The gift of Islam

[Nowake]

Oi gang
Time to shift the Monastery towards a new debate! The latest entries seemed to have left a rather bitter taste. I am unsure the subject will be less controversial, yet I find it a lot more compelling. Please don't skip the spoiler tags, I am only placing them to make the post legible, yet I've placed my principal arguments there.


The theme I would welcome your views on is the influence of Islam on European civilization. Sounds a bit tame considering the widely accepted arguments making the case for the beneficial outcome for the Europeans that resulted from this clash of civilizations and the debt Europe owes to the refined Arab caliphates, as it is generically described almost since Voltaire and particularly in the multicultural era which embraced Said's Orientalism.


However
My point shall build up the grounds to prove the fact that Islam was in fact the cause for the effacement of the Roman institutions, language and culture, and the effect of its birth was one of profound regress across the continent which robbed Europe of almost half of a millennium of economic and cultural growth, while its absence would have likely translated intoa civilizational continuum up to the present day.


I will work my way up to that slowly
Not a few months ago, I was discussing with a friend the fate of Sylvain Gouguenheim ulterior to the impact of his violently opposed "Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel: Les racines grecques de l’Europe Chrétienne”. His thesis, which will be described below, caused an earthquake in 2008 among European intellectuals, especially French multiculturalists. While there were important figures to come to his defence, the book ultimately caused him to lose his position in the research lab of the École Normale Supérieure of Lyon. Three petitions were signed by various public figures, accusing him of intellectual racism and he became an almost officially persona non grata thanks to the hegemony of the above mentioned multicultural current, heavily influenced by Eduard Said’s Orientalism and the works of scholars such as Philippe Buttgen, Alain de Libera, Marwan Rashed şi Irene Rosier-Catach.

There aren’t a great many English language resources presenting his thesis, yet here is a link for a New York Times review: Europe's debt to Islam given a skeptical look

Between the next spoiler tags, I shall attempt to present his argument.

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

In Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel, Gouguenheim points out that a Greek demographic presence linked the culminating period of Late Antiquity with the incipient phase of the Middle Ages in the West; and that presence persisted for centuries. “In the Europe of the High Middle Ages, many regions sheltered knots of ethnic Hellenes: Sicily, Southern Italy, and again Rome.” These communities supported literate elites, who contributed actively to the Latinate majorities among whom they lived, giving rise to such notable figures as Gregory of Agrigento (born 559), who became bishop in his native city later in life; George, Bishop of Syracuse, killed by the Arabs while on a mission to them in 724; Saint Gilsenus (mid-Seventh Century), a Greek-born monk living in a Roman monastery who evangelized in Hainault with Saint Armand; and Simeon of Reichenau, known as “The Achaean,” who belongs to the Tenth Century. In men like Simeon this Byzantine Diaspora reached well beyond Mediterranean Europe into the Rhine and Danube regions. Not only Greek but also Syriac Christians became additional mediators of the classical heritage at this time, driven from their homeland by the Jihad. “Paradoxically,” writes Gouguenheim, “Islam from its beginning transmitted Greek culture to the Occident by provoking the exile of those who refused its domination.” So, to be fair, did the Puritanical spasms of Byzantine court-theology in its regular iconoclastic moods. The persecuted iconodules, like the Syriac Christians, often sought refuge in Italy, Spain, or France.

Gouguenheim makes clear the conscious and deliberate indebtedness of the Carolingian Renaissance to these sustained currents from the East; he emphasizes the importance of the Carolingian Hellenophile project to the preservation and recirculation of Neo-Platonic and Aristotelian thought before the school of Aquinas. “From the court of the Carolingians to that of the Germanic emperors of the Tenth and Eleventh Centuries, one does not cease to encounter men who interested themselves in Greek knowledge and culture.” Gouguenheim mentions how Pépin le Bref (reigned 751-768) petitioned the Pope for Greek texts and how Paul I responded by committing to royal custodianship various “liturgical books, manuals of grammar and orthography, of geometry [and] works of Aristotle and pseudo-Dionysius” along with “men capable of translating them.” Charlemagne himself employed an Italian of Greek background, Paul Diacre (720-799), “to teach Greek to the clerics” at a moment when a marriage seemed possible between his daughter Rothrude and a Byzantine prince. Charles the Bald (reigned 840-877) “was fascinated by Greek culture, to the point that he asked the Irish savant Duns Scotus Erigena to translate the work of [pseudo-Dionysius] towards 855.”

