[GeraldCortis]

[q] Charlemagne was crowned Emperor on Christmas Day, 800, by which time he had reached almost unimaginable success. After his coronation, he inclined more towards the image of patron of the Western Church; at the same time, he propagated a new spiritualism from his courts. This was the beginning of the Carolingian renaissance, which continued into the reign of Charlemagne’s son and successor, Louis the Pious. In the Aachen synods of 816 and 817, new monastic codes were promulgated, accelerating the cultural revolution by calling for the construction of new monasteries and churches and the renovation of existing ones. At the same time, it created the need for new art forms, be they church ornaments or sacred texts.
This phase of imperial ordered was dramatically terminated in 828, when Louis granted his youngest son Charles a share of the empire, precipitating civil war. At around the same time, Scandinavian raiders began to appear regularly. These events threw Western Europe into a state of turmoil, and Charlemagne’s imperial and cultural legacies were fatally threatened.
The Carolingian renaissance required large sums of money to fund the grand projects envisaged by Charlemagne and Louis and their clerical advisers. Initially, they were probably financed by the internal wealth of the empire, such as revenues from imperial estates and even church treasures. It is doubtful whether this could be sustained. Pirenne proposed, rather obliquely, that Islamic silver compensated for the apparent shortfall. On the basis of the results of early archaeological excavations at Dorestad and Haithabu, Pirenne proposed that, following the closure of Mediterranean trade, Arab dirhams followed a circuitous route from Baghdad to Dorestad, passing through the hands of the Khazarians and Bulghars, Scandinavian slave traders in Russia, Baltic Scandinavians, for whom Haithabu was the principle trading emporium, and Frisian merchants before arriving in the Empire. The symbolic link between Mohammed and Charlemagne was formed in the Russian steppes. Those along the chain of trade profited from the commerce, but were nevertheless in a very tenuous position – the entire system would be threatened if a crisis occurred in one link of the chain.
Pirenne perceived the weakening of the Oriental link in the 820s, possibly due to a shortage of silver in the Arab world or the political turmoil in Baghdad after Caliph Haroun al-Raschid’s death, as the beginning of the end of the Carolingian empire. As a result, the Scandinavian merchants, and pirates, who profited from the pre-existing arrangement, saw their supply of silver from the East evaporate, and turned to Western Europe to satisfy their desire for silver. The ensuing Viking raids on continental Europe had a devastating impact on the Carolingian political order and precipitated its collapse.
The notion that the Vikings had a devastating impact on the rest of Europe found early takers. In The Church in Early Irish Society (1966), Kathleen Hughes corroborated Pirenne’s view regarding the ‘chronology of terror’. After 830, Ireland was rarely ever without Vikings. They began to arrive in increasing numbers and conducted ferocious raids, especially on the Irish churches and monasteries, whose wealth was by then famous in Scandinavia. In the 840s, the Vikings began to build fortresses and colonies, such as Dublin. From these fortified camps, the Vikings could attack neighboring regions with impunity. The effects of these attacks were physically and mentally devastating. In addition to the destruction of church property, the plunder of sacred relics left the people bewildered – the supernatural immunity of the saints appeared useless, accepted standards were worthless, and society was thrown into anarchy.
Michel Rouche (1960s) invoked archaeological data in his discussion of the Viking assaults on the towns of Northern Gaul. He shared Pirenne’s view of a movement towards urbanization and the establishment of market towns. To facilitate their expansion, local prelates sought and obtained permission to pull down the old Roman fortifications around the towns, and so by the middle of the ninth century the towns in Gaul were rich and poorly defended, and constituted inviting targets to Viking raiders. The initial response to the Viking menace was counter-attack, but the Vikings had established themselves in fortified camps on river islands. As a result, by the tenth century many urban centers had rebuilt their fortifications. The rebuilding was undertaken not at central behest but rather by local counts. Rouche applied this fact to his thesis that the Vikings, with their network of fortified camps scattered throughout a peaceful kingdom that had forgotten Roman military order, caused the break-up of central political power. Smaller, locally built, fortified units of authority replaced central control over the countryside. In this respect, Rouche concedes to Pirenne’s view that the Viking raids led to the collapse of the Carolingian empire, but instead of a gradually evolving feudal system, Rouche hypothesizes that the feudal system was established rather rapidly, following the Viking assaults.
P.H. Sawyer (1960s) examined the Scandinavian economic infrastructure and its importance to Western Europe. He explained that the driving force behind Scandinavian activity was the acquisition of silver. From around the 700s to the 830s, the Scandinavians satisfied their desire for silver by trading with the Muslims of Central Asia. The Swedes, expanding along the Volga into modern Russia, plundered and enslaved the local Slavic people. They sold these slaves, and native Scandinavian products such as fur and amber, to Khazar and Transoxonian (from Samarkand, Tashkent and Merv) merchants in return for Arabic silver. The transactions took place in the region of the lower Don and also of the Oxus across Bulghar. This silver found its way to Birka in Sweden, Haithabu in Denmark and Kaupang in Norway, where it was exchanged with Frisian merchants for commodities such as pottery, glass and weapons. Sawyer uses an apt quote of Grierson to pursue his point:
The Vikings were important in European commerce because by the accumulation of treasure they naturally encouraged enterprising merchants to attempt to relieve them of it by offering goods in exchange.
This trading activity also supported pirates who plied the Baltic and North Seas; that piracy thrived indicates that there was loot to plunder. The interruption of the flow of silver into Scandinavia, indicated by the fact that coin hoards have been found with coins dating from before 820 and after 890, and not in between, had serious consequences. Scandinavian pirates were forced to rely on Europe for their silver, and the silver reaching Scandinavia thereafter was largely loot, tribute (danegeld), or mercenary fees (heregeld).
Sawyer also highlighted the dangers of relying too heavily on literary sources at the expense of archaeological and place-name evidence. Contemporary literature was written by churchmen, who, as the primary victims of the Viking raids, were hardly unbiased in their writings. Sawyer argued that they regularly exaggerated the sizes of the attacking forces, in an attempt to justify defeat or highlight victories. For instance, it is very possible that many, if not all, Viking raids on monasteries and churches were little more than violent acts of robbery, and he also pointed out that armies of more than a thousand men, such as those described by some chronicles, would have faced problems of supply, discipline and mobility, and would not have been nearly as successful as smaller, compact war bands. He believed that archaeological and linguistic evidence should serve to corroborate literary evidence. Rather than treating them as a welcome check on literary sources, apparent discrepancies brought up by archaeology and linguistics are too often explained away. The deeply rooted conviction that the Vikings came in large armies and spread little but desolation with unparalleled savagery seriously handicaps attempts to determine the true nature and extent of the Viking menace. This view raises doubts about Hughes’ and Pirenne’s conclusions regarding the extent to which the Vikings were able to influence events in Western Europe. In Sawyer’s words:
…once the prejudices and exaggerations of the primary sources are recognized, the raids can be seen not as an unprecedented and inexplicable cataclysm, but as an extension of normal Dark Age activity, made possible and profitable by special circumstances.
Recent archaeological excavations have thrown light on the Viking presence in England. In 1978, Robert Hall analyzed the data obtained by these excavations to study the dark-age history of York. Originally a Roman fortress town, York passed to the Britons before being occupied by the Anglians in the eighth century. There is evidence of commercial activity in the area – York housed a Frisian merchant community and served as an international port. In the mid ninth century, it was captured by the Vikings, and came to be known as Jorvik. Under the Vikings, York saw the reconstruction of its fortifications, and it became the capital of a Scandinavian state in England known as the Danelaw. The Vikings also built a market area physically separate from the old town. Hall’s work suggests that the Vikings were settlers and builders and not solely bloodthirsty warriors.
Campbell, however, argued against being overzealous in the revision of the scale of Viking attacks. He disputed Sawyer’s view of Vikings as being primarily traders and settlers rather than warriors. Owing to the lack of definite evidence for settlement prior to 850, Campbell concluded that, at least initially, the Vikings were in fact predatory warbands of the type familiar in Germanic literature. He also drew attention to the strange fact that wholly independent contemporary literary sources in different parts of Europe give the same sort of figures regarding the scale of the Viking attacks. In addition, in the Danelaw, the episcopal lists of every diocese except York and Lindisfarne are interrupted for decades. Three bishoprics disappeared altogether. Medieval bishoprics were durable institutions, which seldom, if ever, disappeared because of mere ‘decay’. Such disruptions in the history of the Danelaw bishoprics suggest that the effect of the Viking invasions were very serious indeed. The armies of the 860s and 870s, as concentrations of warbands from all over Europe under ambitious royal leadership, could very well have numbered in the thousands.
