INTRODUCTIONbe enough to refer to some of the responses to Horden and Purcell’s first
volume, The Corrupting Sea.^25
Other major themes to be considered must include what has commonly
been seen as the process of Christianization, although a better formulation in
the light of current work would be religious change, encompassing the rela-
tions between a whole variety of religious groups, the degree of local varia-
tion, questions of religious identity and especially self-identity, the history of
Judaism in the late Roman empire, and especially in Palestine on the eve of
Islam, and the context and processes which gave rise to another major religion
of the book. Far more has been written on all these subjects since the publica-
tion of the first edition of this book, not least perhaps under the stimulus of
external events. But the discovery of rich new material, including for instance
pre-Islamic monotheistic inscriptions from south Yemen, and the publication
of studies of spectacular synagogues in Palestine, notably at Sepphoris, have
also made new interpretations possible. A hugely increased scholarly interest
has also developed in the divisions in the eastern church after the Council
of Chalcedon, drawing especially on the very rich written evidence in Syriac
sources (Chapters 5, 8 and 9).
Diversified, localized and fragmented, the Roman army, or rather armies,
of the fifth and sixth centuries were far different in composition and equip-
ment from those of earlier days. Whether the army could now effectively keep
out the barbarians, and if not, why not, were questions as much debated by
contemporaries as by modern historians; the nature of the late Roman army,
and the context of defence and frontiers, together with the new revisionist
approaches towards the barbarian invasions, need therefore to be discussed
again (Chapters 2, 5 and 8).
Finally, the late Roman economy (Chapter 4). How much long-distance
exchange continued and for how long, and if it did, in whose hands was it?
Large estates and landowners are argued by some to be more important play-
ers than has recently been assumed, while the traditional problem of the status
of ‘coloni’ has been subjected to radical new interpretations. In the Near East,
the reasons for the prosperity of hundreds of ‘dead villages’ in Syria, some of
whose remains can be clearly seen, with stone houses and public buildings
still standing to their upper levels, are still not fully understood; yet the local
population was clearly able to engage in fairly elaborate forms of exchange.
Christopher Wickham has stressed the effects of the ending of the annona
system in the early seventh century, and the impact of the seventh-century
invasions included a massive loss to the eastern empire of basic tax revenue.
In Umayyad Syria, the Muslims instituted a completely different tax system,
and as their priorities crystallized, elements of the Roman provincial structure
inevitably began to weaken. But many questions remain about economic life
towards the end of our period, and this perhaps cautions more than anything
else against the too easy absorption of the early Islamic world into that of late
antiquity.