Conclusion

For a book that appeared in 1993, the choice of the title The Mediterranean World in Late Antiquity did not seem to need justification. Given the many publications that have subsequently appeared with the word ‘Mediterranean’ in their titles, it now indeed seems prescient.¹ It has been traditional to see the fall of the Roman empire, or at least ‘the end of the ancient world’, as marking a critical break in historical continuity in the history of the Mediterranean world. However, in their book, The Corrupting Sea,² Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell present the history of the Mediterranean in terms of continuities, abiding structures and the longue durée. In this vision, geography and deeply ingrained social patterns matter more than events, and link all parts of the Mediterranean in commonality. Rather than emphasizing long-distance trading patterns and ruptures, Purcell and Horden lay stress on the continuation at all periods of small-scale connectivity. The ancient Mediterranean world belongs therefore to a system which links it to the Mediterranean worlds of later periods and even of today. Others have taken up this way of thinking and applied the term ‘Mediterranean’ to other seas (‘other Mediterraneans’),³ but the Purcell and Horden model explicitly disrupts the dominant emphasis on long-distance exchange as the marker of Mediterranean unity in late antiquity. The view of the Mediterranean world in the late Roman period as a more or less unified economic system is still to be found in other works; for instance, in Brent Shaw’s comments on Chris Wickham’s Framing the Early Middle Ages, a book with the sub-title Europe and the Mediterranean, 400–800. Shaw sees ‘the Roman Mediterranean world-system’ or ‘Mediterranean world-system (MWS)’ as a unified system that was being reconfigured, or indeed was fragmenting, before the end of Wickham’s chosen period, i.e. by AD 800.⁴ Michael McCormick’s book, Origins of the European Economy, also takes a Mediterranean-wide view and focuses on long-distance trade and travel;⁵ his findings point to a general downturn in cross-Mediterranean activity in the seventh century followed by an upturn by c. 900. This emphasis on long-distance shipping as an indicator of Mediterranean unity has been a powerful theme in the intense study of ceramics as evidence of trade and economic activity during the last generation, and while the study of amphorae in this sense dates only from the 1970s, the importance attached to cross-Mediterranean travel has been traditional since the Belgian historian Henri Pirenne denied the idea that the Roman empire ended with the barbarian invasions, and argued that the real break in Mediterranean culture, or as we would now say, the end of antiquity, came only with the Arab conquests in the seventh century; this, he argued, brought an end to long-distance trade as previously known, and transformed the Mediterranean into an ‘Arab lake’.⁶ In the 1970s and even into the 1980s, the ‘Pirenne thesis’ was still the basis of intense debate, and while the substance of the argument was transformed by the turn of the century in the scholarship towards the utilization of newly available ceramic and other archaeological evidence and the progressive refinement of dating techniques, the underlying agenda remained that of investigating the extent of cross-Mediterranean exchange.

Against this preoccupation with rupture and concentration on what they call ‘high commerce’ and its shipping lanes, Horden and Purcell introduced a sceptical note, pointing out that the Arab conquests in fact opened new networks; the notion of rupture is too simplistic.⁷ A division has also opened up among historians of late antiquity between those who emphasize continuity and others, such as Peter Heather and Bryan Ward-Perkins, who vigorously re-emphasize the traditional ‘fall’ of the western empire in the fifth century, reintroduce the idea of barbarian invasion, and already think in term of a separated western Europe, two groups labelled by Ward-Perkins as ‘continuists’ and ‘catastrophists’. The former look more to the east, and take a longer view of late antiquity, seeing it as embracing the emergence of Islam. That has been the thrust of the last two chapters. The emphasis on the continuity of late antiquity into the early Islamic period also has implications for the application of the Mediterranean model to the later Roman empire: after all, the Roman empire in this period was not limited to those provinces that bordered the Mediterranean, and the eastward emphasis adopted here and in much other recent work changes the focus even more. That tendency is carried further by historians who prefer to see the Roman empire in the context not of the Mediterranean alone, but of the whole of Eurasia.⁸ In contrast, the ‘catastrophist’ view belongs within a scenario whose actual focus is on the origins of western Europe rather than the Mediterranean world.⁹

