Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (3 page)

Secondly, the evidence shows that this culture went into rapid and terminal decline in the 620s and 630s. The great cities of Asia Minor and Syria everywhere at this time show signs of violent destruction; after which they were never rebuilt. Whatever archaeology appears on top of them is invariably impoverished and small-scale; usually little more than a diminutive fortress. Contemporary with the destruction of the classical cities, we find a universal decay in the countryside: Top-soil is washed away and a layer of subsoil, known as the Younger Fill, covers settlements in river-valleys and blocks harbors. This stratum appears throughout the Mediterranean world, from Syria to Spain, and is the geographical signature of the end of Graeco-Roman civilization. With the appearance of this layer, classical patterns of settlement and land-management are abandoned. This is the pattern too in southern Europe, where we now find a retreat of settlement to defended hill-top sites – the first medieval castles. Both these developments can be explained by the appearance of Muslim raiders and pirates throughout the Mediterranean coastlands from the 630s onwards; and if that is not the accepted solution, then no answer is forthcoming.

Thirdly, from the mid-seventh century onwards there is an almost total disappearance of archaeology in Europe and throughout the Middle East and North Africa for a period of three centuries. This disappearance, it seems, has nothing to do with what has always been called the “Dark Age” of Europe, because it appears also in the Islamic lands. By the mid- to late-tenth century cities and towns revive both in the Islamic and Christian lands, and (though the great cities of classical times are gone forever), the material culture of the new settlements looks strikingly reminiscent in many ways of the material culture of the seventh century.

That, in brief, is what the archaeology says. At the end of the present volume we take a brief look at events subsequent to the rise and spread of Islam. There we find that not only did the Arabs terminate classical civilization in the Levant and North Africa, and therefore cut Europe off from the humanizing and civilizing impulses which had previously emanated from those regions, but they now began, in the tenth century, to exert their own influence upon the West. And that influence was anything but benevolent. It is of course widely accepted that Islam had a profound cultural impact upon early medieval Europe. Indeed, the all-pervasiveness of that impact has been traditionally seen as underlining the cultural superiority of Islam at that time. Yet, as we shall see, in addition to some commentaries upon Aristotle, and a few scientific and technological concepts (which were not “Arab” inventions at all) Islam was to communicate to Europe a whole host of ideas and attitudes that were far from being enlightened. Most obviously, the concept of “holy war”, which Europe adopted (admittedly somewhat reluctantly) in the eleventh century, was entirely an Islamic innovation; as was the tendency towards theocracy (enshrined in the all-powerful medieval Papacy) and the suppression, by force, of heterodox ideas.

* * *

It goes without saying that a work such as this cannot claim to be exhaustive, or the last word. Many of the topics covered could profitably have been examined in greater depth; yet so diverse is the range of evidence and so wide the territories and epochs it covers, that a detailed examination of everything is a complete impossibility. I have been compelled to look at written and archaeological evidence for the fifth to tenth centuries from the western extremities of Europe to the borders of Persia. And, as might be expected, the literature dealing with these diverse eras and areas is immense, and growing more so by the day. So much has been written on the economic and political histories of the Byzantine, Frankish, Visigothic and Early Islamic states in the English language over the past twenty years that a complete bibliography might fill an entire volume of its own. But a bulging bibliography does not necessarily indicate a convincing argument or even a coherent line of thought. As such, I have endeavored simply to select some of the most representative material, and to examine the arguments and evidence found therein in detail. And since this is an examination of the Pirenne thesis I have concentrated, on the whole, on those authors who have dealt with his work, or whose own work has a direct impact upon his.

So the scope of the present work is limited. On the whole, I have tended to concentrate upon the evidence of archaeology. If we have learned anything about this epoch, it is that written sources cannot be taken at face value. They must be supported by archaeology. And the archaeology of late antiquity and the early Middle Ages has, so far, produced far more puzzles than answers.

