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Mohammed and Charlemagne

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Belgian historian Henri Pirenne's thesis, that the Mediterranean World of Antiquity was broken by the rise of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries and not by the Germanic invaders of the fifth and sixth centuries has been subject to endless criticism, debate and revision since Mohammed and Charlemage was first published in Europe in 1937.

In Pirenne's view, the conquest of the eastern and southern coasts of the Mediterranean, of Spain, and of the important islands had shut off the movement of world trade which had flourished during the late Roman times. The result of this closure returned western Europe to an earlier "natural" and rural economic system, which set in motion a shifting of the balance of power in Europe from the Mediterranean region to the north.

Although by the time Mohammed and Charlemagne was published the theory that Rome had collapsed suddenly under the impact of the immense German invasions during the fifth century was being qualified, it was Pirenne's theory on the end of the Ancient World and the beginning of the Middle Ages that upset traditional historical conceptions. He advanced the thesis that the Ancient World ended only after the Arab invasions of the seventh and eighth centuries had swept around the coasts of Mediterranean and had converted it into a Moslem lake on which, as one Arab writer said, the Christians could no longer "float a plank." This, Pirenne argued, had been accomplished by the last quarter of the eighth century and had destroyed the essential unity of the Roman Empire. For centuries the Mediterranean had been a "Roman lake" the Mare Nostrum of the Romans which held the great imperial structure together: Rome's trade and commerce, its military and naval might, the important exchange of ideas.

The Mediterranean unity of the Roman Empire had not, according to Pirenne, been destroyed by the German tribes that had occupied the western Empire. The Germans admired the superior Roman civilization and diligently set about to continue it, copying everything from the Roman emperors' dress and ceremonies to the government structures and gold coinage. They did whatever they could to preserve Roman culture.

This book is a classic which is as timely today as it was when it was first published on the eve of WWII. Read it for Pirenne's immaculate scholarship and his then provocative theory that the Teutonic "barbarians" were the upholders and awestruck heirs of Rome and not its destroyers--that distinction belongs to rise Islam.

Mohammed and Charlemagne is the last work of Henri Pirenne. It was published after his death and represents a masterpiece of historical scholarship. This is a seminal work that challenged the thesis that Germanic barbarians obliterated the Roman Empire. His revolutionary thesis was that the unexpected rise and advance of Islam led to the downfall of the Empire. With the rise of Islam, the Mediterranean was no longer a thoroughfare of commerce and ideas. Without the Mediterranean, commerce dried up to a trickle and Europe slipped into the Middle Ages.

The revision and completion of the book was completed by one of Pirenne's students after his death. That leads to one of my criticisms. Previous works by Pirenne I found engaging and masterfully written. This work however, seemed to lack the same literary style and, as a consequence, I found it to be a choppy read that lacked the clear crispness of his previous works. While this statement is subjective, it is not irrelevant. When Pirenne expounds on economic and sociological issues of the Middle Ages his words literally leap off the page. It is disappointing that this subject does not surface until the end of the book.

Henri Pirenne's legacy lies in his famous thesis, published
posthumously in 1937 as "Mohammed and Charlemagne" (and stated
earlier in numerous articles): namely, that whereas the
Germanic invasions of the IV and V century broke the political
unity of the Mediterranean world, they did not break its
cultural and economic unity. The ancient world kept hugging
the coastline 'like frogs around a pond' and the East reasserted
its supremacy over the West. All this changed when the Islamic
invasions conquered Northern Africa and the Eastern
Mediterranean, closing the commercial and cultural exchanges
between the two halves of the Roman empire and capturing the
two most vibrant centres of commerce and culture (especially,
theological culture) of the Byzantine empire: Syria and Egypt,
whose religious separatism had been a constant worry for the
Eastern Roman emperors.

As a consequence, the center of gravity of the European economy
shifted to the more agrarian and less romanized regions around
the Rhine (Charlemagne's capital is in Aix-La-Chapelle, nowadays
Aachen) while the cities of Italy and Southern France decayed.
It is this which eventually led to the emergence of a diversified
Western European culture as opposed to the Middle East and,
eventually, Eastern (Orthodox) Europe. And therefore Charlemagne
could never have existed without Mohammed.