Spufford applied Rouche’s idea of the rise of local authority to the fragmentation of minting. Following the Scandinavian attacks, royal control over minting dissipated to the counts, causing coinage, which had succeeded largely due to royal efforts, to suffer. In addition, the trade balance between East and West, which for a while had been in favor of the West, swung back in favor of the East following the cessation of imperial conquests and the subsequent reduction in the number of slaves available or export. As a result, silver flowed out of Europe, and mining activities were not sufficient enough to compensate for the loss. Silver supplies further decreased as a consequence of extraordinary diversion of silver into church treasuries, and the Viking invasions. More important, perhaps, was that the velocity of circulation of coins decreased. The destruction of market towns and the sack of seaports devastated the embryonic market economy. This economic dark-age envisaged by Spufford continued to the end of the tenth century, until the revival of coinage under the Ottonians of Saxony following the opening of the Harz mines in the 980s. Despite the immediate setback to the economy, however, Spufford viewed the Vikings as economic liberators in some sense, in that they forced Europe to think small – the break-up of the vast Carolingian landed estates ultimately proved beneficial in that it increased agricultural efficiency. The Vikings also liberated treasure that had been locked in church hoards, removed from general circulation.
Campbell also shed light on the long-term economic benefits precipitated by the Vikings, the most important being the establishment of the burghal hidage. Despite the immediate setback to trade in England, the Viking presence had a positive effect on commerce in that the creation of Alfred’s burhs, initially planned for defense, eventually became important market centers. The establishment of later burhs provided for the setting up of markets and mints, and grew to become important sources of revenue for the king and the episcopacy. They also became lucrative as trading centers for their inhabitants. Their creation gave an impetus to urbanization and commercialization of Southern England. Laws of tenth century kings demanded that trade take place in the towns, and they developed into places of permanent habitation and vibrant trade. A charter from the 920s stipulates that one in every nine ‘agrarian soldiers’ was to live in the town and construct dwellings for himself and eight others, who were to keep him supplied. Later, when many such burhs became mints, the inhabitants paid a profitable rent to the king. The burh was thus an important source of wealth and power to the king. These centers, set up in the wake of devastating Viking attacks, supplied not only the scaffolding for the Anglo-Saxon administrative and military structure, but also became extremely lucrative trading centers for their inhabitants and the king, and for the economy at large.
Hodges and Whitehouse argued against Pirenne’s belief in the gradual evolution of North Sea trade, and proposed instead, on the authority of recent excavations at Dorestad, a sudden and massive economic expansion and a correspondingly explosive increase in maritime trading activity. They also challenged Pirenne’s assertion that there was a gradual evolution of a ‘feudal system’, and offer large-scale rebuilding as an alternate explanation for the development of the market in rural areas.
Furthermore, contrary to Pirenne’s notion of a closed curtain drawn across the Mediterranean, they highlighted the existence of nominal contacts between the Abbasid caliphate and the Carolingians, manifested in the form of embassies and the exchange of gifts. However, spiritual divisions and the opposition to maritime links formed by the formidable Byzantine navy deterred any substantial level of diplomacy between the two powers.
Hodges and Whitehouse, along with other historians like Sawyer, insisted upon other factors in addition to the Viking invasions as precipitating the collapse of the great Carolingian administrative machinery. For example, the fact that imperial grants to the church increased dramatically, causing the amount of land under the church to triple in area between 750 and 825, caused the alienation of the Frankish nobility who had grown accustomed to being enriched with church lands. By removing the critical role of Islam, Hodges and Whitehouse demolished one of the planks upon which the Pirenne thesis rested.
The modern perspective on history is that change is extremely gradual, and that it does not necessarily occur in significant steps and processes. Henri Pirenne, though he asked all the right questions, erred in that he answered them by attempting to identify these non-existent significant steps. Pirenne’s thesis is too well-structured, smooth and chronological, and, while appealing to contemporary intuitions, is contrary to the modern acceptance of the fact that history is an extremely messy, local, and specific process. He also suffered the disadvantage of working in a time when other forms of evidence were not very abundant. Later discoveries in the fields of archaeology, linguistics and numismatics have played major roles in detecting flaws in the Pirenne thesis, as have advances in other areas of human knowledge and their effects on the study of history.
Nevertheless, Henri Pirenne was a visionary. His work compels every scholar to wrestle with the concepts of his grand thesis because within their framework rests a truer understanding of the middle ages. It is also noteworthy that after decades of scrutiny and revision, the basic skeleton of the Pirenne theory is still considered valid.

