THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN LATE ANTIQUITYJames O’Donnell has emphasized,^13 it is also sharply raised by the wars of
Justinian and his attempt to restore unified Roman rule from Constantinople.
The general question is brought into further relief by the fact that the Byz-
antines thought of themselves emphatically as ‘Romans’ even though their
official and literary language, and so much of their culture, was Greek. There
was no simple ‘fall of the Roman empire’: one could reasonably say that only
part of the Roman empire ‘fell’, the western part, leaving what contemporar-
ies thought of as Rome still intact. This is obscured by the current framing of
the question in terms of a choice between decline or collapse on the one hand
and continuity on the other.
Stress on a ‘hard’ periodization also raises the question of where to place
the rise of Islam and the establishment of Arab Muslim rule in the eastern
Mediterranean. Older scholarship – and some contemporary works – make
a sharp divide between the late antique (or ‘Byzantine’) Near East and the
Islamic period, a tendency which has been intensified in the past by the influ-
ence of boundaries between academic disciplines. However, attempts to
break down these boundaries have been a feature of the scholarship of the
last two decades, and the thinking of the ‘continuity’ or ‘long late antiquity’
school places the rise of Islam firmly in the late antique, i.e., in the Mediterra-
nean, world.^14 The last two chapters have set out the context in which the first
conquests took place, and emphasized religious, political and social factors in
the pre-Islamic Near East which make the emergence of a new monotheistic
religion more comprehensible. This approach is supported, as we have seen,
by the striking lack of clear signs of dramatic change in the archaeological
record. This is not to deny the power and originality of the new religion or its
role in motivating state-formation but simply to insist that it emerged within
a specific historical context.
Attempts to explain the fall of the Roman empire in the mid-twentieth
century cast the debate in terms of two stark alternatives: either the empire
collapsed because of internal factors, or it fell under the pressure of outside
impact. Thus the French historian André Piganiol famously asserted in 1947
that the empire was ‘assassinated’, and in 1964 A.H.M Jones concluded that
the main factors were external.^15 The Roman empire did not come to an end
through revolutionary change. There was no uprising or popular impulse that
brought about collapse, and in so far as class struggle existed (and there were
certainly massive inequalities), it was for the most part passive and inert.^16
Though it has often been assumed that the lower classes and especially the
non-Chalcedonians, were unwilling to continue fi ghting Constantinople’s
battles in the early seventh-century east, the actual reasons for the eventual
loss of both western and eastern provinces were more numerous and more
complex. It is more fruitful in the context of current research to look for
changes in the balance of centre and periphery and at the shifting relations
of local cultures and identities. Consideration of the longue durée, gradual and
piecemeal change, is more helpful than the appeal to immediate causal fac-
tors. The extraordinary tenacity of the late Roman state can also too easily be