PAUL FREEDMAN: So we
had talked about the
mathematical researches of the
Arabs combining Persian, Greek,
and Indian mathematics
and, of course, with
contributions of their own.
So that the enumeration, the
use of zero are from India,
but the development of algebra
is a unique contribution of
this period and of
these people.
Let's talk briefly
about geography.
Remember the chapter in
Wickham opens with the
contemptuous description of
Palermo by the tenth century
geographer, Ibn Hawqal,
H-A-W-Q-A-L. And the point of
that is not Palermo or anything
like that, but just
the fascination that the Muslim
world had for travel,
for geography.
Geography both of a quantitative
kind-- measuring,
navigation, figuring out to
get from place to place--
and of a kind of curiosities
of the world kind, of
different customs, different
peoples, different products.
So these geographers were
employed by the caliphs, for
example, to figure out the
circumference of the world, to
figure out the relationship
between land and
water in the world.
This is an interesting
form of speculation.
If you look at Christian maps of
the world up to 1300 or so,
they show almost no oceans,
It's all huge
amounts of land mass.
This is partly, it's thought, an
interpretation of something
in one of the apocryphal books
of the Bible that seems to
suggest that seven-eighths
of the world is land.
Ptolemy, whom we spoke about
last time, the Greek
geographer, author of this book
known as the Almagest or
Geography, translated into
Arabic as one of the first
projects of this House
of Wisdom in Baghdad.
Ptolemy has a different
picture.
And Ptolemy is the first
geographer received in the
medieval period to suggest
that there's an
awful lot of water.
And that you could get around
much of the world by water.
Although crucially, Ptolemy does
not think that you can go
around Africa.
Ptolemy has a kind of Antarctic
land mass that
connects with Africa.
And it was only the Portuguese
at the end of
the fifteenth century--
specifically in 1498,
well really, 1489--
who demonstrated that you could
go around Africa, and
thus from the Atlantic Ocean
into the Indian Ocean.
Crucial, crucial discovery.
But this question of how much
water is there versus how much
land is there--
a sense of the entire world--
is a problem investigated
by these geographers.
Many of these guys are
indefatigable travelers.
So there's this book by
Al-Muqaddasi, M-U-Q-A-D-D,
usually known in English as
the Best Division for
Knowledge of the Regions.
Completed in 985 after twenty
years of traveling.
But the greatest traveler of
the Islamic premodern world
was Ibn Khaldun, who is much
later but worth at least
mentioning here, 1332 to 1406.
And he started from his native
Tunis and traveled as far as
China and Indonesia.
And then, finally, a scholar
named al-Idrisi, another one
of these travelers, geographers,
was hired by the
Christian king of Sicily, Roger
the Second, in 1138 to
put together a map of the
world with accompanying
descriptive texts.
And it is an aspect both of the
respect accorded to the
Arab geographers in the
Christian world, and the fact
that despite our tendency to
see these two worlds as
opposed-- after all 1138 is
the era of the Crusades--
there's quite a fair amount of
collaboration, interchange of
knowledge between the Christian
kingdoms of Europe,
and the Islamic world--
the Islamic kingdoms--
of the Southern Mediterranean
and the Middle East.
Finally, medicine.
We're not exhausting the subject
studied by the Arabs,
but I wanted to give you math,
geography, and medicine as
three examples.
The main authority for the
Arabs, the person that they
translated with the most
assiduity and interest, was
Galen, G-A-L-E-N, a physician
who wrote in Greek at the time
of the Roman Empire.
And Galen is the person who
is responsible for the
transmission, if not invention,
of the notion of
the four bodily humors.
This model of physiology
dominated medicine until the
eighteenth century, let's say.
This is the notion that within
human beings there are these
four fluids that are essential
building blocks of character
and of health.
They are both mental and
physical factors in health or
in illness.
And they correspond both
to the four elements--
the four basic things out of
which the world is built
according to Greek science--
and to the interaction of the
corresponding four climates or
four tendencies.
So the four elements: earth,
air, fire, and water.
