Late Antiquity is a rich, messy and complicated era of history, with periods of both decline and mini-renaissances of Roman culture and power, along with a period of astounding growth and dispersion of Christianity. And it was an era of extremely complex geopolitical engagements across three separate continents, as the Roman Empire's power center shifted from Rome to Constantinople. There's a lot that went on in this era, and this book will help you get your arms around it.
And Christianity didn't just grow during this period, it was a tremendous driver of political and cultural change. It changed everything--and to be fair, really destabilized and even wrecked a lot of the existing cultural foundation underlying Mediterranean civilization. But then, paradoxically, the Christian church later provided the support structure to help Rome (temporarily) recover from extreme security problems and near collapse in the mid-third century.
But that recovery was an all-too-brief mini-reversal of the real trend of catastrophic secular decline, especially in the Western Empire. Modern readers can see what happens when a once-great state starts to sag under its own weight, once it encourages (or even imposes) mass immigration, and then starts to fracture under what today we would call special interests. Such a society loses the ability to watch the ball, it can't properly look downfield to prepare for the future, and it starts thinking very, very short term.
Such a state won't--or can't--prepare for adversity, and so when that adversity comes, it ragdolls the entire society. That's when you get 410 AD.
A final few thoughts as I attempt, in my own extremely limited way, to analogize this historical era to today, and form some mental models for what might happen to us in this era. When you consider the centuries of societally extractive behavior from Rome's elites during the Western Roman Empire's decline and fall (let's call it the third, fourth and fifth centuries of the Western Roman Empire), you can't help but consider the idea that perhaps this region (and perhaps most of the entire West?) is simply built to subsist under oligarchy, either in centralized superstate form or in the various fractured "rump-states" that followed after Western Rome broke apart.
Consider the tremendous bureaucratic superstructure built up in Western Europe over the past few decades as the EU extended tentacles throughout Europe. Or consider the rapidly growing budget and central bank balance sheet of the USA right now, such that our government now spends more on interest expense on its own debt than on defense. We are sagging under our own weight.
It was way back in 100 AD when the satirist Juvenal first coined the phrase "bread and circuses" to mock Rome's performative government for fooling its easily distractable citizens into tolerating, even encouraging, incompetent leadership. But it was another three centuries before Alaric the Visigoth sacked Rome, and even then most of the regional oligarchy still remained in place afterward. And of course the Eastern Roman Empire (and its increasingly extractive elite) remained in power for another thousand years. As much as I wish it weren't true, maybe this is the order of things.
[Readers, as always, what follows are my notes, quotes and thoughts from the text, and they are here only to help me order my thoughts and help me remember what I've read. Read no further unless you have infinite time to light on fire.]
Notes:
Preface:
9 "No one can deny the close links between the social and the spiritual revolution of the Late Antique period. Yet, just because they are so intimate, such things cannot be reduced to a superficial relationship of 'cause and effect'. Often, the historian can only say that certain things coincided in such a way that the one cannot be understood without reference to the other. A history of the Late Antique world that is all emperors and barbarians, soldiers, landlords and tax collectors would give as colorless and as unreal a picture of the quality of the age, as would an account devoted only to the sheltered souls, to the monks, the mystics, and the awesome theologians of that time. I must leave it to the reader to decide whether my account helps him to understand why so many changes, of such different kinds, converge to produce that very distinctive period of European civilization--the Late Antique world.
Part One: The Late Roman Revolution
I Society
I The Boundaries of the Classical World: c. AD 200
11 On inheriting the "peak Rome" legacy: Westerners tend to think of only the Western Roman Empire as "Rome" (which did peak around this time). In reality however, "Rome" includes the Eastern Empire, which was dominant for centuries thereafter. Peak Rome wasn't really peak Rome.
12-13 On water transport totally dominating all other transport forms in the region: "It cost less to bring a cargo of grain from one end of the Mediterranean to another than to carry it another seventy-five miles inland." Growth of a sort of Roman administrative state to transport food and supplies, feed soldiers and the court. The water was the road.
14ff On the cultural uniformity of Rome's oligarchy, kind of like an international elite, all speaking the same language, completely alienated and above local tribesmen all over the Empire. They were mere "barbarians" and although the Romans were tolerant of them and their religions. "But the price they demanded for inclusion in their own world was conformity--the adoption of a style of life, of its traditions, of its education, and so of its to classical languages, Latin in the West and Greek in the East."
17 The second century Greek Renaissance: the era of the Sophists, encyclopedias, handbooks of medicine, natural science and astronomy were compiled for the next 1500 years: "Byzantine gentleman of the fifteenth century were still using a recondite Attic Greek deployed by the Sophists of the age of Hadrian." [AD 76-138]
19-20 The "conventional problem of the 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire' which affected only the political structure of the western provinces but not Constantinople, which remained "the cultural power-house of Late Antiquity" for centuries thereafter. On the "slackened" geographical hold on the Mediterranean; Britain was abandoned by 410, By 480 Gaul no longer under Roman rule; on the rise of the Sassanids in Iran in 224; the Sassanid King Shapur I conquering Syria in 260, then Cilicia, thenCappadocia, then defeating Valerian.
II The New Rulers: 240-350
22ff On "two generations of political instability and barbarian invasion after 240... on a scale for which [the Empire] was totally unprepared." On the rise of Persia in 224, the development of a Gothic confederacy in the Danube basin after 248; "Between 245 and 270, every frontier collapsed." "...the armies threw up twenty-five emperors in forty-seven years, only one of whom died in his bed."
24ff Despite pressures of increased taxation; a much larger military, see also the military revolution of the late third century, see also the replacement of the Roman senatorial aristocracy with professional soldiers "risen from the ranks." "Yet it was one of the finest achievements in Roman statecraft" as Gallienus defeated barbarians in Yugoslavia and Northern Italy in 258 and 268, Claudius II pacified the Danube frontier in 269, Galerius crushed Persia in 296. This was the "imperial recovery of the late third and early fourth centuries." "By the end of the third century, its officers and administrators had ousted the traditional aristocracy from control of the empire." Diocletian, Galerius, Constantius Chlorous all examples of men rising from nothing to rule the empire with competence.
27ff 312 AD: conversion of Constantine, thereafter emperors and courtiers were largely Christian. On "The ease with which Christianity gained control of the upper classes of the Roman Empire in the fourth century." Also on the idea that this was a society of new men, mostly soldiers, a new aristocracy wearing battle dress and uniforms instead of togas, This rhymes a little bit with the 20th century dictator in his military fatigues. But there was still a conservative backdrop of the educated upper classes, owners of the great estates, all of whom were educated on Greek and Roman classics literature.
30 the Poet Ausonius, ca. 310-395, Augustine, 354-430.
30ff On a fusion of the traditional scholar and the Empire's new bureaucratic machine "that absorbed talent like a sponge", also men "studiously absorbing classical standards of literature," kind of a retro/throwback period where devotion to the classics became an ideal again.
