Download PDF | Judith Herrin - The Formation of Christendom-Princeton University Press (2021).
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Preface to the Princeton Classics Edition
It is a strange honor for an author to be invited, after more than thirty years, to republish a book that is now deemed a classic. I must therefore begin by alerting any new reader to two features of The Formation of Christendom. First, this is the work of a young woman, written with youthful overconfidence and determination. Second, since it was published in 1987, an enormous amount of high-quality research has been undertaken on the period it covers, circa a.d. 500–800. Our knowledge of the period has been transformed, which means it would be an impossible task to try and update the book. In addition, I feel that its spirit and energy should be retained. This book sets out to show how the entire Mediterranean world between the sixth and ninth centuries a.d. was shaped by a set of forces that— although they formed different societies—venerated the same single God, divided over his nature, contested how to worship him, and struggled to attain a heavenly afterlife. From the periphery of this world, non-Roman agents remade a Roman Empire that was centered in its enormous, new capital of Constantinople. The shared origins of the “West,” the “East,” and the “Islamic”—a tripartite division that still haunts us—go back to this early formative period when each was in active relationship with the others. Such is the claim of The Formation of Christendom. By way of introduction, I’ll try to answer three questions: How did I come to write a history with this ambition? What sort of a historian does it make me? What would I change, were I to “update” it? The Path to Writing The Formation of Christendom When I studied European history as a student at Cambridge in the early 1960s, I felt constrained by the blinkered focus on the British Isles, France, and Germany. I became aware of Byzantium thanks to lectures by Philip Grierson, who used the evidence of coinage to point out the existence of a long-lasting empire that was not part of “the West” yet exercised considerable influence over it. It had a spectacular gold currency, the solidus, that remained stable for over seven hundred years, suggesting there was far more to the history of Europe than was generally taught. This provoked in me an interest in Byzantium from a comparative point of view and led me to do a PhD at Birmingham University under the guidance of Anthony Bryer. I decided to contrast an area under Byzantine imperial rule—central Greece in the twelfth century, documented in the letters of ecclesiastics like Michael Choniates, Metropolitan of Athens—with a more familiar region of the West, selecting the northern European homeland of Geoffroi de Villehardouin and Guillaume de Champlitte, knights who participated in the Fourth Crusade, which captured Constantinople in 1204. I hoped to trace differentiating elements in these two styles of government, imperial and Western, in the complex thirteenth-century social formation that resulted from the crusaders’ conquest of central Greece and the Peloponnese. It proved impossible to complete this overambitious comparison, but studying Choniates’s letters provided me with a familiarity with Byzantium from within and strengthened my resolve to make this medieval empire more familiar. The contrast between Byzantine and Western medieval art led me to the importance of icons and then to the paradox of iconoclasm, which was the topic of the Birmingham Spring Symposium in 1975. With Bryer, I edited the papers in what was the first publication of the Centre for Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies. Since fairly stylized images of Christ, the Apostles, the Virgin Mary (known as Theotokos, Mother of God), and saints were greatly revered in Byzantium, how could they have provoked “the battle of icons,” which involved removing and destroying these holy images? It was through my study of iconoclasm that I realised more fully what a critical role the Arabs played in Byzantine history. From the revelations of the Prophet Muhammad in the early seventh century onward, which I now know were not written in classical Arabic but in a dialect of Mecca used in much earlier oral poetry, Islam challenged Byzantium in multiple ways— not merely military. In order to survive as a Christian medieval empire, the eighth-century emperors had to put the entire society on a war footing and concentrate all efforts to resist Muslim expansion. Leo III and his son Constantine V are famous for introducing iconoclasm, yet closer investigation of their policies revealed the inner strengths that guaranteed survival and the growth of Byzantium into its medieval state character. From these studies I grasped the significance of studying Byzantium not in isolation but as one of the great powers of the medieval Mediterranean world, in ongoing relations with the Arab caliphate in Damascus and later Baghdad, with the central papal authority in Rome, and with the western regions that were becoming what we know as Europe. More distant outposts of Christianity in Britain, Scandinavia, and the Balkans were also linked to this world; indeed, Constantinople had organized the missionary activity that converted Bulgaria and Russia. Clearly, Byzantium played an integrated, leading role in the Mediterranean world, which I planned to analyze in The Formation of Christendom.
With all this help I should have been able to finish sooner. But it was only thanks to a Senior Simon Research Fellowship at the University of Manchester in 1983-84 that a draft of the whole text was finally completed. The critical appraisal of members of the history department, who attended a seminar based on the book, particularly Terence Ranger and Rosemary Morris, improved it in many ways. The staff of the John Rylands Univer- sity Library in Manchester join a number of other librarians, at the British Library in London, the Bodleian in Oxford, and the Olin in Cornell, to all of whom I am indebted. Over the years I have also been fortunate to receive copies of periodicals and books not generally available, provided by Alan Cameron, Michael Hendy, Oistein Hjort, Alexander Kazhdan, Margaret Mullett, Andrzej Poppe, Michael Rogers, Paul Speck, David Winfield, and Ian Wood. An invitation from the Shelby Cullom Davis Center to spend a semester at Princeton in one of the liveliest of history departments allowed me to take advantage of Peter Brown's immense knowledge of Late Antiquity. His suggestions led to many improvements to the text in its ultimate stage. I also learnt much from Roy Mottahedeh and from Paula Sanders's infectious enthusiasm for some of the less accessible aspects of Islamic cul- ture, and was privileged to consult Otto Neugebauer at the Institute for Advanced Study on matters of dating. I have not always taken the advice or accepted the opinions generously offered. Nor, despite this help, have all the problems raised by my research been resolved. But they remain in the text as evidence of my own fallibil- ity, and perhaps occasionally as testimony to the never-concluding and even irresolvable nature of historical investigation. Oxford, March 1986 It is a great honour for The Formation of Christendom to be reprinted in the Princeton Classics series and I am most grateful to Priya Nelson and all her team at the press. My warmest thanks also to Kieran Dodds for his wonder- ful cover photograph of the mosaic in S. Apollinare in Classe, and especially to Howard and Roberta Ahmanson for their generous support in helping me give the book its new phase of life. Oxford. June 2021
Exploring the cultural unity of the Mediterranean world while examining the interrelationship of “East” and “West” proved challenging. I knew Spain was a key region in the development of Christianity, with important witnesses, like John of Biclar, but the significance of the Visigoths in the transmission of Byzantine scholarship to Charlemagne was an unexpected discovery. In more ways than one, I felt that my research demonstrated that without Byzantium, there would not have been a Latin “West.” Thanks to my initial interest in the gold solidus, the relationship I had been taught as a student was reversed. The centre of the early medieval world was Constantinople, while what would become England, Germany, and France constituted its periphery. If today you wish to study medieval chronicles in Latin, you don’t need to be familiar with world history, the Chinese empire, African kingdoms, or Andean civilization, although all such knowledge helps. But you must know that your chronicles are being written within a culture stretching from the Red Sea to the Baltic, from Gaza to Braga, that integrates Greek traditions and Arab impact, in which Byzantium and Rome both have to be incorporated.