These climates or tendencies
are hot, dry, moist--
hot, dry, moist, cold-- right.
Hot, cold, moist, dry.
And the four humors--
these are liquids that are
inside our bodies--
are bile or yellow bile, which
corresponds to fire, which is
hot and dry.
Blood, which corresponds
to the element of air,
and is hot and wet.
Phlegm, mucus, P-H-L-E-G-M,
which corresponds to water,
and is cold and wet.
And, finally, black bile,
which is earth,
and cold and dry.
Key to this idea of the humors
is the notion of balance or
equilibrium.
And in this it resembles Chinese
medicine, Indian
Ayurvedic medicine, and indeed,
at least conceptually,
notions that people have
of their own bodies.
That the experience of illness
or of mental distress is one
of imbalance, of the
predominance of one element
over another.
So the healthy body is in a
state of equilibrium, while
disease is part of a fluctuation
due to imbalance.
But people are never completely
balanced, at least
not for long.
Everybody has some, what's
called temperament.
A "temperament" is a favoring
of one of these humors.
So and we still use these terms
without particularly
being interested in
their origins.
So melancholia, or the
melancholic temperament, which
is associated with sadness,
lethargy, what would be
medicalized now as depression,
is from a predominance of
black bile.
Melan--
black.
Cholar--
bile.
In Greek, melancholia.
There's the choleric
temperament, people who tend
to be angry, irritable.
And this is from regular
or yellow bile,
predominance of that.
Or sanguine: sort of more
optimistic, more risk taking.
Predominance of blood,
the sanguinary humor.
This is the basis of an awful
lot of medical theory of
physiology, of understanding of
disease and its treatment,
as well as its prevention
through things like diet.
There are lots and lots of
medical writings and doctors
in the Islamic world.
The most famous is known in
the West as Avicenna, Ibn
Sina, 980 to 1037.
He is a Persian, active
in Persia.
And he, like many of these
doctors, was not just a
physician, but a musicologist
and a philosopher.
He wrote medical writings on
physiology, diagnosis,
treatment, and medication.
His work was translated into
Latin and known in the West as
the Cannon.
The Cannon of Avicenna was the
standard work taught in
medical schools until the
seventeenth, eighteenth century.
Again, I wouldn't say that I
would be desperate to be alive
in the eleventh century
in order to have
better medical care.
There is no--the humors don't
really work; it's not
scientifically true,
but so what?
We are interested in the world
views in aspects of how people
look at things.
Certainly, many aspects of
this medical care were
superior to what was available
elsewhere.
It was based on observation.
The observation obviously
couldn't be MRIs or CAT scans.
The observation, however, was
much closer than that even
undertaken by the Greeks.
An awful lot of what
might be learned of
disease was through urine.
And the examination of the urine
is almost somewhat the
symbol of being a doctor, that
in some Western illustrations
of medicine you know that the
person is a doctor because
he's holding up this little
flask and examining its
properties.
So, again, you weren't
supposed to--
in some societies--
cut up bodies for autopsies.
We all know things like the
circulation of the blood, the
role the heart in that were not
properly understood for
many centuries later.
But this is the most elaborate
and successful model of
medicine and practice of
medicine in the civilized
world at this time.
So this is a splendid
civilization.
I hope I've given you some
slight indication of that.
Why does it collapse?
This is partly a question
of why does any
civilization collapse.
Time tends to ruin everything.
The Abbasids were victims of the
same divisive tendencies
we've already seen at work
within the Islamic world right
from the beginning.
Religious strife, particularly
but not exclusively the
Sunni/Shi'ite division.
Dynastic, that is to say,
internal or familial problems.
Resentment at taxation.
In the beginning, as we said,
the Islamic conquerors taxed
rather lightly.
But as the ability to rely on
confiscated estates of nobles,
the Church and the state
faded as the
Abbasids became the state.
Like all states, they started
to run out of money.
They had a large army, they had
a large court, they had a
large administrative structure
to maintain.
And then, as now, people tend,
rightly or wrongly, not to
appreciate the role of
government in everything, and
to be resentful of having
to pay for it.