With respect to Aachen, Gouguenheim senses an “irresistible attraction for the Greek authors,” which carries over into the Ottonian period and even intensifies. “The reputedly obscure centuries of the Middle Ages were in reality animated by multiple intellectual rebirths.” Gothic Christianity, far from being averse to or irreconcilable with antique philosophy, “succeeded in the task of integrating antique culture within the Biblical framework of which [Christendom] was the issue.”

In addition to passing remarks, Gouguenheim devotes a separate chapter to the classicizing tendencies of the Syriac and Arab Christians, as distinct from their linguistic cousins and brethren in the Islamic faith. As part of Byzantium, of which their main region of Cappadocia was a province, Syriac Christians played a central role in constituting the Eastern theological discourse during the medieval centuries, continuing to do so even after they had fallen under the sway of the Caliphs, thereby assisting in the westward transmission of Attic and Alexandrian lore. Gouguenheim writes: “Insofar as one speaks of ‘Arabic-Muslim culture’ in the Seventh through the Tenth Centuries, one commits an anachronism… because the culture was at that time barely Muslim and was Arab only by displaced appellation.” Truly, “Syriac is closer to Hebrew than to Arabic,” and the elites of the Nestorian and Monophysite dispensations could generally boast bilingualism in their own tongue and the Koine of the Empire. The jolly idea of Muslim competence in classical learning, as Gouguenheim argues, rests on a misunderstanding: what Islam knew of Greco-Roman wisdom, which it possessed at no time extensively, it knew largely thanks to Syriac scholars. “The Syriac [Christians] were in effect the essential intermediaries of the transmission into Arabic of the philosophical texts of the ancient Greeks,” who generously gave far more than the reluctant takers took. Obtuse westerners betray their lack of discrimination and their poverty of real knowledge in failing to differentiate between Syriac culture and the Arabic-Muslim culture that, by means of the Jihad, conquered and cruelly stamped out Nestorian (and Coptic and Byzantine) society.

Unlike their Muslim beneficiaries, however, the Syriac Christians could assimilate the full range of Greek logic and speculation. The Johannine Logos stemmed from the Greek Logos and the Christianity of the Patres – whether Greek, Latin, or Syriac – therefore comported itself as a rational theology; already in Late Antiquity, Cappadocians and Syrians stood out as the chief developers of Neo-Platonism; emperors both Pagan and Christian sought counsel from the professors of Antioch’s renowned Daphnaeum. In a chapter on “Islam and Greek Knowledge,” Gouguenheim notes that for Muslims, on the other hand, the Logos constituted an inassimilable scandal, subversive of the absolute submission to Allah’s commands, as articulated in the Koran, that the name Islam denotes. Islam kept of Greek thought “in general [only] that which could not come in contradiction with Koranic teaching.” Furthermore, “Greece – and so too Rome – represented a world radically foreign to Islam, for reasons religious, but also political”; and, unlike the Latinate and Frankish peoples, “Muslims did not interest themselves in the languages of those whom they had conquered” because “Arabic was the sacred language par excellence, and that of revelation.”

More aggressively, “Muslim rejection – or indifference – to Greek knowledge manifested itself again through the destruction of the cultural centers that were the monasteries.”

Multiculturalists and Islamophiles have pointed to the Abbasid establishment in Spain (Andalusia) called the Bayt al Hikma or “House of Wisdom” as proof of Muslim enthusiasm for classical learning. Gouguenheim demonstrates that this is another “seductive” misunderstanding, to which the fanciful eagerly yield. The “House of Wisdom” never functioned other than as a Koranic school, and even in that capacity it enjoyed only a truncated existence.

Aristote au Mont Saint-Michel celebrates a central figure, Jacques de Venise (Twelfth Century), who, not only metaphorically, brought Aristotle to Mont Saint-Michel. Jacques was a cleric of Venetian origin, as his name tells, who studied in Constantinople before reestablishing himself in France. Jacques, as Gouguenheim phrases it, through his Herculean labor of scholarship and translation, supplies “the missing link in the history of the passage of Aristotelian philosophy from the Greek world to the Latinate world.” It is a matter of colossal importance that Jacques, as Gouguenheim reports, “translated a considerable number of Aristotle’s works directly from Greek to Latin, making him a pioneering figure.” (Emphasis added) According to the story prevalent today, Aristotle in his fullness returned to the ken of Christendom through a complicated chain of transactions, beginning with supposed Arabic translations out of Greek, and then, by way of Moorish generosity, from Arabic back into Latin and over the Pyrenees. But the story does not wash. It is plagued by linguistic problems, which Gouguenheim duly rehearses, but it is flatly demolished by what Gouguenheim has discovered concerning Jacques’ work. Jacques’ manuscripts, which are in almost every case the earliest attested for a given Aristotelian opus, swiftly gained a reputation, well founded, for being the most accurate and idiomatic. Jacques’ translations gained wide currency and formed the basis for an Aristotelian revival all across Western Europe.

