Where were legionaires recruited from?

[Trithemius]

There were a succession of "lesser renaissances" before the big famous one in Italy. There was a kind of Saxon flowering before the viking troubles and continental Europe had a couple of periods of major cultural development. The Italian Renaissance, which eventually spread to most of Western Europe, grew out of these earlier experiences.

Islamic society also had its phases of cultural growth, and then reversion to militarism, in much the same way that Western Europe did too.

[Philippus Flavius Homovallumus]

They weren't stupid in the middle ages, in fact they were more stupid in the 19th Century, because they thought they knew what they were doing. Yes, a lot of knowledge was lost in the Middle Ages and slavish copying of the ancients meant there was little actual progress but I'm in Exeter and we've had running water here for over 1,200 years.

The big thing about the Renaissance was that people stated thinking again and started testing what they thought, the way the Greeks did. The reason for this was a proliferation of rediscovered ancient works which helped them to see that the Ancients didn't know everything, and they knew they didn't know.

Then the Enlightenment arrived and it all went belly up until about 1850. They actually thought it was good to be very dirty.