2 History Short Writing Assignment

Unit 2 - Sasanian Empire and the Middle East

WA 2

Answer the following question and submit in your Dropbox for Unit 2. It will be difficult to write a good assignment in fewer than 8 paragraphs I would think. Be sure to use information in Donner (you will need to look back at the assignment in Donner for Unit 1), the modules including the online readings and especiallytheir sub units! And the online reading you have selected will help you to produce an excellent submission.

This question asks for a comparison with topics from Unit 1. In an historical comparison, it is important to avoid making two lists - characteristics of one and then of the other - and leaving the actual comparison to the reader. We want YOU to make the comparison. So it is always best to pick a couple of topics to include - we are here asking for 2. In future assignments we may ask for 1 or 2 or even more. And we will usually be asking you to go back and use information you learned in previous units.

At the top of the assignment, you should include the "password" I assigned you in my comments on your first writing assignment - I will increase your grade for WA 1 by 2 points if you do this.

I would think that 8 - 10 paragraphs would be a good target for this assignment.

Compare the policies of the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires in the Middle East. You should choose at least two aspects of their societies, for example: governmental system, religion, treatment of religious minorities, economy and international trade.

Unit 2 - The Sasanian Empire and the Middle East

The archway entrance to the Imperial Palace in the Sasanian capital, Ctesiphon (located about 20 miles south of today's Baghdad). This was rebuilt in the past 25 years - the building to the right of the arch had been destroyed over the centuries.

A section of a stairway at Persepolis, the great capital city of the Achaemenids - the Iranian dynasty before the Sasanians. They build a "royal road", similar in form to the Roman roads, from Persepolis to Sardis, on the Anatolian side of the Aegean Sea - a distance of more than 2000 miles.

Study Guide for Donner's assignment for Unit 2.

In a very recent (July 11, 2013) long book review in The New York Review of Books, Peter Brown alerts us to major and really important new discoveries about the Middle East in the earliest decades of the Islamic and "Believers" movement. The books he reviews, combined with the book we are reading in this course by Donner, revolutionize our understandings of the Middle East in the 100 years before and after Muhammad. General accounts of this period will have to be considerably rewritten! If you get the chance, please glance through that review.

Please read either Frye or Shahid, below

· Frye , History of Ancient Iran: 325-334, Study guide

· Shahid , "Byzantinism and Arabism". Study guide

· Interesting but difficult reading: Haldon , "Pre-industrial States and the Distribution of Resources: the Nature of the Problem." Study Guide for Haldon. This one is really worth the effort.

You should go through the following links - important information for your writing assignment:

Sasanian Persia versus Rome/Byzantium

Sasanian Zoroastrianism and Byzantine Christianity

n

HST 372 Middle East: Muhammad to 1800

Richard Frye. The History of Ancient Iran.

beginning with pg. 325.

THE REFORMS OF CHOSROES ANUSHIRVAN ('OF THE IMMORTAL SOUL')

Chosroes was the most illustrious of the Sasanian rulers and he gave his name to the common designation of Sasanian rulers by the Arabs, Kisra, much as Caesar gave his name to Roman rulers. His reforms set a stamp on the later Sasanian state and society and much of what we know about the organization of Sasanian Iran dates from his reign and afterwards. Under him the national epic was gathered together; probably at that time the Avesta was reduced to the form of the Avestan alphabet and writing we know at the present time, and his economic reforms also have come down to us in Islamic writings, while stories about the splendor, the justice and flourishing of Iran under him abound in later Islamic writings, where he occupies a place similar to the great Shah 'Abbas in Safavid times. The tax reform, begun under Kavad, was carried to completion under Chosroes, and the royal court was much strengthened by this and other measures, which changed the face of the empire, making it stronger when a strong ruler ruled but open to disintegration under a weak king. At the outset he had to put down an attempt by a group of nobles to raise his brother to the throne, but he overcame the plotters and dispatched them.

