Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (27 page)

We possess, from the early Middle Ages onwards, accounts of these regions from European travelers (often pilgrims), who were generally appalled by what they saw. Thus for example in the late eighteenth century C. F. Volney, “probably the most perceptive European traveler to visit the Middle East before the nineteenth century” described in detail conditions in Syria and Egypt under the then Ottoman administration. The main problems identified by Volney were extortionate taxation, the lawlessness of the soldiery, the depredation of Bedouin Arabs, usurious interest rates, and the primitive state of agricultural methods and implements. After describing the routine pillaging of the Ottoman troops, Volney goes on to note that, “These burthens are more especially oppressive in the countries bestowed as an appendage, and in those which are exposed to the Arabs [ie. Bedouins]. … With respect to the Bedouins, if they are at war, they pillage as enemies; and if they are at peace, devour every thing they can find as guests; hence the proverb, Avoid the Bedouin, whether friend or enemy.”
[13]
The latter is a clear reference to the Bedouin custom of permitting their herds to graze on crop-land.

Volney also remarked on the almost total lack of security while travelling: “…nobody travels alone, from the insecurity of the roads. One must wait for several travellers who are going to the same place, or take advantage of the passage of some great man, who assumed the office of protector, but is more frequently the oppressor of the caravan. These precautions are, above all, necessary in the countries exposed to the Arabs, such as Palestine, and the whole frontier of the desert, and even on the road from Aleppo to Skandaroon, on account of the Curd robbers.”
[14]

One does not have to be a genius to imagine the impact of such conditions on trade and commerce.

About eighty years later Mark Twain visited the region and described it pretty much as had Volney, though using slightly more colorful language. Palestine, he says, is “A desolate country whose soil is rich enough, but is given over wholly to weeds ... a silent mournful expanse ... a desolation ... we never saw a human being on the whole route.... hardly a tree or shrub anywhere. Even the olive tree and the cactus, those fast friends of a worthless soil, had almost deserted the country.”
[15]

The above writers also noted a striking feature remarked upon by many other travelers: the almost complete absence of wheeled vehicles. The same feature was mentioned by Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Middle Eastern studies at Princeton. In his 2001 book
What Went Wrong?
Lewis asked the question: What went wrong with a civilization which – he believes – showed such promise at the start, only to be mired in poverty and backwardness from the 12th-13th century onwards? Lewis concludes his volume without arriving at an answer. Yet at one point he makes a telling observation: Wheeled vehicles, he notes, were virtually unknown, up until modern times, throughout the Muslim lands. This was all the more strange given the fact that the wheel was invented in the Middle East (in Babylonia) and had been commonly used in earlier ages. The conclusion he comes to, in line with that of Volney and many others, is that: “A cart is large and, for a peasant, relatively costly. It is difficult to conceal and easy for requisition. At a time and place where neither law nor custom restricted the powers of even local authorities, visible and mobile assets were a poor investment. The same fear of predatory authority – or neighbors – may be seen in the structure of traditional houses and quarters: the high, windowless walls, the almost hidden entrances in narrow alleyways, the careful avoidance of any visible sign of wealth.”
[16]
In the kleptocracy that was the Caliphate, it seems, not even Muslims – far less Christians and Jews – were free to prosper.

[1]
Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations?”
Foreign Affairs,
(Summer, 1993)

[2]
Bat Ye’or,
The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam
(Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1985), p. 46

[3]
Robert Irwin, “Islam and the Crusades: 1096-1699,” in Jonathan Riley-Smith (ed.)
The Oxford History of the Crusades
(Oxford, 1995), pp. 237

[4]
Ibid.

[5]
The sheer scope and immense impact of this Islamic piracy has been dealt with in some detail by Michael McCormick in his,
Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, AD 300 – 900
(Cambridge, 2002).

[6]
That piracy was seen by Muslims as a legitimate part of jihad against unbelievers is seen is quite literally thousands of pronouncements from Islamic sources over the centuries. As an example, we might quote the reply of the Barbary ambassador to Thomas Jefferson when he enquired why they attacked American ships, vessels from a land with whom they were not at war: “…it was written in the Koran, that all Nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”

[7]
Ibn Khaldun,
The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History
Vol. 1 (Trans. Franz Rosenthal, Bollingen Series 43: Princeton University Press, 1958), p. 163. Cited from Bat Ye’or, op cit., p. 161

[8]
Bertrand, op cit., p. 36

[9]
Ibid., pp. 37-8

[10]
Ibid., p. 37

[11]
Ibid., p. 45

[12]
Ibid.