The fundamental problem, as
Wickham points out, is that
the Empire was too big.
And here, we're back where we
started with the Roman Empire.
Empires tend to fall because
they are too big.
And being too big they
tend to overreach.
In other words, they're already
big and they try, if
not to get bigger, at least
to deal with more enemies.
Because as you get bigger you
develop more enemies.
And as you get bigger you
also develop more
fears of external enemies.
So to say that the Empire was
too big is not to say anything
very innovative or unusual.
The real question is why does
there come a point at which
this bigness is fatal?
In other words, the Abbasid
Caliphate does fine from 750
to 910 and then it
falls apart.
Why does it fall apart
when it does?
And I don't have a great answer
for that, except to
point to the other divisions, or
to misfortune: having poor
Caliphs, having Caliphs who
don't last for a long time and
are overthrown.
Nevertheless, states start to
split off from the Caliphate.
The first, right from the
beginning, is Umayyad Spain.
And Wickham talks a little bit
about the civilization of
Umayyad Spain.
But you start to have the
splitting of places like
Egypt, under the Shi'ite Dynasty
the Fatimids by the
tenth century.
What's interesting is that these
societies are run very
much like the Abbasid
Caliphate.
Although they are large, they
are more practical, compact,
and somewhat easier
to hold together.
They have the same kind of
cultural efflorescence,
scientific curiosity,
sensuality of
culture, luxury products.
Indeed, Umayyad Spain would
have the reputation of the
height of civilization
in Christian Europe
of the tenth century.
A nun writing from a German
monastery in the tenth century
named Hroswitha, Hroswitha
of Gandersheim, describes
Cordoba, capital of
Umayyad Spain, the
largest city in Europe--
excluding Constantinople, the
largest city in Western Europe
at this time--
she describes Cordoba as "the
ornament of the world".
She had never visited it.
She's a cloistered nun in
a monastery in Germany.
Nevertheless, for her this
is the most splendid
place in the world.
Splendid in terms of wealth,
population, culture, learning.
And Ornament of the World is
the title of a book by our
colleague in the Spanish
department, Maria Menocal,
written about ten years ago,
describing medieval Spain and
its civilization.
Cordoba would be a center for
learning among Christians,
Jews, and Muslims.
So this series of cultural
accomplishments by the Arabs,
as I said, may come
as a surprise, but
it should not be.
The surprise element may be,
as we've said now more than
once, the ability of the Arabs
to assimilate other traditions
and to remain as conquerors.
That is, these two things
are related.
They remain as conquerors
even though the
Caliphate does not survive.
The Arabs are still the dominant
force in Egypt, North
Africa, and much of the Middle
East. And where they are not
dominant, Islam remains the
dominant faith of places like
Persia, modern Iran,
and further east.
So just because the Caliphate
falls does not mean that Islam
loses power and it doesn't mean
that the civilization of
Islam fails.
At least not at this point.
I hope then we can see that
Islam is a thing in itself, a
historical force in itself,
developed in our period, but
also to some extent an heir
to the Roman Empire.
Remember I said that there
are three heirs
to the Roman Empire--
the Byzantine or Eastern Roman
Empire, most obviously the
Western kingdoms--
and when we come to Charlemagne
next week we'll be
talking about this much
more aggressively--
and the Islamic world.
It's also, however, the heir
to some other cultures.
It's the heir to Sassanian or
Persian culture, for example.
So it is not exclusively to be
understood as a successor to
the Roman Empire, but then
again, neither is the west of
Europe and there is Byzantium.
And those are the things that
we're going to be discussing
in the future.
So any observations thus far,
or problems thus far?
The Islamic world, these three
lectures clear is as can be?
Imprinted in your mind like
the Seal of the Prophets?
OK.
So what about the
seventh century?
Now we're backtracking
a little.
Because with the Abbasids
we'd gotten up as far
as the tenth century.
I want to go back to the seventh
century because it's
the crucial turning point of
the early Middle Ages.
Even though we're in the tenth
week of this course--
is that right?--
here we are at its
hinge, I think.
Or at least we can get
the lay of the land.
