INTRODUCTION

In the year 250 C.E., the most populous and long-settled regions of western Eurasia, which stretched in a great arc from the Atlantic coasts of France, Portugal, and Morocco across the Mediterranean, the Balkans, and the Middle East as far as Afghanistan, were subject to the control of two--and only two-- immense imperial systems: the Roman empire and the Sassanian empire of Persia. Over five hundred years later, around 800 C.E., the populations of the same area still lived largely in the shadow of empire. The Roman empire was still there. From Calabria, across the southern Balkans, and deep into Anatolia, the territories of what we call, by a modern misnomer redolent of ill-informed contempt, the "Byzantine" empire, had been ruled continuously for over eight hundred years by the direct successors of Emperor Augustus. In Rome itself, the pope was still a "Roman." Every document emanating from the papal chancery was dated by the regnal date of the Roman emperor who reigned at Constantinople and by the Indictio, a fifteen-year tax cycle that had started in 312. In 800, also, from Central Asia to the plateau of Castile, an Islamic caliphate, created at headlong speed by the Arab conquests of the 7th century, had gained stability by settling back into the habits of the ancient empires it had replaced. The tax system of the Islamic empire continued with little break the practices of the Roman and Sassanian states. Its coins were denarii, dinars. The system of post-horses and of governmental information on which its extended rule depended was called after its Roman predecessor veredus, al-barAd. Its most significant enemy was still known, in Arabic, as the empire of Rum--the empire of Rome in the east, centered on Constantinople.

For all the startling and self-conscious novelty of their religion, the early Muslim conquerors of the Middle East found themselves heirs to a past of extraordinary density. This past piled up around them in every city they had occupied. The first great public mosque was created, at the Umayyad capital at Damascus, by the simple and dramatic expedient of embracing, in a single enclosure made of porticoes sheathed in shimmering east Roman mosaics, the former temple precinct of Jupiter/Haddad and its recent Christian rival, the shrine of St. John the Baptist. A thousand years of unbroken urban history, and the history of two religions, were thus encased in a new, Muslim place of worship. In 762, the center of what would become the medieval Islamic caliphate was created by the founding of Baghdad. Baghdad stood on ground heavy with the past. It lay upriver from the ruins of the former Sassanian capital of Ctesiphon. These ruins were dominated by the Taq-i Kesra, the immense shell of the Sassanian Palace Arch ascribed to Khosro I Anushirvan (530-579). The awesome height and apparent indestructibility of that great arch of brick was a permanent reminder of an ancient, pre-Islamic style of rule, indelibly associated with the memory of Khosro, the contemporary and rival of the east Roman emperor Justinian (527-565)--himself no mean creator of enduring legacies, the builder of the Hagia Sophia and the definitive codifier of the laws of Rome.

Only at the western tip of Eurasia, in what we call western Europe, did it seem as if the long summer's afternoon of empire had begun to fade. Yet from Ireland to the upper Danube, the clergy shared a common Catholicism, first formed in the Christian Roman empire of Constantine and Theodosius I. Even on the outer periphery of Europe, the clergy still thought of themselves as part of a wider world embraced by great empires. To enter the library of Iona, on the southwest coast of Scotland, and to consult its books was to share in a sacred geography of Christendom that still stretched along the entire length of the old Roman empire and beyond: it included not only Jerusalem and the Holy Places, but also Alexandria, Damascus, Edessa, and memories of Christian martyrs yet farther to the east, in Mesopotamia and northern Iraq.

Although alternately decried and romanticized by scholars of the 18th and 19th centuries as pure "barbarians," the ruling classes of the postimperial kingdoms of the west had, in fact, inherited a basically Roman sense of social order and a Roman penchant for extended empire. Power still wore a Roman face. The acclamation of the Frankish king, Charlemagne, by the Roman people and by the pope as "their" emperor, in 800 (and the deadly seriousness with which Charlemagne accepted the compliment) was yet another case of a successful state-builder from a once peripheral region easing himself into the comfortable seat provided by half a millennium of empire. Charlemagne's contemporary, Caliph HArAen al-RashAd, viewed the indestructible arch of Khosro with much the same mixture of awe and proud entitlement as did Charlemagne when faced with a Rome heavy with pagan and Christian memories. They were both, each in his own distinctive way, inheritors of a remarkable Age of Empires.