[13]
C. F. Volney,
Travels through Syria and Egypt
(London, 1787), Vol. 2, pp. 406-31; in Charles Issawi, ed.
The Economic History of the Middle East, 1800-1914
(University of Chicago Press, 1966), p. 215

[14]
Ibid., p. 217

[15]
Mark Twain,
The Innocents Abroad
, (New York, 1869), pp. 361-2

[16]
Bernard Lewis,
What Went Wrong? The Clash between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East
(New York, 2002), p. 158

W
e have argued that the advent of Islam did indeed terminate all normal trading relations between Europe and the Near East, precisely as Pirenne claimed. This of course stands in striking contrast to the position of Hodges, Whitehouse, and a host of others, who found evidence of extensive trade between Islam and the outside world during the seventh to eleventh centuries. More recently, Michael McCormick has reiterated this criticism of Pirenne,
[1]
and the same has been forcefully restated by Thomas Glick. “In fact,” says Glick, “the Islamic conquest had more nearly the opposite effect than that posited by Pirenne: it opened the Mediterranean, previously a Roman lake, and, by connecting it with the Indian Ocean, converted it into a route of world trade.”
[2]

The evidence garnered over the past century by innumerable archaeologists working throughout the Middle East, has confirmed that, during the seventh to eleventh centuries there was indeed a vibrant trade conducted in the Indian Ocean between the Arabian Peninsula and India and South-East Asia. Of the existence of this trade, and its economic importance, there can be no doubt. This does not, however, I will suggest, present a problem for the Pirenne thesis. The thriving Indian Ocean trade can be explained quite easily if we remember some basic facts: First of all, those conducting this trade were native Arabs and Muslims, based mainly in the Persian Gulf and Yemen, and it was essential to the prosperity of the entire Arabian Peninsula. The Arabs of southern and eastern Arabia had lived off the Indian Ocean trade for centuries, and many had grown prosperous on it. They imported from southern and eastern Asia highly sought-after luxuries, which all the peoples of the Arabian Peninsula had become used to. If this commerce had been disrupted through piracy, the main sufferers would have been the Arabs themselves.

The Mediterranean trade, by contrast, was mainly in the hands of Christian Syrians and Jews. These peoples were not Arabs and very definitely not Muslims. They were inimical to Islam, and therefore of no concern to the Caliph and his ministers. Furthermore, what they imported from Europe and the West was of little interest to the Arabs. It is true that in antiquity Syrian (Phoenician) traders had brought much of great value from western Europe. Britain and, to some degree, Spain, were important sources of tin; and it seems that for a large part of the Bronze Age these regions, as well as central Europe, exported large quantities of ore, as well as finished products of bronze (such as swords) to the Middle East. By late antiquity however other sources of tin had been discovered, and western Europe thus lost much of her importance in this context. One “product” of Europe however did remain of interest to the Arabs, and that was the bodies of the Europeans themselves. White-skinned slaves, both male and female, were highly sought after in the Caliphate. The males were generally castrated and employed in the various offices of eunuchs. The females, as might be imagined, were placed in harems.

Such slaves, however, were not, in the initial stages at least, acquired by trade. The Europeans that the Arabs first came into contact with were all Christians from the southern reaches of the continent. Christian Europeans were not likely to sell their co-religionists into bondage in the Caliphate. But the Muslims had other, more direct ways, of procuring slaves: war and piracy. And, as we have seen, both these were waged against southern Europe with great intensity during the first century of the Islamic expansion.

At this point we recall another facet of the argument against Pirenne, one which we have already briefly alluded to throughout the present work. McCormick and various others have suggested that the slave trade, which the Vikings of northern Europe indubitably conducted with the Muslim world from the late ninth century onwards, must have been a source of wealth for Europe as a whole. Far from terminating trade between Europe and the East, say these writers, the Muslims might actually have increased it.
[3]

