Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (8 page)

This argument too was marshaled by Folz: “Mediterranean trade,” he assures us, “does not [contrary to Pirenne] appear to have ceased at this point.” It may, he concedes, have been slightly impeded by piracy, “But trade between east and west continued nevertheless; it was only the trade-routes that changed.”
[24]
He notes that “From that time onwards [mid-seventh century] silks and spices reached the west via Italy, where they were brought from the great market of Constantinople, or from Moslem Spain, which received them by sea or overland along the African coast route.”
[25]
Folz also argues that the slave-trade, which admittedly brought slaves from Europe to the Islamic world, also became an important source of revenue for the European economies. The end result of all this, he says, is that, “Far from being the cause of a break in the activities of the Mediterranean countries, Islam was more probably responsible for a revival of their trade …”
[26]

Notwithstanding the popularity of this argument, one which is widely heard to this day, it has always had major problems. To begin with, even Pirenne’s harshest critics had to admit that many products of Levantine and Oriental manufacture do indeed disappear from western Europe after the mid-seventh century. This is true, for example, of papyrus, as well as of a whole host of foodstuffs, such as spices of various kinds; and it speaks of some disruption at least. Furthermore, the disappearance of gold currency from the mid-seventh century and its replacement by a very much reduced silver coinage also points towards impoverishment and blockade. And even the most enthusiastic Islamophiles could scarcely argue that the “new” trade initiated by Islam, which was concerned almost entirely with the acquisition of European slaves, could be described as a normal commercial activity. Without exception, the slave trade, wherever it occurs, is accompanied by raiding, piracy, and general banditry; and all these things are recorded in Europe from the mid-seventh century onwards.

A further problem for Pirenne’s critics was concerned with chronology: the fact that very few of the Muslim coin-hoards found in Scandinavia and Russia could be securely dated before the tenth century. From that time onwards, it was true, fairly large quantities of Islamic coinage occurred, but there was nothing, apparently, before then.
[27]
That, at least, was the narrative accepted until the 1990s, at which time archaeologists established that at least one major Scandinavian settlement in Russia, at Staraja Ladoga, was actively trading with the Islamic world in the seventh century; and this was underlined by the discovery of several hoards of Arab coins dating from the mid-seventh century. These are remarkable developments which raise the prospect that the entire chronology of the Viking Age, as well as that of Islamic trading relations with Scandinavia, needs to be radically reconsidered.
[28]

But irrespective of when Islamic gold first appeared in northern Europe, European states continued to mint almost all coins in silver – and even these were pitifully scarce in comparison with the number of coins recovered from the Roman and Visigothic/Merovingian periods. In short, as Europe entered the eleventh and twelfth centuries it continued to have a predominantly rural and barter economy. The only conclusion to be drawn was that, notwithstanding the gold reaching the North from the Islamic slave trade, it was insufficient to generate a money-based economy, and the quantity of gold must have been very small in comparison with the quantities arriving from the Near East during the fifth and sixth centuries. These circumstances furthermore gave added weight to the argument that the source of this gold (the buying and selling of slaves) did not represent a normal pattern of trade: the gold was an inducement to piracy – a piracy which, in itself, prevented any normal form of trading and economic activity along the Mediterranean coastlands of Europe.

Another counter-Pirenne argument also suffered from chronological problems: This was the arrival of new technologies and knowledge in Europe from the Islamic world. These too however only made an impact in the late tenth and eleventh centuries, and since they do not date from the actual “Dark Age” (seventh to mid-tenth centuries), they are not strictly relevant to Pirenne’s thesis and cannot be used in argument against him. Furthermore, even the new technologies of the tenth-eleventh centuries do not necessarily constitute proof of any substantial contact: a single learned or skilled individual might be the means by which a new science or technology is transmitted from one civilization to another, and the spread of such technologies, which undoubtedly occurred in the tenth, eleventh, and twelfth centuries, cannot be regarded as proof of the existence of any meaningful economic contact between the Christian and Islamic worlds.

