Universal Histories in Christendom and the Islamic World, c.700–c.1400
This chapter examines how the part of the world ruled mainly by Christian or Muslim monotheists comprised three main overlapping zones of political, religious, and linguistic culture. First, the various western Christian kingdoms and their northern and eastern borders with the Scandinavian, Germanic, Turkic, and Slavic worlds; second, the Christian Byzantine Empire, centered on Constantinople, and its wider penumbra of satellites and commercial and diplomatic contacts, predominantly in Slavic and Turkic Eurasia; and third, the vast Islamic Empire of the Caliphate and, after its accelerating fragmentation in the ninth and tenth centuries, the ‘commonwealth’ of Islamic successor states. The literate elite in each of these regions used a lingua franca: Latin in the Christian West, Greek in Byzantium, and Arabic in the Islamic world.