Charlemagne minus Mohammed? – A lecture to the Unione Internazionale, 26 November 2013, at the British School in Rome
Recently the archaeologist, Richard Hodges, gave a paper at the British School in Rome, where he revisited the so-called Pirenne-thesis. The paper has been made available at the website of the American University in Rome, of which Richard Hodges is president.
The beginning of the lecture:
“On 28th January it will be 1200 years since Charlemagne died in 814. His legacy was immense. Poems and epics over the next half-millennium ascribed to him the status of the architect of Christian Europe, a crusader against the Arabs and Ottomans. This mythic importance was to grow greater still. Montesquieu and Voltaire traced the roots of the enlightenment to him. Then, in the aftermath of the First World War, the Belgium historian, Henri Pirenne fixed Charlemagne’s role forever in his classic, posthumous history of Europe: Mohammed and Charlemagne. In this influential text, a keystone of world history since its publication, Pirenne concluded:
‘It is therefore strictly correct to say that without Mohammed Charlemagne would have been inconceivable. In the seventh century the ancient Roman Empire had actually become an Empire of the East; the Empire of Charles was an Empire of the west…. The Carolingian Empire, or rather, the Empire of Charlemagne, was the scaffolding of the Middle Ages’.
Somewhat accurately, Chris Wickham recently commented that this phrase ‘fits in with the longstanding metanarrative of medieval economic history which seeks to explain the secular economic triumph of north-west Europe.’ As Wickham set out to show, this triumph needs reassessment.
Nevertheless, Pirenne’s canonical thesis has held most historians in thrall. Indeed, drawn to its simplicity, like moths to a flame, popular European history still slavishly follows his interpretation. In fact, as my colleague David Whitehouse and I argued thirty years ago, the first systematically assembled archaeological evidence showed that the collapse of the Roman Mediterranean, except in the Levant, clearly pre-dated Mohammed. The Arabs did not destroy ‘the Roman pond’. Pirenne was wrong! However, we concluded in 1983 that Charlemagne was the architect of the renascence of Latin Christendom thanks, in particular, to silver acquired from the Abbasid Caliphate.
Our archaeological revision in support of part of Pirenne’s thesis has been widely adopted. The most important support has come from Michael McCormick’s in his marvelous Origins of the European Economy. McCormick, following Sture Bolin’s re-working of Pirenne’s thesis, sought the origins of Charlemagne’s renascence in the connections with the Umayadds and especially the Abbasids in the Near East. Slaves were the primary export from Christendom and Scandinavia; in return silver and precious goods were imported in small but politically significant amounts. These imports, he argued, fuelled the take off of the political economies of Latin Christendom and the west Baltic communities.
McCormick concludes: ‘So in a paradoxical and profound sense, perhaps Pirenne was right, even when he was wrong: without Mohammed, there would have been no Charlemagne’. In sum, McCormick wrote ‘communications between the Frankish empire and the eastern Mediterranean world surged in the final decades of the eighth and the first decades of the ninth century….never again in the history of Europe did they come close to the low levels that prevailed before 750’. Other recent studies of the history of the Mediterranean Sea – by Horden and Purcell – The Corrupting Sea, and by Abalafia – The Big Sea – have essentially accepted this revised Pirenne paradigm. By contrast, Wickham contends that the Merovingians and Carolingians had no interest in the Mediterranean. Their focus, he argues, was on building relations with the Popes in Rome.
Thirty years on from my book with Whitehouse and a dozen years after the publication of McCormick’s monograph a wealth of archaeology now challenges these 20th-century conclusions …”
Read the full lecture at the website of the American University of Rome
ABOUT RICHARD HODGES
Dr. Richard Hodges studied archaeology and medieval history at Southampton University, where he also gained his PhD in 1977 on the trade and ceramics of the North Sea region. He has taught at the Universities of Sheffield (1976-95), Siena (1984-87; 2008), Copenhagen (1988), and East Anglia (1995- ) where he holds a professorship.
He has been Director of the British School at Rome (1988-95), Director of the Prince of Wales’s Institute of Architecture (1996-98), Scientific Director of the Butrint Foundation (1994-2012), and Williams Director of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology (2007-12). He is a board member of the Packard Humanities Institute (2004- ).
Dr. Hodges has worked in Italian archaeology since 1978, participating in the Biferno valley survey (1978-79), the San Vincenzo project (1980-98) and the Montarrenti project (1982-87).
In the 1980s Richard Hodges was part of a major paradigmatic turn inside archaeology and history. In 1983 he published together with David Whitehouse: Mohammed, Charlemagne, and the Origins of Europe: The Pirenne Thesis in the Light of Archaeology. This was later followed up by his magnum opus: Dark Age Economics: origins of Towns and Trade, AD 600 -1000 (New Approaches in archaeology). In it a wealth of new archaeological evidence was presented enabling historians to reassess the growth of international trade and the evolution of towns in this crucial period. Boat remains, coins and trade artifacts were all examined and on the basis of this a general account was offered of the role of towns and trade in the creation of Western Europe. It was the first synthesis of its kind for the medieval period, and confirmed the importance of archaeology as a major source of evidence for an understanding of the economic history of the Dark Ages. Recently (in 2012) this seminal work was revisited in Dark Age Economics: a New Audit (2012).
Amongst his later publications are (with Riccardo Francovich) Villa to Village (2003), (with John Mitchell) San Vincenzo Maggiore and its workshops (2011), (with Sauro Gelichi) From One Sea to Another. Trading Places in the European and Mediterranean Early Middle Ages (2012).
Richard Hodges is currently president of the American University of Rome