Notwithstanding these objections, the arguments of Lombard and Bolin in particular did have a powerful impact, and led to a consensus amongst a large segment of academia that Pirenne had essentially been disproved. It is true that whilst not everyone was convinced, and Pirenne did find support among many prominent historians, among them Hugh Trevor-Roper,
[29]
in general the tone of debate continued to be hostile throughout the sixties and seventies. And a new phase of the battle was initiated in the 1980s with the appearance of an important critique, by archaeologists Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse (
Mohammed, Charlemagne, and the Birth of Europe
). This latter, which took a detailed look at the archaeology of the Mediterranean world and parts of Northern Europe between the sixth and tenth centuries, proved to be extremely influential in sidelining Pirenne. Because of the importance of this volume, we shall devote the next two chapters, plus parts of several others, to a detailed examination of it. Suffice to note here that such was the impact of Hodges’ and Whitehouse’s work that by the mid-eighties enormous numbers of books and articles dealing with late antiquity and the early Middle Ages made no mention of Pirenne or his theory, and on the contrary reiterated opinions that could almost have been written by Robert Briffault in the 1920s.

* * *

By the 1980s then Pirenne and his thesis was generally consigned to the archives of interesting but flawed historical ideas. Yet even as this was happening the controversy about the early Middle Ages and the transition from Graeco-Roman civilization took a somewhat unexpected turn. Increasingly, from the middle of the twentieth century onwards, a new breed of “revisionist” historian emerged to challenge the very notion of a Dark Age at all. This was partly prompted by the discoveries of archaeology, but also by a re-examination of the documentary material and a general questioning of certain clichéd views (such as those of Briffault) which had passed as accepted fact for such a long time. The new perspective was exemplified by Denys Hay when he wrote, in 1977, of “the lively centuries which we now call dark.”
[30]
For Hay and others it had become clear that, contrary to what had been taught for many years, intellectual life did not ossify or contract between the fifth and tenth centuries; nor did the church discourage learning or research. Indeed, in many ways it became increasingly apparent that Christianity played a revitalizing role in the Roman world, simultaneously creating a more humane environment, halting the Empire’s long-standing demographic decline, and encouraging literacy and learning. The knowledge of the ancients, it was now apparent, had not been lost nearly as completely as had hitherto been imagined. Documentary evidence showed a surprising familiarity among the scholastic thinkers of the early Middle Ages with an enormous body of Latin and Greek literature, including secular pagan writers, whose work it had been customary to believe was entirely lost to the West before the Renaissance. Nor, it became apparent, was the spirit of rational enquiry nearly as moribund as people like Briffault had imagined. It was noted for example that Gerbert of Aurillac, the future Pope Silvester II, had in the latter tenth century made important contributions in various fields of scientific research, and was credited with the construction of the first mechanical clock. Another savant of this supposedly “dark” age had made experiments with flying machines, whilst various others had written treatises on geography, natural history and mathematics.
[31]
The caricatures which had for so long misled the public with regard to the Middle Ages were one by one exposed for the fictions that they were. One of the most glaring of these was the belief that, prior to Christopher Columbus, Europeans had thought the earth was flat. The source of this particular fiction was traced by Jeffrey Burton Russell (
Inventing the Flat Earth: Columbus and Modern Historians
) to several anti-Christian writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, most importantly Washington Irving, John Draper and Andrew White.
[32]
In the above volume Russell shows in detail how writers even of the darkest epoch of the “Dark Age” had an extremely good idea of the earth’s shape and of its size – thanks to the calculations of Eratosthenes in the third century BC, which they were well aware of. Science and learning, as Edward Grant as well as many other writers found, was actually encouraged by the Church, and the old view of the Christian faith acting as a dampener on scientific enquiry had to be abandoned.
[33]

Archaeology too began, in some respects at least, to show an astonishing continuity between the world of late antiquity and the Middle Ages. Thus for example it was noted that Merovingian architecture in Gaul during the sixth and early seventh centuries bore a striking resemblance to the Romanesque architecture of France during the tenth and eleventh centuries.
[34]
It was very clear that there existed a direct line of connection between the two, which formed part of a single artistic and technical tradition. A seminal work was that of Peter Brown, whose
The Making of Late Antiquity
(1978) offered a new paradigm for understanding the changes of the time and challenged the post-Gibbon view of a stale and ossified late classical culture, in favor of a vibrant and dynamic civilization.

