"Mohammed and Charlemagne" by Henri Pirenne

"Mohammed and Charlemagne" by Henri Pirenne
Author(s): Peter Brown
Reviewed work(s):
Source: Daedalus, Vol. 103, No. 1, Twentieth-Century Classics Revisited (Winter, 1974), pp. 2533
Published by: The MIT Press on behalf of American Academy of Arts & Sciences
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20024183 .
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PETER BROWN
Mohammed
and Charlemagne
Henri
Pirenne
by
et Charlemagne
in 1937.
Henri
Mahomet
Pirenne's
appeared
posthumously
Pirenne had formulated
its central thesis as early as 1916 and put it forward from
1922 onwards with a rigor of proof to which the book itself adds little other than a
wealth of supporting evidence. Mahomet
et Charlemagne,
therefore, was hailed less
as a novelty
than as the "historical
of the foremost interpreter of the
testament"
social and economic
To reconsider
it as a
of medieval
development
Europe.
"historical
testament/' may help
succinct and brilliant monograph
the future reader and the past connoisseur of this
to seize through its pages the outline of modern at
of the end of the ancient world and the beginning
of the
titudes toward the history
Middle Ages.
as a historical testament. From
It is important to treat Mahomet
et Charlemagne
the outset, it was vigorously contested by Pirenne's
intellectual next of kin, and, as a
et Charlemagne
of Mahomet
in the
has entered circulation
result, the argument
as "The Pirenne Thesis."
academic world
for and against
this thesis
Debates
have provided historians of the Later Roman Empire, Byzantium,
early medieval
Islam,
and Western
Europe,
not
to mention
numismatists,
with
material
for a respect
able academic
light industry, one whose products have, on the whole, proved in
genious and serviceable. That the terms of reference in the debate should stretch
from the ceramic industry of third-century-A.D.
Gaul to the relations between Scan
dinavia and Central Asia in the tenth century is no small tribute to the issues com
translation.
pressed into 285 pages in the English
As with many a "classic,''
it is even possible for the specialist today to do without
et Charlemagne.
of the social and economic development
Mahomet
Histories
of
Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire can be written both with a greater
of an un
range of detail and with a more sober sense of the human possibilities
Western
25
26
PETER
BROWN
in his Mahomet
than was shown by Pirenne
et Charle
economy
a
contain
to
reference
need
the
magne;
only
passing
they
paradoxes of
dazzling
tillers of the ever-richer delta of Late Antique and early
Pirenne's exposition. Happy
medieval
studies can now get on with the job, giving little thought to the headwaters
of that Nile which once swept so great a mass of alluvium down to their respective
fields.
derdeveloped
The "Pirenne Thesis" can be succinctly
summarized:
For centuries after the political collapse of the Roman Empire in the West,
the
economic and social life of Western
to
still
moved
the
Europe
exclusively
rhythms of
a robust "functional Romanity"
resources
were
the ancient world. Romania,
(whose
too easily overlooked
strict
classical
intact
survived
the
from
so-called
scholars),
by
Invasions" of the fifth century A.D. Shabby but irreplaceable, much as
"Germanic
is an unmistakeable
the slipshod cursive script of a Merovingian
document
descen
dant of the ancient Roman hand, worn down by uninterrupted
use, the civilization
Roman
It
survived
because
life
of Romania
outlived
the
the economic
Empire.
long
It was only with the Arab
had continued
based on the Mediterranean
unscathed.
in the seventh century A.D.
conquests of the eastern and southern Mediterranean
was
that this Mediterranean-wide
Islam marks a breach in the
economy
disrupted.
continuum of ancient civilization
In
incomparably deeper than that of the Germanic
vasions. For the first time, half of the known world took on an alien face. The Arab
war fleets of the late seventh century closed the Mediterranean
to shipping; the fall
in 698 sealed the fate of Marseille
in
of Carthage
and with it the fate of Romania
of its Mediterranean-wide
of Western
the civilization
Gaul. Deprived
horizons,
world of Northern Gaul and
Europe closed in on itself, and the under-Romanized
a
in earlier generations.
