38 | CHAPTER 2
dreamed of rebuilding Rome’s frontiers to keep the barbarians out.^76 Scholars
from the former Central Powers found themselves disinvited to international
gatherings—though the charismatic and well- connected Strzygowski spent
much of 1920 to 1922 lecturing in England, Holland, and the United States.^77
Some attempt to get to grips with the issues, at least as regards the earlier
confrontation between civilization and barbarism—which in so many ways
recalled both the recent past (1814–15, 1870–71) and the present^78 —was
made at the International Congress of Historical Sciences held at Brussels in
- One of the questions agitated there was whether the Germanic invad-
ers could have been bearers of any sort of culture worth talking about, with a
predictable division of opinion between French and German scholars.^79
It almost had to be a Belgian—and one for whom, in contrast to Strzy-
gowski, “race and language were infinitely plastic”^80 —who found the perfect
resolution to these Franco- German tensions. It was Henri Pirenne’s (d. 1935)
genial idea, first propounded in 1922 but fully published posthumously in
1937, to leave 410 and all that on one side, and blame the end of Antiquity
on the Arabs.^81 For Pirenne, a low- level Romanity survived parallel to the
establishment of the Germanic kingdoms, mainly because the basic patterns
of commercial exchange also persisted (Pirenne’s famous Syrian merchants in
Gaul). It was only with the Arab invasions in the seventh century, especially
when they spread across North Africa, that Mediterranean unity broke.
Thereafter the Latin world turned in on itself, and substituted Frankish
roughness for the old Mediterranean sheen. Just as for Becker Islamic civili-
zation could not have come into being without Alexander, so for Pirenne
Charlemagne was inconceivable without Muhammad.^82 The difference was
that for Becker (reading the Arabic sources) the Arabs’ role was laudable,
while for Pirenne (dependent on the Byzantinist Vasiliev) it brought about a
permanent rupture.^83 But in the end both scholars were interested in one
thing : the genealog y of Europe, not the development of a complex cultural
tradition up to and through Islam.
76 On what follows, see C. Violante, La fine della ‘grande illusione’: Uno storico europeo tra guerra e
dopoguerra, Henri Pirenne (1914–1923) (Bologna 1997) 147–279; K. D. Erdmann (tr. A. Nothnagle),
Toward a global community of historians: The International Historical Congresses and the International
Committee of Historical Sciences 1898–2000 (New york 2005) 68–100.
77 Karasek- Langer, Schaffen und Schauen 8(7/8) (1932) [2:35] 43–44; Schödl, Josef Strzygowski
[2:35] 17–19.
78 Herzog, “Wir leben in der Spätantike” [2:21] 12–13.
79 A. Marcone, “Un treno per Ravenna,” in L. Polverini (ed.), Arnaldo Momigliano nella storiogra-
fia del novecento (Rome 2006) 228–29.
80 P. Brown, Society and the holy in late Antiquity (London 1982) 71.
81 Cf. P. Delogu, “Reading Pirenne again,” in R. Hodges and W. Bowden (eds), The sixth century
(Leiden 1998) 15–40, emphasizing how Pirenne managed to moderate his dislike of Germans.
82 H. Pirenne, Mahomet et Charlemagne (Paris 1937) 210.
83 Pirenne, Mahomet et Charlemagne [2:82] 132, 143.