Becoming a Historian
The more I studied Byzantine history, the more I realised how little attention its long millennium attracted beyond dedicated specialists. Its impact was generally limited to the period of the Crusades, when western knights campaigned in the eastern Mediterranean and came into contact with the emperor of Constantinople throughout the twelfth century. Information about Byzantium was filtered through Latin texts that reflected the reaction of their authors, often ecclesiastics who disapproved of local Greek religious practices, were perplexed by imperial court procedures, and found Byzantine strategy incomprehensible. These reactions were compounded by papal hostility that dated back centuries and had become focused on theological as well as liturgical differences. Byzantium’s far more important reshaping of Roman imperial traditions, its many adaptations to novel circumstances, and its effective resistance to the emergence and spread of Islam were generally unknown. Only reading the sources in Greek written by its own authors—emperors, scholars, leading prelates, monks, and several famous female writers—could correct the biased dominance of Latin. This work led me to teach about Byzantium and then to write a history of it. But I did not approach the Byzantine Empire as a classicist who knew Greek and discovered a thriving continuation of the Roman world in the eastern Mediterranean. My starting point was as a Western historian who knew Latin and had to master Greek. I always retained a sense of myself as a historian of the early Mediterranean world (which includes Britain and Ireland) and not, as I have been called, a “Byzantinologist.” My commitment to a larger, adventurous perspective may be associated with the build-up to 1968, a year that marked my generation, exploding accumulated dissatisfaction with existing authority. In my case this meant the prevailing empirical, narrow form of history. In resisting this we searched for theory, particularly Marxism and—partly in reaction to the misogyny of many of Marxist practitioners—the novel theories of feminism. The energy of these early engagements can be felt in the pages of The Formation of Christendom. As I explain in Margins and Metropolis (Princeton University Press, 2013), Marxist theory made me aware of the significance of the economy and the undocumented non-elite and influenced my analysis of belief systems as a material force. But I did not find a “class analysis” of Byzantium fruitful and did not become a Marxist. In contrast, investigating female agency and the shaping influence of women, for example, in securing the veneration of icons, opened up fresh and immensely rewarding ways of understanding imperial power and influence. In the preface to Unrivalled Influence (Princeton University Press, 2013), I describe how this led me to become, as I remain, a feminist historian. At the same time, I was fortunate to receive some of the best traditional training one could hope for in the skills of historical research, in Paris, Munich, and Athens, where I added archaeology. For me the joy of history is rooted in making sense of primary sources of all kinds, rather than constructing grand theories. The broader concept that motivated The Formation of Christendom is tempered by a respect for the reality of the sources and what they record. Perhaps part of my radicalism is a stubborn refusal to regard this as “old-fashioned.”
What I Would Change
Reviews of The Formation of Christendom were generally favorable. Rowan Williams, then bishop of Monmouth, was particularly helpful; Alexander Murray was very encouraging; and Marina Warner was correctly critical of insufficient attention to the personal experience of Christian faith. Several reviewers deplored the absence of the liturgy and what it meant to the uneducated, but they welcomed the insistent contrast of developments in East and West in order to identify the roots of what is now called Roman Catholicism and Greek or Russian Orthodoxy. In terms of reassessment, as I have elaborated in my recent book, Ravenna: Capital of Empire, Crucible of Europe (Princeton University Press, 2020), the term “Late Antiquity” is a misnomer for the centuries of transition between the ancient and the medieval world. Inappropriate, because it implies an outlook determined by the past, backward-looking, constantly peering over its shoulder to the ancients and expressing a sense of inferiority, decline, and antiquarianism, and incongruous, because the period saw great change, new ideas, and influential forms of organization. As the Roman Empire became Christian, a novel and dynamic transformation of authority and legitimacy took place. Christian affiliation allowed church leaders to undermine their secular rulers with strident criticism. Christian morality also imposed monogamy and thus transformed imperial legitimacy. Above all, Christian dominance meant that believers looked forward rather than back and understood themselves to be rebuilding a different Rome, which the term “Late Antiquity” fails to communicate. Too often it is used to link the centuries between the ancient and medieval worlds, with much dispute about its dates, as some historians emphasize the later Late Antiquity or the earlier Middle Ages, rather than to mark the acceptance of religious definition. The monotheism of Judaism was no longer confined to a “chosen people”; it was universalized by Christianity and existed, as St. Paul declared, “[w]here there is neither Greek nor Jew, cut nor whole [i.e., circumcised or uncircumcised] neither barbarian, Scythian, slave nor free: but Christ is all, and in all” (Col. 3:11). And with this promise Christianity spread far beyond the Mediterranean world, attracting devotees from the mountains of northwestern Scotland and Ireland and the deserts of Yemen and Ethiopia, only to be challenged by Islam, which in turn claimed to be the final revelation. The best term to describe the fourth to ninth centuries, therefore, is “Early Christendom,” and this should be the title of part 1 of The Formation of Christendom, not Late Antiquity. Recently, in reexamining this process of change, I’ve found Raymond Williams’s study (in Marxism and Literature, 1977), of the distinction between the archaic, the residual, the dominant, and the emergent, all coexisting at the same time, most helpful. Archaic habits are those that literally belong to the past. There are also residual practices, which actively incorporate features of the present while working in opposition to a new dominant order. Sometimes they may not even be recognized as belonging to a previous epoch. The integration into Christian life of ancient customs like household protection (Lares) and the sanctity of graves, for example, removes their pre-Christian character but remains an ancient tradition. Some philosophical concepts also take on a new significance when interpreted by Christian thinkers, even though they are known to derive from Plato or Aristotle. Within the dominant, defined, and regimented Christian life, differences of emphasis, novel explanations of old problems, local customs not shared beyond a particular city or province (saints’ cults or greater reliance on relics, icons, or other material aids), and interpretations of scriptural wording can coexist with official statements of correct belief. Late Antiquity was alive and present within Early Christendom even as the new belief system was becoming dominant. But this continuing ancient influence did not characterize the period as a whole or exercise a defining role. Some merely archaic elements survived, such as the ruins of Rome: an architectural legacy, visible in the palaces, vast baths, and places of entertainment found in walled Roman cities. Within the economy, responsibilities enshrined in the senators’ and city counsellors’ civic duties—tax collection, land measurement, and securing city fortifications and supplies of water and grain—shifted. Once constitutive, these gave way to a new economic formation based on Christian foundations that was quite distinct from the unified imperial system. I promised readers of Christendom a companion volume on this—the economy of Early Christendom—but life and a fascination with the role of women in overturning iconoclasm intervened. The idea of the emergent indicates that new values, practices, and relationships develop within and against the dominant culture—often alternative and oppositional. The emergent remains relatively subordinate to the dominant, difficult to identify, and to the extent that it manifests an oppositional character, the dominant attempts either to incorporate or suppress it. Through repeated processes of active, overlapping change, the emergent seeks to move beyond practical incorporation and makes Early Christendom a period of differentiated transition for the whole Mediterranean world. This is the transformation I tried to capture, and I would now seek to be clearer about its overlapping character. Novel features obviously influenced the aim of extending and deepening universal commitment to prescribed Christian tenets, under the guidance of officially approved leaders (generally bishops) with the help of inspired holy men and women (often later recognized as saints though mocked in their own time). Stories about such individuals who defied the prescribed ways of living proved particularly popular and found a wider readership in many languages: Antony spending years in an abandoned tomb haunted by demons, or women disguising themselves as men or eunuchs in order to escape violent husbands or the threat of marriage or just to find a way to leave their female experience (dependent, often reliant on prostitution) by becoming male. Christendom is full of these stories translated into Anglo-Saxon, Georgian, or Armenian, and some indicate the earliest surviving versions precisely because they are read by native speakers who take greater care to preserve them. Imperial structures were also transformed by Gothic, Vandal, and Frankish impact and direction, for instance, in kingship: the leadership of new political units in the West was not an imitation of rule by emperors. Kingship usually requires the support of advisers, not necessarily equals but major landowners, military officers, and scholars, and draws on Christian leaders, bishops, and abbots. This develops into the overriding character of the West: a Germanic, non-Roman style of political authority, which uses and exploits Roman traditions it wishes to incorporate and tries to curb and devalue characteristics such as inherited family status, titles, or association with the ancient gods, which it rejects. Spain produced the most developed formulation in Isidore of Seville’s intelligent remaking of political authority under royal leadership. Today I would accord the disagreements and schisms that accompanied such expansion and its different characters and arguments greater significance in the spread of many Christianities, with their own communities and varieties of practice and even belief. Because the new faith was personified by the Incarnation, Christ’s life on earth, including His death and resurrection, raised questions related to His nature—was it divine or human? They led on to problems of the relationship between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit within the Trinity, their shared essence and creation. Some argued that the Son must necessarily be subordinate to the Father, while the ways in which His divine and human qualities were combined continued to dominate theological debate for decades. After the Council of Chalcedon in 451, a new definition of mia physis, one nature that united both the human and divine, was endorsed by the Christian communities of Egypt and Syria, while those led by Nestorios, who had been excommunicated at Chalcedon, formed the exiled church of the East and took their own definition to central Asia, where their missionary activity is documented by inscriptions in Syriac. These doctrinal quarrels, recorded mainly in Greek and in the eastern Mediterranean, are often overlooked or not given sufficient weight in the expansion of Christianity. But they undoubtedly contributed to the disagreements between churches and the varieties of rituals, music, artistic motifs, and rulings that developed within Early Christendom. Paradoxically, this period is dominated by a combination of intense variety with a shared understanding of the importance of the faith, a nascent energy of difference that I would emphasize even more now. In part 2, devoted to the confrontation of Christendom by Islam, recent research has confirmed the Muslim warriors’ determination to replace the ancient empires of Rome and Persia and to capture Constantinople, an ambition that was thwarted by the city’s eighth-century Christian defenders. The iconoclast dynasty established by Byzantine Emperor Leo III had to adopt drastic measures that have been much maligned, as have their opponents, devout monks and women who had faith in icons. My response has been to strengthen analysis of the context in which the icons were questioned and the significance of icon veneration for large sections of Byzantine society. Although many adopted a neutral stance and followed imperial leadership, others were inspired by St. John of Damascus, who composed the most effective defense of icons, and monastic leaders like St. Theodore of the Stoudios monastery. This movement of iconoclasm, countered by iconophilism, coincided with the culmination of a long process of the West’s separation from the East under the impact of Islam, which resulted in the emergence of an area named “Europe.” I trace this in my recent study of Ravenna. Eighth-century iconoclasm can therefore be seen as the turning point that set Byzantium on its path to survival and later development into a powerful medieval state that would survive to 1204, and on to 1453. It was also the trigger for the Western assertion of an independent identity under Charlemagne’s rival imperial dynasty, in alliance with the heirs of St. Peter, bishops of Rome. These formative developments took place while the Abbasid rulers of Baghdad extended the religion of Islam to the Far East, setting up a lasting dominance. Whatever changes I would now make, The Formation of Christendom must stand on its own 1980s feet. Its emphasis on the threefold division of the ancient Mediterranean world into Muslim, Byzantine, and western regions as the inception of our modern world is not disputed. At the time, its parallel assertion of the importance of faith and belief systems in generating and shaping that division was out of tune with secular sentiments. Today, we have learned, unfortunate as it may be, that religious passion and doctrine continues to be of the greatest importance to very large numbers of people and accounts for some of the worst outbreaks of violence. While I deplore the consequences of such ill-advised devotion, it is vital to understand the roots and force of such loyalty—not just the power of belief, but the way it becomes embodied in institutions of influence and material loyalties. For this reason, I hope that the book will continue to provoke disagreements among historians as well as to inform future readers of a vital period of our world’s development.