As Gouguenheim writes, “The two great names of theological and philosophical reflection in the Thirteenth Century, Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, utilized [Jacques’] Greco-Latin translations.” In a manner, Jacques brought his project to too fine a point of perfection, reestablishing the Aristotelian tradition so effectively that his own pioneering status lapsed into oblivion, exactly in proportion as knowledge of The Metaphysics and the Analytics came to be taken for granted. Many of his original manuscripts lay unrecognized in the archives at Mont Saint-Michel until recent decades.

All this aside
What actually still surprises me to this day is the virtually uncontested dominance of the generic view that Islam proved to be a beacon of light for an Europe which had been plunged into the Dark Ages by the Germanic tribes westward push, when in fact I would opine Islam was in fact the cause for Europe losing almost a thousand years of progress, and this view was shaped at a rather early age by my lecture of Henri Pirenne’s superb posthumously published book, Mohammed and Charlemagne.

A wonderfully researched thesis, it proves that it was the advance of Islam rather than the barbarian invasions that caused the break with antiquity and the consequent decline of Western civilization in the Middle Ages. The Mediterranean Sea was Europe, and Islam suffocated it. In the worlds of Ibn-Khaldoun (with the necessary reservation as regards Byzantium): ‘The Christian could no longer float a plank upon the sea.’ “Romania” was to be found on all shores of the Mediterranean and trade flourished anew.

“In the VIIth century, nothing announces yet the end of this community of civilization built by the Roman Empire from the Pillars of Hercules to the Aegean Sea and from the shores of Egypt and of Africa to the ones of Italy, Gaul and Spain. The new world has not yet lost the Mediterranean character of the ancient world. its whole activity is focused on the shores of the Mediterranean.
Nothing announces the fact that this millenary evolution shall be brutally interrupted. No one expects a catastrophe. Even if the immediate successors of Justinian cannot continue his work, they have not abandoned it. They refuse to make concessions to the Longobards, they fortify Africa feverishly, their politics extend over the Franks and Visigoths; their fleet rules the sea; the pope in Rome considers them his legitimate sovereigns.”

While I still have the book here somewhere (I've moved about a lot in the past years and thus I am at pains to admit my book shelves would benefit from a neat re-organization at the moment) I shall attempt to piece a review from memory and by patching together the quotes and commentary I could find between the following spoiler tags.

The first section investigates the question of western civilization after the Germanic invasions. Pirenne is at pains to show that while there were important military victories scored by the Germanic tribes, there was little lasting shift in the fundamental culture of Rome. He shows how within a relatively short period of time Germanic peoples were co-opted into Roman culture, intermarried and that the Latin language(s) remained dominant. He argues that fundamentally the Germanic peoples had little desire to destroy the empire, but much preferred to just have a share of the benefits.

So the book begs the question: if Germanic Barbarians did not end the Roman Empire, what or who did? Pirenne posits that the explosive advance of Islam out of the Arabian Peninsula in the seventh century AD ended the Roman Empire. The advance of Islam transformed the Western Mediterranean Sea into a vast "Musulman lake," which, in turn, curbed commerce and thought between Constantinople-centered Roman Empire and the Roman Empire in the West. Islam, according to Pirenne, suffocated Western Europe by transforming the Western Mediterranean Sea into a vast den of predatory Arabs. To survive, many urban Western Europeans decamped from their formerly prosperous commercial maritime cities to inland villages where they embraced agriculture. The axis of life in the West shifted northwards away from the Mediterranean for the first time in history, noted Pirenne.

Pirenne presents and analyzes many lines of evidence to support his work. He organized his thesis in two parts: Western Europe before Islam and Islam and the Carolingians.

I will attempt to synthesize the contents for you:

I. Part One: Western Europe before Islam

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Pirenne taught the importance of the Mediterranean Sea to the far flung Roman Empire. "Of all the features of that wonderful human structure, the Roman Empire, the most striking, and also the most essential, was its Mediterranean character," he wrote. "The inland sea, in the full sense of the term Mare nostrum, was the vehicle of ideas, and religions, and merchandise…Life was concentrated on the shores of the great lake. Without it Rome could not have been supplied with African wheat…On the roads that led thither from the provinces the traffic of these provinces converged upon the [Mediterranean] sea. As one travelled away from it civilization became more rarefied."

Western Europe depended on Constantinople, a maritime city and important naval base in the Eastern Mediterranean, for manufactured articles and luxuries, including silk and spices. "Thanks to the Mediterranean, the [Roman] Empire constituted, in the most obvious fashion, an economic unity," wrote Pirenne. "It was one great territory, with tolls but no custom houses. And it enjoyed the enormous advantage of a common monetary unit, the gold solidus of Constantine, containing 4.55 grammes of fine gold, which was current everywhere."