We should not take this for granted. Back in 250 it was far from certain that an Age of Empires lay in the immediate future. Torn by civil war and largely unprepared for large-scale mobilization, the Roman empire seemed doomed to disintegrate. Nor could anyone have foretold that the Sassanian dynasty, which emerged so rapidly from Fars in the 220s, would eventually mold the sub-kingdoms of the Iranian plateau and Mesopotamia into the formidable world power of the age of Khosro Anushirvan, and in so doing would provide a model of empire as enduring, for the populations of Islamic Asia, as was the myth of Rome for the Christians of western Europe. By the end of the 7th century, it seemed as if the Arab conquerors would destroy themselves through reckless civil wars within fifty years of their conquests. Yet none of these possible events happened. In each case, the immediate future lay not with chaos but with the reassertion of strong, extended empires. The reformed Roman empire of Diocletian and Constantine was the most formidably governed state ever created in the ancient world. It survived largely intact in its eastern regions until 640. The consolidation of the Iranian territories under the Sassanian King of Kings involved a similar, if less clearly documented achievement. After a period of civil wars, the Islamic caliphate emerged, under the Abbasid dynasty at Baghdad, to form what has rightly been called the last great empire of antiquity.

As a result, the populations of western Eurasia (even those of western Europe) could look back, in the year 800, to find their horizon blocked by the massive outlines of great empires, frequently overhauled since 250 yet still irreplaceable.

But there was more to it than that. Today, as Jews, Zoroastrians, Christians, and Muslims, millions of persons are the direct heirs of religions either born or refashioned in late antiquity. Some religions took the form in which they are still recognizable--as was the case with the Jews--within communities bounded by the Roman and the Sassanian empires. Others grasped the fact of empire with spectacular results. Zoroastrians look back to the age of the Sassanians as the time of the restoration of their orthodoxy and of the formation of their religious literature. The Christians embraced with zeal the Christian Roman empire of Constantine and his successors. The Muslims created rapidly, from the remnants of the Roman and the Sassanian states, an empire of their own.

This, very briefly, is what we mean when we talk of "late antiquity." Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World has been put together on the frank assumption that the time has come for scholars, students, and the educated public in general to treat the period between around 250 and 800 as a distinctive and quite decisive period of history that stands on its own. It is not, as it once was for Edward Gibbon, a subject of obsessive fascination only as the story of the unraveling of a once glorious and "higher" state of civilization. It was not a period of irrevocable Decline and Fall; nor was it merely a violent and hurried prelude to better things. It cannot be treated as a corpse to be dragged quickly offstage so that the next great act of the drama of the Middle Ages should begin--with the emergence of Catholic Europe and the creation of the Arabic civilization associated with the golden age of medieval Islam.

Not only did late antiquity last for over half a millennium; much of what was created in that period still runs in our veins. It is, for instance, from late antiquity, and not from any earlier period of Roman history, that we have inherited the codifications of Roman law that are the root of the judicial systems of so many states in Europe and the Americas. The forms of Judaism associated with the emergence of the rabbinate and the codification of the Talmud emerged from late antique Roman Palestine and from the distinctive society of Sassanian Mesopotamia. The basic structures and dogmatic formulations of the Christian church, both in Latin Catholicism and in the many forms of eastern Christianity, came from this time, as did the first, triumphant expression of the Muslim faith. Even our access to the earlier classics of the ancient world, in Latin and Greek, was made possible only through the copying activities of late antique Christians and their early medieval successors, locked in an endless, unresolved dialogue with their own pagan past.

Compared with the solid, almost unseen ground-course of institutions and ideas created in late antiquity that still lie at the foundations of our own world, the earlier classical period of the ancient world has a surreal, almost weightless quality about it. It is the Dream Time of western civilization. It can act as a never failing source of inspiration. But we cannot claim to come from that classical world alone, for whole segments of the modern world had no place in it. These emerged, rather, in the period between 250 and 800: a Europe in which the non-Roman north and the Roman south came to be joined in a common Catholic Christianity; a Greek-speaking world that stood at the western pole of a widely extended federation of Christian communities which ranged from Georgia to Ethiopia, and from Mesopotamia to Kerala and western China; a Middle East in which Constantinople/Istanbul and Baghdad were founded (in 324 and in 762) and have remained among the most emotionally charged cities of Asia; a paganism that lived on, no longer in temples, but in austere philosophical systems that summed up an ancient wisdom which continued to fascinate and to repel Christians, Jews, and Muslims for centuries to come; a Middle East in which Islam had, by 800, become an overwhelming presence. Nothing like this was to be seen before 250. These developments belong to late antiquity. If we do not like what we see in late antiquity, it is often because the ideas and the structures that first emerged at that time are still with us. They have the power to move or to repel us even today. The period which has bequeathed to us such living legacies deserves attention in its own right.

