Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (31 page)

These then are the fact revealed by archaeology. The reader may make of them what he chooses.

[1]
It should be noted that the accepted narrative of Islam’s early expansion beyond Arabia strikes one as utterly fictitious. That the Arabs, a numerically tiny and backward people, should simultaneously attack and overcome both the might of Byzantium and of Sassanid Persia, is quite simply beyond belief. And it is no use to plead that these powers were “exhausted” by the war they had just recently waged against each other. Victorious armies do not tend to be “exhausted”, irrespective of their losses. Witness the mighty Soviet army at the end of World War 2, compared to the weak and incompetent Soviet army at the beginning of the same conflict. Thus Heraclius’ Byzantine army, newly victorious over the Persians, would have been no pushover.

[2]
“Arab-Sasanian Coins,”
Encyclopdaedia Iranica
, at www.iranica.com/articles/arab-sasanian-coins

[3]
Ibid.

[4]
Art historian Kenneth Clark speaks of the “miraculously short time” which the Arabs took to conquer the Byzantine territories of the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. Clark, op cit., p. 7

[5]
Günter Lüling,
Die Wiederentdeckung des Propheten Muhammad. Eine Kritik am “christlichen” Abendland
(Erlangen, 1981) p. 411

[6]
Arab-Persian rivalry is alive and well to this day. Distrust of Iran remains notorious amongst the Arab states of the Middle East, whilst the last words of Saddam Hussein, who launched a murderous war of attrition against Iran in 1980, were reputed to have been “Death to the Persians.”

[7]
Claudio Vita-Finzi, op cit.

[8]
Mike Baillie,
Exodus to Arthur: Catastrophic Encounters with Comets
(Batsford, 1999)

W
e have seen that, irrespective of what happened in Europe, Graeco-Roman civilization was terminated very abruptly in the seventh century in its heartlands, in the Near and Middle East, and in North Africa. In these vast territories a new civilization, quite unlike that which had gone before, appeared with surprising rapidity. This new Islamic culture inherited the resources, wealth, and learning of the old one, and was, from the very beginning, at an enormous advantage over the remnant “Roman” lands which yet survived in Europe. The latter continent was still largely rural and, for the most part, “pagan” and tribal. Nonetheless, as we have demonstrated in great detail in the foregoing pages, it was home to a large and growing population, which, in the territories of the former Roman Empire, in Gaul, central Europe, and Spain, was still heavily under the influence of Rome and, more especially, of Byzantium. The loss of the Middle East and North Africa to Islam did, as Pirenne argued, terminate most of the commercial and cultural contacts which had previously existed between those territories and Europe. But it did not impoverish Europe. The latter continent was, by the late sixth century, largely self-sufficient economically. Trade in luxuries such as wines and spices certainly came to an end, as did the cultural and political influence of Byzantine. The great basilicas of the Visigoths and the Merovingians, with their marble columns and brightly-colored mosaics, were replaced – after a somewhat lengthy period of non-construction – by the more somber and smaller structures of the tenth-century Romanesque. Yet on the whole the loss of contact with the East had no terrible economic consequences for the majority of Europe’s peoples. On the contrary, Europe was thrown back on its own resources, and it may well be that the great western tradition of inventiveness and innovation was stimulated into life at this time. There was, however, one product whose loss could not be easily made good, and whose absence had a profound impact on the west – papyrus.

The termination of the papyrus supply to Europe, as a cultural event, cannot be overestimated. Indeed, it has hitherto been radically underestimated. Papyrus, a relatively cheap writing material, had a thousand uses in an urban and mercantile culture. And, as we saw in Chapter 15, it was the material upon which was preserved the vast majority of the learning and thinking of the ancients. The loss of papyrus led inexorably to the loss of the bulk of classical literature – irrespective of the efforts of churchmen to preserve it on parchment. Thus from the mid-seventh century Europe became a largely illiterate society, and the educated and articulate town-dwellers, so typical of classical antiquity, disappeared. From then on, few people other than churchmen (and not all of these) could read and write.

The impact of Islam then, on Europe, was primarily cultural rather than, as Pirenne thought, economic. And, having cut Europe off from the sources of classical learning, Islam now began to exert its on influence on the continent. Here again we need to emphasize something that has hitherto received insufficient attention: namely the fact that Islam’s influence upon medieval Europe was immense. In the years before the arrival of Islam, the predominant cultural influence had been from the East, from Byzantium and the Levant. In the years after, it continued to be from the East; but the East now meant Islam. And the ideas which then began to cross the Mediterranean, from the Middle East and North Africa, were anything but enlightened.