Acknowledgements
In a book ofthis length, errors offact and judgement are inevitable. Not only are they all mine, but they would have been even more numerous but for the vigilance and care offriends and colleagues. I am glad to thank them in print and at the same time absolve them of responsibility for the final outcome. The following read the whole manuscript at some stage: Anthony Barnett, Guy Boanas, Hugh Brody, Peter Brown, Anthony Bryer, Patricia Crone, David Ganz, Christopher Hill, Eleanor Herrin, Jinty Nelson, Lyndal Roper, and Gareth Stedman Jones. In particular, I pestered Patricia Crone and Jinty Nelson with telephone calls, which they always answered without complaint. Specific queries were also addressed to Sebastian Brock, Donald Bullough, John Haldon, and Cyril Mango, and I am grateful for their expertise. My overwhelming debt is to Anthony Barnett; may he also share in the book*s published life. I want to express my appreciation of encouragement and assistance of different kinds, provided over a long time, by Robert Browning, Averil Cameron, Philip Grierson, George Huxley, Elisabeth Soler, Davinia Truby, Greta Ilott (particularly for her skill when confronted by numerous changes in the text), and especially Tamara Kate, who stood on the parcel when the manuscript was finally dispatched to the publisher. There, I am grateful to my editor, Joanna Hitchcock, and to Sherry Wert for her scrupulous copyediting. For the careful execution of the maps I thank Keith Bennett, and for advice on problems of cartography Mark Elvin. When I began this study in 1977 at the Warburg Institute, University of London, its final shape was by no means clear. The magnificent library there helped me to define its central preoccupations, as the stacks revealed the sources for a broad comparative treatment of early medieval cultures. It is a pleasure to thank the director, Joe Trapp, the librarian, Will Ryan, and the staff of both the photographic and book collections. In 1980-81 I was helped by Olga Vrana and the staff at the Society for the Humanities, at Cornell University. In 1982~83 the British Academy gave me a travel grant, which enabled me to consult manuscripts in Rome and Paris, and I thank Franco Moretti and Vera von Falkenhausen (Rome), David Jacoby and Avigdor Poseq (Jerusalem), and Ernest Hawkins and Taciser and Murat Beige (Istanbul), for making me feel at home in these ancient cities that I so much enjoy visiting and writing about.
With all this help I should have been able to finish sooner. But it was only thanks to a Senior Simon Research Fellowship at the University of Manchester in 1983-84 that a draft of the whole text was finally completed. The critical appraisal of members of the history department, who attended a seminar based on the book, particularly Terence Ranger and Rosemary Morris, improved it in many ways. The staff of the John Rylands Univer- sity Library in Manchester join a number of other librarians, at the British Library in London, the Bodleian in Oxford, and the Olin in Cornell, to all of whom I am indebted. Over the years I have also been fortunate to receive copies of periodicals and books not generally available, provided by Alan Cameron, Michael Hendy, Oistein Hjort, Alexander Kazhdan, Margaret Mullett, Andrzej Poppe, Michael Rogers, Paul Speck, David Winfield, and Ian Wood. An invitation from the Shelby Cullom Davis Center to spend a semester at Princeton in one of the liveliest of history departments allowed me to take advantage of Peter Brown's immense knowledge of Late Antiquity. His suggestions led to many improvements to the text in its ultimate stage. I also learnt much from Roy Mottahedeh and from Paula Sanders's infectious enthusiasm for some of the less accessible aspects of Islamic cul- ture, and was privileged to consult Otto Neugebauer at the Institute for Advanced Study on matters of dating. I have not always taken the advice or accepted the opinions generously offered. Nor, despite this help, have all the problems raised by my research been resolved. But they remain in the text as evidence of my own fallibil- ity, and perhaps occasionally as testimony to the never-concluding and even irresolvable nature of historical investigation. Oxford, March 1986
It is a great honour for The Formation of Christendom to be reprinted in the Princeton Classics series and I am most grateful to Priya Nelson and all her team at the press. My warmest thanks also to Kieran Dodds for his wonder- ful cover photograph of the mosaic in S. Apollinare in Classe, and especially to Howard and Roberta Ahmanson for their generous support in helping me give the book its new phase of life.
