Western government, law, society, and economy had been transformed by the Germanic invasions. In the sixth and seventh centuries, however, western Europe was not left alone to work out the effects of these great changes. The life of the Mediterranean world was again to be disturbed during these two centuries by the ambitions of Greeks and Arabs. The Byzantine and Moslem impact on western Europe was less important than was the Germanic influence. But the aims of the Byzantine emperor Justinian I and Mohammed, the Prophet of Allah, played significant roles in the shaping of the new European civilization.
The eastern Roman Empire was the first to be invaded by the Germans who initially had broken the Danube frontier, which was defended by the ruler in Constantinople. The first great defeat of Roman arms at the hands of the Germans, at the battle of Adrianople, was suffered by the eastern emperor. Yet it was the western Roman Empire that disintegrated in the fifth century. Why, then, did the Byzantine empire survive the German invasions? In the first place the population of the eastern empire was much greater and much more urbanized than was the Latin-speaking part of the Mediterranean world. The Germans were not so ignorant as to be unable to realize that they faced an immensely more difficult task if they turned eastward after they crossed the Danube. Second, the eastern Roman Empire found the focal point of government, culture, and economy in the impregnable fortress of Constantinople. It took the Arabs, who were militarily far superior to the Germans, seven centuries to take Constantinople. Even in the second decade of the twentieth century a military and naval onslaught on the great fortress of the Dardanelles ended in total failure. Obviously the Germans would have had no chance against Constantinople, and they realized it. Yet there was no other way for the Germans to enter the wealthy part of the Byzantine empire except through Constantinople. The fifth-century western emperors also had an impregnable fortress at Ravenna, but the Germans easily bypassed this city and pushed on unhindered into Italy.
The third reason for the survival of the eastern Roman Empire was the ability of the fifth-century Byzantine rulers. These rulers introduced governmental reforms, such as the reduction of the heavy taxation imposed in the preceding century, to gain popular support. They encouraged education and inaugurated the first large-scale codification of Roman law. Following on the work of third-century jurisconsults, the Byzantine legists produced the initial extensive Roman law code in about A.D. 425, which is named after the emperor Theodosius II. Also, the Byzantine rulers were wise enough not to surrender their military powers to German generals, as did their western colleagues. Finally, it must be seen that the invasions had a cumulative effect on the power and wealth of the western emperor that was avoided in the East. As the empire lost its territory, it lost its income from taxes, which meant that the government found it harder and harder to maintain the army, and the shrinking military resources brought about the loss of even more territory, which further reduced imperial income. The government in Constantinople, avoiding this downward spiral, maintained steady tax resources throughout the fifth century. The position of Constantinople as a great center of East-West trade further contributed to the emperor’s wealth.
In the fifth century the emperor took great pains to husband resources; he was preparing for the great day of reconquest. Since no emperor remained in the West after 476, the eastern emperor claimed that the Latin countries had reverted to his domain. He maintained that the imperium was inalienable, and he looked forward to the time when his resources would be sufficient to restore his effective authority at Rome. In the early sixth century the Ostrogothic attempts to create a pan-Germanic Mediterranean empire appeared to endanger the realization of Byzantine claims. Consequently, in 530 the emperor Justinian the Great launched the reconquest for which his predecessors had been preparing for a century.
Justinian I (527–565) had a greater influence on the development of Byzantium than any other emperor between Constantine and the tenth century. Justinian’s uncle was a Macedonian general who had seized the throne. Justin I (518–527) carefully trained his nephew to succeed him on the imperial throne, and of all early medieval rulers Justinian was the best educated and possessed the greatest degree of native intelligence. If destiny had not called him to the imperial purple, he would have had a great career as either a lawyer or a theologian. He was a stern, puritanical individual, the hardest-working man in the empire and greatly devoted to the state. His wife Theodora, formerly a circus dancer, turned out to be an intelligent and vigorous woman who helped her husband considerably. The crowd in the Byzantine circus had organized itself into a strange combination of sport-fan clubs and political associations. Early in Justinian’s reign, during riots between such rival circus groups that the emperor could not control, he felt compelled to abdicate the throne. Theodora, however, having risen from prostitute to empress, would not let her husband forsake his imperial eminence, and Justinian managed to regain control of the situation. His rule turned out to be both long and memorable on many grounds.
Two monuments of Justinian’s reign still survive: the cathedral of St. Sophia (Holy Wisdom) in Constantinople and the Corpus Juris Civilis, the Justinian code. St. Sophia is the greatest achievement of Byzantine architecture. Its style is a perpetuation of the church architecture of the later empire, which, in turn, is modeled on the Roman basilica, but its size and massive quality make the cathedral of Constantinople one of the outstanding examples of medieval art and engineering. The inside of this magnificent structure is adorned with great mosaics that depict the emperor as the representative of God on Earth and thereby proclaim the ideology of imperial rule. Only in recent decades has the covering that the Turks placed over the mosaics been removed so we can at last fully appreciate the skill and resources that went into the creation of the great church commissioned by Justinian. The church of San Vitale in Ravenna, also constructed by Justinian, is likewise remarkable for its splendid mosaics.
Of all the emperor’s work, the making of the Corpus Juris Civilis is the best known and most important in its impact on civilization. The Justinian code is perhaps the outstanding accomplishment in the history of jurisprudence. It consists of nothing less than the codification into a few volumes of the legal life of a great world empire over many centuries. It could only have been commissioned by an emperor who firmly believed that “there is nothing to be found in all things so worthy of attention as the authority of the law” and who was willing to devote all the necessary resources of his state to the inauguration and realization of this enormous enterprise. For the making of his Corpus, Justinian recruited the greatest legists of his empire and carefully set down for them a program of preparing a code of all Roman law on the grounds of rationality, coherence, equity, and the furtherance of imperial power. The Justinian code greatly favors absolutism: The emperor is considered the living law, and his will has the unchallenged force of law. “The emperor alone can make laws [and] it should also be the province of the imperial dignity alone to interpret them.” In this autocratic doctrine, as well as in its rationality and organization, its overriding principles of equity, its adherence to a system of legal procedure in which the authority of the judge as the representative of the emperor dominates the court, the Justinian code stands in boldest contrast to Germanic folk law.