This is a little bit like
approaching a shoreline which
you see very vaguely, and then
suddenly actually you can
start to see the houses and see
which are the mountains
that are far way, and which are
the hills that are in the
harbor, and so forth
and so on.
So I hope that--I mean, the
course differs from many other
history courses in that beyond
just the fall of the Roman
Empire, you don't have an
instinctive feel for what this
course is about, what
its contours are.
So what I'm trying to do is not
just point to a turning in
the road, but I'm trying to
show you the road itself
through the proverbial
forest and the trees.
OK?
Partly what we're concerned
with is periodization.
Now what are the time periods?
Is the classical world and
then the medieval world?
Is it something called the
classical world on
intermediate period called Late
Antiquity and then the
Middle Ages?
What does the course title, "The
Early Middle Ages," mean
when its successor is called
"The Birth of Europe"?
We're going to change that, by
the way, maybe we're going to
combine these into one course
called the Middle Ages, but
that's for the future.
So periodization.
And then when are we talking
about as the
borders of these periods?
It's a murky period that
covered by this course,
roughly 284 to 1000 or
Diocletian to the year 1000.
Murky but important, as I
hope you see already.
The development of such
absolutely fundamental world
historic things as
state-sponsored Christianity,
Islam, the ideas of political
power in Europe as nations as
opposed to the universal
Roman Empire.
All of these things take
shape in our period.
The traditional periodization
concentrated on the fall of
the Roman Empire.
And while everybody admitted
this was somewhat of an
arbitrary date, and indeed its
origins and consequences in
Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the
Roman Empire extend to the
second century AD and go on to
the fall of Constantinople in
the fifteenth century,
nevertheless, 476, the
deposition of the last Roman
emperor ruling from Ravenna by
the barbarian chieftain Odoacer,
who then proclaims
Italy to be part of the Eastern
Roman Empire, or at
least loyal to the Eastern Roman
Empire, that loyalty
largely a fiction.
In the traditional periodization
476 is then
followed by something called
the Dark Ages.
And the Dark Ages end, depending
on your point of
view, with the growth of the
European economy in the tenth
or eleventh century, with the
rediscovery of Latin classical
culture in the twelfth century,
or with the Italian
Renaissance in the fifteenth
century.
Certainly, the Renaissance
artists regarded everything
that came before them
as the Dark Ages.
And it is they who call
medieval architecture
"Gothic", by which they don't
mean a complimentary term.
Because if there's one thing the
Cathedral of Notre Dame in
Paris is not, it's not Gothic
in the literal sense.
It has nothing to do with the
Visigoths or the Ostrogoths.
We have a few little remnants of
Visigothic and Ostrogothic
architecture, and it's
not like that at all.
But for Vasari and people
like this--
Italian Renaissance writers--
all this was just junk.
It was just junk of the past.
It's just the Dark Ages.
The sun rose in Florence
sometime after Dante, is what
most people continue
to believe.
And as a medievalist I long ago
gave up fighting this and
embraced it.
The Dark Ages are cool.
I know Halloween is over but,
nevertheless, we all know that
the Middle Ages is far more
fun than the Renaissance.
Who wants proportion and logic
and severe classical lines,
when you can have gargoyles
and weird stuff?
I'm preaching to the
converted, right?
You're in this class.
If you didn't like weirdness,
you'd be taking well, what
would you be taking?
I think I'll just leave that.
We're not in competition
in this department.
So I'm trying to argue that this
period is more than just
a long nap for people just
waiting for something like the
Italian Renaissance.
There is this book that is
on the cutting edge of
scholarship of this period
that is called The Long
Morning of the Early Middle
Ages, which I think is not a
felicitous title, much as I
admire the people who put this
together who are at another
university not all that
different from this one.
By "long morning" they
don't mean brunch.
That's what I would have called
it, The Long Brunch of
the Early Middle Ages.
People enjoying eggs Benedict on
the smoldering ruins of the
Roman Empire-- eggs
Benedict, right?
The Benedictine Rule.
[LAUGHTER]
OK.
OK.
