Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited · The History of a Controversy

During the 1920s Belgian historian Henri Pirenne came to anastonishing conclusion: the ancient classical civilization, whichRome had established throughout Europe and the Mediterranean world,was not destroyed by the Barbarians who invaded the westernprovinces in the fifth century, it was destroyed by the Arabs,whose conquest of the Middle East and North Africa terminated Romancivilization in those regions and cut off Europe from any furthertrading and cultural contact with the East. According to Pirenne,it was only in the mid-seventh century that the characteristicfeatures of classical life disappeared from Europe, after whichtime the continent began to develop its own distinctive andsomewhat primitive medieval culture.?? Pirenne?s findings, published posthumously in his Mohammed etCharlemagne (1937), were even then highly controversial, for by thelate nineteenth century many historians were moving towards a quitedifferent conclusion: namely that the Arabs were actually acivilizing force who rekindled the light of classical learning inEurope after it had been extinguished by the Goths, Vandals andHuns in the fifth century. And because Pirenne went sodiametrically against the grain of this thinking, the reception ofhis new thesis tended to be hostile. Paper after paper publishedduring the 1940s and ?50s strove to refute him. The most definitiverebuttal however appeared in the early 1980s. This was Mohammed,Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe, by English archaeologistsRichard Hodges and David Whitehouse. These, in common withPirenne?s earlier critics, argued that classical civilization wasalready dead in Europe by the time of the Arab conquests, and thatthe Arabs arrived on the scene as civilizers rather thandestroyers. Hodges and Whitehouse claimed that the latest findingsof archaeology fully supported this view, and their work was highlyinfluential. So influential indeed that over the next three decadesPirenne and his thesis was progressively sidelined, so that r