SPACE: AN EASTWARD SHIFT | 103the Sasanian front, still it was forced to duel diplomatically with Iran and
pay—or, at its own risk, not pay—subsidies. At the dawn of the sixth century
this situation turned to war again, an imbroglio from which Justinian’s west-
ern reconquests in North Africa and Italy could not long distract him. Con-
stantinople’s insistence on adherence to the Council of Chalcedon’s two-
nature Christolog y was, it is true, closely linked to a desire for theological
and ecclesiological harmony with Rome and its bishop; while the Emperors
Maurice (582–602) and Heraclius (610–41) both believed strongly in
Rome’s Mediterranean destiny, and Constans II (641–69) went so far, in the
660s, as to move his capital to Syracuse in Sicily. But the Constantinopolitan
elite’s resistance was intense and successful, culminating in the emperor’s as-
sassination; while the fall of the whole of North Africa to the Arabs was now
imminent.^44 The eastern empire was never in serious danger, at least after Jus-
tinian, of readopting the old Mediterranean paradigm.
Through the clash of Iran with Rome in the “Last Great War of Antiq-
uity” from 603 to 628, the two empires finally became so debilitated that the
Arabs, with astonishing ease, took over the whole of Iran and all Rome’s
provinces south of the Taurus Mountains between 634 and 651 (the death of
the last Sasanid monarch, yazdegerd III, though at this point Iran was still
only patchily subdued). By 710–11, with the fall of the Visigothic monarchy
in Spain and the first appearance of the Arabs at Samarqand, the Caliphate
controlled—with wildly fluctuating thoroughness—everything from (as al-
ready noted) Sogdia to the Atlantic. Until 750 it was ruled from Damascus,
near the Mediterranean periphery; but the Abbasids moved the capital east-
ward to Baghdad in Iraq. If by c. 1000 alternative power centers had emerged
in Iran (Buyids and Samanids) and Eg ypt (Fatimids), this only intensified
the overall eastward and southward shift of power since the beginning of
Islam, and indeed earlier. Other power centers in North Africa and Spain
were not of sufficient weight to invalidate this generalization.
Considering, then, the main currents both intellectual and political of the
First Millennium CE, we have “shifted” (to use Gibbon’s word from my epi-
graph) our interest away from the Mediterranean paradigm toward a region
that stretches from the Western Mediterranean to the Hindū Kush. The cen-
tral sector of this region is what I call the “Mountain Arena,” in other words
the Arabian peninsula plus its northward projection the Syrian Desert, along
with the historically influential regions flanking it, namely Mesopotamia and
Syria, the whole surrounded by a great rim of mountains.^45 Closely linked in
to this Mountain Arena are to the East the Iranian plateau and to the West
the Eastern Mediterranean basin, including Eg ypt and Libya to the South,
44 W. E. Kaegi, Muslim expansion and Byzantine collapse in North Africa (Cambridge 2010) 166–
99; Sarris, Empires of faith [4:42] 289–93.
45 See further below, pp. 116–26.