Oxford. June 2021
Introduction
The Christian way of dating by numbering years from the Incarnation, "in the Year of the Lord," Anno Domini (a.d.), is perhaps the only such chronology currently recognised throughout the world. But while a.d. dating takes the birth ofJesus ofNazareth as its starting point, the system itself only came into use much later. For many centuries Christians conti ued to use pagan and Jewish chronologies and dates. This was a natural consequence of their Judaic inheritance, which provided them w让h a timescale stretching back to the Garden of Eden. The Old Testament embodied a millennial eschatology, in which the years of the world Anni Mundi (a.m.) linked Jews and Christians to the divine act ofCreation, recorded in the Book of Genesis. The method of counting by generations was also a common one, and it too bore Biblical authority from the First Book ofChronicles: "So all Israel were reckoned by genealogies . . (1 Chr. 9.1). For dates in their own lives, the early Christians used some of the many Greco・Roman methods then current: the regnal year of emperor or local ruler; the succession ofRo・ man consuls; or the ancient fbur-year cycle ofOlympiads, going back to the first pan-Hellenic games held at Olympia in Southern Greece. A plethora oflocal eras were in use; in Spain, the Roman conquest of40 B.c. was commemorated through a distinctive aera\ in Syria, the Seleucid era persisted. Later, the accession of Diocletian in a.d. 284 became the starting point of an era widely used in Egypt. Another novel system introduced under the same emperor, originally for taxation purposes, became very widespread: the fifteen-year cycle ofindictions. Similarly, not only did the early Christians use the pagan months as we still do, but in areas subject to intensive Roman influence they also identified days of the month in the manner established by Julius Caesar, counting back from the Kalends, Nones, and Ides. With such a variety of dating methods available, it is not surprising that the followers ofJesus did not consider the introduction of another one. In any case, they were not concerned to document the present as much as to prepare for the future. For the transitory nature of life on earth had been emphasised, and they knew that the Second Coming (Parousia) and Day of Judgement were at hand. From an early stage in their debates w让h the pagans, however, the Christians were concerned to prove the antiquity of their faith relative to secular history. In the early third century, SextusJulianus Africanus set out to demonstrate the superior让y of the Judaeo-Christian faith by fitting the established events of ancient Persian and Greek chronology into the record of the Old Testament. A Christian chronographer of the Alexandrian school working in Palestine, Africanus took the Bible as the record of a preconceived destiny being worked out according to divine dispensation. Cal・ culating the years of the world since the creation of Adam, and using as a model the seven days of Creation and the 70 weeks of the Book of Daniel, he united all world history in seven millenia: the first five covered Biblical history from Creation to the Babylonian captivity (a.m. 1-4999)； the sixth consisted of 500 years ofpreparation for the advent ofChrist一dated to the symbolic mid-point at A.M. 5500一and 500 years ofsubsequent Christian history that would end with the sixth millenium in A.M. 5999- The year 6000 would witness the Second Coming and the Apocalypse described in the Book of Revelation. It would usher in the seventh and final millenium ofthe Kingdom of Heaven. This chiliastic account of human history estab・ lished fixed points for Christians: the date of the birth ofJesus, and the precise moment at which the Parousia would occur. It thereby provided a clear eschatology of Christian existence, and countered pagan predictions that the Christian faith would endure for only 365 years (a claim St. Augustine was pleased to see refuted). From the early third century, therefore, the notion of a Christian age had been established, although 让s dates continued to be recorded in the year of the world. Africanus provided the basis for an even more elaborate dem・ onstration of Christian superiority in historical chronology, drawn up one hunded years later by Eusebius of Caesarea. Eusebius refused to try and calculate the precise number of years between Creation and the Flood, because the Old Testament evidence was too scanty, and differed with Africanus over the precise date ofthe birth ofJesus, which he realised was out by two years. Nonetheless he retained both the millenial system and the symbolic mid-point of the sixth millenium as the hinge between all time before Christ and the remaining 500 years after Him. The chronology and canon tables established by Eusebius summarised the most sophisticated understanding of Christian history at that time and were translated from Greek into both Armenian and Latin soon after their completion. The year of the world 6000 came and went, however, without change, desp让e Christian expectations of the Day ofJudgement. The Parousia had obviously been delayed. Christians were instructed not to reduce their preparations for what might occur at any moment, but the millenial point had passed, and inevitably the theories of Africanus lost some of their authority. Only 25 years later (in "a.m. 6025"), an eastern monk named Dionysios saw a way of drawing upon the chronology developed by Africanus to re- name the Christian era and to identify it by "the years of the Lord,'' Anni Domini. He had been asked by a friend, a western bishop, to explain the complex problems of computation involved in calculating the date of Easter by the Alexandrian method. The task of establishing the correct date for this, the most important moveable festival of the church, had previously been entrusted to the Church ofAlexandria by the First Oecumenical Council at Nicaea (325). So Dionysios translated into Latin the authoritative Easter tables drawn up by St. Cyril in the middle of the fifth century, together with the computistic canons and methods of calculation used in the East. As he worked on his own tables for the future celebration of Easter, projected through a 95-year period, he realised that 28 ninteen-year cycles would soon have passed since the year traditionally attributed to the birth of Christ. He was able to conclude that he was living in the 525th year since the Incarnation. He had found a system that would allow a truly Christian calendar to be elaborated, and rejoiced that he would no longer have to use one that commemorated Diocletian, the pagan persecutor ofthe Christians. Dionysios's Easter tables, and with them the possibility of using A.D. dating, remained relatively unknown, despite initial papal enthusiasm. The untimely death of Pope John I in May 526 unleashed an anti-Greek reaction in Rome that was responsible for the death of Boethius and the disgrace of his eastern associates, among them Dionysios. The Christian system of dating that we use today was another ofthe casualties, for Rome had long harboured hostility towards the powerful see of Alexandria. Although Dionysios's manuscript on Easter calculation passed to Cassiodorus, who described how to convert A.M. dates to A.D. dates, there was no shift to dating from the Incarnation, even at the famous monastery founded by Cassiodorus at Vivarium. It was nearly two hundred years, in fact, before the system was put into regular use, and then by Bede, an Anglo-Saxon monk in remote Northumbria. His Ecclesiastical History of the English People, completed in A.D. 731, is dated throughout by years reckoned from the Incarnation, coupled with the regnal years of local and more distant rulers. Although Bede was an expert at computation and chronology, as his own Easter tables show, he remained quite unknown