Mohammed & Charlemagne Revisited: The Conclusion by Emmet Scott (March 2012)

The entire Mediterranean world was utterly transformed in the seventh century. Everywhere, from Palestine in the East to Spain in the West, the Roman style of life disappeared. Cities were destroyed or abandoned and life rapidly became more rural. The Roman system of agriculture, which had sustained the great cities of the classical age, broke down. The dykes, irrigation ditches and terraces which had for centuries produced vast food surpluses to feed Rome and the other metropolises of the Empire, fell into disrepair. Topsoil was washed away and a layer of silt, now known as the Younger Fill, began to cover many of the towns and villages. As the scattered farming settlements and cities of the Empire were deserted, new settlements, especially in southern Europe, began to appear on defended hill-tops. If the above transformation occurred in 600 AD or slightly earlier, as Hodges, Whitehouse, and a host of other contemporary academics maintain, then it must be regarded as one of history’s greatest enigmas. Nothing that we know of the late sixth century could account for it. That the plague of Justinian’s time (542) was not to blame is proved beyond question by the thriving and populous cities of the Middle East, which excavators found were destroyed violently from 614 onwards. If however the great transformation occurred in the two or three decades following 614, then it makes perfect sense. These years saw the commencement of the ruinous Persian war which damaged many of the cities of Anatolia and Syria, and which was soon followed by the appearance on the world stage of the Arabs. And it was the Arab wars of conquest, far more than the Persian war, which explains the permanence and completeness of the devastation. The damage done during the Persian conflict would have been swiftly repaired – as it had always been before – had not the latter been immediately followed by the arrival on the scene of the Arabs. The religious concept of jihad (permanent religious war) made any kind of peace between the Arabs and the outside world impossible. Since it was the duty of every able-bodied Muslim to wage jihad, it became the custom of Arab rulers to engage in raids on infidel territory on an annual (or twice-annual) basis. All regions on the borders of the Dar al-Islam were liable to be ridden over; and this is precisely what we see occurring in Anatolia and large areas of Spain, such as La Mancha. At a later stage Islamic armies created a similar wasteland in Hungary, where the once-heavily populated Hungarian Plain, the Pushta, became a dreary prairie. Whilst the concept of jihad ensured a permanent war on Islam’s borders, the provisions of sharia law meant that even in the regions controlled by the Muslims, such as Syria and North Africa, native husbandmen and traders were afforded no protection from the predatory attentions of bedouin bandits and herders, who let their flocks graze on the irrigated lands of the former, thus degrading and destroying them. The result was that within a very short time, the whole economy and lifestyle of the classical world disappeared. Once-fertile and irrigated territories were reduced to semi-desert, and the great cities which dotted these regions, from northern Syria to the Atlantic coast of North Africa, were reduced to ghost towns. The urban life which these cities had supported, with their academies, libraries, and theatres, disappeared; and with them went the great bulk of the artistic and intellectual heritage of Greece and Rome. In Mediterranean Europe, in the meantime, Arab raiders, fired by the belief that it was legitimate and even righteous to live off the wealth and resources of the infidel, launched raid after raid against the towns and villages on the coasts, plundering both lay and ecclesiastical settlements and destroying crops in the fields. Early medieval documents are full of descriptions of these atrocities. In the same way, sea traffic was targeted by the jihadis, who confiscated cargoes and enslaved crews and passengers. Within a short time, all trade between Christian Europe and the newly Islamicized East came to an end. The supply of all the Levantine luxuries, which had hitherto provided a modicum of civilized life in the towns and villages of the West, dried up, and Europe was thrown back on its own resources. The centre of gravity in Gaul moved decisively to the North, and a distinctly medieval culture rapidly took shape. * * * The above describes how classical civilization was terminated. Yet there still remains a problem; and that is one of chronology. We have found that the real break-off point between classical civilization and the medieval world is 614, the year of the commencement of the Persian War. It was then, or in the years immediately after, that the great cities of Asia Minor and Syria were destroyed or abandoned, never to rise again. That there was no attempt to repair them after the end of the Persian War (627) indicates that there was insufficient time to do so before the coming of the Arabs (in 638). Yet in a decade we might expect some signs of revival or rebuilding. That there were almost none could suggest that the arrival of the Arabs and Islam on the world stage was slightly closer to the time of the Persian War than is allowed. It is generally believed that Muslim armies did not emerge from Arabia until after Muhammad’s death in 638. Yet there is evidence to suggest otherwise. A letter exists