History Essay - The Early Middle Ages and the Heirs of Rome

Background

This fall of 2023 I listened to the lectures of one course from Yale University’s Open Yale Courses (OYC) curriculum called The Early Middle Ages, 264-1000 (The Early Middle Ages, 284–1000 | Open Yale Courses), or HIST 210. I began this course because Nicole is taking classes at Harvard for her MPH and I am now done with my statistics masters from Georgetown. The inspiration of her coursework coupled with my newly plentiful free time led me to want to listen to some lectures again. 

This course covers the “Early Middle Ages” or “Late Antiquity” period. I was first exposed to this topic from the lectures of Thersites the Historian in his YouTube playlist for the HIS 2202 Introduction to Medieval History course during the early pandemic times. I found it highly interesting because this history seemed very important and yet largely obscure. In conventional history education, different successive areas of the world, narratives, and time periods come to center stage, leaving the rest of the world in the dark. An example succession might be from Ancient Greece, to Ancient Rome, then to the Fall of Rome, then to the Arab Golden Age, then to the European Middle Ages, and so on.

Thersites’s lectures featured a time and palace that I originally thought was a sideshow. In fact, it was the story of the transformation of the world from a familiar ancient history through a strange and exotic period, into something much more familiar again in its resemblance to modern cultural and political contours. In other words, the period of study of this course is a striking paradox of slow changes and sudden discontinuities, a prequel to the modern world and a sequel to the classical world, while at the same time displaying a vibrant story and identity of its own. I would claim that it is however most notable for the way it connects many other times and places.

Thersites was a PhD student at Ohio State University teaching the course in 2017, while this Yale course is taught by Professor Paul Freedman. I was excited to revisit this subject from another more mainstream source.

Funny enough, in the middle of my listening to these lectures, a meme apparently went viral on TikTok calling attention to the apparent disparity between men and women in terms of how often each thinks about the Roman Empire, with women flabbergasted by how often men do so. It so happens that I follow this pattern and think about the Roman Empire fairly often. 

Course Summary

The online course materials included the readings but not the assignments such as the midterm or final papers, which I would have liked to do. In the spirit of a final paper I will give myself the assignment below.

Final Paper Assignment

In class the claim was made that insofar as there can be said to be an “inheritor” of the legacy of Rome, there are three, namely - the Church, the Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, and the Muslim Caliphate. To what extent do each of these represent an inheritor of Rome?

Response

What did Rome leave to its heirs?

First let us define what Rome is so we can identify its later inheritance. Many of the well known elements of the Roman empire were related and codependent. These include professional administration based in cities, military power, infrastructure projects, record-keeping, taxation, law, literacy, intellectual education, religion, and so on. Roman infrastructure such as roads allowed the military to more easily move across the area, projecting power and ensuring the state’s authority. The maintenance of the military required considerable taxation which further required record keeping, which required education and literacy, at least for a managerial class. Record keeping was also needed because taxation was based on land ownership, which requires property rights and therefore a legal and judicial system. Other infrastructure like aqueducts supported cities which were the location of the administration for the military, record keeping, and more, and the administrative positions were not inherited or feudal. While we don’t want to overstate the scope or scale of Roman bureaucracy and institutions, especially in comparison to those of governments today, there are some familiarities to the modern observer.

In addition, Rome was a large empire. We can loosely define an “empire” as a polity controlling a large territory of many nations, nations being ethnic/cultural/linguistic groups. For example, the Jewish nation in the Roman province of Judaea continued to speak their language, practice their religion, and follow their own legal or judicial system, so long as they paid their taxes and swore loyalty to the emperor (Jews were exempted from the required religious veneration of the person of the emperor due to the principles of empire). Such an empire is different than a nation-state, the dominant form of state in the 21st century.

Lastly for our purposes, the Roman empire constituted an area of trade and linkage centered around the Mediterranean. While today it serves as a stark cultural and economic border between Europe and North Africa, the Mediterranean was a highway between the areas during those times. For example, Rome itself relied on North African grain shipments. Saint Augustine was from modern-day Algeria but lived in Carthage (modern-day Tunisia), and Rome and Milan (modern-day Italy). 

The three candidates that will be discussed below each represent continuity and change from the Roman period along these dimensions. They each demonstrate aspects of the Roman administration as well as present innovations. They each reshape the existing cultural and commercial spaces by removing or creating borders and barriers to travel. A significant throughline in Roman history and the history of the three other discussed civilizations is the impact of invasion and migration in effecting political, commercial, cultural, and identitarian changes.

