Religion or Atheism? An open forum.

[MMI]

It was my understanding that we owed our Renaissance not to what we had done in the Dark Ages, but to the careful preservation of ancient books and ideas by the Ottomans, and the gradual re-introduction of those ideas was only made possible as Arabic translations of those ancient works reached Europe.

[Thorne]

It was my understanding that we owed our Renaissance not to what we had done in the Dark Ages, but to the careful preservation of ancient books and ideas by the Ottomans, and the gradual re-introduction of those ideas was only made possible as Arabic translations of those ancient works reached Europe.

To my knowledge you are correct. And the reason those books had to be re-introduced was because the Church had destroyed almost all of the copies they could find. (Some were kept, buried deep within the Vatican, where good Catholics would not be able to read them and get "wrong" ideas.