that's when you get Constantinople.
And he calls it a nova Roma, a new Rome,
and he moves there. Now there's an emperor in the west,
but he goes to the east, and because he's really
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the really powerful guy, the energy of the empire, are
the resources of the empire begin to shift over from
west to east, and that leaves the city of Rome
kind of vulnerable. And what happens is that the edges
or the frontiers of the Latin West begin to move backwards.
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Rome doesn't explode. Rome implodes. Rome suffers from something called hypothermia.
All right, God forbid that should happen to us. But
if you suffer from hypothermia, what happens is that your
body says, well, I can't live without my brain, without
my lungs, without my heart and my major organ. So
I'm going to draw blood away from my extremities. I
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don't want to live without my fingers and toes, but
I can actually survive without that. So the blood comes
in to save the heart. And the heart, of course,
is the city of Rome. So Rome begins to kind
of creep inwards, and the city of Rome becomes vulnerable
because these other tribes from outside of Rome can get
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closer and closer in the city of romas full of money,
and so the city of Rome itself is sacked three
times in a fifty year period, in four ten and
four forty five, in four seventy six, and there's the date,
and let's finally talk about four seventy six. Okay, So
there's an emperor on the throne in Rome, and his
given name is Romulus, and his title as Augustus Emperor.
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And if you look back in Roman history, Rome had
been founded by twins called Romulus and Remus. So historians
in the seventeen and eighteen hundreds see a Romulus at
the very beginning, say about a thousand BC or BC,
and they see a Romulus in four seventy six and
they think this is great, this is bookends boom. Four
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seventy six is the fall of Rome, and that begins
this kind of you know, the thesis of a line
in the sand. So what's happening is that as the
Roman Empire transforms in the west and the energy moves
to the east, power begins to shift from the western
capital of the city of Rome up north. And Clovis
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rather unusual name, isn't it. Clovis converts in the year
five h three, and Clovis is pretty much a tribal
chieftain in the area of France and Germany modern France
and Germany, Germania and Gaul in Latin ideas, and that's
going to be an important moment for the PowerShift of
Christianity later on. And so there's really no western emperor,
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So who's left in the city of Rome. But this
guy called the Bishop of Rome, who over time becomes
so powerful in a civil and a religious way that
we call him the Pope with all of what that means.
And then we have this notion of the barbarian invasions
coming in right now. A barbarian is a relative term.
Barbarian is is one of the one of those distinctions
between us versus them. And to put it in kind
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of trite terms, but maybe terms that can help us.
If you live in Chicago, Cubs fans call white Sox
fans barbarians, and white Sox fans called Cubs fans barbarians.
They just you know, it's not us, So it's them.
And every culture dating back to the ancient Greek says,
anybody who doesn't know our language speaks like blah blah
blah blah blah. And that's where barbarians as a word
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comes from. And these barbarians again, this notion that the
barbarians invade Rome because Rome is collapsing, Well, how many
of you would run into a burning building. I wouldn't.
So obviously, these tribes are coming into Roman territories because
Roman territories have things that they want, like aqueducts, like
clean running water, like the equivalent of flush toilets, not
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quite like better nutrition, like better organization, safer streets, and
so these people begin to move in and they take
their own native Germanic culture and they marry it with
Roman imperial systems, and we begin to get the early
Middle Ages. And these people were probably pushed also. They
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were going towards something that they wanted, but they were
pushed from behind by Attila the Hun who dies in
four fifty three, and the other Huns, and they may
have been pushed by other marauding tribes in China or Russia,
probably because of bad harvests, and so these people needed
to move forward to find food. That's after Rome in
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the west. What's going on in the east, Well, that
little village of Byzantium has now been transformed into the
city of Constantinople, and there's an emperor in Constantinople, the
air of Constantine until the year fourteen fifty three. I
didn't make a mistake there, that's one four five three.
The emperor in Constantinople is going to claim to be
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the heir of ju LEAs Caesar who is killed in
forty four BC, Augustus of Constantine until fourteen fifty three,
and the big one, early one in our period is Justinian.
