Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (9 page)

It would be tempting to ignore Ward-Perkins as a curious throwback; an academic dinosaur unable to “move on” to a new paradigm. Yet this would be to overlook the persuasiveness of his argument and the great influence he is having, as well as the very real problem which his work highlights and keeps us focused on: for whatever view we take, and no matter how favorable our opinion of the “barbarians,” late Roman civilization did indeed die in the seventh century, and its disappearance was accompanied by the disappearance of most traces of human life and culture for several centuries.

In much of his book, Ward-Perkins does little other than state the obvious – pointing out again and again that the Roman Empire actually fell in the fifth century, and that its fall was violent. He concedes that the Germanic invaders made real attempts to adopt the sophisticated civilization of the Romans – including its religion, laws, customs, institutions, art and language – but insists that their efforts were a failure. The Germans, he says, did not commit murder, but they were guilty of manslaughter. Interestingly, he points too to the demographic and civilizational collapse in the East, which of course occurs not in the fifth but in the seventh century. Here he stresses that this collapse was a direct result of the Persian and more especially Arab invasions. By analogy, he suggests that the collapse in the West, two centuries earlier, was the result of the barbarian wars. The advent of the Germans in the West, in the fifth century, did not of course result in the complete disappearance of cities and archaeology that the Persian and Arab invasions of the seventh century seem to have produced further east. Yet in the picture presented by Ward-Perkins the devastation of the West in the fifth century is almost complete, and for him the Dark Age there did not begin in the seventh century, as almost all historians now assert, but in the fifth, and coincides precisely with the arrival of the barbarians.

Because of the importance of Ward-Perkins’ work, it is incumbent upon us to examine his assertions in some detail. We shall have occasion to return to him in various places throughout the present volume, but for the moment a brief look at some of his most challenging arguments will be sufficient.

To begin with, he reiterates the sheer violence of the Barbarian Invasions during the fifth century. No one would or could contradict him on this point. The arrival of the Germans (and Asiatics), no matter how we try to put it, was violent and disruptive. But it is what happened after the fighting died down that is important; and the evidence for this is most clearly to be seen in the archaeology. Archaeology indeed is the nub of the issue. And at a first reading, it may appear that the evidence Ward-Perkins musters is impressive, even convincing. He notes, for example, that shortly after 400 the majority of the high-quality artifacts which were typical of life under the Romans disappear from the western provinces. He admits that, both in Britain and Gaul, as well as in Spain and Italy, imported luxury items continued to occur in the fifth and sixth centuries. Along with these, native craftsmen continued to produce jewelry and other high-status items of great expertise and beauty, during the same epoch. Yet for Ward-Perkins these do not represent evidence of a thriving culture and economy; rather, they are the rare goods of a highly-stratified society which has, in all other respects, reverted to an extremely primitive level. The “cultural complexity” which he attributes to the Roman period, and which was characterized by a widespread literacy and a sharing in high culture by the common man, had disappeared. In short, Europe was already, in Ward-Perkins’ view, medieval.

That, in a nutshell, is the Ward-Perkins thesis; and, it has to be admitted that, on a superficial level it does appear convincing. However, a closer look reveals serious flaws in his methodology. Indeed, his methods and selection of evidence are so flawed that the informed reader must question his good faith. The most serious weakness is in his complete neglect of everything that happened in the Roman Empire before c. 400. Reading Ward-Perkins one gets the impression that it was “business as usual” in the Empire until the barbarians suddenly and inexplicably burst on the scene near the end of the fourth century. Yet all research over the past century and a half has emphasized that this was most emphatically not the case. The decline of Rome, as we have noted above, is now seen as in full swing since at least the year 200, when there is evidence of population stagnation and economic decline on an enormous scale. After that time, few if any great monuments were constructed, and Rome began the long process of imperial contraction, with the abandonment of Dacia in the middle of the third century and parts of Germany at the same time. It is true that, in the territories which remained in the Empire, the appearance of normality, on a superficial level, persisted until the fifth century. This was due to the power of the Roman state, which continued to station huge numbers of troops (who were increasingly of barbarian origin) in the northern provinces. And this brings us to the second major flaw in Ward-Perkins’ argument.