Pirenne acknowledges Barbarians did surround the Roman Empire in both the Greek East and in the Latin West, beginning in the third century. At first, the frontier guard of the Roman Legions ably defended the Empire's borders on the edge of the Sahara, on the Euphrates, on the Danube and on the Rhine. "But behind the dyke the waters were rising," observed Pirenne. "In the 3rd century, owing partly to civil disturbances, there were cracks in the dyke, and then breaches. From all directions there was an irruption of Franks, Alamans and Goths, who ravaged Gaul, Rhaetia, Pannone and Thrace, advancing even as far as Spain.

Initially, military leaders of Illyria (northern part of the Balkans) leaders swept back the Barbarians and re-established the Roman Empire's frontier. "But on the German side of the Empire the limes [border defense or delimiting system of ancient Rome] no longer sufficed; a deep defensive front was necessary. The cities of the interior were fortified: those cities that were the nerve-centers of the Empire, Rome and Constantinople, became two model fortresses."
In the fifth century, the Roman Empire, however, finally "lost" its Western territories to the Germanic Barbarians. Unlike other historians, Pirenne believed the Barbarians were friendly to those they conquered most of the time. Of course, there was a certain amount of pillage and violence. But, he writes, "They [the Barbarians] asked nothing better than to enter the service of Rome…All these Germans who entered the Empire did so to serve it and to enjoy its advantages. They felt for it all the respect of the Barbarian for civilization. No sooner did they enter it than they adopted its language, and also its religion: that is to say, Christianity, after the 4th century; and in becoming Christians, in losing their national gods, and frequenting the same churches, they gradually merged into the population of the Empire. Before long almost the entire army was composed of Barbarians; and many of them, like the Vandal, Stilicho [359-408 AD], the Goth, Gainas, and the Suevian, Ricimer, achieved fame as soldiers of the Empire."

The important question thus becomes: Why did the Germanic Barbarians overrun the Roman Empire in the West? Pirenne wrote that the real cause of the final failure of the Roman Empire to maintain its borders against the Germanic Barbarians was "the flood of the Hunnish advance." The Huns were an early confederation of Central Asian equestrian pastoralists who moved into Europe in the fourth and fifth centuries. The Huns pushed the German Barbarians southward into the Western Roman Empire. "For the first time Europe was to feel, across the immense gap of the Sarmatic Plain, the repercussion of the clashes between the populations of Farthest Asia," opined Pirenne.

Nevertheless, the Roman Empire, in a cultural sense, remained intact, and "could hardly have done otherwise," noted Pirenne. "The Roman Empire continued to be Roman, just as the United States of North America, despite immigration, have remained Anglo-Saxon. As a matter of fact, the newcomers were in a very small minority…What was the population of the Empire? 70 millions?...The Germans disappeared in the mass of the population…Schmidt's figure of 100,000 (Visigoths) may be accepted as probable…The Germanic element in the Western provinces beyond the limes [constituted] 5 percent of the population." (8-9)

Pirenne allowed that a minority can "transform a people when it wishes to dominate it effectively, when it has only contempt for it, regarding it as fit only for exploitation; as was the case with the Normans in England, the Musulmans wherever they appeared, and even the Romans in the conquered provinces. But the Germans wished neither to destroy nor to exploit the Empire. Far from despising it, they admired it." (9) Eventually, all Germanic law, or rather, all Germanic institutions had disappeared when in 442 Genseric [King of the Vandals] ...established an absolute monarchy. His was a Roman government. He struck coins which bore the effigy of Honorius. The inscriptions were Roman. [His] government did not meddle with the economic life of the country, or deal with the realities of daily existence. It seems that the Vandal kings even continued to send presentations of oil to Rome and Constantinople. When Genseric established the order of succession to the throne he did so in a codicil drawn up in accordance with the prescriptions of Roman legislation."
Pirenne provides countless examples over many pages to support his thesis, "There could be no greater mistake than to suppose that the idea of the Empire disappeared after the dismemberment of the Western Provinces by the Barbarians." The Emperor in Constantinople "no longer governed, but he still reigned." "Despite its losses, the Empire was still the only world-power, and Constantinople was the greatest of civilized cities. The foreign policy of the Empire embraced all the peoples of Europe, and completely dominated the policy of the Germanic State. Until the 8th century, the only positive element in history was the influence of the Empire. And it is an undeniable fact that this Empire had become Oriental."