Justinian has a very long reign from five to twenty
seven to five sixty five, has this ragin where he
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is recreating Western learning in a Greek key or a
Greek riff, if you will, and this very close marriage
of church and state. Now, the context here is that
Justinian dies right before that Muslim push that we were
talking about. And again the Muslims kind of bounce off
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of Constantinople after six thirty two and they go across
North Africa and over to the West because they can't
take over Constantinople until fourteen fifty three when Constantinople finally falls.
And there's a golden age of Byzantine history from about
eight fifty to about twelve fifteen. And it's when things
get a little tight there that the Eastern Emperor writes
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a letter to the Western Pope and says, hey, I
need some help here. The Muslims are at my gates.
And that's one of the one of the impetus for
the Crusades. As we're going to see let's go back
to Justinian for a second. Had a fascinating wife by
the name of Theodora, and Justinian and Theodora really reigned
almost as partners, and Justinian inherited from Constantine this notion
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of sacred kingship. Constantine saw himself. He called himself a
thirteenth apostle, a priest and king. And of course that's
a Christian version of the idea that the Roman emperor
was divine, and it goes back into history with this
very close relationship between say Pharaoh, who is divine, the
son of Ra and so as we're going to see
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further down the line, this very uneasy relationship of what
kind of we call a theocracy, where the church and
the state are the same thing. They would have never
separated those words. Pitts an Eastern emperor versus a Western pope.
And Justinian is so fascinated by Rome that he redoes
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the law code for his part of the empire. It's
called the Codex Justinianus. Again, he rather not humbly names
it after himself, and it's a revision of the Roman
law code. And then once he's got that, he starts
traveling west. He takes over southern Italy, he takes over Sicily,
and he's trying to now push the energy not from
west to east, as Constantine had done, but from east
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to west. And Constantinople is going to remain this Eastern
jewel for years where royal authority was given as patronage
to thinkers and artists. And an example of that, the
most beautiful physical example of that is the Church of
Hagia Sophia, which has been a church and then a
mosque and back and forth several times. That's what's going
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on in the east. Well, right now we're heading into
a short break. But when we turn Vikings plus what
it was like to live under Islamic rule, what's going
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on way in the north. In fact, even those areas
in Scandinavia where Rome never showed up. And that brings
us to the vikings. A lot of people don't know
where to put the vikings. You think of the vikings,
and you think of cartoons, and you think of thor
and you say to yourself, but where does that go
in my chronology and my geography, And the answer is
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it goes in the early medieval periods. Some of you
may have read these Vinland sagas. So the Vikings are
called the norse Men because they come from the north,
and so the north Men are the norse Men. And
that's really how they show up in the ancient sources.
They don't show up as the Vikings. And they start
moving around around eight hundred or around eight fifty, and
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they start moving around in the summer, right because you
can't sail in the winter, so they move around in
the summer. And their raiding parties, the Vikings are hit
and run operations. They plunder, they strike, and they plunder
and they leave rather than settle. When they do settle,
they settle as staging posts for further raids, as opposed
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to something that's more permanent. Now, some of those staging
posts naturally grew, but they were never intended to be permanent.
And so one example, way up in northeast Europe would
be on the eastern portion of England in the city
of York. York is actually a Viking or Norse word
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for your vic jo r v i K, And the
city of York to this day takes its Viking heritage
very very seriously, and there's a your viccent there now
where there's been an archaeological dig and a recreation of
what the city or the village of Yorvic looked like
in that period. But when we think of the Vikings,
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we think of cold weather, okay, but they actually also
did these strike and plunder raids in the Iberian Peninsula.
They didn't quite get into the Mediterranean too far because
of the way their ships were built, and bit by
bit they moved from England to Iceland, to Greenland and
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all the way across North America into what is Canada's
Newfoundland around the year one thousand and Again that was
a smaller community, although what people say is the Viking
Well or the Viking Tower in Newport, Rhode Island certainly
is not, but it still draws tourists. There now one
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other player. So we've had after Rome, we've had Byzantium,
we've had the Vikings, and now Islam. So to repeat,
Mohammed's birth is about the year five seventy a d
or ce. Even Muslim sources aren't sure about that. Everybody agrees.
