The Enduring Attraction of the Pirenne Thesis

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Previous articleNext article FreeThe Enduring Attraction of the Pirenne ThesisBonnie EffrosBonnie EffrosBonnie Effros is Professor of History and Rothman Chair and Director of the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere at University of Florida, in Gainesville, Florida (e-mail: [email protected])PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreRereading PirenneAt the beginning of the twenty-first century, as Europeans and North Americans vigorously debate the place of Islam in the West, Henri Pirenne's Mahomet et Charlemagne (1937) and his explanation of the clash of civilizations that led to the end of the Roman Empire has gained renewed popular relevance. Although Pirenne's interest was not in Islam, but rather the contribution of the Arab conquest to the Carolingian renaissance, his work has not only continued to garner attention in the last several decades but, in a disturbing albeit unsurprising development, it has also gained a new set of devotees. Indeed, Mahomet et Charlemagne has attracted readers from among adherents of European right-wing nationalism and American neoconservatism. In their eagerness to condemn the rise of Islamic fundamentalism as a menace to the global hegemony of the West, these historical revisionists have used decontextualized passages of Pirenne's monograph to argue that he labeled Islam the ultimate danger to Western civilization.1This ideological reading of Mahomet et Charlemagne contrasts starkly with the work's more nuanced interpretation and reception in European medieval and Mediterranean historiography, where what is now known as the Pirenne Thesis has made its largest contribution in economic history.2 Although the influence of the monograph's argument has ebbed and flowed since the time of its composition in response to contemporary trends in medieval studies,3 nearly eighty years after its publication, medievalists continue to debate the merits of Pirenne's contribution.4 Its influence in medieval studies has also varied regionally. Whereas Anglo-American, French, and Italian scholars, on the whole, have generally accepted the research priorities established by Mahomet et Charlemagne while they have questioned its conclusions,5 the impact of Pirenne's work in Austrian and German circles has been markedly less profound than the legacy of his contemporary, the Austrian historian Alfons Dopsch.6 Medievalists specializing in the Carolingian period and the epochs that succeeded it or those who work on Mediterranean history more generally have been most apt to embrace Pirenne.7 In particular, Mahomet et Charlemagne influenced the future development of the study of Carolingian economics by Pirenne's successors, like Adriaan Verhulst and Jean-Pierre Devroey, among others.8 By contrast, medievalists whose interests focus on the Merovingian period have found Pirenne's narrative less useful. He looked down on the Merovingian epoch as a decadent period that followed the Germanic invasions and dismissed it as offering minimal innovation,9 a characterization that continues to dog the era popularly known (or dismissed) as the Dark Ages.10It is striking, then, that a monograph as formative as Mahomet et Charlemagne almost never came to be. The published work that we read today is not a direct transcription of the manuscript found on Pirenne's desk after he succumbed prematurely to illness in 1935, shortly after the passing of his oldest son Henri-Édouard.11 Indeed, the Belgian historian's wife Jenny Pirenne (née Verhaegen) and sole surviving son Jacques invited Charles Vercauteren, one of Pirenne's students, to help prepare a posthumous volume from the unfinished work on which the historian had been laboring up until the time of his demise.12 Published in 1937, the slim volume honed ideas the Walloon scholar had developed during the First World War but which took more concrete form in articles he composed in the early 1920s.13It appears that Mahomet et Charlemagne derived foremost from Pirenne's desire to understand the origins of late-medieval cities, the main focus of his research, which Louis Ganshof attributed to Pirenne's upbringing as the son of a manufacturer.14 To this end, Pirenne argued that there was a clean break between the cities of Roman antiquity, the lifeblood of which were the Syrian merchants who served as the mediators of long-distance Mediterranean trade in luxury objects, and urban centers that emerged during the central Middle Ages.15 In Pirenne's estimation, classical cities died out during the course of the Merovingian period and bequeathed nothing but their names and walls to the new towns and churches that emerged in the late tenth and eleventh centuries.16Pirenne also wrote Mahomet et Charlemagne at least in part as a response to the publications of Dopsch.17 The economic historian, like Pirenne, argued for continuity in the post-Roman period but pointed to a far