Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (21 page)

Generally speaking, in the sixth century techniques of metal-working and production developed far beyond anything known by the Romans. Goldsmiths and silversmiths, especially those working in Ireland and Britain, though also in Gaul and elsewhere, now began to produce some of the finest miniature artwork ever created. We have already seen how the manuscript makers of Britain and Ireland utilized the interlacing patterns of Hiberno-Saxon art to create astonishing designs of microscopic detail. Metal-workers of the period now reproduced the same patterns in gold and silver, creating works of miniature art that were never equaled in ancient or medieval times, and had to wait till the eighteenth century before they found rivals. Such masterpieces as the Tara Broach and the Ardagh Chalice display the skill of these jewelers in all its glory.

Along with new techniques of metallurgy, there appeared in the fifth and sixth centuries new forms of architecture, which were innovative in their design, and prefigured the masterpieces of Romanesque and Gothic architecture, which again surpassed anything achieved by the Romans. Thus for example in the late fifth century the Merovingians began building churches which “displayed the vertical emphasis, and the combination of block units forming a complex internal space and the correspondingly rich external silhouette, which were to be the hallmarks of the Romanesque.”
[27]
Similarly, in Spain the Visigoths were producing, by the sixth century, architectural masterpieces that prefigured the Spanish Romanesque of the tenth century. New stone churches, the first buildings in that material, began, as we saw, to appear in England from the early seventh century.

* * *

All in all, we may conclude that the western regions of Europe, the former provinces of the Western Empire, as well as regions such as Ireland, Caledonia, and eastern Germany, which had never been part of the Empire, experienced a thriving intellectual life during the late fifth, sixth and early seventh centuries. Literacy appears to have been widespread, and the classical traditions of scientific and philosophical enquiry were alive and well. New agricultural and metal-producing techniques speak of a vibrant and growing economy, impelled by a rising population. Even greater scientific and intellectual feats were accomplished in the Eastern Empire at the same time, and we shall refer to some of these at a later date.

Before finishing, we should note that in the second half of the tenth century another wave of technical innovation commenced in Europe. Many of the introductions of this period, such as the windmill and paper manufacture, were derived from the East. Yet the spirit of innovation and openness was clearly but a continuation of the same phenomenon which existed in the sixth and early seventh centuries, but which then apparently disappeared in a profound and prolonged Dark Age, an epoch so impoverished and obscure that hardly a fragment of pottery or a coin has emerged from it. What could have caused such a remarkable relapse, a relapse followed three centuries later by an equally remarkable revival?

[1]
James W. Thompson and Edgar N. Johnson,
Introduction to Medieval Europe, 300-1500
(New York, 1937), pp. 221-2

[2]
Encyclopedia Britannica
, Micropaedia Vol. 2, “Boethius”.

[3]
Thompson and Johnson, op cit., p. 222

[4]
Carl Stephenson,
Medieval History: Europe from the Second to the Sixteenth Century
(Harper and Row, New York, 1962), pp. 78-9. There exists a large literature on this topic.

[5]
H. F. Stewart, “Thoughts and Ideas of the Period,” in
The Cambridge Medieval History: The Christian Empire
, Vol. 1 (2nd ed., 1936), p. 596

[6]
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassiodorus

[7]
Thompson and Johnson, op cit., p. 206

[8]
Ibid

[9]
Ibid.

[10]
Ibid., p. 207

[11]
For a discussion, see Stanley L. Jaki,
The Savior of Science
(William B. Eerdmans, 2000)

[12]
Réginald Grégoire, Léo Moulin, and Raymond Oursel,
The Monastic Realm
(Rizzoli, New York, 1985), p. 277

[13]
Cited from Charles Montalembert,
The Monks of the West: From St. Benedict to St. Bernard
. Vol. 5, (London, 1896), p. 146

[14]
John Henry Newman, in Charles Frederick Harrold, (ed.)
Essays and Sketches
, Vol. 3 (New York, 1948), pp. 316-7

[15]
Ibid., p. 319

[16]
Ibid., pp. 317-9

[17]
Günter B. Risse,
Mending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of Hospitals
(Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 95

[18]
Alexander Clarence Flick,
The Rise of the Medieval Church
(New York, 1909), p. 223

[19]
See John Henry Cardinal Newman, loc cit., pp. 264-5.

[20]
Peter Wells, op cit., p. 131.

[21]
Evi Margaritis and Martin K. Jones, “Greek and Roman Agriculture”, in Oleson, John Peter (ed.):
The Oxford Handbook of Engineering and Technology in the Classical World
(Oxford University Press, 2008)

[22]
Trevor-Roper, op cit., pp. 113-15

[23]
Peter Wells, op cit., p. 132

[24]
Ibid.