What does “Fall of Rome” mean?

With all this talk of the inheritance of Rome, it makes sense to briefly discuss the event that leaves an inheritance - the Fall of Rome. The conventional story, known even in the popular imagination, is influenced by Edward Gibbon’s monumental The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire published starting in the 1770s. The political decline is largely attributed to a decline in morality and civic virtue, which Gibbon blames on the spread of Christianity and domestic quarrels. The fall is thought of as a sudden and violent overthrow by foreign barbarian invasion.

There is enormous historiographical debate about whether the “fall of Rome” is a misnomer. On one side, there are those who continue in the conventional tradition and describe a definite break in history and fall of Rome. These historians point to the rapid depopulation of cities; the violent invasions of militarized groups across the Roman borders in Germania and the Balkans; the deposition of the Western Roman emperor in 476 by a non-Roman general; and the great destruction of wealth, organization, and trade. This group tends to focus on the Western Empire. Moral historiography has largely fallen out of favor, however. On the other side, there are those who emphasize continuity over change and describe a gradual process by which the Roman authority transformed into other forms. These historians point to the longstanding interchange between the Roman and barbarian populations; the continued influence of the Roman Catholic Church which patterned itself somewhat after the Roman state; cultural continuity; and the continued existence of the Eastern Roman state. 

Both perspectives have merits and the truth lies somewhere in the middle. Regardless, the decline and fall of the Roman empire resulted in enormous changes. Sadly, in many former Roman regions, economic prosperity and political integration drastically deteriorated and remained in dire straits for centuries. 

What is certain is that the period of Late Antiquity/Early Middle Ages is one of transformation, where the classical legacy blended with innovations to produce a new reality. This blend produced different results in the three regions described below.  

Comparative Analysis of the Three Heirs

Religion

Western Europe/the Church, the Byzantine Empire/Orthodox Christianity, and the Caliphate/Islam in the early Middle Ages were civilizational and religious spheres following related but distinct traditions. They were in contact and competition with each other. In the Christian West and East, religious institutions were considered somewhat separate from the state, while in the Islamic world, there was not such a distinction. In the West where states were weaker, religious and political leaders, in the form of kings and bishops, navigated an ever changing relationship, culminating in deference by the kings to the bishop of Rome, the Pope. In the East, the emperor maintained the legitimacy of the Roman augustus and exercised significant but not total influence over Orthodox patriarchs. In Islamic tradition, matters of law were both secular and religious and were the purview of the Caliph in his role as judge - a distinct “church” organization did not develop.

The three traditions shared proselytizing ambitions - the West spread Catholic Christianity north into Northern Europe and then later into the Americas. The East spread Orthodox Christianity into Eastern Europe and Russia. The Caliphate converted Christian North Africa, Christian Levant, Zoroastrian Persia, and spread Islam into Central Asia and India. In so doing, these groups expanded their religious and state authority beyond the Roman world of the Mediterranean, transcending beyond the parameters of the Classical world.

Roman history was pagan longer than it was Christian, but starting a few decades after the death of Jesus, Christianity gradually spread throughout the Empire as a foreign cult facing occasional persecution. After the legendary conversion of Constantine (reigned from 306 to 337) and the state adoption of Christianity, the conversion of the Roman populace accelerated, arguably out of practical ambition as much as religious fervor. A Christian Rome was unexpected - prior to this period, Roman religion was more of an all-you-can-eat buffet in which individuals incorporated practices and faiths from a panoply of religions. This practice was antithetical to that of Christianity and monotheism. Christianity also influenced the barbarian groups with whom the empire interacted and served as another plank in the relationships between these groups and imperial authority (more on this later).

Eventually, the cultural and economic divides between East and West led to the schism of Catholicism and Orthodoxy. While conflict between Christianity and Islam gets more attention in the 21st century discourse, there is no shortage of religious war within the Christian world, even putting aside the much-later Reformation. 

