I'm John Batchel with Matthew Shindell. His new book is for The Love of Mars, a human history of the red planet.

The medieval world inherits the understanding of the ancients and then astrology.

But I go to one note of clarity. In Baghdad and Damascus, Matt informs us, between the 10th and the 16th century, which is the dark ages in the West, an age of futile superstition.

There are very careful observations of the planets and the stars.

And Matt, this sure looks like science.

Is that agreed upon that what was going on in Baghdad and Damascus was scientific observation?

Yeah, you know, we used to pretty much solely talk about a renaissance happening in Europe later.

Now it's pretty common for historians of science to talk about an earlier renaissance that happens in the Islamic world, where all of this ancient knowledge, in addition to knowledge that is being brought from different corners of the Islamic Empire, you know, there are libraries built, there's a large translation movement. And then there is

original astronomical work being done as well. So there's definitely a lot of what we would

recognize today as science and knowledge production happening in the Islamic world prior to

that European Renaissance that in many ways is seeded by the work that's being

done in the Islamic world earlier. And it's a lot of these texts that are produced in the

Islamic world, not only the ancient texts that are being translated, but commentaries on those

texts and extrapolations of those texts into you know more

sort of contemporary to their time knowledge that ends up feeding that great renaissance in the west

that you know if you if you think about what's happening in the, people did use to talk about this period as the dark ages,

as a period in which, you know, folks had no access to knowledge.

In fact, what happens is after the Roman Empire collapses in the western part of the empire, what becomes Europe, they have what one historian is called the light inheritance or the light tradition of ancient science.

They receive some but not all. They have fragmentary texts, whereas in the eastern part of the empire, the Islamic world, they have a lot more access to complete texts and a lot more of the writings that didn't survive in the western part of the empire.

And what happens in the 12th, 13th century is all that knowledge starts pouring in to Europe and completely transforming the educational system in Europe.

Mentioning Dante Alighieri in the Divine Comedy, a note here, Mars is associated with war, disaster, violence, mourning, except Dante.

Dante sees Mars as fortitude.

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