greater role for Germanic contributions than the Belgian scholar was willing to countenance.18 Like the French historians Fustel de Coulanges and Ferdinand Lot,19 as well as the majority of French archaeologists of his day who viewed themselves as heirs of Rome rather than Germania (and are thus known as Romanists),20 Pirenne's Mahomet et Charlemagne downplayed the impact of the Germanic invasions on European history. While liberally employing reference to Romania for the regions conquered by Rome throughout the text, he avoided the term Germania whenever possible, no doubt because it suggested an independent civilizational structure.21 In this way, Pirenne suggested that Roman society maintained its Mediterranean character despite the arrival of what he concluded was an "infime minorité" of barbarian immigrants,22 a view embraced by few scholars in Germany or Austria either in the twentieth century or today.23As is often recounted, another important source of influence on Pirenne's view of the postimperial Roman world presented in Mahomet et Charlemagne was his training in German historical methodology and his cooperation on a number of publications with the German historian Karl Lamprecht in the 1890s and the inaugural decade of the twentieth century.24 However, the death of Pirenne's son Pierre in the Battle of Yser in October 1914, Pirenne's internment for civil disobedience in a German prisoner-of-war camp from 1915, and his disappointment with Lamprecht's (and many other German colleagues') unflinching support for German imperialism made the Belgian historian more critical of German historiography even if it did not undo the profound impact of German scholarship on his thinking.25 Although Pirenne's reaction to these events was not as xenophobic as that of his contemporary Emile Mâle,26 these formative experiences lowered considerably his estimation of the German nation, as he noted in a reference to his captivity in a 1920 article in the Revue des deux mondes.27As has been ably documented by Patrick Geary, Ian Wood, and others, there is no doubt that Pirenne's composition betrays many of the concerns of the period in which it was written. However, although scholars have given substantial attention to the foundational contributions of national and pan-European perspectives to historical conceptions of the early Middle Ages,28 one perspective that has not been explored sufficiently up till now is that of colonial and postcolonial historiography and the ways in which Orientalism affected nineteenth- and twentieth-century perceptions of the birth of the European Middle Ages. Although Edward Said observed as early as 1979 that Islam represented for Pirenne the Other against which Europe was defined,29 the suggestion has not opened the way to further exploration of this topic. This lacuna is an invitation to reread the Pirenne Thesis not just in its nationalist but also its imperial context and focus as much on its silences as its claims about empires.30 By reengaging the text from this perspective, it becomes evident that some of the assumptions about Islam built into Pirenne's elegant framework are more vexing than the historical problems he sought to resolve related to culture and economy in the post-Roman world. With the benefit of the wealth of archaeological data that has arisen largely since Pirenne's composition of Mahomet et Charlemagne, it is incumbent upon the many scholars whose research priorities are still defined by or against Pirenne's underlying premises to critique more definitively the assumptions embedded in and limitations imposed by Pirenne's portrayal of the post-Roman epoch. While no interpretation will be able to solve all the enigmas of this period, it is time to relinquish a model too broad in its strokes and problematic in its implications. The transformation of the Roman world was far more variable and complex than Pirenne envisioned at the start of the twentieth century and thus his model should not continue to drive and shape research on this era.Pirenne and MuhammadIn 1974, Peter Brown praised the work of Pirenne as freeing research on late antiquity from the impasse of the Romanist-Germanist debate,31 a historical discussion that divided scholars since as early as the sixteenth century between those who saw the roots of medieval Europe in ancient Rome (Romanists) and those who gave credit to Germanic invasion and migration for the creation of medieval institutions (Germanists). Whereas eighteenth-century Germanist scholars, like Henri, comte de Boulainvilliers, and his successors, emphasized significant discontinuities and collapse brought on by the so-called barbarian invasions, Romanist scholars, like Jean-Baptiste Du Bos and his followers, argued that Roman institutions remained relatively intact through the period of the successor kingdoms.32 However, Pirenne's work clearly fell in the latter camp, denying Edward Gibbon's popular narrative of the fissure brought on by the barbarian attacks, and