The history of the rise of European universities throws light on the attitude of the papacy toward education. While Europe was overspread by spiritual and intellectual darkness, God used another people to disseminate truth. When faith in God was lost, and in its place was substituted that blind faith in man and obedience to the church which is known in European history as the age of faith, learning was propagated by the Arabs. That power which had failed to conquer the world by the sword, now gained by intellectual culture what the arms of Mohammed and his immediate successors failed to achieve. Spain, while in the hands of the Moors, contributed more to European civilization than at any other time in her history; and it was as an _educator_ and through the _influence of her schools_ that the papacy received its blow from the south which made her more readily succumb to the revolt of Germany under Luther. By the Arabs “flourishing schools were established in all the principal cities, notably at Bagdad and Damascus in the East, and at Cordova, Salamanca, and Toledo in the West. Here grammar, mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, chemistry, and medicine were pursued with great ardor and success. The Arabians originated chemistry, discovering alcohol, and nitric and sulphuric acids. They gave algebra and trigonometry their modern form; applied the pendulum to the reckoning of time; ascertained the size of the earth by measuring a degree, and made catalogues of the stars.”[98] And all this was done when Europe as a whole was lying in darkness, when the chemist was considered a wizard, when astronomy was merely astrology, and whatever learning existed was formal and spiritless. [Sidenote: Arabs and papal schools] But the discoveries of the Arab teachers could not long remain with them alone, and it is with the spread of their ideas through the schools by means of the students that we are concerned. “For a time they [the Arabs] were the intellectual leaders of Europe. Their schools in Spain were largely attended by Christian youth from other European countries, who carried back with them to their homes the Arabian science, and through it stimulated intellectual activity in Christian [papal] nations.”[99] [Sidenote: Arabs and universities] The specialization of studies such as theology, medicine, or philosophy, together with the impulse derived from the Mohammedans in Africa and the Arabs in Spain, led to the establishment of the universities, which were, as before stated, composed of four faculties, or colleges. “They arose independently of both church and state.” The University of Paris “became the most distinguished seat of learning in Europe. At one time it was attended by more than twenty thousand students.” [Sidenote: Papacy seized universities]