How did the Byzantines continue their hegemony over the Western Empire? Simple! As long as "the Mediterranean remained the great means of communication between the East and the West, the preponderance of the first over the second was inevitable. The sea, which the Byzantines continued to control, spread their influence in all directions. And the civilization of the period was found beside the sea, both in the West and in the East. From Germanism in itself nothing more was to be expected." The one exception to the rule was the new center of culture making its appearance among the Anglo-Saxons, but this culture had come to them direct from the Mediterranean.

Trade flourished between the East and the West in the sixth century AD. Trade went beyond "the mere importation of jewels and articles of clothing…The really important branch of Oriental commerce, by which it was actually related to everyday life, was the importation of spices. One cannot insist too strongly on the importance of this trade. The Roman Empire had received all sorts of spices from India, China, Arabia…Their diffusion was not interrupted by the [Germanic] invasions. They continued, after the invasions, as before them, to form a constituent of the everyday diet."

Commerce required written documents, and the trade in papyrus that came from the East was brisk. "Egypt had the monopoly of furnishing the whole Empire with the writing material in general use, parchment being reserved for special purposes. Now, both after and before the invasions the art of writing was practised throughout the west. It was a necessary constituent of social life."

The demand for oil during this time was fierce. People used it to cook with and for the lighting of the churches at this period. Wax candles came later, after the Islam invasions. Thriving inland commerce involved white slaves, who merchants exported in large numbers eastward. The Barbarian peoples constituted the great source of slaves.

Nothing attests more clearly to the persistence of the economic unity of the Empire during the Merovingian period, after the Germanic invasions, than the persistence of monetary unity throughout the Mediterranean. The Merovingian dynasty ruled ancient Gaul from the fifth to the mid-eighth centuries AD. Pirenne notes, "Until the cataclysm which occurred in the time of the Carolingians, the Greek Orient, like the Occident conquered by the Germans, adhered as a whole to the gold mono-metallism which had been that of the Empire. The Syrian navigators, on disembarking in the ports of the Tyrrhenian Sea, found there the currency to which they had been accustomed in the ports of the Aegean Sea. What is more, the new Barbarian kingdoms adopted, in their coinage, the changes introduced in the Byzantine currency.

II. Part Two: Islam and the Carolingians

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

The German invasions of the Roman Empire were, according to Pirenne, an anti-climax as compared with the explosive expansion of Islam into Roman Empire, beginning in the seventh century. The German invaders, once inside the Roman Empire, "promptly allowed themselves to become absorbed in it, and as far as possible they maintained its civilization and entered into the community upon which this civilization was based," said Pirenne. The Roman Empire's experience with the Musulman invaders was radically different.

The Roman Empire had had practically no dealings with the peoples of the vast Arabian Peninsula. It had not regarded Arabia as a threat and thus had never massed any large proportion of military forces near its border. "It was a frontier of inspection, which was crossed by the caravans that brought perfumes and spices…There was nothing to fear from the nomadic Bedouins of the Peninsula, whose civilization was still in the tribal state, whose religious beliefs were hardly better than fetichism, and who spent their time in making war upon one another, or pillaging the caravans that travelled from south to north, from Yemen to Palestine, Syria and the Peninsula of Sinai, passing through Mecca and Yathreb (the future Medina)," declared Pirenne.

The Persian Empire, led by the Sassanid dynasty, was likewise unaware of the Arab threat. The Persians and Romans instead fought one another while Mohammed (570-632 AD) made his remarkable ascent to unite Arab nomads, preaching a new religion they "would presently cast upon the world, while imposing its own dominion. The Empire was already in deadly danger when [Arab Christian] John of Damascus [676-749 AD] was still regarding Islam as a sort of schism, of much the same character as previous heresies." Pirenne suggests the success of the Islamic attack was due to the exhaustion of the Roman and Persian Empires fighting one another. The Romans, led by Emperor Heraclius (575-641 AD), had at last triumphed over the Sassanids, led by Shah of Persia Chosroes II, in Ctesiphon.

Mohammed died in 632 AD. Several years later, the Islamic attacks began. The Roman and Persian Empires were taken by complete surprise. "The provinces which Persia had just surrendered [to Heraclius] were suddenly wrested from the Empire by Islam. Heraclius was doomed to be a helpless spectator of the first onslaught of this new force which was about to disconcert and bewilder the Western world."

"The Arab conquest, which brought confusion upon both Europe and Asia, was without precedent. The swiftness of its victory is comparable only with that by which the Empires of Attila, Ghenghis Khan and Tamerlane were established," noted Pirenne. "But these Empires were as ephemeral as the conquest of Islam was lasting…The lightning-like rapidity of its diffusion was a veritable miracle as compared with the slow progress of Christianity."