So we've seen that 476 is not
a cataclysmic turning point.
OK.
It's not a cataclysmic turning
point because, first of all,
the Roman Empire survives in
the East as we've said.
[LAUGHTER]
So I think we should turn this
off for just a minute or two
if you don't mind.
Why the seventh century,
seriously?
It is a better claim to the
status as pivot for this
roughly 700 year period
than 476.
It is in some sense the end
of the classical world.
It is in some sense the end of
whatever we want to call this,
Late Antiquity.
This is for basically
four reasons.
One, and the most obvious,
is the rise of Islam.
The rise of Islam and
its consequences.
The breaking apart of
the Mediterranean
into different regions.
Although I've stressed the ties
between Islam, Greece,
Persia, between the northern
and the southern
Mediterranean, between Islamic
Spain and Christian Spain,
nevertheless, the conquest of
the Arabs in the seventh
century and the early eighth
century create somewhat of a
break up of what had
been a united
Mediterranean under the Romans.
They're different religious,
cultural, and trades zones.
Under the Romans, North Africa
and Italy had been really very
close together.
Had much more in common with
each other than say Italy and
Northern Gaul or Britain.
Augustine sails between North
Africa and Italy all the time.
They're quite close.
But we think of them as being
far away because in the modern
world, and indeed since the
Islamic conquests, they've
been culturally and economically
very different.
So this breaking up of the
Mediterranean creates--
and I'll elaborate on
this in a moment--
doesn't create the birth of
Europe exactly, but it creates
Europe as a kind of
separate region.
Naturally, from the geographical
point of view,
Europe has always existed
as a continent.
But here we have the beginning
of the distinction between
Europe and Asia and Africa
without the kinds of close
ties that we've seen connected
the Mediterranean, the two
shores of the Mediterranean,
which mainly because they're
different continents and,
indeed, the third shore of the
Mediterranean in the East,
technically in Asia.
Now these start to fall into
different cultural and
political realms.
So the first aspect of the
seventh century is this
breakup of Mediterranean unity,
the breakup of this
aspect of the Roman legacy.
And if I've emphasized that
there are three heirs to the
Roman Empire, the fact that
there are three heirs to one
fortune shows that they
are distinct.
Second, and related to this, the
rise of Northern Europe.
What had been peripheral in
the Roman Empire starts to
become much more central.
And when we come to Charlemagne
you'll see this.
Around 800--
well, 800 exactly--
is the year in which Charlemagne
is crowned Roman
emperor in Rome itself by the
Pope as it turns out.
But already, this importance of
Northern Europe is evident
in some things we've
been talking about.
The Irish missionaries,
for example.
The role of Ireland in
preserving knowledge and in
diffusing Christianity.
The role of Britain.
The fact that, as I said,
Britain at the time of Bede,
was the most cultivated heir to
the Latin learning of the
Roman Empire.
And the fact that this should be
true in the eighth century
shows some kind of difference,
some kind of change, since in
the Roman Empire these had
been peripheral areas.
The further north you went,
the further away from the
Mediterranean, the less
civilized the society was.
The third aspect of this turning
point, a third way in
which we have a kind of shift,
is the crisis and reshaping of
the Byzantine Empire.
The loss of Egypt to North
Africa, Palestine, and Syria,
which take place in the
seventh century.
And we'll talk about this
more next week.
But the decline of the cities
of the Byzantine Empire, the
militarization of society
in the Byzantine Empire.
In fact, the seventh century
is the era of the Byzantine
Empire that most resembles the
fifth century for the Western
Roman Empire.
If we preserve the term "Dark
Ages" reluctantly, the West
goes into a period of what
Wickham calls "radical
simplification of material
culture." That is to say
people become poorer
and less in contact
with the wider world.
And this happens in Byzantium
in the seventh century.
So it's not that the Eastern
empire survives completely
intact, but that its collapse
is later than that of the
Western empire.
But crucially, again as
we will see, that
collapse is not total.
It's not as complete as that
of the West. The Byzantine
Empire would just barely survive
the seventh and eighth
centuries, and by the ninth
century enter into a period of
efflorescence that we
will be describing.