However, this is not the whole story. As Dennett and Lopez noted,
lack of Oriental merchandise in Merovingian lists may not
necessarily be due to a dearth of imports but to events on
the supply side and most importantly to the opening of the
Russian route to Baghdad, as Scandinavian coin hoards show
(e.g., Bohlin and Riising). Hence the rise of Quentovic and
Dorestad as important ports and the Frisian trade until their
destruction by Northman raiders.

Although commerce was now closed to Frankish shipping,
trade in the Mediterranean had long been the prerogative
of Syrians, who had extensive colonies in Marseilles.
Meroviangian cities in the region had already been declining
for some time and ideas of a renaissance of a Romano-German
culture in the VI and VII centuries are overrated by its
lack of originality; the foremost product of VI century
erudition is the largely fallacious encyclopedia of Isidore.

Despite its flaws, this work is fundamental for its boldness in
presenting a continental and often world view of history and
of great transformations. Required reading.

This magnificent 284 page piece of scholarship was first published in English in 1939 by W.W. Norton, and reprinted more than a dozen times afterwards. My copy, published by Meridian and Barnes and Noble in October 1961, is the sixth Meridian printed after its first 1957 issue of the book.

But the book had more than a dozen publications in French as well. The Meridian edition was translated "by Bernard Miall from the French of the 10th edition published by Librarie Felix Alcan in Paris and Nouvelle Societe d'Editions Brussels.

The author concluded that the Germanic invasions did not destroy the unity of the ancient world or the Mediterranean. By the 5th Century, there was still a Roman culture, even without an Emperor in the West. The regions by the sea had preserved that culture, and spawned the innovations that followed--monasticism, Christian conversion of the Anglo-Saxons and so on. Moreover, much of this culture emanated from Constantinople, which remained, in the year 600, the center of the world.

But "the break with the tradition of antiquity" was caused by "the rapid and unexpected advance of Islam." The result was "the final separation of East from West, and the end of the Mediterranean unity." Whereas before, Africa and Spain had been part of the Western community, Islam attracted them to "the orbit of Baghdad." The root of the change was "another religion, and an entirely different culture. The Western Mediterranean, having become a Musulman lake, was no longer [the] thoroughfare of commerce and of thought" it had always been before.

The Catholic church, interestingly, gained power in Europe, precisely because the Emperor was completely distracted by the advancing "Musulmans," which meant the church no longer had a political counterweight or rival. During the protracted anarchical transitional phase, from 650 to 750, "the tradition of antiquity disappeared...."

The most important section of the book, in my view, is the first chapter in Part II, "The Expansion of Islam in the Mediterranean Basin." Here Pirenne compares the effects of the Germanic invasions to the Islamic conquests. The invading Germanic tribes had "promptly allowed themselves to become absorbed" by European civilization.

But Mohammed's "propaganda" gave "his people a religion which it would presently cast upon the world, while imposing its own dominion." The early interpretation of John of Damascus, of Islam as a sort of schism, like all previous heresies, had already put the western empire "in deadly danger."

The Arab conquest also "brought confusion and chaos upon both Europe and Asia" thanks largely to its unprecedented swiftness and brutality. Pirenne compares it only to the victories of "the Mongol Empires of Atilla, Jenghiz Khan and Tamerlane." But of course, Tamerlane was also Muslim.

Unlike the German tribes, moreover, the Musulmans "were exalted by a new faith." With this, the Arabs required the subjection of conquered populations. "And this subjection they enforced wherever they went."

The conquered, alone, were taxed, and they were "excluded from the community of the faithful. The barrier was insuperable." The Koran, moreover, requires "only obedience to Allah, the outward obedience of the inferior, degraded and despicable beings, who are tolerated, but who live in abjection."

Henri Pirenne (1862-1935) was born and educated in Belgium, and from 1886 to 1930 was professor of history at the University of Ghent. He received "many foreign academic honors.

