Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (7 page)

I
nitial reaction to Pirenne’s thesis was muted, and what reaction there was tended to be hostile. This is not surprising, given the fact that, should what Pirenne was saying be true, the reputation of virtually every medieval scholar then alive was at risk. It cannot be stressed too forcefully just how radically against the grain of contemporary academic thought Pirenne went. Far from seeing the Arabs as the destroyers of classical civilization, scholars had increasingly, over the previous half century, come to regard them as its saviors. More and more they had come to believe that whatever classical learning survived in Europe during the three or four dark centuries between the seventh and eleventh, had done so only though the good offices of the Arabs. This tendency to applaud Arab civilization is traceable to the Enlightenment, though the ground was arguably laid during the Reformation, when Protestant northern Europe detached itself politically and ideologically from the Catholic south. After this, historians in (especially) the English-speaking world came to see the Christian (and therefore Catholic) Middle Ages as a time of darkness and superstition. With the Enlightenment, this tendency spread to France; and among the contemporaries of Voltaire and Diderot, the Islamic world was increasingly viewed as something altogether more cultured – and exotic – than the “dark and obscure” civilization which seemed to have taken hold of Europe after the fall of Rome. Furthermore, by the middle of the eighteenth century scholars had come to realize just how much medieval Europe, from the late tenth century onwards, owed to the Arabs. Scholars discovered that a whole plethora of technical and scientific terms, words such as algebra, alcohol, alkali, antimony, alembic, zenith, nadir, amalgam, etc, were of Arabic origin.
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They read of European scholars of the tenth century onwards, such as Gerbert of Aurillac, who went to great lengths in their quest to acquire the learning of the Arabs and the Moors. Indeed the more they investigated, the more profound the influence of Islamic civilization seemed to have been. Christendom, it appeared, had been little more than a backwater in the tenth and eleventh centuries, whereas the “House of Islam” seemed to be enjoying a Golden Age. In time, some scholars began to see almost all European science and learning as an Arab creation, or at least something that appeared only under the influence of the Arabs. This opinion took root in the nineteenth century, and by the early years of the twentieth century had become, in some quarters at least, part of received wisdom. Take for example the words of one prominent historian and social anthropologist in 1919:

“It was under the influence of the Arabian and Moorish revival of culture, and not in the fifteenth century, that the real Renaissance took place. Spain, not Italy, was the cradle of the rebirth of Europe. After steadily sinking lower and lower into barbarism, it [Europe] had reached the darkest depths of ignorance and degradation when the cities of the Saracenic world, Baghdad, Cairo, Cordova, Toledo, were growing centres of civilization and intellectual activity.”
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Again, “It is highly probable that but for the Arabs modern European civilization would not have arisen at all; it is absolutely certain that but for them, it would not have assumed the character which has enabled it to transcend all previous phases of evolution.”
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In support of these statements, the writer lists a number of Arab inventions, discoveries and innovations. He refers to the astronomers Al-Zarkyal and Al-Farani, who postulated that the orbits of the planets was elliptical rather than circular, as Ptolemy believed.
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He notes how Ibn Sina (Avicenna) is said to have employed an air thermometer, and Ibn Yunis to have used a pendulum for the measurement of time.
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He points to the work of Al-Byruny, who travelled forty years to collect mineralogical specimens, and to that of Ibn Baitar, who collected botanical specimens from the whole Muslim world, and who compared the floras of India and Persia with those of Greece and Spain.
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He lauds the Arab achievement of having introduced the zero into mathematics, and points to the Arab invention of algebra, which was to revolutionize mathematics.
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As if all this were not enough, he asserts that the Arabs invented the empirical method itself, which stands at the foundation of all modern science, and points to the achievements of Arab chemists, or alchemists, whose “organized passion for research … led them to the invention of distillation, sublimation, filtration, to the discovery of alcohol, or nitric acid and sulphuric acids (the only acid known to the ancients was vinegar), of the alkalis, of the salts of mercury, of antimony and bismuth, and laid the basis of all subsequent chemistry and physical research.”
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Warming to his theme, the writer continues:

“The incorruptible treasures and delights of intellectual culture were accounted by the princes of Baghdad, Shiraz and Cordova, the truest and proudest pomps of their courts. But it was not as a mere appendage to their princely vanity that the wonderful growth of Islamic science and learning was fostered by their patronage. They pursued culture with the personal ardour of an overmastering craving. Never before and never since, on such a scale, has the spectacle been witnessed of the ruling classes throughout the length and breadth of a vast empire given over entirely to a frenzied passion for the acquirement of knowledge. Learning seemed to have become with them the chief business of life. … caravans laden with manuscripts and botanical specimens plied from Bokhara to the Tigris, from Egypt to Andalusia. … To every mosque was attached a school; wazirs vied with their masters in establishing public libraries, endowing colleges, founding bursaries for impecunious students. … It was under the influence of the Arabian and Moorish revival of culture, and not in the fifteenth century, that the real Renaissance took place. Spain, not Italy, was the cradle of the rebirth of Europe. After steadily sinking lower and lower into barbarism, it had reached the darkest depths of ignorance and degradation when the cities of the Saracenic world, Baghdad, Cairo, Cordova, Toledo, were growing centres of civilization and intellectual activity. It was there the new life arose which was to grow into a new phase of human evolution. From the time when the influence of their culture made itself felt, began the stirring of a new life.”
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These words were written a year after the end of the First World War and just over a decade before the launch of Pirenne’s radically alternative viewpoint: they would have been endorsed by the great majority of professional academics at the time – and indeed they are endorsed by the majority of academics to this day, as a whole plethora of recent publications make perfectly clear. Thus David Levering Lewis’
God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570-1215
(2008), echoes Briffault’s sentiments to the letter, as does John Freely’s
Light from the East: How the Science of Medieval Islam helped shape the Western World
(2010). Along with major works such as these, every year sees the publication of quite literally hundreds of papers in academic publications and the popular media on a similar vein, as well as the appearance of numerous like-minded television documentaries. These are supplemented by countless lectures and symposia expounding an identical viewpoint. As just one example among many we may mention the paper delivered in April, 2010, in London by Dr. Peter Adamson, professor of ancient and medieval philosophy in King’s College, London. The title of the lecture, “How the Muslims Saved Civilization: the Reception of Greek Learning in Arabic,” speaks for itself.

For what appears to be the majority of academia then, on both sides of the Atlantic, the view is that by the beginning of the seventh century Europe had sunk into a profound Germanic barbarism, from which it had to be rescued by a tolerant and enlightened Islam. This is precisely the view of Robert Briffault and others of the pre-Pirenne epoch. It is true, of course, that not all contemporary academics are in agreement; yet it has to be admitted that the above perspective is still the prevailing one, especially in Europe: which means, of course, that Pirenne’s ideas have been generally rejected. The process of how this came about is worth looking at.

The first shots were fired by Alfons Dopsch, who argued that, though classical civilization survived the Barbarian Invasions, and the invaders had indeed made attempts to preserve Roman institutions and learning, still they were unable to save these, which were in any case in terminal decline.
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The barbarians themselves, he said, inadvertently speeded that decline by their own ignorance of Roman society and by their frequent internecine wars. Thus, although Roman civilization survived till the seventh century, it was only in a debased and decadent form. The strength and vitality that had made Rome great had long since gone. The Muslims then did not so much destroy classical civilization as put it out of its misery.

Dopsch’s critique tended to be echoed by scholars of French and German origin, and throughout the 1940s and 50s there were several further attempts by Continental scholars to rebut particular aspects of Pirenne. As with Dopsch, historians in general have never quite been able to get the notion out of their heads that the Germanic invaders were somehow incapable of being civilized. This was Daniel C. Dennett’s approach in his 1948 article, “Pirenne and Muhammad.”
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Dennett, like Dopsch, did not deny that Graeco-Roman civilization and Roman institutions survived in Gaul, Italy and Spain into the late fifth and sixth centuries, but they survived, he said, only in a weakened and enfeebled state. Any major shock to the system was liable to finish them off, and this came, claimed Dennett, in the sixth century, with a series of plagues, famines, and wars, which effectively delivered the coup de grace to classical culture even before the rise of Islam. Indeed, said Dennett, it was the very weakness of classical civilization in Europe and elsewhere that elicited the Islamic Conquests in the first place.