Islam’s spread was first political and military rather than religious, the opposite of Christianity’s spread. As Arabian war leaders conquered Syria and Egypt, it appears that locals joined with them against imperial authority, for religious and economic reasons. These regions followed Monophysite Christianity, deemed heretical by the emperor. Islamic rulers initially funded their states and armies through expropriation of Church and imperial property rather than extensive taxation. In fact, the initial tax regime favored Muslims with a lower tax burden compared to non-Muslims, incentivizing the state authorities against mass conversions. The Monophysite Christian and Zoroastrian conquered regions nonetheless experienced gradual conversion.

Islam was likely not initially viewed as a separate religion, including by the early adherents, but instead rather as a reform movement. This resembles early Christian development. Islam developed in an Arabia of pagan beliefs, Christianity, and Judaism - each immigrant and native. Islam became distinct from Christianity, but the two traditions remained similar in important ways, including a universalist perspective. Interestingly, Islam was noted by the professor to profess more manageable demands on the adherent;s lifestyle compared to the world-denying facets of Christianity and the heavy handed commandments of Judaism. 

Migration and Invasion

The story of these three regions and traditions can also be told in terms of invasion and migration. First, we must address important disclaimers regarding this analysis. Ancient demographics is closely tied to ethnogenesis. These “origin stories” have very powerful and poisonous political implications today. These identities are often brought to bear in today’s ubiquitous geopolitical/cultural/ethnic conflicts. Many nationalist groups try to leverage these ancient histories by tying themselves to ancient groups to boost their legitimacy, claims to greatness, or ties to land. In addition to the political sensitivities around these topics, there is another unintentional pitfall which is important to bear in mind. It is important to steer away from the challenging proclivity to view the peoples of that time in terms of how they may or may not relate to the peoples of the world today. It is often distracting and causes confusion. If one looks at a map of the early Middle Ages, one will see Franks, Germans, Arabs, Bulgars, Turks, Slavs, and many, many others. In many cases there are links to 21st century identities, but we must be careful not to anachronistically imagine today’s geopolitical players imposed on the early Medieval world.

Modern concepts of citizenship and distinct borders are not applicable for this time. While there were fortified border regions for the Empire in Europe, specifically the Rhine and Danube Rivers, these were porous and admitted many groups of migrants from the North and East. The classification of “Roman” and “Barbarian” were highly overlapping. The empire had formal “federation” associations with many organized groups of barbarians following a war leader. These foederati pledged to wage war for the emperor in exchange for land grants within imperial territory - a large share of the Roman military was barbarian by the 400s. 

The fact of (often sanctioned) migration is contrasted with the popular story of bloodthirsty barbarians invading and pillaging, leading to the destruction of the empire, most attributable to Gibbon. However, there is truth to the invasion story. War leaders entered the Roman area at times when it was suffering a relative vacuum of centralized political or military control and were able to replace the Roman state. These invaders co-opted local administration for their purposes alongside their own armed authority. In the early stages this administration might have been more like a mafia than a state. In the West, the so-called Germanic tribes like the Ostrogoths, Visigoths, Vandals, and others may have deposed the Western emperor but also pledged nominal allegiance to the Eastern emperor. They maintained Roman titles, upheld barbarian and Roman legal systems, and relied both on raiding and Roman tax collecting. Later, the groups transitioned into land-based polities that interacted with the Church and eventually planted the seeds of modern European nations. During that early process, the Frankish kingdoms in particular faced new Invasions by the Vikings as well as settlement. The Vikings typically raided along coasts and deep inland up the navigable rivers in the West due to the weakness of the Frankish states.

In the East, there was a long history of sanctioned settlement by barbarians in the Balkans and in eastern Anatolia. Invasions by Slavs and other groups like the Bulgars, Avars, and Magyars occurred, but the Eastern Imperial military was much better able to maintain its authority. Eastern Vikings known as Varangians were able to sail through Eastern European rivers all the way from the Baltic to the Black Sea, first failing to raid and later trading with the Eastern Roman people. The Varangians played a role similar to that of the Germanic tribes in Eastern Europe and Russia, setting up polities to govern the peoples there.

In the Islamic World, the defining event is the invasion by the Arabs, who displayed some structural similarities to the Germanic tribes and Vikings such as trading/raiding, military reliance on hyper-mobility (desert rather than sea and rivers), tribal culture (reliance on extended kinship), and so on. The Arabs were more successful than their Northern European peers in setting up strong states in their conquered lands, but this is at least partly attributable to the greater wealth and societal organization that existed at the time of their conquest as well as their strategic co-opting of the state apparatus. Islamization and Arabization proceeded much later than the period of study here.

