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The eleventh century marked the beginning of a new era we call the High Middle Ages. Cities began to grow and develop. The walls behind which men and women sheltered themselves, the authoritarian church, the rigid structures of feudalism and manorialism, began to crumble. International trade began not long after the first Crusader entered Jerusalem in 1099. Even more importantly, contact with the civilized Middle East tapped the reservoir of Islamic science, medicine, and mathematics plus the culture of ancient Greece that Islamic scholars had carefully preserved. Partly because of the increasing influence of important women, feudalism began to give way to the more civilized code of chivalry. Running parallel to this was the cult of the virgin, in whose honor hundreds of magnificent churches were erected. The tenets of Scholasticism, the dominant mode of Christian thought, were challen