But the Saracens were by no means sunk in sententiousness or frivolity. They were impassioned for philosophy and science, especially the sciences of mathematics, astronomy, medicine, and chemistry. For their acquirements in these directions they were indebted to the Greeks, and chiefly through the Syrians of Mesopotamia. Here Hellenism, introduced by Alexander, had grown into peculiar strength, nor was the Greek blood itself inconsiderable. From the Syrians the Arabs derived their knowledge both of Aristotle and of Plato, although, from their practical turn of mind, it was the Aristotelian philosophy which they mainly affected, and which passed into the famous Arabic translation of Averrhoes. Carried to Cordova, much of this learning, and particularly that derived from Aristotle, was disseminated through western Europe. The Arabic influence on thought, reflected from Greece, was therefore great. From a more purely literary point of view, we must reckon with the introduction of Oriental apologues and tales, although many of these, as will be seen immediately, come in also from eastern Europe through a Greek medium. In point of form it is impossible not to conclude that the minstrelsy and poetry which prevailed in Moorish Spain contributed liberally to the fashioning of the troubadour poetry of Provence. The itinerant Arab minstrel was not welcomed solely by Moors; he played his part among the true Spaniards, and Spaniards themselves turned minstrels after the same fashion. The eastern, or Catalonian, part of Spain was in language virtually identical with the neighbouring south of France, and no border separated the Catalonian minstrelsy from the Provençal districts. In 1112 the Count of Barcelona became the ruler of Provence, and in his train followed all the poetry and song which had grown familiar in Catalonia. It is dangerous to attempt to decide the more and less of direct borrowing; but the manner of the troubadour, his rhymes, his themes of the _tenso_, the _planh_, and the morning and evening songs, so closely recall the machinery and devices of the Saracens, that the affiliation can hardly be denied. (7) Direct effect of Greece upon Europe to the West was in abeyance from the fall of Rome till the Renaissance. Occasionally indeed, but very seldom, we hear of scholars who read some Greek, and Theodore of Tarsus actually visited and taught in Anglo-Saxon England in the later seventh century. But such influence of Greek work as appears during the dark and mediaeval times comes only in circuitous ways and from inferior writers of inferior matter. It for the most part appears in stories derived from the post-classical Greek romances, or from Oriental tales first translated into Greek and then recast into Latin.