Meanwhile the end of empires has also re-emerged as a key topic for all periods, with the Roman empire as the paradigm by which others are judged. The comparator now is usually the ‘American empire’, as in Cullen Murphy’s book, Are we Rome? The End of an Empire and the Fate of America, published in the United Kingdom with the uncompromising title, The New Rome.¹⁰ A further way of approaching the issue is through explicit attention to comparative history, in particular through a comparison between Rome and China;¹¹ comparative history of this kind may be difficult, but it avoids the over-concentration on Europe (Euro-centrism) which has been criticized by many. Nevertheless, the problem of the end of the ancient world raises issues about east and west – where does the eastern empire fit, and does it belong with Europe? The question is more acute for the later Byzantine period,¹² but as James O’Donnell has emphasized,¹³ it is also sharply raised by the wars of Justinian and his attempt to restore unified Roman rule from Constantinople. The general question is brought into further relief by the fact that the Byzantines thought of themselves emphatically as ‘Romans’ even though their official and literary language, and so much of their culture, was Greek. There was no simple ‘fall of the Roman empire’: one could reasonably say that only part of the Roman empire ‘fell’, the western part, leaving what contemporaries thought of as Rome still intact. This is obscured by the current framing of the question in terms of a choice between decline or collapse on the one hand and continuity on the other.

Stress on a ‘hard’ periodization also raises the question of where to place the rise of Islam and the establishment of Arab Muslim rule in the eastern Mediterranean. Older scholarship – and some contemporary works – make a sharp divide between the late antique (or ‘Byzantine’) Near East and the Islamic period, a tendency which has been intensified in the past by the influence of boundaries between academic disciplines. However, attempts to break down these boundaries have been a feature of the scholarship of the last two decades, and the thinking of the ‘continuity’ or ‘long late antiquity’ school places the rise of Islam firmly in the late antique, i.e., in the Mediterranean, world.¹⁴ The last two chapters have set out the context in which the first conquests took place, and emphasized religious, political and social factors in the pre-Islamic Near East which make the emergence of a new monotheistic religion more comprehensible. This approach is supported, as we have seen, by the striking lack of clear signs of dramatic change in the archaeological record. This is not to deny the power and originality of the new religion or its role in motivating state-formation but simply to insist that it emerged within a specific historical context.

Attempts to explain the fall of the Roman empire in the mid-twentieth century cast the debate in terms of two stark alternatives: either the empire collapsed because of internal factors, or it fell under the pressure of outside impact. Thus the French historian André Piganiol famously asserted in 1947 that the empire was ‘assassinated’, and in 1964 A.H.M Jones concluded that the main factors were external.¹⁵ The Roman empire did not come to an end through revolutionary change. There was no uprising or popular impulse that brought about collapse, and in so far as class struggle existed (and there were certainly massive inequalities), it was for the most part passive and inert.¹⁶ Though it has often been assumed that the lower classes and especially the non-Chalcedonians, were unwilling to continue fighting Constantinople’s battles in the early seventh-century east, the actual reasons for the eventual loss of both western and eastern provinces were more numerous and more complex. It is more fruitful in the context of current research to look for changes in the balance of centre and periphery and at the shifting relations of local cultures and identities. Consideration of the longue durée, gradual and piecemeal change, is more helpful than the appeal to immediate causal factors. The extraordinary tenacity of the late Roman state can also too easily be forgotten in the search for explanations of its supposed decline and fall. Thus, while Justinian’s wars may have overstretched the state economy, he was nevertheless able to sustain a massive war effort over a very long period and on several fronts, to establish a new and substantial Byzantine administrative and military system in the newly reconquered provinces of North Africa and Italy, to reclaim these provinces from Arian religious rule and build or remodel many churches, and to carry through an empire-wide building programme which was impressive on any estimate. That his successors experienced difficulties in maintaining his example was hardly surprising.

