Who Really Killed the Pax Romana?

The Gates of Vienna ^ | August 13, 2012 | Baron Bodissey

[wtd]

I have been reading and re-reading Emmet Scott's book as it is full of details which, like puzzle pieces, fit where the old paradigm of implausible politically correct propaganda simply cannot.

Teaser: History illustrates how the Islamic wave disrupted commercial sea trade routes so it is NO coincidence that the Reconquista kicked off simultaneously with Columbus' effort to seek an eastern sea route to China. If Al Andalus were really the tolerant paradise of coexistance under Islamic rule - the Reconquista would make no sense. If the rise of Islam was so generous and tolerant and willing to safeguard ancient science and literacy . . .why have Islamic societies consistently remained overwhelmingly illiterate in third world lifestyles?

Read Baron Bodissey's review of Emmet Scott's book to begin piecing together this civilizational puzzle for yourself.

[JCBreckenridge]

You mean the conclusion of the reconquista kicked off the voyages of discovery? I hope that is what you meant.

Actually, it was the conquest of Constantinople that was the trigger. No Constantinople, no access to the Spice Road, pressing desire to go the long way around.

[Servant of the Cross]

Thanks for the post and link to Bodissey's review. How timely this book is for modern times!

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached."

[Sherman Logan]

Actually, it was the conquest of Constantinople that was the trigger. No Constantinople, no access to the Spice Road, pressing desire to go the long way around.

The fall of Constantinople was important historically. Economically it was about as inconsequential as can be imagined.

Constantinople for more than a century before its fall was only a minor city-state, surrounded and totally overshadowed by the Ottoman Empire, of which it was a vassal.

Western Europe had been cut off from the Orient for many centuries by Muslim states: Turkish, Mamluk, Fatimid. It was the policies of those states with regard to trade that affected spice prices in Europe. Frequently they got stupidly greedy and raised prices to the point that they strangled trade.

[dfwgator]

Why did Constantinople get the works?

[muawiyah]

The Reconquista starts, more or less, with the arrival of well armed semi-refugees from Cornwall in Northern Iberia ~ in both traditional Celtic areas and the Basque lands.

That's anywhere from the late 500s to the early 700s ~ actually before the Moslems showed up in the South.

The earlier non-Celtic kingdoms simply weren't up to the problem and collapsed.

Time moved slower in those days, and then there was that problem of some serious depopulation going on in Northwestern Europe starting in 535AD. That too has a Cornish component. They began relocating to a now empty Brittany ~ and in fact had to replant all the grapes there and in the upper reaches of the Rhone Valley ~ a climate anomaly had pretty much wiped out agriculture in the area ~ just follow the trail of the fellows who told the tales of immediate post Roman Britain ~ they left their stories, their names, and their cultural legacy all over the place.

Then there were plagues, periods of warming, periods of cooling, too much rain, too little rain, war, rumors of war, and probably more than one comet involved PLUS volcanoes in Iceland went off several times.

As they say just one thing after another. It was sufficiently brutal to allow the Arabs at Mecca and Petra to slip out of their desert fastness into the civilized world and begin to 'Takeover'.

[JCBreckenridge]

Why? Because it was the centre of trade for the entire eastern mediterreanean.

Combined with Trabizond (the end of the road), they were still responsible for significant trade even towards the end.

[muawiyah]

Then there was the event called The Catholic League ~ in the latter half of the 16th century KIng Philippe I/iI of Spain (The bad dude with the armadas) put an end to Ottoman dominance of sea trade in the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa.

Stymied in his ambitions to get Protestants in England to attend Catholic services he assembled the Catholic kingdoms fronting the Mediterranean and sailed off to destroy the Turks ~ which he did. He didn't liberate the Balkans but the Turks were no longer able to keep Western Europeans from sailing into Eastern harbors.

Next thing you know he died in 1598 and his son, Philippe II/III came up with a brilliant solution to the American problem. That problem was it's impending depopulation to a point where no one could conduct any sort of trade in the region.

Philippe II/III proposed to the principle powers that North America be divided up among his relatives in Russia, France, Portugual, Spain and Scotland. A large but otherwise desolate region (we know it as the Eastern Seaboard) would be parceled out to Protestants.

This was all put into a document called the Treaty of London (1604). There's a lot of detail in it including how Protestants should behave in Catholic areas, and how Catholics should behave in Protestant areas.

Sounds trivial to us but in the 17th century this was incredibly advanced thinking.

With everybody in Europe behind the idea of developing North America, mass migrations began, agriculture resumed, the world was saved and the King of Spain retired to a gentleman's life of leisure and travel. He just didn't have the fire his father had, but then again, he wasn't his father's man.

Leaping ahead several centuries, the European powers dismantled the Ottoman Empire and its former claims and created several dozen new countries out of the former Islamic Caliphate.

The Jews returned to Israel ~ after nearly 2,000 years. The atom bomb was invented. Lots of stuff happened!

[JCBreckenridge]

Why? Because it was the centre of trade for the entire eastern mediterreanean.

Combined with Trabizond (the end of the road), they were still responsible for significant trade even towards the end.

[JCBreckenridge]

“Economically it was about as inconsequential as can be imagined.”

Trabizond was the second largest trading city in the mediterranean. I’ll give you one guess as to the first.

Sure, they were much less powerful than they had been before, but still, they were an incredible prize.

