A NEW PERIODIZATION | 83yet if we try to facilitate this comparative effort by defining the period gener-
ously, the obvious comparandum for Christianity is Islam, we soon have a
bigger “esplosione” on our hands than even Giardina imagined, and late An-
tiquity bursts any reasonable bounds. Nothing called “Antiquity” can con-
vincingly be extended far enough into the “Middle Ages” to explain Islam’s
tenth- century maturation; while if we embrace Christianity’s birth and
growth, we must annex too that whole process’s imperial Roman context,
and in so doing stray far from any acceptable backward extension of the epi-
thet “late.” We have to face the fact that Giardina’s diagnosis was right but his
cure was excessively conservative, failing to rise to the challenge presented by
the conjunction of late antique and Islamic studies.^99
Apart from its inherent advantages for understanding the traditions and
societies in question according to their own rhythms of development, and
contextually, the First Millennium is also relevant to Europe’s task of assimi-
lating its Muslim populations, as I already hinted in chapter 1. Inclusive so-
cial attitudes and policies are more likely to be fostered by inclusive histories
propagated through the school syllabus, than by any periodization of Antiq-
uity or definition of the Middle Ages framed to exclude the world of Islam.
It has been argued that specific “optimistic” conjunctures such as the collapse
of communism and the scrapping of certain political boundaries during the
1990s helped, for a time, to make the relatively frontier- free long late Antiq-
uity fashionable; that the strategic balance will one day shift again; and that
longer periodizations are therefore destined to be a passing fashion.^100 yet
the population movements that have brought Islam to Europe have deep
roots in decolonization and globalization; they are largely irreversible once
grandchildren and by now even great- grandchildren are born to the original
migrants, for whom Europe is their only home; and they will most likely in-
tensify, given the pressures on Middle Eastern and African societies from
climate change and water shortage, wars, popular unrest, and economic stag-
nation. For all these reasons, pressures for a more inclusive view of the past
will not go away.
What other arguments can be offered, either more or less directly, against
the First Millennium? Starting from general considerations, it may for ex-
ample be objected that periodization is something we impose on history
after it has happened, from a specific viewing point with unavoidable bias,
and ought not to be assigned excessive importance, unavoidable though it is
99 Compare and contrast F. Millar’s courageous proposal, Rome, the Greek world, and the East [2:3]
3.505–8, for a Judeo- Christianized ancient history syllabus concentrating on Greek and Hebrew at the
expense of Latin, but still excluding Islam, not seen as part of ““our” (Western) conceptual origins.”
100 Av. Cameron, “The ‘long’ late antiquity,” in Wiseman (ed.), Classics in progress [2:116] 175–76,
190–91.