Authors:
  • They [the Templars] had read Avicenna, and they were not ignorant, like the Europeans. How could you live alongside a tolerant, mystical, libertine culture for two centuries without succumbing to its allure, particularly when you compared it to Western culture, which was crude, vulgar, barbaric, and Germanic?

    Umberto Eco (2007). “Foucault's Pendulum”, p.99, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt