One of the basic traits of modern historiography has been the establishment  of dominant causes for complicated and crucial human events. From the publication of Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1787, a veritable parade of historians have set out to explain Rome’s fall by assigning essential causes for the process, ranging from the increase of slavery to the decrease of trade to the emergence of “race mingling” with the barbarian invasions to ecological disasters brought on by widespread crop failures or a noxious diet.

At the end of this line of explanations for Rome’s demise came that of the Belgian medievalist, Henri Pirenne, in 1922. Pirenne accepted the concept of imperial decline, but assigned it not to the sixth century C.E., but  instead to the eighth with the emergence of Islam. Like Gibbon, Pirenne’s work has brought wave after wave of both detractors and supporters. Despite the criticism of the Pirenne Thesis, it soon attained the status of historiographical canon in both textbooks and monographs until, in 1983, two archaeologists, Hodges and Whitehouse, successfully set out to “correct” the Belgian’s work by applying an”archeological scale” to it.

Rather than accepting this as the last salvo in the “fall of Rome/rise of Islam” debate, I argue that the historiographical and archaeological records of the European lands occupied and settled by Islam (Spain, Sicily, Cyprus, etc.) should be fully read and this data fully incorporated. From this broadening of a narrowed and disoriented debate, the terms of which were posited by Gibbon and Pirenne and re-defined by their critics, we would gain a more accurate view of the rise of Europe  – both north and south  – and a less polemical assessment of the role of Islam in this development.  

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