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Introduction

Late Antiquity is a term which has been used increasingly over the last few decades to describe a period of history which saw the classical world of Mediterranean and Middle Eastern empires (Rome and Persia) change into the political and cultural blocs recognisable as the framework of much of the modern world: Christian western Europe, central and eastern Europe, and the Islamic Middle East and Africa.  The term `Late Antiquity' is sometimes used in a narrow sense (to mean basically `the Later Roman Empire' of the fourth to early sixth centuries), at other times more broadly (to include both the Roman and Middle Eastern worlds, and their hinterlands, from the third to the eighth centuries).  It is in this later, inclusive sense that we will use the term in this unit, covering from about 212 to 800.  It is a period not just of regrettable clutter associated with Rome's decline and fall (its traditional portrait), but of major developments which have shaped much of subsequent history.

The scope of this unit is therefore extensive.  Its compass has been chosen with the aim of conveying a sense of the broad movements which drove change in this period and throughout these regions, and which in a fundamental way bind them together, whatever the contingencies of historical events.

Five political and cultural blocs constitute the main subjects of this period:

• the Later Roman Empire

• Sassanian Persia (more correctly, Iran or `Eran')

• the Early Medieval Kingdoms established in the former western European provinces of the Roman Empire from the fifth century onwards

• also from the fifth century onwards, the Byzantine Empire — our term for what contemporaries in all parts of the late antique world recognised as the on-going Roman empire, but now limited to the eastern Mediterranean, centred on Constantinople (modern Istanbul)

• and the Islamic Caliphate, which supplanted both Sassanian Iran and large parts of the Roman East and West from the early seventh century, centred first at Damascus, then at Baghdad.

As far as sources permit, we will seek to study each of these blocs equally, to understand their own dynamics, rather than, for example, to see Persia only in terms of how it impacted on Rome.

Among other factors, religion — in particular, monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but arguably also Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism) — plays a central role in this period.  This is not, however, a unit on religion as such.  Rather, we will be looking at the role of religion in politics, society, and culture.

The unit places considerable emphasis on encountering the period through its written remnants.  Some are famous, some obscure; some are familiar, some bizarre.  Our endeavours to come to terms with these sources are not only instructive lessons in historical investigation, but also valuable exercises in inter-cultural understanding, and excavations of our cultural foundations.

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