The popular picture of the Dark Ages is wrong, according to Brown, a Vermont freelance. "The earth wasn't flat. People weren't terrified that the world would end at the turn of the millennium," she writes. "Christians didn't believe Muslims and Jews were their mortal enemies. The Church wasn't anti-science." In fact, the pope in the year 1000 was the leading mathematician and astronomer of his day. His name was Gerbert of Aurillac and he was known during his lifetime as "The Scientist Pope."