by Emmet Scott
If the monks were classical scholars, they were equally natural philosophers, engineers and agriculturalists. Certain monasteries might be known for their skill in particular branches of knowledge. Thus, for example, lectures in medicine were delivered by the monks of Saint Benignus at Dijon, whilst the monastery of Saint Gall had a school of painting and engraving, and lectures in Greek and Hebrew could be heard at certain German monasteries.[26] Monks often supplemented their education by attending one or more of the monastic schools established throughout Europe. Abbo of Fleury, having mastered the disciplines taught in his own house, went to study philosophy and astronomy at Paris and Rheims. We hear similar stories about Archbishop Raban of Mainz, Saint Wolfgang, and Gerbert of Aurillac.[27]
The monks, from the time of Benedict onwards, established schools all over Europe. Indeed, our word “school” is related to the word “Scholastic,” a term used to broadly define the system of thought and philosophy developed by the monks of this period. Scholastic thinking was based largely on Aristotle, and represented real continuity with the classical traditions of philosophy and rationality.
As well as teachers and educators, the monks established the first hospitals. These were the first institutions ever to exist providing free medical care to all, irrespective of financial circumstances. In the words of one writer: “Following the fall of the [Western] Roman Empire, monasteries gradually became the providers of organized medical care not available elsewhere in Europe for several centuries. Given their organization and location, these institutions were virtual oases of order, piety, and stability in which healing could flourish. To provide these caregiving practices, monasteries also became sites of medical learning between the fifth and tenth centuries, the classic period of so-called monastic medicine. During the Carolingian revival of the 800s, monasteries also emerged as the principal centers for the study and transmission of ancient medical texts.”[28]
As noted by the above writer, their interest in healing led the monks naturally into medical research, and in course of time they accumulated a vast knowledge of physiology, pathology, and medication. Their studies of herbs and natural remedies led them into the investigation of plants, and they laid the foundations of the sciences of botany and biology.
As part of the Rule of Benedict, the monks were committed to a life of work, study and prayer, and the work part often involved manual labor in the fields. This led to a renewed respect for this type of activity amongst the aristocracy who, by the late Roman period, had come to regard manual work with contempt. Their labors in the fields produced a deep interest in agriculture and agricultural techniques. New technologies were developed by the monks, including, almost certainly, the windmill. Everywhere, they introduced new crops, industries, or production methods. Here they would introduce the rearing of cattle and horses, there the brewing of beer or the raising of bees or fruit. In Sweden, the corn trade owed its existence to the monks.
When Benedict established his Rule, much of Europe was still an uncultivated wilderness. This was true primarily of those areas which had never been part of the Roman Empire, such as Germany, but even of parts of Gaul and Spain, as well as Britain and Ireland remained in this condition into the sixth and seventh centuries. These areas the monks brought under cultivation, often deliberately choosing the wildest and most inhospitable tracts of country to set up their houses. Many of the virgin forests and marshes of Germany and Poland were brought into cultivation for the first time by the monks. “We owe,” says one writer, “the agricultural restoration of a great part of Europe to the monks.” According to another, “Wherever they came, they converted the wilderness into a cultivated country; they pursued the breeding of cattle and agriculture, labored with their own hands, drained morasses, and cleared away forests. By them Germany was rendered a fruitful country.” Another historian records that “every Benedictine monastery was an agricultural college for the whole region in which it was located.”[29] Even nineteenth century French historian Francois Guizot, a man not especially sympathetic to Catholicism, observed: “The Benedictine monks were the agriculturalists of Europe; they cleared it on a large scale, associating agriculture with preaching.”[30]
It would be possible to fill many volumes outlining the contribution made by the monks, particularly those of the Early Middle Ages, to the civilization and prosperity of Europe. Their role cannot be emphasized strongly enough; yet it is one that has been curiously overlooked by many historians. In the 1860s and 1870s, when Comte de Montalembert wrote a six-volume history of the monks of the West, he complained at times of his inability to provide anything more than a cursory overview of great figures and deeds, so enormous was the topic at hand. He was compelled, he said, to refer his readers to the references in his footnotes, in order that they might follow them up for themselves.
[1] Robert Briffault, The Making of Humanity (London, 1919), pp. 188-189.
[2]Ibid. p. 190.
[3]Ibid. pp. 190-191.
[4]Ibid. p. 191.
[5]Ibid. p. 198.
[6]Ibid. p. 194.
[7]Ibid. p. 197.
[8] Rosanna Gorini, “Al-Haytham the Man of Experience. First Steps in the Science of Vision,” International Society for the History of Islamic Medicines (2003). Institute of Neurosciences, Laboratory and Psychobiology and Psychopharmacology, Rome, Italy.
[9] Sidney Painter, A History of the Middle Ages, 284-1500 (Macmillan, 1953), p. 303.
[10] Briffault, op cit., p. 217.
[11]Ibid. p. 219.
[12] Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Rise of Christian Europe (2nd. ed., London, 1966), p. 90.
[13]Ibid.