inconceivable
The
prominence
suddenly gained
Germany
Romania was replaced by a Western
dominated
southern-oriented
Europe
by a
Northern Frankish aristocracy. It was a society where wealth was restricted to land; its
ruler, lacking the gold currency that taxation could have drawn from the economy
had trade remained vigorous, was forced to reward his followers by grants of land,
and feudalism was born. Its church no longer included a laity bathed in the living
slipshod Latinity of the South, but was dominated
by a clerical elite whose very
into parchment made
from the hides of their Northern
"ploughed"
handwriting
that of earlier clerics and laymen had slipped easily over sheets of
flocks, whereas
to the quays of
Alexandria
papyrus
shipped direct from pre-Islamic
Egyptian
Marseille.
and diet lost all hint of the "Roman" elegance which had been
Clothes
commerce
in the spices and silk products
based on continued
of the eastern
a Northern Germanic Empire
In short, the Empire of Charlemagne,
Mediterranean.
in any previous century, marks the true beginning
of the Middle Ages;
unimaginable
it was the autumn of the ancient Mediterranean
all that had preceded
culture. The
not
Pirenne
slow
in the
Romania
of
insisted,
any
entropy
happened,
change
through
and human potential of the
South, nor through any discrete rise in the economic
Germanic North. Rather, by breaking the unity of the Mediterranean,
the Arab war
Mohammed
and Charlemagne
27
fleets had twisted a tourniquet around the artery by which the warm blood of ancient
to pulse into Western
in its last Romano-Byzantine
form, had continued
civilization,
correct
to
is
without
that
"It
therefore
say
Mohammed,
strictly
Europe.
inconceivable."1
been
would
have
Charlemagne
readers who are grappling with the
for the "Pirenne Thesis." Modern
own
an
our
to a "Pacific" civilization, will find
from
of
shift
"Atlantic"
implications
the verve and deep historical empathy with which Pirenne entered into a world whose
to the Mediterranean
basin unthinkable
considered
any alternative
par
people
et
is
in
terms
written
of
Mahomet
human
history
ticularly thrilling.
Charlemagne
So much
that suddenly close and tumble upside-down.
thrill alone has carried historians of all periods through this book. Yet the
et
of the end of the ancient world may well
historian
look beyond Mahomet
a
a
moment.
is
for
The
Thesis"
"Pirenne
brilliant
but
frail,
spark,
Charlemagne
into position
between
solid electrical points, patiently constructed and maneuvered
by Pirenne and the scholars of his generation. We can see their outline clearly in the
horizons
This
In order to read Mahomet
et Charlemagne
with an
light of the spark they generate.
in early medieval
eye for present and future development
studies, it is as well to in
quire how these electrical points came to be set up as they were, whether
they can
now stand where they did, and what new leap of current might yet pass between
them.
The first and most lasting impression of Henri Pirenne's work as a whole
is the
one to which the readers of Mahomet
was
et Charlemagne
return.
Pirenne
constantly
the master of his age in expounding
the social and economic
basis of medieval
It is as a series of chapters in the history of Western
civilization.
civilization
and its
et Charlemagne
remains an irreplaceable book.
transformations
that Mahomet
Discussion
of the separate facets of the "Pirenne Thesis" can divert attention
from the stature of the book, much as a charged cloud disintegrates
into a discharge
of discrete hailstones. Nevertheless,
let us examine in passing some of the facets of
Pirenne with which it is now possible to disagree. First, economically,
the commer
in the fifth and sixth centuries was not such as to sup
cial role of the Mediterranean
as we
of ancient civilization
that Pirenne posited; determined,
port the continuity
invasions of the fifth century down to size, Pirenne, as
shall see, to cut the Germanic
scholars of the Late Roman Empire were quick to point out, underrated
the slow dis
Roman society from the third century A.D. onwards. One might
location of Western
add that the hushed generations
the great visitation of the plague after
following
saw
which
the
old
saddened
of
543,
age
Justinian, the maturity of Pope Gregory I,
and the youth of Mohammed,
as a possible
repay more close consideration
might
in
the
of
the
Mediterranean.
turning point
history
restricted toWestern
Second, to have introduced Islam into a debate previously
was
a
master
of
stroke
the
Europe
integration,
brightest "leap" of current of all
two hitherto separate poles. The pages in which Pirenne describes
between
with which the Muslim
conquerors changed the civilization of populations
the ease
that had
28
PETER BROWN
in the book. Yet
remained untouched by the Germanic
settlers are the most profound
(like its nominal ancestors?Judaism
early Islam trembled on the brink of becoming
a Mediterranean
on the surface of
and Christianity)
civilization.