This Guide will also attempt to treat as a single whole the vast geographic space covered by the Roman and the Sassanian empires. And even this extensive space must be seen as no more than a vivid cluster of settlements set in a yet wider world. For, in this period, societies as far apart as Scandinavia and the Hadramawt, Saharan Africa and western China were touched by events along that great arc of imperially governed societies and interacted decisively, at crucial moments, with those societies.

Above all, Late Antiquity was written so that readers should have no doubt as to the advances in scholarship that have enabled scholars for the first time to treat, with even-handed erudition, the very different regions of western Europe, the eastern empire, the Sassanian empire, and the early caliphate, as well as the many more distant societies that were implicated in the overall development of the late antique period.

For if there is one thing which this Guide would wish to bring about, it is that its readers should begin the 21st century with fewer artificial barriers in their minds, erected between periods and regions which have proved, in the light of modern research, to be more continuous with each other than we had once thought. For instance, we go out of our way to encourage readers to join the history of the later Roman empire in the east with the subsequent evolution of the first centuries of Islam. We also encourage the reader to stand on both sides of the political frontiers of the empires of that time. For if they do this, they will be able better to appreciate the all-important process of symbiosis that led to the creation, and to the eventual triumph over the traditional empires, of new societies, created in the "war zones" of the Rhine and the Danube, of Sassanian Central Asia and of the steppelands of Syria and Iraq.

With this Guide in hand, we hope that the interested reader will travel, with sufficient basic information, from the world of Constantine to the seemingly very different world of the Damascus of UAbd al-Malik--and may be surprised to see that not everything had changed. We wish our readers to make a habit of crossing the political frontier that separated late Roman Syria from the busy world of Sassanian Iraq, and of traveling to the steppes of Central Asia and eastern Europe to take up an unexpected viewpoint upon the Roman empire.

Late Antiquity exists to encourage the reader to make such leaps across time and space. In the same way, it hopes to remind the students of religion and of the history of ideas of the unexpected, long-term consequences of many of the better-known achievements of the period. They will find, for instance, that texts of Greek philosophy, science, and medicine written at the beginning of our period will, by the end of it, be circulating in more copies in Syriac and Arabic than in their Greek original. They will be struck by the tenacity and by the long-term implications of the philosophical and theological issues debated in the period. Such themes can be appreciated only when seen in the long term, as they endure and change over many centuries and in very different environments.

Not least of the surprises in store for the reader will be the extent to which religious groups, who throughout this period made a point of distinguishing themselves from each other with singular ferocity, continued, in fact, to be drawn together by the mute force of common intellectual preoccupations and, even when they fought most fiercely (by attacking the cult sites of their rivals), by the oceanic weight of shared notions of the sacred. Whether they liked each other or not, they remained not only "Christians," "Jews," and "pagans," "orthodox" and "heretics," "clergy" and "laity": they breathed the same heavy air of a common civilization--that of late antiquity.

Travel of this kind is calculated to broaden the mind. It is also the aim of this Guide to enable its readers to compare regions which have often been kept apart by the barriers erected by separate disciplines. Students of well-known topics in much-studied regions--for instance, those interested in the Christianization of western Europe--will here be reminded of the working out of analogous processes in other parts of the Christian world. To take one example, the recent remarkable increase of archaeological discoveries in the countries of the Middle East adds a new dimension to such study. It is now possible to compare phenomena well known to the student of the postimperial west, such as the explosion of church building in the cities of Merovingian Gaul, with evidence for a similar explosion among the Christian communities of the Middle East.

Fifteen late antique churches, mainly from the 6th century, have been discovered in Jerash (Jordan) alone. The splendid mosaics recently uncovered at Mefaa, modern Umm ar-Rasas (also in Jordan) have made us all sit up and take notice. These are recognizably late antique productions. They contain scenes that lovingly depict the classical facades of neighboring cities. Yet they were laid down in 718 C.E., that is, by exact contemporaries of the Venerable Bede. They were the work of Christians who had already lived for almost eighty years as subjects of the Islamic empire. It is in such small details, unavailable to us until only a few decades ago, that we can gain, through comparison across widely separated regions, a sense of scale and of the pace of a worldwide phenomenon, such as the establishment and survival of the Christian church in its many regions.

