Crisis in Context: The Migrants' Story with Peter Heather

27 January 2016: Peter Heather (King’s College London and author of 'Empires and Barbarians: Migration, Development and the Birth of Europe') discusses the role of migrants in the early middle ages. Peter was at the Legatum Institute to take part in a special panel that looked at why migration has always been a constant feature of history, and how the motivations and mechanisms of people on the move have shaped the world as it is today. Interviewed by Hywel Williams, Senior Adviser at the Legatum Institute. More information: www.li.com/events/crisis-in-co...

[@TEverettReynolds]

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[@levikendrick3455]

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[@aronlionel1030]

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[@dirksharp9876]

Thank you

[@mrpatriot8279]

I can learn so much from Dr. Heather but I wonder where he stands on the theories of Emmet Scott that it was Islam that finally destroyed classical civilization and not the Barbarians. see Mohammad and Charlamagne

[@ericstutz2047]

It was nobody of these, it was the Christianity. The lifestyle of the ancient Romans, Greeks, etc., changed definitively during the christianization, before arrival the Barbarians. Think about the Theodosius' policies (with several influence by Ambrosius, Bishop of Milan), changing things to converge to Christian integrism. The Barbarians' damage was material, political, economical... but the Christianity's damage was over all the partial (or total, in some things) destroy of the classical legacy. It's more, thanks to Islam many classical writtens came back to Europe across the Iberian Peninsula.

[@NovemberTheHacker]

@@ericstutz2047 Unlike Northern Barbarian invasions, which destroyed the existing structures, the highly Romanised Visigothic nobility continued to be well educated, for the time, including in scientific fields. In fact, a Muslim source referred to Visigothic Seville as the "abode of the sciences". Early Medieval Isidore of Seville was referred as "the last scholar of the ancient world." The same was true for Ostrogothic Italy, which had famous philosophers, as well. It's clear that "Classical civilization," whatever specifically is meant by that, hadn't collapsed, at least in the South. The Carolingian Renaissance revived intellectual activity in the North. The ancient works were preserved by Monasteries in the West and continued to be familiar and read in the Byzantine Empire. Scientific progress continued, the invention of Greek fire, in high probability, saved Constantinople and the empire from the Muslim sieges that almost destroyed it. That's a huge deal. The Muslim naval superiority, piracy, naval raids, basically cut off Europe from the lucrative and highly profitable Mediterranean trade, which had enriched the Greek and Roman economies. It took time for Europe to recover from the massive Muslim, Viking, and Magyar invasions. Once it did, by 1000 AD, European civilization was surpassing Antiquity in prosperity and with the founding of the first Universities soon after, scientific progress followed and excelled tremendously from the 13th Century and onwards. Whether that progress has resulted in positive developments with the emerging Capitalism and the Industrial Revolution, is a different question entirely. Perhaps our conventional answers are misleading in that regard and what we value isn't what we should.

[@ericstutz2047]

​@@NovemberTheHacker, of course I know about the Carolingian Renaissance and the rescue of the classical legacy, in the intelectual sense. My comment refers to the classical way of life, in all non material senses possible. In the strictal material sense, in Western that declined because the barbarian invations; in Eastern because the rise of Arabs, who took more than 60-65% of the Constantinople's territories, and that made a financial collapse. That crisis caused Constantinople have to implement reforms that changed its social, militar and political organization, and for example in this moment the traditional Roman way of life in villaes would no more posible; the centralizated power neither (there is the rise of Eastern form of feudalism). On the other hand, if you think about the romanized Germanic nobility and the regional economies of the Italy, Hispania and south of Gallias, you are going to see that in the 5th and 6th centuries they have not so much standard of living and productivity than the 4th century, but it's better than the next centuries. All the regions went from bad to worse, and in this process the central powers too went decay, the Roman aristocracy could not maintain its way of life in villaes, and then the model of production too changed. All of those in a a structural material sense. About the cultural legacy and non material way of like, you must to see the almost continuous process from Constantine 'the Great' to Justinian (I also recognize that Christianity ended up fitting well in Roman imperial and civilizational ideology; that is well narrated in the Heather's books).