One of his first tasks on ascending the throne was to make peace with the Byzantines, which he did in 532 evacuating several forts in Lazica, and to restore order in society, for as several sources state, children did not know who their fathers were, and questions of inheritance and ownership were unresolved. The aftermath of the Mazdakite troubles not only provided an opportunity to reduce the power of the great feudal lords, who after the time of Chosroes are little mentioned except as officials of the central government, but also to reorganize the clergy, the higher offices of which had been occupied by members of noble families. The basis of wealth and power of the upper classes had to be reorganized first, and this was the tax reform of Chosroes, the results of which lasted into Islamic times.

F. Altheim has studied the tax reforms of Chosroes in detail and is convincing in his conclusions that the great landed nobility previously enjoyed great privileges in exemption from taxation, but as a result of the seizure of lands by common folk during the Mazdakite movement, there was great confusion in claims of land ownership. All land was to be surveyed and taxed in the same way everywhere, while revenues which formerly frequently went to the nobles were to come into the central government treasury. It is possible, as Altheim asserts, that the indictio or tax reform of Diocletian, the joining of the Roman iugatio and capitatio into one tax system collected three times a year, provided the prototype for Chosroes' reforms, but this is inference. It is related in a number of sources that taxes were levied on the produce of land, fruits and grains, but frequently the produce was spoiled before it could be assessed for tax purposes. Under the new system the land was measured, the water rights determined and yearly average rates were set for the land which produced grain, other rates for land which had date palm and olive trees according to the number of the producing trees, and other reforms of which we only have hints.

The tax reform was followed by a reform of the army which was changed from the previous practice of the great feudal lords providing their own equipment and bringing their followers and retainers into the field, to another system with a new force of dehkans or 'knights,' paid and equipped by the central government. It is interesting to note that both the number, as well as the die quality, of coins of Chosroes I increases and improves greatly compared to earlier issues, and the iconography of the coins becomes more stereotyped. Also, it should be remarked that the army reorganization under Chosroes was concentrated on organization and on training, rather than any new weapons or technical advances, and as previously the heavily-armed cavalry remained the dominant force with archers less important. The masses, as usual, were still camp followers and little more than a rabble looking for booty, but a new nobility of service was created which became more influential than the landed nobility. Since payment in specie or even in kind did not suffice to recompense the 'knights,' villages were granted to them in fief, and a large class of small landowners came into existence. The ruler also divided the kingdom into four military districts with a spahbad or general in charge of forces in each part with the primary task of defending Iran from external foes. Walls and forts were also built on the frontiers, but in this policy Chosroes was only continuing the policy of his predecessors, while new roads, bridges and many buildings have been attributed to Chosroes, whether true or not.

The army was tested in the resumption of hostilities with Byzantium, and fortunately we have a detailed account of the war from Procopius. The reasons for a new war were many, not the least of which were embassies from the Ostrogoths in Italy, who were conquered by Justinian, and pressure from some Armenians and Arabs, both eager for war. So Chosroes broke the peace and invaded Syria in 540 moving south of the usual path of armies. He took several towns and received tribute from others and soon was before the walls of Antioch, which had suffered greatly from several earthquakes in 525-526, and it was poorly defended making conquest easy for the Persians. Chosroes pillaged and burned the city taking many captives, after which peace was made with Justinian who paid the Persians a large indemnity. On his return, however, Chosroes obtained ransom from a number of Byzantine cities on his way. Because of these activities Justinian renounced the truce just concluded and prepared to send Belisarius, who had been successful in Italy and North Africa, against the Sasanians.