33 On the intellectual climate of Late Antiquity: "In the later empire, indeed, one feels a sudden release of talent and creativity such as often follows the shaking of an ancien régime." Many intellectuals arose from many classes of society and from obscure provinces: see Plotinus from an obscure town in Egypt, Augustine from Thagaste, Jerome from Stridon, John Chrysostom, a clerk from Antioch, etc. This was a sort of restored society of the Roman Empire during a century of comparative security from 350 on.
III A World Restored: Roman Society in the Fourth Century
34ff A "restoration" around 350 AD, a century and a half of general stability, restoration of borders etc., but also a widening gulf between rich and poor, urbanization, growth of major cities (sounds a little like the 21st century in the West), and the creation of distributed local aristocracy. "They were appointed to govern those provinces in which they were already important landowners... Taxes were paid and recruits appeared for the army because the great landowners ensured that their peasants did what they were told."
38 Also note a decentralization and a sort of "de-
41 A vibe across the empire of standing "united against a threatening outside world; everyone within the empire could count as a romanus, and the empire itself was now called Romania. Note also here what the author calls a "dangerous symbiosis" of Roman and barbarian in the middle Rhine; see for example the Alamanni who were already "a sub-Roman society," living in villas, etc., just like the Roman officers looking at them from across the border.
41ff On the eruption of talent from the East, from provinces that had been previously silent for centuries: see Basil of Caesarea (c. 330-379), Gregory of Nyssa (c. 331-396) among others, gifted bishops who emerged from the Cappadocia region. Also the emergence of Egypt with "a totally new monastic culture" and "a succession of gifted Greek-speaking poets." Also "there was no veneration for the city of Rome" in the provinces like in prior centuries. "Latin emperors like Diocletian and his colleagues showed that it was quite possible to be a fanatical romanus and yet to visit Rome only once in a lifetime."
42ff Also a key difference between the Western and Eastern parts of the empire: "In the East, there were more participants in the empire, and more prosperous participants, than in the West." Thus "enthusiasm for the emperor struck firmer roots" in the East.
43ff "By the fifth century, the wealth of the West has snowballed into the hands of a few great families: an oligarchy of senators stood between the average man and the imperial government in every province." The East was more egalitarian, there was more trade and more small but viable cities, etc., "...while Gaul and Italy fell into the hands of half a dozen great clans, ten families at least competed for influence round Antioch alone." Also peasants of Asia Minor, Syria and Egypt were much better off than "the excluded serfs of the western provinces."
II Religion
IV The New Mood: Directions of Religious Thought, c. 170-300
49ff On Aelius Aristides (118-180): "We know him as the author of a classic panegyric on the benefits of the Roman empire, and as a bitter enemy of the Christians." Aristides left a full account of his dreams, recorded as Sacred Tales, dealing primarily with appearances of the god Asclepius. "...the Roman Empire at the height of its prosperity had room for many such eccentrics." Note however by the next century, the third century AD, the growth of Christianity meant "a divorce from the ways of the past": "The period between about 170 and the conversion of the emperor Constantine to Christianity in 312 saw a vast and anxious activity in religion." The pagan era was an era where gods were seen everywhere: on mass-produced statues, coins and pottery; people believe the gods looked after them, in fact people even expected "direct personal attention" from the gods [See many related concepts in Julian Jayne's wonderful book The Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind]. See also the second century revival of the traditional Oracle sites of the Greek world.
51 These traditions were regarded "as old as the human race itself... [abandoning them] provoked genuine anxiety and hatred. Christians were savagely attacked for having neglected these rights whenever earthquakes, famine or barbarian invasion betrayed the anger of the gods."
52 "The classical mask no longer fitted over the looming and inscrutable core of the universe." Settling onto one God behind all the other gods; On the growing number of men in the third century who really left their mark on the Roman world believing they were acting as servants of God or of the gods: Cyprian, bishop of Carthage (248-58), see emperors Aurelian the Pagan 270-275, Constantine the Christian, Julian the Apostate, also Saint Athanasius (c 296-373) and St Augustine; the author sees this as a sort of social indoctrination: a conversion that enables someone to get at the answers to things without having to grind through a traditional second century education in philosophy, without having to learng all of the classical Greek and Roman body of knowledge; basically not needing that era's standard classical gentleman's formal education; the pagan intellectual of course saw this as a counterfeit of traditional academic philosophical culture!
53ff On the growth of the concept of evil: on the development of demons as active forces of evil "against whom men had to pit themselves." People weren't treating human miseries with the detachment of the classical era; also the Christians viewed paganism as evil inspired by demonic forces. "The Christian Church had inherited, through late Judaism, that most fateful legacy of Zoroastrian Persia to the western world--a belief in the absolute division of the spiritual world between good and evil powers, between angels and demons. To men increasingly preoccupied with the problem of evil, the Christian attitude to the demons offered an answer designed to relieve nameless anxiety: they focused this anxiety on the demons and at the same time offered a remedy for it."
57 On Gibbon's comment that the period where the human race was most happy and prosperous was between the death of Domitian to the accession of Commodus, basically 96-166 AD; Also per the author: around this time a Christian Bishop was more like Karl Marx in Victorian London: "an incomprehensible emigrant in a great city." "In the next chapter we shall see why it was that, when the flamboyant public life of the ancient cities was touched by the frost of public emergency after 240, a world obscurely prepared among humble men in such little conventicles was able to come to the fore in the form of an organized Christian Church."
V The Crisis of the Towns: The Rise of Christianity, c. 200-300
60 "To the articulate Roman and Greek gentleman, the peace of the empire had come as an opportunity to fortify and cherish the customs of one's ancient town. To humbler men it meant nothing of the sort: it meant wider horizons and unprecedented opportunities for travel; it meant the erosion of local differences through trade and emigration, and the weakening of ancient barriers before new wealth and new criteria of status. Imperceptibly, the Roman empire dissolved in the lower classes that sense of tradition and local loyalties on which its upper class depended." [You could think of this as a much more elegant historical version of "Americanization" today.]
62ff On Christianity spreading from the humblest oppressed people into lower middle classes and respectable artisans' cities; an amusing quote here about Galen who "noticed that the Christians were apparently enabled by their brutally simple parables and commands to live according to the highest maxims of ancient ethics."
64 On the distinctive late antique style of art of the 4th century, rejecting many of the formal and formalized classical models.
65 The expansion of Christianity in the third century "was impressive, because it had been totally unexpected." "Seldom has a small minority played so successfully on the anxieties of society as did the Christians. They remained a small group: but they succeeded in becoming a big problem."
65ff "Christian missionaries made most headway in just those areas where Roman society was most fluid. The seedbeds of the church were the raw new provinces of the hinterland of Asia Minor." Also on kind of a world culture/world community of Christians: "At a time when so many local barriers were being painfully and obscurely eroded, the Christians had already taken the step of calling themselves a 'non-nation'." On the church's egalitarianism at the time: "...in an age when the barriers separating the successful freedman from the déclassé senator were increasingly unreal, a religious group could take the final step of ignoring them."