[25]
Ibid., pp. 132-3

[26]
Edward James, op cit., pp. 203-4

[27]
V. I. Atroshenko and Judith Collins,
The Origins of the Romanesque
(Lund Humphries, London, 1985), p. 48

U
p until the 1960s and 70s, historians tended to believe that Byzantium had somehow escaped the general disintegration that occurred in the rest of Europe from the seventh century onwards. The Eastern Empire, after all, did not fall to the Barbarians. No Gothic or Vandal army ever breached the walls of Constantinople. The European provinces of the Empire were indeed periodically overrun by barbarian hosts, but these territories were invariably recovered; and in any case, they did not form the economic or cultural core of the Empire. The eastern provinces however, constituting Anatolia, Syria and Egypt, were by far the most important and populated provinces, and these areas were never touched by the Barbarians. The Arab and Persian assaults in the seventh century, it was conceded, may have deprived the Empire of her most important regions, but Constantinople held onto western Asia Minor and then recovered her European territories in the Balkans. And all through this time she remained a beacon of civilization and culture. Even Pirenne assumed that the Eastern Empire had survived the Arab onslaught more or less unscathed; and indeed the supposed survival of classical culture in Byzantium was viewed as a telling argument against him. If the Arabs had destroyed Graeco-Roman civilization in western Europe, why did they fail to do so in the East? Byzantium would presumably have been subject to the same economic blockade as Italy and Gaul. Why then no disintegration there? Such considerations threw many back to the traditional belief that it was indeed the Germanic invaders of western Europe, rather than the Arabs, who had terminated classical culture there.

The idea that Byzantium not only escaped the “Dark Age” but actually flourished during it was widespread even into the 1950s. Thus in 1953 Sidney Painter was able to describe the eighth, ninth and tenth centuries at Byzantium as “three centuries of glory,” and remarked that during this time, “The Byzantine Empire was the richest state in Europe, the strongest military power, and by far the most cultivated.”
[1]
We are further informed that, “During these three centuries while Western Europe was a land of partly tamed barbarians, the Byzantine Empire was a highly civilized state where a most felicitous merger of Christianity and Hellenism produced a fascinating culture.”
[2]

Fig. 17. Saint Demtrios, Thessalonika, begun in 629; one of the largest surviving seventh century Byzantine churches.

The above opinion, common till the middle of the twentieth century, was of course partly prompted by Byzantine propaganda, which always sought to portray Constantinople as the “New Rome” and the successor, in an unbroken line of authority, of the first Christian Emperor, Constantine. But it was also the result of habitually seeing “barbarism” solely as an innovation of the nomadic tribes of Germany and Scythia. Since Constantinople had never been overrun by these Barbarians, it could not have lost its civilized character. The failure of academics to move away from this almost reflex reaction is testimony to the failure of Pirenne’s thesis to make any real inroads into the mindset of so many in the scholarly community.

Yet irrespective of the somewhat clichéd thinking prevalent in academia, discoveries in the ground have not stopped happening; and these have forced, albeit begrudgingly, a complete rethink of Byzantium’s early medieval past. As a matter of fact, archaeology over the past half century has shown beyond question that the once-proud Eastern Rome was devastated during the seventh century. The same poverty and illiteracy that we find in the West we now find also in the East. Cities decline or disappear completely and the economy of the Empire, or what remained of it, is left in tatters. Indeed, just as in the West, a “dark age” descends.

Fig. 18. Interior of Saint Demetrios.

The disclosure by archaeology of this utterly unexpected circumstance created a major problem for mainstream academia. Apart from the fact that we now knew a “Dark Age” had occurred in the East, just as in the West, it seemed an incredible coincidence that this should have occurred in both regions at more or less exactly the same time. Only a few decades earlier, the writings of Dopsch and Pirenne had compelled historians to abandon their old and traditional view of a Dark Age descending on the West in the fifth century, with the arrival of the Barbarians. They had found it difficult (if not impossible) to picture Germanic kings reigning as Christian and Roman monarchs for two centuries; and, in order to explain the Dark Age that eventually did appear without putting the blame on the Arabs, they had to postulate a gradual decline of the western provinces under the incapable and uncouth leadership of the Germans. What they did not expect was a similar decline in the eastern provinces, territories not governed by Germans, but by descendants of some of the most venerable and ancient families of Rome and Greece.

How to explain this without conceding the argument, in its entirety, to Pirenne?

The discovery of Byzantium’s Dark Age in fact produced what can only be described as a remarkable volte face on the part of the academic community. What was previously regarded as flourishing and opulent was now seen as, from the end of the sixth century, decadent and indeed terminally ill. It could not be argued that the East suffered a gradual decline, for the archaeology proved, beyond question, the existence of a flourishing and wealthy Byzantine world well into the middle and even late sixth century. In the words of one prominent authority, “Archaeological evidence offers striking confirmation of the wealth of the Church [and society at large] from the fourth to the sixth centuries. All round the Mediterranean, basilicas have been found by the score. While architecturally standardized, these were quite large buildings, often a hundred feet or more in length, and were lavishly decorated with imported marble columns, carving and mosaic. In every town more and more churches were built …” But this church-building (and indeed palace-building) did come to a complete halt well before the middle of the seventh century. How could this be explained without pointing to the Arabs? The answer seized upon was a rapid decline from the end of the sixth century onwards. The writer quoted above continues: “… more and more churches were built until about the middle of the sixth century, when this activity slackened and then ceased entirely.”
[3]

But the truth, as we shall see, is there was very little slackening of building activity after the mid-sixth century: new and sometimes magnificent structures continued to be raised throughout the Byzantine lands until the first quarter of the seventh century, after which it did cease entirely. But it did not, as the above writer seeks to imply, cease gradually: It came to an end suddenly and violently.

