Indian Numerals
Indian inventions were not transmitted directly to Europe: Arab-Muslim scholars played an essential part as vehicles of Indian science, acting as “intermediaries” between the two worlds.”
When the Europeans first encountered numeral systems and computational methods of Indian origin, Europeans proved so attached to their archaic customs, so extremely reluctant to engage in novel ideas, that many centuries passed before written arithmetic scored its decisive and total victory in the West.
Renaissance arithmetic: An obscure and complex art
“I was borne and brought up in the Countrie, and amid husbandry; I have since my predessours quit me the place and possession of the goods I enjoy, both businesse and husbandary in hand. I cannot yet cast account either with penne or Counters.” (source: The Complete Essays - By Montaigne Vol. II 1588, p. 379).
These words were written by one of the most learned men of his day: Michel de Montaigne, born 1533, was educated by famous teachers at the College de Guyenne, in Bordeaux, traveled widely thereafter, and came to own a sumptuous library. He was a member of the parlement of Bordeaux and then mayor of that city, as well as friends of the French kings Francois II and Charles IX. And he admits without the slightest embarrassment, that he cannot “cast account” – or, in modern language do arithmetic!
Could he have been aware of the fabulous discoveries of Indian scholars, already over a thousand years old? Almost certainly not. Cultural contact between Eastern and Western civilizations had been very limited ever since the collapse of the Roman Empire. The first operating method (counters) stands in the highly complicated tradition of Greece and Rome; the second (penne) which Montaigne would no doubt have ascribed to the Arabs, was in fact the invention of Indian scholars. But no one had thought of teaching it to him; Montaigne, like most of his contemporaries, no doubt viewed it with mistrust and suspicion.
This situation did not alter in the conservative bureaucracies of the European nations throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. It is now perhaps easier to understand why skilled abacists were long regarded in Europe as magicians enjoying supernatural powers. All the same, even before the Crusades, Westerners could have made full and profitable use of the Indian computational methods which the Arabs had brought to the threshold of Europe from the 9th century CE. But there was another, more properly ideological reason for European resistance to Indo-Arabic numerals.
Even whilst learning was reborn in the West, the Church maintained a climate of dogmatism, of mysticism, and of submission to the holy scriptures, through doctrines of sin, hell and the salvation of the soul. Science and philosophy were under ecclesiastical control, were obliged to remain in accordance with religious dogma, and to support, not to contradict, theological teachings. Some ecclesiastical authorities thus put it about that arithmetic in the Indo-Arabic manner, precisely because it was so easy and ingenious, reeked of magic and of the diabolical: it must have come from Satan himself! It was only a short step from there to sending over-keen algorists to the stake, along with witches and heretics. And many did indeed suffer that fate at the hands of the Inquisition.
The very etymology of the words “cipher” and “zero” provide evidence of this. When the Arabs adopted Indian numerals and the zero, they called the latter sifr, meaning “empty”, a plain translation of the Sanskrit shunya. From abstract zero to infinity was a single step which Indian scholars took early and nimbly. The most surprising thing is that amongst the Sanskrit words used to express zero, there is the term "ananta, which literally means "Infinity".
(source: The Universal History of Numbers - By Georges Ifrah p. 511 - 589).
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