MOHAMMED AND CHARLEMAGNE PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Henri Pirenne | 304 pages | 28 Mar 2003 | Dover Publications Inc. | 9780486420110 | English | New York, United States Mohammed and Charlemagne - Henri Pirenne - Google Books The lights went out, quite literally, with the Islamic conquests. People fled the coastline and began building hilltop castles to avoid slaughter and enslavement. The Mediterranean was no longer a highway but a frontier of piracy and plunder. The sea became a blockade, choking off trade and communication with Byzantium. Papyrus became a thing of the past, and literacy plummeted almost overnight to levels equivalent to those in pre- Roman times. The whole balance of power in the Roman Empire had shifted to the east: Constantinople was founded in , and by the beginning of the s Ravenna supplanted Rome as the capital of the western empire. Rome was then sacked twice, in and then , with the western empire dissolving in With all of that — a huge drop in the Roman aristocracy, population, and general fortune — we would rather obviously expect a dramatic drop in the wealth of the settlements around central Italy. Under the Visigoths in Spain, the Franks in Gaul, and the Vandals in Africa, society was reviving and flourishing, especially in the sixth and early seventh centuries. The evidence shows expanding populations engaged in vigorous trade within Europe and with the eastern Mediterranean; new territories being brought into cultivation; growth of cities both old and new; clear proof of dramatic technical and scientific innovation; advanced learning and scholarship of all kinds. This was almost a renaissance , let alone a revival, and it was abruptly terminated in the early seventh century with the Islamic invasions. They used the exception of central Italy to argue a non-existent rule — and an exception we would expect in advance. For whatever strange reasons, people have difficulty believing the Germanic invaders were capable of civilization, but they were. In the East, Hodges and Whitehouse again blame the wrong people, this time the Persians. As Scott says, there had been wars between Persians and Romans before; it was the way of Roman life for seven centuries. How is it that this particular Persian war supposedly led to the end of classical civilization in the east? No matter how destructive, wars are normally followed by treaties of peace, and then the recovery of economic prosperity. The answer is self-evident: it was the Arabs, in the wake of the Persians, who laid the permanent waste. The religious concept of jihad was one of permanent religious war that made any kind of peace or genuine coexistence impossible. Fertile areas became semi-desert, and cities became ghost towns. The Muslims had no use for literature, drama, painting, and narrative, and were often hostile to these. And even though science and medicine were supported, the only degree offered at an Islamic university was in religious law. Philosophy became a hobby for a select few and had no impact on daily life, which was the role of sharia in any case. We also often hear that Jews and Christians enjoyed a protected dhimmi status in Islamic lands, but in practice they were not protected. Under sharia their rights were subordinate to Muslim rights, and they were often insulted, robbed, and killed with impunity. Their protection could be revoked at a whim and often was. Scott fleshes out Pirenne by showing that the impact of the Persian-then-Arab assaults on the Byzantine empire were so great, and the severance of western Europe from Constantinople so severe, that the Germanic kings of the west began asserting their independence in a reactive way. They started minting coins in their own image under Clothar II, r. For the first time ever, by the eleventh century, Christians began thinking in terms of holy war. Scott emphasizes that none of this excuses the medieval church. Of course, its very neatness should raise alarm bells. The archaeological evidence doesn't really accord with Pirenne's statements about it and far more contradictory evidence has been found since he wrote , he's got some weird ideas about Islam Muslims did trade with Christians and with other People of the Book without major issue for most of the medieval period, so far as I'm aware , and there's an anti-Semitic undercurrent to a lot of what he says about Jewish merchants. He also engages in a lot of special pleading to bolster his idea that Romanitas continued because some of its forms of government were adopted by new Germanic kings, or because popes dated their documents still according to imperial reigns. The latter in particular really doesn't tell us anything about the political situations on the ground—formal papal recordkeeping is an inherently conservative