in the East and without influence there. In the West, however, he was quickly followed. Many eighth-century chronicles adopted the same method ofdating, and Charles the Great, known to us as Charlemagne, made the system familiar in many parts of Europe by using it for some of his acts of government. Meanwhile, in the Greek East, the Byzantines adopted the system of dating from the Incarnation, but only side-by-side with ancient systems, which remained dominant. Old Testament chronology in the form elabo-rated by Eusebius continued to date universal history by the year of the world, while the year of the emperor reigning in Constantinople and the 15-year indiction cycle served to identify more recent events. In Rome the ecclesiastical authorities continued to use traditional methods, also dating their documents by indiction and imperial year, until the middle of the eighth century. And when they did change, it was not to the A.D. method exclusively; they substituted the year of Charles's rule for the Byzantine imperial year, adding the pontifical year also. Secular dates thus remained the norm in Rome, even ifthese became firmly axed on the realities ofwestern power, while the A.D. system was gradually becoming established in much of northern Europe. In striking contrast to this lengthy process of devising and implementing a Christian dating system independent of any ruler, Islam found its own particular method within a decade of the Prophet*s death in A.D. 632. Muslim society took Muhammad's flight (Hijri) from Mecca to Medina as the basis of its new calendar. The year of the Hijri(A.H.), complete w让h its lunar months adapted from the Jewish system but renamed in Arabic, was introduced. It remains a chronology employed in many parts of the world today. The emergence of an Islamic dating system was thus as brief and intense as the Christian was extended and disrupted. Yet these two world calendars were first diffused as authoritative methods of counting the years in the same period: the tumultuous centuries that span the transition between the late Roman and early medieval epochs. Modern times began in those dark ages—and not only with respect to our present styles of dating.
Ever since the seminal work of Henri Pirenne on the consequences ofthe eruption of Islam, the seventh century has been recognised as decisive in the development of the Middle Ages.2 Despite the paucity of evidence, which does not facilitate close investigation, it is clear that the political unity ofthe Mediterranean world was irrevocably lost at that time. Roman imperial forms of government, often adapted to novel purposes in the non-Roman kingdoms ofthe West, began to give way to medieval ones. In particular, the risfe of feudalism distinguished western Europe from the two other successors of ancient Rome: Byzantium and the Caliphate. The tripartite division has been of lasting significance for the modern world, and it is in the interaction of the three component parts that the initial partic・ ularity of the West can be located. I cannot resolve, nor have I addressed, the ^structural dynamic" ofthis transition to feudalism. 3 An adequate his・ torical theory will probably need to be articulated within a much broader framework of comparison, which will also Identify patterns ofimperial decline and succession, for example, in China, India, and Japan. But by investigating the transformation of the ancient world in its entirety and the three heirs of Rome in their shared Mediterranean context, I have tried to expand the empirical base for further theoretical work.
Although political and economic elements ofthe transition from Antiquity to the Middle Ages may be determinate, they are here subordinated to a study of the development of Christian faith. This is approached not through the well-known features of ecclesiastical history, but through an analysis ofmedieval faith as a material force. Nor do I begin with the physical substance ofthe church, its properties, its accumulated wealth, and its economic role in dispensing charity, which will form the subject of a companion volume. The following study will, instead, examine the structural role of faith in early medieval society. It may appear perverse to tackle the cultural parameters of Christendom before its economic dimension. But the capacity of fia让h to mobilise, frequently manifested in the seventh and eighth centuries, is indicative of a force that may determine other factors, particularly at times of political failure and economic crisis. Belief is often taken for granted as a given fact, whose characteristics can be assumed at all levels of society, the most sophisticated and least educated. Rather than make that assumption, I prefer to try and examine the meanings of belief for early medieval believers. This is a delicate business not only because of the inherent difficulty of grasping the significance of fk让h for people so distant from us, but also because medieval religion is sometimes conceived, and criticised, as the chiefsupport of an unchanging and fixed social order. While beliefs certainly did unite and restrict medieval Christendom, they seem to me infinitely more complex than they are often thought. There are a great many subversive aspects to belief, and medieval culture was more varied than ecclesiastical leaders cared to admit. So I make no apology for studying religion from the viewpoint of a non-believer; the history offaith is far too important to be left to adherents alone. The Formation ofChristendom addresses both the Christian and the Muslim inheritors ofthe Roman Empire and asks how it was that they came to define their world solely in religious terms. As the ancient world collapsed, faith rather than imperial rule became the feature that identified the universe, what Christians called the oikoumene, and Muslims, Dar al Islam. Religion had fused the political, social, and cultural into self-contained systems, separated by their differences of faith. Other regions beyond these spheres were of course known, but were branded as barbarian, pagan, heretical, and hence inferior. Such groups might even intrude into the Christian and Islamic worlds, as the Jewish communities did, always condemned and only tolerated under certain conditions. Paradoxically, however, Christianity, and in its turn, Islam, was formed in reaction to other faiths and creeds, Judaism primarily, but also the cults of pagan Greece and Rome, the panoply of Egyptian deities, Persian Zoroastrianism, Mithraism, and others. The history ofthe growth ofChristian faith at the expense of these, and then of Islam in reaction to Christian as well as Judaic practice, does not require another general study. Instead of assuming a universal potential within the first Christian communities ofthe East Mediterranean, where Islam now predominates, I have asked how Christianity developed a dominant position and status in Europe, of which the term Christendom could justifiably be used. Concomitantly, I have looked closely at the religious rivalry that resulted in the transfer to Muslim allegiance ofthose areas where Christianity first flourished. The term ''Christendom'' is recorded in late ninth-century Anglo-Saxon England and has no exact parallel in the Latin or Greek words used previously to designate Christian adherence, Christianitas or oikoumene.4 It thus enters European vocabulary at the time when King Alfred was translating works of Augustine, Boethius, and Pope Gregory the Great into AngloSaxon. But this first known use does not reflect the reality of the late ninth century, a troubled period of Viking raids, which familiarised Christians in the West with Nordic paganism. On the contrary, the Anglo-Saxon concept ofChristendom derives from an earlier period, when Charles the Great created a notion ofChristian universality in his Holy Roman Empire.