Bosra, Transjordania. “Bosra is an extremely ancient city mentioned in lists of Tutmose III and Akhenaton in the fourteenth century BC. The first Nabataean city in the 2nd century BC, it bore the name Buhora, and then Bustra during Hellenistic period. Later the Romans took an active interest in the city, and at time of Emperor Trajan it was made the capital of the Province of Arabia (in 106 BC) and was called Neatrajana Bustra. The city flourished when it became a crossroads on the caravan routes and the official seat and residence of the Imperial Legate. After the decline of the Roman Empire, Bosra played a significant role in the history of early Christianity. It was also linked to the rise of Islam, when a Nestorian monk called Bahira met the young Mohammad when his caravan stopped at Bosra, and predicted his prophetic vocation and the faith he was going to initiate.

"The Arabs…took possession of whole sections of the crumbling Empire," writes Pirenne. In 634 they seized the Byzantine fortress of Bothra (Bosra) in Transjordania; in 635 Damascus fell before them; in 636 the battle of Yarmok gave them the whole of Syria; in 637 or 638 Jerusalem opened its gates to them, while at the same time their Asiatic conquests included Mesopotamia and Persia. Then it was the turn of Egypt to be attacked; and shortly after the death of Heraclius (641) Alexandria was taken, and before long the whole country was occupied. Next the invasions, still continuing, submerged the Byzantine possession in North Africa."

Why were the Arabs not absorbed by the populations they conquered, in a manner similar to the German Barbarians, as described above? "There is only one reply to this question," replied Pirenne, "and it is of the moral order. While the Germans had nothing with which to oppose the Christianity of the Empire, the Arabs were exalted by a new faith. It was this, and this alone, that prevented their assimilation. For in other respects they [Arab Muslims] were not more prejudiced than the Germans against the civilization of those whom they had conquered. On the contrary, they assimilated themselves to this civilization with astonishing rapidity; they learnt science from the Greeks, and art from the Greeks and the Persians. In the beginning, at all events, they were not even fanatical, and they did not expect to make converts of their subjects. But they required them to be obedient to the one God, Allah, and His prophet Mahommed, and, since Mahommed was an Arab, to Arabia. Their universal religion was at the same time a national religion. They were the servants of God."

Islam imposed itself upon the entire basin of the Mediterranean. "From the second half of the 7th century it aimed at becoming a maritime power in regions where Byzantium, under Constant II ( 641-668), was supreme. The Arabian ships of the Caliph Moawiya (660) began to invade Byzantine waters. They occupied the island of Cyprus, and off the coast of Asia Minor they won a naval victory of the Emperor Constans II himself. They seized the island of Rhodes, and advanced upon Crete and Sicily." They subjugated the Berbers in North Africa and founded the holy city of Kairouan in 670 (located in Tunisia, about 160 km south of Tunis). The Berbers and Romans cooperated to push back the Arabs in the 680s, thereby restoring the coast of Africa to the Byzantines.

The Arabs perceived they were in trouble, since the victory of the Byzantines threatened their invasion of the Mediterranean, which they sought to control. In desperation, the Arabs took Carthage by assault (695 and again in 698) and finally replaced "the ancient city with a new capital at the head of the gulf: Tunis, whose harbor—Goletta—was to become the great base of Islam in the Mediterranean. The Arabs, who at last had a fleet, dispersed the Byzantine vessels. Henceforth they had the control of the sea."

From Tunis, the Islamic warriors assembled converted Berbers into a military force that conquered Spain under the control of the Visigoths. In 711 a Berber army, whose strength is estimated at 7,000, crossed the Straits under the command of Tarik…All the cities opened their gates the conqueror, who, reinforced in 712 by a second army, finally took possession of the country.

The Arabs reached no further into Europe as the Carolingians were able to preserve the Occident. The Carolingian dynasty replaced the Merovingian dynasty in 751 AD. The first Carolingian King was Pepin the Short (714-786), but the greatest Carolingian monarch was Charlemagne (747-814), who was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III (died 816) at Rome in 800 AD. The Arabs also did not take Constantinople, which resisted with the great attack of 718, and thereby protected the Orient.

The important point here is that the expansion of Islam was unable to absorb the whole of the Mediterranean. "It encircled the Mediterranean on the East, the South, and the West, but it was unable to obtain a hold upon the North. The ancient Roman Sea had become the frontier between Islam and Christianity. All the old Mediterranean provinces conquered by the Musulmans gravitated henceforth toward Baghdad."

