Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (22 page)

It was the Persian war then, in the reign of Heraclius, which began the economic destruction of the Eastern Empire. In the words of Clive Foss, whom Hodges and Whitehouse quote: “The Persian war may … be seen as the first stage in the process which marked the end of Antiquity in Asia Minor. The Arabs continued the work.”
[12]

It was thus from the 620s that the great cities of the East, particularly in Asia Minor and Syria, fall into ruin. In the years after that date, to quote Clive Foss again: “Almost all the cities [of Asia Minor] suffered a substantial decline; Smyrna alone may have formed an exception. In some instances, the reduction was drastic. Sardis, Pergamum, Miletus, Priene and Magnesia became small fortresses; Colossae disappeared, to be replaced by a fort high above the ancient site. … The cities reached their lowest point in the seventh and eighth centuries … urban life, upon which the classical Mediterranean culture had been based, was virtually at an end; one of the richest lands of classical civilisation was now dominated by villages and fortresses.”
[13]

Thus the words of Clive Foss. Cyril Mango, one of the most important contemporary authorities on Byzantine civilization, is much more forthright: “One can hardly overestimate the catastrophic break that occurred in the seventh century. Anyone who reads the narrative of events will not fail to be struck by the calamities that befell the Empire, starting with the Persian invasion at the very beginning of the century and going on to the Arab expansion some thirty years later – a series of reverses that deprived the Empire of some of its most prosperous provinces, namely, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and, later, North Africa – and so reduced it to less than half its former size both in area and in population. But a reading of the narrative sources gives only a faint idea of the profound transformation that accompanied these events. … It marked for the Byzantine lands the end of a way of life – the urban civilization of Antiquity – and the beginning of a very different and distinctly medieval world.”
[14]
Like Foss, Mango remarked on the virtual abandonment of the Byzantine cities after the mid-seventh century, and the archaeology of these settlements usually reveals “a dramatic rupture in the seventh century, sometimes in the form of virtual abandonment.”
[15]
With the cities and with the papyrus supply from Egypt went the intellectual class, who after the seventh century were reduced to a “small clique.”
[16]
The evidence, as Mango sees it, is unmistakable: the “catastrophe” (as he names it) of the seventh century, “is the central event of Byzantine history.”
[17]

The “dramatic rupture” of the seventh century is therefore not simply another chapter of the Eastern Empire’s past; it is the central event of her history.

Constantinople herself, the mighty million-strong capital of the East, was reduced, by the middle of the eighth century, to something resembling a ghost town. Mango quotes a document of the period which evokes a picture of “abandonment and ruination. Time and again we are told that various monuments – statues, palaces, baths – had once existed but were destroyed. What is more, the remaining monuments, many of which must have dated from the fourth and fifth centuries, were no longer understood for what they were. They had acquired a magical and generally ominous connotation.”
[18]

So great was the destruction that even bronze coinage, the everyday lubricant of commercial life, disappeared. According to Mango, “In sites that have been systematically excavated, such as Athens, Corinth, Sardis and others, it has been ascertained that bronze coinage, the small change used for everyday transactions, was plentiful throughout the sixth century and (depending on local circumstances) until some time in the seventh, after which it almost disappeared, then showed a slight increase in the ninth, and did not become abundant again until the latter part of the tenth.”
[19]
Yet even the statement that some coins appeared in the ninth century has to be treated with caution. Mango notes that at Sardis the period between 491 and 616 is represented by 1,011 bronze coins, the rest of the seventh century by about 90, “and the eighth and ninth centuries combined by no more than 9.”
[20]
And, “similar results have been obtained from nearly all provincial Byzantine cities.” Even such paltry samples as have survived from the eighth and ninth centuries (nine) are usually of questionable provenance, a fact noted by Mango himself, who remarked that often, upon closer inspection, these turn out to originate either from before the dark age, or after it.

When substantial archaeology again appears, in the middle of the tenth century, the civilization it reveals has been radically altered: The old Byzantium of late antiquity is gone, and we find an impoverished and semi-literate rump; a medieval Byzantium strikingly like the medieval France, Germany and Italy with which it was contemporary. Here we find too a barter or semi-barter economy; a decline in population and literacy; and a general reduction in urban life. And the break-off point in Byzantium, as in the West, is the first half of the seventh century.

* * *

From this, it becomes clear that classical civilization, in the East as well as in the West, did not just wither away and die: it was killed. The signs of violent destruction are everywhere from around 615 onwards. But who killed it?

As might be expected, Hodges and Whitehouse, as well as Mango, attempt to exonerate the Arabs and pin the blame on the Persians – as well as on an inherent decadence on the part of classical civilization itself. They stress that, in Ephesus, “Urban life clearly was waning quite dramatically when the first Arab attack took place in 654-5.”
[21]
Fine, but there had been wars between Persians and Romans before. Indeed, war between these two had been almost part of normal life for seven centuries. How is it then that this war led to the end of classical civilization? What was different about this conflict? Wars, no matter how destructive, are normally followed by treaties of peace; and when these are signed economic activity and prosperity recovers. It had happened before many times between Romans and Persians. It did not happen this time. Why?