The sheer wealth and luxury of Byzantine civilization during the sixth and early seventh centuries, long hinted at in the written sources, has now been fully confirmed by excavation. I leave it to another chapter to examine this topic in detail: Suffice to note here that the opulence of the late classical cities has astonished the excavators. Let’s look, for example, at the city of Ephesus. Once again, I will quote Pirenne’s arch-opponents, Hodges and Whitehouse: “In the fifth century many parts of the classical city were being rebuilt, and all the signs point to an immense mercantile wealth as late as 600. The best examples of this late flowering have been found in the excavations alongside the Embolos, the monumental street in the centre of Ephesus, where crowded dwellings have been uncovered. Nearly all of them were lavishly decorated in the fifth or early sixth century, and their courtyards were floored with marble or mosaics.”
[4]

Again, “The sheer grandeur of the fifth and sixth centuries in Ephesus can be seen in the remains of the great Justinianic church of St. John. In architectural and artistic terms the chroniclers led us to believe St. John was close to Sancta Sophia and San Vitale in magnificence. Its floor was covered with elaborately cut marble, and among the many paintings was one depicting Christ crowning Justinian and Theodora. No less remarkable are the many mausolea and chapels of the period centred around the grotto of the Seven Sleepers. These Early Christian funerary remains testify to the wealth of its citizens in death, complementing their lavishly decorated homes by the Embolos.”
[5]

Tellingly, Ward-Perkins, another severe critic of Pirenne, goes much further even that Hodges and Whitehouse. Writing in 2005, and therefore from the perspective of an extra thirty years of archaeological excavation in the Byzantine region, Ward-Perkins remarks that, “throughout almost the whole of the eastern empire, from central Greece to Egypt, the fifth and sixth centuries were a period of remarkable expansion.” “We know,” he continues, “that settlement not only increased in this period, but was also prosperous, because it left behind a mass of newly built rural houses, often in stone, as well as a rash of churches and monasteries across the landscape. New coins were abundant and widely diffused, and new potteries, supplying distant as well as local markets, developed on the west coast of modern Turkey, in Cyprus, and in Egypt. Furthermore, new types of amphora appeared, in which the wine and oil of the Levant and of the Aegean were transported both within the region, and outside it, even as far as Britain and the upper Danube.”
[6]
This prosperity represented not just the late flowering of a decaying and doomed society; it represented, rather, in many ways, the very apex of Graeco-Roman civilization. “If we measure ‘Golden Ages’,” he says, “in terms of material remains, the fifth and sixth centuries were certainly golden for most of the eastern Mediterranean, in many areas leaving archaeological traces that are more numerous and more impressive than those of the earlier Roman empire.”
[7]

Before moving on, it is important to note that the wealth and populousness of the East at this time is precisely what we would expect from the point of view of Rodney Stark and others, who see Christianity as a revitalizing force in the Roman world. The eastern provinces were of course Christianized long before those of the West and so would earlier have benefited from a natural increase in population. This of course is precisely what the archaeology shows.

None of this then sounds like the final days of a civilization that had essentially run its course and was waiting to expire. And it is worth pointing out that Ward-Perkins included North Africa within the sphere of this late Golden Age of Byzantine culture, thus standing in stark contrast to the elaborately constructed arguments of Hodges and Whitehouse, who sought to portray North Africa as an economic and cultural wasteland after 600.

The cities of the time were sustained by a vast and thriving agriculture. Evidence of this has been found everywhere. Archaeological exploration of the Limestone Massif in northern Syria, for example, has revealed that during the sixth century the region attained great prosperity thanks to the cultivation of the olive tree.
[8]
Studies here have revealed the co-existence of large and small holdings, but also a general trend, in the years extending from the fourth to the sixth century, towards the break-up of the bigger estates and the growth of villages composed of relatively well-to-do independent farmers.
[9]
During this time an enormous system of cultivation and terracing made great expanses of the Middle East and North Africa fertile and productive. It was the existence of this agricultural infrastructure that permitted the existence of the late classical cities.

The end came dramatically: In Ephesus, for example, we are told that, “suddenly, in about 614, to judge by the coin evidence, ... [the] residential complexes were destroyed by fire. There has been much debate about the cataclysmic end of these quarters: was there an earthquake, or were the houses sacked by the Persian army in 616, or was there a major fire which began by accident?”
[10]

Hodges and Whitehouse answer their own question as they continue: “… the picture [in Ephesus] changed after the Persian sack in 616. A new city was constructed, enclosing less than a square kilometre, while a citadel was established on the hill of Ayasuluk overlooking Ephesus. The city wall defended a little of the harbour, which was evidently silting up by this time.”
[11]