SPACE: AN EASTWARD SHIFT | 101or even Thule.^35 The Iberian Peninsula played an early and distinctive role in
the story of the Caliphate, whose conquest of it actually realized Quirinalis’s
dream. But just as the Mediterranean paradigm takes Greece and Rome as its
points of reference, so our story chiefly unfolds along the coasts and deep
into the hinterlands of the Levant, in Mesopotamia and Arabia, and in Iran.
If historians of Europe find this hard to swallow, they had better reflect on
the merely ride- on part played in most accounts of this period by the steppe
peoples of Central Asia such as the Huns, Hephthalites, Avars, and Turks.^36
yet these held the fate of Iran, and often of Rome too, in their hands. The
Turks bordered simultaneously on East Rome, Iran, and China. No Latin
power ever even dreamed of such a role. My choice here is to deal with the
central lands just now delineated and justified, and to touch on the Latin
world and Central Asia only when required by this already wide perspective.
The more one adopts the Eurasian perspective in its widest sense, from Japan
or at least China to Britain, and makes Rome’s eastern peripheries the center
of one’s world, the less surprising the framework I here propose will seem.^37
Empires and commonwealths
Because the emphasis this book gives to intellectual and religious traditions
is historically motivated, some historical context has to be provided for them.
However briefly, we need to acknowledge the political frameworks in which
they became implicated or indeed to which—in the case of Christianity and
especially Islam—they directly gave rise. During the period from Christ up
to about 1000 the three fundamentally important states are Iran, formerly
Achaemenid, then Arsacid, and finally Sasanian; the Roman Empire; and
the Caliphate. Iran and Rome between them just managed to embrace an
East- West territory comparable to the unified Caliphate in its greatest exten-
sion under the Umayyads, from Afghanistan to the Atlantic, or Farghānā to
Andalus as they themselves put it.^38 (The Umayyads had Arabia too, but
nothing permanent on the Mediterranean’s northern shore.) When Iran and
Rome interacted, they did so in Mesopotamia, Syria, and (somewhat less)
Arabia. This is the same region we have identified as of prime importance to
the three monotheisms, in their origins but also in their dissemination.
35 Philippus (Bardaisan), The book of the laws of countries [ed. and tr. (Italian) I. Ramelli, Bardesane
di Edessa: Contro il fato (Rome 2009)] 174–206; Ananias of Shirak, Geography [tr. R. H. Hewsen, The
Geography of Ananias of Širak (Wiesbaden 1992)] 2.4–5.
36 C. I. Beckwith, Empires of the Silk Road: A history of Central Eurasia from the Bronze Age to the
present (Princeton 2009).
37 Sasanians would have been a lot less surprised than Romans, since the North Mesopotamian
frontier was so close to their (winter) capital at Ctesiphon.
38 H. Kennedy (ed.), An historical atlas of Islam (Leiden 2002^2 ) maps 6 and 9.