Was Europe during the dark and middle ages more advanced in science and technology than the eastern civilizations?
Hanson: After 9-11 that question has become a battleground, as we are told ad nauseam that Europe was backward while Islam was flowering a vast oversimplification. Remember after the fall of Rome, Europe was fragmented in a variety of religious and ethnic enclaves while by the 8th century Islam was beginning to unite much of the former empire in North Africa and Asia. However, recall too that the logistics of transporting the Crusaders to the Holy Land was sophisticated and there was not much difference between arms and armor on either side; both copied designs whose origins were Roman or Roman-inspired. We can arbitrarily cite this and that selective evidence as proof of a particular point of view, but I tend to note that whereas in the Islamic world free, secular inquiry and the preservation of classical texts, at the apex of classical Islamic culture, were often either under siege or the domain of a small elite. In Europe such enclaves were the result of social and economic turmoil