The Church and the West

The Office of Western Emperor

By 800, Charlemagne was crowned Western Roman Emperor by the Pope, the first major figure to claim the title since Romulus Augustulus was deposed in 476. Taking the title at face value, Charlemagne’s accomplishment might be considered a restoration following a 300 year interregnum in the West. On the other hand, since this is often cited as the founding of the Holy Roman Empire (HRE), we could instead follow the analysis of Voltaire who called the HRE “neither holy, roman, nor an empire” and reject that this had anything to do with classical Rome.

The standard narrative is still Gibbon’s, which as mentioned above, promulgated the cultural narrative that the Roman empire experienced a catastrophic fall at the hands of barbarian invaders after a longer period of self-inflicted decline. The decline culminated with the deposition of the Emperor Romulus Augululus in 476 by the barbarian Odoacer.

For centuries before 476, there had been a gradual increase of so-called barbarian presence in the West. The Roman army grew to rely on barbarian recruits and mercenaries. Barbarians joined the army sometimes as individuals and other times en masse in distinct tribal groups. Eventually, barbarians ascended to the top military ranks. By the 400s, barbarians held the rank of magister militum - a title close to but greater than “general”. Odoacer was the leader of the foederati, while Orestes, another barbarian war leader, was the magister militum. Orestes was the father of Emperor Romulus Augustus, underscoring the lack of clear lines between Roman and barbarian.

Orestes had been a member of Atilla the Hun’s court in his native Pannonia in the Balkans while Atilla reigned there. Orestes was named magister militum by the Western Emperor Julius Nepos in 475. Faced with failures on many fronts, Julius Nepos was weak. Orestes initiated a coup, forcing Nepos to flee. Orestes did not have the legitimacy himself to claim the title due to his barbarian identity, but he installed his son nonetheless. Odoacer deposed Augustulus and Orestes with the backing of the Senate in Rome. Odoacer proclaimed himself rex or King of Italy, a new title, and was recognized as dux or duke by the Eastern Emperor in exchange for nominal allegiance both to the Eastern Emperor and the Western Emperor in exile.

We may come to appreciate the possibility that this deposition, the event that marks the fall of the Roman Empire in the West, was more of a civil war or internal coup. The sovereignty, allegiances, and identities beforehand was already murky, and it was no clearer afterwards. It is clear that the Roman Imperial system possessed overwhelming legitimacy in the minds of the people at the time that the invaders and coup leaders wished to at least nominally slot themselves into that system. Odoacer’s kingdom would not last long, as he was invaded and replaced by Theodoric the Great, leader of the Ostrogoths, who like Odoacer was technically loyal to the Eastern Emperor while emulating imperial style to a greater degree.

The Institution of the Church

After the recognition and adoption of Christianity throughout the Roman empire in the 300s, in East and West, the church began to develop an organizational hierarchy based in cities parallel to the empire itself. Today’s Catholic hierarchy - priests in towns and neighborhoods, bishops in larger dioceses or cities - is that inheritance. This parallel structure was distinct from that of the state, so as the state withered and was replaced by barbarian kings in the West, the Church remained in place.

Bishops and monasteries provided too weak a structure to administer society in the West. The region was rapidly becoming poorer, more violent, and disorganized. As mentioned above, the barbarian leaders, promoting themselves as kings, professed loyalty to the Roman emperor and wished to be seen upholding Roman legitimacy and tradition. However, the symbolic role of Roman authority was replaced by the Church. Bishops began to exercise significant spiritual and secular authority. The bishop of Rome, also known as the Pope, gradually took on the prominence of the defunct Western Emperor, evidenced by the use of the old imperial title pontifex maximus - but not the political power. Indeed, the Eastern Emperor viewed the upstart bishop of Rome as a rival. The barbarians had largely been Christianized well before 476 through interactions with the Empire. They therefore had uneasy deferential relationships with the bishops, punctuated by power conflicts.

