Hello, dear friend.
I'm so glad you're here again.
You know, I've been thinking about where we've been together. It has been an amazing journey. Back in episode 50, we explored the 19th century in a special ten episode series. You remember, that remarkable hundred years when the world transformed itself. When steam engines and telegraph wires stitched continents together. When ideas about democracy and human dignity began reshaping societies. When the modern world, the one you live in now, started taking shape.
And here we are at episode ninety nine -- it's hard to imagine, but that means the next one---episode 100---should be something special.
And I've been thinking about what story deserves that spot. What's important enough, what's been overlooked enough, to mark this moment.
So starting with episode 100, I'm going to tell you about another transformation. Another missing piece of the puzzle. A place and a time that most people have completely forgotten---even though without it, that 19th century world we explored, and the Renaissance before it, and the modern world you inhabit... none of it would exist.
Over the next several episodes, we're going to explore the chapter that got left out of your history books.
And I promise you this: by the time we're done, you'll never think about how Europe got "smart" again the same way.
So settle in.
This is going to be a journey.
And it starts in a place you might not expect.
Let me guess what you learned in school.
There were the ancient Greeks and Romans---brilliant civilizations, philosophy and architecture, democracy and law. Then Rome fell in 476, and Europe plunged into what people used to call the "Dark Ages." Now historians politely call it the "Early Middle Ages," but the picture's the same: knowledge lost, libraries burned, barely anyone could read, constant warfare, plague, poverty. A thousand years of darkness.
And then, suddenly---the Renaissance! The "rebirth." Sometime around the 14th or 15th century, Europe woke up. Rediscovered the classics. Artists painted masterpieces. Scientists made discoveries. And right at the heart of it all: Gutenberg's printing press in 1450, spreading knowledge faster than ever before.
From darkness to light. From ignorance to enlightenment. Problem solved.
Except... how?
How exactly did Europe "rediscover" Greek philosophy? Where were those books hiding for a thousand years? Who kept them safe? Who copied them? Who translated them?
And here's a question almost nobody asks: how did Gutenberg's printing press change everything when books were still incredibly expensive to produce? What made paper cheap enough and plentiful enough that printing actually mattered?
The story you were taught has this enormous gap in it.
It's like watching a magician pull a rabbit from a hat and never asking: where did the rabbit come from? How did it get in the hat?
The standard story goes: Rome fell, everything was terrible, then---abracadabra---Renaissance.
But that's not how it happened.
There's a whole chapter missing. A bridge nobody mentions. A place where, while most of Europe struggled in those "dark" centuries, something else was happening entirely.
And that's the story I want to tell you.
The year is 929.
While most of Europe is fragmented into small kingdoms, struggling to maintain order, there's a city on the Iberian Peninsula that's about to declare itself a caliphate.
Córdoba.
If you could stand on a hillside overlooking it, you'd see something that wouldn't exist anywhere else in Europe for centuries: a city of perhaps 250,000 people. Paved streets. Running water. Street lamps---yes, street lamps---lighting the roads at night. Libraries. Public baths. Gardens with fountains.
The largest city in Western Europe. And it's Muslim.
This is Al-Andalus. Moorish Spain. And for the next few centuries, it's going to be the place where knowledge doesn't just survive---it flourishes.
In the 10th century, while monasteries in Christian Europe might have a few hundred books---mostly religious texts, carefully guarded---the library in Córdoba is rumored to hold between 400,000 and 500,000 volumes.
Let that number sink in for a moment.
Half a million books.
And here's something remarkable: it wasn't just one person's collection. It was a working library. Books were catalogued, organized, copied. There were teams of scribes, translators, and scholars. One of them---and we'll spend a whole episode on her---was a woman named Lubna. Born into slavery, freed, and eventually put in charge of this vast repository of knowledge.
She knew mathematics, poetry, grammar. She could solve complex geometric problems. She supervised the acquisition of books from as far away as Baghdad, Damascus, and Cairo.
While most women in Europe couldn't read, Lubna of Córdoba was running one of the world's great libraries.
And she wasn't alone. The city was full of scholars---Muslim, Christian, and Jewish---working side by side. Translating Greek philosophy into Arabic. Preserving medical texts. Advancing mathematics and astronomy.