It is of course widely accepted that Islam had a significant cultural and ideological impact upon Europe in the early Middle Ages. Historians, as we saw, tend to focus on science and philosophy. It is well-known, for example, that Muslim scholars, beginning with the Persian Avicenna (Ibn Sina) in the late tenth and early eleventh century, had made extensive commentaries upon the works of Aristotle, which they attempted to integrate, with a very limited degree of success it must be noted, into Islamic thought. In the second half of the twelfth century Avicenna’s work was taken up by the Spanish Muslim Averroes (Ibn Rushd), who made his own commentaries and writings on the Greek philosopher. By that time European scholars were very much aware of Arab learning, and men like John of Salisbury even had agents in Spain procuring Arabic manuscripts, which were then translated into Latin. “Soon the commentaries of Averroes were so well known in Europe,” says one historian, “that he was called ‘the Commentator,’ as Aristotle was called ‘the Philosopher.’”
[1]
At a slightly earlier stage, Christian Europeans had found their way into Muslim-controlled regions such as Sicily, often in disguise, in order to avail themselves of the scientific and alchemical knowledge of the Saracens. No less a person than Gerbert of Aurillac, the genius of the tenth century, on whom the figure of Faust was based, journeyed into the Muslim territories for this very purpose.

The profound influence exerted by Islam upon the philosophical and theological thinking of Europeans was stressed by Briffault, who noted how, “The exact parallelism between Muslim and Christian theological controversy is too close to be accounted for by the similarity of situation, and the coincidences are too fundamental and numerous to be accepted as no more than coincidence. … The same questions, the same issues which occupied the theological schools of Damascus, were after an interval of a century repeated in identical terms in those of Paris.”
[2]
Again, “The whole logomacy [of Arab theological debate] passed bodily into Christendom. The catchwords, disputes, vexed questions, methods, systems, conceptions, heresies, apologetics and irenics, were transferred from the mosques to the Sorbonne”
[3]

Europeans could not, of course, fail to be impressed by what they found in Islamic Spain and southern Italy. They themselves lived in a relatively backward environment. Crucial technologies began to creep into Europe at this time, often via Jewish traders and scholars, who were, for a while, the only class of people able to safely cross the Christian-Islamic frontiers. To these Jewish travelers, some of whom were physicians, alchemists and mathematicians, Europe almost certainly owes the acquisition of such things as the “Arabic” numeral system, knowledge of alcohol distillation, and probably algebra and a host of other information. “Muhammedan philosophy and theology had, we know, been carried to the Benedictine monasteries through the Jews, and the metropolitan house of Monte Cassino.”
[4]
The Spanish Jews in particular “supplied Arabic versions of Greek writers to Christendom.”
[5]
Indeed, so important was the influence of these Jewish traders and scholars that we might even say that, at a crucial moment, the Jews delivered to Europe the knowledge that helped her survive the Muslim onslaught. And we know how Europe later thanked them!

All of the above is well known and denied by no one. Yet, as we saw, Europeans were by no means devoid of their own Greek and Latin texts; and virtually all the classical literature that has survived into modern times did so through the good offices of Christian monks, not Arab philosophers. And, as I will now argue, the real ideological impression of Islam was not the enlightened thinking of Avicenna and Averroes, who were in any case rejected and expelled from the Muslim canon, but the darker thinking found in the Koran and the Haditha: the doctrines of perpetual war against non-believers; of holy deception (taqiyya); of death for apostates and heretics; of judicial torture; of slave and concubine-taking as a legitimate occupation. These were the teachings, and not those of the philosophers, which left an indelible imprint on medieval Europe. And this began right at the beginning.

* * *

The first Islamic (or Koranic) idea to find followers in Europe, and the one most obvious and recognized, was the impulse to iconoclasm, to the destruction of religious imagery and art. Iconoclasm began sometime between 726 and 730 when the Byzantine Emperor Leo III ordered the removal and destruction of all sacred statues and images throughout the Empire. His justification for doing so came from the Old Testament denunciation of idol-worship, yet it is evident that the real inspiration came from Islam.