It's a shame that Pirenne and his body of work have not retained their deserved rankings among contemporary scholars of Islam.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

Henri Pirenne, who revolutionized the study of medieval beginnings, presents a thorough explanation of his intriguing thesis in this final historical volume. His point is well taken, that the Moslem invasions of the 7th and 8th centuries were just as crucial, if not more so, to the dawn of the Middle Ages as were the Germanic invasions of the 3rd, 4th, and 5th. However, as far-sighted as this idea may be, there is a near obsessiveness with proving his point that tends to make Pirenne's work seem less than well-founded. Several wide sweeping generalizations are made, such as the observation that the Germanic invaders contributed nothing of worth to their new surroundings, but rather came for the social paradise that was the Roman Empire. Also, he seems to contradict his own conclusions from time to time, as in his assertion that Charlemagne both sought and did not seek a Mediterranean Empire during his reign. As a whole, though, the book is a fascinating read.

For those who do not have any knowledge of Latin or French, the book makes a difficult read, as many of his sources are quoted in their original language, and beginning historians may have trouble with the veritable barrage of unfamiliar names and concepts. However, two works which may make this problem a little less severe are William Bark's "Origins of the Medieval World," and "The Pirenne Thesis," edited by Alfred Havighurst.

Although by many dismissed as "dated", Pirenne's "M&C" remains a central piece of historical writing that cannot be ignored.

That is why first-rate scholars of today, like Michael McCormick, are still wrestling with the range of issues Pirenne brought into focus. (McCormick's "Origins of the European economy, 300-900" is an indispensable modern masterpiece, by the way).

While Pirenne certainly overstated his case in some respects (particularly in minimizing the economic decline of the Mediterrenean in the fifth and sixth centuries along with an oversimplified picture of the Carolingian Empire as an essentially non-monetary society), some aspects retain relevance, and also some validity:

1. Pirenne emphasized the crucial importance of the nort-western Frisian trade in Carolingian times in the "new economy". This point is uncontroversial today; what is probably dated is Pirenne's restriction of monetary Carolingian economy to this region; McCormick, for example, is highly convincing in his arguments that the Carolingian juggernaut fed the Slavic slave export to the Islamic countries (and to a lesser extent, to Byzantium) by way of Venice.

2. It is an indubitable fact that the Rhone valley and ports like Marseilles were wholly insignificant in Carolingian times, in complete contrast to their pivotal role in Merovingian times. (McCormick and others don't dispute that).

But, this is the only region of Gaul that has a direct Mediterrenean connection!!
Thus, dynamically speaking, Pirenne is perfectly correct in saying that France's link to the rest of the Old Roman world shifted northwards, namely through the Alpine passes and Germany and so on.

The Mediterrenean "unity" was indeed a broken thing at the time of Charlemagne, in the sense that it was not transport acrooss the sea that connected Gaul to the rest as it had been up till the..seventh century.

And what might the role of the rise of Islam be here?
To mention a few points:
1. McCormick notes that the large factories for the production of garum around Gibraltar went into a precipitious decline as the result of the Muslim invasions of North Africa (and then Spain). This is an uncontroversial issue.
But, how would these products have been spread throughout the (northern) Mediterrenean?
An ideal stopping place along a coastal-hugging route would, indeed, be Marseilles.
It would therefore be highly interesting to study whether Marseilles, in Merovingian times up to the Arab invasions, was a major transit station milking off Spanish products.
If that was the case, then the Muslim expansion cannot get "off the hook" for the decline in the importance of the Rhone area.

2. If I remember correctly, a major export article from Merovingian Gaul was timber, along with wine and grain. The timber was sent to wood-poor areas like Nort Africa and Syria.
While the withering of Rome in the fifth and sixth centuries would result in a probable collapse in the wine and grain export from Gaul, the timber export would hardly have been affected (or rather, that is something to find out!).
But, the demand after construction materials like timber is highly sensitive to political distress. Furthermore, as the result of the Muslim invasions, it would seem highly imprudent to furnish the new masters in Syria and North Africa with building materials for fleets.