Although the Justinian code was not studied in the West in the early Middle Ages, after the middle of the eleventh century it slowly became the basis of the legal systems of all the European countries, with the exception of England. It is true that this reception of the Roman law brought unfortunate consequences politically in that it provided a juristic basis for the absolutism of the later Middle Ages and early modern times, but the other characteristics of the Justinian code are so much in line with enlightenment and rationality that it deserves to be recognized as an unsurpassed legal system. Furthermore, it must be remembered that if the Justinian code propagated the Roman-Byzantine doctrines of imperial autocracy, it is unlikely that any but an absolute ruler would have had the power and resources to carry through such a monumental work of codification to its conclusion. A comparison with the other great legal system of western civilization, the English common law, bears out the truth of this statement. Even at the present time the extent of codification of the common law is insignificant when contrasted with the work of legal synthesis and rationalization effected by Justinian I thirteen centuries ago.
St. Sophia and the Corpus Juris Civilis would have been monuments enough for most rulers, but they were not enough for Justinian. Partly because of the autocratic tradition of imperial rule; partly because of the febrile atmosphere of the court that adored the emperor as the deputy of Celestial Majesty; and partly, no doubt, because of his own unbounded ambition, he could not rest until he was the ruler of the Eternal City. He never questioned whether an exhausting war of reconquest was in the interests of the welfare of his people; that is not the way Byzantine emperors thought. Justinian did not even consider whether Byzantium really possessed sufficient resources to undertake a costly war of reconquest. He ignored the threats to Byzantine security represented by the Germans, Slavs, and Mongolians, who pressed on the Balkan frontier, and the powerful Persian empire to the East. Aroused by the ambitions of the Ostrogoths, Justinian determined, at his accession, to restore his authority “over the countries which the ancient Romans possessed, to the limits of both oceans, and lost by subsequent neglect.” An emperor who could proclaim himself “pious, fortunate, renowned, conqueror, and triumpher, ever Augustus” in his great law code was not a man to consider the possibility of failure. Placing his “sole reliance upon the providence of the Holy Trinity,” he despatched his army and navy to invade North Africa only three years after the beginning of his reign.
Even before Justinian exhausted the military and economic resources of his empire on Italian battlefields, he had, by his religious policy, dug the grave of Byzantine power. Since the fourth century the eastern empire had been troubled by religious problems. Theodosius the Great had extinguished the Arian heresy, but novel unorthodox theological doctrines again won wide support in Egypt and Syria in the fifth and sixth centuries, inspired, in part, by Platonic philosophy and, in part, by nationalistic feeling that found its expression in religion. Large masses of the Egyptian and Syrian populations abandoned the traditional doctrine of the Incarnation and, following the tenets of Platonism, subscribed to the Monophysite heresy that claimed that Christ had only one spiritual nature. This view was an anathema to the Latin church, which held that in the one person of Christ there were two natures, human and divine. This doctrinal dispute between the Latin church and the Egyptian and Syrian Christians placed the emperor in a difficult position. If he was to retain the pope’s loyalty, without which he could scarcely hope to regain his authority in Italy, he could not afford to agree with the Monophysites. Consequently, at the Council of Chalcedon in 451 the emperor forced the Greek bishops to accept the Latin doctrine on the nature of Christ held by Pope Leo I. This did not, however, settle the issue. In the last decade of the fifth century the emperor went over to the Monophysite position, which brought down the wrath of Pope Gelasius I. In the 520s Justin I, preparing for the Byzantine invasion of Italy, reverted to the Latin position to gain papal support against the Ostrogoths.
Justinian continued his uncle’s policy, but not just for political reasons. As a trained theologian he decided that the Monophysites were wrong on doctrinal grounds, and he launched a severe persecution of the Monophysites that lasted throughout his reign and was continued by his successors. The result was widespread disaffection in the great cities of Egypt and Syria, which, next to Constantinople, were the most valuable parts of the empire. By the end of Justinian’s reign the persecuted Monophysites had been forced into a position of disloyalty to the Byzantine state, and Egypt and Syria were easy prey for any invader who would provide toleration for the heretical churches of the eastern Mediterranean. Whatever might be said of Justinian’s doctrinal views on purely theological grounds, they turned out to be disastrous for the unity and security of the empire. As J. B. Bury, the great historian of the Byzantine empire, commented with respect to Justinian’s religious policy, “a theologian on the throne is a public danger.”
The long-range effects of Justinian’s disputes with the Monophysites were thus most unfortunate for Byzantine power. In the short run they made possible the invasion of Italy, with papal support for the imperial army. In fact, in the early part of his reign, Justinian went so far as to issue a decree acknowledging the separate spheres of jurisdiction of the sacerdotium and the imperium to placate the pope. Of course, he later abandoned this acceptance of the moderate aspect of the Gelasian doctrine and returned fully to the traditional Byzantine caesaropapist position. But in 530 he was prepared to risk everything for the success of his great venture. To regain Rome, he was willing to hazard all the military and economic resources of his state, to antagonize large groups in the greatest cities of his realm, and even to swallow papal political doctrines. With so much at stake, the future of both Byzantium and western Europe hinged on the success of this great gamble.