It is evident that the Byzantines did not begin rebuilding in the ruined eastern provinces after the ending of the Persian war. And the fact that they did not rebuild can only mean they did not have time to rebuild before the Arabs came to waste the area permanently. Yet this statement implies two further and crucial questions: (a) Could we be mistaken about the number of years that elapsed between the Persian war and the arrival of the Arabs? And (b) What was it about the Arabs that would have caused them to bring about such lasting destruction? After all, even if the Arabs had arrived in Syria, Egypt and Asia Minor at the same time as the Persians, we might expect classical systems of agriculture and trade to have then reasserted themselves. This in fact did not happen, and even Hodges and Whitehouse admit that the Arab conquest of North Africa brought a “dark age” to the region lasting two to three centuries.
[22]

The question of the chronology of Islam’s expansion beyond Arabia shall be revisited near the end of the present volume, whilst the nature of Islam as a religious and political philosophy will be examined in Chapter 13. In the meantime, we should note that the Arabs themselves hinted that it was they who had wasted the cities of Anatolia. Speaking of that region, a ninth century Arab geographer noted:

In days of old cities were numerous in Rum [Anatolia] but now they have become few. Most of the districts are prosperous and pleasant and have each an extremely strong fortress, on account of the frequency of the raids which the fighters of the faith [Muslims] direct upon them. To each village appertains a castle where in time of flight they may take shelter.
[23]

These raids, as we shall see, were a perpetual feature of life along the borderlines of the Arab-controlled world, and they had an immense impact upon the entire Mediterranean region – an impact that was felt even into the early years of the nineteenth century.

Fig. 20. Map of Europe and the Middle East around 600, just before the Arab Conquests.

In contrast to the claims of Pirenne’s critics, the beginning of the seventh century was a period of rapid expansion and new development in many parts of Europe and the Middle East. The Byzantine Empire was experiencing an era of unparalleled prosperity, as cities grew larger than under the old Roman Empire. In the same way, Visigothic Spain was prosperous and highly developed, with every indication of an expanding population. The Visigoth kings had begun to found new cities. Italy under the Lombards also registered growth, after centuries of decline, with much building activity under Queen Theodelinda. The same was true of Frankish Gaul which, united again under Chlothar II, enjoyed a period of great prosperity and expansion. In the previously barbarian Celtic lands of Ireland and Scotland (Caledonia) there flourished a unique Christian civilization, and Anglo-Saxon England stood on the verge of being reincorporated into the civilized world of Latin Christianity. Even the barbarian kingdom of the Avars, centered on the Hungarian Plain, showed some continuity with Roman civilization, and there is much evidence of occupation of the towns along the Danube and parts of Transylvania.

Notwithstanding the claims of senior academics, then, the evidence of archaeology suggests a dramatic and sudden end to Byzantine civilization sometime near the first quarter of the seventh century. There was no “gradual decline” or “period of decadence.” And yet, as we have seen, over the past thirty years the great majority of academics working in this area have postulated just that. How else to account for the complete disintegration of urban life and the economy in the mid-seventh century? The only alternative would be to pin the blame on the Arabs; and this is something they have, for a number of reasons, recoiled from doing. Quite apart from a now almost default habit of seeing the Arabs as a cultured and civilizing force – and therefore incapable of reducing an entire civilization to dust – there is the problem of how to account for the speed and ease with which the Arab armies swept over the provinces of the East. And the very speed of the Arab conquests has now become in itself a major proof of the inherent weakness and “decadence” of Byzantine civilization. Indeed, the notion that it was a terminal decline in late classical civilization that called forth the Arab conquests is received wisdom among many academics, and has generated a whole genre of writing.

Yet this idea, now so prevalent, ignores a glaring fact: the parts of the Roman and Byzantine worlds conquered by the Arabs were not the barbarous and uncivilized ones: It was, without exception, the civilized and prosperous provinces that fell to them. All the regions overrun by the Saracens, Anatolia, Syria, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain, were invariably the most urbanized, prosperous, and centralized parts of the late classical world. It was only indeed when they reached the more barbarous and less Romanized parts of Europe, such as northern Spain and Gaul, that they began to encounter effective resistance.

This is a topic to which we shall return in due course, for it is of central importance to the whole debate.

[1]
Sidney Painter, op cit., p. 35

[2]
Ibid.

[3]
Cyril Mango, op cit., p. 38

[4]
Hodges and Whitehouse, op cit., p. 61

[5]
Ibid., p. 62

[6]
Ward-Perkins, op cit., p. 124

[7]
Ibid.

[8]
G. Tchalenko,
Villages antiques de la Syrie du nord
Vol. 1 (Paris, 1953), pp. 377ff.

[9]
Ibid.

[10]
Hodges and Whitehouse, op cit., pp. 61-2

[11]
Ibid., p. 62

[12]
Ibid., p. 61

[13]
Ibid., pp. 62-3

[14]
Cyril Mango, op cit., p. 4

[15]
Ibid., p. 8

[16]
Ibid., p. 9

[17]
Ibid.

[18]
Ibid., p. 80

[19]
Ibid., pp. 72-3

[20]
Ibid., p. 73

[21]
Ibid., p. 62

[22]
Ibid., p. 71

[23]
Hodges and Whitehouse, op cit., p. 63; from M. F. Hendy, “Byzantium, 1081-1204: an economic reappraisal,”
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society
, 5th series, 20 (1970), 36