ABSTRACT
Opinions of such weight would seem to establish a priori that the culture of Islam, dominant in thirteenth-century Europe, must have been known to Dante. It is inconceivable that he, leading a life of such mental activity, should have ignored Moslem culture, which at the time was
all-pervading; that he should not have felt the attraction of a science that drew men of learning from all parts of Christian Europe to the court of Toledo, and of a literature the influence of which was paramount in Christian Europe, which it initiated in the novels, the fables and the proverbs, as well as the works on moral science and apologetics, of the East.1
