Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (24 page)

[1]
Hodges and Whitehouse, op cit., p. 46

[2]
Ibid., p. 45

[3]
Ibid.

[4]
Ibid., p. 46

[5]
Claudio Vita-Finzi,
The Mediterranean Valleys
(Cambridge, 1969)

[6]
Hodges and Whitehouse, op cit., p. 57

[7]
Ibid.

[8]
Ibid.

[9]
Ibid., pp. 57-8

[10]
Ibid., p. 57

[11]
“At the very time the Vikings were raiding Christian communities around the North Sea, Moslems from North Africa and Spain were also attacking Crete, Sicily, southern Italy, Provence and southern Anatolia. The raids began when the western Islamic kingdoms broke with the Abbasids in the 820s. The loss of wealth affected the political stability of the Maghreb and Umayyed Spain just as it had in the Baltic countries. Raids and invasions aimed at the vulnerable Christian communities were the result.” Hodges and Whitehouse, op cit., p. 167

[12]
Pirenne, op cit., p. 159

W
hatever arguments may be presented about Islam’s impact upon classical civilization in Europe, there is no question at all that in the East, in those regions which came under the domination of Islam, the effect was to terminate classical civilization, and to terminate it very quickly. Indeed, Islam eliminated the civilization of classical antiquity far more completely in Syria, in Anatolia, in Egypt and in North Africa than it ever did in Europe. This is obvious enough, but it needs to be said, for it is a fact that is often overlooked.

In Europe, whatever we may say of the collapse of the economy and the dwindling of cities, some aspects of Graeco-Roman civilization survived, even at the height (or depths?) of the Middle Ages. Here Latin continued to be the language of learning and culture, and it survived too, in a moderated form, in the everyday speech of Italy, Spain, and Gaul. Christianity, the religion of Rome, continued to be the faith espoused by the populace, and we should note that in the Church, particularly in the monasteries, there existed an institution which made real efforts to preserve the learning and literature of the classical world.

It goes without saying that none of these things pertained in the territories which came under Islam. These regions, on the whole, belonged to the Greek-speaking rather than the Latin-speaking parts of the Roman Empire; but they contained by far the most important centers of classical civilization at the start of the seventh century. In Egypt, in Syria, in North Africa, and in Anatolia, Islam gained control of lands containing enormous urban centers, beside which the “cities” of the West looked like mere villages. The Levantine provinces were the cultural and economic powerhouses of the Roman world. We know that the cities of Egypt, Syria and Anatolia held great academies, invariably equipped with well-stocked libraries; and that these remained vigorous and growing institutions into the first decades of the seventh century. The student of the time could study a wide variety of subjects in institutions throughout the Empire: “Philosophy (including in principle what we understand today by science) flourished at Athens and Alexandria; medicine also at Alexandria, at Pergamum and elsewhere; law at Beirut.”
[1]
Although there was nothing corresponding precisely with what we understand as a university, with a multiplicity of disciplines available at one location, nevertheless, by travelling the student could become acquainted with all kinds of knowledge: “The School of Alexandria and that of Constantinople … came closest to our concept of a university …”
[2]
“After completing his secondary schooling in a local town, he [the budding scholar] would go to a larger centre, say Antioch or Smyrna or Gaza, to study with a prominent rhetor; but if he was attracted to philosophy, he would have to travel to Alexandria or Athens. The quest for learning was synonymous with travel. … The mobility of students was paralleled by that of professors: Libanus, for example, had taught at Nicomedia, Nicaea and Constantinople before he settled down in his native Antioch.”
[3]

This epoch saw extremely important advances in science and technology. We know, for example, that Aetius of Amida (mid-fifth to mid-sixth century), Paulus of Aegina (c. 625 – c. 690) and Alexander of Tralles (c. 525 – c. 605), three noted physicians, all made contributions to the study of medicine as well as other disciplines: they investigated, for example, the principles of conics and built ingenious machinery, including highly advanced astrolabes, the computers of their time.
[4]
According to science historian Samuel Sambursky, the researches of the Byzantine scholars of the sixth century were anticipating, in many ways, the discoveries of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. By the sixth century, he shows, Neo-Platonic philosophers were constructing complex machines using cog-wheel technology, as well as making important discoveries about the natural world.
[5]
And this innovation did not end with the reign of Justinian, or with the sixth century. Thus, as we saw, “Greek Fire,” a form of primitive flame-thrower devised by a Syrian architect, was used to devastating effect by the Byzantines against Muslim invaders in 677.
[6]

As might be imagined, literacy rates in this late classical world were high; and there existed, as well as the great libraries attached to the academies, innumerable private ones in the possession of wealthy citizens. Industry and commerce of all kinds flourished in the ports, and merchants plied a vigorous trade with lands in the Far West and in the Far East. The process by which the great discoveries and technical innovations of China and India would reach the West had already commenced; in the time of Justinian the secrets of silk-making reached the West, prompting the growth of a silk-producing industry in the Levant and in Spain.
[7]

Fig. 21. Palmyra, one of the great classical cities of the Middle East destroyed during the Arab conquests in the mid-seventh century. The settlement survived the Arab invasion, but went into an irreversible decline in the years that followed, as its hinterland became a desert.

