Henri Pirenne

Henri Pirenne (French:

Henri Pirenne's reputation today rests on three contributions to European history: for what has become known as the Pirenne Thesis, concerning origins of the Middle Ages in reactive state formation and shifts in trade; for a distinctive view of Belgium's medieval history; and for his model of the development of the medieval city.

Pirenne argued that profound social, economic, cultural, and religious movements in the

In 1914, Belgium

At the conclusion of the war, Henri Pirenne stopped his work on A History of Europe in the middle of the 16th century. He returned home and took up his life. He died at Uccle, Brussels in 1935. His son Jacques Pirenne, who had survived the war to become a historian in his own right, discovered the manuscript. He edited the work by inserting dates for which his father was uncertain in parentheses. Jacques wrote a preface explaining its provenance and published it, with the English translation appearing in 1956. It stands as a monumental intellectual achievement.

Theses and works

On the formation of European towns

Pirenne first expressed ideas on the formation of European towns in articles of 1895;^[7] he further developed the idea for the Pirenne Thesis while imprisoned in Germany during World War I. He subsequently published it in a series of papers from 1922 to 1923 and spent the rest of his life refining the thesis with supporting evidence. The most famous expositions appear in Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (1927, based on a series of lectures of 1922) and in his posthumous Mohammed and Charlemagne (1937), published from Pirenne's first draft.^[8]

In brief, the Pirenne Thesis, an early essay in economic history diverging from the narrative history of the 19th century, notes that in the ninth century long-distance trading was at a low ebb; the only settlements that were not purely agricultural were the ecclesiastical, military and administrative centres that served the feudal ruling classes as fortresses, episcopal seats, abbeys and occasional royal residences of the peripatetic palatium. When trade revived in the late tenth and eleventh centuries, merchants and artisans were drawn to the existing centres, forming suburbs in which trade and manufactures were concentrated. These were "new men" outside the feudal structure, living on the peripheries of the established order. The feudal core remained static and inert. A time came when the developing merchant class was strong enough to throw off feudal obligations or to buy out the prerogatives of the old order, which Pirenne contrasted with the new element in numerous ways. The leaders among the mercantile class formed a bourgeois patriciate, in whose hands economic and political power came to be concentrated.

Pirenne's thesis takes as axiomatic that the natural interests of the feudal nobility and of the urban patriciate, which came to well-attested frictions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, were in their origins incompatible. This aspect of his thesis has been challenged in detail.^[9]

Traditionally, historians had dated the Middle Ages from the

According to Pirenne, the real break in Roman history occurred in the 8th century as a result of Arab expansion. Islamic conquest of the area of today's south-eastern Turkey, Syria, Palestine, North Africa, Spain and Portugal ruptured economic ties to western Europe, cutting the region off from trade and turning it into a stagnant backwater, with wealth flowing out in the form of raw resources and nothing coming back. This began a steady decline and impoverishment so that, by the time of Charlemagne, western Europe had become almost entirely agrarian at a subsistence level, with no long-distance trade.^[11]

In a summary, Pirenne stated that "Without Islam, the Frankish Empire would probably never have existed, and Charlemagne, without Muhammad, would be inconceivable."^[12] That is, he rejected the notion that barbarian invasions in the 4th and 5th centuries caused the collapse of the Roman Empire. Instead, the Muslim conquest of north Africa made the Mediterranean a barrier, cutting western Europe off from the east, enabling the Carolingians, especially Charlemagne, to create a new, distinctly western form of government. Pirenne used statistical data regarding money in support of his thesis. Much of his argument builds upon the disappearance from western Europe of items that had to come from outside. For example, the minting of gold coins north of the Alps stopped after the 7th century, indicating a loss of access to wealthier parts of the world. Papyrus, made only in Egypt, no longer appeared in northern Europe after the 7th century; writing reverted to using parchment, indicating its economic isolation.

