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Charlemagne, Muhammad and the Fall of Rome
Henri Pirenne transformed the way historians think about the end of the Classical world and the beginning of the Middle Ages.
A study in early medieval history appeared in 1937, called Mahomet et Charlemagne. Its author, a Belgian scholar named Henri Pirenne, had died two years previously, after a long and distinguished career. The 300-page manuscript of the work was found on his desk. Precisely because it was an unrevised draft it represents, perhaps, the boldest statement of views formulated over the last 40 years of his life. Its posthumous publication ensured his immortality.The Pirenne Thesis broke decisively with what had been until then the standard accounts of the end of Antiquity and the beginning of the Middle Ages. Received wisdom designated the harbingers of change as the Christianisation of the Roman Empire in the fourth century and the barbarian invasions of Rome in the fifth century. Not so in Pirenne’s view: while what Edward Gibbon called ‘superstition’ and ‘barbarism’ may have changed the cultural and political temper of the Roman world, they did not fundamentally disrupt its structures. Rather, Pirenne argues, it was the rise of Islam in the seventh century that broke up the ancient Mediterranean world, forcing Christian Europe onto its path of medieval development. In the eighth century, a Frankish warlord took the stage and established himself as ruler of a revived Roman Empire. He was hailed as Charles the Great – Charlemagne – yet he was less master of his own destiny than it might appear. In Pirenne’s formulation: ‘It is therefore strictly correct to say that without Muhammad, Charlemagne would have been impossible.’Pirenne’s intervention was transformative. He changed the way we think about the threshold between the ancient and medieval epochs and opened up an entire field of inquiry for postwar generations. Without Muhammad and Charlemagne, the modern study of Late Antiquity would have been impossible.I. Muhammad and the disruption of the ancient worldThe key to Pirenne’s analysis is the distinction he draws between politics and social relations: between, on the one hand, the Roman Empire as a political structure; and, on the other, the Mediterranean as a basin of exchange, both economic and cultural. For all its sound and fury, Rome was an epiphenomenon, argues Pirenne: Mediterranean networks constituted the real coherence of the ancient world, stretching back beyond the Romans and the Greeks to the Phoenicians. Seen in this light, the so-called barbarian invasions of the Roman Empire in the fifth and sixth centuries might make headlines – as when Rome was sacked in 410 – but they made no real difference to the deep structure of things. Long after the formal collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476, these long-established networks continued to function.In the seventh century, Pirenne contends, just a few decades witnessed the sudden, massive disruption of this ancient world. The astonishingly rapid Muslim conquests in Syria, North Africa, Asia Minor and Spain transformed the Mediterranean: once an empire, now it was a frontier. In the West, this constituted a major geopolitical shift: the Franks now found themselves cut off from their traditional sources of trade and thrown back on their own devices. The consequence was the overthrow of their ruling dynasty, the Merovingians, and the rise to power of a new family, the Carolingians. While Charlemagne may have claimed to be a Roman emperor, his rule was in fact a new departure. He was a medieval European, not an ancient Mediterranean, his power and wealth based on agrarian rather than commercial wealth.The Pirenne Thesis is, almost certainly, false. Virtually every aspect of his argument has been challenged, if not rejected outright. For example, in assessing the vitality or otherwise of the Mediterranean economy, Pirenne monitored the circulation of four commodities: gold, papyrus, spices and silk. He believed these goods had disappeared from north-west Europe by the end of the seventh century and this persuaded him that a radical change had taken place. It was, however, soon demonstrated that the disappearance of these commodities was neither simultaneous nor contemporaneous with the Muslim invasions. The absence of gold did not connote the collapse of networks of exchange. Its replacement, silver coinage, was simply a far more flexible medium for exchange. In this case, it is not difficult to see Pirenne as a man of his time, obsessed, like many in the 1930s, with the Gold Standard.Yet despite this, historians still talk about Pirenne. He is a constant point of reference in scholarly discussions of the period. This is partly because of the creative power of his intervention. Pirenne did as much as anyone to put to flight the stereotype of the ‘Dark Ages’ and to inspire subsequent generations to explore the late ancient world anew. But there is a negative charge to his legacy. Muhammad and Charlemagne appeals to some insalubrious 20th-century traits, namely a distaste for the Aryan and a fetishisation of the Semitic.II. Pirenne among the GermansPart of the rhetorical brilliance of Muhammad and Charlemagne is its calm scorn for the historical role of the Germanic barbarians. Here, Pirenne reckoned with the nationalist fervour of the historiography of his day and with the German tradition in particular. In the 19th century the discipline of History underwent a process of professionalisation in its pursuit of research on the barbarian peoples. The premise was that, rough and ready as they were, the barbarian kingdoms were the distant parents of modern European nation states. Taking his stand against this origin myth, Pirenne argued that, whatever military and political inroads the Germanic peoples made on the Roman Empire, their presence made no difference to the cultural, social and economic health of the old Mediterranean order.There are grounds here to read Muhammad and Charlemagne as a species of revenge fantasy against German nationalism. Pirenne tells us as much in his War Diaries. Before the First World War, Pirenne had enjoyed close contacts with German scholars, especially those who strove to develop an alternative to the school of nationalist text criticism in the service of the Fatherland that was associated with Leopold von Ranke (whom Pirenne met in Berlin, when Ranke was 90). In August 1914, as German troops rolled into Belgium in a war over the Balkans – because there existed no other plan for German mobilisation – Pirenne imagined that the European republic of letters within which he moved would carry on relatively untroubled by the idiotic manoeuvrings of diplomats and generals. It was not to be. By the end of the year he had lost a son on the Western Front and had learnt that those whom he had considered his colleagues were among the 93 luminaries who had put their names to a public statement defending the sacred mission of the German people and the just violation of Belgian neutrality. In January, when one of these German colleagues came to Ghent to pay Pirenne a visit, the Belgian refused to open the door to him.Pirenne spent the next 15 months organising the passive resistance of the history faculty at the University of Ghent to German attempts to reopen the institution with a suitably revamped curriculum, taught in Flemish rather than French. For these efforts, in March 1916, he was summarily deported to Crefeld in Westphalia. From here, he was shunted around the internment camps of the Second Reich for two and a half years, forced to write letters home in soft lead pencil so as to facilitate censorship. Professional courtesy and bourgeois civility – the values by which Pirenne, the son of a wool manufacturer from Verviers near Liège, had organised his world – were no longer in operation. In such circumstances, it required an enormous effort of will on his part to imagine that in the fifth and sixth centuries, when the Visigoths and others broke across the Roman frontiers, urban living had continued uninterrupted.Pirenne was in no sense immune to the lure of 19th-century patriotic historiography. The lofty disdain he shows for the impact of the barbarians in Muhammad and Charlemagne contrasts with the scarcely concealed nationalism of Pirenne’s other work. While his seven-volume History of Belgium, written over three decades, is always concerned to relate developments in the Low Countries to European history as a whole, in Medieval Cities, which appeared in both French and English in the mid-1920s, Pirenne argued that the burghers of Ghent were the real fathers of Europe. This was always the corollary to his argument in Mohammed and Charlemagne: for all that the Carolingians achieved in recalling the greatness of Rome, theirs was a relatively short-lived experiment and one based, furthermore, on the meagre profits of local agriculture. Civic life, as it had existed in the Classical world, did not really begin in western Europe until after the turn of the millennium: its standard bearers were the cloth merchants of Flanders, who opened the West again to the benefits of a civilisation based on the successful pursuit of long-distance exchange.III. Heart of Darkness: Pirenne, Islam and AfricaFor Pirenne, ‘the Arab’, not the German, wields the awesome power of the Other. At the heart of Muhammad and Charlemagne, he writes:The great problem is to determine why the Arabs, who were certainly not more numerous than the Germans, were not, like the latter, absorbed by the populations of the regions they had conquered, whose civilisation was superior to their own. There is only one reply to this question, 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, which prevented their assimilation.The rise of Islam was ‘a clean cut: a complete break with the past ... which was to continue even to our own day’. This break is also a geopolitical shift, involving the definition of ‘East’ and ‘West’ in their modern senses. Muhammad and Charlemagne instinctively opposes the distinctions of the East/Islam and the West/Christianity. Islam is oriental because it is all but synonymous with ‘Arab’. In Pirenne’s lexicon, ‘Arab-Muslim’ becomes, like the terser ‘Jew’, an ethnic-religious composite, designating a semitic people with an alien god. The Arabs were not, Pirenne emphasises, fanatics; they did not seek to convert their subjects. ‘But they required them to be obedient to the one god, Allah, and his prophet, Muhammad, and, since Muhammad was an Arab, to Arabia. Their universal religion was at the same time a national religion.’Here, as elsewhere, Pirenne was simply wrong. In Spain, for example, it has been demonstrated that the invading armies were neither Arab, nor Muslim: not until the ninth century does it make sense to speak of an Islamic regime in Córdoba. But the magnetism of the Pirenne Thesis derives in part from its appeal to categories of East and West and, in particular, to an orientalised Islam condensed in the figure of ‘Muhammad’ that were part of the stock-in-trade of Pirenne’s contemporary audience – as they are, still, a part of ours.It need not entirely surprise us that Pirenne, the victim of German nationalism, might also emerge as an instinctive spokesman for western imperialism. In searching for a genealogy for Pirenne’s Muhammad, we may be led, like Joseph Conrad’s Marlow and his Kurtz, from his novella Heart of Darkness (1899), up the River Congo. The categories Pirenne used to describe ‘the Arab’ may have been inherited from the propaganda generated by King Leopold II of Belgium as part of his attempt to participate in the ‘Scramble for Africa’. The extraordinary story of how Leopold secured the Congo Free State for himself as a personal fiefdom, under cover of a rhetoric of philanthropy and through a series of diplomatic machinations, has been told and retold. Leopold’s colonial venture was a triumph and a disaster that swept the nation and its great historian along with it.In 1878, Leopold had met, for the first time, Henry Morton Stanley on his return from his epic traversal of Africa, from Zanzibar to the mouth of the River Congo. Stanley confirmed Leopold’s hopes that the Congo was a suitable vessel for his colonial ambitions. A month later, Leopold received a short panegyric from a 15-year-old Pirenne, on the occasion of the dedication of the dam on Belgium’s River Gileppe at the end of July 1878. By the end of the century, when the first volume of Pirenne’s History of Belgium appeared, Leopold’s power and wealth as lord of the Congo, and his prestige as a philanthropist, were at their height. Leopold’s nemesis followed swiftly in the shape of the sustained campaign in the early 1900s led by Gustav Morel to expose Leopold’s regime of exploitation. In 1908 Leopold was forced to cede his fiefdom to Belgium, in whose hands it remained until the early 1960s. The secretary of the National Commission to the Congo, established in 1909, was none other than Henri Pirenne. In 1921, a year before the publication of Muhammad and Charlemagne, Pirenne gave an address, ‘The formation of a colonial mentality’.In its homogenised depiction of ‘the Arab’ and Islam, Muhammad and Charlemagne echoes the kind of ideological ‘white noise’ generated by Leopold and many others to decry the activity of the Swahili-speaking Muslims, who sold slaves from the Congo in the markets of Zanzibar. In the discourse of missionaries and explorers from the 1860s onwards, these became ‘Arab slave traders’. None was more notorious than Tippu Tip (Hamed bin Muhammed el Murjebi), who was initially Leopold’s business partner in breaking open the eastern Congo, before becoming the target of a military and propaganda campaign against Arab slave trading. The White Man’s Burden, therefore, and specifically Leopold’s Christian duty in the Congo, was a war of liberation, with the goal of drawing Africa away from Arab despotism and into the free domain of the West. When Pirenne argues, as above, that there is ‘only one answer’ to the question of the Arab impact on the ancient world ‘and it was of a moral order’, his argument necessarily evokes the ‘moral order’ of Leopold’s intervention against ‘the Arab’ in the Congo.IV. The Future of Late AntiquityPirenne’s legacy is, therefore, mixed. On the one hand, for the first time since the Renaissance, he gave us a different way of thinking about European history. For centuries, the presumption was a simple division between Ancient and Medieval – and this is still how it is divided up and taught in schools and universities. Since the 1940s, however, historians have begun to imagine and to name ‘Late Antiquity’ as a period, a transitional era running from the third to the eighth century, none more so than Peter Brown. His The World of Late Antiquity, first published in 1971 and still in print, showed that the collapse of the Western Roman Empire should no longer be accorded its privileged epoch-defining status. The reign of ‘the Fall of Rome’ is over and this has enabled us to tell more complicated stories about the processes involved. The subtitle of Brown’s book, From Marcus Aurelius to Muhammad, gestures back to Pirenne. The book ends with a keen sense of the parting of the ways between Muhammad and Charlemagne and ‘the cost of the chasm that yawned across the Mediterranean throughout the Middle Ages’. By the same token, we may ask to what extent Late Antique scholarship continues to partake of the cultural predispositions of Muhammad and Charlemagne. The answers are not all reassuring. While the issue of ‘Aryanism’ is becoming less problematic, the orientalisation of Islam remains, I would suggest, unresolved.We have followed in the tracks of Pirenne and we are now, on the whole, much more clear-eyed in our treatment of ‘the Germanic’ peoples and of the question of ethnicity more generally. Since the Second World War, scholars in Vienna in particular have been engaged in a sustained critique of the legacy of 19th-century nationalist history. The urgency of their work was redoubled by the collapse of Yugoslavia in the 1990s: a reminder, should one be needed, of the lethal force of tendentious claims about ethnic identity. In the 1990s, the European Science Foundation Project on the ‘Transformation of the Roman World’, in which the Viennese historians Herwig Wolfram and Walter Pohl played a lead role, proved to be a venue for something approaching a consensus on ideas of ethnicity in the early Middle Ages; we now emphasise the narrative, strategic and, above all, political quality of claims about ethnic identity.This has yet to happen with Islam. We lack still a social history of the period which starts from the premise that its central event was the transformation of Abrahamic monotheism: the rise, alongside Judaism, of Christianity and Islam and its staggering success on the world stage. The outlines of an economic history are there. As one of Pirenne’s early critics pointed out, in fact the rise of the Islamic Empire, far from bringing an end to networks of exchange, had the effect of broadening and expanding them. Rethinking it, we might want to argue that the history of globalisation begins with the fall of Rome and the rise of Islam.Pirenne’s view of Islam – as an alien force bringing a world to an end – can be a dangerous ideological tool. In current right-wing fantasies about our era as the Fall of Rome (‘we are being invaded by peoples we do not understand’) the barbarians are not German, but ‘Arab-Muslim’, transferring the tropes of 1930s’ racism from one semitic group to another.It would be wrong, however, to suggest that Muhammad and Charlemagne simply recycles the violent prejudices of its era. Like his contemporary Joseph Conrad, Pirenne was more than prepared to reflect critically on the premise of European moral superiority, exploring the intuition that modern Africa held a mirror to Europe in the distant past and, perhaps again in the future. Heart of Darkness opens on a boat swinging to her anchor on the Thames as night falls over London:‘And this also’, said Marlow suddenly, ‘has been one of the dark places of the earth ...I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here, nineteen hundred years ago – think of a decent young man in a toga ... coming out here in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader even, to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery, had closed around him – all that mysterious life of the wilderness that stirs in the forest, in the jungles, in the hearts of wild men. There’s no initiation either into such mysteries. He has to live in the midst of the incomprehensible, which is also detestable. And it has a fascination, too, that goes to work upon him. The fascination of the abomination – you know, imagine the growing regrets, the longing to escape, the powerless disgust, the surrender, the hate’.The story of Colonel Kurtz, the brilliant agent gone wrong, had been played out in an earlier colonial era. Marlow acknowledges a subsequent history of civilisation, but is cautious not to celebrate. ‘Light came out of this river since – you say Knights? Yes, but it is like a running blaze on a plain, like a flash of lightning in the clouds. We live in a flicker – may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling.’ Pirenne’s Muhammad and Charlemagne has been a lightning flash of inspiration, but he himself knew well how temporary the flicker of civilisation might be.Conrad Leyser is Clarendon Associate Professor and Tutor in History at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Authority and Asceticism from Augustine to Gregory the Great (OUP, 2011).
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