ricketyclick

Historian John O’Neil, in his book Holy Warriors: Islam and the Demise of Classical Civilization, makes the case that three hundred years were inserted into the calender so that Otto III would be recorded as the monarch during Christ’s millenial return in 1001, despite Otto having reigned in the 700s. This would explain the extreme dearth of historical and archaeological evidence of the missing three hundred years.

Such a radical alteration of the calendar could easily have been accomplished – according to O’Neill – as so few then could read, so few were learned, and multiple calendars were then in use.

What’s more, as D.L. Adams explains in his review of Holy Warriors on Big Peace, this would mean that the Crusades would have begun within decades of the jihad against Christendom in Europe, rather than after a hitherto unexplained gap of three hundred years.

O’Neill also adds two more particularly valuable insights to our growing knowledge of Islam and the devastating impact that it has had upon the non-Muslim world. Islam and jihad brought about the fall of classical civilization in Europe through its incessant attacks on European states, most particularly through its closure of the Mediterranean. Islamic jihad on the Mediterranean denied papyrus to the nations of Europe. The denial of this fundamental component of European commerce, communication, and record-keeping resulted in catastrophic changes, according to O’Neill.

Christian Europe prior to the “Dark Ages” suffered continual assaults by Islamic armies and the depredations of Viking raids. Two main results occurred; one, European slaves were taken by the Vikings and sold to the Muslims and two, centralized powers of Europe were unable to protect their lands and people.

Local powers arose to oppose attacks against the borders. These new powers became the feudal lords of Europe – completely decentralized powers that arose to defend their lands and oppose jihad and Islamic conquest. European feudalism came about as a direct defensive response to the endless jihad of Islam against Christendom, according to the author.

O’Neill does not miss the current cultural themes across Europe driven by “the mentality of political correctness, where the victim is transformed into the aggressor and the aggressor portrayed as the victim (p182).” Regarding current European views of Islam O’Neill notes, not without irony, that “astonishingly enough, this is a religion and an ideology which is still extolled by academics and artists as enlightened and tolerant.” (p210)

Fascinating story. The review itself is well worth your time, but I think I’m going to have to get the book as well.

Not at all incidentally, O’Neil acknowledges his debt to the scholarship of Henri Pirenne’s 1937 classic, Mohammed and Charlemagne, currently in print as a Dover edition.

[update]
Read the comments at the review; many seem well informed.

In particular, suffer this drench of cold water:

The chronology idea is utterly absurd. In the AD 1540, it was possible to use Ptolemy’s tables from AD 200 to predict the motions of the planets. Copernicus did this, for instance, and got okay results. If anyone had falsified the calendar even by a single year, this would have been impossible. (And this is just one of a great many astronomical proofs — e.g., what about the fact that we can identify the dates of historical eclipses from antiquity?)

Nevertheless, it seems that this does not refute O’Neil’s or Pirenne’s more important thesis of Islam’s take-down of Western European culture, although it is not uncontroversial.