40 | CHAPTER 2
The leading French student of late Antiquity, Henri- Irénée Marrou, was a
Catholic intellectual who stood in the tradition of patristic scholarship. Like
Lietzmann he came to reject the decline diagnosis (having first espoused it, in
his study of Augustine), and this rejection deeply influenced subsequent schol-
arship.^87 yet he pointedly ignored Strzygowski^88 and barely touched on the
Islamic world. In a few pages written at the very end of his life, he evoked what
he called “entrelacs,” interlace decoration either continuous or knotted, and
dwelt with special warmth and admiration on its development in the Book of
Kells, while dismissing the Muslim arabesque as too rigidly rational.^89
As for the Italian Santo Mazzarino’s famous notion that late antique cul-
ture underwent a “democratization,”^90 he understood that as a symptom of
vigor and change not sclerosis, so one might take him as broadly sympathetic
to Strzygowski’s position, Oriental influences being a surge from “below.”
Mazzarino was mainly concerned with the third century, though, and had
little to say about Islam. Ernst Stein’s Geschichte des spätrömischen Reiches/
Histoire du Bas- Empire (1928–59) and Jones’s Later Roman Empire were
major achievements, but firmly Romanocentric (the empire not the city).
They ended in 565 and 602, respectively, and eschewed the wider horizons
that might have been accommodated under the rubric “late Antiquity.”
On a quite different wavelength, closer to that of von Le Coq, the Tübin-
gen Romanist Joseph Vogt was advocating a kind of UNESCO- style ap-
proach to ancient history, proclaiming in the year 1957:
It is our generation’s desire, after political catastrophes and spiritual de-
bacles, to regain our bearings in a historical world that embraces all of
mankind. In this situation, the problem of the ancient world’s contacts87 Cf. Mazza, Tra Roma e Costantinopoli [2:19] 36–50.
88 H.- I. Marrou, Décadence romaine ou antiquité tardive? IIIe- VIe siècle (Paris 1977) 12; id., Chris-
tiana tempora (Rome 1978) 69.
89 Marrou, Décadence romaine [2:88] 163–67 (and contrast T. Allen’s observations quoted above
pp. 35–36). In the long run, a much more fertile contribution to the study of Islam in relation to late
Antiquity was made by the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs in his La topographie légendaire des
évangiles en Terre Sainte: Étude de mémoire collective (Paris 1941). Halbwachs began his investigation of
the Palestinian holy places with the Bordeaux Pilgrim, who was already in 333 expounding a thoroughly
Christianized vision of Roman geography ( J. Elsner, “The Itinerarium Burdigalense: Politics and salvation
in the geography of Constantine’s empire,” Journal of Roman studies 90 [2000] 194–95). Halbwachs’s
pursuit of his theme down to early modern times requires him to touch on the sociopolitical conse-
quences of Muslim rule; but Islam also had its own literary take on the life of Christ, as now demon-
strated, with copious acknowledgment to Halbwachs, by L. Valensi, La fuite en Ég ypte: Histoires d’Orient
et d’Occident (Paris 2002). The development of Halbwachs’s study of cultural or collective memory by J.
Assmann, Das kulturelle Gedächtnis (Munich 1992), has already had some impact on study of Islam; see,
e.g., the articles gathered in Numen 58 nos. 2–3 (2011). On Halbwachs, see recently D. Iogna- Prat, “Mau-
rice Halbwachs ou la mnémotopie,” Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales 66 (2011) 821–37.
90 S. Mazzarino, [Il basso impero:] Antico, tardoantico ed èra costantiniana (Bari 1974–80)
1.74–98.