The initial stage of the Byzantine invasion of the Latin world went well for the Greek armies. Under the command of Belisarius, a military genius, Justinian’s forces easily conquered the Vandal kingdom in North Africa. In 533 Belisarius was ready to cross to Italy, pursuing the same invasion route as was to be followed by the allied armies in World War II. The bishop of Rome welcomed the Byzantine invaders, and, following papal leadership, the Italian population abandoned their Arian Ostrogothic rulers. The Ostrogoths had lost their great king, Theodoric, and they were not well led, but unlike the Vandals they had not forgotten how to fight. A quick Byzantine victory in Italy would have seen the fulfillment of Justinian’s plan and turned the clock back to the fourth century. Instead, it took the Byzantines nearly three decades to destroy Ostrogothic resistance. This Gothic war, as it has been called, ruined Italy economically. Italy suffered a devastating blow from which it did not recover until the tenth century. By the middle of the sixth century a noticeable deurbanization had taken place; the great cities, such as Rome, Naples, and Milan, had suffered a catastrophic loss of population, and great Mediterranean cities were transformed into sleepy provincial towns. A contemporary wrote in about 550 that “Nothing remains for the inhabitants of Italy but to die.” The Gothic war is the decisive dividing point in the economic and social history of early medieval Italy, a far more important break than the Germanic invasions of the fifth century. Italy declined rapidly from her traditional position as the cultural and economic leader of Europe and did not begin to regain this place until the late tenth century.
The long Gothic war was as great a disaster for the Byzantine state as it was for Italy. To carry through his grandiose policy of reconquest, Justinian was forced to revive Roman financial oppression in its worst form and to exhaust the resources of his empire. By the time his reign finally came to an end in 565, he was hated not only by the persecuted Mono-physite groups in Egypt and Syria, but even by members of the imperial court who, at the beginning of his reign, had acclaimed him the greatest emperor. This widespread disaffection is expressed in the libelous Secret History of Procopius, who had been Belisarius’ secretary. The emperor who had built St. Sophia and commissioned the Corpus Juris Civilis is portrayed by Procopius as “deceitful, devious, false, hypocritical, two-faced, cruel, . . . a faithless friend . . . a treacherous enemy, insane for murder and plunder.” Procopius’ censures reflect the inevitable reaction of an exhausted and ruined people against the leader whose excessively ambitious policies have led them to disaster.
While undertaking great campaigns in Africa and Italy, Justinian had done nothing to diminish the power of enemies closer to home. His successors were left to struggle desperately against the Persians on the eastern frontier and a host of Mongolian, Slavic, and German tribes pressing on the Balkan defenses of the empire. Finally the emperor Heraclius I (610–641) decided that a new policy had to be adopted to save Constantinople. He allowed the Bulgars, a Hunnish tribe, and various Slavic peoples to settle in the Balkans and in Greece, asserting only a nominal suzerainty over them. The emperor retained under his own authority only the fringe of the peninsula around Constantinople itself, and the ethnic composition of the Balkans changed even more radically than that of western Europe. Heraclius devoted all the remaining resources of his empire to saving Constantinople and Asia Minor from the Persians. In this he was successful. He inflicted a decisive defeat on the Persian empire, which had threatened Rome for several centuries, and the Persian state disintegrated.
Heraclius I was one of the greatest, but also one of the most unfortunate, of the Byzantine emperors. He rescued the empire from destruction and even inaugurated a revivifying organization. It could be said that he also saved Europe from the Persians, for if Constantinople had fallen to its eastern enemy, there was nothing to prevent a Persian advance into Italy. But already at the time of Heraclius’ death in 641 a new and even more powerful menace had made its appearance: the Moslems from the Arabian desert. By the end of the fourth decade of the seventh century, the Arabs had conquered Syria and were in the process of invading Persia and Egypt. Three decades later they had swept on along the Mediterranean coast and conquered the whole of North Africa.
Thus, within a century of Justinian’s death, the richest and most heavily populated parts of the empire had been lost to the new masters of the Mediterranean world. It is necessary to agree with J. B. Bury’s hard judgment that “if any man can be regarded as responsible for this dismemberment of the eastern empire, it is the great emperor Justinian.” As a result of his religious policies, the East was irrevocably disunited on religious issues. Egypt and Syria were alienated from Constantinople and were disinclined to resist the new invaders, who tolerated their religious beliefs. Furthermore, Justinian had so exhausted the resources of the Byzantine state that his successors did not possess sufficient men and money to maintain the eastern frontier. First the empire had to abandon the Balkans to the Bulgar and Slavs, and then it lost to the Moslems everything else except Constantinople and Asia Minor.
In Italy the reversal of Justinian’s work was not as complete and catastrophic as it was in the East, but it came even more rapidly. Italy had hardly passed under Byzantine administration—in fact, Justinian was only three years in his grave—when a new Germanic people broke across the Danube frontier and invaded northern Italy in 568. These were the Langobardi, or the Lombards, one of the crudest and most primitive of all the Germanic invaders. The Lombards established a domain very different from the kingdom of Theodoric the Ostrogoth.
The Lombards never ruled the whole of Italy. They dominated the country north of Rome, except for the fortress of Ravenna, which remained in Byzantine hands until the middle of the eighth century. Most of the territory south of Rome continued to be ruled by Constantinople, although the Lombards had some outposts in the south as well, and Sicily was conquered by the Moslems in the seventh century. In this way Italy came to be divided among four rulers—the Byzantines, the Lombards, the pope, and the Moslems—and was not to be reunited under one ruler until the latter part of the nineteenth century.
