With the cutting-off of the supplies of papyrus by the 
Mohammedans, the Mediterranean, long a Roman lake, became 
a Muslim lake, and the Roman centre collapsed. What had been 
the margins of this centre-margin structure became 
independent centres on a new feudal, structural base. The 
Roman centre collapsed by the fifth century A.D. as wheel, 
road, and paper dwindled into a ghostly paradigm of former 
power.

     Papyrus never returned. Byzantium, like the medieval 
centres, relied heavily on parchment, but this was too 
expensive and scarce a material to speed commerce or even 
education. It was paper from China, gradually making its way 
through the Near East to Europe, that accelerated education 
and commerce steadily from the eleventh century, and provided 
the basis for “the Renaissance of the twelfth century,”