Christ’; ‘Nestorians’ also spread to the far east and were officially welcomed to China in the
630s, as recorded on an eighth-century stele in Chinese and Syriac found at Xian.
51 For a sceptical approach to John of Damascus’ connection with St Sabas see M.-F. Auzépy,
‘De la Palestine à Constantinople (VIIIe – IXe siècles): Étienne le Sabaïte et Jean Damas-
cène’, Travaux et Mémoires 12 (1994), 183–218. Stephen the Sabaite was a monk of St Sabas in
the late seventh century, and his Life, written by Leontius in Greek, 807, and translated into
Arabic and Georgian, contains many details about the monastery, but is curiously silent on
the famous theologian: see Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It, 109–10; see also 480–4 on
the diffi culties surrounding the biography of John of Damascus.
52 The situation of Jews under Islam has become in some quarters highly emotive, with the
use of the concept of ‘dhimmitude’, but see Mark R. Cohen, Under Crescent and Cross: the Jews
in the Middle Ages, rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008).
53 Schick, Christian Communities of Palestine, 171–2; a well-known, though isolated, case of an
individual was that of Peter of Capitolias (Beit Ras), put to death under Al-Walid I in 715:
ibid., 173–4.
54 Ibid., chap. 6, 112–23; corpus of sites: 227–484.
55 Garth Fowden, Qusayr Amra. Art and the Umayyad Elite in Late Antique Syria (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 2004).
56 Alan Walmsley, Early Islamic Syria: An Archaeological Assessment (London: Duckworth, 2007),
76–90.
57 Averil Cameron, ‘Byzantium in the seventh century: the search for redefi nition’, in J. Fon-
taine and J. Hillgarth, eds., The Seventh Century: Change and Continuity (London: Warburg
Institute, 1992), 250–76.
58 Kate Cooper and Matthew Dal Santo, ‘Boethius, Gregory the Great and the Christian
“afterlife” of classical dialogue’, in Simon Goldhill, ed., The End of Dialogue in Antiquity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 173–89, at 187, and see Averil Cameron,
Changing Cultures in Early Byzantium (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996).
Conclusion1 For this phenomenon, see especially Susan Alcock, ‘Alphabet soup in the Mediterranean
basin: the emergence of the Mediterranean serial’, in William V. Harris, ed., Rethinking the
Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 314–36.
2 Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); see Brent D. Shaw, ‘Challenging Braudel: a new vision of the
Mediterranean’, Journal of Roman Archaeology 14 (2001), 419–53; Harris, ed., Rethinking the Medi-
terranean; Irad Malkin, ed., Mediterranean Paradigms and Classical Antiquity (London: Routledge,
2005); David Abulafi a, ed., The Mediterranean in History (London: Thames and Hudson, 2003);
id., The Great Sea. A Human History of the Mediterranean (London: Penguin, 2011).
3 David Abulafi a, ‘Mediterraneans’, in Harris, ed., Rethinking the Mediterranean, 64–93.
4 Brent D. Shaw, ‘After Rome. Transformations of the early Mediterranean world’, New Left
Review 51 (May/June 2008), 89–114.
5 Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy. Communications and Commerce AD
300–900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
6 Henri Pirenne, Mahomet et Charlemagne (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1937); see the review by Peter
Brown, ‘Mohammed and Charlemagne by Henri Pirenne’, in id., Society and the Holy in Late Antiq-
uity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 63–79. As Brown points out, though
the book appeared only in 1937, Pirenne had expressed his ideas from as early as 1922.
7 Horden and Purcell, The Corrupting Sea, 169–72; cf. on ‘high commerce’ 365–76; ‘early medi-
eval depression’, 153–60.
8 See Ian Morris and Walter Scheidel, eds., The Dynamics of Ancient Empires. State Power from Assyria
to Byzantium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Walter Scheidel, ed., Rome and China.
Comparative Perspectives on Ancient World Empires (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
NOTES TO CHAPTER 9