genre. That's like saying that the fact that the term "last will and testament" is still current means that most people could tell you the difference between a will and a testament. It cannot, however, be read with unqualified acceptance. Mar 04, Ryan Patrick rated it really liked it Shelves: medieval-history , non-fiction Un classico imperdibile, semplice e comprensibile, ma allo stesso tempo molto interessante e ricco di interpretazioni relativamente originali, da leggere. Apr 11, Elliott Bignell rated it really liked it. This was a dense and sometimes intractable read with a few startling insights. I found it hard going but worth the slog. Pirenne suffers a little from the historian's deformity of Kingitis, and expends a deal of space tracking the rise and fall of the early Germanic monarchs and those around them. This is reality TV for the pre-Marconi erudite, and not for everyone. I personally have a taste for more details of the agricultural landscape, diet, medicine, philosophical ideas and the other This was a dense and sometimes intractable read with a few startling insights. I personally have a taste for more details of the agricultural landscape, diet, medicine, philosophical ideas and the other trappings of a whole civilisation. As we are dealing with the fall of the classical West, philosophical ideas are not far away, but that it about as far as it goes. So I might have written this book off with two or three stars. Why didn't I? Well, because there is a striking new way of looking at the Mediterranean world and the transition from late antiquity to the Middle Ages, and one that I find Pirenne has managed to sell to me. Pirenne's assiduous collection of royal mugs reveals a picture of the hairy barbarians who penetrated the Empire quite different to the usual. He states no less that that the Goths, Vandals, Lombards and Franks who indundated most of Western Rome, beside sacking the odd city like Rome, did not actually displace Rome. They became part of it. The Germans wanted the status of Roman citizenship, once they had tasted it. The economy collapsed, feudalism took hold, gold coin was no longer minted and Latin fragmented into the score of languages we see today, retained in a pure form only by the clergy. Why, if the martially potent Germans sought to retain the empire, did they not do so? Pirenne's answer is that the astonishing, explosive expansion of Islam a mere few years after the death of Muhammad turned Europe on its head and the Western Mediterranean into a corsairs' boating lake. Africa, the bread-basket, was lost in a flash. Trade across the sea stagnated. Iberia and Sicily were overrun and Constantinople besieged. Parts of Southern France were occupied and cities from Italy to Scandinavia raided. What the German and Turkic barbarians did not achieve by way of fragmenting the Empire Islam achieved in a moment. Europe turned in on itself. This is a compelling vision, and explains some oddities such as the simultaneous fragmentation of Latin as a vulgar tongue and perfection as a language of erudition. It also chimes well with the aspiration to continuity which obviously hung about the Holy Roman Empire. The Empire felt itself to be the old but clearly was not. The oddly tense relationship between the Church and the Emperor acquires some clarity in Pirenne's light, as well. So on the whole I found this a tiring but very worthwhile read. I am glad I persevered. Nov 24, Resul rated it really liked it. Apr 22, James rated it really liked it. It breaks a lot of notions that I had about the conitnuing traditions of Roman society after the 5th c. Only thing that was a bit of a let down was the discussion of the slave trade and its importance to European Society during the decadence of the Carolingian Era. I had hoped this would be a bigger part of Amazing Historiographical work by Pirenne on the transition from Romanized Europe to the Middle Ages. I had hoped this would be a bigger part of this book, but it was not focused on until the 20 pages or so, leading up to his conclusion. Still a classic work of Historiography and essential reading for anyone interested in Early Western Civilization. Questi termini sono tornati nel lessico politico contemporaneo riflettendo su questioni di geopolitica concernenti i flussi migratori che interessano l'Europa. Read for my freshman Western Civilization course in college, this book was written by a distinguished French historian in the 's. Its thesis is basically that the Muslim conquest of the Middle East and North Africa, by disrupting the cultural and economic unity of the Mediterranean world, was the decisive break between Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Western Europe was cut off and had to work with what it had left to develop its own civilization, which emerged thereafter.