The Caliphate

2021 ◽  
pp. 355-379
Author(s):  
Andrew Marsham
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Economic History ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Organizational Structures ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Rapid Expansion ◽  
Ethnic Identities ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
The Mediterranean

The first Muslim empire—the Caliphate—began with the conquests of the mid-seventh century CE and fragmented in the mid-tenth century. This chapter outlines the Caliphate’s political and economic history, its organizational structures, and forms of coercive and ideological power. During a long eighth century, the Mediterranean and the Middle East were transformed by the formation of new elites, by a new transregional coinage economy, by the rapid expansion of new cities and settlements, and by an agrarian revolution. The religion that became Islam was crucial in uniting the conquerors of the empire, and then as the idiom for the expression of the conquered peoples’ political ambitions. Eventual widespread conversion among the conquered populations meant that as the Caliphate collapsed, it left behind Muslim successor states, as well as new linguistic and ethnic identities—notably the Arabic and New Persian linguae francae, and a transregional “Arab” ethnicity.

The Saxon Culture-Sequence at Portchester Castle

1970 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barry Cunliffe
Keyword(s):  
Tenth Century ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Fifth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Sixth Century ◽  
Isle Of Wight ◽  
Glass Vessel ◽  
Local Tradition ◽  
Culture Sequence ◽  
Made In

SummaryExcavations at Portchester Castle have produced evidence of occupation throughout the Saxon period. After the cessation of standard Roman wares and local hand-made types early in the fifth century two Grubenhäuser were built. The contemporary assemblage, assignable to the mid fifth century, included (?) imported carinated bowls and local hand-made grass-tempered wares made in the Roman tradition. Late in the fifth or early in the sixth century stamped Saxon urns appear and probably continue, alongside the grass-tempered tradition, into the seventh century. An association of a grass-tempered pot with an imported glass vessel of eighth-century date shows that the local tradition persisted, but by the middle of the eighth century hand-made jars in gritty fabrics, like those from Hamwih, appear in a substantial rubbish deposit which belongs to the initial occupation of the hall complex. By the tenth century a new style of wheel-thrown pottery, called here Portchester ware, is dominant. It is mass produced and distributed largely from the Isle of Wight to central Hampshire and from the Sussex border to the River Mean. Contemporary forms include imported wares, green-glazed pitchers, pots from the Chichester region, and an assemblage made in a wheel-made continuation of the local gritty-fabric tradition. Portchester ware had gone out of use by 1100 at the latest.

What Did Conversion to Islam Mean in Seventh-Century Arabia?

Islamisation ◽  
2017 ◽  
pp. 83-101
Author(s):  
Harry Munt
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Religious Life ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
Church Father ◽  
Muslim Majority ◽  
The Church

In a late seventh- or very early eighth-century Coptic homily anachronistically attributed to the church father Athanasius of Alexandria (d. 373), it is lamented that, following the Arab conquest of Egypt in the early 640s, ‘many Christians, Barbarians, Greeks, Syrians and from all tribes will go and join them in their faith’.1 This prophecy comes across as somewhat hysterical to many modern observers – at least within its seventh-or eighth-century context – since it is now the generally accepted consensus of historians that the processes through which the inhabitants of the conquered territories of the Middle East converted to Islam were extremely gradual and persisted for centuries. Monumental changes to the political, social and religious life of many communities in this region came in the decades and centuries after the conquests – developments to which many non-Muslims fully contributed – but Muslim-majority populations are not thought to have emerged widely until the ninth or tenth centuries at the very earliest.

Mediterranean Troughs, 600–900

The Great Sea ◽  
2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Abulafia
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Regional Variation ◽  
Tenth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
The West ◽  
The Third ◽  
Aegean Islands ◽  
The Mediterranean ◽  
Fundamental Unity ◽  
Mass Murderer

By the sixth century, the unity of the Mediterranean had been shattered; it was no longer mare nostrum, either politically or commercially. There have been attempts to show that the fundamental unity of the Mediterranean as a trading space, at least, survived until the Islamic conquests of the seventh century (culminating in the invasion of Spain in 711), or even until the Frankish empire of the incestuous mass-murderer Charlemagne acquired control of Italy and Catalonia. There have also been attempts to show that recovery began much earlier than past generations of historians had assumed, and was well under way in the tenth or even the ninth century. It would be hard to dispute this in the case of the Byzantine East, which had already shown some resilience, or in the case of the Islamic lands that by then stretched from Syria and Egypt to Spain and Portugal, but the West is more of a puzzle. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that some historians observe decline at the same moments as others detect expansion. To this one can sensibly answer that there was enormous regional variation; but the question remains when and whether the Mediterranean lost, and then recovered, its unity. Just as in antiquity the integration of the Mediterranean into a single trading area, and subsequently into a single political area, had taken many centuries, from the Dark Age of the tenth century BC to the emergence of the Roman Empire, so in the era of the ‘Third Mediterranean’ the process of integration was painfully slow. Full political integration was never again achieved, despite the best efforts of invading Arabs and, much later, Turks. The loss by Byzantium of so many of its mainland possessions to the Slavs and other foes did leave the empire with several remarkable assets. Sicily, parts of southern Italy, Cyprus and the Aegean islands remained under Byzantine rule, and the empire drew wealth from gold and silver mines in several of these lands. Even Sardinia and Majorca were under Byzantine suzerainty, but it is unclear whether a functioning network of communication across the Mediterranean still existed.

Rome, the Arabs, and Iconoclasm

2021 ◽  
pp. 135-149
Author(s):  
Edward J. Watts
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Eighth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
Christian Worship ◽  
Iconoclastic Controversy

By the early seventh century a combination of Persian invasions and, ultimately, Arab conquests removed the Roman Empire from the Middle East and North Africa. Although the emperor Heraclius sparked a brief but dramatic Roman resurgence in the early 630s, these traumatic losses pushed Romans to reintroduce the rhetoric of decline and renewal. Instead of focusing on the traditional, pagan Roman past as Romans had done in earlier centuries, their seventh- and eighth-century counterparts thought about how the empire’s Christian religious practices had fallen away from the ideals that had once made Rome a powerful Christian empire. One result was the Iconoclastic controversy, an argument between Romans who embraced the role of icons in Christian worship and others who wanted to suppress their use. Both sides claimed that the religious practices for which their opponents advocated had broken with the traditions that had once made the empire strong.

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