Shimmering
over water, are reminders
medieval
Islamic civilization,
like the path of a moonbeam
of Romania?in
in its
Islam's spread of Mediterranean
legends as far as Indonesia,
in its preservation
revival of Greek philosophy,
of gestures of ancient Mediterranean
so long forgotten inWestern
Christian worship
Europe that today they stand for all
in modern
that is alien and "oriental"
Islam. Ummayad
palaces on the fringe of
as works of Gandhara
art: their stance between East and
Syria are as tantalizing
is still undecided.
was fought within
Islam
Indeed, the battle for control of the Mediterranean
old Roman Damascus
and new Baghdad,
itself, between
Syria and Iraq?between
heir to the majesty of the Sassanian Empire. It was the last round of a battle that had
to determine whether
been fought from the days of the Achaemenids
the Mediterra
nean would
sink to the status of a distant fringe area of a Eurasian empire. The
West
constant
court of
initiative
and diplomatic
military
enjoyed
by the Persian
over
in
of
the
the
sixth
contained
the
century
Emperors
Ctesiphon
Constantinople
An
of
final
of
of
the
Arabic
teller
Persian
victory
ingredients
fairy-tales
Baghdad.
to draw
and One Nights)
(distant harbinger of The Thousand
already threatened
in the marketplace
of Mecca. Even Sinbad the Sailor
audience
away Mohammed's
had already made
his debut. The recently published
discoveries
of the British
to Siraf on the Persian Gulf
Institute at Teheran
in their archaeological
expedition
trade that must have formed the basis for
give an impression of a Sassanian maritime
the Arab commercial
empire in the Indian Ocean. These are clear rumblings of the
vast subsidence
that shifted the center of gravity of Near Eastern civilization
away
from the Mediterranean.
the true battle for
Around the shores of the Mediterranean,
the survival of Romania was waged not for control of the salty sea itself, but by sturdy
in Nubia,
farmers?in
the Upper Nile,
and in the great olive plantations
of North
rainwater against the
Africa?for
control of the irrigation that held their precious
at
have discovered,
blind pressure of the nomads. Polish and British archaeologists
an
a
in
at
Assuan
of
little
the
Faras and
Kasr-Ibrahim
Romania,
province
Egypt,
that held onto its water and so to its sixth-century
Byzantium
amazing miniature
culture up to the age of Joan of Arc.
of the main
student and unqualified
the modern
acceptance
Standing between
are the facts that Romania was
et Charlemagne
line of the argument of Mahomet
than those stressed by
by fissures more ancient and more paradoxical
dilapidated
to
in
coincide at few
relation
Islam's
and
that
Romania,
Pirenne,
deeper rhythms,
to
Pirenne
attention. To
which
first
drew
with
the
juxtapositions
tempting
points
a
revived ap
has
been
there
these I must add that among Western
medievalists,
in
this period,
world
and
of
the
Northern
obscurely
slowly
taking shape
preciation
and a
little since the age of the Megaliths,
often along sea routes that had changed
of
the
economic
and
historians,
redefinition,
among
particularly
steady depreciation
as
in
of
the
factors
movement
and
bullion
of
of
the
style
luxury
goods
significance
to both these points I shall return.
civilization:
Mediterranean
Christian
Mohammed
and Charlemagne
29
Pirenne, however, chose his evidence as he did because what interested him was
and its material
civilization
basis. Differing ways of life and their material
foun
dations drew his unfailing attention. How the style of one civilization differed from
that of another?this
Pirenne would seize upon and lay bare with unfailing clarity
and zest in terms of a landscape, of an economic
situation, or of a form of social
His
Histoire
et Charlemagne
is
de
Mohamet
without
the
organization.
Belgique
a
for
not
two
here
deals
successive
with
he
cramping necessity
single explanation;
and contrasting
styles of civilization, but with a spectrum of contrasting ways of life,
in time and contiguous
in space, each firmly set by Pirenne in its own
contemporary
economic
and social context,
as a bundle
each explored
of distinctive
human
In a masterly
for in
survey of the fourteenth-century
possibilities.
Netherlands,
Flemish face
stance, Pirenne describes how Flanders slowly took on its non-French,
as the sea routes from the Atlantic ousted the land routes across the
of
Kingdom
France; it was a Flemish face, also, because the local producers at Bruges and Ghent
no longer depended on the merchants who had
previously controlled the distribution
of cloth along the roads into the French-speaking
south. In a few, lucid pages he
in social structure and cultural horizons of momentous
analyzes a revolution
impor
tance for the history of modern Belgium.
