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Entry: The Wines of Provence and the Armies of Allah Link: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_wines_of_provence_and_the_armies_of_allah#1543 Post contents: “So what happened to turn wealthy sixth-century Gaul into the howling wasteland it would become just a hundred years later? According to Pirenne, it was the Islamic conquest of the Middle East and North Africa.” Ah, the Islamics are to blame for the dark ages! Of course. I guess if we want to believe the Islamic hordes were able to turn the relatively distant West into a “howling wasteland” by the 7th century, we better ignore the fact that the Eastern Empire was able to survive and even thrive long after that. Anyway, Bryan Ward Perkins in “The Fall of Rome: And the End of Civilization” disputes the fairly new concept that “between the fifth and seventh centuries, the switchover from rule by Roman generals commanding barbarian armies to barbarians commanding themselves was not all that traumatic.” Ward-Perkins uses archaeological data (everthing for pot shards, to estimates of cattle size, to coinage, to graffiti) to show that fairly soon after the West fell to the barbarians Western Europe’s quality of life, from literacy to luxury to food availability rapidly disintegrated Sent at: 2008 09 06