114 | CHAPTER 4
in the Slavic world, progressively Christianized from the sixth century on-
ward. It merits notice here if only because Dimitri Obolensky’s book about it
was responsible for putting the concept of commonwealth on the First Mil-
lennium map.^77 Our third commonwealth, though, is none of these, for they
are too remote from our central concern with the development of Jewish,
Christian, and Muslim monotheism and Greco- Roman rationalism in their
First Millennium heartlands. Instead we turn to the world of Islam in its early
maturity, after the frenetic initial phase of empire building.
The Iranian and East Roman Commonwealths were at their most vigor-
ous when running parallel to empire. When empire collapsed or contracted,
the commonwealth dwindled or changed mode of operation—for example,
Iranism, increasingly Islamized, under the Abbasids. The origins of the Is-
lamic Commonwealth are more disputed. On one reading it already began to
emerge as far back as the mass Berber revolt in 740 at the end of Umayyad
rule, when Damascus lost direct control of everything west of Tunisia.^78 In
other words, for a time it paralleled the Caliphate when that, now Abbasid,
was still at the height of its power. But a more decidedly postimperial view^79
echoes the tenth- century historian Masʿūdī in emphasizing the administra-
tive disarray and economic collapse of the 930s and 940s,^80 so that the steady
decentralization of the Abbasid Caliphate and multiplication of competing
centers of power and, by extension, culture too was the real genesis of com-
monwealth. (One might add the tenth/eleventh- century leveling out of the
conversion curve—“religious homogeneity magnified the importance of
other differences,” especially regional identities.^81 ) In Iran and North Africa
new and vigorous shoots burst forth. The Samanid dynasty in Khurāsān and
Transoxiana emerged c. 900 and lasted until 1005, while the Buyids domi-
nated Iraq and parts of Iran, especially prosperous Fārs, from the 930s to the
1040s. As for the Fatimids, they established themselves at Qayrawān in 909.
After the foundation of Cairo, which became the wealthiest city in the Eur-
asian world, their rule endured until 1171.
These were all substantial states, economically prosperous and the more
culturally brilliant for their competing to maintain the efflorescence of Is-
77 D. Obolensky, The Byzantine Commonwealth: Eastern Europe 500–1453 (London 1971); cf.
Shepard, Proceedings of the 21st International Congress of Byzantine Studies [4:74] 1.17–28; also C.
Raffensperger, Reimagining Europe: Kievan Rus’ in the medieval world (Cambridge, Mass. 2012), posi-
tioning Rus’ not just as part of a Byzantine Commonwealth, but within a pre- Crusades Europe, all of
which looked to Constantinople for cultural models and Roman legitimacy.
78 Gibbon 51: 3.322; K. y. Blankinship, The end of the jihād state (Albany, N.y. 1994) 3, 203–4.
79 H. Kennedy, The Prophet and the age of the Caliphates (Harlow 2004^2 ) 187–88, 198–209.
80 Al- Masʿūdī, Meadows of gold [4:22] 395, 504; cf. H. Kennedy, “The decline and fall of the First
Muslim Empire,” Der Islam 81 (2004) 3–30.
81 Fowden, Empire to commonwealth [4:53] 163–65; E. L. Daniel, “The Islamic East,” in New Cam-
bridge history of Islam [2:106] 1.465–66 (whence the quotation).