Islam and the Development of Medieval Europe

Gina Mahaz
HIST134
11 December 2016

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Islam and the Development of Medieval Europe
While there are many in the West who claim that Islam did not play a major role in the
making of Europe, we will show in this essay that Islam was in fact a significant ingredient in the
historical development of medieval Europe. There were three principal reasons for Islam's
influence on the making of Europe. By destroying the maritime commerce of the Mediterranean
Sea for a long period of time, Islam's military expansion forced Western European countries to
change their economies from a trading system to an agricultural, land-based system. By cutting
off the flow of commodities from the East that the Europeans had come to rely upon during the
days of the Roman Empire, Islam forced the Europeans to come up with their own locally
produced alternatives. Lastly, by militarily isolating the Europeans culturally and politically
during the Middle Ages, Islam set back the development of education, literacy and the arts in the
West for many centuries.
To understand Islam's sudden rise to world power, it is important to understand the
geopolitical situation in the Middle East in Mohammed's day. John Bagot Glubb describes that
world after the decline of Rome:
At the beginning of the seventh century A.D., the Western world was divided between
two power blocs, the Byzantine Empire and the Kingdom of Persia. The Byzantine
Empire consisted of the eastern and southern portions of what had once been the Roman
Empire, for Italy, France, Spain and Britain had been overrun by barbarians and lost. 1
But neither one of these empires was strong enough to dominate the region by itself, and a power
vacuum was created that the insurgent Arab peoples were able to fill:
The two great Middle Eastern empires of that era, Byzantium or Eastern Rome and
Sassanian Iran, had fought one another to an exhausted standstill . . . Both Empires were

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exhausted, faced financial crises, and were rent by internal schisms. To economize, the
Byzantines stopped paying subsidies to the Christian Arab tribes who had guarded the
steppe lands of Syria and Jordan . . . in 633 the caliph launched probes of tribal forces
northward into Byzantine territory; in the following year his great general marched
northward in Iraq, and turning westward, rode straight across the Great Syrian Desert for
500 miles, appearing suddenly outside the walls of Damascus. After looting Damascus
this army and other Arab tribal groups fought several brief battles with Byzantine forces,
until in July of 636 on the Yarmuk River in what is now Jordan they met and destroyed
the assembled Byzantine forces led by the Emperor. 2
The warrior spirit of the Arab tribes was joined with the new and militant faith of Islam, and the
tribes marched out into the old Byzantine Empire; within a century they had conquered all of
Mediterranean Africa, and conquered Spain.
As a world power, Islam was able to effectively destroy the maritime commerce in the
Mediterranean Sea that Europeans had based their civilization upon for over a thousand years.
The Byzantine Empire did not collapse, but the Europeans dominant role in Mediterranean
commerce did; the result was that the entire basis of the European economy was transformed into
a land-based, internally oriented system. As John Bagot Glubb states,
From about 700 onwards, the pattern was one of agriculture in Western Europe and
commerce and industry in the Arab Empire . . . In the East, however, the Byzantine Area
from the Adriatic to Constantinople just succeeded in retaining the old commercial
background. In the eighth and ninth centuries, trade barely survived, owing to the
dangers of navigation from Arab piracy. 3

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When the Islamic Empire seized control of the flow of commodities from the East to
Europe, many other aspects of European life were transformed. As we have seen, the new order
was the opposite of the situation in the Roman Empire, where agricultural commodities came
from the outlying provinces and Europe was the trading center. Now, the Arabs established their
own trading center in Baghdad, and under the Ummayad and then the Abbassis dynasties Islam
cut off the European trade routes. Glubb sees the cut-off of trade routes and the above-mentioned
domination of maritime commerce as the two main causes of the "Dark Ages":
The extent of the Arab dominions from Spain to Turkestan cut off Europe from trade
with Asia. Charlemagne, the contemporary of Haroon, was reduced to a silver currency
because in the West gold was unobtainable. Arab fleets enjoyed naval command of the
Mediterranean and Western Europe was reduced to a purely agricultural economy without
foreign trade. The Dark Ages of Europe had come . . . To the Arabs, on the other hand,
this was the Golden Age of military glory, wealth, commerce, learning and culture. 4
The Europeans were forced to fall back on their own locally produced goods and commodities;
the spices and silks for which the East was famed were little seen in Europe for the next four
centuries.
Many social changes took place as a result of the cultural and political isolation of
Western Europe from the rest of the civilized world. Lacking the cosmopolitan influences of an
international trading economy, the Europeans fell into a semi-barbaric state. This was not,
however, the result of the so-called "barbarians" of the north:
Education suffered, from the poverty of the towns and from the lack of materials on
which to write. A community of farmers saw little need for literacy or, at any rate, could
not achieve it. Before long, only the Church produced men who could read and write . . .