After returning, Chosroes built a new city, strictly following the model of Antioch, near Ctesiphon, and he settled his captives from Antioch in it calling it the presumptious title Weh Antiok Khusrau (Better than Antioch [has] Chosroes [built this]), but it was called Rumagan, 'town of the Greeks' by the local inhabitants, and al- Rumiyya by the Arabs. He is said to have founded several other towns and erected walls at Derbend. The following year the Sasanians took advantage of the request of emissaries from the king of Lazica to send an army to support him against Byzantine encroachments, and at first they were successful capturing a Byzantine fortress on the Black Sea coast called Petra and establishing a protectorate where Sasanian rule had never before penetrated. Belisarius in Mesopotamia ravaged the country around Nisibis, but no decisive battle was fought, and the Byzantine general was recalled by Justinian and sent to the west. In 543 a Byzantine army suffered defeat in Armenia, and Chosroes was encouraged to again invade Syria, and he besieged Edessa, now more important than Antioch, but he was repulsed and retreated with the payment of a ransom. A five-year truce was then concluded between the two empires and Chosroes received two thousand pounds of gold. In Lazica the inhabitants revolted against Persian control, and a Byzantine force was sent in the fourth year of the truce to aid the local populace to oust the Persians, and as a result the Lazic war continued for a number of years.

Both Procopius and Agathias stress the strategic importance of Lazica, and if we view the Lazic war as a prelude to the ambitious dreams of Chosroes to control the trade of the silk route to China and the sea way to India, as indicated by his interventions later with the Turks and in Yemen, then the Byzantine authors may have correctly discerned the far-reaching plans of the Persians. In the Lazic war Chosroes finally lost, and negotiations were begun with Byzantium in 556 which led to a fifty-year peace treaty signed in 561, by which the Persians evacuated Lazica for an annual payment of gold. The treaty and a description of the sealing of the documents can be found in Menander Protector, giving an insight into contemporary diplomatic protocol.

In the east a new force had appeared in Central Asia, the Turks, who attacked the Hephthalites defeating them. Chosroes, taking advantage of the disunity of Hephthalite princes and apparently the absence of a central authority among them, about 557-558 annexed some Hephthalite principalities south of the Oxus River, while the Turks extended their hegemony north of the river. The main Hephthalite domains, however, were not annexed by the Sasanians, for under the son and successor of Chosroes they caused much trouble. The initial cordiality between the Turks and Chosroes soon changed, possibly because of the hope of Chosroes to dominate trade between Central Asia, China and India and the West. Later relations between the Turks and Persians deteriorated, and in 568 a Turkish embassy, recorded by Menander, arrived in Byzantium to make an alliance against the Persians, but nothing came of the proposed two front attack on Sasanian Iran.

The hostilities in the north between the two empires were matched by competition in the Arabian peninsula especially Yemen, where the Ethiopians, who had been converted to Monophysite Christianity, sent an army in 522 against the Himyarites, the dominant power in south Arabia at that time.lS A local leader Dhu Nuwas defeated the Ethiopians and sought aid from Iran, while the Ethiopians turned to the Byzantines who responded with ships and supplies. The king of Ethiopia led his troops across the ed Sea in 525, defeated and killed Dhu Nuwas and installed an Ethiopian protege as king of the Himyarites. The success of the Ethiopians led to an embassy to them from Justinian in 531, reported by Procopius, who says the Byzantines suggested that the Ethiopians could force the Persians out of the India trade. Nothing came of this, since an Ethiopian general, Abraha, seized power in the Himyarite kingdom sometime between 532 and 535 and established an independent state which he ruled until his death in 569 or 570, the 'year of the elephant' or the year of the birth of the prophet Muhammad. Several years afterwards Ma 'd-Karib, one of the sons of Abraha, fled from his half-brother who had succeeded to the throne, and he secured the support of Chosroes. The latter sent a fleet and a small army under a commander called Vahriz to the area near present Aden and they marched against the capital San'a'l which was occupied. Saif, son of Mard-Karib, who had accompanied the expedition became king sometime between 575 and 577. Thus the Sasanians were able to establish a base in south Arabia to control the sea trade with the east. Later the south Arabian kingdom renounced Sasanian overlordship and another Persian expedition was sent in 598 which was successful in annexing southern Arabia as a Sasanian province which lasted until the time of troubles after Chosroes II.