The empire was vulnerable to external developments as well as to its own internal problems. Not merely was it faced by extensive barbarian settlement in the west and the expensive and difficult Persian wars, in the east, followed by the Arab conquest. Changes in central Asia led in the fifth century to danger from the Huns, fortunately dissolved after the death of Attila, and later to the appearance of the Hephthalites, who threatened Constantinople at the end of the reign of Justinian. By this time the empire was already attempting to use the Avars to control other groups such as the Slavs in the Danubian regions. Corippus approvingly describes their haughty reception by Justin II at the beginning of his reign, but Justin’s high-handedness to these and other potential enemies proved disastrous; large payments to the Avars by his successor Tiberius II (578–82) did not prevent them from becoming a major threat, or from besieging Constantinople in 626.¹⁷ Needless to say, contemporaries had only a vague idea of the ethnic origins of the Avars and the Turks,¹⁸ whose prominence in the late sixth century was followed in turn by the emergence, by the end of the seventh, of two other Turkic peoples, the Bulgars and the Khazars. Faced with these movements, the empire oscillated between trying to make alliances, backed up with payment of subsidies, and, when necessary, fighting. This was indeed the normal state of affairs, varying only in degree; war, not peace, was the norm, and when peace did prevail for a time it had usually been bought at a high cost.

Seen against this background, the ‘decline’ explanation appears inadequate. It is premised on the idea that it is reasonable to expect cultures and societies to be able to maintain themselves indefinitely in the same state. Phrases such as ‘the end of classical antiquity’ and the like assume an entity, ‘classical antiquity’, which is not itself liable to change. But societies do not exist in a vacuum. Changes in late antique urbanism have received enormous attention as indicators of decline or transformation; yet cities in antiquity, like cities now, did not exist in a steady state but were constantly being remodelled and adapted. Then, as now, the human environment was one of constant change. Myriads of small and large changes were taking place both within the vast territories of the empire and outside its borders: it is these changes taken together which have misleadingly been labelled ‘decline’. Words such as ‘decline’ are irredeemably emotive, and it is not the historian’s place to sit in moral judgement on his subject or to impose inappropriate classical norms.¹⁹

A different mode of explanation can be derived from recent work in anthropology, according to which complex societies tend of themselves to become ever more complex until finally they reach the point of collapse.²⁰ At first sight this avoids the difficulty of confusing explanations of change with descriptions of it. But it is not clear whether it really succeeds, or how appropriate a theory it is when applied to the Roman empire. A further danger in such generalizing explanations is that they may fail to take into account the actual historical variables – while it may be useful to see the Roman empire in comparison with other imperial systems, it was also a society sui generis, held together by a unique balance of factors which historians are still in the process of trying to understand. Similar issues arise in relation to comparisons between empires, which depend heavily on the specific points of comparison chosen. We must not lose sight of the particularity of late antiquity in the zeal to explain away the ‘fall of the Roman empire’.

The present flow of research on the eastern provinces in late antiquity is indeed striking, but stems from the same preoccupation with acculturation and cultural change that lies behind comparable work on the west. The field is led by archaeology; archaeologists are giving more and more attention to studying the interaction of cultural systems and especially the process of acculturation. It is promising to see that an emphasis on ethnoarchaeology, the study of subcultures, and an emphasis on survey, landscape and small settlements lead them to take a longer and a broader view, and to turn less readily than before to literary sources for ‘corroboration’ of detailed hypotheses. Late antiquity – a period of cultural change and acculturation on a grand scale – offers tremendous scope in this direction, with consequent changes in how historians interpret the period and what questions they ask.

