7

VIEWPOINTS AROUND 1000

TŪS, BASRA, BAGHDAD, PISA

I suggested in chapter 3 that the First Millennium periodization can be con-
ceived of as an arch thrown from one support to another, but also as pivoted
round a central event, here the rise of Islam. The First Millennium’s useful-
ness does not depend on its start and finish being shown to have cosmogonic
significance. Even freely chosen points in the flow of time may illustrate ei-
ther what is common to all history, and the arbitrariness of periodization, or
else—in microform—the characteristics of a particular phase of human af-
fairs.^1 Nevertheless, in the minds of Christian theologians and historians the
birth of Jesus and the reign of Augustus did acquire momentous significance,
just as did the destruction of the Jerusalem temple for Jews, and for Muslims
the career of Muhammad set against the early seventh- century clash between
Iran and Rome. Ignoring these intellectual constructions may look like a
streetwise option for the historian keen to burnish materialist and skeptical
credentials, but actually just undermines one’s grasp of historical reality and
causality.
But what of the First Millennium’s cutoff point? Certainly the Millen-
nium was eagerly anticipated, and freighted with apocalyptic hopes and
fears. Unlike the coincidence of Augustus and Jesus, though, this construc-
tion turned out to be a deception and lacked historical posterity. It did not,
in retrospect, change very much the way most people saw the world. Nor was
the career of Ibn Sīnā, with whose name I have associated the end of the First
Millennium, anything to compare with Augustus and Jesus, either in reality
or imagination—despite his huge, centuries- long influence on thinking peo-
ple from Central Asia to the Atlantic. The end of the First Millennium, or of
the fourth Muslim century, did see, though, a maturation in the Muslim
world, as it took on political and cultural contours much closer to what we
are familiar with than the early Abbasid period. In this last chapter I treat the
years around 1000 not exactly as another pivot—that would be a whole new
project—but rather as a viewing point from which to look mainly back but

1 G. Traina, 428 dopo Cristo: Storia di un anno (Rome 2007); H. U. Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living at
the edge of time (Cambridge, Mass. 1997).