In this analysis offaith and the struggle between Christianity and Islam, the Muslim challenge is crucial, because it threatened the legitimacy of both the theological and political dimensions of Christianity. Although Christian authorities might identify Muhammad as another heretic, albeit with an extremely large and devout (pllowing, his claims to be the ultimate prophet ofGod explicitly contested the orthodoxy oftheir own faith. Islam was proposed to believers as the strict observance ofmonotheism: "There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is his Prophet,** as the Muslim profession of faith states. Like Christianity, it broke from the primitive, tribal claims ofthe Israelites, while it too recognised the enduring force ofMosaic Law. Islam, however, insisted upon a monotheism unconfused by Trinitarian problems. Both faiths believed in the same God, and each claimed to fulfil the promises of the Jewish Old Testament: Christians through the New Testament, which proclaimed the Messiah and spread the faith among Jews and Gentiles alike; Muslims through the Koran, which identified Muhammad as the final prophet ofGod, whose instructions replaced all previous ones. The extent to which Islam considered that it had surpassed both the older religions is symbolised by the building of the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. On the site of the Temple Mount, the holiest ofJewish holy places, Caliph Abd al Malik commissioned a mosque over the rock from which Muhammad had ascended into heaven. The octagonal building, constructed in white marble with reused Roman columns and decorated in glittering floral mosaics by Christian craftsmen, is surmounted by a golden dome typical of classical and early Christian architecture. According to the long Koranic inscription that runs around the interior, it was completed in a.h. 71 (a.d. 691-92) as a celebration of Allah, the God of both Jews and Gentiles who now favoured the Muslims above all others. It was under the impact of these Islamic claims that Christians developed new means to ensure their survival. They also abandoned several pagan features inherited from the ancient world and adopted Christian ones—the introduction of dating from the Incarnation being an outstanding example. The simultaneous emergence ofIslamic and Christian calendars was no coincidence. In rejecting Muslim belief, however, the eastern and western churches redefined their faith in different ways. Faced with Islamic monotheism, they each attempted to regulate their Christian belief and practice in accordance with their own interpretation of the Old Testament. In the East, the entirely novel doctrine oficonoclasm was elaborated, as a means of preventing the worship of man-made objects, to be replaced forty years later by the elevation of icons to an integrated position w让hin worship. In the West, both the destruction and the veneration ofreligious pictures was condemned by the emergent Christian leadership of northern Europe, where Charles was identified as a New David and his subjects as a New Israel. The division of Christendom, marked by the synod of Frankfurt in 794, finalised a long tendency towards separation, and set the churches ofWest and East on different courses. Long before Muhammad began dictating his revelations, however, internal factors had confirmed tendencies towards a division of the ancient world. To draw attention to those elements, linguistic, cultural, and artis・ tic, that separated East from West, is not to deny the unity of the Medi・ terranean. Following Braudefs magisterial work it is impossible to ignore the special environment shared by those regions united under imperial rule around the Roman lake.6 Within this fixed physical framework, marked by a common pattern of ancient structures and systems of belief, parallel and simultaneous but distinct processes were responsible for the development of three particular heirs: the reconstituted empire of the East, the Arabic Caliphate of the South, and the self-conscious unit of western ''Europe''— the modern sense attached to this term originates at the time ofCharles the Great. Desp让e the lasting divisions established by the year A.D. 800, these regions remained bound together by their shared inheritance as well as by their geographical setting. Precisely because these bonds were real, there were constant attempts to recreate a past unity, attempts as varied as the movements for political union usually based on crusading force, or those for religious union based on theological compromise.
Throughout the following study, the terms ''East'' and ''West'' are used as a shorthand for the Greek regions of the eastern Mediterranean and the Latin areas ofthe West respectively.7 These terms are of course Eurocentric. But they correspond roughly to the regions where the two major classical languages were spoken. Their meaning is fairly clear, they are in widespread use today, and I have not found any better general designations. The historian, after all, can try to allow for, but should not seek to escape, her time. Linguistic factors held the key to the process of differentiation between an ''Eastern'' and a ''Western'' sphere during the early Christian period. For as the un让y of the Mediterranean became less meaningful to its inhabitants, East and West were locked into ever-increasing mutual incomprehe sion. In the first great history ofthe faith by Eusebius (263-340), the Christian church is always singular, yet the existence of many churches formed by Christians scattered throughout the Roman Empire, and their geographical separation, is recognised. Eusebius himself personified the Greek sense of superiority; he knew no Latin, and he depended upon the careful translations of others to render his work comprehensible to western Christians. One hundred years later, a considerable body of Greek patristic thought had been made available in Latin, but the West never had access to the full range ofearly Christian writings from the East: nor was the work ofwestern authors like St. Augustine accessible to Greek speakers. In the East, however, this was not felt as a loss. As Momigliano has shown in his panoramic sweep of ancient culture, the Greeks and their Christian descendants remained impervious to scholarship transmitted in a medium other than their own.8 After the turn of the sixth century, when knowledge of Latin became rare at the imperial court of Constantinople, the Greek-speaking world closed itself off from western thought. While translation skills were not maintained in the West either, scholars there did not forget the existence of Greek, and they revealed a continuing curiosity about it. The non-classical world of the North, the Irish in particular, remained open to new channels of information in unfamiliar languages, especially the three sacred tongues, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, in which Scripture was preserved. In this respect they reacted like the Syriac-speaking population of the Near East, who had cultivated the art of translation from an early date. Syriac versions of Greek writings provided a vital link with the ancient world, for it was through this medium that the Arabs gained access to Greek science and philosophy, as well as early Christian works that they