CONCLUSIONfrom a variety of allegiances, when differing cultural and mental systems jos-
tled for pre-eminence, is, after all, something that we can all recognize, and
with some of whose problems we might identify in the post-modern world.
This was a time of change and of state-formation; new ways of constructing
social identity were coming into being all round the Mediterranean, without as
yet any certainty as to which ones would survive. History is about change, and
those who are living in the middle of it are the last to recognize it for what it
really is;^22 those who write about it from the vantage point of many centuries
of hindsight need to be careful not to impose patterns and sharp breaks when
the reality was very different.
The date of AD 700 suggested as an end point for this book is of course
somewhat arbitrary, given the elasticity with which the concept of late antiq-
uity is currently deployed. At the same time it acts as a marker to indicate that
by the mid-eighth century, western Europe, Byzantium and the east looked
different, and that each had undergone a period of sometimes painful adap-
tation. The coronation of Charlemagne as emperor by the pope in Rome
on Christmas Day, AD 800, in one sense marked the transformation of the
Frankish and Carolingian kingdom and asserted a theoretical equality with
the empire at Constantinople that was underpinned by the dream of a pos-
sible marriage alliance with the Empress Irene. The eighth-century emperors
of Byzantium had struggled with military defeat, depopulation of the capital
and enormous loss of territory and achieved administrative, military and fiscal
change. The divisions of loyalty which surrounded the eighth and ninth-cen-
tury debate about religious images were not yet over, but the beginnings of
intellectual revival in Byzantium were already apparent. In the east, the build-
ing of the new round city of Baghdad by the Caliph al-Mansur and its replace-
ment of Damascus as the new capital of the Abbasid dynasty represented a
cultural as well as a geographical move towards the east. We can continue to
debate about when late antiquity came to an end, but each of these develop-
ments also presents new and different challenges for historians.
The last generation has seen an explosion of scholarship on late antiquity,
accompanied by a debate about methodology which shows no sign of abating.
The notion of a ‘benign’ late antiquity, with an emphasis on cultural continu-
ity, has come under fire from several quarters, for its perceived lack of eco-
nomic or administrative content, and for an over-optimistic approach which
conceals the actual violence of the period. New approaches to barbarians and
identity have also transformed scholarship on the west, and are in turn stimu-
lating a return to older ideas in some quarters. Archaeology is central to these
developments, and new discoveries and new research are changing the picture
all the time. The debate about late antiquity is sometimes cast in terms of a ten-
sion between material culture, warfare and economic history on the one hand
and cultural history on the other, but this opposition should be resisted: in a
full history of the period all these approaches need to be included. Not only
has the rich surviving textual and literary material proved an immensely fruit-
ful field of study, but there has also been a new attention to theological and