WI: North Africa stays Christian

IIUC North Africa was Coptic Christian and thus was persecuted by Byzantine authorities for their failure to embrace orthodoxy. If a Coptic Empire could be formed then perhaps it could it survive and thrive, but it would be unhappy and thus fractious under Byzantine rule.

"North Africa", which in this context I understand to exclude Egypt, was always strongly Chalcedonian Orthodox. Attempts at compromising with the Monophysite churches of Syria and Egypt by the Emperors of the seventh century were most strongly resisted by the bishops of Africa. There were odd Christian sects in North Africa earlier on who faced a degree of hostility from the Roman state, but these had ceased to be important by the fifth century.

As for "persecution": there's no real evidence that actual persecution really happened. I did my undergraduate dissertation on Egypt in the sixth century, and from that area, the very heart of Monophysitism, there's almost no evidence of the imperial authorities systematically attacking anti-Chalcedonian churches.
 
IIUC North Africa was Coptic Christian and thus was persecuted by Byzantine authorities for their failure to embrace orthodoxy.

Were the Northwest Africans actually Coptic? All the history I read talk about Catholics (St Augustine the most famous among them), Arians (the Vandal invaders), and various heretics like the Donatists. I don't think I've ever read anything stating that Coptics were well represented in Tripolitania, Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco.
 
My understanding was that this desertification was already proceeding in force and was pretty much inevitable regardless of what mankind would do. You'd need to go back to about 3000 BC to find a green Sahara.

Except that Northwest Africa is NOT the Sahara. The climate between the sea shore and the mountains was (and still is) Mediterranean. The lands of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco were a breadbasket of the Classical world.

We have numerous documents, including from Islamic sources like Ibn Khaldun, that the Banu Hilal invasions of the 11th century significantly destroyed the agricultural lands of the Maghreb. Many people noted it changed from being a net food exporter to a food importer afterwards. Serious degradation occurred as a result.

I think you are confusing two very different concepts.
 
Except that Northwest Africa is NOT the Sahara. The climate between the sea shore and the mountains was (and still is) Mediterranean. The lands of Tunisia, Algeria, and Morocco were a breadbasket of the Classical world.

We have numerous documents, including from Islamic sources like Ibn Khaldun, that the Banu Hilal invasions of the 11th century significantly destroyed the agricultural lands of the Maghreb. Many people noted it changed from being a net food exporter to a food importer afterwards. Serious degradation occurred as a result.

I think you are confusing two very different concepts.
I posted this on the previous page:

http://www.ohioswallow.com/extras/9780821417515_chapter_01.pdf
 

Based solely on this, I am not convinced the Banu Hilal did not significantly degrade the agriculture of the region. It simply establishes two things. The first is that compared to thousands of years ago stretching into the Ice Age, that the land was much greener. This is well known and doesn't change anything. The second is that the specific colonial French "declensionist" narrative may be overstated.

Perhaps it is. Nevertheless we know that over the course of the Zirird Dynasty famines greatly increased after the Banu Hilal invasion and turned the country into a net food importer, especially from Norman Sicily. There was an obvious and immediate decline.

Perhaps that was only temporary, and the region subsequently recovered to its full splendour, and the only long term decline is solely due to long term climactic changes. However, based on solely the first chapter of the book, I can't say that. The book seems mainly concerned with overturning a specific French narrative and comparing colonial French versus native agricultural techniques in regards to the land nowadays. It doesn't seem to marshal a lot of evidence specific to the Banu Hilal's destruction of agricultural land 1000 years ago. Destruction of farmland into pastoral shrubland won't be shown in tree pollen counts.

I am reluctant to simply to ignore contemporary and near contemporary accounts of the Banu Hilal invasions because of someone's problem with specific claims made by the French. Perhaps the rest of the book goes into more detail.
 
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