What did this mean for the Orient and the Occident? They were cut off from one another. "The bond which the Germanic invasion had left intact was severed. Byzantium was henceforth merely the centre of a Greek Empire" with its farthest Western outposts as Naples, Venice, Gaeta and Amalfi. The fleet still enabled it to remain in touch with them, and thus prevented the Eastern Mediterranean from becoming a Musulman lake. But the Western Mediterranean was precisely that. Once the great means of communication, it was now an insuperable barrier."

"This was the most crucial essential event of European history which had occurred since the Punic Wars. It was the end of the classic [Greek and Roman] tradition. It was the beginning of the Middle Ages, and it happened at the very moment when Europe was on the way to becoming Byzantinized"

exhorted Pirenne.

The Arabs opened new trade routes connected not to the Mediterranean or the Black Sea, but to the Baltic Sea via the Caspian Sea, by way of the Volga River. The Scandinavians, whose merchants frequented the shores of the Black Sea, were suddenly forced to follow the new route to sell their furs and other merchandise. "Navigation between the Musulman ports of the Aegean Sea and those ports which had remained Christian became impossible from the middle of the 7th century," observed Pirenne.

The Arab conquest of Spain in 711, and "the conditions of insecurity obtaining on the coast of Provence immediately after this conquest, absolutely put an end to any possibility of sea-borne grade in the Western Mediterranean," continued Pirenne. "Thus, it may be asserted that navigation with the Orient ceased about 650 as regards the regions situation eastward of Sicily, while in the second half of the 7th century it came to an end in the whole of the Western Mediterranean. By the beginning of the 8th century it had completely disappeared. There was no longer any traffic in the Mediterranean, except along the Byzantine coast. Ibn-Khaldoun famously said, "The Christians can no longer float a plank upon the sea."

The Mediterranean was henceforth at the mercy of the Saracen pirates. In the 9th century they seized the islands, destroyed the ports, and made their razzias [plundering raids] everywhere. "The great port of Marseilles, which had formerly been the principal emporium of Western trade with the Levant, was empty. The old economic unity of the Mediterranean was shattered, and so it remained until the epoch of the Crusades. It had resisted the Germanic invasions; but it gave way before the irresistible advance of Islam."

The flow of spices, papyrus, oil, wine, and other merchandise from Byzantium and Asia dried up. Records show that "by the end of the 7th century and the beginning of the 8th spices had disappeared from the normal diet. They did not reappear until after the 12th century, when the Mediterranean was reopened to commerce." Oil was not longer exported from Africa, and churches turned to wax candles for their lighting. The use of silk became unknown during this period. Charlemagne dressed simply, which was in sharp contrast to the preceding Merovingian kings. Gold became increasingly rare. Proof of this is in the increasing content of silver in the coins during the Carolingian period. The wealthy professional merchants, who were often great benefactors to society, disappeared. An active trade in slaves from Slavonia continued via Venice, which continued to exist under the protection of Byzantium.

Pirenne summarized the dismal situation in this way:

"The Christian Mediterranean was divided into two basins. The East and the West, surrounded by Islamic countries. These latter, the war of conquest having come to an end by the close of the 9th century, constituted a world apart, self-sufficing, and gravitating toward Baghdad. It was toward this central point that the caravans of Asia made their way, and here ended the great trade route which led to the Baltic, by way of the Volga. It was from Baghdad that produce was exported to Africa and Spain.

Christian navigation, however, continued active only in the Orient, and the furthermost point of Southern Italy remained in communication with the Orient. In the Occident, on the contrary, the coast from the Gulf of Lyons and the Riviera to the mouth of the Tiber, ravaged by war and the pirates, whom the Christians, having no fleet, were powerless to resist, was no merely a solitude and a prey to piracy. The ports and the cities were deserted. The link with the Orient was severed, and there was no communication with the Saracen coasts. There was nothing but death. The Carolingian Empire presented the most striking contrast with the Byzantine. It was purely an inland power, for it had no outlets. The Mediterranean territories, formerly the most active portions of the Empire, which supported the life of the whole, were now the poorest, the most desolate, the most constantly menaced. For the first time in history the axis of Occidental civilization was displaced towards the North, and for many centuries it remained between the Seine and the Rhine. And the German peoples, which had hitherto played only the negative part of destroyers, were now called upon to play a positive part in the reconstruction of European civilization. The classic tradition was shattered, because Islam had destroyed the ancient unity of the Mediterranean."

The stunning Islamic invasion of Europe was the beginning of the Middle Ages. "Before the 8th century what existed was the continuation of the ancient Mediterranean economy. After the 8th century there was a complete break with this economy. The sea was closed. Commerce had disappeared. We perceive an Empire whose only wealth was the soil, and in which the circulation of merchandise was reduced to the minimum. So far form perceiving any progress, we see that there was a regression. Those parts of Gaul which had been the busiest were now the poorest. The South had been the bustling and progressive region; now it was the North which impressed its character upon the period."