In recent decades then quite literally dozens of authors have nailed their colors to the mast and published work decrying the very existence of a Dark Age. So prominent has this school become that it is now, to some degree, part of received wisdom; and to talk of a Dark Age is, in many quarters at least, to invite scorn. These writers have emphasized, in a thousand publications, how archaeology has demonstrated the existence of vibrant and demographically expanding societies throughout Europe during the sixth and seventh centuries. These were, in part at least, heavily under the influence of Rome and Byzantium; though they were also heavily “native” in their inspiration. The astonishing culture that appeared in Ireland and Britain during these centuries, with its dramatic “Hiberno-Saxon” art, was surely not the signature, these writers hold, of a decadent and dying society. Architecture in stone too, throughout the former territories of the Western Empire, which had all but disappeared by the fifth century, reappeared in the sixth and seventh centuries, even in places like Anglo-Saxon England, where the Germanic migrations had effaced Roman civilization in a most thorough way. And this architecture looked distinctly Roman in appearance. Continuity too is seen in the survival of Latin as the language of learning and of the church.

So overwhelming and striking has been the evidence for the survival of classical culture that by 1996 Glen W. Bowerstock could write of “The Vanishing Paradigm of the Fall of Rome.” Bowerstock went through the archaeological evidence in detail and came to the conclusion that Roman civilization (and even in some aspects the Roman Empire) never really fell at all, but simply evolved into the culture we now call “medieval,” a culture which was, however, much more “Roman” than has until recently been admitted or realized.
[35]
More recently, a plethora of publications, many of which look in some depth at the archaeology, have argued passionately in the same vein, and we may cite Peter S. Wells’
Barbarians to Angels
(New York, 2008), Chris Wickham’s,
The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400 – 1000
(2009); and Ken Dark’s
Britain and the End of the Roman Empire
(Stroud, 2001), as among the most influential.

Denying the very existence of a Dark Age, the “Revisionists” have always tended (whenever they have considered it) to refute the contention of Pirenne that Islam plunged Europe into an economic and cultural limbo in the seventh century. But in spite of the very clear continuity they trace from the seventh to the tenth and eleventh centuries, they have been signally unable to account for one glaring fact: the apparently almost complete disappearance of archaeology for three centuries between the mid-seventh and mid-tenth centuries. This was a problem highlighted at various times during the twentieth century both by Pirenne’s supporters and critics. Indeed, for the latter group it was the very completeness of the disappearance during the seventh century which convinced them that western societies had to have been already in decline in the latter years of the sixth: otherwise the thoroughness of the disappearance, the very totality of the demographic collapse, is beyond explanation or comprehension. This was a theme taken up in 2005 by Bryan Ward-Perkins, whose
The Fall of Rome and the End of Civilization
, took a more or less traditional view of late antiquity, returning fully to the opinions of people like Briffault, who imagined the Germanic peoples savages incapable of civilized life.

The Ward-Perkins book in fact fully underlines the apparently insoluble dichotomy at the heart of the whole Dark Age debate: How is it that a civilization as sophisticated as that of the Romans could disappear – apparently completely – for several centuries, only to reappear, admittedly in a greatly transformed state (“Romanesque”), in the tenth and eleventh centuries? Ward-Perkins himself of course would deny almost any continuity from classical Rome, and would see the Latin elements in medieval civilization as entirely superficial. For him Romanesque culture was the creation of semi-literate peasants and savage chieftains who, from the tenth century onwards merely copied the ruined buildings of the Romans, which still littered the landscape. Yet even the Revisionist school struggles to explain the real or apparent lack of building in stone, and indeed of almost all archaeology, in the three hundred years stretching from the mid-seventh to mid-tenth centuries. Whilst the Revisionists tend to ignore this embarrassing gap, for Ward-Perkins it is proof positive that the barbarians really did destroy Roman civilization, a process they began in the fifth century and completed in the seventh. (Ward-Perkins will have none of Pirenne’s talk about Arab culpability: The Arabs he sees as urbane and cultured.)