Henri Pirenne

Professor of history at the University of Ghent for four decades, Pirenne pioneered social and economic history based on archival sources. During World War I, after his son fell at the Battle of the Yser, Pirenne led non-violent resistance against German occupation, was arrested, and spent two years in German internment camps.

While interned without books, he drafted his landmark work Mohammed and Charlemagne, arguing that it was the Islamic conquest of the Mediterranean, not Germanic invasions, that broke Roman trade unity and pushed European civilization northward. His seven-volume Histoire de Belgique remains a classic monument of historiography.