In 565 the emperor Justinian died and was succeeded by Justin II, who resolved to stop subsidies to Arab chieftains to restrain them from raiding Byzantine territory in Syria. A year earlier the Sasanian governor of Armenia, of the Suren family, built a fire temple at Dvin near modern Erevan, and he put to death an influential member of the Mamikonian family, which touched off a revolt which led to the massacre of the Persian governor and his guard in 571. Justin II took advantage of the Armenian revolt to stop his yearly payments to Chosroes for the defense of the Caucasus passes. The Armenians were welcomed as allies, and an army was sent into Sasanian territory which besieged Nisibis in 572, but dissension among the Byzantine generals not only led to an abandonment of the siege, but they in turn were besieged in the city of Dara, which was taken by the Persians, who then ravaged Syria and caused Justin to sue for peace. Justin was succeeded by Tiberius, a high Byzantine officer, in 574 who made a truce with Chosroes, but it was not concluded, and in the following year the Persians invaded Armenia where they were at first successful. Then, as so frequently in the wars between the two empires, fortune changed, and the Byzantines gained many local successes. Attempts to negotiate a peace in 576 failed after a great Sasanian victory over the Byzantines in Armenia. In 578 a new Byzantine commander Maurice captured several Sasanian strongholds, but the Armenian revolt came to an end with a general amnesty from Chosroes, which brought Armenia back into the Sasanian Empire, and peace negotiations between the two great powers were under way when Chosroes died in 579.

It is impossible to do more than summarize the achievements of Chosroes and to list the various developments in political, social and cultural matters during his reign. So much is ascribed to Chosroes in later Islamic writings that it is diflficult to determine how much is fact or fable. Certainly much that we find in state organization, taxes and the like, in Islamic times had their origins in the state reforms under Chosroes, or in changes which occurred during his reign, and the tendency of peasants in Iran today to assign any obviously pre-lslamic bridge, caravanserai or other structure to Chosroes 'of the immortal soul' is testimony of the impression he made on his contemporaries. Even foreign writers inimical to Chosroes were somewhat awed by the imposing figure of the Sasanian ruler, cruel and hard but worthy of respect.

Although history, especially in Iran, has been limited to urban, elite groups, the basis of support of an Iranian government or culture was the rural peasantry, and during the Mazdakite upheaval, even the peasantry influenced events. It may be exaggerated to say that Iran was changed from a feudal land into an empire after Chosroes, for castes continued, with the scribes or bureaucracy added to the traditional Indo-lranian three-caste system of priests, warriors and common folk. In a sense the landowning elite gave way in influence to a bureaucratic elite tied to the crown. The direct taxes levied on the land and on the peasants greatly reduced the 'middle-man' role of the landed nobility between common folk and the court. Although we have no statistics and only fragments of data, one may speculate that in the long run the reforms of Chosroes caused problems for the peasants, because a substantial shift in peasant settlement patterns from old irrigated lands to new dry-farming lands seems to have occurred. The massive irrigation systems of Chosroes on the plains, aided by dams and canals, may have at first aided an expansion of agriculture, but the centralization perhaps robbed the local people of initiative with the result of a decline in population on the plains with a consequent growth of towns. On the plateau we have no information but urban development was certainly much smaller than in Mesopotamia. Also Mesopotamia and Khuzistan were easier to administer by the central government.

The urban development in Khuzistan can be linked to the great expansion of trade under Chosroes I. The state now tended toward monopolistic control of the trade with luxury goods assuming a far greater role in the trade than heretofore, and the great activity in building of ports, caravanserais, bridges, and the like was linked to trade and to urbanization. The Persians dominated international trade, both in the Indian Ocean and in Central Asia and South Russia in the time of Chosroes, although competition with the Byzantines was at times intense. Sasanian settlements in Oman and Yemen testify to the importance of the trade with India, but the silk trade with China, as we shall see, was mainly in the hands of the Sogdians.