The Lombards organized themselves into two or three large duchies and a few smaller principalities. Like the early Franks, they condemned Roman culture and government, with the result that the Roman administrative and legal systems disintegrated. The Byzantines had not had enough time to make the Justinian code well known in Italy. Roman law survived in its homeland only as the customary law of the native Italian population and was mixed with the miserable hodgepodge of Lombard folk law. In addition to their political and legal decrepitude, the Lombards remained Arians (for the most part) for a century after their conquest of northern Italy and thus were completely out of touch with the church and the papacy. In fact, even in the eighth century the pope looked upon the Lombard dukes as his bitter enemies. Perhaps no Germanic people had so little to offer to European civilization as did the backward Lombards. They contributed to Italian life only their name and their blood; the former affected the political geography of northern Italy, and the latter made the physical makeup of north Italians different from the Mediterranean physiognomy of the southerners. These were meager boons in exchange for Theodoric’s policy of civilitas. Of course, Justinian had not intended to replace the Ostrogothic with Lombard rule in Italy. But as in his policy in regard to the eastern part of his empire, the risks that he took were so great that failure was bound to result in, a worse condition than had existed at the beginning of his reign.
The emperors after Justinian never possessed the strength to attempt the reconstruction of the Roman Empire. Placed on the defensive by the Moslem armies, Byzantium drifted farther and farther away from Europe into a culture of its own. The Justinian code is the last great product of Byzantine letters to be written in Latin. Henceforth the civilization of the eastern Roman Empire consisted of a distinctive blending of Greek, Balkan, and oriental qualities.
Justinian’s failure demonstrated to the men of the West that, as a result of the barbarian invasions, the Roman Empire could not be effectively reunited. Justinian, the greatest Roman emperor since Constantine, was the nemesis of Byzantine power. In the late sixth and seventh centuries Europe turned away from Constantinople, and the European peoples no longer looked to the hard-pressed Byzantine emperors and the essentially alien Byzantine culture for leadership and guidance. Hence, the most important consequence of Justinian’s work for sixth- and seventh-century Europe was to bring to center stage the West’s own men and institutions. The West was thrown back upon its own resources and had to find leadership in its own ranks: the church, led by the papacy and the monastic orders, and the Frankish monarchy. The short-lived alliance between the papacy and the Byzantine emperor had in the end created only a new disaster for Italy. It remained to be seen whether an alliance between the papacy and the Frankish monarchy could be effected with more fortunate consequences.
The expansion of Islam was a decisive factor in medieval history. It divided the Mediterranean world into three civilizations and power blocks: the Byzantine, the European, and the Islamic. One of the major themes in medieval history from the seventh to the twelfth centuries was the relationship and interaction among these three cultural, economic, linguistic, and religious groupings. In various degrees each of these civilizations was an heir of the late Roman Empire. Byzantium exemplifies the most direct continuation of Roman law, administration, and thought. Western Europe also inherited many Roman traditions, and Islam absorbed some aspects of Roman imperial organization and the better part of the philosophy and science of Greece and Rome. However, Islam was also heavily indebted to oriental traditions, particularly those of Persia and Egypt. Oriental culture had also influenced the later Roman Empire, but Islam was the medieval civilization most directly in touch with the eastern heritage.
The triumph of Islam on the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean in the seventh century was the consequence of the final and successful attempt made by Arabic tribes to break into the Mediterranean world. There was nothing novel in an Arabic invasion of Egypt and Syria; there had been periodic invasions of the Fertile Crescent by nomads from the Arabian desert since the second millennium B.C., and the appearance of the Hebrews in Palestine may have been the consequence of one such northward thrust. The organization of the Mediterranean world under Roman rule had, however, put a stop to large-scale Arabic incursion, and the Byzantine empire, until the early seventh century, was successful in blocking the northward migration of the Arabian peoples.
What difference, then, can be seen in this new Arabic invasion that accounts for its success on a great scale? In the first place, the attack on the Mediterranean world came at a time when the two empires that could have blocked the path of migration and conquest were either dead or exhausted. Heraclius I had just destroyed the Persian empire, but Byzantium’s military resources had been fully expended, and the imperial armies were able to offer only token resistance to the Arabs. Furthermore, great masses of the population of Egypt and Syria had been alienated by the religious policy of the orthodox emperor. Not being satisfied with this disaffection, Heraclius had undertaken a large-scale persecution of the Jews, who made up substantial portions of the population of Alexandria, Antioch, and other great eastern cities. Under these circumstances, the Arabic invaders could not but have succeeded, provided that they possessed a modicum of unity and organization.
And for the first time the warlike peoples of the Arabian desert had been united by a common faith and by religious authority. In this way Islam contributed the vital factor that made possible the rapid Arabic conquest of the richest provinces of the eastern Roman Empire. The old myth that the Arabs burst forth with the sword in one hand and the Koran in the other, offering the Mediterranean peoples either conversion or death, has long been discredited. In fact, the Arabs tolerated the religious practices of the Christians and Jews they conquered, only placing a head tax and limitation of political rights on those who would not recognize Mohammed as the Prophet of Allah, and therefore they had a vested interest in not hurrying the conversion of their subjects.
We should also forgo the assumption that Arabia was an impoverished desert. On the contrary, there were several important commercial cities, of which Mecca was the largest and most prosperous, and extensive commerce was carried on with the lands to the east. Great caravan routes stretched across the peninsula, and the picture we build up of Arabia at this time must include areas where urban and agricultural life flourished.