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[Vomazoono]

tl(and unreadable)dr

[CalBettaulp]

Could you post a longer version with less paragraph breaks and without the bolding of the salient points please? Lose your tidy little summary too, if possible.

[ecosportpol_ru]

Originally posted by LordShiva
That's exactly what the professor said So why did you foist it on us?

[GECEDEANY]

This trading activity also supported pirates who plied the Baltic and North Seas; that piracy thrived indicates that there was loot to plunder. The interruption of the flow of silver into Scandinavia, indicated by the fact that coin hoards have been found with coins dating from before 820 and after 890, and not in between, had serious consequences. Scandinavian pirates were forced to rely on Europe for their silver, and the silver reaching Scandinavia thereafter was largely loot, tribute (danegeld), or mercenary fees (heregeld).
Sawyer also highlighted the dangers of relying too heavily on literary sources at the expense of archaeological and place-name evidence. Contemporary literature was written by churchmen, who, as the primary victims of the Viking raids, were hardly unbiased in their writings. Sawyer argued that they regularly exaggerated the sizes of the attacking forces, in an attempt to justify defeat or highlight victories. For instance, it is very possible that many, if not all, Viking raids on monasteries and churches were little more than violent acts of robbery, and he also pointed out that armies of more than a thousand men, such as those described by some chronicles, would have faced problems of supply, discipline and mobility, and would not have been nearly as successful as smaller, compact war bands. He believed that archaeological and linguistic evidence should serve to corroborate literary evidence. Rather than treating them as a welcome check on literary sources, apparent discrepancies brought up by archaeology and linguistics are too often explained away. The deeply rooted conviction that the Vikings came in large armies and spread little but desolation with unparalleled savagery seriously handicaps attempts to determine the true nature and extent of the Viking menace. This view raises doubts about Hughes’ and Pirenne’s conclusions regarding the extent to which the Vikings were able to influence events in Western Europe. In Sawyer’s words:
…once the prejudices and exaggerations of the primary sources are recognized, the raids can be seen not as an unprecedented and inexplicable cataclysm, but as an extension of normal Dark Age activity, made possible and profitable by special circumstances. What a load of bullshit. 820-890 saw the great period of Viking conquest on the British Isles, with kingdoms set up in York, Dublin and Man/Orkney. It's the era of Ivar the Boneless. You don't achieve that level of conquest with a few piddling little gangs of robbing yobbos.

[oronozopiy]

"For more than fifty years, the history of the Middle Ages has been dominated by the ‘Pirenne Thesis’, "

er no. Ive read economic histories challenging Pirenne, and counter revisionists attempting to resuscitate Pirenne, for over 20 years.

After a distortion like that, I didnt read the rest of this long article.

[gagagaridze]

Originally posted by lord of the mark
"For more than fifty years, the history of the Middle Ages has been dominated by the ‘Pirenne Thesis’, "

er no. Ive read economic histories challenging Pirenne, and counter revisionists attempting to resuscitate Pirenne, for over 20 years. Pirenne published in 1922-23.

Over 50 years since then = 1974.

Over 20 years since then = 1990s and 2000s.