This wasn't some utopia. There were wars, political struggles, religious tensions. But for a while---for a few remarkable centuries---Al-Andalus was a place where knowledge mattered more than the language it was written in or the faith of the person who wrote it.
And when the Caliphate of Córdoba eventually collapsed in 1031, that tradition didn't die.
It moved.
The city is Toledo.
It sits in the center of the Iberian Peninsula, on a hill surrounded by the Tagus River. For centuries it had been part of Al-Andalus, a Muslim city full of libraries and scholars. Then in 1085, it was conquered by Christian forces.
And something unexpected happened.
Instead of burning the libraries, instead of scattering the scholars, the new Christian rulers looked at all those Arabic books and realized: we want to know what's in these.
So they invited translators.
By the 12th century, Toledo had become something extraordinary: a workshop where Arabic texts were being translated into Latin. Muslims, Christians, and Jews working together---often in pairs, one reading Arabic aloud, the other writing it down in Latin.
They translated Aristotle. Euclid. Ptolemy's astronomy. Al-Khwarizmi's mathematics---which gave Europe the word "algorithm." Avicenna's medical texts, which would be used in European universities for the next 500 years.
Greek philosophy that had been lost to Christian Europe? It came back through Arabic translations made in Baghdad and Córdoba, now being rendered into Latin in Toledo.
The man who translated more than anyone else---Gerard of Cremona---spent decades in Toledo, working through more than 80 books. Astronomy, mathematics, medicine, philosophy. He died there in 1187, surrounded by the texts he'd spent his life making accessible.
And there were others. Michael Scot, who translated Averroes' commentaries on Aristotle. Hermann of Carinthia. Robert of Ketton. Translators whose names most people have never heard, doing work that made the Renaissance possible.
Because here's the thing: when European scholars started reading Aristotle again in the 13th century, when Thomas Aquinas built his theology on Greek philosophy, when universities in Paris and Oxford started teaching logic and natural science---
They were reading translations made in Toledo. From Arabic. By scholars who worked in a culture of collaboration that Christian Europe had mostly forgotten.
The Renaissance didn't just happen. It was built on this foundation. On books preserved in Córdoba, translated in Toledo, and finally---finally---spreading across Europe.
But even that's not the whole story.
Because there's one more piece nobody talks about.
But even that's not the whole story.
Because there's one more piece nobody talks about. And honestly, when I first noticed it, I laughed out loud.
Do you want to know what made the Renaissance possible?
Sheep.
I'm serious.
Let me show you what I mean.
The year is 1347. The Black Death arrives in Europe like a thief in the night, and by the time it's done, half the people are gone. Half. Can you imagine? Villages empty. Fields abandoned. An entire generation just... erased.
And the survivors---exhausted, traumatized, trying to make sense of a world that suddenly has far too much land and far too few hands---they look at those empty fields and think: What now?
And someone says: "Sheep."
Because here's the thing about sheep, dear one---they don't argue. They don't demand wages. They don't need teams of workers following them around. You put them in a field, they eat grass, they grow wool. Simple.
So the sheep multiply. And suddenly, Europe is drowning in wool.
And where there's wool, there are spinners. And oh, the spinning wheels---have you ever watched one? Hypnotic. The wheel turns, the thread appears, almost like magic. Faster than the old drop spindles, so much faster.
More thread means more cloth. And more cloth means... well, people wear clothes. They wear them out. They tear them. They outgrow them. They stain them beyond saving.
And all that worn-out cloth becomes rags.
Mountains of rags.
Now, here's where it gets interesting.
Because someone---and I wish I knew who, I really do---someone looked at a pile of rags and thought: What if we could turn this into something useful?
They'd been making paper for a while by then, but it was expensive, slow, made in small batches. Then they figured out: you take these rags, you soak them, you beat them into pulp with big wooden hammers powered by waterwheels---thump, thump, thump, I can still hear it---you press the pulp flat, let it dry, and you have paper.
Cheap paper.
Paper by the wagon-load.