The Prophet was himself a city dweller. Mohammed was a poor member of one of the most prominent families in Mecca, and he made his living as the caravan manager for a wealthy widow many years his senior, whom he subsequently married. We know little about Mohammed that would serve to explain his teachings. He had a substantial acquaintance with Judaism and Christianity, which he picked up in his business relations; he was given to epileptic fits in which he experienced visions and received the word of Allah from the archangel Gabriel that he set down in the Koran; and, unlike Jesus of Nazareth, he was an extremely able political organizer and military leader. In his early career, while he was building up his authority, Mohammed did not refrain from following the principle that the end justifies the means. He relied for early support on Jewish tribes in the neighboring city of Medina, but when he no longer needed them, he turned against them. On one occasion he organized bandit attacks on passing caravans to finance his religious enterprises. Although many legends have been preserved in Arabic literature about the great Prophet, what we know of his personality comes mainly from the meager facts of his biography and Koranic doctrine. These accounts reveal him to have been an austere, devout, strong man with a smattering of learning and a moderate level of intellectual sophistication, and great personal courage.
Mohammed may not have been the most sophisticated and learned of religious thinkers, but no spiritual leader has ever founded a faith which has so rapidly appealed to such an enormous number of people. Of all the great religions of mankind, Islam is most suited to serve as a universal religion. The theology presented in the Koran is simple and easily comprehended. It envisions an omniscient deity who makes severe ethical demands on mankind, but who at the same time promises certain reward of eternal life in return for fulfillment of the divine precepts. The all-powerful and all-knowing Allah is a purely monotheistic deity; the Christian idea of the trinity is as much an anathema to the Moslems as to the Jews. Mohammed brings to mankind the word of God, but Mohammed is only the last and the greatest of the prophets, “the seal of the prophets,” and he is not in any way a partaker of divinity. In the Koranic view Christ, like Abraham, is one of the great prophets who prepared the way for Mohammed, but the Christian theology of the Trinity, with its heavy debt to Platonism, is rejected by Mohammed in favor of pure monotheism.
“Islam” means “submission” to the will of Allah, and Allah demands from His adherents among mankind, if they wish to enjoy the great rewards which He promises, the fulfillment of a stern and puritanical code of conduct. The Moslem is to pray several times a day, and he is to make an attempt to go on a pilgrimage to the fountainhead of the true faith at Mecca at least once in his life. The Koran sets down a long series of regulations on the daily life of the Moslem. The Moslem is to refrain from drinking and gambling, he is not to practice usury in business, and generally he is to deal with his fellow humans according to the highest precepts of justice and mercy. The Moslem is to exercise charity toward his fellow men, and he is to be most generous in assisting the unfortunate and downtrodden of mankind. The Koran emphasizes the value of family life, and while, for the Moslem who can afford it, four wives are allowed, the most rigorous precepts of sexual morality are enjoined upon all members of the Islamic faith. Finally, the Moslem is required to give his life, if necessary, to further and protect the true faith, and for those Moslems who suffer such martyrdom the rewards of eternal life will be the most assured and the greatest. Holy war is one of the pillars of Islam.
The Koranic doctrine presents the most explicit theory of merits among any of the great religions of mankind. Those who follow the word of Allah and who serve God with sincerity and devotion are assured of eternal life and eternal happiness. The agonizing problems raised by the Pauline-Augustinian stream in Christian thought are completely avoided in the Koranic teachings. And even the occasional doubts that creep into Hebraic thinking on the question of merits and reward, such as are found in the Book of Job, are largely absent from Islamic thought. Furthermore, whereas the Hebraic concept of heaven is extremely vague and the Christian concept of heaven is purely ethereal and spiritual, the Koranic picture of heaven is both specific in detail and highly attractive to human desires. In fact, the Moslem is promised a heaven in which he can partake of pleasures denied him in this world; he may drink; gamble; and enjoy the company of beautiful black-eyed maidens, who are mentioned several times in the Koran as rewards promised to the most worthy members of the faith. The Islamic religion, then, is an optimistic one. It conceives of an omnipotent and omniscient God who requires a high and generous level of conduct, and for those who fulfill these precepts it promises the certainty of reward in a heaven that turns out to be a most attractive oasis. It is no mystery why this religion proved to be most popular among the Arab warriors, but its theology is austere enough and its ethic certainly rigorous enough to appeal also to men of the greatest education and sophistication, both in the medieval period and today.
In the eighth and ninth centuries the great majority of the Christian populations who lived along the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean went over to this new faith founded by Mohammed. It was a great blow for Christianity that its oldest and most intensive centers were lost to Islam. Yet, from the point of view of the history of human values, when the high quality of Islamic theology and ethics is taken into account, it cannot be said that a great disaster occurred. It is obvious that the Christians were eager to accept the faith of their conquerors and to free themselves from the civil disabilities that were imposed upon those who remained outside the Islamic faith. But the disabilities were not severe, and it is both sad and strange that the great churches of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and North Africa so quickly collapsed before the attractions of conversion to Islam. It is true that the Christian churches did not entirely disappear and that fragmented Christian groups continue to exist in the Islamic countries to the present day, but two hundred years after the death of the Prophet, the influence and number of the great churches of the eastern and southern Mediterranean had become negligible. And it was not only the orthodox eastern church and the various heretical Greek churches that lost the majority of their followers to Islam; by A.D. 900 the Latin church in North Africa had all but disappeared, and the Spanish Christian church had suffered enormous losses. A Spanish Christian writer of the tenth century tells us that many of his younger contemporaries were converting to Islam not only because of their political ambitions but because of the attractions of Arabic literature and culture.
The effect of the expansion of Islam on the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean may be gauged from the fact that these regions are thought of today as the heartland of Islamic civilization, with attendant distinctive political, economic, and intellectual qualities. Long before Mohammed received the word of Allah from the archangel Gabriel, the intellectual life of the eastern and southern coasts of the Mediterranean was dominated by St. Paul, Philo, Eusebius, and St. Augustine. Yet so complete and irrevocable was the effect of the Arabic expansion and domination that St. Augustine’s North African homeland is thought of as profoundly Moslem and Arabic in language and culture.