[Redleg Duke]

That’s nobody’s business but the Turks!

[knarf]

I am REALLY enjoying this read.

Thank you, wtd

" And then there was the concept of Holy War, which did not exist in Christianity until it was borrowed from Islam (pages 240-242):

We have found that in the years after 600 classical civilization, which was by then synonymous with Christendom, came into contact with a new force, one that extolled war as a sacred duty, sanctioned the enslavement and killing of non-believers as a religious obligation, sanctioned the judicial use of torture, and provided for the execution of apostates and heretics. All of these attitudes, which, taken together, are surely unique in the religious traditions of mankind, can be traced to the very beginnings of that faith. Far from being manifestations of a degenerate phase of Islam, all of them go back to the founder of the faith himself. Yet, astonishingly enough, this is a religion and an ideology which is still extolled by academics and artists as enlightened and tolerant. Indeed, to this day, there exists a large body of opinion, throughout the Western World, which sees Islam as in every way superior to, and more enlightened than, Christianity.

[x]

That is the once-famous Pirenne hypothesis, developed by a Belgian historian 75 years ago. After Roman political authority collapsed, trade routes across the Mediterranean remained, as did the Eastern Roman Empire (Byzantium). In the West, Germanic kingdoms could view themselves as carrying on the Roman tradition, so economically, culturally, psychologically one could assert or pretend that nothing had changed.

Muslim conquests in the Near East, Africa, Turkey, and Europe itself disrupted trade connections and the sense of Europe or the West or Christendom centered on the Mediterranean. The way was open for Charlemagne and a new empire in the Frankish territories. Rome had finally fallen and Northern Europe came into its own as the core of Christendom.

I certainly hope the book gives Henri Pirenne the credit due him, but it's not really a crude who-done-it with a predictable Muslim villain. Something definitely happened to Rome before the Muslims came along. People didn't theorize about the change or seriously begin to build something new until circumstances made the.

History illustrates how the Islamic wave disrupted commercial sea trade routes so it is NO coincidence that the Reconquista kicked off simultaneously with Columbus' effort to seek an eastern sea route to China.

Clearly Columbus can be tied to the decline of Muslim power in Spain. You needed to have ports to make the trip, but this was all 700 or so years after Muslim conquests disrupted those routes to begin with.

If Al Andalus were really the tolerant paradise of coexistance under Islamic rule - the Reconquista would make no sense.

First, in the real world tolerance is a relative thing. A political order can be much more tolerant than another, while it's less tolerant than a third system.

Secondly, politics are about power. Indeed, much of religion was about power in those days. What rulers and clerics did wasn't always a reflection of how they were treated by others, but of what their aspirations were and what they thought they deserved.

[Billthedrill]

Something definitely happened to Rome before the Muslims came along.

Mostly the Gothic Wars, especially the third one. Belisarius under Justinian cleaned out the Vandal occupation of Rome's former breadbasket and then continued into the Italian peninsula leaving a tremendous power vacuum behind that the eastern Empire simply did not have the manpower to fill. Rome was sacked, occupied, besieged, and completely emptied for a period of a couple of days. That must have been one of history's weirdest sights for anyone who got left behind in the ghost city.

It was obvious to anyone who watched Ostia decay that no grain from northern Africa was a foot on the western Empire's throat. The Arabs weren't even the first to realize that. Controlling those sea lanes meant that Rome had to look northward and eastward for its very sustenance. And after Narses got through with the Ostrogoths there wasn't much left to fill the power vacuum at all until a bunch of tribal Arab horsemen came along.

Great stuff (which you knew perfectly well, and thanks for the leading question...) ;-)

[wtd]

Scott's book discusses Pirenne and is launched off of Pirenne's hypothesis.

I have also read Pirenne's book on the subject. Scott examines Pirenne's hypothesis through the dual lens of archaeology and Islamology and presents tons of archaeological data to support this work.

Read Baron Bodissey's review of Scott's book and decide for yourself if it sparks an interest in examining Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy.

Without reservation, I wholeheartedly recommend both.

[SunkenCiv]

---

Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited: The History of a Controversy by Emmet Scott Kindle Edition Unknown Binding

The Epilogue -- The termination of the papyrus supply to Europe, as a cultural event, cannot be overestimated. Indeed, it has hitherto been radically underestimated. Papyrus, a relatively cheap writing material, had a thousand uses in an urban and mercantile culture. And, as we saw in Chapter 15, it was the material upon which was preserved the vast majority of the learning and thinking of the ancients. The loss of papyrus led inexorably to the loss of the bulk of classical literature -- irrespective of the efforts of churchmen to preserve it on parchment.

---

[SunkenCiv]

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Thanks wtd. To all -- please ping me to other topics which are appropriate for the GGG list.

[Sherman Logan]

Methinks you miss my point.

Every single item of the Eastern trade goods that changed hands at Constantinople, which was indeed a center of commerce right up to the end, though its commerce was almost completely controlled by that time by Italians, had first to transit a Muslim state. When Constantinople fell, nothing changed in this regard, therefore its fall was not consequential with regard to whether Western countries could get spices and other eastern goods without using Muslim middlemen.

[Sherman Logan]

Nit.

Trebizond is on the Black Sea, not the Med.

[Sherman Logan]

Would love to see a link to the text of the Treaty of London.