This chapter addresses developments in Late Antiquity, which witnessed a partial shift to more land-based conceptions of both ownership and rulership. The prior literature has pointed to two explanatory factors: the decline of classical polis culture amidst the deurbanization of Late Antiquity, and the rise of Christianity. The chapter draws together the threads of this literature, in order to develop an account of late antique cultural change. Classical Roman property law, it argues, had its context in classical cities. The relative decay of urban dominance and the rise of Christianity tended to undermine the classical foundations of the law of both ownership and rulership. The Empire was reconceived in more territorial terms, while classical conceptions of elite power faltered. The resulting shifts did not result in any decisive and thoroughgoing transformation of the understanding of ownership and rulership, but they set the stage for later developments of great significance.

This chapter looks at the different ways in which a free person might come to forfeit their freedom in the late antique and early Islamic Middle East. Although frowned upon and theoretically illegal, free persons might opt, due to extreme poverty or privation, to sell themselves or their family, offering their labor in return for basic sustenance. Otherwise, loss of free status might occur due to a debt default, which, if the sale of a debtor’s assets realized insufficient credit, could see them being forced to work to pay off what they owed. This solution was common in the fouth–eighth centuries, but by the ninth century it was increasingly deemed unacceptable. This chapter considers what led to this shift in legal thinking, the degree to which Islamic law continued late antique practice and the nature of this continuity.

This introduction poses the central thesis of this volume: that the early Islamic empire was tied together by networks of social dependency that can be tracked through the linguistic and material traces of interconnectivity in our sources. It is suggested that the particular relationships that emerge from the granular case studies in this volume can illuminate the constituent parts of the early Islamic empire as a whole. Studies link material and textual sources, and in particular focus on the language and rhetoric used by sources to describe relations and interactions, and what they show of the modes, expressions and conditions that governed communication and interaction. It is suggested that empires are not ruled by top–down force alone, but that legitimacy and stability are created in various ways, both top–down and bottom–up.

This chapter probes the powerful presence of Greek epic in the world of late antique Christianity. The chapter begins by exploring the dynamic variety of uses to which hexameter verse was put by late antique Christians, including poems on surprisingly salacious themes. It then turns to consider hexameter poems on specifically Christian topics. First it examines the earliest examples of such texts, the Sibylline Oracles and the poems in the Codex of Visions. He then analyses the group of poems all composed in the fifth century CE: the Metaphrase of the Psalms of ps.-Apollinaris, the Homeric Centos and Martyrdom of St Cyprian of Eudocia and the Paraphrase of John’s Gospel by Nonnus. Each of these is, in a different way, a transcription into hexameter verse of a pre-existing Christian text — a striking development in the history of Greek poetry. Whitmarsh shows how this shift enacts, and indeed puts pressure on, the distinction between form and content. Yet for all that they have in common, each of the three fifth-century poets has a different agenda, and reflects a unique poetic vision and aesthetic.

This chapter locates a shift in beginning in the seventh century in which the power to halt quakes began to move away from collective repentance and toward saintly intercession. First, it examines the seventh-century Life of St. Symeon Stylites the Younger, a Syrian pillar saint with ties to Constantinople. It focuses in particular on hymns recorded in the Life for earthquakes that purportedly caused them to cease when sung by the holy man. The chapter shows how seventh-century Byzantines could have constructed the role of the saintly intercessor when faced with natural disasters. Next, it analyzes changes in Constantinople’s earthquake commemoration rite in the eighth century, specifically the introduction of the Theotokos as the city’s chief protection against earthquakes. Eighth-century liturgical editors borrowed from the rites commemorating the enemy invasions of Constantinople in 623, 626, and 717–18, in which the Theotokos was remembered to play a prominent role in protecting the city. It shows how the earthquake commemoration liturgy no longer saw earthquakes as divine judgment against the sin of the city, but as outside threats to the city for which powerful heavenly intercessions were needed.

This chapter discusses how East Roman emperors utilized the theology of divine chastisement, particularly the efficacy accorded to repentance, to their advantage. During the earthquakes of 396 and 447, Emperors Arcadius and Theodosius II, respectively, led mass penitential rituals and performed public acts of humility until the quakes ceased. Such public acts of repentance posed a political risk to emperors since they could appear to confirm their responsibility for the disasters. However, imperial supporters like bishop Severian of Gabala and historian Socrates Scholasticus highlighted the quakes’ cessation rather than their cause, and located the power to halt quakes in the humble prayers of the rulers themselves rather than worshippers as a collective. In the aftermath of these earthquakes, authorities framed Roman emperors as “New Davids” – effective spiritual intercessors as well as military protectors – inaugurating a biblical typology for emperors that would continue throughout Byzantine history.

