214 | CHAPTER 7
to Islam within the First Millennium framework, though, will be harder for
medievalists to accommodate, given that they still see it as peripheral to their
remit. First Millennium studies encourage us to chart a Eurasian dynamic, es-
pecially c. 1000 as the Eurasian Hinge, uneasily poised between the collapse of
Abbasid power, the coming of the Seljuks and the intrusion of the Crusaders,
opens up to interaction with the flanking but very different worlds of Central
Asia and Latin Europe, and all are slowly integrated into a widening system of
exchange culminating in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries.^62
I would emphasize the term “evolution” rather than the idea that there
came a “turning point” into an entirely different era. There was a critical in-
tensification of tendencies already under way, which had first become appar-
ent through the Carolingian and Macedonian renaissances and the stimula-
tion offered by Abbasid trade.^63 It is often said that the Muslim world has no
need of renaissances; but here too we see, c. 1000 CE/400 AH, a maturation
of Islamic civilization—and its obverse: Ibn Sīnā’s impatience with writing
commentaries on Greek texts, or the disappearance of churches from the
urban tissue.^64 Then, the twelfth- century Renaissance in the Latin West re-
flects the rise of an intellectually, militarily, and commercially far more fo-
cused Europe, partly thanks to stimulus from the Muslim world. Between on
the one hand the First Millennium and the dynamics arising from it, and on
the other hand the Italian Renaissance anticipated in the twelfth- century Re-
naissance, the autonomy of the “Middle Ages” is undeniably squeezed.^65
Even more so when one takes into account the wish of some students of early
modern Europe to annex the half- millennium from 1250 to 1750, or even a
whole millennium, 800 to 1800.^66
M. McCormick (eds), The long morning of medieval Europe (Aldershot 2008) 1–10, vigorously claim the
whole period from 400 to 1000 as “the long morning of an expanding and changing world.” Comparison
with the civilizational level of the fourth- century Roman West, or the Caliphate’s expansion, might have
induced more sobriety. See below, n. 63.
62 J. L. Abu- Lughod, Before European hegemony (New york 1989).
63 The importance of Carolingian developments should not be underestimated. Comparison with
the Abbasids (implied, notably, by Charlemagne’s minting in the 780s and 790s of high- quality imitation
Abbasid dinars: L. Ilisch, “Die imitativen solidi mancusi,” in R. Cunz [ed.], Fundamenta Historiae [Han-
nover 2004] 91–106) is entirely legitimate, even if it throws up few resemblances, e.g., W. Drews, Die
Karolinger und die Abbasiden von Bagdad: Legitimationsstrategien frühmittelalterlicher Herrscherdynas-
tien im transkulturellen Vergleich (Berlin 2009). But until the eleventh century there is no justification for
assigning the Latin West a role in the story of the middle and late First Millennium equal to that of the
Greek, Arab, and Iranian worlds. On these, Central Asia from the Huns to the Seljuks exercised far di-
recter influence: cf. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road [4:36], whose chap. 5 offers a conspectus of sixth-
to eighth- century states from China to the Franks.
64 M. Guidetti, “The Byzantine heritage in the dār al- islām,” Muqarnas 26 (2009) 1–36.
65 J. Banaji, “Islam, the Mediterranean and the rise of capitalism,” Historical materialism 15 (2007)
47–74, dates the rise of European capitalism to the eleventh century already, and argues for its unmedi-
ated roots in the Muslim and late antique monetary economy and other commercial arrangements.
66 Osterhammel, Verwandlung [2:94] 100.