AMOTZ ASA-EL
Having died two years earlier, the great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne (1862-1935) didn’t get to enjoy the excitement with which his last work, Mohammed and Charlemagne, was received when published posthumously.
Recognized to this day as one of the greatest historians of medieval Europe, Pirenne’s imaginative thesis argued that the Middle Ages began not with the decline of Rome, as previously agreed, but with the rise of Islam.
The new faith, Pirenne claimed, was hostile to trade.
The urge to subdue Christendom inspired an anti-commercial strategy that sought to stifle the Mediterranean’s vibrant commerce by driving a wedge between its Christian north and Muslim south.
That, argued Pirenne, is what shuttered Europe’s horizons, choked its economy, and condemned it to epochal stagnation.
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