The expansion of Islam occurred over exactly one hundred years—from the death of the Prophet in 632 until the battle of Tours in 732, when the Arabic armies penetrating into France suffered a defeat at the hands of the Frankish ruler. Many Arabic tribes became violent and restless after Mohammed’s death, and the caliph, the “successor” of the Prophet, urged them to resume their marauding expeditions toward the Byzantine empire. By 638 Jerusalem had fallen to the Arabic armies, and in the following three decades the armies swept on through Syria and Persia and even reached northern India. Other Arabic armies went into Egypt; conquered Alexandria; and then moved rapidly across the Libyan desert into North Africa, which they easily took from the Byzantine governor. In 711 the Arabic armies, assisted by the fierce Berbers of the North African desert who had rapidly been converted to Islam and Jews who has suffered persecution in the hands of the Spanish church and monarchy, inflicted a complete defeat on the Visigothic king and became masters of Spain. The Christian princes managed to hold out in the Pyrenees until the tenth century, when they began the slow reconquest of the Iberian peninsula from the Moslems, which was not completed until the fifteenth century. Until the twelfth century the Moslem position in Spain was secure, and they were masters of the greater part of the peninsula; until the tenth century, in fact, nothing was heard from the petty Christian lords who barely managed to survive in the mountains.
It may be that the Arabs had now fully expended their resources and that they would not in any case have conquered France, but their defeat at the battle of Tours in 732 put a stop to their further advance to the north, and they remained satisfied with Spain. Meanwhile, in 717 the Arabs made their last great assault on Constantinople before the fifteenth century and were unable to take the great fortress on the Bosporus. The Arabs quickly became masters of the Mediterranean and conquered Sicily and Crete, and they attacked Constantinople from the sea. But the citadel on the Dardanelles was able to withstand the Moslem onslaught in part because of a new weapon that the Byzantines had developed: the so-called Greek fire, a form of incendiary bomb that the Greeks used to inflict great damage on the Moslem fleets. Constantinople thus managed to survive the Arabic attack and thereby saved western Europe from Moslem conquest via the soft underbelly of the European peninsula. Yet, of all its great and wealthy eastern provinces, Byzantium had managed to hold on to only Asia Minor. The harassed emperor was now forced on the defensive, and there was no possibility of the exhausted Byzantine state undertaking a war of reconquest against the Arabs for another two hundred years.
Until the middle of the eighth century, the extensive territory that the Arabs had conquered was under one rule. The caliph made his capital in Damascus and ruled these vast territories and peoples with an autocratic government modeled on the oriental monarchy of Persia. In the eighth century the non-Arabic peoples who had been conquered and had converted to Islam became dissatisfied with their subject position and demanded a share of the government of the vast Arabic empire and equal citizenship with the warrior caste that had come from Arabia. Finally, in the middle of the eighth century the subject peoples revolted against the caliph of the Omayyad dynasty, who ruled from Damascus, and a new dynasty, the Abbasids, who were mainly Persian in background seized the title of caliph and set up a new capital in Baghdad.
The supplanting of the Omayyad by the Abbasid dynasty was a signal for revolt and political decentralization throughout the Islamic world, and by the end of the ninth century, instead of one great Arabic empire, the Islamic world was divided into several states. The rulers of these states continued to respect the caliph as the successor of the Prophet, but the political power in the Islamic world had now fallen into the hands of various despotic princes. Among these princes was the ruler in Spain, where the Omayyad dynasty alone had managed to prevail. The Mediterranean world was now united by the Arabic religion and language, and it formed a great international economic system, but the Arabic civilization was no longer a political entity. From the eighth century the term Arabic identifies a great civilization on the eastern and southern shores of the Mediterranean to which many peoples—Greek, Persian, Syrian, Egyptian, Jewish, and Berber, as well as Arab—contributed.
The caliph’s position as the religious leader of Islam became a purely nominal one. By the end of the ninth century three distinct traditions and groups had emerged within the Moslem religious community, which by and large still prevail. First of all, there was the orthodox position, which had an overwhelming superiority in the size of its following. The orthodox tradition depended strictly on the Koranic revelation; the Traditions of the Prophet, which were additional doctrinal pronouncements attributed to Mohammed; and a vast complex of religious, moral, and social law derived from the Koran and the semicanonical Traditions. The caliph was supposed to be the defender of orthodoxy, but this task was actually assumed by a group of religious teachers whose attitude and professional status closely resembled that of the Talmudic Jewish rabbis, who, indeed, they may have originally emulated. There was actually no overriding central authority in the Moslem religious fellowship; there was no pope in Islam. In each Moslem country the orthodox teachers banded together to proclaim the truths of revelation and religious law, and the extent of their power and influence depended largely on whether they could obtain the support of the state. Until the eleventh century the Arabic princes were frequently much more liberal and secular in their attitudes than were the leaders of orthodoxy, and hence the latter, while they had great influence, generally lacked the power to persecute those who dissented from their doctrines and legal precepts.
The two other traditions in medieval Islamic religion were the messianic and the mystical. The messianic form of Islamic thought involved the belief in a continuing revelation expressed by new prophets who claimed to be descendants of Fatima, the daughter of Mohammed. The supporters of these successor prophets (Shiites) were naturally bitterly opposed by the orthodox Sunnis, who regarded Mohammed as the ultimate prophet. But occasionally, in the Middle East and northern India, messianic leaders succeeded in transforming their theocratic claims into actual political power and thereby provided isolated areas in which the supporters of a continual revelation found refuge.
The mystical tradition in Islam, as in medieval Judaism, was a reaction against the stultifying confines of orthodoxy. The Moslem mystics (Sufists) sought a direct personal relationship with God and an intense religious experience as an escape from the heavy legalism of orthodoxy.