The symbiosis between barbarian kings and the Church is best exemplified by the Franks, a later-arriving group compared to the Vandals and Goths. Under the Merovingian dynasty, the Franks relied on pre-Christian legitimacy. This was exemplified by pre-Christian practices like maintaining long hair and polygamy. This later gave way to the Christian-based legitimacy of the Carolingians, particularly under Charlemagne, who allied so explicitly with the Pope and was thereby crowned emperor. The Carolingians also relied both on religious and military triumphs for legitimacy. They succeeded in stopping Arab advances in Ibera and Gaul/France, expanded into the Low Countries and further east into modern Germany and Poland, and created a polity similar in scope to the classical Western Empire. Charlemagne made explicit allusions to this restoration through the pursuit of the imperial title. Centuries later, Roman authority exuded political legitimacy. The relationship between the Carolingians and the Church eventually caused political problems for the Carolingians. Their dependence on the Church became large enough that a Pope openly asserted that his authority was above that of the Carolingians.

The Church was not only an heir to the administrative structure of the Roman state, it also maintained classical learning in the Benedictine monasteries through the penitent work of transcribing classical books, albeit for their utility in interpreting the Bible.

By the end of the period addressed by the course approximately 1000, the West faced many of the same challenges as it did before 476. The region was poorer and more disorganized. Few observers would have anticipated the geopolitical expansion of Western Europe after 1500. If one were to look for accomplishments by the West at the end of the period, one might point to the expansion of Catholic Christianity northward, the consolidation of power by the Pope, and the origins of the later polities of France and Germany.

Continuity and Discontinuity

So far I have outlined a historical narrative emphasizing the continuity rather than the discontinuity. I will now address the latter a bit. Very significantly, the Roman trade zone with its attendant economic (relative) prosperity gave way to a great reduction in trade and material wealth. The Mediterranean region was no longer a trade zone and the cultural heft relocated progressively northward in orientation, especially by the Carolingian dynasty with its capital in Aachen in modern Germany rather than Italy. While some construction projects continued, it did not match the infrastructure of the Romans. Populations declined, especially in cities - in the city of Rome, from close to one million at its height down to thirty thousand at most. Roman tax records and Roman law were maintained but the tax receipts drastically reduced and the administration came to rely more on plunder. Many of the professional administrative positions were transformed into feudal inherited positions, even such that the King of the Franks could not control his so-called underlings without bribing them with plundered goods and land. Therefore, we see that the urban-based Roman economic and trade system, with the administration required to support it, gave way to a world much different than that of the so-called Pax Romana.

Eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire

The Eastern Roman Empire called itself the “Roman Empire'' until its final collapse in the 1453 conquest by Mehmed the Conqueror. It represented a more-or-less continuous state lineage to the reforms of the emperor Diocletian. In 286, Diocletian divided the empire into eastern and western administrative halves, appointing a co-emperor in the East while retaining the east for himself. Even before the official division, East and West were culturally, economically, and linguistically distinct. The East was richer (Egypt was the most productive agricultural province) and Greek-speaking, while the West spoke Latin. Diocletian’s division was an administrative move that divided the empire into administrative sub-units rather than dividing into two different empires. The goal was to make the increasingly unwieldy empire more tractable to govern. However, the ambitions of the co-emperors and their successors were not restrained. Not so much later in 324, following warfare, Constantine restored unified rule of the entire Empire. However, the capital was moved from Rome to a new city in the east, Constantinopolis. The gravity of the empire was moving eastward. 

Invasions and Restorations

Both the East and West faced significant migration and invasions, but East and West responded differently. The Western state could not survive these migrations and invasions. The Eastern Roman state administration was able to preserve authority by integrating and exerting control over some groups while also rebuffing invasions or rebellions by these groups. This was often accomplished by deflecting them into the West, which was amenable to the barbarians since the West represented an easier target compared to the militarily stronger East. The administration in the West was not able to withstand, and so the barbarian war leaders were able to assume authority as kings. The Eastern Emperors did not see the collapse of the Western colleague as the end of Roman authority in the West. Instead, Eastern Emperors sought fealty from the barbarian rulers, which was nominally the case for centuries. Routinely, the Eastern Emperors pursued campaigns of reconquest in the West, particularly Italy and North Africa, most notably by Justinian.