In the 1920's and 1930's this particular manner
of grasping
the folds in the
landscape of medieval Europe called for deep serenity of vision. Pirenne came from a
Flemish
industrialists, yet he was professor at the predominantly
family of Wallon
of Ghent. What mattered
for him was the shifting pageant of
speaking University
varying social structures, not the Romantic shibboleths of race and language. There
is real personal warmth
in his appreciation
man of the
of Jean Froissart?chronicler,
a fitting symbol of the human diversity and tolerance that
world, true cosmopolitan,
Pirenne admired
in the fourteenth-century
Netherlands.
Race and language,
for
Pirenne, were infinitely plastic. His heavy emphasis on the continuity of Romania as
a social and economic unity based on the Mediterranean
was forced into prominence
by his steadfast refusal, as a cultivated European of the 1920's, to admit that, by vir
tue of their race alone, the Germanic
invaders could have offered any alternative
to
it. It took more than a Romantic
nature of
emphasis on the supposedly distinctive
Germanic political and legal institutions to convince this Belgian that the Germanic
invaders had anything
to offer to a civilization based on such tangible and massive
realities as a network of ancient towns, a disciplined
tax-system, and a living com
merce.
Early in his career, Pirenne opted for Paris against Germany. He opted for the
conviction of Fustel de Coulanges,
that the documents of the early Middle Ages, if left
to speak for themselves
in their rough Latin, would, to the unprejudiced
reader, speak
of a Late-Roman
social scene prolonged untidily into the Merovingian
period, and not
of any new Germanic
Pirenne first conceived
the
principles of social organization.
main theme of Mahomet
et Charlemagne
in an internment camp in Germany after
1914, to which he had been sent for refusing to collaborate with the German attempt
to re-open the University
of Ghent as a "nationalist,"
Flemish university. This goes
some way to explain why he upheld its paradoxes with such
sharpness: for Pirenne,
PETER
30
BROWN
the traditional equation of aWestern
European of the early twentieth century in ex
Germanic
invaders
plaining his own past had had one crucial element removed?the
were not a significant factor in the history of the early medieval
period. If he could
turn neither to Alaric nor to Clovis to account for the developments
that led to the
creative non-Roman
left on
empire of Charlemagne,
why not to the only genuinely
the horizon?Mohammed?
Pirenne's
of Germans
canny narrative about the early settlements
Rereading
around the Mediterranean
makes one appreciate
the vital contribution made by
to the history of the barbarian
Marxist and Marxist-influenced
in
historiography
vasions. Here, as in Pirenne, is history "demythologized,"
rendered antiseptic to the
to the grey, common humanity which,
in Late
myth of race by stern attention
Roman conditions,
rapidly turned German warlords into great landowners and starv
into serfs. Whether
the organizing principle at issue is the Romania of
ing pillagers
Pirenne or the class struggle of Marx, the history of the barbarian invasions has been
made more intelligible
through the choice of a principle different from those which
of "Romanist"
studies.
and "Germanist"
guided generations
et Charlemagne
is the sort of classic that can
One can appreciate how Mahomet
In one firm stroke, Pirenne released the study of Late An
render itself unnecessary.
and "Germanist"
tiquity from the impasse created by the rival claims of "Romanist"
to look
scholarship has raced ahead, without
legal historians. Naturally,
bothering
to areas where Pirenne's
back. The debate over the "Pirenne Thesis" quickly moved
contributions
knowledge
lagged behind his intuitions: in fact, the most stimulating
have been made by Byzantinists
and Islamic scholars.
This is easy to understand.
Pirenne's book, the work of a master of Northern
testament of a generation
of Byzantine
European
history, was also the historical
of Byzantium was the
studies. The discovery of the social and economic achievement
most exciting
To the
studies in Pirenne's
feature of early medieval
generation.
historian of the transition from the ancient to the medieval
idea of the state, the
Byzantine Empire was a surviving example of the ancient bureaucratic polity: a state
cities and a
supported by a high rate of taxation, soundly based on mercantile
prosperous
peasantry,
able
to maintain
a
professional
army,
a
salaried
bureaucracy
the "feudal"
and a prestigious gold currency. By this high yardstick of achievement,
was
West
of
measured
and
found
Pirenne's
the
medieval
fertile in
society
wanting.
