20 | CHAPTER 2
historical evidence itself rather than because our society is or ever can be
Muslim in the sense Momigliano’s was Christian. And although, in quoting
the Italian historian, I have adopted Peter Brown’s translation of “sfocia” as
“to end naturally,” it might also be rendered “to lead to,” “to debouch” (as a
river into a lake), which would better convey my view that Islam did not, as
has been imagined, kill Antiquity, but grew out of it and even developed
some of its major preoccupations. I would like to suggest that such a recon-
ception of Islam’s relation to late Antiquity—which actually takes us “be-
yond late Antiquity” in the sense in which the term is most commonly un-
derstood—is implicit not only in the Qurʾān’s intense dialogue with rabbinic
Judaism and Christianity, but also in the origins of late Antiquity as an inde-
pendent academic discipline, as we see if we go back to Vienna—in particu-
lar—at the very beginning of the twentieth century. The example set then
was not, though, consistently or effectively followed up.
But before considering the crucial books that came out in 1900 to 1901,
we need to take firmly on board that, long before late Antiquity became an
independent discipline, major aspects of the period were already at the focus
of Renaissance and Reformation thought. In particular, Constantine’s reli-
gious revolution resonated so deeply that we can claim late Antiquity as a
fundamental contributor to European thought, long previous to its formal
“invention” as a separate period.
It goes without saying that, throughout the Middle Ages both Greek and
Latin, the theological and ecclesiological legacy of late Antiquity was what
was uppermost in the mind of all educated people. Still, late Antiquity meant
“paganism” as well as Christianity. Within a restricted circle in the Greek
world, much of the secular literature of Antiquity remained familiar right
down to the Ottoman capture of Constantinople in 1453, and indeed be-
yond. As for the Latin world, to begin with it made do with only a thin trickle
of secular texts: Virgil, Livy, Cicero, and a few others, to judge for example
from Carolingian library catalogues.^5 Although the situation much im-
proved from the twelfth and especially the thirteenth century onward, it was
only during the Italian Renaissance of the fifteenth century that non-
Christian ancient thought began to be widely studied in its own right—not
merely for how it could spice theolog y—and sometimes in Greek as well
as Latin. Particularly the contribution of Marsilio Ficino (d. 1499), in unveil-
ing Plato and the Hermetica through Latin translations, can hardly be
overestimated.
No less important than these new ways of thinking was the inclination
toward critical reading of texts, including Christian ones. When Lorenzo
Valla (d. 1457) exposed as a forgery the Donation of Constantine, on which
papal claims to temporal dominion were built, that brought about (eventu-
5 R. McKitterick, The Carolingians and the written word (Cambridge 1989) 153–54, 169–96.