COMMERCIAL RELATIONS IN THE MIDDLE AGES 35
cities or castles, destroyed fourteen thousand churches or temples of the unbelievers, and edified fourteen thousand mosques for the exercise of the religion of Mahomet. One hundred years after his flight in Mecca, the arms and the reign of his successors extended from India to the Atlantic ocean, over the various and distant provinces which may be comprised under the names of (1) Persia, (2) Syria, (3) Egypt,
(4) Africa, (5) Spain.” [1] In this great Mahomedan empire, “ We should vainly seek the indissoluble union and easy obedience that pervaded the government of Augustus and the Antonines; but the progress of the Mahomedan religion diffused over this ample space, a general resemblance of manners and opinions. The language and laws of the Koran were studied with equal devotion at Samarkand and Seville. The Moor and the Indian embraced as countrymen and brothers in the pilgrimage of Mecca; and the Arabian language was adopted as the popular idiom in all the provinces to the westward of the Tigris.” [2]
The entire trade of history has been to account for his Saracen expansion purely and simply by Religion; but an economic interpretation of this same phenomenon may also stand the test. A well-known writer says “The sudden surging forward of the Arabs was only apparently sudden. For centuries previously, the Arab migration had been in preparation. It was the last great Semitic migration connected with the Economical decline of Arabia. . . . . . . . . In short, long before Mahomet, Arabia was in a state of unrest, and a slow, uncontrolled infilteration of Arabian tribes and tribal branches had permeated the adjoining civilized lands in Persian as also in the Roman territory, where they had met with the descendents of earlier Semitic immigrants to those parts, the Armaneans, who were already long acclamatised there.
Hunger and avarice, not religion, are the impelling forces, but religion supplied the essential unity and central power. The expansion of the Saracens’ Religion, both in point of time and in itself, can only be regarded as of minor import and rather as a political necessity. The movement itself had been on foot long before Islam gave it a party cry and an organization.” [3]
1 Gibbon’s “ Decline and fall of the Roman Empire, ” Vol. V, p. 401.
2 Ibid, Vol. V, p. 493.
3 Cambridge Medieaval History, Vol. II, p. 331-2.