For trade or defense reasons Chosroes practiced the ancient transfer of populations from one part of the empire to another as one can see by the addition of bishoprics to the realm of eastern Christianity, as well as by many notices of such shifts in the sources. He also welcomed refugees from the Byzantine Empire such as the philosophers from the school at Athens which had been closed by Justinian in 529. They became homesick, however, and Chosroes negotiated their return in a peace treaty according to Agathias, but he still had many medical doctors and sages at his court. On the intellectual side of his court, translations were made into Middle Persian from Greek, Syriac and Sanskrit, and many stories have been preserved in later Arabic and Persian works on the chief minister and sage Buzurjmihr, to give him the Arabic form of his name. The introduction of the game of chess to Iran from India is tied with his name, and although many scholars have considered him to be a fiction, Christensen not only argues his real existence but identifies him with a medical doctor called Burzoe, also at the court of Chosroes. Connected with the name of Chosroes I are many wise sayings in Islamic works and collections of such andarz are many, such that it is highly probable that this Sasanian monarch became the origin of many apocryphal stories in later works. In the realm of religion many Middle Persian books are said to have been written in the time of Chosroes, although it should be remembered thatjust as Shapur I and II are confused in later works, so are Chosroes I and II. The Pahlavi books, as well as Islamic sources, imply that Chosroes I was tolerant of religions other than Zoroastrianism, which he ordered cleared of heresy, and most scholars agree that the final and fixed form of later, dualistic Zoroastrianism traces its origins back to the reign of Chosroes I.

If we turn to the visual arts, again the pomp and glory of the reign of Chosroes strike the observer. Many Sasanian silver objects date from the time of Chosroes, although dating is frequently exceedingly difficult. One reason for problems in identifying or dating Sasanian art is the lack of a 'Zoroastrian' art and an artistic symbolism matching Christian and Buddhist art, although decoration perhaps predominated in late Sasanian art over representation, and much of the geometric or floral nature of Islamic art seems to have had its origins in Sasanian Iran. Even though one can hard!y speak of a 'Zoroastrian' art, all specialists agree that Sasanian art, like its predecessor the art of the Achaemenids, is a royal art with plenty of royal symbollsm. Much more than trade and commerce, art was bound to the court and the wlshes of the ruler, and it seems that, just like the coinage, the silver plates, textiles, even glassware and pottery, not to mention architecture, all came from royal workshops or related establishments. Whether Sasanian art is primarily derived from Hellenistic art or is more dependent on ancient Iranian and Near Eastern traditions is a matter for art historians and need not concern us here, but whatever the origins, Sasanian motifs, such as the mythical bird, the senmurv, are found on art objects from India, China and the western world, evidence of the importance of Sasanian culture in the realm of the arts.

It is not possible here to even mention the many aspects and problems of Sasanian art, except to note several features which exemplify the nature of political power and pomp of the Sasanian rulers. The monumental architecture, such as the Qala-ye Dukhtar and palace of Ardashir at Firuzabad, the Taq-e Kisra in Ctesiphon, if not built by Chosroes at least enlarged or completed by him, and others, all express the pride and wealth of the Sasanians. The symbolic quality of the representational art of the Sasanians too strikes one, for representation of kingly glory may be seen in many forms, such as the mountain goat with a ribbon around its neck, the head of a wild boar, tulips, winged creatures, or even leaves, all from nature yet not represented in their natural forms but heraldic in nature. In other words, the art objects may not have been made for the royal court but they appear as though they were. This 'centralization' of only a few art motifs repeated many times expresses the ideals of the imperial state and society after Chosroes I. It is interesting that much more has been written about the arts of the Sasanians, and they have been far more studied, than has been the political, social or economic history of Sasanian Iran.