So, much work remains to be done. Having said that however, I am convinced that the evidence now accumulated points decisively to a vindication of Pirenne, if not in exactly the manner he imagined. Islam did indeed terminate classical civilization in its main centers, in the Middle East and North Africa. Its impact upon Europe however was more nuanced, and did not perhaps amount to the economic catastrophe Pirenne believed. Temperate Europe was already economically self-sufficient before the arrival of the Arabs; and their presence in the Mediterranean did little more than block the importation to the West of certain eastern luxuries which were enjoyed by the elites of Gaul, Spain and Italy. Much more serious however was the termination of the papyrus supply, an event which led, inter alia, to the loss of the great bulk of the heritage of classical literature and to the general loss of literacy amongst the population of Europe. This led, very quickly indeed, to the “medieval” mentality with which we are all too familiar.

Henri Pirenne, 1862 - 1935

F
or centuries scholars assumed that the civilization of ancient Rome, the civilization we now call “classical,” was destroyed by the barbarian tribes of Germany and central Asia who, during the fourth and fifth centuries swarmed into the Empire and destroyed the political power of the Eternal City. The migrations of the Goths, Vandals, and Huns were held responsible for reducing Europe to an economic and cultural wasteland, and initiating the long period of backwardness we now call the “Dark Ages.”

This was the view that prevailed till the sixteenth century, at which point, in the wake of the Reformation, a new suspect was added: the Christian, or more accurately, the Catholic, Church. According to this idea (one that remains strikingly popular in the English-speaking world), Christianity was corrupted beyond recognition after the time of Constantine and from the fourth century onwards a power-hungry Church hierarchy, in cahoots with the Imperial authorities, kept the population of Europe in subservience and ignorance, effectively completing the destructive work of the Barbarians.

With the advent of a more stringent historical method in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries cracks began to appear in the above edifice; and by the mid-eighteenth century Gibbon was ready to exonerate the “innocent barbarians.” He remained however highly critical of the Church, which he blamed for extinguishing the rational spirit of the ancients. Even as Gibbon was writing however, scholars’ understanding of the period was evolving; and the nineteenth century was to bring forth a plethora of new types of evidence. The discovery and translation of more and more medieval documents gradually revolutionized our understanding of late antiquity, whilst by the mid-nineteenth century the new science of archaeology was casting its own fresh and unexpected light on the problem. Thus by the start of the twentieth century it had become evident that, as an imperial power, Rome was already in a fairly advanced state of decay by the middle of the third century – two hundred years before the official “end” of the Empire in 476. Historians began to speak of the “crisis” at that time. They noted a contraction of Roman power in the third century: the loss and abandonment of several provinces, beginning with Dacia and parts of Germany. They noted too a general shrinking of cities and the cessation of construction on a monumental scale. All the great structures which to this day dot Europe and elicit the admiration and astonishment of the tourist – the aqueducts, the amphitheatres and the city walls – were raised before the beginning of the third century. After that, there was almost nothing. More and more historians began to discern “a fundamental structural change” at the time, “which the great emperors at the end of that century, and Constantine himself at the beginning of the next, did but stabilize.”
[1]
A new consensus developed, according to which there were “two successive Roman Empires. … First, there is the Roman Empire of Augustus and the Antonines, of which we mainly think, the majestic web of planned cities and straight roads, all leading to Rome. … Secondly, after the anarchy of the third century, there is the ‘Lower Empire’, the rural military empire of Diocletian and Constantine, of Julian the Apostate and Theodosius the Great. This was an empire always on the defensive, whose capital was not Rome, but wherever warring emperors kept their military headquarters: in the Rhineland, behind the Alps or in the East; in Nicomedia or Constantinople, in Trier, Milan or Ravenna.”
[2]

The Roman Empire, it thus became clear, was already in an advanced state of decay by the year 200; and it was also increasingly less “Roman”. We hear that, “Already before the ‘age of the Antonines’ [in the second century] it had been discovered as Tacitus remarked that emperors could be made elsewhere than in Rome,” and, as the above writer drily remarked, “By the third century AD they were generally made elsewhere.” In that century, we know, “there were not only military emperors from the frontier: there were also Syrian, African and half-barbarian emperors; and their visits to Rome became rarer and rarer.”
[3]
And the advent of “half-barbarian” emperors was paralleled by an increasingly half- or fully barbarian army. From the third and even second century historians noted the recruitment into the Roman legions not only of great numbers of “semi-barbarians” such as Gauls and Illyrians, but of actual barbarians, such as Germans and Sarmatians. Indeed, so far had this custom gone by the fourth century that by then several distinguished Roman families boasted a barbarian ancestor many generations earlier.