This chapter concerns Constantinople’s liturgical rite for the commemoration of earthquakes in its original, fifth-century form. Celebrated each year on the anniversary of certain quakes, worshippers ritually reenacted local earthquakes, performing a long, penitential procession that retraced the earthquake evacuation route. The rite was structured by biblical readings, hymns, and prayers that framed the people of Constantinople as the sinful, biblical people of God. In ritual performance, worshippers could envision quakes as manifestations of divine wrath against the sins of the city, and their collective repentance as effective in restoring stability to the earth and balance within the human-environment-divine relationship. After discussing the liturgical rite, its performance, and theology, the chapter locates the origins of its theology of divine chastisement in local homilies and ritual responses to earlier quakes, focusing in particular on the archbishop John Chrysostom’s Constantinopolitan homilies on earthquakes from the early fifth century.

This chapter examines the ways in which Byzantine political and ecclesiastical elites recast local earthquakes as divine blessing upon the city rather than manifestations of divine wrath as evinced in the liturgical commemoration rite. First, it examines a legend that arose in connection with the earthquake of 438 that framed it as a divine theophany. Following the divisive Council of Chalcedon in 451, ecclesiastical authorities in Constantinople’s imperial church used the legend against their miaphysite opponents to cast the quake as divine approval of Constantinople’s political and theological claims. Next, it turns to the earthquake of 557, which partially destroyed the famous church of Hagia Sophia built by the emperor Justinian in 537. Justinian rebuilt the church in 562 and held an elaborate ceremony complete with a liturgy of rededication for the church. This ceremony and its liturgy eschewed the theology of divine chastisement and framed the quake as a temporary setback, an opportunity for Justinian to display his prowess over the destructive effects of nature by rebuilding the church to be more magnificent than before.

This chapter describes how medieval Constantinople ceased to commemorate new local earthquakes on its liturgical calendar and instead crafted new ways of responding liturgically to seismicity. First it discusses new liturgical hymnography added to the commemoration rite for the quake of October 26, 740, and the establishment of that day as an annual “earthquake day” on which worshippers could reflect on natural disaster in the abstract, even as the hymns presented an incoherent set of conflicting theologies of earthquakes. It then examines how earthquakes from the distant past became potent ideological symbols in this period. It concludes with an examination of a prayer from the late eighth century created for use whenever earthquakes struck, a form of liturgical response that came to replace the practice of commemorating new quakes.

Scholars generally assume that Procopius, the noted sixth century classicizing historian, was a misogynist who in his notorious Secret History belittled the impact Theodora and Antonina had on the Empire’s fortunes. In that work and his Wars, Procopius highlights the plight of women in the warfare of the reign of Justinian. How, then, are we to reconcile the seeming hatred of, for example, Antonina in the Secret History with the apparent empathy of the suffering inhabitants of Italy in the Wars? In this chapter the author explores the role of women in the military of the age of Justinian at both the top (amongst the officer class – Antonina) and the bottom (amongst the civilians and the rank-and-file) ends, through the gaze of Procopius, and in the process establish the female component of what is generally assumed to have been a wholly male space. Comparative evidence is abundant and includes such materials as the Code of Justinian; other sixth century texts such as those of Pseudo-Joshua the Stylite, Agathias, and Corippus; the papyri of Nessana (which detail the relationship between soldiers and civilians in late sixth century Israel/Palestine); and the material remains of Roman fortresses such as el-Lejjun.

Great changes have taken place in the approach of historians to the topic since the publication of East of Byzantium (1980). Instead of centre-periphery or top-down models they now see the relations between Byzantium and the east in terms of connectivity, networks and horizontal ties. This is connected with the spread of late antiquity as a concept and includes a great expansion in Syriac studies. Late antiquity now embraces the emergence of Islam and looks towards Eurasia; another challenge is posed by the rise of global history. But these developments, with the new focus on the fall of the western empire, raise major problems of identity for Byzantium itself, and indeed for western Europe.

Terms like “Classical Arabic,” “Classical Armenian,” “Classical Syriac,” and “Classical Persian,” though not entirely unproblematic, arouse minimal controversy and are widely used. These Near Eastern languages have their classical traditions of learning, all arising in the same region, all interacting with one another. Let us therefore envision a “Classical Near East” to foster modern scholarly exchange between specialists in pre-modern Near Eastern history and philology. This essay explores the prospects of a broader arena of ancient and medieval research for specialists in the premodern Near East that transcends the specializing delimitation of modern identities and religions