A NEW PERIODIZATION | 85Millennium is based may also have owed something to the rise of Islam. It did
not catch on in the Latin world until Bede c. 731 (even more tardily among
nonscholars), or in the Greek world until late Byzantine times. In both situ-
ations there was acute awareness of mounting pressure from Islam, so perhaps
adopting the Christian era was a conscious—if delayed—reaction to the
quick- off- the- mark formulation of the simple and uniform hijra era, which is
first attested on a papyrus receipt as early as AH 22.^102 (The Church of the
East, being on the front line, adopted hijra dating as early as 676.^103 )
The aspect of the First Millennium which (experto credite!) attracts most
criticism is, nevertheless, its suspiciously Eusebian inception with Augustus
and Christ. Although nobody can deny Christianity begins and Roman im-
perium matures, or enters a new phase, with the millennium, the fact that the
Christian historian Eusebius declares this coincidence providential is enough
to make it taboo. Against this capital charge of Christianocentrism, various
pleas may be entered, starting with the fact that I propose the First Millen-
nium as a frame for not just one but several long- term cultural trends, with
round- figure termini that are approximate and symbolic of course, but—
apart from their Christian significance—happen also to correspond to vari-
ous non- Christian processes of cultural maturation outlined in this chapter
and elaborated in chapters 5 and 6. As for Eusebius, far from weaving private
fantasies, he induced much of his posterity to think as he had about Rome
and the Church,^104 and thus encouraged further convergence, for example in
numerous bishops warmly committed to the Roman Empire’s authority and
prepared to act on that loyalty, assuming civic as well as ecclesiastical leader-
ship in both East and West. Eusebius’s vision, however theological in its ori-
gins, became an active force in history.
A more creative aspect of this debate is that it encourages thought about
the nature of historical periodizations. These may emerge effortlessly from
the phenomena (an empire or dynasty rises and falls); or they may respond,
with greater or lesser appropriateness and accuracy, to a question the histo-
rian poses, as here: How do Judaism, Christianity, and Islam interact in their
youth and early maturity, with each other or with more secular currents such
as Greek philosophy or Roman law? Do these interactions speak to our own
cultural conjuncture? I have explained how such preoccupations might lead
one to find the First Millennium a rational and functional periodization, on
102 AD: V. Grumel, La chronologie (Paris 1958) 222–24; Declercq, Anno Domini [3:90]. Bede and
the Saracens: R. G. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as others saw it (Princeton 1997) 226–27; K. S. Beckett, Anglo-
Saxon perceptions of the Islamic world (Cambridge 2003) 18, 123–24. Hijra: A. Ghabban, “The inscrip-
tion of Zuhayr,” Arabian archaeolog y and epigraphy 19 (2008) 216; cf. Donner, Narratives [3:87] 237; and
Pourshariati, Decline and fall [1:22] 167–71, 465, for some qualifications.
103 Pinggéra, in Wallraff (ed.), Julius Africanus [3:63] 281.
104 Note also Mann, Sources of social power [1:4] 1.306–10: “Christianity as the solution to the
contradictions of empire” (insisting at 308 that Christianity spread continuously from the Crucifixion).