Before and After Muhammad The First Millennium Refocused

86 | CHAPTER 3 grounds of research convenience, not theological and providential arrière- pensée. In chapter 4 I will make some ...

A NEW PERIODIZATION | 87 A related issue is the study of intellectual systems over long periods, which also provokes charges of ...

88 | CHAPTER 3 terranean (1991) and Peter Heather’s Empires and barbarians (2009), de- ploying the First Millennium because it e ...

A NEW PERIODIZATION | 89 an exclusively Latin and Greek perspective weigh less heavily on medievalists than on classicists. The ...

90 | CHAPTER 3 but because these sent out the creative impulses which were dominant at the beginning of the Second Millennium, a ...

A NEW PERIODIZATION | 91 will not be Muslim, as Eusebius’s was Christian. Nor will it be Eurocentric. Rather it will reflect a g ...

4 SPACE AN EASTWARD SHIFT The distinction of North and South is real and intelligible; and our pursuit is terminated on either s ...

SPACE: AN EASTWARD SHIFT | 93 into the plain of Piedmont, “not on the back of an Elephant,” Gibbon was characteristically eager ...

94 | CHAPTER 4 ons, soaked in the blood of countless foes, and sacrificed to his gods. He en- joyed subduing wild animals as wel ...

SPACE: AN EASTWARD SHIFT | 95 Alexandria on the way to Arabia and India, Byzantium/Constantinople at the entrance to the Black S ...

96 | CHAPTER 4 several Semitic languages.^16 Greek colonists, led by the Euboeans of Eretria and Chalcis, and the Corinthians, f ...

SPACE: AN EASTWARD SHIFT | 97 Greeks and Romans mostly ignored the Arabs, the geographer sees Palestine and the Hijāz as related ...

98 | CHAPTER 4 tity; so did Rome’s growing doctrinal intolerance, especially the expulsion of the so- called School of the Persi ...

SPACE: AN EASTWARD SHIFT | 99 not to have to venture beyond the Mediterranean paradigm.^26 It was not that some previous unity w ...

100 | CHAPTER 4 To resume: Given, first, that our concern is chiefly with Judaism, Christi- anity and Islam, not just in their o ...

SPACE: AN EASTWARD SHIFT | 101 or even Thule.^35 The Iberian Peninsula played an early and distinctive role in the story of the ...

102 | CHAPTER 4 Not of course that we can understand Rome by looking at her eastern provinces alone; but these were nevertheless ...

SPACE: AN EASTWARD SHIFT | 103 the Sasanian front, still it was forced to duel diplomatically with Iran and pay—or, at its own r ...

104 | CHAPTER 4 and Asia Minor, the Aegean, and the Balkans to the North. These three re- gions (the last variously extended wes ...

SPACE: AN EASTWARD SHIFT | 105 unity. This unity was nevertheless briefly brought about—before the Arabs— by the last great Sasa ...