intuition not shared by every scholar of the Later Roman Empire, many
tuition?an
social and cultural differences between eastern
of whom still stress the long-standing
to apply this idea of
in
Late Roman times?was
and western Mediterranean
society
toWestern
for Pirenne
Byzantium
Europe before the Islamic conquests. Romania:
a
in
eastern
it
word
coined
the
Mediterranean
where
this word
(revealingly,
sum
to
seemed
the
remained current up to Ottoman
up
times)
exhaustively
shabby,
but solid, social and cultural furniture of Merovingian
Gaul. He saw Western
Europe
as a substandard Byzantium:
in
"Until the 8th century, the only positive element
was
the
of
the
influence
Empire."
history
in the
too narrow a definition
of Mediterranean
civilization
This was, perhaps,
Late Antique period. The traveler who drives along the coastline of the Mediterra
Mohammed
and Charlemagne
31
to the North, massive forerunners
nean, always aware of the grey band of mountains
of the Alps, that dwarf the plains covered with vineyards
and the porphyry es
carpments heavy with the scent of cistus, might be reminded that, in a similar way,
alternative
styles of life to the clearly defined Romania of Pirenne had existed as
men many centuries before Charlemagne.
for Mediterranean
A
palpable presences
in the early Middle Ages is today better
civilization
history of Western
European
able to find room for an element
the distinctive
trenchantly excluded by Pirenne:
of
recent
the
civilization
of
the
North.
in
The
achievements
Irish
and Anglo
style
Saxon studies have revealed an insular world in the late sixth and seventh centuries
of vast creativity,
on Romania.
The work of social
only partly dependent
studies than with any other
(more fruitfully allied with Dark-Age
anthropologists
of
that
of
Ancient
has
induced a sober respect for the
period
history except
Greece)
skill with which
and
societies
have been
preliterate
primitive
technologically
observed to create a resilient "technology
of human relations." A connoisseur of the
intricate codes of behavior revealed in Beowulf and confirmed
in the life of African
as
tribes might still find the Merovingian
Pirenne
found
court,
it, "a brothel," but its
violences were governed by the law of the blood feud?and
this was not the "law of
the jungle." The claims of a new generation of historians working on the culture and
social mores of Dark-Age Northern Europe are more solid than earlier claims based
i on a Romantic?and
later brutally racist?idealization
of the "Germanic"
contribu
tion to early medieval
Europe, against which Pirenne so rightly set his face in the
1920's and 1930s. These new studies reveal values and social habits which were resili
ent and apposite, even in Romania;
their rise to prominence
in the civilization of the
as
not
of
to
need
be
due
the
age
Charlemagne
regarded
closing down of some infi
richer
alternative.
nitely
Pirenne's approach is most revealing where he touches most closely on cultural
of the conscious values of groups supports his perspective
history. The evidence
better than does the fragmentary
and ambiguous
ac
evidence
for their economic
tivities. Surprisingly enough, it is the historian of the Christian Church, and not the
economic historian, who finds Pirenne's
vision of the early medieval
period most
identified
itself
its
almost
from
with
the urban
helpful. The Christian
religion
origin
civilization
of the Mediterranean;
it penetrated
into the sprawling countryside
of
Western
towns of Asia
Europe along trade routes that linked it with the "boom"
Minor; and it fed its imagination on Palestine and Syria and found that its intellec
tual powerhouse,
in the Latin world, was North Africa. Indeed, the history of the
Christian Church in the early Middle Ages is the history of Romania d la Pirenne. A
student of religious sentiment and its visual expression in the eastern Mediterranean,
who sets out to trace the evolution of the Byzantine
iconostasis only to find the miss
in a description
of a church in seventh-century
ing link in the surviving evidence
returns to his task with a sober respect for the taproots that the
County Kildare,
culture
of the Christian Church
sank into the ancient soil of Romania.
scholar who scrutinizes the evidence
for commercial
contact between Gaul
and the eastern Mediterranean
in the sixth century must surely come away with the
odd feeling that somehow the glass that he holds in his hand for this meticulous
task
The
PETER
32
tells him
BROWN
far more
about the quality of Mediterranean
civilization
than do the
in
its
text
to say to
The
focus.
has
whole
he
read
has
fragments caught
something
him. Rather than turn over yet again references to Syrian merchants
and Egyptian
papyrus in the History of the Franks by Gregory of Tours, itmight be more rewarding
to attempt
to delineate
the mental
horizons of Gregory himself?a
but
delicate,
better-documented
task, promising more sure conclusions. What did Romania really
mean
to Gregory? How deeply were the ancient ways still sunk into his mind and
of a miracle,
his characterization
of a
categories of behavior? Did his expectations
reactions to the ways of God with men still move
to the
holy man, his instinctive
same rhythms as Syria and Cappadocia?
an examination
This enterprise,
of the
ease or difficulty with which Mediterranean
men and their neighbors
respective
of
ancient world from their
Romania
could
lift
the
the
heavy legacy
throughout
illuminate some of the greatest unsolved problems of medieval
minds, might
history.
it would not, I suspect, have satisfied Pirenne to rest his thesis on the
However,
atavisms of Christian bishops. He wanted more from a civilization:
he wanted towns
and merchants.