66 Per this author, the sense of religious community was the legacy of Judaism. "It saved the Christian church. Because it thought of itself as 'the true Israel', the Christian community was able to remain rooted in every town in which it was established like a limpet on a rock when the tide recedes."
67 [Money quote here explaining how Christianity then became the glue--the duct tape, even--tenuously holding together an increasingly unstable civilization]: "The Christian community suddenly came to appeal to men who felt deserted. At a time of inflation, the Christians invested large sums of liquid capital in people; at a time of increased brutality, the courage of Christian martyrs was impressive; during public emergencies, such as plague or rioting, the Christian clergy were shown to be the only united group in the town, able to look after the burial of the dead and to organize food-supplies. In Rome, the church was supporting fifteen hundred poor and widows by 250. The churches of Rome and Carthage were able to send large sums of money to Africa and Cappadocia, to ransom Christian captives after barbarian raids in 254 and 256. Two generations previously, the Roman state, faced by similar problems after an invasion, had washed its hands of the poorer provincials: the lawyers declared that even Roman citizens would have to remain the slaves of the private individuals who bought them back from the barbarians. Plainly, to be a Christian in 250 brought more protection from one's fellows than to be a civis romanus."
67 On the Christian sacrifice of alms which was a significant departure from pagan practice.
68 On the "Little Peace" of the Church: "The Christian Church enjoyed complete tolerance between 260 and 302." On the importance of this era driving the sustainability of Christianity long term: during this period Rome was far too preoccupied with problems on all of its frontiers to worry about what was happening in the Mediterranean cities as Christianity spread. "When Diocletian finally established his palace in Nicomedia in 287, he was able to look out at a basilica of the Christians standing on the opposite hill. The Roman Empire had survived; but in this Roman empire, Christianity had come to stay."
VI The Last Hellenes: Philosophy and Paganism, c. 260-360
70ff On Hellenism; on the intelligentsia of the Greek world, who retained their pagan beliefs and also managed to keep a tremendous amount of of Greek intellectual works alive through this period, this period was sort of a revival of ancient Greek thought throughout the Christianizing era.
72ff Plotinus (205-270) after dabbling in Gnosticism, seeking "the exotic philosophy of the Persians and the Indians" and then settling into the tranquility of Plato. See also Porphyry of Tyre (c. 232-c. 303), follower of Plotinus and author of "a prodigiously learned and devastating criticism of the Christian Scriptures." [Unfortunately Theodosius II ordered the work burned so all that survives are fragments quoted in refutations written by various Christian apologists]; on Iambilichus (died c. 330), a younger colleague of Porphyry, his pupils converted Julian the Apostate from Christianity back to Hellenism.
73 "The 'Hellenes' created the classical language of philosophy in the early Middle Ages, of which Christian, Jewish and Islamic thought, up to the twelfth century, are but derivative vernaculars. When the humanists of the Renaissance rediscovered Plato, what caught their enthusiasm was not the Plato of the modern classical scholar, but the living Plato of the religious thinkers of Late Antiquity."
74ff On the interweaving of Christian worldviews with Neoplatonism; also on the celebration of the human body: that the human body and its various functions was no more a "sin" than for a man to cast a shadow; this is essentially the exact opposite of the ascetic ideal of the Christian hermits.
77ff On how key Christian intellectuals like Marius Victorinus, Augustine, Ambrose and Boethius were "unchallenged heirs of Plotinus." See also in the Eastern Roman Empire: Synesius, bishop of Ptolemais, who maintained a friendship with the pagan lady Hypatia of Alexandria and "became bishop in 410, on condition that, while he might 'speak in myths' in church, he should be free to 'think as a philosopher' in private."
78ff Later, as Christians would destroy the gods by destroying their temples [note that the author marks this by comparing it to the idea of banishing electricity by destroying all plugs and switches], certain aspects of the pagan gods and Neoplatonism still survived: see for example the names of the planets (note also how astrology influenced thinking right up to the 17th century!), the days of the week, the author quotes a very pagan-sounding passage from Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, etc.
VII The Conversion of Christianity, 300-363
82 "'If all men wanted to be Christians,' the pagan Celsus wrote in 168, 'the Christians would no longer want them.' By 300 the situation had changed entirely. Christianity had put down firm roots in all the great cities of the Mediterranean: in Antioch and Alexandria the church had become probably the biggest, certainly the best-organized single religious group in the town."
82ff On how Christianity and the leaders of the Christian church began to grow the Church into something suited for the "outlook and needs of the average well-to-do civilian." On the idea that Constantine's conversion in 312 would have either not happened or meant something totally different "if it had not been preceded, for two generations, by the conversion of Christianity to the culture and ideals of the Roman world." Citing "the towering genius" Origen of Alexandria (c.185- c.254), assimilating Christianity into Roman culture, followed by a succession of Greek bishops and culminating in the writings of Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea (c.265-339), an advisor of Constantine.
84 "A Christian, therefore, could reject neither Greek culture nor the Roman empire without seeming to turn his back on part of the divinely ordained progress of the human race."
84 "The early fourth century was the great age of the Christian Apologists--Lactancius (c. 240- c. 320), writing in Latin, and Eusebius of Caesarea, in Greek. Their appeals to the educated public coincided with the last, the 'Great Persecution of the Church', from 302 to 310, and with the conversion and reign of Constantine as a Christian emperor from 312 to 337." Also on the idea that "the beleaguered Roman Empire was saved from destruction only by the protection of the Christian God." This was a message that played on the great fear of Mediterranean people of the late third century for whom civilization was a "fragile veneer" according to the author.
86 On the spasmodic and brutal Christian persecution after 302 which was a brutal shock to respectable Christians; then in 312 Constantine won the Battle of the Milvian Bridge and credited the victory to the Christian God; Christian leaders then seized the opportunity, with the provincial Bishop Lactantius "emerging" as tutor for his son, with Eusebius of Caesarea writing supportive rhetoric and propaganda for him, etc. "This prolonged exposure to Christian propaganda was the true 'conversion' of Constantine."
87 Constantine could have been anywhere on the spectrum of Christian tolerance: a tolerant emperor, or a god-fearing emperor, or like Philip, who was emperor from 244-249 a "crypto-Christian," but Constantine was literally a Christian apologist and openly, public claimed his mission as a Christian emperor "to be saving the Roman Empire."
88ff On Constantine's "great thaw" of the early fourth century between pagan and Christian worlds; also an interesting nuance here about intellectual levels: Christian bishops were totally okay with uncultivated people like Constantine, they were used to autodidacts (see for example Athanasius's biography of Saint Antony who was an uneducated Coptic-speaking farmer's son); keep in mind also that someone like Constantine or Saint Antony would never be accepted into a pagan/neoplatonic classical school environment so this is another example of Christianity identifying kind of with a middlebrow level of intellectuality, while at the same time kind of bridging classical culture over to regular people.
