Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (17 page)

The quality and sheer technical competence of Hiberno-Saxon art is perhaps best illustrated by the comments of art historian J. O. Westwood: “I have examined, with a magnifying glass, the pages of the Gospels of Lindisfarne and the Book of Kells, for hours together without ever detecting a false line or an irregular interlacement; and when it is considered that many of these details consist of spiral lines, and are so minute as to be impossible to have been executed with a pair of compasses, it really seems a problem not only with what eyes, but also with what instruments, they could have been executed. One instance of the minuteness of these details will suffice to give an idea of this peculiarity. I have counted in a small space, measuring scarcely three-quarters of an inch in width, in the Book of Armagh, not fewer than one hundred and fifty-eight interlacements of a slender ribbon-pattern, formed of white lines edged by black ones upon a black ground.

No wonder that an artist of Dublin, lately applied to by Mr Chambers to copy one of the pages of the book of Kells, excused himself from the labour on the grounds that it was a tradition that the lines had been traced by angels.”
[19]

Art historian Kenneth Clark remarked on the fact that the technical excellence of the work evinced in the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels was never equaled. They are, he said, “almost the richest and most complicated pieces of abstract decoration ever produced,” and are “more sophisticated and refined than anything in Islamic art.”
[20]
This in spite of the fact that among the Muslims (owing to the ban on representational art), calligraphy became the primary outlet of artistic expression.

[1]
Wells, op cit., p. 109

[2]
Ibid., pp. 109-10

[3]
Ibid., pp. 111-12

[4]
Ibid., p. 112

[5]
Or at least good-quality pottery, though even the poor-quality material is in short supply. See eg. Ward-Perkins, op cit, pp. 104-8 and 123

[6]
A thorough overview of the archaeological evidence is provided in Robin Fleming’s excellent
Britain after Rome: The Fall and Rise, 400-1070
(Allen Lane, 2010)

[7]
Wells, op cit., p. 116

[8]
Ibid., p. 154

[9]
Ibid.

[10]
Frank Stenton,
Anglo-Saxon England
(3rd ed., Oxford, 1973), p. 52

[11]
Ibid.

[12]
Ibid., p. 111

[13]
The single exception is said to be Saint Wystan’s church at Repton in Derbyshire, which contains a small crypt, dated from the mid-eight century, and chancel walls, supposedly dating from the ninth century.

[14]
Nancy Edwards,
The Archaeology of Early Medieval Ireland
(B. T. Batsford Ltd., London, 1996), pp. 68-71. Prior to the fifth and sixth centuries, the number of identifiably Roman artefacts is “remarkably small.” Ibid., p. 1

[15]
Cited from Nancy Edwards, Ibid., p. 122

[16]
Ibid., p. 258

[17]
Ibid.

[18]
See www.irish-society.org/Hedgemaster%20Archives/book_of_Kells.htm

[19]
Westwood, quoted in Thompson and Johnson, op cit., pp. 212-3

[20]
Kenneth Clark,
Civilisation
(BBC publication, London, 1969), p. 11

P
erhaps owing to the fact that the Islamic Emirate founded in Spain in the eighth century has captured the imagination of so many writers in the English-speaking world, Visigothic Spain has tended to be eclipsed in terms of academic attention. Even worse, many of those who speak and write of the Visigothic epoch do so only as a preliminary to a discussion of the Islamic period, and works promoting the old and clichéd view of the “barbarian” Visigoths continue to appear with depressing regularity. Oblivious to the discoveries of archaeology, these insist that Visigothic Spain was a declining and generally disintegrating society. Recent examples of the genre (and it is an enormous one) are Thomas F. Glick’s
Islamic and Christian Spain in the Early Middle Ages
(originally published by Princeton University in 1979, but republished by Brill Publishers in 2005) and David Levering Lewis’s
God’s Crucible: Islam and the Making of Europe, 570 – 1215
(New York, W. W. Norton and Company, 2008). Both these authors present what they purport to be an examination of the Visigothic state prior to the Islamic conquest. They each endeavor to portray a divided and stratified society that was already in an advanced state of decay before the arrival of the Muslims. They admit that the ruling Visigoths formed a relatively small proportion of the population – perhaps a quarter of a million Visigoths as against about six to eight million Hispano-Romans. This we might imagine would imply that the economy should have continued more or less as it had been before the Visigothic conquest. Yet Glick and Lewis will have none of this. They argue that the country was an economic ruin when the Arabs arrived; though they demure in identifying the cause of this ruin, save from hinting darkly that natural disaster may have had a role to play. In Glick’s words:

“The Hispano-Romans followed the general pattern of Mediterranean agriculture: cereal grains (wheat and barley), grapes, and vegetables grown in irrigated fields in the Ebro Valley and the Eastern littoral. What is clear is that the entire economy was in a state of profound disarray and agriculture was ruined as result of a series of natural disasters beginning in the seventh century. Perhaps we can accept at the root of this string of bad harvests, famine, and plague Ignacio Olagüe’s theory of a general climatic shift in the western Mediterranean world, beginning in the third century A.D., which had the result of making the climate drier and hotter and which reached crisis proportions in the high middle ages, forcing a greater dependence on irrigation agriculture in North Africa and Spain. Medieval chronicles noted famine and plague in the reign of Erwig (680-686), when half the population was said to have perished. Plagues of locusts were reported. There can be no doubt that the constant political turmoil of late-seventh- and early-eighth-century Spain takes on more poignant meaning if set against a background of worsening harvests, prolonged drought, famine, and depopulation. Moreover, it makes more intelligible the shift in the balance of peninsular agriculture, away from dry-farming and herding, towards an increased reliance on irrigated crops, during the Islamic period. Islamic society in Spain was able to adjust to an arid ecology by directing the flow of economic resources into the technological adjustments required to increase irrigated acreage, whereas the Visigoths understood only a herding, forest ecology and could not adjust to any other.”
[1]

Amidst all the wordiness here the only evidence proffered for a climate shift are the medieval chronicles which “noted famine and plague in the reign of Erwig.” But medieval chronicles noted famine and plague all the time, and their reliability is now regarded as suspect, to say the least. This is very poor grounds for such a sweeping statement about a national economy during a period of over two centuries. Note also the claim that the entire climate of North Africa became drier in the seventh and eighth centuries, thereby exonerating the Arabs from any responsibility for the desertification of these once-prosperous regions. Yet the loss of North Africa’s agricultural base is intimately tied with the arrival in the region of the Arabs, as we shall see in this and subsequent chapters.

Glick’s pronouncements on Spain’s urban economy in the Visigothic period are of a type with those on agriculture. He tells us that, “Visigothic trade was largely in the hands of Jews, who formed a numerous minority, and foreigners.” This, he claims, could have had repercussions: “When economic recession set in, Jews were blamed and a regressive cycle of restrictive anti-Jewish legislation could only have led to more disruptions of trade.”
[2]
We here note the phrase “could only have.” And this, essentially, says it all. The author is clutching at straws, endeavoring to paint a picture of a decayed and degenerate civilization, already in the clutches of its own Dark Age before the arrival of the Muslims. “The barbarian invasions [of the Visigoths],” he claims, “were further responsible for the physical ruin of much of the urban plant built by the Romans,” and “Archaeological evidence demonstrates that when the Muslim invaders arrived in 711 many Hispano-Roman cities were already largely buried in subsoil.”

This latter is a reference to a layer of subsoil which in fact covers virtually all late classical settlements in the Mediterranean, from Syria to Spain and Morocco, though Glick is apparently unaware of this. We shall deal with this stratum in due course, for it is extremely important in attempting to understand the fate of Graeco-Roman civilization. But before proceeding we should note that the reference Glick provides is a Spanish one, Leopoldo Torres Balbás, who however does not blame the Visigoths for the feature: all he says is that the deposit generally marks the end of the Roman period. Yet Visigothic civilization, by any reckoning, was “Roman” in its essential features; so it is evident that the clay stratum in question cannot be used as proof that the Visigoths destroyed the Roman cities.
[3]
In fact, the latest archaeological consensus, as we shall shortly see, is that the Hispano-Roman cities thrived under the Visigoths. It was only after the Arab conquest that urban life disintegrated.

The impression of bad faith on the part of the author is reinforced by his pronouncements on almost every topic. Take for example his comments on mining and metallurgy under the Visigoths:

“The economic regressiveness of Visigothic Spain is well illustrated by the failure of the Goths to carry on the vast mining enterprise begun by the Romans, who removed from Iberian pits a wide variety of metals, including silver, gold, iron, lead, copper, tin, and cinnabar, from which mercury is made. The relative insignificance of mining in Visigothic Spain is attested to by the winnowing of the full account given by Pliny to the meager details supplied by Isidore of Seville, who omits any mention, for example, of iron deposits in Cantabria. The most important Roman mines have lost their Latin names, generally yielding to Arabic ones – as in Almadén and Aljustrel – probably an indication of their quiescence during the Visigothic period and their revival by the Muslims. The Goths may have allowed their nomadic foraging instinct to direct their utilization of metal resources. In some areas mined by the Romans they probably scavenged for residual products of abandoned shafts that remained unworked, and metal for new coinage seems largely to have been provided by booty captured from enemies or from older coins fleeced from taxpayers.”