The Roman Empire faced its most significant peer rival to its east in Sasanian Persia. The ancient and powerful empires waged repeat wars in the regions of Mesopotamia and the Caucuses. After first pacifying the Sassanians in the late 520s, only a few decades after the deposition of the Western Emperor, Eastern Emperor Justinian began an ambitious military campaign aimed at the restoration of the Empire alongside his primary general Belisarius. At the time, Justinian may have viewed his times as similar to those of the Crisis of the Third Century. The Crisis was a relatively recent period of civil war, barbarian invasion, and collapsing state authority that the regime nonetheless exited successfully in 284 with the ascension of Diocletian and the implementation of his reforms. Justinian’s armies reconquered much of North Africa from the Vandals relatively easily in the 530s and large portions of Italy from the Goths via a destructive and exhausting campaign in the 530s and 540s. Despite the peace treaty with Persia, the Eastern Empire faced renewed war with the Persians during the exhausting Italian campaigns. At the same time, both regions faced the first wave of Bubonic Plague in the so-called Plague of Justinian. 

With hindsight we might harshly judge Justinian’s focus on restoration in the West which was well underway by the time of his death in 565 rather than marshaling resources to shore up the borders to the east. In retrospect , we see that the rise of Islam in the early 600s and the Islamic conquest of Roman North Africa and the Roman Levant throughout the mid 600s was facilitated by the much weakened state of the Eastern Roman military and regime due to the wars and plague. Nonetheless, the Arab invasions did not destroy the Roman state. Sasanian Persia was completely conquered during the Islamic invasions.

Despite the loss of some of the most productive provinces to the expanding Caliphate, the Eastern Empire did not fall. After a period of crises from the 600s to 800s, the Byzantine region recovered. By the year 1000, the Byzantine state achieved stability and prosperity under the Macedonian dynasty. In what has been called a Byzantine Golden Age, the region experienced a rejuvenation of culture. Thus, the Eastern Roman state continued its existence until 1453, despite its reduced geopolitical footprint. With the area of control reduced to Anatolia and the Balkans, the identity of the empire increasingly became Greek, and historians have come to refer to the empire as Byzantine rather than Eastern Roman to reflect the eventual development of a distinct and unique culture and identity beyond that of classical Rome. Reforms such as the theme system and the East-West Schism of 1054 further differentiated Byzantine identity. 

Roman or Greek?

Conventionally in the minds of historians the popular imagination, the largely Greek and Orthodox Christian identity of the Eastern Empire has distinguished it from the Latin and Catholic Roman West. The term Byzantine is an anachronistic and purely historiographic term not used by the Byzantines themselves. It derives from the Greek settlement Byzantion that existed at the later location of Constantinopolis. It is indeed somewhat absurd to call a state “Roman” when it doesn't even contain the city of Rome, but that was the contemporary name. In the debate between continuity and change in the East, one’s position largely depends on how to interpret this cultural orientation. As mentioned before, the Roman East had always been Hellenistic. Learned Romans conducted much of their literary and rhetorical work in the Greek language. Roman religion was derived from the Greek. Much of this owed to the presence of Greek colonists in Italy dating from the earliest formation of the city of Rome more than a thousand years before the fall of the Western Empire. Nonetheless, over time there was less cohesion between the Eastern and Western Mediterranean, and the regions grew more distinct.

The Eastern or Byzantine Empire had major accomplishments in influencing the development of Eastern Europe and Orthodox Christianity through successful diplomacy in that region. Viking incursions into Eastern Europe had a larger impact there than in the West. The Varangians established the first of the Slavic states, primarily Kievan Rus. The Byzantines had long standing interactions between the Varangians and the Slavs. Varangians were employed as the imperial guard. Many Slavs had migrated into the Balkans, including in imperial areas of control. As the Varangian dynasties created distinct Slavic states to their North, Byzantines influenced these states in order to develop additional allies. This was so successful that the Russians later alluded to Roman legitimacy during their own imperial expansion, and aspired to the status of  the “Third Rome.” 

In the early years of the 800s, there was a fascinating crossroads in history. The Eastern Empire was ruled by its first empress regnant, Irene of Athens, from 797-802. As mentioned above, the West saw its first “emperor” in centuries when Charlemagne was crowned by the Pope in 800. Irene, according to a single source, is reported to have pursued a marriage with Charlemagne in an effort to restore the unity of the empire. At the same time in the West, many clergy refused to accept a woman as Roman Emperor, leading some to suggest that Charlemagne could claim the entire empire for his own, which he did not do. Due to larger historical trends, a reunification may not have been durable. Nonetheless, the historical “what-if” is very curious.

