E98 The Fall of Rome and Henri Pirenne

Gladio Free Europe

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On September 4, 476 the barbarian general Odoacer deposed the last Roman emperor in the West and proclaimed himself king of Italy. After 500 years of existence, the Western Roman Empire was gone. But if you were living there at the time, would you have even noticed anything had changed?

Liam and Russian Sam return to one of their favorite historical subjects, an area that has energized and terrified generations of scholars for 1500 years: the decline and fall of the Western Roman Empire. Considered to mark the end of classical antiquity and the start of the middle ages, this event was traditionally understood to be the fundamental cataclysm of the history of Europe, perhaps even the history of the world. But on the eve of the Second World War, aging Belgian historian Henri Pirenne proposed an alternative view: that the collapse of the Roman Empire and the rise of the barbarian kingdoms only amounted to a change in management. The real transformation of the Roman world into the medieval world would not happen until centuries later, when the empires of the Muslims and the Carolingian Franks built new political and economic systems that replaced what had been left by Rome.

This is the key argument of Mohammed and Charlemagne, Pirenne's most famous work published posthumously in 1937 and one of the most revolutionary texts in medieval history. Still hotly debated today, Pirenne's thesis upended a seemingly adamantine tradition of scholarship established by the Italian humanist Petrarch in the 14th century, and elaborated by later historians such a Edward Gibbon, which viewed the medieval period as a detestable Dark Age that had to be redeemed by the discovery of Roman glory. While not rejecting outright the notion of an early-medieval Dark Age, Pirenne put forward a strong argument for continuity across the 4th, 5th, and 6th centuries, interrupted not by the invasions of barbarian peoples but instead by the later rise of the Muslim caliphate. New religious divisions severed the arteries of trade and communication that united the Mediterranean world. And when a new Roman Empire emerged in the west the following century, Pirenne argues that this realm of Charlemagne did not restore Roman civilization as once was believed, but instead created a new imperial system just like their Arab contemporaries.

Listen to this week's Gladio Free Europe to decide for yourself if the end of the Western Roman Empire did or did not mark the end of the Roman world.

Further Listening:

E13 Migration and Memory

E15 The Last Kingdom

E33 Late Roman Empire

E36 The Franks ft. Natasha

E49 The Arab-Norman Civilization (Part 1)

E50 The Arab-Norman Civilization (Part 2)

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