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this relapse into ignorance has erroneously been attributed to the barbarian conquests,
whereas in reality it appears to have been principally due to the Arab encirclement of
Europe. The Dark Ages did not begin with the barbarian invasions in the fifth century but
with the Arab closure of the Mediterranean in the seventh. They slowly came to an
end after the year 1000, as the Arab Empire weakened. 5
But by that time the feudal system was well established in Europe, and that system became the
basis of the literary, artistic and social order of Europe until well into the age of the Renaissance.
The Islamic influence on European civilization lasted throughout the formative period of
the Middle Ages. In spite of the obvious religious and cultural differences, political and trade
relations were maintained even during the period of the Crusades:
European contacts with the Middle East had never totally ceased in the Middle Ages.
Venice and Genoa, even in decline, maintained merchants' factories along the Levant and
Egyptian coasts. The Portuguese, reaching the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century,
rapidly established similar factories on the Persian Gulf. Gradually as the British and
French aspired to world empires, they too created, took over, or inherited centers of trade
and influence. 6
So the Islamic influence on the development of European civilization was not simply a direct
influence which shut off Europe from the rest of the world; it was also an indirect, but positive
influence on European culture which took place as the Westerners assimilated the learning and
commercial routes of the Arab Empire.
In conclusion, Islam had a decisive role in the making of European civilization, in both a
negative and a positive sense. In the negative sense, the Islamic Empire succeeded in cutting off
Europe from the Mediterranean and the outside world for many centuries; the Dark Ages were in

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large measure a consequence of European isolation from commercial routes and Eastern
commodities, as Europe fell back on her own bare agricultural resources. The whole cultural
complex that we refer to as the feudal system of the medieval European world was thus shaped
by the Islamic domination of the Mediterranean. In a positive sense, however, Islam preserved
the medicine, philosophy, astronomy, and even the languages of the classical world until such a
time as the West was prepared to reabsorb them. For these reasons, Islams power and military
reach was definitely a significant ingredient in the making of Europe.

Endnotes

1. John Bagot Glubb, The Course of Empire, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.,
1966), p. 21.
2.

William R. Polk, The Arab World, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), p.
48-9.

3.

John Bagot Glubb, The Empire of the Arabs, (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.,
1965), p. 145.

4.

Glubb, The Course of Empire, p. 29-30.

5.

Glubb, The Empire of the Arabs, p. 144.

6.

Polk, The Arab World, p. 70.

Bibliography

Glubb, John Bagot. The Course of Empire. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965.
The author, Lieutenant General Sir John Glubb, was in the period 1938-56 commander of the
Arab Legion. The book is the third in a series on the history of Arabia and covering the years
860-1145. It was written in his retirement.
Glubb, John Bagot. The Empire of the Arabs. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1965.
Sir John Glubb writes of the history of the Arab Empire from 680 to 860. This chronicles the period
when the pure burning zeal of religious enthusiasm became spent, when the ludicrously simple
'administration' of a wide empire from the desert town of Medina moved to their inevitable end.

Glubb, John Bagot. The Great Arab Conquests. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1963.
Glubb applies his military experience and knowledge of Arab culture to a book about the rise of Islam
and the explosion of the Bedouin tribes from Arabia, which overwhelmed the two greatest empires
(Byzantine and Persian) of the time. The story of Mohammed's rise to become the prophet-leader of
all the tribes of Arabia is told and Glubb analyzes how Islam grew into an overwhelming force.

Glubb, John Bagot. The Lost Centuries: From the Muslim Empires to the Renaissance of
Europe, 1145-1443. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1967.
This title covers the lost centuries that almost no one has written about in their entirety. It covers
roughly the time period of the 11th century through the 15 th. He writes from great experience and
includes a great deal of evidence in building his chronology.

Kedourie, Elie. Islam in the Modern World. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1980.
Professor Kedourie is a leading academic in Arab studies and published this collection of
writings as a history of Islam in the modern world.
Polk, William R. The Arab World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981.
This is a revised edition of the first published 1965 version that analyzes the historical and
cultural background of the Arab people. It focuses on the economy of the Arab world as well as
foreign relations. Polk is a veteran and foreign policy consultant who is related to former
President James K. Polk.