Take note: The only evidence Glick has that mining declined under the Visigoths is the “meagre details supplied by Isidore of Seville” and the fact that the most important Roman-age mines in Spain are now known by Arabic names. This hardly constitutes convincing evidence upon which to make such a sweeping statement; and it stands in stark contrast to the vast wealth, in gold, silver and precious stones, that the Arabs themselves claimed to have carried off from Spain.

Glick’s portrayal of the Visigoths as nomadic pastoralists verges on the comic, given the fact that they had left their nomad existence behind two centuries earlier and had adapted so completely to the Roman style of life (remember they never constituted more than a tiny minority of the Spanish population) that they left not a single Germanic word in the Spanish language. The Arab chroniclers who described the conquest of Spain remarked repeatedly on the effeminacy of the Visigoths. Not, we might feel, the most attractive of characteristics, but one that is hardly typical of nomadic warriors. Glick goes on:

“Thus the failure of the Visigothic state, seen in its unbalanced economy, as well as in its disjointed and incohesive social organization, was also reflected in its technological atony, which was at the core of the elite’s inability to adapt to any ecology other than that with which it was originally familiar: the men of the woods never strayed too far from there. They were unable to build on the Roman base. In 483 the duke Salla repaired the Roman bridge at Mérida; yet in 711 the Arabs found the bridge at Córdoba in ruins …”
[4]

On this last point, it seems never to have occurred to Glick that the Visigoths themselves destroyed the bridge to prevent the further advance of the Arab armies. This is a basic rule of warfare. Yet the comment is typical of Glick and adds further ammunition to the idea that he is pursuing an ideological agenda, and has little interest in facts. Unable to find any evidence of a decaying urban environment either in the written sources or in the archaeology, Glick clutches at straws. For the facts, as disclosed both by archaeology and contemporary written sources, as we shall now see, speak of Visigothic Spain as a prosperous and largely urban late classical civilization.

Fig. 15. View of Reccopolis, one of at least four great cities founded by the Visigoths during the sixth and seventh centuries.

It is well known that, unlike Gaul, Spain was a relatively urbanized and sophisticated society under Imperial Rome. Along with Italy and North Africa, the Iberian Peninsula had been one of the mainstays of Graeco-Roman civilization. What then happened under the Visigoths: Did it retain its pre-eminence? Written evidence certainly gives the impression of life continuing more or less as normal. One of the most important sources, the
Vitas Patrum Emeritensium
, or Lives of the Fathers of Merida, apparently written in the seventh century, provides a vivid description of everyday existence in the city of Merida, the provincial capital and seat of the metropolitan bishop of Lusitania in the sixth century. “The impression created by the Lives of the Fathers of Merida,” we are told, “is that of a city [and a society] still enjoying a period of some prosperity in the sixth century …”
[5]
Even the Arab invaders, who arrived in Spain several decades later, were impressed by the size and opulence of the cities. Their annalists recall the appearance at the time of Seville, Cordoba, Merida and Toledo; “the four capitals of Spain, founded,” they tell us naively, “by Okteban [Octavian] the Caesar.” Seville, above all, seems to have struck them by its wealth and its illustriousness in various ways. “It was,” writes Ibn Adhari,

“among all the capitals of Spain the greatest, the most important, the best built and the richest in ancient monuments. Before its conquest by the Goths it had been the residence of the Roman governor. The Gothic kings chose Toledo for their residence; but Seville remained the seat of the Roman adepts of sacred and profane science, and it was there that lived the nobility of the same origin.”
[6]

This can hardly be described as the picture of a society in the middle of a Dark Age! Another Arab writer, Merida, praises Seville’s great bridge as well as “magnificent palaces and churches.”
[7]

The Iberian Peninsula has been much excavated over the past half century, and what has been found fully confirms the literary testimony. Archaeologists have uncovered a “wealth” of architectural remains, which “seem to confirm” the impression created by the written sources.
[8]
We are told that, “Continuity from classical antiquity into the sixth century is strikingly recorded at Merida” and various other places, and that “in Visigothic Spain elements of physical continuity with antiquity were greater than is often appreciated.”
[9]
We hear, for example, that “the very distinctive style of sculpture of the sixth and seventh centuries, which seems to have spread to other parts of western Baetica and southern Lusitania, appears to owe something to the conscious imitation of the models of the earlier Roman past … as well as to the influence of contemporary Byzantium.”
[10]
“Recent excavation,” we hear, “has shown that the urban centre of Merida did remain in use in the Visigothic period and that, unlike some of the former towns of Roman Britain, it did not become a deserted or semi-rustic area. The principal change lay in the way Christian buildings replaced the former secular public ones in the city centre. Traces of what appears to be a substantial civic basilica, now obscurely described as a triumphal arch, survive beside the site of the early Roman forum. Adjacent to this structure was the Church of St Mary, the Baptistery of St John and the bishop’s palace. At least one other church was built across on the other side of the forum in the sixth century.”
[11]