Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy (30 page)

With the general break-off point then in the 620s, we would need to reconsider much of the classical-looking archaeology of Britain, France and Spain which is currently dated to later decades. Thus the surviving British churches which are said to have been built into the 650s and 660s – before ceasing for three hundred years – would probably have been built rather in the 610s and 620s, and have been part of the church-building program initiated by Augustine’s mission in the 590s. Thus too the Merovingian structures said to have been built after the reign of Chlothar II (584-629), such as the church of Saint Denis in Paris, probably need to be reassigned to earlier decades.

It cannot be stressed too strongly that the chronology of this obscure period is much less secure than generally imagined. Often a date is supplied by little more than guesswork or analogy, and there is a tendency to “stretch” archaeological finds into the middle or later seventh century in order to have something – anything – to show for that period. Precisely the same phenomenon is encountered at the other end of the Dark Age where, as Hodges and Whitehouse noted, there is a temptation to assign material of the tenth century into the ninth in order to have something to show for that epoch. In the Islamic world, dates are often derived from a tiny handful of often barely legible coins which apparently bear an “Age of Hegira” date. If however what we have said above holds good, and the Persians adopted Islam voluntarily, it is highly likely that the system of notation found on the early coins is not to be automatically accepted as indicating the Age of the Hegira. We remember that the first Islamic coins are basically Sassanid with the addition of the Arabic legend
besm Allah
. The date, however, or the year number, is written in Persian (Pahlavi). It does not say “Age of Hegira,” and it is merely assumed that this is what is referred to. But what if that is wrong? The term Age of Hegira actually only appears on Islamic coins from the eleventh century onwards, when it is generally written in conjunction with the
anno domini
date of the Christians. The two appear on coins side by side. Could it be then that all the so-called Age of Hegira dates found on Islamic coins between the seventh and early eleventh centuries do not refer to the Hegira of Muhammad at all, but are a reference to some event or events of Persian history? Could it be too that successive Muslim rulers changed the dating system arbitrarily on more than one occasion? This latter is suggested by the discovery of Islamic coins of wildly differing dates in sites and strata of the same epoch.

If such be the case, then everything we understand about early Islamic history and its progression will need to be re-examined in a fundamental way. For the moment, however, all such suggestions remain speculative. All we can say with certainty is that with the commencement of the Persian and Arab Wars in the early part of the seventh century, Byzantine civilization begins its rapid and complete disappearance in Syria, most of Anatolia, Egypt, and North Africa. Since these were by far the most important centers of late classical civilization, it is therefore little more than a travesty for Hodges, Whitehouse, and the rest of Pirenne’s critics, to suggest that the arrival of the Arabs had nothing to do with the disappearance of that very civilization.

The destructive work of the Arabs was not therefore confined to Europe, as Pirenne had somehow imagined. As we have noted again and again throughout the present study, archaeology had revealed a puzzling hiatus in settlement between the mid-seventh and mid-tenth centuries all over the Middle East and North Africa. This gap mirrors the hiatus in Europe – the Dark Age gap that was always attributed there to the destructive work of “the Barbarians.” Indeed, the absence of archaeology in both Europe and the Islamic world during these centuries has now become so acute and embarrassing that it has elicited some radical explanations.

The first of these, popular with certain academics specializing in climate history, has a long pedigree. The idea that the Dark Age was caused by a climate or other form of natural disaster was in fact first proposed as long ago as the nineteenth century. More recently, as we saw in Chapter 11, the theory was called forth to explain the abandonment of North Africa’s late Roman cities and the desertification of much of the region. By the 1960s a similar event or series of events was invoked to explain the appearance throughout the Mediterranean basin of the Younger Fill, the layer of sediment which covers most of the late Roman sites of the region. This was the view of Claudio Vita-Finzi.
[7]
An even more radical version of the theory appeared in 1976 with the publication of astronomers Victor Clube’s and Bill Napier’s book
The Cosmic Serpent: A Catastrophist View of Earth History
. Here Clube and Napier argued that various myths and legends from ancient history, as well as the disappearance of several ancient civilizations, could be traced to a series of cosmic catastrophes triggered by the earth’s encounter with an enormous comet. The last of these events, said Clube and Napier, may have occurred at the start of the seventh century and caused the Dark Age. A more recent incarnation of the same thesis appeared in 1999 with dendrochronologist Mike Baillie’s
Exodus to Arthur: Catastrophic Encounters with Comets
.
[8]

Whilst at first glance the cosmic catastrophe hypothesis sounds outlandish, it has to be admitted that the very completeness of the demographic collapse of the Dark Age throughout Europe and the Middle East favors it above the simple climate-change hypothesis of Vita-Finzi, or the plague thesis of various others. Nonetheless, there are several major problems with any natural disaster solution. First and foremost, were such a terrible event or series of events to have occurred, we should expect it/them to have figured very prominently in the literature of the age, or subsequent ages. It is true, of course, that chronicles and various other documents of this time do speak of plagues, floods, earthquakes, etc. But these have always been the stock-in-trade of the chronicler, and similar events, much more reliably reported, are recorded throughout the period of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire. But nothing of the type envisaged by Clube and Napier, or even by Vita-Finzi, appears in the documentary records. Secondly, such a catastrophe should have left a far clearer mark in the archaeological record. It is true that in the Mediterranean region we have the sediment layer of the Younger Fill at the correct time. However, this feature is entirely absent in temperate Europe, which also seems to have experienced complete abandonment and population implosion. Here, there exist numerous settlements spanning the late Roman period through to the High Middle Ages. In all of these, there seems to be continued and unbroken occupation in all ages – with the exception of the seventh to tenth centuries. Yet between these two epochs there is no layer of sediment of destruction. On the contrary, the early seventh century material appears to lie directly underneath that of the mid-tenth century, and to be culturally closely related to the latter.