He dies in six thirty two, about six ten, when
he's about forty years old. He receives the first revelation.
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The angel Gabriel comes to him and says recite, there
is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet,
which is the first revelation, but it actually doesn't occur
in the first surah or chapter of the Koran, because
the Koran doesn't go chronologically, and so it's about two
thirds of the way through. And what Mohammed does is
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he attacks local idol worship in Mecca, the area in
modern day Saudi Arabia, and Mohammed is very much like
Abraham was in the ancient Biblical times because he is
a monotheist surrounded by polytheists. And so he's thrown out
of Mecca in the year six twenty two in something
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that shows up in the sources as the Heijira, and
he's thrown out of Mecca and he goes to Medina.
This happens to be year one of the Muslim calendar, right,
so we've had a change in the Christian calendar year
one of the Muslim calendar. We have an ancient Jewish
calendar as well. He dies in six thirty two and
in a one hundred year period that historians couldn't make
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up if they tried. From six thirty two to seven
thirty two Islam begins its advance. Now there is a
lot of controversy about Islam's advance. A lot of people
say Islam advanced its faith at the point of a sword. Well,
Islam was spreading, and excuse me, but Christianity had spread
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that way as well, And so there's notion that Christianity
spreads peacefully is not true in all cases, in all places,
at all times, and the same as true of Islam. Yes,
there were bloody encounters, but there were also encounters where
communities welcomed Islam. It was the dam dating force. Why
are you're going to fight against that tide? And they
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cut deals with Islam in much the same way that
people deals with the Roman Empire. Come to town, we
will be loyal, but leave us alone to worship as
we wish. And so in six thirty two to seven
thirty two, Islam takes over the modern day Holy Land,
gets as far as Constantinople, but can't take over Constantinople
for another seven hundred years. Saudi Arabia and all of
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those areas today like Kuwait and all of North Africa,
jumps the Iberian Peninsula Spain and establishes a capital in Kordeba,
And so there are a lot of places in the
United States and in fact around the world where Jewish, Muslim,
and Christian dialogue takes place, and a lot of these
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programs are called Kordeba House or the Kordeba Program because
Kordaba becomes kind of an example of how the three
faiths could have coexisted. So it's they're stopped in the
East in the year seven eighteen by a Byzantine emperor
by the name of Leo the Third fighting against a
very very interesting Islamic general called Suleiman comes up in
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the sources as Suleiman the Magnificent, and they're stopped in
the West in seven thirty two by Charlemagne's grandfather, who
was named Charles Martel. Now you can't open up a
phone book from that period of time if one did
exist and finds Martella Charles, because Martell is a Frankish
word for the hammer, kind of sounds like a mafia boss.
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Charles the Hammer, And he's called the Hammer because he
was such a forceful fighter that running into him was
like running into a brick wall. Remember Stonewall Jackson from
the American South, And so everybody has to come together
under Charles's command to do what nobody had been able
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to do for a hundred years, which is stopped the Muslims.