Before the end of the twelfth century, there was a very rich current of secular thought in the Islamic world, which made Arabic scholars of the tenth and eleventh centuries the greatest philosophers and scientists of their age, from whom the Europeans in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries were to derive a considerable part of their knowledge in these fields. The Greek philosophic and scientific writings, including the whole of the Aristotelian corpus, which was unknown in Latin Europe before the twelfth century, were translated into Arabic in eighth-century Syria with the assistance of Greek scholars who belonged to heretical Christian sects. The Aristotelian and other Greek scientific writings moved westward through the Islamic world and reached Spain by the end of the ninth century. Tenth-century Cordoba was famous even in hostile Latin-Christian countries as a center of thriving scholarship and science. A nun, writing in distant Germany in the late tenth century, referred to Cordoba as “a fair ornament” of culture, renowned for its seven streams of knowledge. As late as the twelfth century Arabic medicine was far superior to the western variety, and only the opposition of orthodox religious leaders to dissection prevented the Moslem physicians from achieving the medical discoveries that came in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in western Europe. In the tenth and eleventh centuries mathematics was almost exclusively an Arabic science, as the perpetuation of the terms algebra and Arabic numerals in western languages indicates. The Arabic mathematicians were heavily indebted to Chinese scholarship, but they made many original contributions. In the Arabic world before the twelfth century philosophy and science were in the hands of scholars who made their living in secular professions, such as medicine, education, and government. Religious and intellectual leadership was separate, and intellectual life was dominated by scholars who had little to do with orthodoxy. This situation contributed to the vitality and boldness of Arabic science, although in the long run it made rational inquiry and speculation vulnerable to attack and subversion on doctrinal grounds during the orthodox reaction of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
The Arabic world of the early Middle Ages was renowned not only for intellectual achievements but for its agricultural wealth and commercial prosperity. Compared to the Moslem countries, western Europe appears as an underdeveloped area. The Mediterranean world under Moslem rule at the zenith of its power and prosperity in the early eleventh century resembled the Hellenistic and Roman empires in the size and grandeur of its cities. Medieval Islam in its best days was a commercial economy held together by long-distance trade between great cities.
The favorable economic situation of the Arabic world was, of course, scarcely an Arabic creation. A multitude of ancient populations were involved—Syrian, Egyptian, Persian, North African, as well as Jews and Arabs. The Arabs, however, did have the good sense during the early Middle Ages to preserve the irrigation systems of the Mediterranean countries, which had been in existence since Roman times and even much earlier in many places, and to perpetuate international trade in the Mediterranean, which had hitherto been dominated by Byzantine merchants. The Arabs themselves had originally nothing to contribute to the economic life of the Mediterranean world, but they learned commercial and industrial techniques rapidly from the peoples they conquered. They turned out to be remarkably good sailors; they built large fleets and in the eighth and ninth centuries almost completely controlled the Mediterranean. The Moslem princes provided a sound coinage, which became the medium of exchange for important commercial transactions not only in the Mediterranean world, but in many parts of western Europe as well. After the Latin-speaking peoples stopped producing their own gold coins in the eighth century, they continued to use Arabic gold coins in international trade, and archaeologists have discovered these coins all over western Europe. It must always be remembered, however, in considering Arabic commerce, that the ubiquitous figure of the Arabic merchant in the early medieval world was often only Arabic speaking; ethnically he could be an Egyptian, a Syrian, a Jew, or one of the many other peoples who were brought together under Islamic rule.
The impact of the expansion of Islam on the economy of western Europe has been the subject of enormous controversy among historians. There can be little doubt about the impact of Islam on the political and intellectual development of early medieval Europe; it was negligible in both cases. The impact was negligible not because western Europe had nothing to learn from Islamic civilization; on the contrary, both in government, in which the Arabic countries had absorbed the Roman-Byzantine traditions of bureaucracy, and in philosophy and science, the western Europeans could have benefited greatly from Arabic instruction. But during the early Middle Ages there were no Moslems living under Latin-Christian rule, and, because the western peoples looked upon the Moslems as perverse and pernicious heretics, they closed their eyes to the benefits they could derive from association with the Arabic peoples.
The Latin-Christian peoples deprived themselves of the benefits of Moslem civilization through their self-imposed political and cultural isolation. Only at the end of the tenth century did the hatred that the Christians felt for Mohammed’s teachings begin to take second place to the obvious advantages that could be gained through study at Cordoba. The greatest Latin scholar of the age, the Frenchman Gerbert of Aurillac, who eventually became pope, went to Moslem Spain to study philosophy and mathematics. The education he received from Arabic teachers made him so intellectually superior to his Christian contemporaries that for many centuries Gerbert was regarded as the possessor of mysterious powers of sorcery and black magic. It was not until after 1100 that the iron curtain between Latin Europe and Moslem Spain was effectively breached; the result was the importation of the Aristotelian corpus from Spain and Sicily into western Europe, inaugurating an intellectual revolution.
The economic effects of the expansion of Islam are by no means so clear, and the question of the effect of the emergence of the new power block in the Mediterranean in the seventh and eighth centuries on the economic relations between East and West is still debated. This controversy was the result of the last work of the influential Belgian economic historian, Henri Pirenne, entitled Mohammed and Charlemagne and published posthumously in 1936. Pirenne was a rarity—an able and learned scholar who was also an original thinker and the master of a vivacious and persuasive literary style.
