The Arab Presence in France and Switzerland in the 10Th Century*

THE ARAB PRESENCE IN FRANCE AND SWITZERLAND IN THE 10TH CENTURY* BY KEES VERSTEEGH URING the entire 10th century the history of the South of France D was dominated by large groups of Arabs, who controlled the whole area of the French and the Swiss Alps from a vantage point at the coast near Saint-Tropez. The sources available for this period-mostly Latin sources-do not call these invaders Arabs, but they speak of Saracenes or Agarenes, sometimes of Moors or even fusci « Blacks» or pagani ((Heathen))'. The presence of Saracenes in the Provence and in the neighbouring areas is part of the expansion from the South that the Arabs had initiated in 711, when Tdriq invaded Spain from North-Africa. From Spain the Arab conquerors tried several times to break through into the empire of the Franks by way of the Pyrenees. The Frankish armies succeeded in repulsing the Arab armies-this is mostly associated with the relatively minor skirmishes of Poitiers and Tours, 732- and as a result the conquista North of the Pyrenees came to a stand- still. From now on the Arab presence remained restricted to the * A preliminary version of this article was presented as a paper at the 13th Con- gress of the Union Européenne d'Arabisants et d'Islamisants at Venice (September 30, 1986); a popularized version has appeared in the review al-Azmina («al-�Arabfi žib�lal-Alp», 7 (1987) 26-30). I am very grateful to Pedro Chalmeta (Madrid) who gave me the valuable information from Ibn Hayy�n's Muqtabis. I wish to thank all the informants from Switzerland who sometimes sceptically, but always with much kindness and enthusiasm provided me with the material without which this article could not have been written. In particular I wish to mention Pierre Dubuis (Univ. de Lausanne, Sion); Maurice Casanova (Neuchâtel); Gian P. Sarratz (Pontresina); Pierre Reichenbach (Monthey); Jean-Michel Girard (Bourg-Saint-Pierre); Jean-Denis Galland (Moudon); René Projer (Sankt Gallen); Prof. Dr. Louis Carlen (Univ. de Fribourg); Dr. Walter Ruppen (Brig); Dr. Albert Carlen (Sitten); René Berthod (Orsières); the Bibliothèque Com- munale de Martigny; the Bibliothèque Cantonale de Sion; and the Gemeindever- waltung von Saas-Fee. I am grateful to Remko Terlaan (Nice) for sending me a copy of his mémoire de D.E.A., entitled L'itinéraire du Sarrasin en Provence:Du réel à l'imaginaire (Université de Nice, 1986). His approach differs from mine in that he is primarily interested in tracing the development of the image of the Saracenes in Provençal folklore, legends, historiography and local customs. 1 Cf. Daniel (1979:53); ChronicumNovaliciense, V, 18 (p. 114.39). 360 Iberian peninsula. A final end to the `official' presence of the Arabs in the South of France came in 750 when Pipin conquered the last Arab stronghold, Narbonne, which they had held occupied since 720. The expansion towards the North was also carried out by a second route, through Italy, in particular during the 9th century. The dynasty of the Aghlabids, whose capital was Qayrawan, had begun the conquest of Sicily in 827, and this campaign lasted until 902, when Taormina was destroyed. But even in the period before the final victory in Sicily, numerous attacks had been undertaken by the Arabs in Italy itself, partly on their own initiative, partly also because their assistance was requested by local rulers, who used the Arab armies to defeat a rival2. The most important stronghold of the Arabs in Italy became their naval base at Bari on the Adriatic coast, which they kept occupied from ± 840 till 871. In 846 the Arab troops laid siege to Rome and their campaigns brought them as far as Venice. After the fall of Bari in 871 Arab activities in Italy gradually came to an end, at least from the South. They had to fall back on Sicily, which in 969 became officially part of the Fatimid empire in Egypt. The Norman conquest of Sicily in 1091 marked the end of Arab domination in these parts of the Mediterranean. In the literature concerning this period frequent mention is made of Arab raids in the Alpine area, variously brought into connection with the Arab presence in the South of France, in Spain, and in Italy. These invasions have been dealt with for the first time exhaustively by Reinaud in 18363. Reinaud published his study before the publication of most of the contemporary sources in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, which has made available most of the relevant testimonies. In this article I shall try to deal with the information in these sources concerning the Arab presence in the French and Swiss Alps, and to find an answer to the question of what hap- pened to the Arabs after they had lost their main stronghold. It should be added that the relevant sources are almost without excep- tion Western chronicles written in Latin. The Arabic sources are almost completely silent about this episode, probably because it involved only irregular troops-mercenaries, pirates, 2 Cf. ChronicaMonasterii Casinensis,pp. 597-601. 3 Quoted here from the English translation by Haroon Khan Sherwani (1964); extensive accounts of this episode are also given by Poupardin (1901) and (1907). .

Load more