But this society is not really
Roman anymore on some
fundamental level--
fundamental level including
control of Rome and Italy.
The basis of the Byzantine
Empire will be Anatolia, that
is Asiatic Turkey and the
Balkans, modern Romania,
Bulgaria, Greece, Albania,
Croatia, Serbia, and so forth.
Constans II, Byzantine emperor
from 652 to 668, leaves
Constantinople after the first
Muslim siege intent on
creating a new capital in the
West because Constantinople is
too vulnerable.
In other words, he envisages a
Eastern Roman Empire, but with
its capital in Sicily.
He moves his capital eventually
to Syracuse,
Siracusa in modern Sicily.
He's the last emperor
to visit Rome.
Well, the last eastern Roman
emperor actually to put in an
appearance in Rome.
As I've said, these emperors
would call themselves the
Roman emperor until the day the
Turks penetrated the walls
of Constantinople in 1453.
But they weren't really emperors
of Rome in the sense
of control over the city of Rome
after 664, the last visit
of an emperor to Rome.
And then four years later he
was murdered in Syracuse.
Well, the fact that the emperor
is murdered is not all
that unusual.
A lot of these emperors get
murdered, get their noses cut
off in lieu of murder.
The notion being that if you're
mutilated you can't be
an emperor again.
And then one of these
emperors as we'll--
again, we'll discuss this--
comes back even though
his nose is gone.
But what this means is the end
of this experiment in moving
the seat of the Empire.
It moves back to
Constantinople.
And Constantinople, for better
or worse-- and surprisingly, a
lot for better--
remains the capital of this
powerful, if limited, empire.
The seventh century, however,
should not be seen as a time
when these realms
are completely
isolated from each other.
The Islamic, the Eastern,
the Western.
It is still possible
to travel.
And, indeed, Brown
emphasizes this.
The archbishop of Canterbury
in the end of the seventh
century, Theodore, came from
Tarsus in Anatolia, Syria.
Many of the popes of
this era were of
Syriac or Greek origin.
This starts to fade, however,
as Islam takes control over
more and more of the former
Eastern Roman Empire.
So not only do you get a
diminution in communication
and cultural exchange between
the Islamic world now as it is
and the Christian world, you
get less between East and
West. In the West people no
longer tend to know Greek
outside of Rome and
the papacy.
And by the eighth century, even
in Rome, this knowledge
is much, much diminished.
And then the reorientation
of Persia.
It's no accident that Brown
begins the chapter that you've
read with a discussion
of Persia.
And, actually, we hear more
about Persia now in this
reading than in any other single
reading for the course.
And this is not just because of
the Islamic conquest. Part
of it is Persia's, modern
Iran's position.
It's modern Iran, but it's
also modern Iraq.
The capital of Persia is in what
is now Iraq, in the more
fertile part of the former
Persian empire, that is to say
the West, what is known in the
ancient world as Mesopotamia.
So Persia could be oriented
towards Mesopotamia or could
be oriented more towards
the East, towards India
ultimately.
And this is partly for
extraneous reasons.
The rise of these people called
the White Huns who
press Persia from the East and
take over modern Afghanistan
and even what's now
Eastern Iran.
Persia has been a kind of off
stage presence in this course.
But in terms of trade, there
had been a great deal of
interaction.
Trade and culture.
The Silk Road.
Traffic in spices.
There have been a tremendous
traffic in
religious ideas, as well.
Nestorianism becomes strong in
Persia, the heresy of the
fifth century.
Manicheanism, which we discussed
in relation to
Augustine comes from Persia.
A lot of apocalyptic thinking
in both Islam and in
Christianity.
The focus on the end of the
world and what God has planned
for sinners and for the
justified, comes
from Persia, as well.
Now, however, in the seventh
century and the eighth century
start to see a hardening
of the boundaries.
Western Europe is less in
contact with the East. It's
less in contact with Byzantium,
with which it has
religious disputes.
And it is out of contact with
these influences coming from
the East from as far as Persia,
that characterized the
period that we began
with and up to now.
