Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (11 page)

[1]
R. Hodges and D. Whitehouse.
Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe
, (London, 1982) p. 26

[2]
M. J. Fulford, “Carthage: overseas trade and the political economy, c. AD. 400-700,”
Reading Medieval Studies
6 (1980), 68-80; J. A. Riley, “The pottery from the cisterns 1977. 1, 1977.2 and 1977.3,” in J. H. Humphrey (ed.),
Excavations at Carthage 1977 Conducted by the University of Michigan
, (Ann Arbor, 1981), pp. 85-124

[3]
R. Hodges and D. Whitehouse,
Mohammed, Charlemagne, and the Origins of Europe
(London, 1982), p. 28

[4]
Ibid., p. 28

[5]
Ibid.

[6]
Ibid., p. 30

[7]
Yet even Hodges and Whitehouse could scarcely deny that magnificent churches continued to be erected in Italy well into the seventh century; though they cease after about 630 or 640.

[8]
Ibid., p. 31

[9]
Ibid., pp. 31-2

[10]
See Catherine Delano Smith, Derek Gadd, Nigel Mills and Bryan Ward-Perkins, “Luni and the ‘Ager Lunensis’: the Rise and Fall of a Roman Town and its Territory,”
Papers of the British School at Rome,
Vol. 54 (1986), 81-148

[11]
Hodges and Whitehouse, op cit, p. 32

[12]
Ibid

[13]
Ibid., p. 40

[14]
Ibid.

[15]
Ibid., p. 42

[16]
Ibid.

[17]
Ibid., pp. 169-70

A
t first glance, the evidence presented by Hodges and Whitehouse from Carthage and central Italy appears impressive. Excavations in both areas seem to have uncovered a terminal decline in economic activity and even in population during the fifth and sixth centuries. Yet a closer look reveals deep flaws in the authors’ thinking.

Let’s look first of all at Carthage.

According to Hodges and Whitehouse, Carthage was in a pitiable state by the beginning of the seventh century. They quote Henry Hurst, who noted that, “late burials occur commonly within the former area of Carthage, as in other sites of Byzantine Africa, and are conventionally interpreted as representing a late stage of decline, economically and in terms of population, when large areas of the city were redundant and the traditional regulations requiring burial areas to be outside the city walls were relaxed.”
[1]
Hurst here does not specifically date this degraded epoch before the Islamic invasion, but Hodges and Whitehouse nonetheless strive to portray it as such by their comment: “A further building over this graveyard has been interpreted as the home of refugees from the Arabs, who arrived in the province in 695-8. By then, the city was only a shadow of its former self and must have resembled the decaying industrial towns with which, today, we in the West are beginning to become familiar.”
[2]

It is striking that Hodges and Whitehouse produce no evidence to support their contention that the decaying city uncovered by Hurst, the last phase of the settlement, was a pre-Islamic city. In fact, evidence to be examined below would strongly suggest that this declining and crumbling Carthage was all that remained of the once-brilliant metropolis in the immediate aftermath of the Islamic conquest.

The proposition that the classical economy and Mediterranean trade terminated around 600 – the idea upon which Hodges and Whitehouse’s thesis ultimately stands or falls – presents a glaring problem: What caused this termination? Pirenne at least proposed a mechanism – Muslim fleets of raiders and pirates – by which economic activity could have been interdicted. Hodges and Whitehouse offer no such mechanism. What happened around the year 600 to cause such a collapse? Since deep antiquity western Europe had maintained economic relations with the eastern Mediterranean. Spanish and British tin, as well as bronze from central Europe and amber from the Baltic, have been found in the tombs of the pharaohs and the cities of the Assyrians. Even the most corrupt and decrepit political institutions will presumably allow some kind of economic activity – if only out of self-interest. Was there nothing in western Europe after 600 that the peoples of the Levant required; and was there nothing that the Levant could supply that the wealthy classes who ruled Spain, Gaul, Britain and Italy would want? Such a scenario strikes one a profoundly improbable; yet this is precisely what is proposed by Hodges and Whitehouse.

The only attempt at explanation comes on page 53, where they suggest that Europe in the sixth century may have had a parallel in sixteenth century South America, “where the conquistadors not only slaughtered on a massive scale, but also destroyed the traditional social and economic systems.” The result of this, they say, “was indeed generalised demographic collapse.” “In the Mediterranean,” they continue, “the structure of Roman society and its economy were undermined, and its wealth was absorbed by two centuries of intermittent warfare.”