What was Pirenne’s thesis? Briefly, it was that the expansion of Islam brought about the economic disintegration of the Mediterranean world. The advance of Islam produced the final separation of East from West and the end of the Mediterranean unity that, Pirenne claimed, had continued to exist all through the period of the Germanic invasions. Africa and Spain, which had always been part of the Latin world, belonged henceforth to a culture centered in Baghdad. “The western Mediterranean became a Moslem lake; the west was blockaded and forced to live upon its own resources. For the first time in history, the axis of life shifted northward from the Mediterranean.” Cut off from Mediterranean life, western Europe reverted to a natural (that is, rural) economy and developed the new institutions of the feudal state and manorial society. The attractions of this clear, incisive, and cosmic thesis are obvious, and Pirenne was able to advance it with a considerable show of evidence. But several scholars writing after 1950 contended that the Mohammed and Charlemagne thesis is a gross exaggeration and oversimplification of the course of early medieval civilization.
Two distinct aspects of Pirenne’s thesis must be sustained if his interpretation is to remain valid: first, that the Germanic invasions were not a turning point in economic history and second, that the expansion of Islam was the cataclysmic turning point.
Pirenne contended that in spite of the Germanic invasions, the economic unity of the Mediterranean world was preserved in the fifth and sixth centuries and Merovingian France remained part of Mediterranean civilization. This view depends on a misreading, intentional or otherwise, of the picture of Merovingian society provided by Gregory of Tours. According to Gregory, there had not been a complete break with Mediterranean trade and culture, but there had been a marked decline of Mediterranean influence. In the economy of sixth-century Gaul trade and monetary transactions were not important; Merovingian France was dependent to a large degree on landed wealth alone. The cities depicted in Gregory of Tours’ history were political and episcopal centers, not commercial centers. The Roman curiales class had disappeared; the trade with the eastern countries was carried on by easterners—Syrians and Jews. Merovingian France, compared with Byzantium, was already an underdeveloped area in which agriculture was the basis of the economy and in which commerce was of little importance. This picture of the Merovingian economy, furthermore, has been substantiated by archaeological evidence. Obviously then, the economic decline of France and the disintegration of the economic unity of the Mediterranean world were well under way before Mohammed.
This is not to say that the Germanic invasions were a sudden catastrophe that alone produced this economic decline. The economic unity of the Mediterranean, and with it the volume of international trade, was declining from the end of the second century. Although it is still not completely certain to what degree the Germanic invasions marked a sharp turn in economic history, it definitely appears that “the meeting of German primitivism with Roman decrepitude,” as Robert Lopez described it, markedly accelerated the economic disintegration of the Mediterranean world, whose first symptoms were evident as far back as the second half of the second century A.D.
Toward the end of the sixth century there was a partial restoration of international trade in the Mediterranean under Byzantine auspices. The Syrian merchants in Gregory of Tours’ time are evidence of this fact. By the middle of the seventh century there is evidence of a partial restoration of the tin trade between England and the eastern Mediterranean. There is also fragmentary evidence that Ireland and the Baltic countries, which had never been touched by Roman civilization, were now drawn into the nexus of Mediterranean trade.
The second part of Pirenne’s Mohammed and Charlemagne thesis now remains to be examined: To what extent did the Moslem expansion terminate this partial revival of east-west trade? Pirenne argued that the Moslems and Christians hated each other, and since Moslem sea power dominated the Mediterranean in the eighth and ninth centuries, the continued economic relations between western Europe and the Mediterranean became, a priori, impossible. He pointed to the moving of centers of European life to northern France and the Rhine valley, the decline of the Mediterranean French ports, and the increasing tendency to a purely rural economy in eighth-century France and concluded that they must have been due to a breakdown of east-west trade as a result of the Arab advance. He also offered some specific and empirical evidence for his thesis. In the late seventh century the western church stopped using Palestinian wine in the Eucharist and published its documents on parchment, no longer on paper imported from Egypt.
Perhaps for half a century or a little longer east-west trade was almost completely cut off, but certainly from the middle of the ninth century there is ample evidence of a continued trade between western Europe and the Islamic countries. The staple western exports to the Islamic countries consisted of slaves, furs, metal products, and timber. In return, the Moslem merchants offered oriental luxury goods to make the harsh life of the European nobility a little more comfortable. It seems strange that Pirenne, who was a great authority on medieval commerce, completely overlooked the significance of the thriving slave trade between western Europe and the Mediterranean countries. Jewish merchants initially played an important part in this exchange, and by 900 the Venetians and other Italian merchants had suppressed their religious zeal sufficiently to become the middlemen of east-west commerce. Certainly at all times in the early Middle Ages Mediterranean trade was hampered by Arabic pirates, and this situation made international commerce a risky business and kept the cost of transportation high. But the European merchant got a high return on whatever goods did not fall prey to piracy or shipwreck, and since the goods involved were luxury items and raw materials intended to satisfy the tastes of the ruling classes and were not for mass consumption, the necessarily inflated cost to the buyer was not a prohibitive factor.
It may be conceded that the expansion of Islam encouraged the commercial disintegration of the Mediterranean world and that it was a factor in the progressive ruralization of the European economy and the transference of the centers of European life to northern France and the Rhine valley. But the actual cutting off of Europe from Mediterranean trade was only momentary, if it ever occurred. The expansion of Islam represents but one stage in an economic process of autarky and deurbanization that had been going on since the end of the second century A.D. The civil wars of the third century, the Germanic invasions, and finally the Arabic military triumph were the events that accelerated the process and helped to produce the feudal and manorial world of the ninth century. Pirenne contributed greatly to our understanding of medieval history by calling attention to the economic consequences of Islam, but he exaggerated its cataclysmic significance and underrated the impact of the Germanic invasions. Mohammed did not determine the world of Charlemagne, as Pirenne believed; the institutions of eighth- and ninth-century Europe would not have been substantially different had the expansion of Islam never taken place. Nothing is more fundamental in early medieval history than the self-sufficiency of western Europe after Justinian failed to reconstitute the Roman Empire and the working out in isolation of the destiny of western civilization, with its own institutions and its own leadership.