46 | CHAPTER 2
senses and thoughts of late antique people, Liebeschuetz chronicles with ill-
disguised regret or puzzlement—echoes of Burckhardt!—the fading not
only of ancient urbanism but of Greco- Roman (especially mythological) lit-
erature and art, and the Christianization he perversely equates with
“decline.”^112 His acceptance, though, that in the immediately pre- and post-
Muhammad East things were otherwise, at least on the material level, shows
a different story might have been told, if his cultural preferences had been
less Greco- Roman (not even Syriac) and anti- Christian/Muslim, and his un-
derstanding of the polis less political/Aristotelian and more economic.^113
Chris Wickham, in two major recent books, Framing the early Middle
Ages (2005) and The inheritance of Rome (2009), succeeds up to a point in
establishing a middle ground. He takes the early Caliphate quite generously
into account, albeit always from a European perspective. His approach is ma-
terialist and Marxist, focused on the economy; yet he questions the easy cor-
relation between a less monumental, more private environment and “de-
cline”; and he (grudgingly) acknowledges that cultural factors cannot be
ignored.^114 Culture to him, though, means education and the Church, as so-
cially enmeshed and even socially controlled forces. He does not involve
himself with the history of ideas as such, and when debates about the nature
of Christ or the Qurʾān impinge on politics, he registers surprise at “the ap-
mental architecture implies socioeconomic decline, and stresses evidence for prosperity even after the
Umayyads.
112 J. H. W. G. Liebeschuetz, Decline and fall of the Roman city (Oxford 2001), esp. 295–317,
414–16, and 11 for the Islamophobic lapse; id., “Transformation and decline,” in J.- U. Krause and C.
Witschel (eds), Die Stadt in der Spätantike—Niedergang oder Wandel? (Stuttgart 2006) 476 (Christian-
ization = decline). On the danger of direct equations between abstract or dematerialized artistic style and
“spirituality,” see J. Trilling, “Late antique and sub- antique, or the “decline of form” reconsidered,”
Dumbarton Oaks papers 41 (1987) 469–76. Naturally, diverging views of the same developments are avail-
able in the ancient sources too. It was easy for traditionally minded intellectuals, anyway a minority, to be
pessimistic (e.g., Damascius, Life of Isidore [ed. C. Zintzen (Hildesheim 1967); ed. and tr. P. Athanassiadi,
Damascius: The philosophical history (Athens 1999)] 118 (Epitoma Photiana); John Lydus, On the magis-
tracies [ed. and tr. (French) M. Dubuisson and J. Schamp (Paris 2006)] 3.11, and On the months [ed. R.
Wuensch (Leipzig 1898)] 4.2 (and cf. A. Kaldellis, “The religion of Ioannes Lydos,” Phoenix 57 [2003]
305–6); while one and the same writer might strike contradictory poses (Procopius of Caesarea).
113 For indications of economic resilience in seventh- to eighth- century East Rome as well as the
Caliphate, and even in the West, see articles by C. S. Lightfoot, G. Varinlioǧlu, and A. Walmsley in
Dumbarton Oaks papers 61 (2007); M. Whittow, “Early medieval Byzantium and the end of the ancient
world,” Journal of agrarian archaeolog y 9 (2009) 141–47; L. Zavagno, Cities in transition (Oxford 2009);
R. Alston, “Urban transformation in the East from Byzantium to Islam,” Acta Byzantina Fennica 3 (2010)
9–45, esp. 34–35 on East Rome and 40–41 on Liebeschuetz; articles by J. Koder and C. Lightfoot in C.
Morrisson (ed.), Trade and markets in Byzantium (Washington, D.C. 2012). In the early caliphal East,
material decline is easiest to document in cities exposed to East Roman counterattack, such as those on
the coast: M. Levy- Rubin, “Changes in the settlement pattern of Palestine following the Arab conquest,”
in K. G. Holum and H. Lapin (eds), Shaping the Middle East (Bethesda, Md. 2011) 155–72.
114 C. Wickham, Framing the early Middle Ages (Oxford 2005) 7, 258, 595, 672–74, 825; id., In-
heritance [1:26] 9, 10.