This hardly constitutes an explanation of anything. The very point of Pirenne’s study was to show that the structure of Roman society and its economy were not undermined at all in the fifth and sixth centuries; and the survival of undefended Roman villas into the late sixth century suggests that he was absolutely right. As regards the two centuries of intermittent warfare in the fifth and sixth centuries, these were hardly unusual. Rome had arguably been involved in far more destructive internecine wars during the first and second centuries BC and the second and third centuries AD. Yet these had not caused the collapse of Roman civilization.

If we return to the question of Carthage, we detect striking flaws in Hodges’ and Whitehouse’s methodology and conclusions. They emphasize, for instance, the decline in the occurrence of foreign amphorae and coins in the decades after Justinian’s reconquest of the city. Yet this does not necessarily imply a dying society. After all, the authors themselves admit that between circa 400 and 425 only about 10 percent of amphorae found at the city were of eastern origin: Which means, essentially, that by the last decades of the sixth century the situation had reverted to what it was in the first decades of the fifth. Furthermore, the excavator himself, Fulford, did not see in this evidence of a terminal decline. He suggests that “once the province was released from its obligation to Rome [after 425 under the Vandals], it was possible to sustain a lively trading relationship with various parts of the Mediterranean. … However, once Justinian reconquered the city and it was again burdened with taxes, commercial life diminished and the corn sold for private luxuries under the Vandals was requisitioned to meet the needs of the state.”
[3]

In other words, this was an economic recession, not a collapse of civilization.

Even more serious, however, is Hodges’ and Whitehouse’s failure to spell out the criteria by which the coins and amphorae were dated. Their statement is simply that virtually all eastern coins and amphorae disappear from Carthage by “about 600.” The operative term here is “about,” and I would suggest that with this word the authors are committing an act of legerdemain on their readers. Everyone agrees that Carthage continued to function as a Roman-style city until its conquest by the Arabs in 698. Presumably then from 533, when Justinian brought the region back under imperial control, until 698, the metropolis continued to use amphorae and imperial coinage. If the “dramatic decline” in eastern coins and amphorae covers all the years from 533 to 698, rather than 533 to 600, as Hodges and Whitehouse strive to imply, then all becomes clear. The Persian conquest of Syria in 614 and Egypt in 619 (plus devastation of Asia Minor in the years between) severely disrupted commerce throughout the whole Levant from that time onwards. The coins of Heraclius, the Emperor of the time, are regularly found in great hoards; and the latest of these, dating from 619 or 620, are virtually the last Byzantine coins found anywhere in the Near East for another three hundred years.
[4]
This being the case, it is clear that if the total tally of coins and amphorae takes in all the years between 533 and 698, then we should not be surprised to find a “dramatic” decline. The more years that are added after the real point of disappearance, namely 619 or 620, then the lower the average number of foreign amphorae and coins there will be.

If we combine Hurst’s explanation for the decline in the years between 533 and 620, with the knowledge that imperial commerce virtually disappears after the violent events of the latter year, then all is explained. There was no “gradual decay” of classical civilization at Carthage; there was a sudden and dramatic disruption, a disruption caused by violent events further to the east.
[5]

Fig. 2: Interior of Sant’ Apollinare, Ravenna, mid-sixth century

Concomitant with the claim that trade between the western Mediterranean and the east ended around 600, Hodges and Whitehouse, we have seen, argued that the population of western Europe and the western Mediterranean had been falling dramatically since the third century – a process that continued into the sixth and early seventh centuries. They admitted to a brief economic (and perhaps population) recovery in the West during the late fifth and early sixth centuries, but asserted that by the mid-sixth century this had come to an end, and all western societies went into terminal decline.