purportedly from Muhammad to the Persian king Chosroes II, inviting him to embrace Islam. Whether this communication is genuine or not (actually, it is without question a forgery), it does illustrate an important truth: The Persians had a long history of religious antagonism towards Christianity and towards Byzantium, and as such would have been natural allies of the Arabs against the latter. Indeed, the war between Chosroes II and Heraclius had all the characteristics of a religious conflict – a veritable jihad, no less. The Persians took Jerusalem in 614 and carried out a terrible massacre of the Christian population; after which they looted the churches and seized some of Christendom’s most sacred relics – including the Holy Cross upon which Christ was crucified. The story told by the Byzantines of how Heraclius, against all the odds, turned the tide of war and won back the sacred relics, strikes one as fictitious. And indeed, it is just with the reign of Heraclius that the dim and little-known period we now call the Dark Ages commences. German writer Heribert Illig (of whom more shall be said presently) has put forward the interesting suggestion that the Persians encountered Islam in Syria and, seeing the latter as a valuable ally against Byzantium, joined forces with the Arabs. It is not inconceivable that some of the Persian ruling class may have converted to Islam and gradually imposed the new faith upon the populace. This would explain why the Arabs were able to conquer – with such apparent ease – the mighty and invincible Persian Empire, an Empire that had withstood the best efforts of Rome to subdue it for seven centuries.[1] And it would further explain why early Islam is so thoroughly Persian in character. The earliest Islamic coins, for example, are simply Sassanid Persian, usually with the addition of an Arab phrase such as besm Allah – “in the name of God,” and with the name of Chosroes II or his successor Yazdegerd III. But in all other particulars they are indistinguishable from Sassanid currency. According to the Encyclopdaedia Iranica, “These coins usually have a portrait of a Sasanian emperor with an honorific inscription and various ornaments. To the right of the portrait is a ruler’s or governor’s name written in Pahlavi script. On the reverse there is a Zoroastrian fire altar with attendants on either side. At the far left is the year of issue expressed in words, and at the right is the place of minting. In all these features, the Arab-Sasanian coinages are similar to Sasanian silver drahms. The major difference between the two series is the presence of some additional Arabic inscription on most coins issued under Muslim authority, but some coins with no Arabic can still be attributed to the Islamic period. The Arab-Sasanian coinages are not imitations, since they were surely designed and manufactured by the same people as the late Sasanian issues, illustrating the continuity of administration and economic life in the early years of Muslim rule in Iran.”[2] Importantly, the date is written in Persian Pahlavi script, and it would appear that those who minted the coins, native Persians, did not understand Arabic. We hear that under the Arabs the mints were “evidently allowed to go on as before,” and that there are “a small number of coins indistinguishable from the drahms of the last emperor, Yazdegerd III, dated during his reign but after the Arab capture of the cities of issue. It was only when Yazdegerd died (A.D. 651) that some mark of Arab authority was added to the coinage.”[3] Even more puzzling is the fact that the most common coins during the first decades of Islamic rule were those of Chosroes II, and many of these too bear the Arabic inscription besm Allah. Now, it is just conceivable that invading Arabs might have issued slightly amended coins of the last Sassanid monarch, Yazdegerd III, but why continue to issue money in the name of a previous Sassanid king, one who, supposedly, had died ten years earlier? This surely stretches credulity. Did then Chosroes II convert to Islam as part of Persia’s ongoing Holy War against Christian Byzantium? Conventional history tells us that Yazdegerd III was the last of the pre-Islamic rulers of Iran, and that, in his time Caliph Umar conquered the country. Yet the poet Ferdowsi, who seems to have possessed a detailed knowledge of the period, mentions no Arab conquest at all. The Arabs are mentioned, but not as enemies of Yazdegerd III. The latter, who is portrayed as a villain, is killed by a miller, not by the Arabs (who are also portrayed as villains). Indeed, the events described by Ferdowsi have all the hallmarks of a Persian civil war. Is it possible that during the time of Yazdegerd III an internecine war erupted between an “Arabizing” group of extreme Islamists and a more traditional Persian faction? Later Islamic propagandists could have portrayed this conflict as an Arab “conquest” of Persia. As we saw earlier, excavation has revealed few signs of violent overthrow at the termination of the Sassanid epoch, and all the indications are of a relatively peaceful transition from Sassanid rule to Islamic in the middle of the seventh century. Pottery and other artwork of the period continue to be thoroughly Persian in character. If the Persians converted to Islam around 620, then the Arab conquests of Syria, Anatolia, Egypt and North Africa, which have always presented such a problem for historians (how could a few nomads on camels conquer such powerful and heavily-populated provinces?) would thus be at least partly explained as the work not of the Arabs but of Islamicized Persians.