Our primary problem is to examine the effects of Christianity on geographical knowledge and belief, effects which sprang in large measure from men’s varying attitudes toward the Bible. Some believed that Scripture contains the absolute and only truth, but others were willing to grant a partial authority to pagan teachings. The evolution of science was profoundly modified by the conflicts between these divergent tendencies of thought and by the efforts made to reconcile one with the other. The general result spelled disaster to clear thinking in geography. Moreover, many of the facts which the scholars of antiquity had gathered together were wholly lost sight of in the confusion that accompanied the disintegration of Roman civilization. The horizon of the known world was narrowed from the wide bounds it had reached in the time of Ptolemy.[177] New information acquired by exploration and travel was ignored; and a host of legends, fancies, and false theories took the place of the reasonably accurate body of information which the Greeks and Romans had possessed. IGNORANCE OF THE BEST WORK OF ANTIQUITY During these long years Constantinople was the only great metropolis of Christendom, the only center where the arts and sciences of civilization were cultivated without interruption. We might expect, therefore, that the Byzantine influence upon Western geography would be as marked as it was upon Western art and architecture. But this was not the case. However much the scholars of Constantinople may have been interested in the historians of antiquity, they neglected the geographers; and the scientific geography of the Greek Empire was at best a work of lifeless compilation and commentary. Furthermore, knowledge of Greek was at no time widespread in the West until the Renaissance, and the great majority of Western scholars were profoundly ignorant of Byzantine literature.[178] For their geography the men of the Occident turned rather to the Bible and to the mediocre and worse than mediocre works of an age of intellectual degeneracy. Solinus, Martianus Capella, Macrobius, Aethicus of Istria, and Orosius became authorities from which later writers derived their facts. SCIENTIFIC STAGNATION DURING THE EARLY MIDDLE AGES