Another and perhaps even more radical solution to this problem has recently been suggested by Heribert Illig, whose ideas about the early expansion of Islam we have briefly alluded to. According to him, the three centuries stretching from 614 to 911 never existed at all; they were phantom years inserted into the calendar by the Emperor Otto III around 1000. Thus for Illig all history after the tenth/eleventh century needs to be backdated by almost three centuries. The Norman Conquest of England therefore would have occurred in 769 rather than 1066, and the First Crusade would have been launched in 798 rather than 1095. (In the same way, the year of publication of the present book would be 1715 rather than 2012).

It is undeniable that Illig’s proposal would make sense of many hitherto puzzling facts. Thus settlements like Helgö, and many others throughout Europe, which were apparently occupied continuously from the fifth and sixth centuries through to the High Middle Ages, but which lack any material from the mid-seventh to mid-tenth centuries, would no longer cause a problem for historians. And the occurrence of Islamic coins and Viking trading stations in Russia dating from the seventh century would make perfect sense, with the Viking raids, which are in any case recognized as being elicited by the Islamic demand for European slaves, commencing in the seventh century rather than the ninth.

It should be noted too that Illig’s proposals would dramatically alter the narrative of European-Islamic interaction. For one thing, the Crusades would then have been launched in the late eighth century, rather than the eleventh, and would be a natural European response to ongoing Islamic aggression; whilst the Islamic Golden Age, which is said to have endured between the seventh and eleventh centuries, but which archaeology can find no trace of before the late tenth century, would therefore rightly have commenced in the second half of the seventh century and have come to an end by the late eighth century. Thus the period during which the Islamic world was ahead of the West is dramatically reduced; and indeed the much-vaunted Islamic Golden Age would be revealed (just as Islam’s critics have long suggested) as little more than the final afterglow of the splendors of the late Sassanid and Byzantine civilizations; an afterglow quickly crushed under the dead weight of Islamic theocracy.

It is of course impossible to do justice to a concept so radical and so revolutionary in a few paragraphs. A thousand objections immediately spring to mind, and mainstream academics, both in Germany and elsewhere, have thus far – on the whole – come out against it. And it should be remarked that the two alternative theories, the “Climate Catastrophe” and the “Phantom Time,” are mutually incompatible and contradictory. One would accept the existence of the Dark Age, both in Europe and the Middle East; the other would deny its existence in both areas.

Both alternative theories take a leap of the imagination even to allow the possibility that they may be right. Yet we should remember that all revolutionary ideas initially seem absurd. Later, when we have become used to thinking in such terms, they appear self-evident. I would not be surprised if one of the above theses were to go through a similar process.

* * *

If we leave aside the, as yet, insoluble questions raised by the Climate Catastrophe and the Phantom Time theorists, we may nonetheless conclude by stating that archaeological investigation over the past half century has revealed the following:

(a) Classical civilization showed a marked decline from the beginning of the third century onwards. From then through to the first half of the fifth, there is evidence of a fairly dramatic drop in the population of the Roman Empire, particularly in the western provinces. By the late-fifth century, this decline was halted and even reversed. Archaeology shows the greatest revival of trade, expansion of population, and recommencement of high-quality architecture in North Africa and Spain, two regions which now experienced something of a golden age. But by the mid-sixth century Latin civilization was also expanding in Gaul, central Europe and even Britain. Indeed, it now began to spread into regions never reached by the Roman Legions, such as eastern Germany, Ireland and northern Britain. Only Italy, particularly central Italy, showed signs of decay; but this was not primarily the result of the Barbarian Invasions of the fifth century, and is adequately explained by the decline of Rome’s political importance.

(b) The same pattern is observed in the East, where numerous cities with very large populations were sustained by a thriving economy and agriculture. That the great plague of 542, which swept the Mediterranean world, did not inflict terminal damage, is proved beyond question by the discovery of thriving and prosperous cities of the late sixth and early seventh centuries throughout the Levantine region. Indeed, by the second half of the sixth century these regions now began to experience an epoch of unparalleled prosperity and opulence. Cities expanded and trade increased well into the second decade of the seventh century.

(c) By the third or perhaps fourth decade of the seventh century classical civilization began rapidly to disappear. The cities of the East were either destroyed or abandoned – or both. This destruction was without question the work of first the Persians and then the Arabs. With the disappearance of the cities came the decline of the classical system of agriculture. Enormous areas of previously cultivated and fertile land quickly became barren and overgrown, a phenomenon almost certainly explained by the Arab custom of allowing their herds to graze on cultivated fields; which behavior was prompted by the Islamic doctrine that “the faithful” had a right to live off the labour of “the infidel.” In Mediterranean Europe at the same time, the classical system of agriculture also disappears. Furthermore, the scattered lowland settlements of classical times are abandoned and replaced by defended hilltop settlements. If these developments were not caused by Arab piracy and slave-raiding, then no explanation for them is forthcoming.

(d) From about the third decade of the seventh century the great majority of urban settlements in Europe and throughout the Near East were abandoned. Indeed, almost all settlement of any kind seems to disappear. Little or no archaeology from the mid-seventh to mid-tenth centuries has been discovered in a wide arc stretching from Scotland and Ireland in the north-west to the eastern borders of Persia in the south-east. Then, around the third or fourth decade of the tenth century, new urban centers appear. These are not – in the East at least – nearly as large as those of the early seventh century, and they are distinctly medieval, rather than classical, in character. Nonetheless, the material culture of these settlements, in terms of art and artifacts, often bears striking comparison with the material culture of the early seventh century.