89ff On Constantius II ("this limited and much-maligned man" says the author) who ruled from 337-361 and who made Constantine's Christianizing transition "into a lasting reality." He upheld Arianism (Arius lived c.250-c.336), he was an example of pursuing a political middle way; he exiled Athanasius five times; Arianism was seen as more of an intellectual and cultivated framework as opposed to the simple/simplistic piety of the Egyptian monks.
90 On Greek literature as a sort of "success literature" for layman and bishops in the Constantinople court, "they read Greek literature to gain the skills of a gentleman, not to learn about the gods."
91 On Julian, who came to power through quite a bit of luck and then unified the empire; the first genuine educated emperor in quite a while: educated in Greek culture, celebrating Hellenic culture and the pagan gods. The author has a very interesting take on Julian's reign: "This 'pagan reaction' of Julian's reign was far from being a romantic effort to put the clock back to the days of Marcus Aurelius. Like so many 'reactions', it was an angry attempt to settle scores with collaborators. Julian was naturally disturbed by the rapid spread of Christianity among the lower classes; but the real objects of his hatred were those members of the Greek upper classes who had compromised with the Christianity of the régimes of Constantine and Constantius II... The Christians had abused the heaven-sent gift of Greek culture: their apologists had used Greek erudition and philosophical questionings to blaspheme the gods; Christian courtiers had battened on Greek literature to appear civilized. In 363, Christians were forbidden to teach Greek literature: 'If they want to teach literature, they have Luke and Mark: let them go back to their churches and expound them.'"
93 On what Julian would have done had he not died eighteen months after becoming emperor; he would have done his best to push Christianity out of the governing classes of the empire, just like Buddhism was driven to the lower classes by the Confucian mandarinate in the 13th century in China. However, the author notes that the fact that even Julian's own works were preserved shows that there was a compromise between Christianity and Hellenism and it "had come to stay."
93ff Interesting comments here on Christianity as a sort of Cockney religion driving increasing literacy; the first thing an Egyptian peasant found himself made to do on joining a monastery was he had to learn to read; on advances in book production, where the scroll was replaced by the codex; see also the spread of Greek-speaking monasteries and the spread of the Greek language throughout Asia Minor; see also comments on Coptic as a literary language which grew out of Egypt under Christian monastic culture.
VIII The New People: Monasticism and the Expansion of Christianity, 300-400
96ff Well-written passage here comparing Plotinus to St Antony: one leading the life of an educated pagan gentleman, extremely literate and educated, embracing austerity and his own form of asceticism; the other literally obeying the instructions of Christ to sell all you have, give it to the poor and follow me and retiring into the desert. The difference here is that in the Christian version of this anyone from any strata of society could embrace Antony's journey. To do it Plotinus' way you had to be incredibly well-trained, well-educated and groomed as a civilized, sophisticated pagan gentleman.
98ff On the ascetic movement spreading all over Europe: as far as Constantinople, Milan, Carthage, Armenia, Syria, and obviously Egypt; see also the Syrian Stylites who took the ascetic movement literally to new heights by squatting on the top of pillars--see Simeon (c. 396 to 459) as the primary example here. Contrast this with the Egyptian monks who focused on humility, prayer and manual labor; on these Desert Fathers' "Sayings" which the author describes as the peasantry of Egypt speaking to the civilized world and providing a model for life all across Europe, even as far away as Russia.
100ff Questioning the oft-repeated assumptions that the near-Eastern ascetic movement was just peasants escaping oppression and tax collecting; the author claims that these founding monks simply had talents that found no outlet in peasant communities, they made their reputation as being prizefighters against the devil. "Anthony was an educational misfit; Macarius had been a smuggler; Pachomius had been uprooted by military service; the amiable Moses had been a highwayman."
102ff On the emergence of the holy man as someone who held a role as great as the emperor, greater than the church or religion itself, a new center of focus; see for example the church holy men who protected Antioch from the emperor Theodosius' justice in 387; see also Simeon the Stylite, rebuking and advising the governing classes of the whole Eastern Empire from the top of his column; see also the reputations of the various holy desert fathers.
103ff On a burst of anti-pagan aggression among various monks and Christians beginning in the late 4th century, destroying certain important pagan sites, even ransacking nobles' estates for idols. "Paganism, therefore, was brutally demolished from below. For the pagans, cowed by this unexpected wave of terrorism, it was the end of the world. 'If we are alive,' wrote one, 'then life itself is dead.'" Note also the late fourth century was when "Christianity asserted itself, for the first time, as the majority religion of the Roman empire."
104ff On the rise of power of Christian congregations in the distributed cities across the Empire; likewise on the rise in power of a given city's Christian Bishop, who was an organizing figure there, both backed by a congregation and, potentially, by the violence of the monks.
108 On the explosion of the ascetic movement during the late fourth century, as well as some of the great bishops who did much "to establish the Christian Church in Roman society." See for example Ambrose at Milan (374-397), Basil at Caesarea (370-379), John Chrysostom at Antioch and Constantinople (398-407), Augustine at Hippo (391-430). "...they had shouldered the late Roman equivalent of the 'White Man's Burden'; and they set about ruling their flocks with a sombre energy of colonial governors in a 'backward' territory." Note also these bishops managed to get emperors from Theodosius I onwards to deprive pagans and heretics increasingly of civic rights.
108ff On a change in the general flow of wealth: during the second century, surplus income went into State-funded public works and public buildings, but by the fifth century onwards this "money flood" went into the Christian church, much of it for the remission of sins; this drove a rise of the economic position of the Christian Church, as "it mushroomed like a modern insurance company." [!!!] By the sixth century, "the income of the bishop of Ravenna was twelve thousand gold pieces; the bishop of a small town drew a salary as great as that of a senatorial provincial governor." This also funded the amazing artistic achievements of the Christian Church in the fifth and sixth centuries.
109-110 Interesting passage here on the evolution of the monastic movement into a sort of removed aristocracy; then becoming for the bishops a sort of professional class, educated on the scriptures (and no longer in a pagan/Hellenic classical education); they saw themselves as a professional elite with their own subculture and a sense of superiority over the world. Contrast this with the monasticism of the East, which was more mingled with community life and helped drive the growth of the church; also monks played important community roles in hospitals, with burials etc., making the church and obvious presence to the average townsman.
111-112 Military and political collapse, especially in the West: In 378 AD the Visigoths destroy the Eastern divisions of the Roman army and kill emperor Valens at the Battle of Adrianople [for more on this see the highly readable The Day of the Barbarians by Alessandro Barbero]; in 406 tribes of Germania cross the Rhine and began occupying Gaul; in 410 the Visigoth king Alaric sacks Rome. "It is fashionable to regard these barbarian invasions as inevitable. Contemporaries, however, did not enjoy the detachment and the hindsight of the modern historian." On Christianity as an urban and peaceful culture, with no warrior ferocity whatsoever: "Christian officials and Christian bishops were equally shocked by barbarians: 'What place would God have in a savage world?' wrote one; 'How could the Christian virtues survive among barbarians?' wrote another. The history of the Late Antique world after 400 is, in part, the history of how the differing societies of East and West, whose structure and attitudes had evolved in the manner described in this part of the book, would adjust themselves to the appearance of new strangers."
Part Two: Divergent Legacies
I The West
IX The Western Revival, 350-450
115ff In 357 Emperor Constantius II came into Rome from Constantinople as a conqueror, "annexing a backward area," bringing the simple minded Rome-based clergy up-to-date with the Greek world. Discussion here on the aristocracy of Rome, basically senators, who practiced leisured scholarship, great landowners who would write letters of recommendation and letters about Senate protocol, this was copied by some of the newer nobilities of Gaul and Spain. Also on the Latin Christians who were for a long time a harassed minority, and as a result became sort of a closed-off group, thinking of themselves as a superior elite. This was further amplified as the Roman Senatorial aristocracy converted to Christianity in the late fourth century.
116ff On some of the great literary works of the late fourth and early fifth century of in Latin: Ausonius of Bordeaux (c.310-c.395) and his romantic poetry; Jerome (c.342-419) and his satirical vignettes of Christian Roman society; Sulpicius Severus and his Life of Saint Martin "which became a model of all future Latin hagiography." Augustine and his great book On the Trinity.
118 Ironically just as the Latin West had come into its own culturally in the late fourth century, "Two generations later, the Western Empire had disappeared."
118ff Long discussion here of a wide range of reasons behind the collapse of the fifth century imperial government in the West: morale, economic and social factors, also both the aristocracy and the Catholic Church had dissociated themselves from the Roman army that defended them; ultimately they found that they could do without the army, as we will see. On the last great Emperor of the West, Valentinian I, followed by weaker men: Theodosius I (379-395), then Honorious (395-423) and then Valentinian III (425-455). During this era "the highest offices became a virtual appanage of the Italian and Gallic nobility... Amateurism, the victory of vested interests, narrow horizons--these are the ugly hallmarks of the aristocratic government of the Western Empire in the early fifth century."
120ff Still more ironic comments here where the author talks about how Romans of this era idealized Rome the most enthusiastically during the late fourth and early fifth century collapse; it was these men who dreamed up the myth of an eternal Rome, Roma aeterna. Note that "this wave of patriotism divided men's loyalties, rather than uniting them." See Symmachus, treasuring Rome as a holy city "where pagan rights had ensured the success of the empire" but then also see how Catholic bishops also viewed Rome as a holy city, but because the bodies of apostles Peter and Paul rested there.
122ff On the growing intolerance of barbarians who came to live in the city: note that the so-called "barbarian invasions" of the early fifth century were not destructive raids, they were more a gold rush of immigrants from underdeveloped countries in the north, flooding into wealthier lands closer to the Mediterranean. [Hmmmm, does this sound familiar?] Ironically these barbarian tribes had their own warrior aristocracies who were perfectly happy to leave their fellow tribesmen behind and become absorbed into the prestige and luxury of Roman society. See for example Theodoric, King of the Ostrogoths (493-525) who frequently said "An able Goth wants to be like a Roman; only a poor Roman would want to be like a Goth."
124 Alaric the Visigoth when he first attacked the Balkans was "deflected" by the Eastern Empire to the West "where he faced a society with neither strength nor skill." Rome refused to negotiate with barbarians, attempting appeasement, but then later Alaric sacked Rome in 410.
124ff The author discusses here the general Roman intolerance from church and townspeople towards barbarians, both with feelings of dread and dislike; this indirectly led to the formation of formal barbarian kingdoms in various regions: see the Vandals in Africa from 428 to 533, the Ostrogoths in Italy from 496 to 554, the Visigoths in Toulouse from 418 and later in Spain until 589 when they were converted to Catholicism; Note also, interestingly these became essentially heretical kingdoms: excluded from Catholic culture, they either remained pagan or they adopted Arian Christianity. One notable exception was the Franks, centered mostly around Northern Gaul. Note that the bishops saw Clovis (481-511) as a "new Constantine."
125 The author makes an interesting comparison here between China and Western Rome: China was far more overrun by Mongolian barbarians than the Western Roman Empire was ever overrun by Germanic tribes, but yet in China these barbarians went native within a few generations and continued the Chinese imperial tradition. In contrast the Visigoths, the Ostrogoths and the Vandals were never absorbed or "Romanized" this way.
X The Price of Survival: Western Society, 450-600
126 After the 410 sack of Rome the imperial government settled in Ravenna, but "lost so much land and taxes that it remained bankrupt up to the time of its extinction in 476." Also, fascinating comments here on how the incredible safety and security of of the late 300s quickly devolved into insecurity and insularity: "In the late fourth century, senatorial ladies from northern Spain traveled freely all over the Eastern Empire; in the fifth century, a bishop writing in Asturia hardly knew what happened outside his own province. In western Europe, the fifth century was a time of narrowing horizons, of the strengthening of local roots, and the consolidating of old loyalties."
126 Note also that immediately after the sack of Rome the Catholic Church asserted unity, suppressing a schism in Africa and 411, and in 417 eliminating the Pelagian heresy. [Per Wikipedia: Pelagianism is a Christian theological position that holds that the fall did not taint human nature and that humans by divine grace have free will to achieve human perfection. Pelagius (c. 355-c. 420 AD), an ascetic and philosopher from the British Isles, taught that God could not command believers to do the impossible, and therefore it must be possible to satisfy all divine commandments. He also taught that it was unjust to punish one person for the sins of another; therefore, infants are born blameless.]
128 Rome starts encouraging a sort of client-oligarchy among various barbarian tribes; on using the aristocracy of the tribes they knew to protect them from tribes they didn't know: for example the Visigoths protected Roman villas from the Saxons whom Rome knew from the Saxons terrorizing Britain. The Visigoths also were persuaded to join the Roman army in halting Attila's Huns. Barbarian garrisons in Gaul held off Saxon invaders, etc. The Western Empire was no longer united, it was a loose grouping of provinces, client states, buffer states, etc.
130ff On the de-spreading of education: see for example in areas of Gaul where the Western Empire used to turn out thousands of educated young men "in the thriving university city of Bordeaux," but by the fifth century "the study of Latin literature had shrunk to the private libraries of a few great senatorial villas... A classical education became the badge of a narrow oligarchy." Letters written among bishops in this era in flowery Latin would have been "as impenetrable to the contemporary outsider as they are now to the modern reader." Note also however it was also at this time that the peasantry switched languages from Celtic to low Latin, an interesting epicyle versus the overall trend.
131-2 On the north-south divide in Italy: the North led by barbarian emperors like Odoacer (476-493) or Theodoric; the South left to its own with a vast clergy and Senate, their own coinage, etc.
132 On Boethius, his book Consolation of Philosophy written while waiting to be executed by Theodoric; this work reached back to the pre-Christian ancients despite the fact that he was a staunch Christian.
132 Justinian, the Eastern emperor, reconquers Africa; his general Belisarius enters Ravenna; "East Roman rule continued in Ravenna, Rome, Sicily and Africa for centuries to come." The author calls this a disaster for the senatorial aristocracy in place, because he was too efficient a tax collector!
134ff Justinian's reconquest of Rome/Ravenna displaced the Senate elite, but paradoxically helped establish a clerical elite that "made itself felt throughout the Middle Ages." Essentially Byzantine armies stayed in Rome for centuries, basically protecting the papacy and what would eventually become the Western Church.
II Byzantium
XI "The Ruling City": The Eastern Empire from Theodosius II to Anastasius, 408-518
137ff [This chapter backs up a bit in time to take up events in the Eastern Empire] Theodosius II becomes Eastern Emperor (408-450), on the development of the great Latin compilation of laws known as the Theodosian Code; Rome sacked in 410, three days of mourning were "declared" in Constantinople but no help given at all [hmmm, just like the "help" England gave Poland in 1939...], but Theodosius built his famous walls around his city which still stand. On the fact that both Roman and Greek were spoken there; on the decline of the political power of the army and the growth of an administrative state; "In the course of the fifth century, the Roman empire had found its way to a new identity, as the empire of Constantinople."
139: Attila the Hun (434-453) with the first barbarian empire "on par with the Romans," crushing the myth of Roman safety and superiority once and for all, driving a need for "adroit diplomacy"; on the professionalized bureaucracy of the Byzantine empire.
143ff On the provinces not being neglected as one would usually see in any large empire: Egypt as an example, entering the mainstream with Coptic art and icons, Syriac merchants travelling as far as Gaul and central Asia.
144 The Council of Chalcedon, 451; Emperor Marcian taking away power from the patriarch of Alexandria, making Constantinople the leading Christian city of the empire; the author makes a case here that the empire was unified in spite of these theological divisions; saying that the later theological divisions of the late fifth and sixth centuries "should not be seen as a desperate attempt to heal a divided empire" instead it was a unified empire expecting the church to be unified as well.
147ff On Anastasius (491-518), a unifier, a consensus-builder, a competent ruler, a metaphor for Constantinople as a unified empire working for doctrinal consensus.
XII La Gloire: Justinian and His Successors, 537-603
150ff On Justinian (527-565) (note that Justinian's uneducated father Justin became emperor by luck after rising through the military), who was originally obsequious to the senator-aristocracy, but after unrest in Constantinople in the "great" Nika riot of 532, and after the people and the Senate united against him, and half the city was burnt, he then regained power, rebuilt much of the city, making the court more impressive, etc. (his wife traveled with four thousand attendants, for example). Also, Justinian as the "most Christian emperor."
151ff More on Justinian: rebuilding the Hagia Sophia church, burnt down during the Nika riot, a revolutionary new church; taking advantage of the geopolitical situation to seize Africa from the Vandals. Also "In 539, the Ostrogoths had been driven out of Rome, and were suing for peace."
153ff The rest of Justinian's reign was anticlimactic; note also the elites/senators who wrote his history hated him, thus "...the history of his reign was written--as was so often the case in the Roman empire--by the alienated and the embittered" governing class he displaced.
154ff "The 540s were a catastrophic decade." Persia broke its truce with Byzantium, the Danube frontier became permeable again and the Slavs went deep into Roman territory; from 559 onwards Constantinople itself was menaced by Turkic nomads who were heirs to Attila's empire: first the Bulgars followed by the Avars. Also the Empire's control of the Balkans more or less evaporated; also the Great Plague in the 540s and then again in the 570s, "the worst attack until the Black Death of 1348."
155ff "From 540 onwards, Justinian sank himself into a dogged routine of survival. The true measure of the man and of the East Roman state was not the belle époque of 533 to 540: it was the quality revealed in the harsh years that followed." What happened here was that Justinian practically by himself managed to restore most of these boundaries; his military became technologically innovative [this ultimately culminated in "Greek fire" used devastatingly by the seventh century by the Byzantine navy]; Justinian innovated a government monopoly in silk for new revenue source, restored the Byzantine control of Spain and Africa and protected the Danube with alliances, etc. It seemed to show that autocracy could work, but the succeeding generations were victim of Justinian's own success as the Empire began to de-professionalize, began to break down into clashes in local regions across the Empire, etc. "Justinian had cut away too much of the old tissues of east Roman society... His successors had nothing to fall back on but his tradition of palace-government: Maurice (582-602) and Heraclius (610-41) were spectacular emperors; but they had to govern their empire through a camarilla of hated and disunited courtiers and through their relatives."
157 Note that the sixth century Eastern Roman Empire had a high level of agriculture, a good tax base, plenty of commerce, etc. They had money to build fortifications and use diplomacy as "substitutes for military strength." "But money could not create soldiers." [Very helpful quote that describes the United States Empire quite well, we have the former but not the latter anymore] "Hence the strange combination of fragility and grandeur in the Byzantine Empire after Justinian..."
157ff With the Eastern Empire under pressure from the Avar tribes to the north and Persia from the East (Persia dominated the attention of the Eastern Empire during the sixth and early seventh centuries), Rome basically became an outpost [no one is coming to save you: again, perhaps a metaphor in the coming decades for many of the American nation-states with military bases elsewhere in the world, like Taiwan, Japan, Eastern Europe etc.] Also an interesting "Byzantine pageantry" sort of infected these various isolated medieval kingdoms all across Europe where there would be books written on Byzantine papyrus, relics placed in Byzantine silverwork, etc. The Near East was also the center of gravity in the Christian world too during the seventh century and after: Jerusalem and other places were Byzantine cities. In general there was a common culture, a common idiom, a common coinage, a common piety and a common loyalty to Byzantine culture all across the Mediterranean even into the 700s, all as a legacy of Justinian.
159 On the entry of the Moors into Spain in 711, "the notorious betrayal of Don Julian... an isolated Byzantine governor, Julianus of Ceuta: his ill-judged use of the Muslims as barbarian mercenaries was in the best traditions of Byzantine foreign policy laid down by Justinian."