found interesting.9 The long-term effects ofthe Greek refusal to look beyond their own heritage became evident in the twelfth century, when western scholars began to benefit from the Arabic medium oftransmission. From Baghdad, where Syriac versions had first been rendered into Arabic, the basic works of Aristotle, Ptolemy, Euclid, and many applied subjects had been disseminated throughout the Islamic world. In the caliphate of Cordova (Spain) and the trilingual culture of southern Italy and Norman Sicily, clerics trained in translation skills provided Latin texts.10 The twelfth-century discovery of Greek thought and its accompanying stimulation of western intellectual endeavour had no parallel in Byzantium, though the period witnessed a lively cultural and artistic development. There was no concerted effort at understanding Latin culture until the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, when parts of St. Augustine, some of the Roman classics, and St. Thomas Aquinass Summa Theologica were finally translated into Greek. It was already too late for the East to catch up with the more adventurous scholarship ofthe West. A further element ofseparation within the Med让erranean world that can be traced back to the period of transition lies in the development of distinctive artistic traditions. From a shared heritage of Late Antique skills and a common environment decorated with classical buildings and ancient statuary, the three heirs of Rome faced the problem of representation and resolved it in very different ways. In addressing this matter, the West was guided by the dictum of Pope Gregory I that pictures are the bibles of the illiterate, while the East adapted the ancient tradition ofportraiture for the lifelike representation ofholy people in icons. Western art came to be dom・ inated by a pedagogic function, not ignored in the East but there supplemented by the use of icons as an aid to veneration. Through veneration, icons came to act as intercessors between God and men in a fashion barely known in the West. This contrast in Christian art forms must be set beside the Islamic prohibition of sacred art altogether. In enforcing the Mosaic commandment against the worship of man-made objects, Muhammad established the basic framework for a purely decorative art suitable for Islam. No scenes from the life of the Prophet or his companions were to be illustrated, human portraits were banished, even graves were unmarked (proscriptions that were not observed to the letter). Instead, inscriptions ofKoranic verses formed an elaborate calligraphic art visible on ceramic, leather, and wooden objects, in mosques as well as on official seals and coins. The question ofwhat could or should not be shown in artistic terms was tackled in completely different ways, which only assumed their settled form after the iconoclast movements ofthe eighth and ninth centuries. Despite the turbulence ofthe early medieval period, it w让nessed the establishment of Christianity as the fundamental belief of the vast majority of people in eastern and western Europe. Edmund Bishop once described the period between Caesarius of Arles (in the early sixth century) and Alcuin (in the late eighth) as the darkest of western European history. He went on: "Yet it is precisely in those three centuries that took place the evolution definitely fixing the religion ofmedieval and a large part ofmodern Europe . . . when popular piety that has listened to the word of the preachers makes the ideas they express ...让s own; and that piety in its slow and silent workings generates by and by a common and accepted belief.M11 The very obvious role of Christian institutions in sustaining beliefand maintaining at least a part of ancient culture into the modern period should not make us forget this other, less discernible role, which made Christians of entire peoples previously devoted to the cults ofWoden or the moon, sacred trees and pagan goddesses.*12 It is a much harder subject, for converts did not record their thoughts and were often accused of sliding back into ancestor worship (or worse); yet it is equally worthy of analysis. his Liturgica Historica (Oxford, 1918), 165-202. In connection with the first article, G. Mercati added a note, "More Spanish Symptoms/* 423-30, which is also included in Bishop's later volume. 12 H.-I. Marrou, "La place du haut Moyen Age dans I'histoire du christianisme," Settimane 9 (Spoleto, 1962): 595-630; cf. Anderson, Passages, 131-39, on the church as the "indispensable bridge between two epochs/' In examining this history ofthe formative period ofChristendom, I have tried to provide a persistent general reader with an overall view of the period that links ancient Rome with Charlemagne and laterEuropean history. While different aspects are familiar enough—the decline of the Roman Empire, the importance of Christianity during the ''Dark Ages," feudalism, Bede, Moorish Spain, medieval cathedrals, voyages of discovery, and the Renaissance—the connections between them are frequently unclear. The rebirth of classical interests during the Renaissance, for instance, could hardly have taken place without prior developments, but these remain abstruse, partly because they are not usually set in their proper context: the entire Mediterranean, Islamic as well as Christian, which had its centre in the East. Byzantium is of fundamental importance in this process. I have, therefore, had to write a history of the Mediterranean between about a.d. 550 and 850 to document the transformation that occurred, the conse・ quences of which remain embodied in the area to this day.
While the book has become long and perhaps difficult, I have tried to use English translations of source material wherever possible, though evidence in original languages is also provided. My hope is that a persistent general reader will find the result as exciting as scholars familiar w让h the field. While studying early medieval faith, I have become aware of the complex interlockings of belief with cultural factors, as well as with those elements ofsocial and political development that have been deliberately excluded from this study. These extensive interconnections are very evident, whether one is reading the seemingly endless theological tracts and ecclesiastical histories that form the basic sources, or the archaeological, literary, and artistic studies that are an essential supplement. I am only too conscious not only of my own limitations, but also of the patchy and unsatisfactory nature of the material, its uneven distribution and inherent difficulties. Yet it seems churlish to condemn it as inadequate; we have to make the best of 让.My reading has necessarily been selective—it wouldprobably be impossible to read all the available material, and in any case I am not equipped to do so. The approach outlined above requires a consideration of Islam and early Arabic history that cannot wait for me to master its medium. Ifmy interpretation appears overconfident, it is because I have covered my hesitation with firmness, a firmness based on the conviction that the formation of Christendom in this period is a subject of immense interest and relevance that demands fresh investigation, whatever the risks and dangers.
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