Henri Pirenne: Mohammed and Charlemagne. Rome never 'Fell'. It was replaced.

First part here.

The ‘Enlightenment’ darkened history.  One aspect of the violence done to Europe’s past, its culture and heritage, is the lie, repeated everywhere, ad-nauseum, based on men wearing wigs who did no primary research and who viewed themselves as the insufferably highest of ‘evolved’ beings; is that ‘Rome fell’.  It crashed on a dark day in 476 A.D.  A resounding clap and storm of thunder and disagreement from the civilisation Gods redounded across Western Europe as rain and hail fell.  Immediately a dark veil of superstition, ignorance and palaeolithic beliefs was pulled across Europe, expressed by the Catholic Church, a target of hate and opprobrium for the Enlighteners, who in their ignorance and bigotry failed to recognise that their own rather easy lives were built on the civilisation created by the Church and Christianity.  In this historical revisionism, Rome collapsed in 476, and the Continent pulled by the dead weight of the anti-rational Church, fell into an abyss.  Nothing remotely like this occurred. But truth was never the objective of the endarkening religion of ‘rationalism’, itself irrationally proposing extreme opposites from reality. 

The Roman empire carried on after 476, and very little was altered, until the time of the Muhammadan invasions and destruction of the Mediterranean Christian civilisation starting in 637 AD.  The unified Christian cultural achievement centred around the Mare Nostrum was not shattered by the German takeover of the Western part of the Roman empire.  It was sundered by the Muslim Jihad which separated Syria, North Africa, Spain, southern France (until the mid-9^th century) and parts of Italy and the Western Mediterranean isles, from Christian Byzantium and the world’s largest city, manufacturing entrepot and port, Constantinople.  Trade, culture, money, paper and consumer goods were deranged, the ports shrank, the merchant fleets were abandoned, the massive increase in White slavery (with links to the Vikings), Jihad, piracy, raids, and slaughter of Christians along European coasts, reduced the once urbanised areas of Western Europe to penury and ruin.  Europe turned from the Mediterranean to the north, and went from a trading empire, to a land-based empire, assaulted on three fronts by the Musulmans, the Vikings and the Avars/Huns from the early 8^th century to the 10^th centuries. 

Before the Muslim Jihad the Western European economy was still Mediterranean-centric, prosperous and along the coasts and trade routes, urbanised.  No collapse can be discerned and the evidence in Visigothic Spain and elsewhere, points to a profoundly rich civilisation.  Sutton Hoo in England, at the fringes of the former Roman state, has revealed an enormously rich 6^th century Saxon burial chamber indicating a society with extreme surplus of income and wealth, and trade routes stretching into Asia.  This site is 100 years after the ‘fall of Rome’ and puts a lie to the myth of an age of darkness and ignorance.

Pirenne relates how the absolutism of the Roman Empire and its wealth, once transmogrified into German-dominated states, found expression in the new merger of Church and State, in which secular powers used the Church, its organisation, literacy, influence and prestige, to administer, admonish and acquire societal order and control.

“Nothing could be less Germanic than the royalty of these military leaders.  It was simply personal power; exactly what we find in the Empire.

In all these Kingdoms the absolutism of the king is explained by his financial power.  Everywhere, as the successor of the Emperor, he disposed of the fisc and the taxes.  Now the wealth of the fisc was enormous.  It included the Imperial domain, the forests, the waste lands, the mines, the ports, and the highways, and there were also the taxes and the mint.  Thus the king was a landed proprietor of enormous wealth, and he also possessed a formidable treasury of minted gold.  No prince in the West, before the 13^th century, can have been so rich in money as these kings.  The description of their treasuries calls up the image of a river of gold.  Above all, this wealth enabled the king to pay his functionaries…..the retention of the Roman impost and the market-toll were the essential sources of their power….”

The above describes a wealthy, energetic, urban, trading society.  Schools, literacy, poets, writers and artists were legion.  Pagan classics were still copied and learnt.  Iconography and religious art were created and appreciated.  Windmills, watermills, pumps, textiles, medicines and monasteries were built, manufactured, founded and expanded.  The lengthening lines of commerce illustrate a large sub-stratum of literate professionals, engaged in contracts, pricing, transactions, credit, interest bearing loans and detailed record keeping.  This was no backwater, isolated, enclosed and autarchic civilisation. 

Cities existed and expanded.  Bathing never disappeared given that the aqueducts, infrastructure, plumbing and movement of water was not destroyed in the urban areas.  Trade in spices, oil (for lamps, replaced by wax candles post the Musulman invasions), paper, jewels, manufactured consumer goods from the East, food, wine and other products not available locally accelerated until the Musulman closing of sea traffic which started with the conquest of Spain in 720 A.D.  The Western Mediterranean was severed from Byzantium and the reduction in trade and interchange was profound and obvious by the time of Charlemagne’s rule circa 770 A.D.

Like so much ‘common knowledge’ in the ‘age of science’ the idea that Rome ‘fell’ is a myth which serves a purpose.  It was proposed by those who hated the Church and Christianity.  It is promoted today by the same like-minded bigots who wish to devalue their own culture and heritage and who wish the destruction of the Church.