It is for this reason, also, that the Guide has paid so much attention to recent archaeological discoveries. Through these it is now possible to grasp an entire world no longer in its broad outlines, through the magisterial sweep of narratives such as Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire or, as in a magnificent bird's eye view, through A. H. M. Jones's The Later Roman Empire, but rather in the accumulation of vivid details on the ground. An entire landscape has filled up with the traces of villages and unpretentious bathhouses, with the jolly mosaics of the petty gentry and with hundreds of little churches and synagogues dedicated by pious notables. Scattered across the entire sweep of the late antique Mediterranean and the Middle East, these recently discovered remains remind us that late antiquity did, indeed, happen. We are dealing with a distinctive civilization, whose density and sheer tenacity, on a humble level that we had hitherto barely suspected, demands some form of overall treatment.

This is what we hope that Late Antiquity will do. The reader, however, should know that it is a guide. It is not an encyclopedia, a dictionary, or a lexicon. Dr. Samuel Johnson, with becoming irony, once defined a lexicographer as "a harmless drudge." Neither in our contributors nor in our readers have we expected such tame qualities. In the essays with which the volume begins, we have not wished to sacrifice the vividness of a personal introduction to selected themes to the harmless drudgery of a comprehensive survey. The essays are meant to provoke thought. They are not there to repeat, under the guise of providing comprehensive information, the narrative stereotypes that have weighed particularly heavily on our interpretation of the period. It is the frank intention of the authors of these essays to encourage readers to travel further in new directions. For it is their opinion that new directions have, indeed, been opened up for the period of late antiquity in a manner which would barely have been thinkable only a century ago; and that these directions point firmly away from many commonly accepted stereotypes of the period.

Last but not least, the editors have always considered that the purpose of this Guide was to provide as wide a range of information as possible on the late antique period. But it was never our intention that it should be all-inclusive. We have, indeed, attempted to cast our net wide. But an Irishman's definition of a net remains true: it is "a lot of holes tied together with string." No editor can long contemplate a venture such as our own without being painfully aware, also, of those holes.

What matters, in this case, is that we have been freed from the need to tell all. It has long been recognized that the late antique period stands at the crossroads of many histories. The great highroads of many well-established disciplines traverse our period: dictionaries of the classical world end in late antiquity, dictionaries of Judaism and Christianity inevitably pass through it, dictionaries of Islam, Byzantium, and the Middle Ages make it their starting point. As a result, we can refer the reader to those many exhaustive dictionaries, encyclopedias, and lexicons that deal competently with themes that are central to late antiquity. None of these specialized works of reference covers the late antique period in all its aspects. But what they do cover, they cover with such thoroughness as to make it unnecessary and positively counter-productive to our enterprise to reproduce what they already contain. To take an obvious example: those interested in the history of the Christian church are urged to turn to works such as The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, the Dictionnaire de Spiritualite, the Prosopographie chretienne (which has already produced one precious volume for Africa), the Reallexikon fuer Antike und Christentum and, now, to The Coptic Encyclopedia--to mention only a few--to find in them the many Christian figures that do not appear in our own Guide. Our reason for failure to include such persons is blunt, and we hope that it will prove acceptable: given that the Christian church has received abundant specialized treatment in this period, and is likely to continue to do so, we concluded that too many saintly men and women, too many bishops and too many heretics would have meant too few villages, too few recently discovered mosaics, altogether too little emphasis on the continuity of the humdrum, profane life of the majority of "worldly" persons of whom we now have evidence and about whom we have seldom spoken at sufficient length.

The same can be said of almost every theme on which we touch. Our Guide is there to point the way. It is not there to act as a substitute for the many well-established reference works that touch upon this period. The contributors to the essays and to every article have done their best to provide up-to-date bibliography. The index will enable the reader to follow subjects, places, and persons that are not dealt with explicitly in the essays or in the articles. We think that, in the end, the reader who uses this Guide with enterprise and patience will find more solid string in its net than he or she had first thought, and fewer holes. And for those in whom we trust this Guide has instilled a salutary zest for further information, we need only point out The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, the Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire, and the new edition of The Oxford Classical Dictionary, not to mention The Encyclopedia Judaica, the Encyclopedia of Islam, and the Reallexikon fuer germanische Altertumskunde, among many other reliable and largely up-to-date works of reference. If this Guide inspires, in those who read it, a wish to continue to study the distinctive period of late antiquity in its many aspects, to follow the directions into new territory to which it points, eventually to add to the areas sketched inevitably so briefly in its pages and to attempt, by their own further efforts, to remedy its omissions, then the editors will consider that this volume will have served its purpose.

Excerpt copyright © 2002 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. All rights reserved.