The one exception to this rule was the Low Countries in the extreme north of the Carolingian Empire. They were a great center of maritime navigation, but were atypical of the rest of the Empire. The seas on the Northern were still free and the Flemish cloth industry had not disappeared. The Viking civilization also prospered in the 9th and 10th centuries. "The Carolingian Empire had therefore two sensitive economic points: one in northern Italy, thanks to the commerce of Venice, and on in the Low Countries, thanks to the Frisian and Scandinavian trade. And in these two regions the economic renaissance of the 11th century had its beginnings. But neither was able to reach its full development before the 11th century." The Low Countries were crushed by the Normans and Venice was hampered by the Arabs and the turmoil in Italy.

The severe commercial regression brought on by the Islamic paralysis of the Western Mediterranean resulted in making the soil more than ever the essential basis of economy life in Europe. The Latin language disappeared in the great disorders of the 8th century. The political anarchy, the reorganization of the Church, the disappearance of the cities and of commerce and administration, especially the financial administration, and of the secular schools, made its survival, with its Latin soul, impossible. It became debased, and was transformed, according to the region into various Romanic dialects…Latin ceased to be spoken about the year 800, except by the clergy."

The one exception to the generality of economic and cultural regression in Europe in the 8th and 9th centuries was the Anglo-Saxons in whom the Latin culture was introduced suddenly, together with the Latin religion. "No sooner were they converted, under the influence and guidance of Rome, than the Anglo-Saxons turned their gaze toward the Sacred City. They visited it continually, bringing back relics and manuscripts. They submitted themselves to its suggestive influence, and learned its language, which for them was no vulgar tongue, but a sacred language, invested with an incomparable prestige. As early as the 7th century there were men among the Anglo-Saxons, like the [Benedictine monk] Venerable Bede [672-735] and the poet Aldhelm [639-709], whose learning was truly astonishing as measured by the standards of Western Europe." Indeed, the Anglo-Saxons propagated Christianity in Germany.

III. Conclusion

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Pirenne drew two conclusions from his remarkable synthesis, which grew out of his keen analysis of the objective findings of his research.

First, "the Germanic invasions destroyed neither the Mediterranean unity of the ancient world, nor what may be regarded as the truly essential features of the Roman culture as it still existed in the 5th century, at a time when there was no longer an Emperor in the West.

"Despite the resulting turmoil and destruction, no new principles made their appearance; neither in the economic or social order, nor in the linguistic situation, nor in the existing institutions. What civilization survived was Mediterranean. It was in the regions by the sea that culture was preserved, and it was for them that the innovations of the age proceeded," e.g., monasticism and the conversion of the Anglo-Saxons. "In 600 the physiognomy of the world was not different in quality form that which it had revealed in 400."

Second, "the cause of the break with the tradition of antiquity was the rapid and unexpected advance of Islam. The result of this advance was the final separation of East from West, and the end of the Mediterranean unity. Countries like Africa and Spain, which had always been parts of the Western community, gravitated henceforth in the orbit of Baghdad. In these countries another religion made its appearance, and an entirely different culture. The Western Mediterranean, having become a Musulman lake, was no longer the thoroughfare of commerce and of thought which it had always been.

"The West was blockaded and forced to live upon its own resources. For the first time in history the axis of life was shifted northwards form the Mediterranean. The decadence into which the Merovingian monarchy lapsed as a result of this change gave birth to a new dynasty, the Carolingian, whose original home was in the Germanic North.

"With this new dynasty the Pope allied himself, breaking with the Emperor [in Constantinople], who, engrossed in his struggle against the Musulmans, could no longer protect him. And so the Church allied itself with the new order of things. In Rome, and in the Empire which it founded, it had no rival. And its power was all the greater inasmuch as the State, being incapable of maintaining its administration, allowed itself to be absorbed by the feudality, the inevitable sequel of the economic regression. All the consequences of this change became glaringly apparent after Charlemagne. Europe, dominated by the Church and the feudality, assumed a new physiognomy, differing slightly in different regions. The Middle Ages…to retain the tradition term—were beginning. The transitional phase was protracted. One may say that it lasted a whole century—from 650 to 750. It was during this period of anarchy that the tradition of antiquity disappeared, while the new elements came to the surface.

"This development was complete in 800 by the constitution of the new Empire, which consecrated the break between the West and the East, inasmuch as it gave to the West a new Roman Empire—the manifest proof that it had broken with the old Empire, which continued to exist in Constantinople."