[14] Charles Simmonds, Alcohol: With Chapters on Methyl Alcohol, Fusel Oil, and Spirituous Beverages (Macmillan, 1919), pp. 6ff.
[15] See e.g. Carl B. Boyer, A History of Mathematics, Second Edition (Wiley, 1991), p. 228.
[16] James W. Thompson and Edgar N. Johnson, An Introduction to Medieval Europe, 300-1500 (New York, 1937), p. 175.
[17]Ibid., p. 176.
[18]Ibid., p. 178.
[19] Rodney Stark, The Rise of Christianity: A Sociologist Reconsiders History (Harper Collins, 1996), pp. 20-1.
[20] Moses Maimonides, The Guide for the Perplexed, M. Friedländer, trans. (Barnes and Noble, New York, 2004).
[21] Bertrand, op cit., p. 58.
[22] We know, for example, that Alfred the Great visited Rome, as did numerous other princes of the British Isles, France and Germany.
[23] Réginald Grégoire, Léo Moulin, and Raymond Oursel, The Monastic Realm (New York, Rizzoli, 1985), p. 277.
[24] Cited from Charles Montalembert, The Monks of the West: From St. Benedict to St. Bernard. 5 Vols. (Vol. 5) (London, 1896), p. 146. It is true that Alciun is a man of the ninth century, an epoch from which surviving documents must be treated with the utmost caution. Yet tenth century characters, whose historical reality is not to be doubted, were also well acquainted with the Classical authors.
[25] John Henry Newman, in Charles Frederick Harrold, (ed.) Essays and Sketches, Vol. 3 (New York, 1948), pp. 316-7.
[26]Ibid., p. 319.
[27]Ibid., pp. 317-9.
[28] Günter B. Risse, Mending Bodies, Saving Souls: A History of Hospitals (Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 95.
[29] Alexander Clarence Flick, The Rise of the Medieval Church (New York, 1909), p. 223.
[30] See John Henry Cardinal Newman, loc cit. pp. 264-5.
2
Islam’s Teaching and Attitudes
As I have shown in some detail in Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited, the arrival of Islam upon the stage of history was marked by a torrent of violence and destruction throughout the Mediterranean world. The great Roman and Byzantine cities, whose
ruins still dot the landscapes of North Africa and the Middle East, were brought to a rapid end in the seventh century. Everywhere archeologists have found evidence of massive destruction; and this corresponds precisely with what we know of Islam as an ideology.
Unlike Christianity, early Islam was spread entirely by the sword. Later Muslims believed implicitly that the example was here set by Muhammad. Whether this is correct, or whether anyone named Muhammad ever existed, is another question, one that is briefly examined in the Appendix to the present volume. From the point of view of Islam's impact upon the outside world and Europe in particular, however, the fact is that Muslims have never, since the late seventh century at least, doubted Muhammad’s existence and have since then viewed him as the perfect model for human behavior and moral action. In their basic religious texts, the Qur’an, the Hadith (sayings and deeds of Muhammad) and the Sira (Muhammad’s biography, written by Ibn Ishaq around 720), a comprehensive picture of the life and teachings of their Prophet emerges: What we find is the story of a desert warlord who was also an extremely sensual man, a man who freely indulged in the more carnal pleasures. Muhammad, we find, used violence to spread his teachings, and advocated that others do the same. During the military campaigns in which he was involved he took slaves for his own gratification and permitted others to follow suit.
This is not, of course, the image of a prophet or holy man most westerners expect. Nor is it in accordance with what most other cultures expect of a man of God. Muhammad is said to have ordered at least sixty raids and wars, and to have personally participated in twenty-seven of these, some of which involved massacres. Gibbon, as unbiased an authority as may be found, attributed the spectacular success of Muhammad’s faith to the promise of plunder and comely captives. “From all sides the roving Arabs were allured to the standard of religion and plunder; and the apostle sanctified the licence of embracing female captives as their wives and concubines; and the enjoyment of wealth and beauty was a feeble type of the joys of paradise prepared for the valiant martyrs of the faith. ‘The sword,’ says Mahomet, ‘is the key of heaven and of hell: a drop of blood shed in the cause of God, a night spent in arms, is of more avail than two months of fasting or prayer: whosoever falls in battle, his sins are forgiven ...’”[1] All of the early spread of Islam involved the sword. Contrast this with the growth of Christianity, or Buddhism, for that matter. Islam is virtually unique among world religions in that its primary scriptures advocate the use of military force and its early expansion – indeed its expansion during the first six or seven centuries of its existence – invariably involved military conquest and the use of force.