And in fact he does that at a battle on
a field between the two cities of Poitier and tour
It actually was closer to Poitier, but both of those
two cities claim to this day to have been the
spot where Charles Martell stopped the Muslim advance. Because of
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tourism dollars, and Charles Martel has had a new life
in the last ten or fifteen years because of the
very politicized notion that some have that Islam is trying
to capture or take over Western civilization. So people who
are looking for some political character to say, oh, we
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need to be like, they picked Charles Martell, an obvious
example of politicizing history. And so the Muslims fall back, oh,
from that area in Gaul, they go back over the Pyrenees,
and then the story of seven thirty two to fourteen
ninety two from the Christian perspective is called the ray
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Konquista or the Reconquest, where Christianity is pushing down, down,
down down the Muslims and the big moment is Toledo's
fall in ten eighty five, and we'll see later that
it's the fall of Toledo in ten eighty five in
the West that makes the Pope say, well, if we
beat the Muslims there, maybe we can beat them in
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the Holy Land. And the Crusading movement begins eleven years
later in ten ninety six. I want to spend a
moment talking about dynasties. Now again, you may think that
this goes against my notion that I don't want to
talk about names, dates, and places, But I do want
to talk about these dynasties because the dynasties from this
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period remain important dynasties throughout history because they are centered
in cities that are still very important in history. And
so the first dynasty after Mohammad dies, Mohammed doesn't have
a son, he doesn't have a natural air, so it's
his son in law that takes over, and very quickly
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Islam splits into Sunni and Shia, and there's also a
Sufi mystic movement that crosses over the two of them
in much the same way that Christianity splits into East
and West early on as well. And so you have
it takes a little while for dynasties to set themselves
up in these arrival dynasties, and the first major dynasty
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is the Umayad dynasty, which is based in Damascus. Damascus
remains the capital of modern day Syria, and that's for
about one hundred years after Muhammad till about seven fifty.
And then the Abbasids, who are based in Baghdad, yes
that's Baghdad in modern day Iraq, which actually is not
far from ancients Babylon, and they basically control Islam, especially
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in what we call the modern Middle East, from about
seven fifty to twelve fifty eight, and the power shifts
to Egypt in the capital of Cairo under the Fatimids
for a period of time within there, and then the
Mamluks take over from twelve fifty to about fifteen thirty.
It's in fact the mom Luks who take over Constantinople
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in fourteen fifty three. And then the Ottomans. And folks
know the Ottomans from courses that you've taken if you
remember famous cartoons of the sick Man of Europe on
the eve of World War One. The Ottoman Empire is
that very corrupt decentralized, shaky organization that gets destroyed by
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the imperial Western powers and gets chopped up officially in
the Treaty of Versailles, and in fact Europe in the
modern Middle East are still dealing with some of the
fallout from those decisions. How did Muslims live with Christians
and Jews? Well, you know, we don't want to again
use cartoon characters, but it is generally true that in
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the medieval period it was better to be a Christian
or a Jew living under Islamic rule than a Muslim
or a Jew living under Christian rule, because Muslims didn't
have this notion that they needed to evangelize, that they
needed to convert everyone underneath them. And so let's use
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an example from the Roman Empire. The Jews and the
Roman Empire was what was called a religio licta, a
permitted religion. That is, the Jews were left alone. Or remember,
the Jews are Monotheists and apollotheistic setting in the Roman Empire,
and Jews are allowed to practice their faith as long
as they pray to their God Yahweh for the safety
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and security of the empire and pay tribute. Night's fancy
word for taxes, and so there is a measure of
tolerance toward Jews, and this happens a little bit with
Christians as well, but Christianity becomes persecuted in the Roman Empire,
as do the Jews later on. And so the notion
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of Islam is that Islam goes into a culture and
it assimilates what's there, and it enculturates what's there. It
doesn't destroy the culture. It encounters the culture and says,
what can we marry here, which is precisely what the
Roman Empire had done when spreading north in Europe, and
precisely what Christianity will do in its best moments assimilate
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and enculturate as well. And that's why some people who
are used to using the phrase pox Romana the Roman
peace have looked upon this period as a pox Islamica.
It's a controversial term, not everybody subscribes to it, but
by and large, if you paid your taxes and you
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didn't cause trouble, you were allowed to practice your Christian
or Jewish faith. That is not to say that there
weren't the equivalent of what we call programs against Christians
and Jews under Islamic rule, but then again, there were
programs under Christian rule against Jews and Muslims as well,
So we have to tell the whole story. And so
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there is no need for an Islamic Renaissance because there's
no Islamic Dark Age. Muslims are having these great advances
in medicine and math and exploration in the sciences. The
face of the Roman world has significantly changed. Next time
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on Secrets of the Medieval World, the Renaissance and the
Renaissance men behind it, not just Da Vinci. Half hour history.
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