84 | CHAPTER 3
for purposes of coherent exposition and teaching. The historian will ideally
be in a position to survey history as a continuum, breaking it down into mi-
croperiods for purposes of research, then expanding it again in order to
achieve synthesis. One can only agree. But few are in practice able to achieve
much of an overview, given the habit and necessity of specialization. If this
situation is to be palliated, we can begin by promoting (or returning to) lon-
ger periodizations in usum scholarum, so that the ideal, at least, is inculcated
at an early age. At the same time, there is no reason why complementary pe-
riodizations should not run simultaneously—in which case a major argu-
ment for the First Millennium would be that it helps clarify and contextual-
ize late Antiquity, about whose definition it is proving so hard to reach
agreement. (And it will not get easier: future Muslim participants in the de-
bate will certainly want to know why late Antiquity is so much about Chris-
tianization, but not at all about Islamization.)
Another objection to our First Millennium is that it is not the only pos-
sible one: for example, the Romans celebrated the thousandth birthday of
their city in 248 with wild animal displays in the Colosseum. Our First Mil-
lennium is a Christian formulation calculated from the birth of Jesus, an
event of essentially theological significance and only to Christians; while the
period culminates in the rather different religion of Islam, which plays down
the significance of pre- Islamic history. To make a point of singling out the
first Christian millennium may therefore seem Christianocentric or even Eu-
rocentric to some, or just plain confused. As Arnaldo Momigliano put it in a
lecture delivered almost fifty years ago,
The modern notion of historical periods selected according to the in-
trinsic importance of the facts and according to the reliability of the
evidence is quite clearly part of our pagan inheritance. Experience
seems to show that it can somehow be reconciled with the Jewish idea
of a history from the creation of the world. The reconciliation with the
Christian notion of a history divided into two by Incarnation is a more
difficult problem.^101
yet the point of the First Millennium as a useful historical periodization as
well as one rooted in reliably attested (though less reliably interpreted)
events is that by definition it embraces the formation of Christianity (not to
mention rabbinic Judaism) as well as Islam, whose initial concept had not a
little to do with the perceived shortcomings of Christianity. And the issues
between Christianity and Islam, which gave such vigor and interest to their
encounter, were—among much else—theological issues. Had they been
purely military, political, or economic, we would not still be discussing them
today. What is more, the spread of the AD dating system on which the First
101 A. Momigliano, Essays in ancient and modern historiography (Oxford 1977) 196–97.