And this is reflected in the
changing of the center of
gravity of the Caliphate that
we alluded to last time.
The move from Damascus to
Baghdad is not only a
strategic decision or a cultural
decision, but it's a
de-Mediterraneanizing
of Islam.
Its capital is now within the
former Persian Empire.
And if it doesn't mean a
Persianization of the
Caliphate, it certainly means
that Islam is not really a
Mediterranean religion and
certainly not exclusively.
And then, finally, in the West
the seventh century sees the
end of a secular elite.
When we began this course we
talked about the Roman Empire
as characterized by a civilian
or senatorial elite of wealthy
people of cultivation, who are
not only literate but who are
scholarly and artistically
inclined.
These people are gone by
the seventh century.
In their place is a smaller and
somewhat different elite,
at least elite understood
by learning, of clergy.
It's at this point that
monasteries and churches
become the repository of the
classical legacy and are run
by the almost sole literate
people in society.
So how do we put these
things together,
these phenomena together?
One way of doing this that
was very popular in the
mid-twentieth century was what
was known as the "Pirenne
thesis", named after the great
Belgian historian Henri
Pirenne, who was active in the
teens, twenties of the
twentieth century.
Henri Pirenne, the
Pirenne thesis.
And the Pirenne thesis
goes like this:
The Roman Empire did
not fall in 476.
It continued, if not as a
political entity, as a
sociocultural and most
especially, economic entity.
Because the Mediterranean and
Mediterranean unity were what
characterized the Roman Empire
from the start, and this was
not disrupted by
the barbarians.
Mediterranean trade continued
to exist. Gold coinage
continued to exist.
What ended them was not the
collapse of the Empire in the
West, but Islam.
That the Arab invasions cut off
the different pieces of
the Mediterranean and ended
Mediterranean trade.
And with the end of the
Mediterranean as this key
entrepot, or economic heartland,
new centers were
created, particularly
Northern Europe.
The rise of Northern Europe that
I mentioned here was most
obvious in the ascent
of Charlemagne.
Charlemagne, crowned emperor
in Rome in 800, was by no
means from Rome or Italy, but
was from the Frankish realm.
The lands of his family were
in what is now Belgium,
Western Germany, the
Netherlands, and
Northeastern France.
His capital was not Rome.
He went there to be crowned.
His capital was rather in
Aachen, a city that is in
Germany but only barely.
It's very close to
the Dutch border.
Very close to Belgium,
as well.
Very close to Luxembourg.
And quite close to France.
He is a representative then
of Northern Europe.
Aachen had been known to the
Romans because it has hot
baths, and that's why
Charlemagne chose it also:
natural hot springs.
But it is not part of the olive
oil and wine-growing
regions of the Mediterranean
that we saw were what the
Romans loved, and what they
considered to be civilization.
For Pirenne then, the rise of
Charlemagne is made possible
by Mohammed.
And, indeed, his master work
was called Mohammed and
Charlemagne.
Here, the periodization
is definitely Islam.
Islam creates Europe because
Europe is the antithesis to
the world created by Islam.
Pirenne had no ideological
opposition to Islam.
For him Islam is simply a
facilitating factor in
destroying the ancient world.
And by ancient world, he means
the Mediterranean.
Well, this is one of those
elegant theories
that has been disproven.
It's been disproven largely by
archaeology, which has shown
that there's lots of trade
in the Mediterranean.
That the arrival of Islam by no
means disrupted trade, by
no means disrupted
these contacts.
But it is true--
and I've just said
or emphasized--
that beginning with Islam,
beginning with the seventh
century, there is a drifting
apart of cultural and
political realms. We can start
to identify three different
civilizations.
And next week we're going to
talk about the flowering of
Byzantium, that is the height
of this Eastern Roman Empire
in terms of its political
military power.
And then we're going to come to
Charlemagne and try to see
what this landscape of the
development of something other
than mere barbarian post-Roman
successor states
means for the West. OK.
It's been a lot of fun.
721
00:45:14,600 --> 00:00:00,000
Thanks.