building instead on the foundations established by his Romanist predecessors, like Numa-Denis Fustel de Coulanges in La cité antique (1864). As early as 1939, the Swedish historian and numismatist Sture Bolin characterized the aim of Pirenne's thesis as reducing the post-Roman era to an extension of the imperial epoch and thus not distinctive in its own right. In an English version of his 1939 article published in 1952, Bolin noted that Pirenne's work differed from that of Dopsch, since he placed much greater emphasis than the latter on Carolingian innovation.33 Indeed, Pirenne downplayed the unique (and especially Germanic) features of the Merovingian period in an effort to show its continuity with late-imperial Rome.34 According to Pirenne and many French historians of his era, the medieval period began with the Carolingian period. Its institutions, like feudalism, resembled those of the late Middle Ages rather than those of antiquity, and its apparent contributions overshadowed any contributions by the Merovingians.35 Pirenne's work was inspiration for the early Annalistes, most notably Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch, whom he mentored before and after they inaugurated their new journal the Annales in 1929.36What Brown and others have appreciated about Pirenne's work was the facility with which it shifted emphasis from the centuries-old Roman-barbarian debate to a discussion of decline and transformation through economic markers such as trade and other quantifiable forms of Roman vitality.37 However, this high praise deemphasized the second and arguably more original part of Mahomet et Charlemagne, wherein Pirenne attributed disruption of Mediterranean unity, which he deemed the most essential characteristic of the Roman Empire,38 to the Islamic conquests of the seventh and eighth century. Pirenne claimed that Arab control of much of the Mediterranean was the most essential development in European history since the Punic Wars, severing East from West and creating a Greek (rather than Roman) Empire that could do little more than defend its fleet and its last possessions, including posts in Naples, Venice, Gaeta, and Amalfi.39 And, although Pirenne's claim of an Arab-controlled Mediterranean largely devoid of commercial activity was hotly contested by scholars more familiar with Islamic history as early as the 1940s,40 the focus of their successive critiques was almost uniquely this economic argument rather than the larger civilizational claims staked by Pirenne. Notably, Maurice Lombard demonstrated that Arab leaders, just as their Byzantine and Persian predecessors, engaged extensively in trade during the period questioned by Pirenne.41 Bolin, too, pointed to the wealth of data for continued economic interaction even if it was not conducted via the Mediterranean. He forcefully demonstrated that the sphere of trade that included Western Europe was, if anything, enlarged by Islam, which shifted its central focus first to Syria and then to Iraq.42Moreover, a related and essential dimension of Mahomet et Charlemagne was its discussion of the religious dynamics of the post-Roman West. In his study, Pirenne gave significant attention to Christian institutions, suggesting that they were integral to guaranteeing cultural continuity in the West (just as he believed that disaccord over the definition of orthodoxy in the East ensured the rapid fall of the regions of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt to Islamic domination).43 Importantly, Pirenne viewed the Arab conquest as dramatically different from those of the pagan and Arian Germanic peoples, as it brought about complete reorientation of the lands they controlled:To tell the truth, a minority can transform a people when it wants to dominate it effectively, when it only has contempt for it, and considers it as matter to exploit; this was the case for the Normans in England, for the Muslims everywhere they sprang up, and the same for the Romans in the conquered provinces. However, the Germans wanted neither to destroy nor exploit the empire. Instead of having contempt for the empire, they admired it. They did not have anything to oppose it like moral force. Their heroic period ceased with their installation.44From this perspective, Pirenne hypothesized that in late antiquity, in contrast to the spread of the Germanic tribes, who were readily assimilated, the spread of Islam imposed a new equilibrium—a new moral order—upon the Mediterranean. Although Arab leaders took on the science of the Greeks and the art of the Greeks and Persians, they brokered no possibility of accommodation to the religions of the lands they conquered. Unlike the Germanic tribes, they instead remained exclusively obedient to God, Muhammad their Prophet, and their Arab heritage. Pirenne attributed to this devotion the consequently impenetrable barrier, formed foremost by religion but also by language, between Muslims and the populations they conquered.45As characterized by Paolo