One such question is how far the influence of the state actually penetrated. Despite the political shifts, when seen from the longer perspective it is arguable that neither the establishment of the barbarian kingdoms in the west nor the Arab conquests brought the degree of change in the underlying social and economic structures of Europe that can be seen from the eleventh century onwards.²¹ In northern Europe, one may point to a difference between the agricultural methods and crops more suitable to the heavy northern soil and colder climate of northern Germany and France and the wine- and oil-based economy of the Mediterranean; yet the same northern provinces, with the same ecology, had also been part of the Roman empire. In the east, both archaeologists and historians are agreed that the seventh-century Arab conquests in Palestine and Syria brought little real break in continuity. Much too much emphasis is still placed on the ‘collapse’ of the Roman empire and the ‘transformation’ of the classical world, and too little on the long-term continuities.

The search for the causes, in the traditional sense, of this ‘transformation’ also tends to obscure the particularity of individual experience in late antiquity, the range and variety of which in fact gives the period its undoubted imaginative appeal to modern eyes. A time of rapid change, when local structures were often more meaningful than the Roman state, when people could choose from a variety of allegiances, when differing cultural and mental systems jostled for pre-eminence, is, after all, something that we can all recognize, and with some of whose problems we might identify in the post-modern world. This was a time of change and of state-formation; new ways of constructing social identity were coming into being all round the Mediterranean, without as yet any certainty as to which ones would survive. History is about change, and those who are living in the middle of it are the last to recognize it for what it really is;²² those who write about it from the vantage point of many centuries of hindsight need to be careful not to impose patterns and sharp breaks when the reality was very different.

The date of AD 700 suggested as an end point for this book is of course somewhat arbitrary, given the elasticity with which the concept of late antiquity is currently deployed. At the same time it acts as a marker to indicate that by the mid-eighth century, western Europe, Byzantium and the east looked different, and that each had undergone a period of sometimes painful adaptation. The coronation of Charlemagne as emperor by the pope in Rome on Christmas Day, AD 800, in one sense marked the transformation of the Frankish and Carolingian kingdom and asserted a theoretical equality with the empire at Constantinople that was underpinned by the dream of a possible marriage alliance with the Empress Irene. The eighth-century emperors of Byzantium had struggled with military defeat, depopulation of the capital and enormous loss of territory and achieved administrative, military and fiscal change. The divisions of loyalty which surrounded the eighth and ninth-century debate about religious images were not yet over, but the beginnings of intellectual revival in Byzantium were already apparent. In the east, the building of the new round city of Baghdad by the Caliph al-Mansur and its replacement of Damascus as the new capital of the Abbasid dynasty represented a cultural as well as a geographical move towards the east. We can continue to debate about when late antiquity came to an end, but each of these developments also presents new and different challenges for historians.

The last generation has seen an explosion of scholarship on late antiquity, accompanied by a debate about methodology which shows no sign of abating. The notion of a ‘benign’ late antiquity, with an emphasis on cultural continuity, has come under fire from several quarters, for its perceived lack of economic or administrative content, and for an over-optimistic approach which conceals the actual violence of the period. New approaches to barbarians and identity have also transformed scholarship on the west, and are in turn stimulating a return to older ideas in some quarters. Archaeology is central to these developments, and new discoveries and new research are changing the picture all the time. The debate about late antiquity is sometimes cast in terms of a tension between material culture, warfare and economic history on the one hand and cultural history on the other, but this opposition should be resisted: in a full history of the period all these approaches need to be included. Not only has the rich surviving textual and literary material proved an immensely fruitful field of study, but there has also been a new attention to theological and documentary texts such as the acts of the church councils, with the realization that such material is central to the general history of the period. Contemporaries engaged in fierce arguments and expressed themselves in strong language, which modern historians are learning belatedly to see for what it was. Now too, they are discovering the actual areas of common ground between polytheists and Christians, between different Christian groups, between Christians and Jews and Christians and Muslims. The parameters have well and truly changed.