The demographic question is fundamental to understanding Hodges’ and Whitehouse’s thinking. That there was a serious problem, one that can be traced back to the second or perhaps even the first century, is beyond question. As we saw earlier, the Romans themselves were well aware of this issue, and the population decline has been confirmed, in the western provinces at least, by the evidence of archaeology, which shows shrinking cities and a cessation of new building, from the late second century onwards. We have seen too how Constantine’s legalizing and fostering of the Christian faith may have had, as one of its goals, the amelioration of the birth-rate problem. None of this is denied. The crucial question is this: Did the decline which commenced in the second or third century continue into the fifth and sixth; and did Christianity and the Christianization of the Empire fail to halt it? According to Hodges and Whitehouse, the answer is, Yes. We have seen how, using evidence primarily from central Italy (Spain, as we have seen, is ignored, and Gaul as well as Britain are barely mentioned), the authors claimed to find grounds for believing that the population of the western provinces had declined by perhaps 80% between the middle of the third and the end of the sixth centuries. If true, such a circumstance would certainly confirm the authors’ conviction that classical civilization was terminally ill and hardly needed to be killed off by the Arabs. But an assertion of such sweeping implications needs abundant proofs, whereas the authors’ argument is in fact based on little more than the evidence from Italy, particularly from the Roman Campagna, alluded to in the previous chapter. Archaeologists, we recall, found a sharp decline in the occurrence of the high quality imported pottery known as African Red Slip Ware from the third to seventh centuries. The decline began around 200, was fairly precipitous after 350, and by 600 only a few sites contained the expensive ceramics.

Hodges and Whitehouse considered the various alternatives as to what this might mean, but came down in favor of the idea that it indicated a dramatic fall in population as a whole. And from this they extrapolated that the whole of western Europe and North Africa was involved in a similar process. They admitted, in passing, that a great many other academics had considered this question and addressed it at length; and that almost invariably they had rejected the notion of a demographic collapse taking in the whole of western Europe. Of these only two names are mentioned: C. R. Whittaker and C. J. Wickham. Hodges and Whitehouse make no attempt to explain Whittaker’s and Wickham’s thinking, though they quote Wickham’s statement that “generalised demographic collapse is a difficult enough process to imagine, let alone … locate in the evidence,” as well as his claim that “historical sources … in the eighth century, primarily the
Liber Ponteficalis
, give no impression that the countryside had been abandoned.”
[6]
From this, Hodges and Whitehouse give the impression that Whittaker’s and Wickham’s rejection of the idea of population collapse was based solely on a reading of early medieval documents. But this was far from being case. In fact, both Whittaker and Wickham considered the archaeological evidence from Italy in detail, and they duly noted the decline in African Red Slip Ware between the fourth and sixth centuries. However, they also (unlike Hodges and Whitehouse) considered the political history of Rome between the third and sixth centuries; and, having done so, concluded that the occurrence of luxury items in villas surrounding Rome concurs precisely with what we know of the Eternal City’s fortunes during this epoch. They emphasized that between the fourth and sixth centuries the balance of power in the Roman Empire shifted decisively to the East, with the founding of Constantinople in 324. By the beginning of the fifth century, Rome was no longer even the capital of the Western Empire, her place having been taken by Ravenna. The city was then sacked twice in the same century; in 410 by Alaric and his Visigoths, and in 455 by Genseric (or Geiseric) and his Vandals. With the abolition of the Western Empire in 476 the prestige of the city suffered further, and after the invasion of Italy by the Lombards in 568, Rome seems to have been reduced to little more than an average-sized provincial town.

The country villas around Rome which imported luxuries like Red Slip Ware in the second and third centuries were owned by members of the Roman aristocracy. With the precipitate decline of that aristocracy, along with Rome’s fortunes (and population), in the fourth to sixth centuries, we would expect, said Whittaker and Wickham, nothing else than a dramatic drop in the wealth of the settlements around the city. And that is precisely what we do find. It is important to remember that Rome, unlike other great cities of antiquity such as Alexandria and Constantinople, did not occupy a position that would naturally have guaranteed her wealth and prosperity. She stood at no trading crossroads; she owed her vast wealth and population to her military prowess and to her political importance. With the decline of these, her population would naturally have dwindled.

We should note at this point that, from at least the first century, Rome’s population was inflated by hundreds of thousands of economically inactive persons. Aside from the aristocrats themselves, there were armies of bureaucrats and courtiers surrounding the Emperor, huge numbers of soldiers, and a vast host of unemployed plebeians, who had to be supported by a social security system, which the Romans named the “dole.” This vast unproductive population could only be maintained by the importation into the city, on an annual basis, of enormous quantities of grain and other foodstuffs from Egypt and North Africa. Clearly Rome, at the height of the Empire, housed a population that was far and away in excess of anything that could be maintained by normal systems of trade and agriculture. With the decline of the city as a political power, the great majority of this population would naturally have disappeared.