XIII The Empires of the East: Byzantium and Persia, 540-640
160ff On the Persian Empire as a link between East and West via the city of Ctesiphon; on Indian science and on how the story of the Buddha filtered into the Mediterranean, "Chinese travelers knew Persia well, while their knowledge of the Roman world stopped at Antioch." "Persian Society had an acute a sense of the 'barbarian' as did the Romans" after many conflicts on Central Asian raiders. "The Central Asian frontier was the military laboratory of the Late Antique world." and it led to developments like the cataphract: a heavily armored horseman and a predecessor of the medieval knight. Persia was an intermediary for technology, like the silkworm (which Byzantium got from the East) and likewise glassmaking (which China got from Roman techniques); see also two "alternate" forms of Christianity, "the radical asceticism" of Manicheanism and Nestorian Christianity.
164ff On Mesopotamia, "the economic heart of the Persian Empire," "an area of immense creativity"; this is where Mani (216-277) the founder of Manicheanism came from, he wanted to create a self-consciously universal religion; Manichean missionaries reached Northern Spain by the fifth century and Peking by the seventh.
165 Also Mesopotamia is where "the final crystallization of rabbinical Judaism" happened. "Protected by the shahs from Christian intolerance, the rabbis of Mesopotamia gained intellectual pre-eminence over their cowed brethren in Palestine. They compiled the Babylonian Talmud. At a time when the emperor Justinian was laying down which version of the scriptures the Jews should be allowed to read in the synagogues of his empire, the rabbis of Ctesiphon were free to conduct a vigorous polemic against the Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Virgin Birth. Searching criticisms aired in the cities of Persian Mesopotamia soon filtered along the caravan routes into Arabia, where they had a decisive influence on the epoch-making monotheism of Muhammad."
165ff Mesopotamia comes into its own in the late fifth century as Persian control of this region began to collapse, see also Persia's total defeat under the Shah Firuz (459-84) against the Hephthalite Huns. "It was the end of the Iranian ancient régime." Next, however, the nobility rally around a young shah, Khusro I (530-579), a just king, who said: "The monarchy depends on the army, the army on money; money comes from the land-tax; the land-tax comes from agriculture. Agriculture depends on justice, justice on the integrity of officials, and integrity and reliability on the ever-watchfulness of the King."
166 "The forty-eight years of harsh rule by Khusro I and the thirry-seven years of brittle grandeur under his grandson, the erratic Khusro II Aparwez--('the victorious ', 591-628), mark the true birth of the Middle Ages in the Near East."
168 "The amazing feature of the sixth century was the rapid rise of Persia on the Eastern frontiers of Byzantium... At the beginning of Khusro I's reign, Persia was a parasite of Byzantium: the shah used his formidable war-machine to extort money from its richer neighbour by blackmail."
169ff On Khusro II's court of Christians, mostly Nestorians, and his invasion of the Byzantine Empire in 603, "ostensibly to avenge the fallen emperor Maurice and to uphold legitimate rule against the usurper Phocas." Note also this was "The dream of the new Mesopotamian Court, to reunite the Fertile Crescent as in the days of Cyrus, Xerxes and Darius" and they managed to take Antioch in 613, Jerusalem in 614, Egypt in 619, and moved right up to the other side of Bosporus by 620. And then Heraclius pulled a very imaginative and risky attack from the Caucusus, allied with the Khazars, directly onto the Persian Empire in 627, Khusro II was so discredited by this raid on the estates and holy cities of Zoroastrian clergy and nobility that he was murdered by his ministers in 628. This left the near East in catastrophe, Alexandria was partly deserted, the conquered territories were mercilessly taxed, and Persia had nothing to fall back on, soon to lose a military defeat at the hands of the Arabs in 641.
170 "But the most fatal weakness of all was that neither great empire was prepared for what followed--for the explosion from the primitive south of the Fertile Crescent associated with the rise of Islam. ...both sides had forgotten about the Arabs."
XIV The Death of the Classical World: Culture and Religion in the Early Middle Ages
172 Interesting blurb here on how certain historians conventionally think of Heraclius as the first "medieval" ruler of Byzantium, incorrectly so. Also he is (conventionally) seen as launching a sort of crusade into Persia to recover the relic of the Holy Cross captured by Persians in Jerusalem in 614. This is wrong on a couple levels: first of all Heraclius was "just a basically conservative emperor" following the traditions of Justinian; also Khusro II ruled a group of Nestorian Christians who were taking good care of this relic!
172ff On the hardening of boundaries in the greater region, both territorial and spiritual; the growth of the medieval idea of a Christian society; On "a rapid simplification of culture. The most important feature of the ancient world, in its late antique phase especially, had been the existence of a sharp boundary between aristocratic and popular culture. In the late sixth century, the boundary was all but obliterated; the culture of the Christian man in the street became, for the first time, identical with that of the élite of bishops and rulers. In the West, the secular élite simply disappeared."
175ff On the disappearance of classical culture in favor of a basic literacy needed by administrative bishops throughout most of the West; basically these people were too busy trying to beat back barbarians, hold a government together, and maintain their bureaucracies.
176 [fascinating quote here] "Nothing shows the change of atmosphere more clearly than the fate of the book itself. The early Middle Ages was an age of lavish book-illumination--for the written word had ceased to be taken for granted in western Europe. The book itself became a holy thing. It was solemnly embellished; and reading was made easier for the uninitiated by punctuation and by the insertion of chapter-headings (both unknown in the matter-of-fact book-production of the ancient world). The great Gospel-books, the liturgical books, carefully prepared anthologies of the sermons of the fathers, came to stand apart, along with other holy objects, and the great basilica-churches that linked the men of the seventh and eighth centuries to their awesome, partly understood past."
177 "In Byzantium, a classical élite survived. It constantly recreated itself throughout the Middle Ages. Most of our finest manuscripts of the classics were produced in medieval Constantinople. Indeed, if it were not for Byzantine courtiers and bishops of the ninth and tenth centuries onwards, we should know nothing--except from fragments in papyrus--of Plato, Euclid, Sophocles and Thucydides." On the [fascinating] idea that Byzantium never experienced a Renaissance because they never lost their classical past; for them it had never died and they never needed to have it reborn!!
180ff And then a decline in the aristocratic-led antique culture in the east, where the independent elite basically collapsed and went away and "in the late sixth century the culture of the governing class of the empire finally became indistinguishable from the Christian culture of the average man." Christian intolerance grew as well; this was also becoming "the golden age of Byzantine hagiography" featuring lives of the saints written in simple Greek, a sort of middlebrow culture; note also the miracle stories in the Dialogues of Gregory the Great are a Latin version of the same phenomenon. The author calls the culture now "'medieval' in the true sense"; that it was "a new, non-classical sensibility," and not just in the written word, but also in music: see the Byzantine liturgy which developed its dramatic form, for example. Also, the cross took on more central importance, also the icon developed during this time and "flooded the Mediterranean world." Likewise the growth of relics. "No hermit ever sat at Tours in the sixth century: but the bishop and townsfolk lived under the shadow of the great basilica of St Martin, constantly aware of the presence of a man now dead for some two hundred years." Christianity had become now the "ancestral religion."