The question of the Iconoclast episode is one of primary importance. Above all, it has been asked: What could have prompted Byzantine Emperors to go against one of the most fundamental tenets of their faith (the honoring of sacred images) and start destroying these in a manner reminiscent of Oliver Cromwell? Such action can only have been prompted by a crisis of the most profound kind. We have seen that in the early years the advance of Islam seemed unstoppable. The Empire suffered defeat after defeat. Within little more than a decade she had lost all her Middle Eastern possessions outside Anatolia. These included the most prosperous and populous provinces, Egypt and Syria; core areas of the Empire, and part of Imperial territory for seven hundred years. The Empire was experiencing its darkest days; and the fall of Constantinople must surely have seemed imminent. It is precisely crises of such type – those which threaten our very existence – that lead human beings to question fundamentals, to think the previously unthinkable. The Byzantines would have seen their reverses as a sign of divine anger, and a sure indication that they were doing something wrong – something perhaps that their Muslim foes were doing right! A central tenet of Islam is the rejection of images, which are regarded as idols and their honoring condemned as idolatry. No doubt some in Byzantium began to see this as the key.

If this was the psychology behind Byzantine Iconoclasm, then it is clear that Constantinople did not willingly and enthusiastically adopt Islamic thinking. Rather, the success of the new faith from Arabia was such that the Byzantines began to believe that it might enjoy God’s favor. Islamic ideas were therefore considered as a way of resolving a profound crisis. Yet, it is important to remember that, for whatever reason, Islamic ideas were copied. The whole of Christendom, East and West, was threatened by Islam; and, one way or another, ideas derived from Islam itself began to be considered by Christians as an answer to that very crisis.

Iconoclasm caused great divisions within the Empire, and was firmly rejected by the West – creating, it seems, some of the conditions leading to the final break between the Pope and Constantinople. Yet the very fact that a Roman Emperor could introduce a policy so obviously inspired by the beliefs of the Arabs tells us eloquently the extent to which the influence of Islamic ideology now began to make itself felt throughout Europe.

* * *

One of the most outstanding characteristics of the Middle Ages, and one that above all others perhaps differentiates it from classical antiquity, was its theocracy. The Middle Ages were, par excellence, the age of priestly power. In the West, the influence of the Church was immense, reaching much further than it ever had under the Christian Roman Emperors or the Germanic kings of the fifth and sixth centuries. The Papacy now stood in judgment of kings and Emperors, and had the power to choose and depose them. “By me kings reign” was the proud boast of the medieval papacy.
[6]

How did this come about? The refounding of the Western Empire under Charlemagne, according to Pirenne, was intimately connected with the rise of Islam and the destruction of Byzantine power. It was also, very consciously, seen as a method of strengthening Western Christendom against the advance of Islam. In years to come, the new Western Empire would be renamed the Holy Roman Empire – a singularly appropriate title, for the Empire represented a symbiotic union, at the heart of Europe, of spiritual and temporal authority. The crowning of the Emperor – for which the inauguration of Charlemagne became the model – was an event loaded with religious significance. These men ruled
Dei gratis
, and made the Church the main instrument of royal government. The authority of the Western Emperor would henceforth not simply be derived from his own military and economic strength, as it had been under the Caesars and Germanic kings of the fifth and sixth centuries, but ultimately upon the sanction and approval of the Church.

There were several factors in this crucial development. Pirenne, as we saw, noted that with the decline in literacy in the seventh century – following the closing of the Mediterranean – kings were forced to look to the Church to supply the educated functionaries needed to run the apparatus of the state. Again, the loss of tax revenue after the termination of the Mediterranean trade meant that the position of the monarch was weakened
vis a vis
the barons and minor aristocrats. These now gained in power and independence. The kings desperately needed a counterbalance to this, and the support of the Church carried great weight indeed. With the Church on their side the kings could – just about – keep the barons under control. But there was necessarily a trade-off. The Church might keep the king on his throne, but it gained in return an unheard-of influence and authority. Eventually the kings of Europe became, quite literally, subordinate to the Pope, who could even, in extreme cases, dethrone them. Everything a medieval ruler did, or proposed to do, he had to do with the sanction of the Church. Even powerful and independent warriors, such as William of Normandy, could only proceed with a project like the invasion of England after gaining papal approval.

The Carolingian and Ottonian Emperors thus laid the foundations of the medieval theocracy; yet in their time (ninth/tenth century), the papacy was still relatively weak. It was to elicit the support of Otto I against his Italian opponents that Pope John XII revived the dignity of Emperor in the West, after it had lapsed again following the death of Charlemagne. Here we see that in the tenth century, supposedly at the end of a 300-year-long Dark Age, there existed conditions remarkably similar to those pertaining in the sixth and early seventh centuries: Germanic kingdoms that were essentially secular in character, where Popes and prelates were subordinate to the monarchs. Yet conditions were changing. Otto I and his successors staffed their administrations with churchmen, who by then clearly had a monopoly on learning and even literacy. The old, Roman world, was very definitely a thing of the past. From this point on, the power of the Church would grow and grow.