I remember standing in one of those paper mills, watching the workers haul baskets of old tunics and torn bed sheets, stuff that would have been thrown away or burned. And they'd dump it all into these huge vats, and the hammers would start pounding, and the whole building would shake with the rhythm of it.
And I thought: This is where books come from.
Not from scribes carefully scraping calfskin.
Not from scholars in quiet rooms.
From rags.
From worn-out clothes that nobody wanted anymore.
Can you even imagine explaining this to someone from ancient Rome? "Oh yes, your great libraries, your philosophical works, your medical texts---they all survived because a thousand years later, there were too many sheep, so people had cheap cloth, which turned into rags, which turned into paper."
They'd think you were mad.
But it's true.
And here's the beautiful, ridiculous convergence of it all:
By the 1450s, Gutenberg is tinkering with his printing press in Mainz. Movable type, metal letters, all very clever. But do you know what he needed more than anything?
Paper.
Lots and lots of cheap paper.
Because you can invent the most brilliant printing technology in the world, but if you can't afford to print on anything, you've just made a very expensive paperweight.
But thanks to the plague, and the sheep, and the spinning wheels, and the rags---
He had paper.
Suddenly, printing wasn't just possible. It was practical.
So let me connect the threads for you, because this is where it all comes together, and I still get chills thinking about it:
In Córdoba, Lubna and her colleagues built a library with half a million books.
In Toledo, Gerard of Cremona and dozens of other translators spent their lives turning those Arabic texts into Latin.
In countless villages across Europe, sheep grazed on land emptied by plague.
In workshops, women sat at spinning wheels, turning wool into thread.
In mills along rivers, workers beat rags into pulp.
And in Mainz, Gutenberg set metal type and pulled the first printed pages.
None of them knew they were part of the same story.
But they were.
The books from Córdoba. The translations from Toledo. The paper from rags. The press that could multiply them by the thousands.
That's the Renaissance.
Not one genius. Not one invention. Not one moment.
But a thousand years of accumulated knowledge meeting a supply chain nobody planned, creating a cascade that changed everything.
And it started with sheep.
I still can't get over that part.
Sheep.
So that's what I want to show you over the coming episodes.
Not the story of one person, but a whole ecosystem of knowledge. The people who built it, preserved it, transmitted it. The invisible infrastructure that made the visible achievements possible.
We're going to meet Lubna of Córdoba, that freed slave who ran a library with half a million books. We'll walk through the translation schools of Toledo and meet the scholars---Muslim, Christian, Jewish---who worked together to bridge languages and cultures. We'll explore what it meant to live in a place where your religion mattered less than your ability to read, to think, to contribute.
We're going to trace how Greek philosophy traveled from Alexandria to Baghdad to Córdoba to Toledo to Paris. How a medical text written in Greek, translated into Arabic, then into Latin, ended up saving lives in a monastery in Germany.
And we're going to ask questions that don't get asked enough: What makes knowledge possible? What does it take---not just intellectually, but practically, materially---to preserve ideas across centuries? What happens when people choose collaboration over conquest, curiosity over certainty?
This is the missing chapter in the story you were taught.
The chapter between "Rome fell" and "the Renaissance began."
The chapter where Europe didn't figure it out alone---where the Islamic world, Jewish scholars, and Christian translators built something together that none of them could have built separately.
Starting with episode 100, we're going to walk through that world together.
We're going to meet the people who made it work.
And I think you're going to be amazed at how much they have to teach us.
Not just about history.
But about what's possible when we choose to learn from each other instead of walling ourselves off. When we preserve each other's wisdom instead of destroying it. When we recognize that truth doesn't care what language it's written in.
They knew that 800 years ago.
Maybe it's time we remembered.
So next time, we begin.
Episode 100.
We're going to Córdoba in the 10th century to meet a young woman born into slavery who became one of the most respected scholars in Europe's greatest city.
Her name was Lubna. And her story is where this all starts.
Until then, think about this: the next time someone tells you about the Renaissance, about how Europe rediscovered knowledge, about Gutenberg and the printing press---
Ask them about the chapter they left out.
Ask them about Córdoba.
Ask them about Toledo.
Ask them about the rags.
Because the story you think you know is incomplete.
And I can't wait to show you what's been missing.
Much love. I am, Harmonia.