8
THE EASTERN
MEDITERRANEAN – A
REGION IN FERMENT
The last chapter underlined the amount of recent scholarship devoted to the
fate of towns, and the efforts of scholars to discover whether, and why, there
may have been a ‘decline’ in the sixth century. Undoubtedly in the case of the
east, much of the motivation for this lively interest derives from hindsight
- from our awareness that the Arab conquests were just round the corner,
and our knowledge that most of the eastern provinces were to be so quickly
lost to the eastern empire. In a striking number of cases, the inhabitants of
the cities we have been discussing simply surrendered them to the invaders.
Now more than ever, given contemporary events, historians face the chal-
lenge of explaining the speed and ease of the Arab conquests, and it is natural
to look for at least a partial answer in the state of the eastern provinces in the
immediately preceding period. But a vibrant economic life has been revealed
in recent work on the eastern provinces, and this, and the emergence of new
approaches to Byzantine and early Islamic archaeology, have made the Near
East in the sixth to eighth centuries one of the most fertile current areas of
study. To that must be added a striking upsurge of interest in linguistic change
and in the religious complexities of the region in this period. Chapter 9 will
consider the Persian and Arab invasions, the situation of Jews in Palestine and
elsewhere, and the religious confl icts of the seventh century which were felt in
Palestine and Syria just as the Arabs armies arrived. The present chapter will
be concerned with broader questions of settlement, the mix of languages, cul-
tural expression and religion in the east, and the tense situation on the frontier
and in these borderlands between Rome and Persia in the sixth century which
led to the renewal of war between Byzantium and Persia and the successful
Persian invasion of the early seventh century. The latter events, which ended
with a great and unexpected victory for the Byzantines under the Emperor
Heraclius, but were followed almost at once by the incursions from Arabia
which we know as ‘the Arab conquests’, will be discussed in Chapter 9.
Settlement and populationTo what extent were long-term changes already taking place in the demo-
graphic structure of the east, the mix of ethnicities, and the relation of town to