One branch of Sasanian art which was widespread among the populace but which also displayed the royal motifs mentioned above, and has repercussions in other areas, is that of sphragistics, for in antiquity people used seals instead of signatures. On many thousands of Sasanian seals or seal impressions on clay, we find a large repertolre of motifs including figures or busts, as well as official seals only with writings. For Sasanian onomastica the seals are invaluable, and we find personal names such as Mihr Bokht or Zurvandad, which, however, do not mean that those who held these names were followers of a separate religion of Mithraism or Zervanism but they were simply Zoroastrians. Others were named after a fire temple, a day of the month, or for rnany other reasons. Perhaps more important than private seals, which usually give us only a symbol or design but sometirnes the name and title of the owner and rarely other information, were the 'official' seals with writing alone which tell us about administrative divisions of provinces as well as titles, and no personal names, since they were seals of offices not of persons. The vast majority of these seals date from the time of Chosroes I or later, and we have an interesting passage from the Matigan which substantiates the evidence of the seals and sealings themselves It goes as follows: "Furthermore, thus, the seal of usage (official seal) of the mobads and of the hamarkar (official of finances) was first (introduced) by order of Kavad son of Peroz and that of the judge (datavar) first by order of Chosroes son of Kavad. When the seals of the mobads of Fars were carved, it was written not the mobad in the name of his mobad quality, but in the name of the 'advocate of the poor,' and for this reason it was carved on the seal of the mobad of Fars in this manner. Seals, of course, were ancient in the Near East and seem to have been the predecessors of writing. In Babylonia the vast majority of clay sealings were economic in nature, and persons responsible for commercial transactions put their seal mark on goods and records of dellveries of goods. Priests participated in transactions and in control over trade and both sealings and cuneiform tablets relating to trade and legal matters have been found in temples in ancient Mesopotamia. Since the Sasanians were part of a tradition of conservatism it should cause no surprise to find priests acting as witnesses and as udges and custodians of records in various transactions of a village, city or a province in Sasanian Iran. The two storehouses where Sasanian clay sealings have been found in a room of the fire temple at Takht-e Sulaiman in Azerbaijan and at Qasr-e Abu Nasr or old Shiraz, held records of various transactions in the form of clay sealings, covering a time span of several generations at the end of the Sasanian period One controversy still unresolved is to what were the clay sealings originally attached before they were placed m their archives? One view is that they were attached to rolled documents, while another is that they were attached to oods before being removed to the archives. In the archives these sealings may have had tags or even documents attached to them for identification, but it is difficult to believe that only documents were originally attached to these sometimes large and heavy pieces of clay of so many different forms.

From sealings, as well as from later Arabic sources, one may reconstruct the provincial subdivisions of Sasanian Iran after Chosroes, under the four military divisions. The province was subdivided into kura (from Greek xvpa?) also called osan, which in turn were divided into rostak (Ardbic rustaq) or tasug. This division, as well as the nomenclature, was not at all uniform throughout the empire and over time designations changed, just as the dehkan, once a noble, became a peasant today. Likewise, the administration, loyal to the court and central government, was imposed on the landowning caste system, and sometimes the two clashed in the exercise of power and authority. The difficulty of determining provincial subdivisions in Sasanian times, especially in the lowlands of Khuzistan and Mesopotamia, is compounded by changes in boundaries and in names made by various Sasanian rulers at the end of the dynasty. We may assume that the information provided by Arabic sources relates mainly to the situation after Chosroes II Parviz. The division of the empire into four parts, after the points of the compass, by Chosroes I was more for military or defense purposes than for civil administration, although it must be admitted that we are not informed about the civil organization which was formed beside the military governor (spahbad) and his assistant (?) (padgospan). To go into details on administrative geography would far exceed the limits of this book, and we must restrict ourselves in brief to Iran proper.