Thus, as I see it, the Muslim invasions in the southern mediterrenean may have dealt the deathblow to a flourishing timber trade down the Rhone, and that in this sense, Pirenne was right with regard to the devastating impact of these invasions on Gaulish economy.



Anyway, aside from these speculations, Pirenne's book is elegantly written and is a very good read.

Like most revisionist histories, it's enjoyable to see an authors attempts at cause and effect even if you don't agree with some of their arguments.
The Roman Empire faced a north-south divide between the Roman south and the German north before being broken by the Wanderung, so the concept is not new and the idea that the Islamic Conquest closed off the Roman Mare Nostrum is self-evident. I do take issue with this thesis that the Germanic invasions had no lasting impact (you should remember that each historian is a product of their time), they don't call it the Dark Ages for nothing. Yes, the world of 650AD may have been recognisable to an inhabitant of 400AD, but in purely technological or agricultural terms. After the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, where are the tax receipts, the literature, the civic building projects and the infrastructure repairs and the developed legal processes? While the german tribes who crossed the Rhine may have looked upon the Empire as a cash cow or lands to be expropriated, they were too unsophisticated to run it themselves, relying first on romanised patricians, then the Church to handle the levers of government as the provinces collapsed into decay and internecine warfare. It wasn't until those statelets coalesced into mature principalities that the decay was able to be reversed from Charlemagne onwards. However they still harked back to the forms of the Roman Empire that they had supplanted.
The closing off of the Mediterranean is a different matter, easily verified through documentary, archaeological and mercantile sources. Again, a group of people looking enviously at the Roman patrimony who did their best to supplant it, but one that Pirenne here accurately describes as a huge cultural and economic shift, that continues to this day with a north-south and an east-west divide across the Mediterranean. The only real obstacle to an Islamic Roman Empire was Byzantium, behind who sheltered the western statelets.
Whether you agree with Pirenne or not, it is still an absorbing study of the collapse and division of the Roman Empire whose ghost still haunts us today.

This magnificent 284 page piece of scholarship was first published in English in 1939 by W.W. Norton, and reprinted more than a dozen times afterwards. My copy, published by Meridian and Barnes and Noble in October 1961, is the sixth Meridian printed after its first 1957 issue of the book.

But the book had more than a dozen publications in French as well. The 1961 Meridian edition was translated "by Bernard Miall from the French of the 10th edition published by Librarie Felix Alcan in Paris and Nouvelle Societe d'Editions Brussels.

The author concluded that the Germanic invasions did not destroy the unity of the ancient world or the Mediterranean. By the 5th Century, there was still a Roman culture, even without an Emperor in the West. The regions by the sea had preserved that culture, and spawned the innovations that followed--monasticism, Christian conversion of the Anglo-Saxons and so on. Moreover, much of this culture emanated from Constantinople, which remained, in the year 600, the center of the world.

But "the break with the tradition of antiquity" was caused by "the rapid and unexpected advance of Islam." The result was "the final separation of East from West, and the end of the Mediterranean unity." Whereas before, Africa and Spain had been part of the Western community, Islam attracted them to "the orbit of Baghdad." The root of the change was "another religion, and an entirely different culture. The Western Mediterranean, having become a Musulman lake, was no longer [the] thoroughfare of commerce and of thought" it had always been before.

The Catholic church, interestingly, gained power in Europe, precisely because the Emperor was completely distracted by the advancing "Musulmans," which meant the church no longer had a political counterweight or rival. During the protracted anarchical transitional phase, from 650 to 750, "the tradition of antiquity disappeared...."

The most important section of the book, in my view, is the first chapter in Part II, "The Expansion of Islam in the Mediterranean Basin." Here Pierenne compares the effects of the Germanic invasions to the Islamic conquests. The invading Germanic tribes had "promptly allowed themselves to become absorbed" by European civilization.

But Mohammed's "propaganda" gave "his people a religion which it would presently cast upon the world, while imposing its own dominion." The early interpretation of John of Damascus, of Islam as a sort of schism, like all previous heresies, had already put the western empire "in deadly danger."

