This was the final judgment of the Arabic race and its subject allies
upon the western limits of the world, and in two ways they helped to fix
this belief, derived from the timid coasting-traders of the Roman Empire
on Greek and Latin Christendom. First, the Spanish Caliphate cut off all
access to the Western Sea beyond the Bay of Biscay, from the eighth to
the twelfth centuries. Not till the capture of Lisbon in 1147, could
Christian enterprise on this side gain any basis, or starting-point. Not
till the conquest of the Algarve in the extreme south-west of the
peninsula, at the end of the twelfth century, was this enterprise free
to develop itself. Secondly, in the darkest ages of Christian
depression, the seventh, the eighth, the ninth, the tenth centuries,
when only the brief age of Charlemagne offered any chance of an
independent and progressive Catholic Empire in the west, the Arabs
became recognised along with the Byzantines as the main successors of
Greek culture. The science, the metaphysic, the abstract ideas of these
centuries came into Germany, France, and Italy from Cordova and from
Bagdad, as much as from Byzantium. And on questions like the South
Atlantic or Indian Ocean, or the shape of Africa,--where Islam had all
the field to itself, and there was no positive and earlier discovery
which might contradict a natural reluctance to test tradition by
experiment--Christendom accepted the Arabic verdict with deference.

In the same way, on still more difficult points, such as the theory of
a canal from the Caspian to the Black Sea, or from the Caspian to the
Arctic circle, or from the Black Sea to the Baltic, Paris and Rome and
Bologna and Oxford accepted the Arabic descriptions.

It has been necessary for us to attend to the defects of Arabic
geography, in order to understand how in the long Saracen control of the