Precisely the same line was taken just four years later by Anne Riising, and indeed by a whole host of authors during the 1950s and ‘60s.
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Thus in 1953 one prominent historian could write of the “gradual decline of civilization in Gaul, which had been ongoing since the third century.”
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The said decline, we are informed, “became more rapid in the Merovingian period.” “The Franks,” the writer explains, “were essentially warriors … [who] had no interest in urban life.”
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Their kings, we are told, “did not consider the encouragement of trade and commerce by keeping roads and bridges in repair, policing the trade routes, and protecting merchants and their goods, any part of their royal function,” and “Although the ancient cities on the Mediterranean coast retained some sea-borne commerce, trade almost disappeared in the interior. By the end of the Merovingian era, Gaul was essentially an agricultural region with a localized agrarian economy. There was little money in circulation and few traders moved along the roads.”
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The overwhelming impression given here, and in countless similar and even more recent publications, is of a long and painful decline – a gradual descent into anarchy and illiteracy under the auspices of a barbarous people who had no real understanding or appreciation of civilized life. And though the above writer does concede that, until the time of Gregory of Tours (late sixth century), there was little sign of civilizational decline in Gaul, yet, “after that generation [of Gregory of Tours] disappeared, learning became extremely rare and literacy rather uncommon.”
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By the 1960s more writers were prepared to take up the cudgels. Thus in 1964 French historian Robert Folz could write that “… the towns of Gaul [of the fifth and sixth centuries] certainly suffered from the economic depression which had characterized the whole of the west from about the third century onwards.”
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Evidence which for Pirenne was of great importance, such as the continued use of gold in coinage, is reinterpreted. “We must not be deceived here by outward appearances,” Folz warns. “As in Roman times, Gaul had continued since the fifth century to have a gold standard. But the precious metal had become more and more rare, and was hoarded; from the middle of the seventh century, no more gold coinage was struck. It was replaced by silver, in the form of the
denier
or the
sceatta
, a coin of Anglo-Saxon origin, which gives an early indication of the growing importance of exchange with the north.”
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So, what for Pirenne was evidence of a sudden and violent break with the past – namely the abandonment of the gold standard and the reorientation of trading relations away from the Mediterranean towards the north – was for Folz simply the logical conclusion of a process that was already at an advanced stage. He admits that, “The trade carried on between west and east by way of the Mediterranean still continued [during the fifth and sixth centuries]. Silks, spices and ivory were unloaded in the ports of Provence to supply the needs of wealthy customers. Olive oil was needed for food and lighting, and Egyptian papyrus was used to write on … But this was an unbalanced trade, which had to be paid for in gold. Its volume continued to decrease; in any case it could not be called very great. The chief middlemen were foreigners, especially Syrians and Jews, the latter being particularly active in the towns of the south – Marseille, Arles and Narbonne.”
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Interestingly, it is only at this point that Folz mentions Pirenne and his thesis. After providing a brief summary, he asks: “What are we to make of this theory?” There would be no need, he says, to “involve the reader in the controversy surrounding Pirenne’s great book,” and it would be enough, he says, “to say that his claim cannot be fully substantiated.”
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“I remarked,” he continues, “that the bonds between the west and the east had been growing weaker since the third century, and that the west was slowly turning its attention northwards. It is thus impossible to speak of a sudden reversal of the situation resulting from the arrival of the Arabs.”
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This then was the main thrust of opposition to Pirenne from the 1940s onwards, and it is an argument which has resurfaced with many variants again and again over the past sixty years. By the mid- 1940s it was joined by another and equally perennially recurring theme: namely that the Muslims did not disrupt trade in the Mediterranean at all and that, if anything, their arrival in the mid-seventh century signaled the start of a new age of trading and prosperity. Thus for example in 1947 French historian and numismatist Maurice Lombard argued that Europe benefited from the arrival of Islam (rather than suffered from it) because the Muslim desire for European slaves initiated a lively trade which brought huge amounts of gold to the continent. As proof of this he cited the hoards of Muslim
dirhems
found in Scandinavia and European Russia.
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In the same vein Scandinavian numismatist Sture Bolin argued that Islamic trade with northern Europe during the eighth to tenth century was the basis of the Carolingian Renaissance, and held that “an examination of the hoards from Carolingian times will show fairly directly how close the connections were between the Frankish and Arab worlds …”
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