In 1993 Samuel P. Huntington famously noted that “Islam has bloody borders.”[2] He might have added that Islam has always had bloody borders. Before he died, Muhammad is said to have told his followers that he had been ordered to “fight with the people till they say, none has the right to be worshiped but Allah.” (Hadith, Vol. 4:196) In this spirit, Islamic theology divides the world into two parts: the Dar al-Islam, “House of Islam” and the Dar al-Harb, “House of War.” In short, a state of perpetual conflict exists between Islam and the rest of the world. There can thus never be a real and genuine peace between Islam and the Dar al-Harb. At best, there can be a temporary truce, to allow Muslims to recuperate and regroup. In the words of Bat Ye’or, “the jihad is a state of permanent war [which] excludes the possibility of true peace.” All that is allowed are “provisional truces in accordance with the requirements of the political situation.”[3] In the words of medieval historian Robert Irwin, “Since the jihad [was] … a state of permanent war, it [excluded] … the possibility of true peace, but it [did] … allow for provisional truces in accordance with the requirements of the political situation.”[4] Also, “Muslim religious law could not countenance the formal conclusion of any sort of permanent peace with the infidel.”[5] And this is precisely what we find: In the long stretch of time since the life of Muhammad, it is doubtful if there has been a single year in which Muslims, in some part of the world, have not been fighting against infidels. In the history of relations between Europe and the House of Islam alone, there was continual and almost uninterrupted war between Muslims and Christians since the first attack on Sicily in 652 and on Constantinople in 674. In the great majority of these wars, the Muslims were the aggressors. And even the short periods of official peace were disturbed by the “unofficial” activities of corsairs and slave-traders. For centuries, Muslim pirates based in North Africa made large parts of the Mediterranean shore-line uninhabitable for Christians, and it is estimated that between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries alone they captured and enslaved something in excess of a million Europeans.
More shall be said of Muslim piracy in the Mediterranean as we proceed.
At the opposite end of the Islamic sphere, in India and the Far East, war was equally endemic, and the horrors committed by successive Muslim invaders of India would need a volume in themselves to enumerate. Suffice to say that, lacking the limited protection extended to followers of religions “of the Book” (Christianity and Judaism), the Hindus and Buddhists of the Subcontinent suffered merciless slaughter and enslavement. This was violence on a completely unprecedented scale. Nothing like it had been seen before. One estimate holds that around fifty million Hindus and Buddhists died in the early centuries of Islamic conquest and rule – a slaughter wholly unprecedented in history and scarcely without parallel even in modern times. It is true that by the sixteenth century Islamic rule was somewhat ameliorated under the wise and tolerant Mughals; but for centuries earlier this was not the case.
The seventeen incursions of Mahmud of Ghazni, who led the original Islamic conquest in 1010,[6] were particularly devastating. In the words of one historian; “Though the court chronicler Utbi clearly exaggerated his sultan’s prowess when he claimed that ten thousand Hindu temples were destroyed in Kanauj [district of northern India] alone by Mahmud’s sword, it is not difficult to appreciate the legacy of bitter Hindu-Muslim antipathy left by raids that may have taken even 1 percent of that toll.”[7] In one of his most notorious attacks, Mahmud assaulted Somnath, whose inhabitants “stood calmly watching the advance of Mahmud’s fierce army … confident that Shiva, whose ‘miraculous’ iron lingam hung suspended within a magnetic field inside Somnath’s ‘womb-house,’ would surely protect his worshippers from harm. Here, too, the chronicler probably exaggerated, for he wrote that fifty thousand Hindus were slain that day and that over two million dinars’ worth of gold and jewels were taken from the hollow lingam shattered by Mahmud’s sword. Yet the bitter shock of such attacks, whatever the factual sum of their deadly impact, was even more painfully amplified in the memories of those who had watched helplessly as friends and family were slain or enslaved by invaders who came to kill, rape, and rob in the name of God.”[8]
One long-term consequence of these invasions was the virtual disappearance from India of the hitherto prevalent and pacifist Buddhism and its replacement by a form of Hinduism whose militancy is summed-up in the fact that its central scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, is an account of how the avatara Krishna urges his devotee (Arjuna) to take part in a bloody battle – in spite of the pacifist arguments advanced by the latter. The impact of Islam also saw the rise, in Northern India, of the even more militantly-inclined Sikh movement.
The disappearance of Buddhism in India, under the impact of Islam, is of great importance in that it shows how Islam tended to produce a more warlike mindset in the regions subject to its aggressive attentions. To this day Hindus point the finger of blame at Buddhism for the ease with which the Muslims conquered the Subcontinent. The very same process seems to have been operational in the West, where the more peaceful regions of the Byzantine world were overthrown with considerable ease by the Muslim invaders, whilst their own doctrine of “holy war” was later adopted by the Christians of Europe.
The centrality of war in Islamic theology is express
ed succinctly by Ibn Abi Zayd al Qayrawani, who died in 966:
Jihad is a precept of Divine institution. Its performance by certain individuals may dispense others from it. We Malikis [one of the four schools of Muslim jurisprudence] maintain that it is preferable not to begin hostilities with the enemy before having invited the latter to embrace the religion of Allah except where the enemy attacks first. They have the alternative of either converting to Islam or paying the poll tax (jizya), short of which war will be declared against them. The jizya can only be accepted from them if they occupy a territory where our laws can be enforced. If they are out of our reach, the jizya cannot be accepted from them unless they come within our territory. Otherwise we will make war against them ...
