PROSPECTS FOR FURTHER RESEARCH | 221Chapter 3
In developing my argument for the First Millennium, I show how this peri-
odization, or at least certain mutually compatible elements of it, is implicit in
several monotheist historians who lived during the centuries in question.
Among these Christian and Muslim writers, by far the least known is Elias of
Nisibis (d. 1046), who wrote in both Arabic and Syriac and covered the First
Millennium—albeit as the culmination of a history that starts from Adam—
with attention to Iran, Rome, and the Caliphate. As a bishop at the very
heart of the Fertile Crescent who also engaged in theological debates with
Muslims, this unusual bird’s- eye view of our subject came naturally to Elias.
With him, my argument begins to draw on the geo- strategic centrality and
literary legacy of the Syriac world, an approach further elaborated in chapters
4 (geographical framework) and 5 (Aristotelianism). While a monograph
on Elias is certainly a desideratum, a large- scale synthetic account of the
Syro- Arabic Christian world, overlapping Iran, Rome, and Arabia, before
and after Muhammad, would revolutionize our historical perspective. A start
has been made by Sidney Griffith, The Church in the shadow of the Mosque:
Christians and Muslims in the world of Islam (2008), concentrating on theo-
logical and philosophical literature in Arabic.
Chapter 4
Closely linked to the role of the Syro- Arabic world is the question of cultural
commonwealth, for the Iranian and East Roman spheres of influence over-
lapped both there and in the Caucasus. This overlapping of cultural zones
raises in acute form the problem of how to define commonwealth, political
as well as cultural. Once the vast Abbasid Caliphate succumbs to its centri-
fugal forces in the tenth century and generates a new commonwealth, the
problem of definition acquires an Islamic dimension too. The concept of
commonwealth, popularized by Dimitri Obolensky’s The Byzantine Com-
monwealth: Eastern Europe 500–1453 (1971) and developed with reference
to the Christian East from the fourth century onward in my Empire to com-
monwealth (1993), has of late been critically reexamined, and somewhat un-
dermined with regard to Orthodox Eastern Europe and Russia, with the im-
pact of shared faith on political allegiance being called in question (see the
works by J. Shepard and C. Raffensperger referred to above [4:74, 77]). There
is also the question of whether the Latin West should be regarded as an ex-
tension of Constantinople’s cultural zone, or an independent common-
wealth. Given the current taste for comparative histories of empire, a more
systematic comparison of cultural commonwealths seems to be called for.