Ward-Perkins places great emphasis upon the fact that, in the years after 400, a great deal of “cultural complexity” disappeared from the western provinces. The scarcity of copper coinage, for example (he admits the continued vigorous minting of gold and silver currency at the time), and the declining occurrence of quality pottery, are seen by him as infallible signs that commercial activity amongst the poorer classes (apart from subsistence farming) ceased. However, he fails to recognize that societies can be prosperous and expanding without the use either of coinage or high-quality pottery. The Egyptians had neither during their long history, and, had it not been for their habit of burying their most precious goods with their dead (and the erection of sumptuous tombs and temples), we might now imagine the ancient Egyptians to have been little more than primitive barbarians. The use of small denomination currency in the northern provinces until the 430s or 440s was entirely driven by the presence there of Roman garrisons, whilst the withdrawal of the legions in the middle of the fifth century meant the end of this money economy along the Rhine and Danube frontiers, as well as in northern Gaul and Britain. Thus it was the presence of the legions, and that alone, which had maintained the appearance of “cultural complexity” in these territories between the years 200 and 400. But this most emphatically did not mean that these regions were at that time economically prosperous. The presence of the legions maintained the illusion of normality until around 430, after which the illusion vanished, and the real situation revealed itself.

Yet the withdrawal of the Roman state would not necessarily have been an economic catastrophe. Populations seem to have remained steady, or even – as Christianity took root – expanded. Furthermore, the loss of spending-power signaled by the disappearance of the legions appears actually to have encouraged local manufacturers, who had hitherto been hindered by the ready availability of high-quality imports from the Middle East and North Africa. That this is the case is seen both in the increasing size of rural and even urban settlements at the time, as well as in the vibrant glassmaking, pottery and metallurgical industries which appeared in Merovingian Gaul towards the end of the fifth century (of which more will be said presently). It is seen too in the adoption of new technologies such as the moldboard plough, which were devised precisely to break in new and more difficult land to feed an expanding population. None of this evidence is examined or even mentioned by Ward-Perkins; and his attempts to portray the Visigothic and Frankish states in Spain and Gaul as barbarous principalities verges on the ridiculous.

Ward-Perkins’ ideas and arguments will be encountered again as we proceed. For now, all we need say is that, notwithstanding the weaknesses of his position, he has proved extremely influential, and is far from being alone in his views. Indeed a whole genre of publications now exists diametrically opposed to the Revisionist notion of classical continuity.
[36]
For Ward-Perkins has dovetailed nicely with what has now become the “traditional” view of the Middle Ages and of early Islam, which saw the former as barbarous and ignorant and the latter as urbane and cultured. Just as the Revisionists redoubled their efforts to abolish the Dark Age, a whole plethora of historians of the Islamic world have cast their hat into the ring in reiterating the existence of a European Dark Age – a darkness from which the West had to be rescued by Islam. The events of September 2001 have arguably heightened the passion and rhetoric of the debate: they have certainly made it more relevant and of more interest to the general public. Thus over the last decade there has been a rush of books by Islamophiles such as David Levering Lewis, John Freely and Thomas F. Glick which could, in most respects, have been written by Robert Briffault in the 1920s, and which mark a full return to the notion of a barbarous post-Roman West; and so complete has the sidelining of Pirenne become (in the English-speaking world at least) that a recent history of the Mediterranean by John Julius Norwich (
The Middle Sea
) can fill several hundred pages without the slightest reference to Pirenne. So, what for Pirenne was the “central event” of European history (the closing of the Mediterraean by the Arabs in the seventh century), is now seen by a large segment of academia as something of no importance whatsoever.

The Islamophiles have not, of course, had it all their own way, and there has also been a fairly robust restatement of the Islamic world’s shortcomings, particularly with regard to its attitude to science and learning. Thus for example 1993 saw the release of Toby E. Huff’s
The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West
, in which the author argued that Islam’s world-view was essentially inimical to the rise of science as we know it, and that was why it fell behind Europe in the eleventh or twelfth century, and remained behind ever since; whilst Bat Ye’or has argued (
The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam
(Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985)) that Islam ill deserves the reputation for openness and tolerance it has gained in some quarters; and that religious minorities such as Jews and Christians suffered a very severe form of oppression during the centuries of Islamic rule in the Middle East and North Africa. Other, more controversial authors, such as Robert Spencer, have in recent years released a plethora of works arguing that Islam, from its very inception, was essentially intolerant and backward, and could never have produced either an Enlightenment or an Age of Science.
[37]
Yet none of these authors have specifically defended Pirenne’s thesis, which was that Islam actually produced a dark age.

