The earlier Fathers of the Church, whatever may have been their merits as theologians and dialecticians, were not distinguished by an ability to understand the truths of natural science or to combat error in that field. With the establishment of the barbarian kingdoms between the sixth and eighth centuries came an epoch of mental stagnation in nearly all realms of science and scholarship. Learning in general and geography in particular suffered almost universal eclipse. Yet dark and ignorant as the times may have been, the torch of civilization was kept burning, if feebly, by a few Irish and English monks[179] and by contacts with the Levant that were maintained through Greek, Asiatic, and Egyptian traders in the principal cities of Europe.[180] If not much authentic geographical information was contributed to Western society by these agents of enlightenment, they served to disseminate certain geographical legends and traditions destined to seize a strong hold on the Western imagination. In the days of Charlemagne came the new awakening sometimes known as the “Carolingian Renaissance;” and, although tenth-century Europe relapsed temporarily into a torpor, a current of theological interest and, with it, interest in the natural sciences had by then once more set in—a current which was to reach full flood at the time of the Crusades. _SOURCES_ What works widely read during these centuries served as sources of geographical information for the scholar of the era of the Crusades? THE BIBLE First and foremost we must place the Bible. Certainly in the pagan world no one book had ever held the paramount position in the minds of thoughtful men that Scripture held during the Middle Ages. As we saw in the Introduction, the two great fountainheads of medieval geography were the works of Greek philosophers and historians and the Bible. The geographic material in Scripture is neither very extensive nor very explicit in comparison with the contributions of such writers as Strabo and Ptolemy to the geographic education of mankind, and yet so tremendous was its authority that it tended at one time completely to supersede classical teachings. Slight and confusing as may have been its geographical references, the man of the Middle Ages attached to all of them paramount importance. Simply compare a map of the world reconstructed from Ptolemy’s data[181] with one of the crude Beatus sketches reflecting Biblical beliefs,[182] and some of the changes which the reading of Scripture had wrought become strikingly apparent.