And it is here that we must refute a hypothesis widely circulated and widely credited in academic circles over the past half century. The conquests of Islam, it is said, and the apparent ease with which they were carried out, are proof in themselves of the decadence and decline of Byzantine society in the late sixth and early seventh centuries. This, after all, is the very core of the argument present in Hodges’ and Whitehouse’s book. Yet it is an argument that has little to recommend it. We have seen that the regions conquered by the Arabs were without exception the most civilized and economically developed of the Roman and Byzantine worlds. These territories seem to have fallen not because they were uncivilized and backward, but because they were in a sense too civilized. The spirit of barbarism had long disappeared from the Eastern Provinces. Under the protective shield of Rome, the farmers, artisans, and intellectuals of the eastern and southern Mediterranean had grown to despise the calling of the soldier, and to see the defense of the country as someone else’s business. At the time of the Persian invasion in 619, Egypt had not experienced war for six and a half centuries. And whilst North Africa had suffered the Vandal invasion and the subsequent reconquest of the province under Justinian, these events had little direct effect upon the civilian population, which continued with its normal everyday business as before. And it is significant that the only part of mainland Europe to be conquered was Spain, by far the most prosperous and, as we would say, settled and civilized part of the continent. (Italy had forfeited that position long before in the savage wars which rent the Peninsula during the reconquest by Justinian and the subsequent Lombard invasion). The weakness of Spain, whose defense was entirely in the hands of a numerically tiny aristocratic – Visigoth – elite, may be regarded as a microcosm of the weakness of the Byzantine world. Here there existed a highly centralized society with a professional army, and an extremely rigid system of law-enforcement. The civilian populations of Anatolia, of Syria, of Egypt, and of North Africa, were vast; but they were completely unused to war. After the defeats of the Imperial forces, there existed no tradition of military training or activity which could have facilitated independent local action against the invaders. Nor was there any mechanism by which they could be recruited into the Imperial Army and rapidly trained as soldiers.

It is significant, and worth stressing, that the only part of North Africa which offered any sustained resistance to the Arabs was the relatively “uncivilized” part in the far west, which had earlier thrown off the yoke of Rome and reverted to its native tribalism and incessant internecine war. Again, as we saw in an earlier chapter, it was only when the Arabs reached the semi-tribal lands in the mountains of northern Spain that they began to meet effective resistance there

So, the prosperity of the Eastern Empire in the late sixth and early seventh centuries is not to be doubted. The archaeology, we have seen, proves it again and again, as even Hodges and Whitehouse concede. Yet all this ended with the Arab conquests. It is true, of course, that some commerce and learning continued for a while under the newcomers; and this is a topic which we shall return to in due course, for it is one upon which there has emerged a whole mythology.
[8]
Yet it is equally true that the process which saw the economic and cultural decline of Egypt, Syria and Anatolia began almost immediately after the Arab invasions. From Syria and Anatolia in the East to Morocco in the West, the southern shores of the Mediterranean are dotted with the ruins of abandoned Roman cities. These metropolises (and there are literally thousands of them), which were invariably in fertile and cultivated territories, now stand as mute witnesses to the reality of what Arab conquest meant: For it was only in the seventh century that these cities were abandoned and the countryside on which they stood transformed into barren wasteland.
[9]
These ruins are what Kenneth Clarke described as the “bleached bones” of the classical world which the Arabs left in their wake.
[10]
The Younger Fill silt layer occurs here too, and with the desertification of the countryside came the silting up of river valleys and harbors, as invaluable topsoil was washed away.

That so many of the Roman cities in the Middle East and North Africa were abandoned is striking and in complete contrast to what happened in Europe. In the latter region the Roman towns were continuously occupied throughout the fifth and sixth centuries and into the Middle Ages. Thus Roman Londinium became Anglo-Saxon Lundenwic and then medieval London. The Roman town of Paris became the center of Merovingian power during the sixth century and remained the capital of France thereafter. It was precisely because of the continuous occupation of Europe’s Roman cities that so little of the original architecture has remained – above ground, at least. The stone and marble of the great Roman buildings of London, for example, have long since disappeared because they were recycled many times in new structures erected throughout late antiquity and the Middle Ages.

The Roman centers of the Middle East and North Africa, by contrast, were (with a handful of exceptions) completely abandoned, and the surrounding countryside transformed into an arid or semi-arid wasteland; with the result that very many of the great monuments of these areas have survived to become important tourist attractions.

Fig. 22. Scene from Caesarea Maritima, one of the great cities of the Middle East destroyed in the seventh century.

That these settlements were abandoned in the early to mid-seventh century admits of only two possible explanations. Either they were abandoned immediately before the arrival of the Arabs, and their demise elicited by some form of climate catastrophe or other natural disaster such as a plague; or the Arabs themselves were responsible for their demise and for the destruction of the region’s agricultural base. It has to be admitted that all the literary sources point to the second solution as the correct one. Documents from the period speak unanimously of flourishing settlements and active economies brought to an end by the Arab invaders. And the archaeology too, as even Hodges and Whitehouse have admitted, has tended to confirm this picture, with clear evidence of massive destruction at the terminating point of virtually all the late Byzantine cities of the area.

Admitting then that the Arabs did immense damage to the actual buildings, how does this explain the desertification of the territories in which these cities stood? That at least, we might feel, surely cannot have been the work of the Arabs. Surely for that at least Mother Nature must take the blame!

The above question is one that has prompted a great deal of study and debate, both among scientists and historians. The definitive work however was published in 1951 by Rhoads Murphey, Professor Emeritus of History at Harvard. In an article entitled “The Decline of North Africa since the Roman Occupation: Climatic or Human?”, he provides a detailed outline of the problem. I shall quote him at some length, as what he says is most instructive: