The Inheritance of Rome: A History of Europe from 400 to 1000 was written by Chris Wickham, a Professor of Medieval History at the University of Oxford, England. He was also the editor of the work Marxist History-writing for the Twenty-first Century from 2007, which received praise for its distinctly Marxist outlook in International Socialism, a journal associated with the Socialist Workers Party in Britain, a party of revolutionary Socialists.
He talks about Arab conquests and “raids,” but doesn’t explain Islamic Jihad as a word or concept. By reading this book and this book alone you will have no understanding whatsoever of the fact that Europe was for over a thousand years targeted by a religiously sanctioned war of conquest, certainly not that in the minds of many Muslims this drive for world domination continues to this day. In fact, you will learn more about Tunisian olive oil than about Jihad.
Wickham is critical of Henri Pirenne’s work Mohammed and Charlemagne, published posthumously in 1937. Pirenne argued for the partial continuation of Mediterranean Roman civilization after the collapse of effective imperial rule. Wickham states — correctly — that his theory was largely “pre-archaeological.” Later studies have demonstrated that Pirenne underestimated the extent to which trade declined in the western Mediterranean region. Roman civilization collapsed almost entirely in the northernmost province of the old Empire, Britain, and there was much less shipping in the West well before the Arab invaders arrived.
Nevertheless, while Pirenne’s thesis does have to be modified in some of its details, he remains correct in pointing out that the Arab invasions brought major additional changes and that nobody in the West dared to call themselves “emperor” before the Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries AD. Previously, they had referred at least in theory to the Emperor in Constantinople. Yet the Eastern and Western provinces, the latter including the pope in Rome, drifted further apart after the Muslim presence complicated communications and drastically altered the political situation and military dynamic of the Mediterranean world.
Muslims did not create the European weakness of the post-Roman era, but they certainly exploited it for a long time. Gradually, new political, military and cultural institutions emerged in the West out of the ashes of the Roman world, a new version of European civilization. It is possible to see parallels to the situation today, when Muslims and other external enemies prey upon internal European weakness. Perhaps, now as then, over time novel political institutions and innovations will evolve out of this chaos to reverse European decline and restore cultural innovation and dynamism on the Continent. Only time will tell.
Read the rest at at Dr. Bostom’s place.
19 comments:
In the book "God's Battalions - The Case for the Crusades", Rodney Stark attempts to debunk Pirenne's hypothesis, in my view convincingly.
In fact he contends that the Dark Ages are largely a myth and that Europe outstripped all other parts of the world technologically during this era. How else would Europeans have been able to mount the crusades and defeat much larger Arab armies, far from home?
Hmm let's see. First Crusade began in 1096. The period under discussion is 400 to 1000.
700 AD, +/= two to three hundred years, and 1100 AD, are not the same, no more than Frederick the Great or Louis XIV had use of jet fighters.
Can you, perhaps, understand this difficult concept?
Besides, it was not technology that carried the day at Tours. Charles Martel's men were unarmored infantry, taking on the heaviest-armored cavalry in the world at the time. _That_ is representative of the period. Your argument is nonsense.
As for the Dark Ages being a myth, this is a pernicious lie on the same level - and motivated by the same thing - as Holocaust denial. It is a willful refusal to believe that something emotionally dear - in this case, Christian society - could possibly have gone so wrong. The plainly evident facts of population, trade, literacy, life span, and a multitude of others for the period under discussion indicate very clearly that life did get far more difficult for a very long time. Italy itself did not recover the levels of population and trade that it had under the heights of the Empire until the 1600s. Similar figures stand for most of the rest of Europe. Christian apologists can not make these facts disappear, no matter how much they would wish to present that millenium (and particularly its first half) as some sort of ideal period. And finally, the people who saw the end of the Dark Ages were the ones who gave it that name, and being so much closer to it, they knew better than you what it was that had ended.
http://www.two--four.net/weblog.php?id=P1879
Gattamelata was a symbol of the end of the Dark Age, but in being so, it was and is equally a symbol of that age's existence. To deny this is to deny the value and the very existence of the civilization they struggled to create.
If the secular-left gives any credence to the Religious aspect of Jihad, then they have to give credence to the Christian European's response as well.
Painting the initial Jihads/Crusades against Europe as mere "raids", it makes the European response look ridiculous and foolish.
But what I also suspect with Wickham, as is the case with most of the "intellectuals" I live and work with, they simply refuse to take the time to learn what Jihad is really all about.
In maintaining one's ignorance of an uncomfortable subject, the politically correct version of events is the easiest to adopt and run with, since most main-stream critics won't challenge it.
And by the time the thoughts
... and by the time the ideas in question are, well, questioned, we often have other more pressing issues to dwell on.
There's one writer who continues where Pirenne had left the story: John O'Neill wrote Holy Warriors: Islam and the Demise of Classical Civilization"
Sag.
Wow, you really area a nasty piece of work. All I do is summarise the argument of a book in a few lines and you virtually accuse me of being a Nazi. Your vicious, pompous and stilted tone is that of a quasi-deranged narcissist.
As I said, the argument is not mine, and, unlike you, I have no emotional investment in the argument one way or the other, but I will discuss Stark's response to the points you make.
"Hmm let's see. First Crusade began in 1096. The period under discussion is 400 to 1000.
700 AD, +/= two to three hundred years, and 1100 AD, are not the same, no more than Frederick the Great or Louis XIV had use of jet fighters.
Can you, perhaps, understand this difficult concept?"
What decisive innovations affecting the success of the crusades took place in the last 100 years before they occurred?
"Besides, it was not technology that carried the day at Tours. Charles Martel's men were unarmored infantry, taking on the heaviest-armored cavalry in the world at the time. _That_ is representative of the period. Your argument is nonsense."
The Muslim troops would more accurately be described as light cavalry. Nor were Martel's troops all infantry. He had cavalry of his own, real heavy cavalry in this case. Martel's cavalry had high-backed saddles with stirrups that allowed them to charge enemies with confidence. The Muslims did not have this. They would have been knocked off their horses by the impact if they tried to charge an enemy with a lance. And to describe Martel's troops as "unarmoured" is laughable.
So what accounted for the success of the crusader armies, then, if not superior military technology?
The crusaders had better armour, real heavy cavalry and crossbows, all innovations developed during the "Dark Ages".
"As for the Dark Ages being a myth, this is a pernicious lie on the same level - and motivated by the same thing - as Holocaust denial. It is a willful refusal to believe that something emotionally dear - in this case, Christian society - could possibly have gone so wrong."
Preposterous. As with Muslim apologists and multicultists, you attempt to switch a discussion based on fact to one based on hypothesising about the supposed motivation of the person making the argument. The motivation doesn't matter. The facts matter.
"The plainly evident facts of population, trade, literacy, life span, and a multitude of others for the period under discussion indicate very clearly that life did get far more difficult for a very long time."
Stark argues that during the "Dark Ages" Europeans developed agricultural innovations that led to them being the best fed of any major population group in world history. He points out that the decline in trade was far less great than Pirenne claimed. And he demonstrates that the crux of Pirenne's argument, that the Mediterranean became "a Muslim lake", is false. Sea power continued to be a major weakness for the Muslims.
"And finally, the people who saw the end of the Dark Ages were the ones who gave it that name, and being so much closer to it, they knew better than you what it was that had ended."
Who called it the Dark Ages during the "Dark Ages"? In any case, these people were an intellectual elite who prized book-learning above all other things. Stark argues that it is this intellectualism - the prioritising of book learning above more practical knowledge - that has led to the Dark Ages being so classified.
The dark ages were first referred to by that name during the Renaissance period and the enlightenment,when it was fashionable to look to the classical era as "better" than what came after it. They were called "dark" in comparison to the "light" of that allegedly superior classical era. No other reason. The fact that the name stuck for so long is a testament to the power such generated mythology can have over people. Nowadays, the period is generally described as the early mediaeval period, or the middle ages, and is acknowledged to have been a period of rapid and vibrant cultural and technological advancement in contrast to the stultified late classical period which, whilst largely peaceful, showed little in the way of anything but the most basic advancement.
I don't remember ever reading anything about technological advances being impossible during a Dark Age, in fact the histories I read said that many such advances came from the Monasteries during the Dark Age.
Knowing you are fighting on the rigth side also helps, to win...
Cheradenine Zakalwe said: "So what accounted for the success of the crusader armies, then, if not superior military technology?"
Terry Jones of Monty Python fame wrote a GREAT humorous but historically accurate BBC TV series with an accompanying book about this topic where he debunks the myth that the Dark Ages were, well, dark....
"Jones' fascination for the Dark Ages also led to a series of well-regarding documentaries on the subject for the BBC. Jones served as writer and presenter in each of the programs, which examined the Crusades ("The Crusades," BBC, 1995), technology ("Ancient Inventions," BBC, 1998), and the day-to-day existence of citizens in medieval times ("Terry Jones' Medieval Lives," BBC, 2004). The latter earned him an Emmy nomination for Outstanding Writing for Non-Fiction Programming in 2004."
- "The Middle Ages is an unfortunate term. It was not invented until the age was long past. The dwellers in the Middle Ages would not have recognized it. They did not know that they were living in the middle; they thought, quite rightly, that they were time's latest achievement."[51] — Morris Bishop
- "If it was dark, it was the darkness of the womb."[52] — Lynn White
*All quotations from Wikipedia
@Rollory
The real Dark Ages where the renaissance because of:
1: The decline of scholasticism and the growth of mystical, hermetic and neoplatonic movements.
2: The beginning of the witch hunts and a growth in millenarian cults.
3: The beginning of mercantilism and urban decay.
4: Colonialism and the mass-genocide against Native American and Hindians, the beginning of the slavery movement.
5: At it's end, the beginning of the reformation wars.
We may well be entering a new dark ages, now. Willful ignorance, savage barbarity, and societal decay are all marks of civilizational downfall.
"Roman civilization collapsed almost entirely in the northernmost province of the old Empire, Britain, and there was much less shipping in the West well before the Arab invaders arrived."
1. British shipping wasn't the only shipping going on in the thriving Mediterranean; it probably represented a relatively minor proportion.
2. Shipping trade decreasing due to an Empire devolving is a relatively benign and normal occurrance; while shipping trade becoming severely restricted due to hostile new armies imperialistically making the Mediterranean hostile through murderous piracy and relentless razzias on coastlines (in addition to periodic attempts at formal military invasion) is an entirely separate matter, and the two matters ought not be mentioned conjointly except by way of contrast.
3. Pirenne's central thesis -- that the Muslim invasions and conquest Westward transformed the Mediterranean from a perennial watery bridge of cross-cultural trade and learning and syncretism (which it had enjoyed continuously for a good thousand years through the pagan Roman Empire clear into the Christian Roman Empire) into a hostile wall that nearly completely choked off that former vibrant intercourse of cultures -- is the point that post-Pirenne revisionist historians have yet to refute persuasively (when they are not simply oblivious to it due to the Western Amnesia that has overcome the West, including Academe, in the past half century).
Simultaneous with the Muslim invasions and pirate raids from the East and South -all around the Mediterranean region- were similar, non-religious predations by the Norsemen from the other direction out of Scandinavia.
Together, these two military plundering waves laid waste to much of the coastal Civilized world for centuries, which stifled development and enslaved and intimidated the peoples of the former Roman outposts as effectively as twin plagues.
The Normans were eventually absorbed into the reviving Western world, while Islam continues its raids, invasions and depredations to this day.
The Normans later helped oust the Muslims from Sicily. So as usual from non-Muslims, unlike from Muslims, we see change for the better.
For Jewel:
Ya think?
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