This accounts, perhaps,
insistence
"Pirenne Thesis":
Pirenne's
was
merchants
the
Syrian
distinguishing
in the
for the most hotly contested element
trade conducted
that the long-distance
by
characteristic?indeed
the sine qua non?of
era.
the Romania of the pre-Islamic
Here again we touch on the outstanding
life work: his un
quality of Pirenne's
as
of
the
of
of
The
full
the
medieval
age
city.
meaning
Charlemagne,
derstanding
an
et
not
it
is
of
in
marks
the
end
the
that
Mahomet
only
presented
Charlemagne,
Cities. Pirenne's brilliant
cient world, but that it serves as the backdrop toMedieval
Cities, begins with a world that had recently, in the Carolingian
sketch, Medieval
knew better than Pirenne how
lost its cities and their merchants.
Nobody
Age,
creation of merchants
the ancient city was from the medieval
different
city?the
alone. Yet one cannot resist the impression that Pirenne, looking back, past the band of
into the Romania of
shadow that fell over urban life in the age of Charlemagne,
In
times, saw the same shade of light on both sides of the darkness.
Merovingian
Medieval
the revival of trade in tenth-century
Cities, Pirenne describes
Europe as
to Pirenne, was a sur
from Venice. Venice,
sweeping "like a beneficent
epidemic"
a tenacious colony of
vival of the old, mercantile
style of the Roman Mediterranean,
"honorary
Syrians" perched on the edge of the landlocked Carolingian West.
InMahomet
et Charlemagne
is as much a symptom as the cause of
the merchant
a style of civilization of which Pirenne evidently approved: "the South had been the
In fact, however, when disentangled
from the
and progressive
bustling
region."
the Syrian merchant
that made up Pirenne's Romania,
skein of related phenomena
cuts a poor figure. In the Later Empire, he was a stopgap who replaced the more
ventures of the classical Roman period. In Italy, it has been shown,
solid commercial
on land and vanished,
into sand; no
like water
the merchants
spent their money
were
horizons for the soapmaker whose fortunes
Mediterranean-wide
safely invested
of merchants
of luxury goods sur
in estates near Ravenna. The discreet ministrations
vived
because
the Arab invasions precisely
they had always been
One might
look for the genuine article far into the East?in
marginal.
sporadic and
the villages of
Mohammed
33
and Charlemagne
and the Sassanian capital at Ctesiphon
Mesopotamia
(whither the brother of one
a
of
merchants
vanished
for
Syrian
family
twenty years in the sixth cen
profitable
in
Isle
of
in
the
Persian
in
the
the
tury),
Gulf,
camp of nomad chieftains on the
Kharg
ends of the silk ways of Central Asia, in the wake of Persian condottieri
on the
Western
was described
frontiers of China where Christianity
discovered
(in newly
Chinese Christian documents
of the late seventh century) as "the religion of An
tioch." There we could find a merchant
and his distinctive
culture after the heart of
caravan
it
but
would
be
the
routes
of
the
culture
of Asia, not of the
Pirenne,
Mediterranean.
It was as a symbol of a style of life that Pirenne stuck to the role of the Syrian
in creating the Romania of post-Roman Western
merchant
Europe. For Pirenne had
that capacity of the greatest historians of civilization,
and especially of historians who
a warm blush of
attempt to deal with the problem of changing styles of civilization:
romantic fervor that led him to identify himself wholeheartedly
with one style of life,
and so to follow its development
and modification
interest heavy
with a passionate
with love and concern. Pirenne for the Middle Ages; Rostovtseff for the ancient world:
each in his way was a great European bourgeois,
studying with deep commitment
the fate of civilizations
based on cities.
References
1. Henri
Pirenne,
Mohammed
and Charlemagne,
tr. B. Miall
(New York: W. W.
Norton,
1939),
p. 234.