216 | CHAPTER 7
Attention to the fall of Constantinople in 1453 served to excuse the title; but
East Rome’s cultural and symbolic status had long since ceased to be matched
by any political clout. In his last chapters, Gibbon reverted to Old Rome on
the Tiber and briefly gestured forward to the revival of classical culture
which heralded the rise of Europe. Gibbon’s emphasis on Oriental empires
and bracketing of medieval Europe was evidently intended to provoke a
Catholic historiographical tradition which saw the classical revival and Eu-
ropean Modernity as having been prepared by the Church. One recalls, too,
his emphasis on the rationality of Islam, in covert opposition to orthodox
Christian Trinitarianism. No wonder Gibbon’s posterity has generally de-
clined to read beyond volume 3.
The First Millennium periodization should not be construed as sanction-
ing Gibbon’s provocation, but rather as offering an alternative way out of
Antiquity in the spirit of his innovative, neglected later volumes. The Euro-
pean/Christian and Asiatic/Islamic exits from Antiquity are not unrelated
to each other. No amount of adulation of Charles the Great can persuade an
impartial observer that “Europe” was born already in 800. Here, Catholic
historiography truly overreached itself. But from the middle of the eleventh
century onward it is indeed arguable that Europe comes into focus, and not
in isolation from the world of Islam. I for a time considered acknowledging
this by offering two Epilogues, one looking forward to the Eastern evolu-
tions I have just sketched, the other returning to Pisa, at whose Scuola Nor-
male Superiore these chapters were first tried out as three lectures in 2009. It
seems preferable to emphasize instead the connectivity of these worlds; but
Pisa is not at all a bad place to do that.
From about 1050, Pisa grew fabulously wealthy on its Saracen wars and
the conquest of Corsica, Sardinia, and the Balearic Islands.^69 After the naval
victory granted by the Virgin Mary off Palermo in 1063, the present duomo
was begun the following year on a colossal scale with few parallels in Europe
at that time. Inscriptions on the facade record that spoils of victory provided
the funds, and compare the architect Buscheto to Odysseus and Daedalus
(and Pisa therefore to ancient Greece).^70 The duomo’s axial relationship to
the new circular baptistery built in 1153, and their setting amid the Campo
dei Miracoli, mirrored the Aqsā Mosque and the Dome of the Rock on the
Haram al- Sharīf in Jerusalem. The Crusaders called the Dome of the Rock
the “Temple of the Lord” and the Aqsā the “Temple of Solomon”; while the
Pisans built an upgraded version in the heart of their city,^71 and imagined
themselves latter- day Children of Israel struggling against the Midianites of
69 G. Scalia, “Pisa all’apice della gloria: L’epigrafe araba di S. Sisto e l’epitafio della regina di Maiorca,”
Studi medievali 48 (2007) 809–28; Abulafia, Great Sea [4:15] 271–86.
70 A. Peroni (ed.), Il Duomo di Pisa (Modena 1995) 1.336–37, 2.43–44.
71 J. E. A. Kroesen, The Sepulchrum Domini through the ages (Leuven 2000) 41–42.