Fars province, the Sasanian homeland, was probably a model for the rest of the empire, and we know there were five kuras, designated by the major cities in them, Istakhr, Arrajan, Bishapur, Ardashir Khwarreh and Darabgird. The first, where the governor resided, and the largest, extended east to Yazd. Arrajan was called Weh az Amid Kavad 'better than Amida has Kavad (built this)' or Wamqubad in Arabic or Bizamqubad on coins. Ardashir Khwarreh was also called Gur, present Firuzabad. The divisions of Khuzistan province are unclear, for different Arabic sources give various provincial subdivisions, but there were at least seven, since Khuzistan, although much smaller than Fars, was richer agriculturally and was more heavily populated. The largest kura was Hormizd-Ardashir (called Hormizshahr or Suq al- Ahwaz by the Arabs), present Ahwaz. Other kuras were Rustaqubad (in Arabic the area of 'Askar Mukram), Shustar, Susa, Jundeshapur, Ramuz and Dauraq, but over time changes were many in this province. For other provinces, especially on the plateau, we have much less information which is also confusing. Changing of provincial and local boundaries was made for many reasons, but such changes were mountains and rivers, kept divisions fairly constant, and the administrative subdivisions of Fars province, for example, have remained much the same throughout history although towns in them rose and declined.

Enough has been said to indicate the great significance of the reign of Chosroes I, and even though much has accumulated around his name and reign which should not be attributed to him, nonetheless the achievements of Chosroes were outstanding. Yet in the long run they did not insure lasting loyalty to the dynasty, and they did not rectify the grave defects of the caste system of society. On the contrary, the centralization of power and authority left local officials with little initiative and much resentment, at least in regard to the central power, such that the Islamic invaders, after the defeat of the imperial armies in three great battles in the west, had only local opposition, with little thought of unity to defend the empire. But the weakness of Sasanian Iran at that time was in no small measure the result of both internal and external fighting in the empire and the lack of rulers with the personal influence and power of a Shapur or Chosroes.

THE LAST RULERS

Hormizd IV, son of Chosroes and a Turkish princess given in marriage to the Sasanian monarch to promote good relations between the two states, inherited the war with Byzantium. Attempts by Tiberius to end the war between the two empires failed, mainly because the Persians refused to surrender the city of Dara and also demanded a large annual subsidy. The Byzantine general Maurice was successful against the Persians in Mesopotamia, but in 582 the death of Tiberius caused Maurice to go to the capital to mount the throne, and he was replaced by incompetent generals who were defeated, and the war continued with attacks and counter-attacks. More threatening, however, was an invasion of the Turks into the northeastern part of the Sasanian Empire. Fortunately Iran had a brilliant general of the Mihran family called Bahram Chobin who decisively defeated the Turks at a great battle near Herat in 589, reported in a number of sources. The chronology and events in this period have been studied in detail with few large problems remaining, except the usual details of chronology and verifiability, so unlike most of ancient Iranian history. After his defeat of the Turks Bahram Chobin is reported to have crossed the Oxus and secured much booty, but so much fable is intertwined with the deeds of Bahram that it is difficult to tell fact from fiction, and furthermore stories about Bahram Chobin and Bahram Gor are exchanged in the tales about both Bahrams. It is unlikely that the ruler killed by Bahram in the east was the king of the Western Turks, but more likely a subordinate ruler. Whether the Turkish attack on Iran was a well-coordinated plan together with Byzantine and Arab diversions in the west with the aim of ending a Sasanian monopoly on east-west trade is possible but mere surmise. The popular general was then sent to the Caucasus area, and although Theopylactus says that the Persians were the aggressors, the hostilities between the two empires had not been resolved, and Bahram's initial success was a continuation of the struggle. But in a minor engagement Bahram was defeated by the Byzantines, and this led to his revolt in Iran.

