In the mid-ninth century A.D. Ibn Khurradadhbeh described Western Europe as a source of “eunuchs, slave girls and boys, brocade, beaver skins, glue, sables, and swords,” and not much more. A century later another Muslim geographer, the great Masudi, wrote that Europeans were dull in mind and heavy in speech, and the “farther they are to the north the more stupid, gross, and brutish they are.” This was what any Muslim sophisticate would have expected of Christians, particularly the “Franks,” as Western Europeans were known in the Islamic world, because these people, barbarians most of them, lived at the remote Atlantic margin of Eurasia, far from the hearthlands of its high cultures.

Six centuries later the Franks were at least equal to, and even ahead of, the Muslims and everyone else in the world in certain kinds of mathematics and mechanical innovation. They were in the first stage of developing science-cum-technology that would be the glory of their civilization and the edged weapon of their imperialistic expansion. How, between the ninth and the sixteenth centuries, had these bumpkins managed all that?

What was the nature of the change in what would be called in French their mentalité? As a necessary preliminary to any attempt to answer that, we should examine that mentalité in the 1500s. It is the effect, and knowing it, we will know better what to look for in the way of causes.