185ff Note also here an increasing decentralization of the Empire: in the West, Rome had shrunk pretty much to the city walls; in the East there was more and more distributed power in cities like Alexandria and others in the region.
186 Note the arrival of Muslim rule in the region around the near East, due to the arrival of Arab armies, "completed the Christianization of public life of the cities of the Near East"; interesting how this paradoxically hardened Christianity and Christian culture.
187 The author describes the arrival of the Arabs as cutting "the last threads that had bound the provincials of the near East to the Roman empire." The Empire had become decentralized and the different regions had their own local identity and religious allegiances, etc., under Muslim rule. And then there's a good story here about John the Almsgiver [patriarch of the city] sailing from Alexandria to ask the emperor for help, "he was told in a dream not to waste his time: 'God is always close at hand; but the emperor is far, far away...'"
III The New Participants
XV Muhammad and the Rise of Islam, 610-632
189ff Short history of Muhammad here; the author uses an interesting turn of phrase to describe the rise of Islam: he describes the religion of Islam as a "sudden detonation fitted into the culture of the Near East." Changing the Arab tribal ideal of the extroverted man "held rigidly to the obligations of his tribe" into an individual ideal of a man standing at the last judgment on his own. The Muslim was a god fearer just as any Christian or Jew.
191ff Islam was essentially a foreign message that helped reorganize and unify the conflict-ridden society of the Arab region. "Allah has sent us a prophet who will make peace between us." The 'Umma (the greater community of Islam) as a sort of super-tribe. Peace for the Arabs "but for the rest of the Near East--a sword."
192ff On the Muslim caliphs who came after Muhammad establishing a high quality military: competent commanders, new fortification technology, new advancements in siege warfare, and the mobility of the Bedouin.
XVI "A Garden Protected By Our Spears": The Late Antique World Under Islam, 632-809
194 The Byzantines were routed at the battle of the Yarmuk in 636, Antioch fell in 637, Alexandria in 642, Carthage in 698; the Persian/Sassanian state crumbled after the battle of Qadesiya in 637. "Only Byzantium survived with its capital and administration intact. Yet a second Heraclius never came. ...no Christian army ever returned to these eastern shores until the time of the Crusades."
194ff The beginning of the Umayyad caliphate (660-750), it had sort of an Arabic and Bedouin style aristocratic leader class, "lightly Islamized" as the author puts it, this "absorbed and remodeled the educated classes of the early medieval Near East."
196ff On the spread of Arab culture even as widely as Spain, where people in Cordova would "read verses and fairy-tales of the Arabs, and study the works of Muhammadan philosophers and theologians." Communities around the Near East would pay protection money to the Arabs "in return for military defense and as sort of a standing fine for not having embraced Islam. Hence the almost total laissez-faire of the seventh century Arabs... For them, the conquered provinces were 'a garden protected by our spears'." For the author if anything this increased stability and comfort across the Near East.
197ff By 800 Byzantium's "classical legacy had shrunk to the walls of Constantinople." Note also in the court of Charlemagne "a circle of cosmopolitan clergymen," many Irish or Northern Englishmen who had never known Roman rule "struck up a passable imitation of the courtly literati of the days of Ausonius and Sidonius Apollinaris."
198 On during the eighth and ninth centuries the Arab Islamic Empire faced a similar problem of the Roman Empire in the third century: "the sudden erosion of a proud traditional oligarchy"; in the case of Islam, because it was an egalitarian religion, many Syrians and Persians became administrators or theologians in the power structure of the state, displacing the Arab oligarchic leaders of before.
200ff On more hardening of the borders and the boundaries between Christian and Muslim worlds; the Eastern Mediterranean became much more Islamic; see the great mosque built in Damascus from 706-714; see how Arabic became the language in Damascus replacing Greek; note also that Byzantium basically saved Europe by holding out under various sieges; and then a revolt in Iran and 715 and the foundation of Baghdad in 762 which ended Arab supremacy and led to the Abbasid dynasty. "The Umayyad dynasty was an Arab empire; the Abbasid dynasty, a Persian empire." And this led to a sort of efflorescence of classical culture, particularly Greek philosophy, all over again in the Arab world, thanks to the Syriac speaking clergy in Mesopotamia. "Mesopotamia regained a central position that it had lost since the days of Alexander the Great... The Mediterranean cities declined as the great caravans by-passed them, bringing trade by camel along the oceans of sand that stretched from the Sahara to the Gobi Desert. In North Africa and Syria, the villages that had sent their oil and grain across the sea to Rome and Constantinople disappeared into the sand. The Mediterranean coast, from being the heart of the civilized world, imperceptibly diminished in significance, as the numbed extremity of a great Eurasian empire." And then the Persian center of gravity here started to tilt its view towards Asia, bringing the art of papermaking to Baghdad in 751; an "eastward pull of the vast mass of Persia" which the author believes "was the salvation of Europe. It was not the Greek fire of the Byzantine navy outside Constantinople in 717, nor the Frankish cavalry of Charles Martel at Tours in 732, that brought the Arab war machine to a halt. It was the foundation of Baghdad." Basically the author is arguing here that "the fearful mobility" of the Bedouin armies was replaced by a bureaucratized stable Abbasid caliphate with its "meticulous diplomacy" which was based basically on a substrate of Persian tradition.
203 "The Muslim World turned its back on its poor Christian neighbors across the sea... In the more stable world created by this vast shift of the balance of culture, western Europe could create an identity of its own. But the student of Late Antiquity, who realizes how much European culture owes to the fruitful interchange between the populations of the Fertile Crescent, open at one end to an empire based on the sea and, at the other, to the Iranian plateau, can estimate the cost of the chasm that yawned across the Mediterranean throughout the Middle Ages."
Vocab:
Recondite: (of a subject or knowledge) little known; abstruse.
Glacis: a gently sloping bank, in particular one that slopes down from a fort, exposing attackers to the defenders' missiles.
Trahison des clercs: A compromise of intellectual integrity by members of an intelligentsia. https://en.m.wiktionary.org/
Appanage: a gift of land, an official position, or money given to the younger children of kings and princes to provide for their maintenance; a necessary accompaniment: "there is a tendency to make microbiology an appanage of organic chemistry"
Camarilla: a group of courtiers or favourites who surround a king or ruler.
To Read:
Plotinus: On Beauty
Porphyry on Plotinus/Plotinus: The Enneads
Porphyry: Aids to the Study of the Intelligibles
Porphyry: Homeric Questions
Porphyry: Against the Christians
Origen
Eusebius
Gregory of Tours: History of the Franks (trans. O.M. Dalton)
P. Llewellyn: Rome in the Dark Ages
Boethius: Consolation of Philosophy
Procopius: History of the Wars
Procopius: Secret History
P.N. Ure: Justinian and his Age
The Cambridge Medieval History
J B. Bury: Byzantine Texts (5 vols)
Pseudo-Zacharias Rhetor: Historia Miscellanea
R. Frye: The Heritage of Persia