Delogu, Pirenne's work effectively captured the transition from the empire to the post-Roman states by pointing not just to changed conditions of political and economic activity but also to altered psychological and religious attitudes. According to Pirenne, whereas leaders of the invading Germanic cohorts might be prepared to acknowledge the inferiority of their culture as opposed to that of Rome, the Islamic invasions succeeded due to the zeal of the Arab conquerors who intentionally subverted the preexisting order.46 Whereas the pagan Germanic peoples blended into the Roman Christian population with time, the religious inclinations of Arabs allegedly made this impossible. And, in regions conquered by the Arabs, the heirs of Rome were forced to assimilate even if they were allowed to retain their religious practices: "Germanic peoples were Romanized once they entered into Romania. Romans, by contrast, were Arabized once they were conquered by Islam. It matters little that, until the midst of the Middle Ages, there subsisted in the midst of the Muslims small communities of Copts, Nestorians, and above all Jews. This entire ambience was no less profoundly transformed. There was a break, a complete rupture with the past."47 With this argument in favor of historical discontinuity brought on by Arab conquest, Pirenne noted that the sea that had once been the cradle of Christian civilization now became its frontier.In Pirenne's view, the siege of Constantinople loomed large. Following the period of anarchy that succeeded the death of Justinian II in 711, Pirenne noted that Leo III the Isaurian was able to repel the Umayyad fleet definitively in 718 thanks to his use of Greek fire and his alliance with the Bulgarians. Pirenne described this event as "the last attack attempted by the Arabs against the city 'protected by God.'"48 He contrasted Byzantine success with the battle of Poitiers (732), which he saw as less significant than was traditionally held. The conflict lacked the momentous hallmarks of Constantinople's victory because of the persistence of the Muslim threat in the south of Gaul following the victory of Charles Martel and Duke Odo (Eudes) of Aquitaine over Emir 'Abd al-Rahman I.49 For Pirenne, the Muslim threat remained considerable for Western Europe well into the period that saw the rise of the Carolingians. Pirenne thus considered the Arab invasions to have brought not just economic disruption but also to have altered the very equilibrium of European civilization.50The reasons for this radical stance are not entirely clear. Pirenne's biography does not suggest that the motivation for this contention was either his religious faith or political conservatism. While inspired by Godefroid Kurth's Les origines de la civilisation médiévale (1886), Pirenne, a liberal Catholic whose was a and whose was a his view that the was the source of does this perspective to have derived from in and of the from the reference to which can be found in Pirenne's composition of Mahomet et he considered to a discussion of Roman civilization in North research was still not well in either the history or of Byzantine or Muslim in the or North in the early decades of the twentieth century, some foundations had been from the of Mahomet et Charlemagne, which not be entirely of Pirenne's reading on the since these were he was not well about scholarship on the Umayyad and Pirenne's characterization of the Arab as a of to have derived instead from of Arab culture and society that were in his Indeed, Pirenne was not entirely of North he to in just a after the of the conquest of the to a of among others, other than He made a to in Although these came too late to have his of the clash of civilizations in Mahomet et Charlemagne in any profound way, Pirenne's of the devotion of Arab and their to their faith in the course of their an to contemporary and colonial that and cultural in this Pirenne's on Arab society the ideological of French historians of his time with to a (or Mediterranean after more than a century of colonial and in North contention that the rise of Islam brought of the classical period his in its North and Middle in ancient and In direct to the in which he believed that Germanic populations in post-Roman states in the West as they to Roman Pirenne Islam as a that brokered no it was only the of Mahomet et Charlemagne that concerns about the that his took from their study of the end of ancient Roman in North and the they believed in the West from a of the political this last for Pirenne, the in the new of by Islam in the Mediterranean was that its the in Europe to and and in what we today as the Carolingian Although their were by this remained the period that Pirenne and his with the end of Merovingian and the start of medieval Christian in contrast to of Pirenne, Mahomet et Charlemagne on a the that attracted first from historians and in more the volume success among medievalists because of the

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