Islamic Caliphate

For this paper, we are considering the Arabic caliphates and their claims to inheriting the Roman legacy. We will not consider the claims of later Turkish empires, especially that of the Ottomans, the sultan of which claimed the title of “Caesar of Rome” (Kayzer-i Rûm in Turkish) in addition to Turkish, Arabic, and Persian titles. 

In many conventional Western histories, Islam is portrayed as an unpredictable sharp turn in world history. Unfortunately, later events like the Crusades, Reconquista, Ottoman expansion, and the recent War on Terror have supported the narrative of the “clash of civilizations”. In addition, events like the destruction of pre-Islamic sites by ISIS reinforce the idea of discontinuity between the Christian and Muslim worlds on one hand and the Classical and Muslim worlds on the other. However, in my opinion, Islam represents another chapter in the Western tradition rather than a departure from it. 

Furthermore, the rise of Christianity and its adoption as state religion by Roman emperor Constantine could be considered even more unlikely than the rise of Islam. Christianity’s spread as a widespread universalist, proselytizing faith may have set the precedent for Islam’s later spread. The spread of both Christianity and Islam was facilitated by the connections and relative ease of travel made possible by Roman authority. The arrival of Islam might be lamented by historians rooting for Christianity, but so too would Christianity’s arrival be lamented by older historians rooting for classical pagan Roman culture and religion. 

Muhammad

Muhammad’s life is unique among world-religion-historical figures. His life is fairly well attested, unlike those earlier religious figures such as Zoroaster, Moses, or Jesus who to varying degrees represent historically unknowable legendary figures. However, the historical facts of Muhammad’s life are impacted, redacted, and embellished by later Islamic sources. In the 570s, around the time of Muhammad’s birth, Mecca was a trading center in the Hejaz region of Arabia with an interchange of religions and peoples. Muhammad came from a relatively well off family and married into a more well off family, and by the age of 40 was well established. Around 610, he asserted himself as the seal of the prophets, bringing the next and final prophecy in the line of prophets stretching back to Abraham and in keeping with Jewish and Christian prophetic traditions. He left Mecca due to opposition from the powerful families there and went to Medina. Over time in Medina, his movement grew from a handful of followers, largely made up of his relatives, to a large sophisticated, organized, and militarily capable group with Muhammad as a leader/judge/preacher. They succeeded in conquering Mecca in 630 before Muhammad’s death in 632. During Muhammad’s life and in the early succession, the Muslim movement and Arab society were occupied by civil war, but upon the conquest and unification of Arabia by the Muslims in the early 630s, the movement’s military energies were harnessed and diverted to the raiding and then conquest of Persia and Syria in the mid 630s and Egypt in the late 630s and early 640s.

Arabian invasions bear some resemblance to those of the Germanic and Viking groups. Prior to the invasions, Arabs had been peripheral to the much larger Roman and Persian cultures to their northeast and Northwest. Society was mercantile rather than agricultural, based on extended kinship or tribal links, relying on intermittent raiding of the northern neighbors. The invasions themselves likely started as raids that proved far more successful than anticipated as the Roman and Persian militaries were exhausted and largely absent, and the raiders turned to conquerors as a function of opportunity. As mentioned before, locals joined the invaders. A strong example is that there began to be Muslim victories at sea in the 650s. More likely than not, these were fleets from the Levant rather than Arabia, possibly manned by natives of the same. 

Caliphate

Unlike their European counterparts, the Arab conquerors instituted a less expropriative regime on the populace via a system of taxation with differing treatments for Muslims and non-Muslims. In order to implement the tax system, the Arabs maintained Roman and Persian administration. Plundering state and church properties was pursued rather than actions against the general public. The region did not experience economic contraction like Western Europe, crises like Eastern Europe, or anything like a dark age. Quite famously, the period until 1000 was a golden age culturally and economically, at least partly due to the comparatively good governance. 

The Muslim world for centuries was governed at the top by a single figure called the Caliph, a role somewhat similar to the Roman Emperor. The Arabic term “caliph” translates to “successor,” designating the successor to Mohammad as leader of the Muslim community or umma. Several dynasties held the position of caliph between the 700s and 1000. Each claimed legitimacy from citing ancestral connections to Muhammad during the early years of Islam. The first four Caliphs are known as the Rashidun Caliphate. These Caliphs led the Umma from Muhammad’s death in 632 until 662, overseeing the initial large expansion out of Arabia. By 661, the Rashiduns had conquered Persia, Syria, and Egypt. The Umayyads, deriving from the third Rashidun, continued the conquest and expanded into central Asia, North Africa, and Spain. The Abbasid dynasty began in 750 and for several centuries. It was during the early Abbasid period that the Medieval Muslim Golden Age is considered to have occurred, featuring great advances in the natural sciences and arts. After the 900s, The Abbasid dynasty gradually lost political control of the Muslim world, starting with the more distant regions, while retaining religious and symbolic authority. By the 1200s, the Abbasids were limited to the Mesopotamia region and non-Arabian Muslim groups such as the Turks were politically ascendant. 