The Arab conquest also "brought confusion and chaos upon both Europe and Asia" thanks largely to its unprecedented swiftness and brutality. Pierenne compares it only to the victories of "the Mongol Empires of Atilla, Jenghiz Khan and Tamerlane." But of course, Tamerlane was also Muslim.

Unlike the German tribes, moreover, the Musulmans "were exalted by a new faith." With this, the Arabs required the subjection of conquered populations. "And this subjection they enforced wherever they went."

The conquered, alone, were taxed, and they were "excluded from the community of the faithful. The barrier was insuperable." The Koran, moreover, requires "only obedience to Allah, the outward obedience of the inferior, degraded and despicable beings, who are tolerated, but who live in abjection."

Henri Pierenne (1862-1935) was born and educated in Belgium, and from 1886 to 1930 was professor of history at the University of Ghent. He received "many foreign academic honors.

It's a shame that Pierenne and his body of work have not retained their deserved rankings among contemporary scholars of Islam.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

This was a dense and sometimes intractable read with a few startling insights. I found it hard going but worth the slog. Pirenne suffers a little from the historian's deformity of Kingitis, and expends a deal of space tracking the rise and fall of the early Germanic monarchs and those around them. This is reality TV for the pre-Marconi erudite, and not for everyone. I personally have a taste for more details of the agricultural landscape, diet, medicine, philosophical ideas and the other trappings of a whole civilisation. As we are dealing with the fall of the classical West, philosophical ideas are not far away, but that it about as far as it goes.

So I might have written this book off with two or three stars. Why didn't I? Well, because there is a striking new way of looking at the Mediterranean world and the transition from late antiquity to the Middle Ages, and one that I find Pirenne has managed to sell to me. Pirenne's assiduous collection of royal mugs reveals a picture of the hairy barbarians who penetrated the Empire quite different to the usual. He states no less that that the Goths, Vandals, Lombards and Franks who indundated most of Western Rome, beside sacking the odd city like Rome, did not actually displace Rome. They became part of it. Continuity was preserved, not just in Byzantium but in Africa, Italy, Languedoc and Iberia. The Germans wanted the status of Roman citizenship, once they had tasted it.

So why, then, did the Western Empire nevertheless collapse and Europe sink into a Dark Age? The economy collapsed, feudalism took hold, gold coin was no longer minted and Latin fragmented into the score of languages we see today, retained in a pure form only by the clergy. Why, if the martially potent Germans sought to retain the empire, did they not do so? Pirenne's answer is that the astonishing, explosive expansion of Islam a mere few years after the death of Muhammad turned Europe on its head and the Western Mediterranean into a corsairs' boating lake. Africa, the bread-basket, was lost in a flash. Trade across the sea stagnated. Iberia and Sicily were overrun and Constantinople besieged. Parts of Southern France were occupied and cities from Italy to Scandinavia raided. What the German and Turkic barbarians did not achieve by way of fragmenting the Empire Islam achieved in a moment. Europe turned in on itself.

This is a compelling vision, and explains some oddities such as the simultaneous fragmentation of Latin as a vulgar tongue and perfection as a language of erudition. It also chimes well with the aspiration to continuity which obviously hung about the Holy Roman Empire. The Empire felt itself to be the old but clearly was not. The oddly tense relationship between the Church and the Emperor acquires some clarity in Pirenne's light, as well.

So on the whole I found this a tiring but very worthwhile read. I am glad I persevered.

This book should be required reading for anyone with a need to understand how the world we live in today got to be in the condition in which we find it and ouselves. It is extremely useful, in that it sheds much needed light on the contemporary, social, religious and economic issues so many in the West must confront and deal with daily. (Presumably, just about everybody.)
The author, with masterful scholarship, sheds light on the elements and motives underlying the transition from the epoch of the Roman Empire to the two worlds that emerged from its ruins--the worlds of Christendom and Islam. With care and patience, the author concisely identifies how those worlds struggled to coexist. It will provide the reader an understanding and appreciation for the irony with regard to how little has changed in sixteen-hundred years.

Thomas F. Motter KCSJ
Author: The Song of Charlemagne; The Grail Revelation; The Hard Goddess; The Island of Destiny