During the 1920s Belgian historian Henri Pirenne came to an
astonishing conclusion: the ancient classical civilization, which
Rome had established throughout Europe and the Mediterranean world,
was not destroyed by the Barbarians who invaded the western
provinces in the fifth century, it was destroyed by the Arabs,
whose conquest of the Middle East and North Africa terminated Roman
civilization in those regions and cut off Europe from any further
trading and cultural contact with the East. According to Pirenne,
it was only in the mid-seventh century that the characteristic
features of classical life disappeared from Europe, after which
time the continent began to develop its own distinctive and
somewhat primitive medieval culture. Pirenne's findings, published
posthumously in his Mohammed et Charlemagne (1937), were even then
highly controversial, for by the late nineteenth century many
historians were moving towards a quite different conclusion: namely
that the Arabs were actually a civilizing force who rekindled the
light of classical learning in Europe after it had been
extinguished by the Goths, Vandals and Huns in the fifth century.
And because Pirenne went so diametrically against the grain of this
thinking, the reception of his new thesis tended to be hostile.
Paper after paper published during the 1940s and '50s strove to
refute him. The most definitive rebuttal however appeared in the
early 1980s. This was Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of
Europe, by English archaeologists Richard Hodges and David
Whitehouse. These, in common with Pirenne's earlier critics, argued
that classical civilization was already dead in Europe by the time
of the Arab conquests, and that the Arabs arrived on the scene as
civilizers rather than destroyers. Hodges and Whitehouse claimed
that the latest findings of archaeology fully supported this view,
and their work was highly influential. So influential indeed that
over the next three decades Pirenne and his thesis was
progressively sidelined, so that recent years have seen the
publication of dozens of titles in the English language alone which
fail even to mention his name. In Mohammed and Charlemagne
Revisited historian Emmet Scott reviews the evidence put forward by
Hodges and Whitehouse, as well as the more recent findings of
archaeology, and comes to a rather different conclusion. For him,
the evidence shows that classical civilization was not dead in
Europe at the start of the seventh century, but was actually
experiencing something of a revival. Populations and towns were
beginning to grow again for the first time since this second
century - a development apparently attributable largely to the
spread of Christianity. In addition, the real centres of classical
civilization, in the Middle East, were experiencing an
unprecedented Golden Age at the time, with cities larger and more
prosperous than ever before. Excavation has shown that these were
destroyed thoroughly and completely by the Arab conquests, with
many never again reoccupied. And it was precisely then, says Scott,
that Europe's classical culture also disappeared, with the
abandonment of the undefended lowland villas and farms of the Roman
period and a retreat to fortified hilltop settlements; the first
medieval castles. For Scott, archaeology demonstrated that the
Arabs did indeed blockade the Mediterranean through piracy and
slave-raiding, precisely as Pirenne had claimed, and he argues that
the disappearance of papyrus from Europe was an infallible proof of
this. Whatever classical learning survived after this time, says
Scott, was due almost entirely to the efforts of Christian monks.
The Pirenne thesis has taken on a new significance in the post 9/11
world. Scott's take on the theory will certainly ignite further and
perhaps heated debate.
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Review This Product
Sun, 11 Aug 2024 | Review
by: Tanya K.
The thesis is well argued and presented. This book was pleasant to read and easy to understand. This book contains a great deal of information, and ideas/hypotheses, which are all very interesting and provide quite a lot of thought-food.
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