* * *

And so the arguments have raged back and forth. When all is said and done, however, the rejection of Pirenne remains almost absolute. That rejection is based upon a single proposition; one that has appeared in a variety of guises and headings over the past seventy years, but whose essential elements are always the same and may be summarized thus: Classical civilization, though still alive at the end of the sixth century, was badly weakened by the Barbarian Invasions, and was in an advanced state of decay. This decay had reached a critical stage by the end of the sixth century, and by the time of the Islamic invasions in the middle of the seventh century classical culture was already in effect dead. Islam did not then impede trade or trading contact between Europe and the Middle East; on the contrary, it opened up a whole new world of commercial enterprise during the seventh and eighth centuries, a process which eventually led to the revival of Europe.

[1]
R. A. Newhall,
The Crusades
(London, 1927), pp. 90-94. See also the works of H. A. R. Gibb.

[2]
Robert Briffault,
The Making of Humanity
(London, 1919), pp. 188-189

[3]
Ibid., p. 190

[4]
Ibid., pp. 190-191

[5]
Ibid., p. 191

[6]
Ibid., p. 198

[7]
Ibid., p. 194

[8]
Ibid., p. 197

[9]
Ibid., p. 188

[10]
A. Dopsch,
Wirtschaftliche und soziale Grundlagen der europäischen Kulturentwicklung
(Vienna, 1918-20)

[11]
Daniel C. Dennett, “Pirenne and Muhammad,”
Speculum: Journal of Mediaeval Studies
, Vol. XXIII (April 1948), No. 2.

[12]
Anne Riising, “The fate of Pirenne’s thesis on the consequences of Islamic expansion,”
Classica et Medievalia
13 (1952), 87-130

[13]
Sidney Painter,
A History of the Middle Ages, 284-1500
(Macmillan, 1953), p. 67

[14]
Ibid., p. 67

[15]
Ibid., pp. 67-8

[16]
Ibid., p. 68

[17]
Robert Folz,
The Coronation of Charlemagne
(English ed., London, 1974), p. 6

[18]
Ibid.

[19]
Ibid., p. 6

[20]
Ibid., p. 7

[21]
Ibid.

[22]
Maurice Lombard, “L’or musulman du VIIe au XIe siècles. Les bases monetaires d’une suprematie économique,”
Annales ESC
2 (1947), 143-60

[23]
Sture Bolin, “Mohammed, Charlemagne and Ruric,”
Scandinavian History Review
1 (1952).

[24]
Robert Folz, op cit., p. 7

[25]
Ibid., pp. 7-8

[26]
Ibid., p. 8

[27]
See eg. Philip Grierson, “Commerce in the Dark Ages: a critique of the evidence,”
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
(5th series) 9 (1959), 123-40. In view of the fact that Muslims were interested in acquiring European slaves from the very beginning – the seventh century – it is seen as somewhat strange that archaeological evidence for that trade only appears in the tenth century. We shall encounter this puzzling gap of three centuries in the historical process again and again as we proceed.

[28]
See H. Clarke and B. Ambrosiani,
Towns in the Viking Age
(St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1995)

[29]
See, Hugh Trevor-Roper, op cit.

[30]
Denys Hay,
Annalists and Historians
(London, 1977), p. 50

[31]
Stanley L. Jaki, “Medieval Creativity in Science and Technology,” in
Patterns and Principles and Other Essays
(Intercollegiate Studies Institute, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, 1995), p. 81

[32]
Jeffrey Burton Russell,
Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians
(Praeger Paperback, 1991)

[33]
See eg. Edward Grant,
God and Reason in the Middle Ages
(Cambridge, 2001)

[34]
V. I. Atroshenko and Judith Collins,
The Origins of the Romanesque
(Lund Humphries, London, 1985)

[35]
Glen W. Bowerstock, “The Vanishing Paradigm of the Fall of Rome,”
Bulletin of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
, Vol. 49, No.8 (May, 1996)

[36]
Yet another angle on the problem of the Dark Age, or possible solution to it, appeared in Germany in the 1990s: This being that the Dark Age never existed at all, and that the almost three centuries between 614 and 911 were inserted into the calendar by mistake. A summary of this controversial thesis is contained in the final chapter.

[37]
Some of Robert Spencer’s most popular titles are:
The Myth of Islamic Tolerance: How Islamic Law Treats non-Muslims
(Regnery, 2005);
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades
(Regnery, 2005);
Religion of Peace? Why Christianity is and Islam isn’t
(Regnery, 2007)