SPACE: AN EASTWARD SHIFT | 111rulers that they too are envisaged as members of the Iranian Common-
wealth.^64 At the opposite extreme of isolation, the Church of the East was for
the first century of its presence in China perceived as Iranian rather than
Roman.^65
Each of the Commonwealth’s constituents assimilated Iranism differently,
but helped by the fact that, although Mazdaism played its part in the articu-
lation of Iranian culture, religion was not the necessary constituent it was in
the East Roman and Islamic Commonwealths. That was why Iranism could
go on providing a cultural substrate for Armenia—for instance—even after
it embraced Christianity;^66 also, to a remarkable extent, for the Abbasid Ca-
liphate and its derivatives. Today the idea of the Iranian Commonwealth, or
Greater Iran, continues to be propagated, especially by those who want Iran
to compete with Turkey for influence in ex- Soviet Central Asia. It also un-
derlies the major scholarly reference work on Iran, the Encyclopaedia Iranica,
“covering a multi- lingual and multi- ethnic cultural continent.” Through its
numerous articles on regions and cities outside Iran proper (India, for ex-
ample, or Asia Minor; Kabul or Jerusalem), the EIr rewrites, from the per-
spective of Iran, the history of its Roman and other peripheries.^67
In these peripheries Rome had, ever since Augustus, competed with Iran
for a role—in the Caucasus, for example, and in South Arabia, as we shall
shortly see. But it was Constantine’s genius to associate his empire with a
force, namely Christianity, which would carry Roman influence into the
whole region spread out between these poles. Between the fourth and sixth
centuries a string of Christian communities or even states emerged, either
close to or beyond Rome’s eastern and southern borders: in Armenia and
Georgia, among the Arab tribes in or beyond the Syrian and Arabian frontier
zone, in South Arabia, Ethiopia, and Nubia, and even in South India. All
these together constituted a cultural, spiritual, and to varying degrees politi-
cal commonwealth associated with East Rome.^68 That Constantine also—in
another stroke of genius—transferred the seat of his authority to Constanti-
nople meant that henceforth Roman horizons, while still heavily influenced
64 C. Bakhos and M. R. Shayegan, “Introduction” to their The Talmud in its Iranian context
(Tübingen 2010) XV.
65 T. H. Barrett, “Buddhism, Taoism and the eighth- century Chinese term for Christianity,” Bul-
letin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 65 (2002) 555–60; S. N. C. Lieu, “The Luminous Reli-
gion (Ch’ing- chao, i.e. the Church of the East or Nestorianism) in China,” in A. Mustafa and J. Tubach
(eds), Inkulturation des Christentums im Sasanidenreich (Wiesbaden 2007) 315–16.
66 J. R. Russell, Zoroastrianism in Armenia (Cambridge, Mass. 1987); id., “Armenia and Iran iii,”
EIr 2.438–44.
67 See also the new Journal of Persianate studies (Leiden 2008–).
68 On this East Roman Commonwealth (or “First Byzantine Commonwealth”), see Fowden, Em-
pire to commonwealth [4:53] 100–37. P. Wood, “We have no king but Christ”: Christian political thought
in Greater Syria on the eve of the Arab conquest (c. 400–585) (Oxford 2010) 209–64, prefers “Miaphysite
Commonwealth,” with reference to the period after 451.