The Pirenne Thesis: Analysis, Criticism, and Revision

This is a short book, only a little over 100 pages. But it discusses an interesting topic: when did the Western Roman Empire really fall? Some people blame the collapse of the Western Roman Empire on the Goths. Some blame it on the Huns. Some on the fact that Romans had grown rich and lazy. Some blame it on the Christians (actually, I agree with this theory to a large extent). But Henri Pirenne blamed it on the Moslems. And we see his argument for this in the present volume. I think Pirenne wrote much of his material while in jail, and deprived of much of the reference material that he would surely have found useful. Obviously, Pirenne's thesis required Rome to last well past 476 AD, given that Mohammed was not born until long after that. As the book explains, that raises four issues: 1) What developments distinguished Antiquity from the Middle Ages? 2) What impacts were there on the West of the German invasions and the Arab invasions? 3) Were the events of the 8th and 9th centuries basically a continuation of the previous 300 years or were they in sharp contrast to them? 4) What can we as historians say about trade in the West from 400 AD to 1000 AD? While Pirenne is blasted by several authors in this book, I think the above issues were worth raising. And thus I think Pirenne did make a contribution to our knowledge of the history of that era, even though his ideas have been refuted. As a matter of fact, I think the authors could have done a more convincing job of refuting Pirenne, but I doubt that many people will agree with me about this. The final two articles may be the most interesting. In one, there is an analysis by a specialist in Islamic history, Daniel C. Dennett Jr. In the final article, Anne Riising provides an overall summary of the evidence to date and the conclusions drawn from it. It was surprising how difficult it was for historians to agree on something as basic as the questions Pirenne raised. And I shudder to think how difficult it would be to come up with anything useful had the issues been as politicized as many historical questions now are.