The crisis of the third century naturally became the subject of intense debate amongst historians. Nowadays it is often regarded as having an economic origin, and scholars talk of inflationary pressures and such like. This may be partly true; but what seems undeniable is that the real problem lay deeper. There is now little dissention on the belief that by the year 100 the population of the Empire had ceased to grow and had begun to contract. The inability to hold the most outlying of the Provinces, in Dacia and Germany, is viewed as an infallible sign of a general shrinkage. This shrinkage may have had various causes, but the practice of infanticide – widespread and commonplace in the classical world – must surely have been one of the most important.
[4]
Official Roman documents and texts of every kind from as early as the first century, stress again and again the pernicious consequences of Rome’s low and apparently declining birth-rate. Attempts by the Emperor Augustus to reverse the situation were apparently unsuccessful, for a hundred years later Tacitus remarked that in spite of everything “childlessness prevailed,”
[5]
whilst towards the beginning of the second century, Pliny the Younger said that he lived “in an age when even one child is thought a burden preventing the rewards of childlessness.” Around the same time Plutarch noted that the poor did not bring up their children for fear that without an appropriate upbringing they would grow up badly,
[6]
and by the middle of the second century Hierocles claimed that “most people” seemed to decline to raise their children for a not very lofty reason, love of wealth and the belief that poverty is a terrible evil.
[7]
During the third century successive emperors made efforts to outlaw infanticide, though how successful they were remains unclear. What seems certain is that even if infanticide became less important in the third and fourth centuries, the birth-rate remained stubbornly low, for the Romans also practiced very effective forms of birth control. Abortion was also practiced, and caused the deaths of large numbers of women, as well as infertility in a great many others.
[8]
Quite possibly, by the end of the first century, the only groups in the Empire that was increasing by normal demographic process were the Christians and the Jews.

Taking this into account, several writers, by the early years of the twentieth century, began to suggest that Rome’s adoption of Christianity in the fourth century may have had, as one of its major goals, the halting of Rome’s population decline. Christians had large families and were noted for their rejection of infanticide. In legalizing Christianity therefore Constantine may have hoped to reverse the population trend. He was also, to some degree, simply recognizing the inevitable.
[9]
By the late third century Christians were already a majority in certain areas of the East, most notably in parts of Syria and Asia Minor, and were apparently the only group (apart from the Jews) registering an increase in many other areas. This was achieved both by conversion and by simple demographics. The Jews too, by that time, formed a significant element in the Empire’s population – and for the same reason: They, like their Christian cousins, abhorred the practice of infanticide and abortion. It has been estimated that by the start of the fourth century Jews formed up to one tenth of the Empire’s entire population. Whether or not Constantine legalized Christianity therefore, it would appear that in time the Empire would have become Christian in any case.
[10]

