The great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne had famously argued that there would have been no Charlemagne without Muhammad because Muslim control of Mediterranean trade reduced the European economy to subsistence agriculture and allowed the Franks to promote themselves and win papal support for their king. It was a terrible irony when crusading Christians from the West succeeded where the Muslims, coming from the East, had failed. Her view recognized Muhammad’s revelation as a vigorous form of monotheism that stood, militarily and theologically, in direct competition with both Christianities. Herrin understood that Islam was no less important a component of the overall history of Christendom than European or Byzantine Christianity. By capturing Constantinople in 1204, the Roman Catholic Crusaders from Europe finally succeeded in doing what the Arabs had been desperately trying to do in the seventh and eighth centuries. The concept of Christendom embraced not only medieval European Christianity, which ultimately led to the Crusades, but also the rival Byzantine orthodoxy that was based in Constantinople as well as the new faith of Islam that challenged it. When the British Byzantinist Judith Herrin published her book The Formation of Christendom in 1987, many historians suddenly discovered that early medieval Christianity was far more complex than they had ever imagined. Book cover with Christ Pantokrator surrounded by saints (detail), Constantinople, late tenth–early eleventh century
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