[4] Is this possible? Well, historical criticism has increasingly come to recognize the narrative of Arab expansion as, in some respects at least, an enormous fabrication. Thus for example German orientalist Günter Lüling opined that the earliest “Islam possessed an almost exclusively Abbasid [ie Persian] historiography, which Omayyad historical literature deliberately and extraordinarily successfully suppressed. … The entire old-Arabian historiography was, for the period until circa 400 AH/1000 AD, completely reworked on dogmatic lines.”[5] That the Arabs of the later Middle Ages were actively involved in falsifying history is proved by the existence of a number of forged documents purporting to treat of events of the early seventh century. In this category is the “letter from Muhammad” to Chosroes II, mentioned above. And if the invasion and conquest of Persia by the Arabs is a fiction, then the purpose of this letter is obvious: According to Islamic law, offensive action against the Infidel could take place only after the latter had been invited to accept Islam and had rejected the offer. The Muhammad letter would then have been part of the general invention of an Arab invasion of Iran, providing the event with its justification.[6] If the arrival of Islam on the world stage were thus dated from the 620s, rather than the 640s, then we would be presented with an entirely new view of the past; and much that was previously incomprehensible would begin to make sense. The failure of the cities of Asia Minor to recover after the destruction by the Persians from 616 onwards would no longer be a mystery, whilst the precipitate decline of Carthage at the same time would be explained. And such a chronological realignment would have implications for Europe. Most importantly, it would mean that the termination of Mediterranean and eastern influences occurred precisely in the 620s, and that it was from this decade that there commenced the historically obscure period we now call the Dark Ages. Trying to pin down the precise point at which the latter epoch commenced is of course a notoriously difficult task and, as we have seen repeatedly in the present study, significantly differing interpretations can be derived from the same bits of evidence. Hodges and Whitehouse, we saw, were rather keen to place the break-off point at 600 or shortly beforehand, whilst the latest archaeological data seemed to place it a couple of decades later. Thus we know that African Red Slip Ware and Carthaginian amphorae were still being imported into Britain and Ireland as late as the 620s, but not after that. 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 and Bill Napier’s book The Comsic 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 to 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 1714 rather than 2011). 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 seem initially 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: 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. 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. 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. 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. These then are the fact revealed by archaeology. The reader may make of them what he chooses.

[1] It should be noted that the accepted narrative of Islam’s early expansion beyond Arabia strikes one as utterly fictitious. That the Arabs, a numerically tiny and backward people, should simultaneously attack and overcome both the might of Byzantium and of Sassanid Persia, is quite simply beyond belief. And it is no use to plead that these powers were “exhausted” by the war they had just recently waged against each other. Victorious armies do not tend to be “exhausted”, irrespective of their losses. Witness the mighty Soviet army at the end of World War 2, compared to the weak and incompetent Soviet army at the beginning of the same conflict. Thus Heraclius’ Byzantine army, newly victorious over the Persians, would have been no pushover. [2] “Arab-Sasanian Coins,” Encyclopdaedia Iranica, at www.iranica.com/articles/arab-sasanian-coins [3] Ibid. [4] Art historian Kenneth Clark speaks of the “miraculously short time” which the Arabs took to conquer the Byzantine territories of the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa. Clark, op cit., p. 7 [5] Günter Lüling. Die Wiederentdeckung des Propheten Muhammad. Eine Kritik am “christlichen” Abendland (Erlangen, 1981), p. 411 [6] Arab-Persian rivalry is alive and well to this day. Distrust of Iran remains notorious amongst the Arab states of the Middle East, whilst the last words of Saddam Hussein, who launched a murderous war of attrition against Iran in 1980, were reputed to have been “Death to the Persians.” [7] Claudio Vita-Finzi, op cit. [8] Mike Baillie, Exodus to Arthur: Catastrophic Encounters with Comets (Batsford, 1999)



Emmet Scott is a historian specializing in the ancient history of the Near East. Over the past ten years he has turned his attention to Late Antiquity and the declining phase of classical civilization, which he sees as one of the most crucial episodes in the history of western civilization. His new book, Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy is published by New English Review Press. It may be ordered through Amazon here and is available on Kindle here.

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