The conventional wisdom, repeated recently in How the Middle Ages Really Were, claims (the quote is "composite"):
...the works of Greek and Roman thinkers like Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy, Archimedes and many others had been lost in the West after the collapse of the Roman Empire... ...Medieval scholars learned those works because they were preserved by the Arabs...
Even when Rome fell (two centuries before the Arab conquest began), Constantinople remained and should have preserved at least the major works, and the land communications of Europe with the Arabs went through it anyway.
Were these works "lost" to the West, and only preserved by Arabs?
