Fall of Rome

The paperback edition
I read in college.

The Roman Empire became old and tired, corrupt and decadent.  Eventually, it could no longer defend its borders.  The Germanic barbarian tribes poured in, and by the late fifth century, the Western half of the Empire was dead, to be replaced by a new feudal economy led by Germanic peoples like the Franks .  The death of the Empire was a tragedy, but in the long run the infusion of vigorous Germanic blood created a new, more vigorous Europe.

This was the version of history I picked up in school, and is essentially the story told by Gibbon in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  It wasn't until college -- where, in one of my many academic incarnations, I was a medieval history student -- that I ran into what was (and is) known as "the Pirenne thesis."  That was long ago, and I had more or less forgotten Pirenne and his historical studies until a couple of months ago.  Out of curiosity and nostalgia, I ordered from a book club a freshly formatted and nicely bound version of Henri Pirenne's seminal work, Mohammed and Charlemagne.

The gist of Pirenne's thesis, based on his study of all the social and economic evidence available to him at the time, was that the Germanic tribes entering the late Empire -- while causing a certain amount of local havoc, mayhem, and destruction -- actually had little effect on the on-going Roman economy.  The Empire, east and west, was a Mediterranean civilization, and its economy was based on Mediterranean shipping back and forth among Italy, North Africa, Greece, Egypt, and the Levant.  The barbarian invasions did not disrupt this shipping, Pirenne believed, and the Germanic tribes eventually, at different times in different areas, settled down and became assimilated into the Empire's social life and economy.

In 600 the physiognomy of the world was not different in quality from that which it had revealed in 400.

It wasn't until Islam unexpectedly sprang out of the Arabian peninsula, spreading its armies across North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, seizing control of the seas, that the Mediterranean unity was broken, and that the western Empire was severed from the eastern half controlled from Constantinople.  No longer having access to the Mediterranean, the Western Empire's trade ceased, the West's economy was devastated and each small region was forced to become self-sufficient -- a process lasting from about A.D. 650-750, ultimately leading to the far more primitive feudal economy. 

Mohammed and Charlemagne was published posthumously in 1937, but its basic ideas were developed by Pirenne while, as a Belgian, he was held captive by the Germans during the first world war.  By the time I first learned of the Pirenne thesis, it had been highly controversial for several decades, with national prides at stake.  Emerging German nationalism had taken comfort in the concept of a vigorous Germanic wind blowing away -- in an act of "creative destruction," if you will -- the worn-out remnants of the ancient civilization.  The concept of Germans (and other ethnic barbarians) being co-opted for two hundred years by the Roman world they had conquered, until finally the old world was blown away by a vigorous Muslim wind blowing out of Arabia, was considerably less congenial.

In her preface to my recently-purchased volume, Oxford historian Averil Cameron assures us that issues raised by Pirenne are as controversial today as they were before I first learned of them.  Many of the data relied on by Pirenne have been questioned or their importance has been superseded by newly discovered data.  I gather that there is now a tendency to conclude that the "true" version of late Roman history is an admixture of Gibbon's original description and Pirenne's attack on that position.

Dr. Cameron reminds us that history is always subjective.  Historians examine the limited evidence available, and from that evidence draw sweeping generalizations.  She reminds us that

Pirenne's questions about West versus East, antiquity versus the Middle Ages, the origins and definition of Europe, and the role of economic factors in history are issues which historians have been addressing for centuries and which are still among the great issues of today.

Why Roman civilization declined and fell, and why it was succeeded by the feudal structures of the early Middle Ages, fascinated me as a student, just as it has fascinated centuries of historians and generations of ordinary people.  We'll never have a complete answer, but as historians acquire an ever-increasing amount of data -- economic and archeological, not just literary -- their conclusions gradually inspire more confidence. 

Synthesizers like Henri Pirenne add excitement to the study of history, and prompt ever new questioning. 

Now, I really need to read the book I hold in my hand -- Pirenne's actual text, not just his concluding chapters and Dr. Cameron's preface!