Hodges and Whitehouse too emphasize the economic importance of the slave trade (though they demure from calling it a “slave trade”), and point to the rich finds of gold and luxury items of oriental origin recovered over the past century from various parts of Scandinavia. They also emphasize the part played by European ports on the Mediterranean. Venice, we know, was involved, as was – for a while – Marseilles; and so too was Constantinople; though Hodges and Whitehouse admit that a great degree of this commerce was conducted entirely outside the boundaries of Christian Europe: one of the most important of all slave-trading depots was located at Astrakhan, at the mouth of the Volga on the Caspian Sea, where the commerce was entirely with Scandinavians.
[4]
Having said that, there is no doubt that, at certain periods, the above-mentioned Christian cities did take part in the traffic; and not a few authors have waxed lyrical about the mighty benefits that must have accrued from it. In the words of Glick: “By the tenth century, when the Muslims had taken control of strategically important islands (Crete, Sicily, the Balearics) Islam effectively controlled the Mediterranean, which did not constitute a barrier to trade, but rather a medium whereby all bordering states could participate in a world economy, fertilized by healthy injections of Sudanese gold.”
[5]

Why, the objective reader might ask at this stage, does Glick fail to mention the ravaging of the coastlands of northern Spain, southern France, Italy, and Greece by Muslim pirates at this time; a ravaging so intense that large areas became uninhabitable? And whilst it is true, as we have seen, that some Christian states in the region did become involved, these were the exception. Also, Glick must surely be aware that most of the “Sudanese gold” arriving in Europe ended up Scandinavia; which destination it reached by way of the Volga or Dnieper Rivers, thus bypassing Christian Europe altogether.

Furthermore, we should note that the Viking raids, which devastated much of northern and western Europe for about two centuries, was intimately tied to the Muslim demand for European slaves, begging further the question of how this could be viewed as in any way beneficial to Europe and European civilization.

Again, if so much gold were now arriving in Europe, why was this not translated into gold coinage? In answer to this, Glick treats us to a large paragraph in which he speaks of the “relative value” of gold and silver, and basically tells us that in Europe during the seventh to eleventh centuries silver was more valuable than gold; hence they minted their money in silver. What he fails to tell his readers is that virtually all coinage – even bronze coinage – was extremely scarce during these centuries, apparently proving beyond question that the continent was impoverished and reduced to a barter economy, as Pirenne claimed.

We might conclude then that, whilst Muslim traders paid for their human captives in gold and silver, the amount they paid must have been small in comparison with the quantities reaching Europe during the final pre-Islamic centuries. Even more importantly, we must never lose sight of the fact that this “trade” was in no way a normal one: European slaves were procured equally by purchasing them from Viking pirates or through their Christian European intermediaries – or they were taken directly from southern Europe by Arab and Muslim pirates. Indeed, the great majority of the human cargo reaching Cordoba, Damascus and Baghdad seems to have been procured in the latter way; and this was an activity which, as we argued, must have commenced at the very beginning of the Islamic period. Statements such as that of Hodges and Whitehouse, which attribute Saracen piracy and raiding to specific socio-economic conditions at certain epochs, betray a woeful misunderstanding of Islam and a willful ignorance of its history. War against the infidel was a fundamental duty of every Muslim, and a state of permanent conflict existed between the House of Islam and the outside world.

The first appearance of Saracen pirates and slave-raiders would have terminated all normal commercial intercourse in the Mediterranean; and so it is futile to talk of any “benefits” to Europe. Some time later, Scandinavian pirates became involved, and we should stress that the entire Viking phenomenon was intimately connected with the expansion of Islam. In the words of Hugh Trevor-Roper: “What were these Vikings doing? What sudden force drove these piratical Northmen to range over the seas and rivers of Europe, creating havoc? It used to be supposed that it was merely a sudden, unexplained growth of population in Scandinavia which lay behind this extraordinary outburst. No doubt this was true: so vast an expansion cannot have been sustained by a static population. But the scope and direction of the raids point also to other motives. There were opportunities abroad as well as pressures at home; and these opportunities link together the Viking raids and the Moslem conquests.”
[6]

Trevor-Roper goes on to describe the vast wealth accumulated by the Caliphate in its expansion across Asia and Africa, and how, with this wealth, it could purchase what it wanted from Europe. What the Muslims wanted, above all, was “eunuchs and slaves.” He continues: “It was one of the functions of the Vikings to supply these goods. Half traders, half pirates, they ranged over all northern Europe, and in their ranging, or through the method of piracy, they collected furs and kidnapped human beings. For preference they dealt in heathen Slavs, since Christian States had less compunction in handling a slave-trade in heathen bodies – they could always quote that useful text, Leviticus xxv, 44. So the Vikings fed both Byzantium and the rich new civilization of Islam with the goods which they demanded and for which they could pay. In doing so they penetrated all the coasts and rivers of Europe.”
[7]

