Rome's Three Heirs, 500-950

Is there a connection between the rise of Islam and the emergence of Charlemagne's empire in northern Europe?

This is an interesting question. How could there be a connection between the rise of Islam - and you think about the death of Mohammad in the middle of the 7th century - and the establishment of Charlemagne's empire a century and a half later in northern Europe?

This powerful suggestion was made by historian Henri Pirenne in 1937, in a book called Mohammad and Charlemagne. His argument was essentially that the rise of Islam and the rapid spread of Islam throughout the Near East, Northern Africa, and into Spain caused a power vacuum in Europe. Pirenne hypothesized that Islam and Christianity would be necessarily hostile to one another and that the Muslims, by taking control of the Mediterranean, would have been trying to stop any kind of commerce or communication between the Christian west and the now very Muslim east. In other words, it was based on the assumption that the relationship between Christianity and Islam is always going to be a hostile one.

Historians since then have really pulled back from this. In particular, historians are now looking for the many different kinds of connections that existed between the Islamic world and the early medieval west. And they are finding these connections all over the place. They are finding that there was very free and frequent movement of peoples and goods between the Islamic caliphates and Islamic kingdoms of Spain and the north. They are finding that one of these connections was because these northern European Christians who didn't have very much wealth to exchange with Islam for all the exotic goods they wanted to get, were selling each other into slavery to the Muslims. So instead of there not being any connection between Islam and the Christian west, there were plenty of connections that were very lucrative on both sides.

If Charlemagne doesn't come to power because of this power vacuum, does he have any connection with this Islamic world? He does, absolutely, but again it is not a violent one. What we know is that Charlemagne and his grandfather, Charles Martel, had a negative relationship with the Muslims on their immediate borders. That is, the Muslim kingdoms of Spain, which shared the border of the Pyrenees with the Frankish kingdom of Charlemagne. That was not an easy relationship and there were plenty of battles and skirmishes between those two but the Muslims of Spain are not the same as the Muslims of Baghdad. In fact, Charlemagne had a very cordial relationship with the Muslim caliph in Baghdad, Harun al-Rashid, who was in fact the Muslim caliph of the Arabian Nights, a great and legendary figure like Charlemagne. Charlemagne and Harun al-Rashid exchanged gifts on a regular basis, the most famous of which was when Harun al-Rashid sent Charlemagne an elephant called Abul-Abbas who then lived out his life, poor creature, in the wilds of Germany. Archaeologists have even found his bones.

In the end, there is a very close connection between the growing wealth and political consequence of the early medieval kingdom, of the empire of Charlemagne, and Islam, but it is not necessarily this hostile connection that was posited by early historians.