It would now be thought that the western world would at once adopt the new numerals which Leonardo had made known, and which were so much superior to anything that had been in use in Christian Europe. The antagonism of the universities would avail but little, it would seem, against such an improvement. It must be remembered, however, that there was great difficulty in spreading knowledge at this time, some two hundred and fifty years before printing was invented. "Popes and princes and even great religious institutions possessed far fewer books than many farmers of the present age. The library belonging to the Cathedral Church of San Martino at Lucca in the ninth century contained only nineteen volumes of abridgments from ecclesiastical commentaries."[537] Indeed, it was not until the early part of the fifteenth century that Palla degli Strozzi took steps to carry out the project that had been in the mind of Petrarch, the founding of a public library. It was largely by word of mouth, therefore, that this early knowledge had to be transmitted. Fortunately the presence of foreign students in Italy at this time made this transmission feasible. (If human nature was the same then as now, it is not impossible that the very opposition of the faculties to the works of Leonardo led the students to investigate {133} them the more zealously.) At Vicenza in 1209, for example, there were Bohemians, Poles, Frenchmen, Burgundians, Germans, and Spaniards, not to speak of representatives of divers towns of Italy; and what was true there was also true of other intellectual centers. The knowledge could not fail to spread, therefore, and as a matter of fact we find numerous bits of evidence that this was the case. Although the bankers of Florence were forbidden to use these numerals in 1299, and the statutes of the university of Padua required stationers to keep the price lists of books "non per cifras, sed per literas claros,"[538] the numerals really made much headway from about 1275 on. It was, however, rather exceptional for the common people of Germany to use the Arabic numerals before the sixteenth century, a good witness to this fact being the popular almanacs. Calendars of 1457-1496[539] have generally the Roman numerals, while Koebel's calendar of 1518 gives the Arabic forms as subordinate to the Roman. In the register of the Kreuzschule at Dresden the Roman forms were used even until 1539. While not minimizing the importance of the scientific work of Leonardo of Pisa, we may note that the more popular treatises by Alexander de Villa Dei (c. 1240 A.D.) and John of Halifax (Sacrobosco, c. 1250 A.D.) were much more widely used, and doubtless contributed more to the spread of the numerals among the common people. {134}