Pirenne's thesis did not convince most of the historians at the time of its publication, but historians since that time generally agree it has stimulated debate on the Early Middle Ages, and has provided a provocative example of how periodization would work.^[13][14] It continues to inform historical discussion in the 21st century, with more recent debate focusing on whether later archaeological discoveries refute the thesis or demonstrate its fundamental viability.^[15][16]

Belgian history

Pirenne's other major idea concerned the nature of medieval

Pirenne's history cemented his reputation as one of Belgium's leading public intellectuals in his lifetime. His thesis remains crucial to the understanding of Belgium's past, but his notion of a continuity of Belgian civilization forming the basis of political unity has lost favor. Some Belgian scholars have argued that the creation of their country was a historical chance.[18] Pirenne's argument that the long Spanish rule in the Low Countries had little continuing cultural impact has likewise fallen, in the face of new research since 1970 in the fields of cultural, military, economic, and political history.^[19] Henri Pirenne donated the majority of his personal library to the Academia Belgica in Rome. In 1933, the seventh volume received was awarded the Francqui Prize on Human Sciences.

Medieval Cities

Pirenne was also the author of Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (1927), a book based on lectures he delivered in the United States in 1922. In this book, he contends that through the period from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, Europe reclaimed control of the Mediterranean from the Muslim world, and opened up sea routes to the Orient. This allowed the formation of a merchant/middle class and the development of that class's characteristic abode, the city.

He argued that capitalism originated in Europe's cities, as did democracy. His "Merchant Enterprise School" opposed Marxism but shared many of Marx's ideas on the merchant class. Pirenne's theory of a commercial renaissance in towns in the 11th century remains the standard interpretation.

A History of Europe

Pirenne wrote a two-volume A History of Europe: From the End of the Roman World in the West to the Beginnings of the Western States, a remarkable but incomplete work which Pirenne wrote while imprisoned in Germany during World War I. It was published by his son in 1936. A translation into English, by Bernard Miall, was first published in Great Britain in 1939 by George Allen and Unwin.

Bibliography

• Pirenne, Henri. Histoire de Belgique (7 vols.) (1899–1932)^[20]
• Pirenne, Henri (1909). "The Formation and Constitution of the Burgundian State (Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries)" (PDF).
  JSTOR 1836443
  .
• Pirenne, Henri. Belgian Democracy, Its Early History (1910, 1915)[21] 250 pp. History of towns in the Low Countries online free Archived 27 May 2012 at the Wayback Machine
• Pirenne, Henri. "The Stages in the Social History of Capitalism", The American Historical Review, 19:494, April 1914 in JSTOR^[22]
• Pirenne, Henri. Medieval Cities: Their Origins and the Revival of Trade (1927)^[23]
• Pirenne, Henri. A History of Europe (1936).^[24]
• Pirenne, Henri. Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe (1956)^[25]
• Pirenne, Henri. Mohammed and Charlemagne (1937)^[26]
• Pirenne, Henri. "Reflexions d'un Solitaire". (edited by Jacques-Henri Pirenne) in
  ISSN 0001-415X.^[27]
  First publication of his wartime prison journal.
• Pirenne, Henri (1969). Medieval cities: their origins and the revival of trade. Frank D. Halsey (trans.). Princeton University Press. p. 253.
  ISBN 9780691162393
• Lyon, Bryce; Lyon, Mary (1976). The Journal de guerre of Henri Pirenne. Amsterdam: North-Holland.
  ISBN 9780720404432
  .

