A NEW PERIODIZATION | 89an exclusively Latin and Greek perspective weigh less heavily on medievalists
than on classicists.
The books by McCormick and Wickham, both economic historians
mainly interested in early medieval Latin Europe, bear some further com-
ment. They show admirable broad- mindedness not just in their chronologi-
cal sweep, but also in taking on board the East Roman and Arab- Islamic
worlds as well. Nonetheless, their perspective is quite different from that of-
fered here. McCormick is perfectly aware that, after what he sees as the de-
mise of the ancient Mediterranean economy in the seventh century, the east-
ern, southern, and western shores conquered by the Arabs continued more
peaceful and prosperous than the northern shores, which remained in Chris-
tian hands.^112 yet he is not really much concerned with this difference, in its
own right, until the economic dynamism of the Abbasid economy becomes
so irresistible that it begins, very slowly in the closing decades of the eighth
century, to drag Latin Europe back into the light. And since, even then, his
search is for the earliest signs of “the decisive advance of the European com-
mercial economy,”^113 McCormick describes the influence of the Abbasid
economy rather than the beast itself. One is constantly aware, reading his
book, that a general history of the Eurasian economy from 750 to 900, free
of anachronistic concern with a region not fully on stream until “several
centuries”^114 later, would have to place Abbasid Iraq center stage. That admis-
sion, coming from such an accomplished historian of Europe, is an impor-
tant gain; yet it remains only an implicit admission.
A similar viewpoint is adopted in Wickham’s two books. By framing his
narrative of the period up to 1000 not (it is true) in order to explain teleo-
logically the origins of “Europe,” but still from a firmly Latin and Roman
perspective,^115 Wickham privileges a part of the world which was, as he him-
self admits,^116 distinctly peripheral to the great centers of power, wealth, and
creativity: Constantinople, Cairo, Baghdad. There is an arbitrariness here,
whose dependence on a modern European sense of identity we need to rec-
ognize more explicitly. (Wickham berates teleological approaches in others.)
By contrast, the historian who passes by Baghdad rather than Aachen en
route to the year 1000 and then into the Second Millennium follows the
organic, mainstream development of the most vigorous elements in the late
antique synthesis, those Greco- Roman, Sasanian, Syriac, and then Muslim
currents that I have chosen as the focus of my account, and not arbitrarily,
112 McCormick, Origins [2:84] 115–19, 149, 782–84.
113 McCormick, Origins [2:84] 794.
114 McCormick, Origins [2:84] 793.
115 Cf. especially Wickham, Inheritance [1:26] 282, 333.
116 Wickham, Inheritance [1:26] 4, 281–82, 425.