THE TELEGRAPH: In a new extract from his brilliant book on Rome, Boris Johnson argues that our anxieties about Islam must not jeopardise the reconciliation between East and West[.]
Fragments of plaster are still falling from the ceiling after the Pope made his famous speech about Islam in September 2006.
Hardly anyone had heard of Manuel II Palaeologus, the old codger he quoted with such explosive results. Not many knew that he was the antepenultimate Roman emperor, or that he lived in what is now Istanbul.
But after six centuries of obscurity, Manuel's views were top of the news.
"Show me what Mohammed brought that was new," said the Pope in Regensburg, "and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith that he preached."
That sentence was taken out of context, flashed round the world, and soon there were riots everywhere from Jakarta to Qom.
The doors of churches were stoved in by mobs. Morocco recalled its ambassador to the Holy See.
Most wretchedly of all, Somali gunmen were so stoked up by the anti-Papal imprecations of the local imam that on Sept 16, shortly before lunch, they pulled up outside a Catholic-run hospital in Mogadishu and fired seven shots into the back of a sweet-faced, 62-year-old Italian nun called Sister Leonella.
It was no accident that the head of the Roman Catholic Church should quote the despairing words of the father of the last Roman emperor.
The views of the present Pope about Islam, or at least the views he cited and from which he at no point dissented in his speech, are very old indeed. They are at least partly dictated by deep underlying accretions of phobia and anxiety.
It is these subconscious layers of prejudice that help to explain how we think about everything from Islamic terrorism to Turkish membership of the EU.
To understand how these attitudes came to be formed, we need to look right back to the time of Manuel II Palaeologus, and the role of Islam in the death throes of the Roman Empire.
Manuel was not a "Byzantine", or at least he would not have understood what you meant by that polemical term, coined in 16th-century Germany.
He was a Roman, a Romaios, and though he spoke in Greek, that was because Greek was a Roman language. His coins still called him "king" and "autocrator", and he was the direct titular heir of Augustus Caesar, in an unbroken tradition going back 13 centuries.
He was the Vice Gerent of God on Earth, the ruler of the Roman Empire - though the Roman Empire over which he ruled had been sliced down to a tiny rump.
By 1391 the position was so bad that Manuel had to give himself up as a hostage to the sultan, the appalling Beyazit, and to go out and watch the Turks on their dreadful business.
He was made a spectator of the Turkish destruction of what had been the heartland of civilisation, and of the Roman world, and Manuel's anti-Islamic appeal has a resonance today, because Turkey is again being considered for membership of the EU.
In so far as there is a problem with the Turkish application, it is little to do with economics. Turkish per capita GDP is bigger than some previous EU entrants'.
It's not about Cyprus, or poverty, or population. It's not even that the Turks have sallow skin, thick eyebrows, or low foreheads, or whatever other prejudiced stereotype you choose.
No, my friends, the reason the richest nations on earth have havered for so long about admitting Johnny Turk to their club is all about - you know - "values".
As the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Carey, put it breathily on the Today programme: "Surely a European Union has to be more than economic? It has to have common values and so on..."
And as for the Holy Father, Pope Benedict, here is what he said when he was just Cardinal Ratzinger, back in 2004. "Turkey is in permanent contrast to Europe," he said, and admission to the EU would be a mistake.
What these politicians mean, with their nudge-nudge remarks about "values" and "culture" and "Europeanness", is that in the course of that thousand years something rather fundamental happened to the Roman Empire and to Constantinople. That something was Islam.
Adolf Hitler was not a noted classical scholar, but he took a professional interest in the rise and fall of Reichs. "I often wonder," the dictator mused, "why the ancient world collapsed." It is a very good question, and much depends on what you mean by collapse.
Hitler was too busy conquering Belgium to read the works of its greatest historian, but in 1935 Henri Pirenne had produced an answer to the Führer's question. It was called Mahomet and Charlemagne, and though hardly anyone is now willing to defend the argument in its entirety, it has proved one of the most influential works of our time.
Henri Pirenne looked at the barbarian invasions of the western Empire. Where others have seen breakdown and disaster, he was more struck by the continuities.
In spite of their name, the Vandals did not destroy all the Roman villas.
They liked to live in them, and even if there were a few tiles missing, the agricultural system was recognisably Roman. There were still land taxes, and the same latifundia - the big farms - and the same tolls at the markets.
Above all, they benefited from the same great Roman unity - the economic system that was based around Mare Nostrum, the Mediterranean.
Herodotus once came up with a fine metaphor for the Greek cities that ringed the Mediterranean: they were like frogs around a pond, he said; and in many ways that metaphor was still accurate.
The frogs were larger, perhaps, and they were more like Greco-Roman frogs, but they were still all the same species, croaking and communicating across the prosperous inner sea.
And then, says Henri Pirenne, there came the Muslim invasions of the seventh and eighth centuries.
The Persian Empire fell. Egypt was lost. Africa was lost, the breadbasket of the Roman world. The Arabs were completely different in their war aims from the Germanic tribes who had pushed down from the north and sacked Rome.
They didn't want to integrate. They didn't want to buy into that gorgeous Roman civilisation. They didn't aspire to Romanitas, let alone Christianitas. The Germans became Romanised as soon as they entered Romania.
As Pirenne puts it, the Roman became Arabised as soon as he was conquered by Islam.
Onwards and upwards roared the Muslims. Why are we so afraid of Turkey? (more)
Mark Alexander