The question for historians was: Did Constantine’s surmise and gamble prove correct? Did the Christianization of the Empire halt the decline? On the face of it, the answer seemed to be “No!” After all, less than a century later Rome herself was sacked, first by the Goths and then, several decades later, by the Vandals. And by 476 the Western Empire was officially dissolved. However, by the latter years of the nineteenth century more and more evidence began to emerge, much of it from archaeology, which seemed to suggest that Roman civilization did not end in the fifth century. Some of the most important work in this field was done by Austrian art historian Alois Riegl, who did much to redefine the fifth and sixth centuries as late antiquity, rather than part of the Dark Ages, as they had previously been habitually designated. In his seminal
Die spätrömische Kunstindustrie nach den Funden in Österreich-Ungarn
(1901), he argued that the art of the fourth, fifth and sixth centuries did not represent a collapse of classical standards, but a continuation and development of what went before. Partly under the influence of Riegl, more and more historians began to view the early Germanic kingdoms of the fifth and sixth centuries as clients of the Empire rather than destroying conquerors. Documents of the time, they noted, showed that the “barbarian” princes seem to have done everything in their power to preserve Roman institutions and laws. They regarded themselves as functionaries of the Empire, and they accepted Roman titles bestowed upon them by the Emperor in Constantinople. The gold coins they issued were struck with the image of the Byzantine Emperor, and many of the offspring of these “barbarian” kings were raised and educated in Constantinople. Artistic and intellectual life seemed to have flourished under them, as did the economy and the cities built earlier in the time of the Caesars; whilst a widespread and prosperous trading network continued to connect western Europe with the great centers of population and culture in the Eastern Mediterranean. This much became clear: by the late fifth and sixth centuries a recognizably “classical” civilization still existed in Italy, Gaul, Spain and North Africa – as well, of course, as in Byzantium and throughout the eastern Mediterranean. The one exception was Britain, which had been more or less lost to the Roman world in the fifth century – yet even here, in the only province where the Germanic invaders actually imposed their language – there began to emerge evidence of a much more robust Roman survival than had previously been imagined.

And yet, having said all that, scholars could hardly ignore the fact that classical civilization did indeed die, and die completely, throughout western Europe and North Africa. This seemed to have occurred sometime between the mid-seventh and early eighth centuries. Cities were abandoned, literacy plummeted, royal authority declined and local strongmen, or “barons,” seized control of the provinces. The Middle Ages had begun. But the fact that the Germanic kings had presided over prosperous and apparently flourishing late “Roman” societies for two centuries – without destroying them – merely brought forth the question, more and more urgently: What then did finally destroy those societies?

This was the conundrum facing medieval historians in the early years of the twentieth century. One of those who turned his attention to the problem was Belgian historian Henri Pirenne. Originally specializing in Belgian history, from 1915 onwards Pirenne began to look at the wider European picture; and by the middle of the 1920s he had arrived at a radical conclusion: classical civilization had not been destroyed by the Goths, Vandals, or Huns, or indeed by the Christian Church. It was destroyed by a people who it had, even then, become fashionable to credit with saving Western Civilization: the Arabs. The evidence, as Pirenne was at pains to show in his posthumously published
Mohammed et Charlemagne
(1938) seemed incontrovertible. From the mid-seventh century trade between the ancient centers of high culture in the Levant and the West seemed to have come to an abrupt halt. Luxury items originating in the eastern Mediterranean, which are mentioned routinely in the literature until the end of the sixth century, disappear completely by the mid-seventh century, at the latest. The flow of gold, which the West derived from the East, seemed to have dried up. Gold coinage disappeared, and with it went the towns and urban settlements of Italy, Gaul and Spain. Documents of the period made it very clear that these, especially the ports, owed their wealth to the Mediterranean trade. Worst of all, perhaps, from the perspective of culture and learning, the importation of papyrus from Egypt seemed to have entirely ceased. Pirenne stressed that fact that this material, which had been shipped into Western Europe in vast quantities since the time of the Roman Republic, was absolutely essential for a thousand purposes in a literate and mercantile civilization; and the ending of the supply would have had an immediate and catastrophic effect on levels of literacy. These must have dropped, almost overnight, to levels perhaps equivalent to those in pre-Roman times.

* * *

Pirenne held that the disappearance of such Levantine products in the middle of the seventh century pointed to only one possible conclusion: that the Arabs, whose well-known predilection for piracy has been documented for centuries, must have, through their raiding and freebooting, effectively terminated all trade in the Mediterranean, thus isolating western Europe both intellectually and economically. Prior to that, he noted, the whole of the West was heavily under the influence of Byzantium, and was becoming increasingly so. He stressed that the Germanic kings of the Gaul and Spain regarded themselves as functionaries of the Eastern Emperor, who was, for them, still the “Roman” Emperor. They accepted titles bestowed upon them by Constantinople and the coins they minted bore the image of the Emperor. When the office of Emperor of the West was abolished in 476, Odoacer sent the insignia of the office to Constantinople.