It is generally supposedly that the Viking epoch commenced in the early ninth century. Yet we should note that the existence of a seventh century Viking trading centre at Staraja Ladoga in north-west Russia has now been confirmed, whilst a very large number of Arab dirhams, dating from the seventh century, has been found in various parts of Scandinavia.
[8]
The existence of these coins can only mean either of two things: (a) That the Arabs were using two or three hundred year old coins in their regular trading relations with the Vikings, or (b) that the Viking Age began in the seventh century, right at the start of the Islamic epoch. Of these, option (b) seems by far the more probable; yet the implications of such a conclusion are so far-reaching and so unsettling to the conventional view of Dark Age history that the evidence has been largely bypassed in textbooks and scholarly publications.

We should note that, here again, we have an example of a phenomenon of the seventh century apparently mirrored by one in the tenth.

* * *

Hodges and Whitehouse emphasized that the early Caliphs presided over an opulent and flourishing civilization, and they pointed to the legendary status of Baghdad during the eighth century and Samarra during the ninth as evidence of this. As we saw, Baghdad of the eighth century has provided few proofs of its wealth and size, though Samarra has indeed revealed an enormous settlement replete with gardens, palaces, mosques and baths. Other cities of Mesopotamia and Iran, such as Siraf, have also been found to have flourished at this time.

Before continuing, it needs to be emphasized that the early Islamic centers which are said to have revealed substantial archaeology – that is, from the seventh to tenth centuries – are invariably in Mesopotamia and to the east, most especially in Iran; and it seems beyond question that the Islamicization of Mesopotamia and Persia, the former territories of the Sassanid Empire, was a far less violent affair than the Islamicization of the Byzantine lands. There is evidence of much greater cultural and economic continuity in the former than in the latter. Almost all excavated sites west of the northern Euphrates have revealed a destruction layer separating Byzantine and Islamic epochs; whilst in Mesopotamia and Iran this is lacking, with the evidence pointing to a relatively peaceful transition from Zoroastrian to Islamic civilization.

Whether or not this be the case, it is clear that the eastern regions of the Caliphate, in Mesopotamia and Iran, enjoyed a great deal more wealth and continuity from the seventh to tenth centuries than did the territories of the west, the former lands of the Eastern Roman Empire.

Yet even in the east, the continuity which Hodges and Whitehouse lay so much emphasis upon is open to question. The dates provided by excavators at the Mesopotamian sites are often based on little more than a handful of barely legible coins. These, as well as the testimony of the medieval Arab chroniclers, form the basis of early Islamic chronology. Thus about five separate occupation layers are mentioned by Hodges and Whitehouse as occurring at Siraf, a Persian Gulf port of southern Iran, between the mid-seventh and early tenth centuries, though in fact the only ruins they can actually show, of a bazaar site, of a residential quarter, and of a house courtyard, all date from the tenth century. Furthermore, the depth of strata is nowhere near what we would expect from the supposedly four centuries during which the site was occupied. This was a fact overlooked by David Whitehouse in his several published reports on the site.
[9]
We encounter a similar situation at Samarra, though in an even more acute form. There we find that the traditional Arab account of the city’s history, which Hodges and Whitehouse seem to trust implicitly, has been thoroughly debunked by archaeology. According to the Arabs, in the year 836 Caliph Al-Mutasim decided to move his capital from Baghdad, following riots at the city. His attention was drawn to an empty site about 120 kilometers upstream on the Tigris, inhabited only by a few monks, who informed him of a former city in the area and a legend that it would be rebuilt by “a great, victorious and powerful king,” at which point the Caliph began construction there of his new capital. Archaeology however has shown that Samarra was already a large and important center under the Sassanids, whose king Chosroes I (late sixth century) extended the Nahrawan canal to the locality, thus opening it for settlement. To celebrate the completion of this project, a commemorative tower (modern Burj al-Qa’im) was built at the southern inlet south of Samarra, and a palace with a “paradise” or walled hunting park was constructed at the northern inlet (modern Nahr al-Rasasi) near to al-Daur. Later Sassanid rulers added to the settlement, and Herzfeld found evidence of a large and important Sassanid metropolis, replete with palaces, gardens, etc. The city continued to be inhabited and to expand under the first Islamic rulers. We know, for example, that another irrigation canal, the Qatul al-Jund, was excavated by the Abbasid Caliph Harun Al-Rashid, who began the construction of a new planned city, though this project was supposedly abandoned unfinished in 796.