A NEW PERIODIZATION | 53(not) to be, which makes qualitative (or even moral) judgment and peri-
odization relatively straightforward matters. It also allows for the possibility
of sudden decline, or collapse, which 410 is still sometimes understood to
have been.
For those, by contrast, who see humankind constantly, across the ages,
adjusting bit by bit not to decline, either slow or precipitate, but to gradual
transformations, drawing lines of demarcation is harder. For them, longer pe-
riodizations have undeniable appeal—but not so long as to become mean-
ingless, and certainly not in association with “decline,” which as a hermeneu-
tic tool becomes more useless the further it is stretched out over time. Even
Gibbon came to recognize this, at the end of his immense narrative of East
Rome’s “one thousand and fifty- eight years... of premature and perpetual
decay” from 395 to 1453, and subtly recast it as “the triumph of barbarism
and religion.”^11 His heirs, rather than face the whole second millennium of
Rome—and into its third—under the sign of decline, followed his example
and called it “Byzantium” with its own distinctive rises and falls.^12 Ottoman-
ists have likewise rejected the old view that Ottoman history from 1600 on-
ward was an unremitting story of decline. Instead they prefer “to analyse the
notion of decline, to study this concept as a phenomenon in intellectual his-
tory, and thereby to limit its wholesale and tendentious application.”^13
Maturations
The First Millennium has the basic advantage of embracing the “long” late
Antiquity advocated by Peter Brown, in other words the formation of Chris-
11 Gibbon 32: 2.237, 71: 3.1068; Pocock 1.2–3; and cf. Ghosh, Journal of Roman studies 73 (1983)
[1:29] 5 nn. 24, 26, on the centrality of “decline” to the emotional and tragic appeal of Gibbon’s book as
a work of literature.
12 J. K. J. Thomson, Decline in history: The European experience (Cambridge 1998) 63–96. Cf. N.
Baynes, The Byzantine Empire (London 1925) 7: “An empire to endure a death agony of a thousand years
must possess considerable powers of recuperation.” On Gibbon’s use of the term “Byzantine,” see above,
p. 11 n. 33.
13 S. Faroqhi, “In search of Ottoman history,” in H. Berktay and S. Faroqhi (eds), New approaches
to state and peasant in Ottoman history (London 1992) 232–33; cf. A. Mikhail and C. M. Philliou, “The
Ottoman Empire and the imperial turn,” Comparative studies in society and history 54 (2012) 725–34. On
Ottoman decline or at least uninventiveness as a Eurocentric construct, see C. Finkel, “ ‘The treacherous
cleverness of hindsight’: Myths of Ottoman decay,” in G. MacLean (ed.), Re- orienting the Renaissance
(Basingstoke 2005) 148–74; J. Goody, The theft of history (Cambridge 2006) 99–118. On the other hand,
there is such a thing as congenital weakness. Cf. R. Matthee, Persia in crisis: Safavid decline and the fall of
Isfahan (London 2012) xxvii: “In today’s academic climate, skeptical about (non- Western) decline and
especially averse to decline as a moral category, one is almost forced to reject this type of interpretation
out of hand and to focus on manifestations of continued vitality in the form of artistic expression, reli-
gious disputation, or overlooked provincial initiative. But to do so [in the case of the Safavids] would be
to ignore the many unmistakable signs of trouble.”