Similarly to the Christian faiths in Europe, Islam spread into bordering regions such as Central Asia, South Asia, Africa, and into Southeast Asia. Central Asian groups were converted and later became very powerful and significant political forces. The nomadic conquerors like the Seljuks and Timur fit this mold. In contrast to the relationship between Byzantium and Russia, the Central Asian Muslims rivaled the Arabian Muslims. The Seljuks later invaded and displaced Arabian political power in Anatolia and Persia. 

Scholarship

Islamic scholarship was a critical means of preserving and advancing Classical  learning, primarily in the sciences, medicine, and philosophy. Islamic scientists provided enormous advances in medicine and mathematics, including algebra, algorithms, etc. In the Abbasid capital of Baghdad, the regime built the splendid House of Wisdom, analogous to the Library of Alexandria in antiquity or contemporary American research universities. Many scientific subjects became known in the West via Arabic translations into Latin rather than Greek sources. 

The Islamic tradition of literary and theological study motivated widespread study of Classical Greek philosophy, particularly of Aristotle. These sources were viewed as helpful in interpreting religious texts. Ancient Greek philosophy had significant cultural influence across the entire Abrahamic world through the transmission of the works of Aristotle via the Islamic scholars. Aristotle’s philosophical focus on rational metaphysics and an aloof, mechanical, almost deist creator, introduced the idea that religious concepts could be reasoned about logically. Prior to this influence, Jewish and Christian religion emphasized faith rather than reason. In that view, God was a very personal god, intimately involved in the workings of the world and in one’s life. His actions were inscrutable, irrational, and irascible (all well known features of the so-called “old testament God”). Books like Job taught that any human attempt at divining God’s will was not only impossible but immoral. The three great Medieval philosophers - Averroes (Ibn Rushd) in Islam, Maimonides (Moses ben Maimon) in Judaism, and Thomas Aquinas in Christianity - combined Abrahamic suprarational faith with Aristotelian rationalism that dominates today. Later theologians would attempt mathematical proofs of God’s existence, anathema to the concept of faith.

Multiple Inheritances

Caliphate rule created the kind of trade zone and economic and cultural efflorescence that typified the height of the Roman period, reaching from Spain to India. At the same time, the previously unified Mediterranean developed a much harder border due to the development of Christian and Muslim cultural zones. The divide was not absolute, but the divide exists into the present day in the tenuous ties between North Africa and Southern Europe and the stalled EU candidacy of Turkey. The Mediterranean possessions of the caliphate drifted from the Christian Mediterranean due to cultural influences from Arabia, Persia, and India, the other cultural centers within the Caliphate. Therefore, the Islamic impact was to put a definite end to the Roman cohesive trade and cultural zone throughout the entire Mediterranean.

If it can be said that the Caliphate was an heir to Rome, it must be acknowledged that much of its identity and prosperity comes from other sources, specifically Persian, Indian, and Arabian. The Caliphate’s capital was relocated from Mecca/Medina in the Hejaz to Damascus in Syria to the new city of Baghdad in modern Iraq. This reflects and symbolizes the shift from an Arabian to Roman to Persian orientation. The Abbasid capital of Baghdad was very close in proximity to the old Persian capital of Ctesiphon and was located in the borders of pre-Islamic Persia. Arab scholars were not interested in Greco-Roman traditions of poetry and literature but rather focused on Arabian and Persian literary traditions. This contrasts with the great and productive interest in Greco-Roman science, medicine, and philosophy. 

Another significant difference with the other two regions and the pre-476 Christian Roman Empire was the lack of distinction between church and state. Islam was more individualistic in its religious practice in that it did not rely on an organization such as a church or temple to intermediate. Although pagan Rome was actually similar to Islam in its lack of separation (the emperor was also pontifex maximus), there was not the same individualism.