See also

• Paul Fredericq – historian, regarded as the Flemish equivalent of Pirenne

Notes

1. ^ Henri Pirenne at geneanet.org
2. ISBN 9780415252256
   .
3. ^ Dopsch, The Economic and Social Foundations of European Civilization (tr, 1937).
4. ^ Richard Hodges - Dark Age Economics. The origins of towns and trade, ad 600–1000 (1982) London
5. ^ "Overzicht rectoren". University of Ghent. Retrieved 6 November 2019.
6. ^ De Schaepdrijver, Sophie (2011). ""That Theory of Races" Henri Pirenne on the Unfinished Business of the Great War". Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Nieuwste Geschiedenis. 41 (3–4): 533–552.
7. ^ Pirenne, "L'origine des constitutions urbaines au Moyen Age", in Revue Historique, 1895.
8. ^ Henry Pirenne (1937). Mohammed and Charlemagne English translation by Bernard Miall, 1939. From Internet Archive. The thesis was originally laid out in an article published in Revue belge de Philologie et d'Histoire 1 (1922), pp. 77–86.
9. ^ E.g. by A. B. Hibbert, "The Origins of the Medieval Town Patriciate" Past and Present No. 3 (February 1953:15–27).
10. ^ In this context, K. Randsborg, The First Millennium AD in Europe and the Mediterranean: an archaeological essay (1991) is cited by Averil Cameron, The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity AD 395–600 1993:4; the extent to which the new data and interpretations of processual archaeology have altered modern perceptions is the theme of Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse, Mohammed, Charlemagne and the Origins of Europe: archaeology and the Pirenne thesis, 1983.
11. ^ Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne; the thesis appears in chapters 1–2 of Medieval Cities (1925)
12. ^ the quote appears in Medieval Cities p.27
13. ISBN 9781444323665
    .
14. ISBN 9781606060575
    .
15. ^ Freedman, Paul H. (2011). "The Early Middle Ages, 284–1000 — Lecture 17: The Crucial Seventh Century". Open Yale Courses.
16. ISBN 9780578094182
    .
17. ISBN 0-19-822108-8
    .
18. ISSN 0770-0962
    .
19. S2CID 143454426
    .
20. ^ Pirenne, Henri (1 January 1902). Histoire de Belgique. Bruxelles : H. Lamertin.
21. ^ Pirenne, Henri (1 January 1915). Belgian Democracy: Its Early History. Manchester University Press.
22. ^ Pirenne, Henri (4 May 2010). The Stages in the Social History of Capitalism.
23. ISBN 0691007608
    .
24. ISBN 9781409724605
    .
25. ISBN 9780156275330
    .
26. ^ henri pirenne mohammed charlemagne.
27. doi:10.1016/S0304-4181(97)00014-6
    .

Further reading

• Brown, Peter. "Mohammed and Charlemagne by Henri Pirenne." Daedalus 1974 103(1): 25–33.
  ISSN 0011-5266
• Cate, James L. "Henri Pirenne (1862–1935)," in S. William Halperin, ed. Some 20th Century Historians-essays on Eminent Europeans, (1961) 1–30.
• Frank, Kenneth W. "Pirenne Again: A Muslim Viewpoint," The History Teacher, Vol. 26, No. 3 (May 1993), pp. 371–383 in JSTOR
• Ganshof, F. L. "Henri Pirenne and Economic History." Economic History Review 1936 6(2): 179–185.
  ISSN 0013-0117 online
• Havighurst, Alfred F. ed. The Pirenne Thesis: Analysis, Criticism, and Revision (1958) readings by scholars [1], [2]
• Hodges, Richard and David Whitehouse (1983). Mohammed, Charlemagne, and the origins of Europe. Cornell University Press.
  ISBN 0-8014-9262-9
  . Influential analysis of the Pirenne Thesis and the role of recent archaeological findings.
• Lyon, Bryce. Henri Pirenne: A Biographical and Intellectual Study (1974)
• Lyon, Bryce. "The Letters of Henri Pirenne to Karl Lamprecht (1894–1915)." Bulletin De La Commission Royale D'histoire 1966 132(2): 161–231.
• Brown, Elizabeth A. R. "Henri Pirenne: a Biographical and Intellectual Study." History and Theory 1976 15(1): 66–76. review of Lyon in Jstor
• McCormick, Michael (2001). Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, 300–900. Cambridge University Press.
  ISBN 0-521-66102-1
  . A reexamination of the Pirenne Thesis.
• Powicke, F. M. "Henri Pirenne," The English Historical Review, Vol. 51, No. 201 (January 1936), pp. 79–89 in JSTOR
• Tollebeek, Jo. "At the crossroads of nationalism: Huizinga, Pirenne and the Low Countries in Europe," European Review of History (2010) 17#2 pp. 187–215.
• Warland, Geneviève (2018). "Henri Pirenne, témoin fiable ou narrateur meurtri? De son Journal de Guerre à ses Souvenirs de Capitivité". Guerres Mondiales et Conflits Contemporains. 272 (4): 51–64.
  JSTOR 26792560
  .

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Henri Pirenne.

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Wikisource has original works by or about:
Henri Pirenne

• "Henry Pirenne". In Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
• Digitheque Henri Pirenne Archived 17 July 2009 at the Wayback Machine
• A review of Mohammed and Charlemagne
• Works by Henri Pirenne at Project Gutenberg
• Works by or about Henri Pirenne at Internet Archive
• Newspaper clippings about Henri Pirenne in the 20th Century Press Archives of the ZBW