Henri Pirenne was born in Verviers, Belgium, on December 23, 1863, into a family of industrialists . From a young age he knew the ins and outs of the textile industry that dominated the economy of the region and that later served as inspiration to develop his most recognized works. His father wanted him to study law and sent him to the University of Liège. Once there he discovered his true vocation after attending the courses of the historian G. Kurth and decided to dedicate himself entirely to history. He completed his training at the universities of Paris, Leipzig and Berlin, and during these years G. Schmoller and K. Lamprecht (with whom he formed a long friendship) exerted a clear influence on the young Belgian historian.
Beginning in 1885, at the age of 23, he was in charge of a course in diplomacy and palaeography at the University of Liège, disciplines which he came to master completely. The following year he moved to the University of Ghent where he would teach Middle Ages history and Belgian history until 1930, when he wanted to give that university a more Flemish character. In 1907 he was appointed secretary of the Royal Commission on History of the Belgian Academy and by then his fame had far surpassed the borders of his native country. During the Great War he was taken prisoner by the Germans and took advantage of his captivity to learn Russian and delve into the roots of Byzantine history. He finished his teaching career at the University of Brussels and died in Uccle, near the Belgian capital, on October 24, 1935.
Henri Pirenne can be classified as a pure historian. Unlike the great historians of the late nineteenth century, his works deal exclusively with history, without delving into other disciplines such as philosophy, aesthetics or literature. This proceeding, however, does not mean that his work is limited to the limited study of political history or economic history, quite the contrary. Marc Bloch defined him as an "integral historian" who knew how to cover the essence of historiography in his more than thirty books and three hundred published articles.
We highlight four major features of Henri Pirenne's work. The first consists of his critical preoccupation with sources. The weighted study of the testimonies was a constant in all his works, for whose production he repeatedly resorted to the auxiliary sciences as support for his thesis.
The second feature lies in the emphasis placed on men, concretely, and more especially on collective phenomena and in economic and social forces. He considered that the engine of human evolution was found in those forces, which he saw as the essential and constitutive motives of human activity in the past. This does not imply that he positioned himself alongside historical materialism, since he also believed in the real (and sometimes decisive) influence of the actions of individuals on the course of history. But, in his opinion, above individuals and political and military events were economic and social phenomena that provided a line of continuity in the shaping episodes of man's future. This is clearly seen in his History of Belgium in which, above the political and historical issues, he warns of the progressive evolution of the economic and social elements of the Belgian nation.
The third feature is his taste for synthesis, for general approaches and for universal explanations. Taste that was translated into the international or supranational character that most of his works adopted. Pirenne believed that above political studies, circumscribed to a delimited territory, stood economic and social history without borders to enclose it. This interpretation facilitated his analysis of past events and favored his conception of universal history, which he delved into during the last years of his life.
The fourth and final feature was his dedication to the Middle Ages, especially the High Middle Ages. His most important studies of this period focus on the role played by northern European cities during the economic and cultural revival of the 11th century. The cities of the Middle Ages, Economic and social history essay and Les anciennes democraties des Pays-Bas They are pioneering works in his time (now classics) that gave rise to a new way of conceiving history through the combined study of the different areas of society (the economy, culture...).
In the last years of his life, his interest in this period led him to investigate the transition from the ancient world to medieval civilization, for which purpose he focused on the economic fracture that the Islamic expansion in the 7th century, which caused difficulties for navigation in the Mediterranean and the breakdown of relations between the West and the East. Thesis that he captured in his posthumous work Muhammad and Charlemagne .
Henri Pirenne's work is characterized by its simplicity and simplicity, away from all academicism and with the qualities of accuracy and clarity as the axes of the narrative.