Hormizd suppressed the great nobility and protected the weak, which indicates a continued opposition to the policies of Chosroes, and it seems clear that internal affairs in Iran were most unsettled. Bahram's demotion and revolt, attributed to the jealousy of Hormizd in the sources, surely had deeper roots in the unhappiness of the nobility with their ruler, for Bahram was supported by the nobility on all sides. Troops sent to attack Bahram deserted to him, and Bahram marched on Ctesiphon late in the year 589. The aristocracy did not support Hormizd, and the religious leaders also were not happy with the tolerance and even friendship of Hormizd towards Christians and other non-Zoroastrians, so the ruler was abandoned. A palace revolt freed the nobles Hormizd had imprisoned, and the rebels were led by two brothers-in-law of the monarch, called Bindoe and Bistam; Hormizd was seized and blinded. In February 590 Chosroes Abarvez or Parviz 'the victorious' was raised to the throne, and shortly thereafter Hormizd was put to death. Bahram, however, was not reconciled to the son of Hormizd, and hostilities broke out at Hulwan, but Chosroes, seeing that he could not defeat the experienced general, fled to Ctesiphon and then to the Byzantine frontier, and at Circesium in March 590 he was received by the governor who communicated the request of Chosroes for asylum and aid to regain his throne to Emperor Maurice in Constantinople. Chosroes was granted asylum in Hierapolis until a decision about aid to him could be reached. Both Bahram and Chosroes promised the ceding of a number of frontier towns to the Byzantines, if they would support one or the other.

The course of events leading to the restoration of Chosroes II are known from Theophylactus and Theophanes as well as from Arabic sources, and the rule of Bahram lasted only a year. Legitimacy of the house of Sasan played a role in the erosion of support for the usurper Bahram, and Nisibis was the first important city to defect to Chosroes and his Byzantine allies. Bindoe the uncle of Chosroes, who had accompanied him into exile, was sent with an army to Armenia to outflank Bahram, who was defeated in the lowlands and lost Ctesiphon. He retreated to Azerbaijan but was finally defeated and fled to the Turks in Central Asia where he received asylum, until he was assassinated after a year. Thus ended the reign of Bahram who, more than his soverign, captured the emotions of Persian bards and story tellers, but peace did not return to the land.

Chosroes had to cede territory to Byzantium, reward hls supporters and punish his uncles, who had been instigators of the d:ath of his father. He put to death Bindoe, but Bistam escaped and became a rebel in the Elburz mountains. Gathering former partisans of Bahram Chobin around him, Bistam was able to maintain independence and even expand his authority, striking coins and ruling the northeastern part of Iran. It was not until 601 that the rule of Chosroes was restored over all of the empire which had been greatly weakened by the civil wars.

Peace and good relations were maintained with the Byzantines tnoughout the rule of Maurice in spite of raids of the Ghassanid Arab clients of the Byzantines into Sasanian territory in 600, but the murder of the Byzantine emperor and the seizure of the throne in Constantinople by Phokas, an officer, in 602 changed the situation. Chosroes used this as a pretext for opening hostilities and, when an emissary from the new Byzantine emperor arrived, he was imprisoned. Phokas was faced with revolts all over the empire, and Edessa, which had replaced Antioch as the most important city in the general area of northern Syria, was besieged by an army sent by Phokas. Chosroes in 604 sent an army against the forces besieging Edessa who were defeated, and the Persians briefly occupied the city. Dara also fell after a siege in 605, and Chosroes resolved to carry the war into the heart of enemy territory. One army sent into Armenia was completely successful and continued westward invading Cappadocia, while in 607 a renewed Sasanian invasion of the west captured more towns. In 610 Phokas was overthrown and killed, and Heraclius became emperor with the resolve to make peace at once with Chosroes. The latter refused, however, and war continued with more Persian successes. In 613 Damascus was captured and in the following year Jerusalem, where among other booty the true cross was taken to Ctesiphon. In 615 a Persian general marched to Chalcedon opposite Constantinople, while in 617 the king of the Avars appeared before the land walls of the Byzantine capital. Emperor Heraclius almost left the city in despair for north Africa, especially after Egypt, the main source of grain for the empire, was occupied by the Persians in 619.

Although Chosroes had succeeded in extending the frontiers of the Sasanian Empire almost to the limits of the Achaemenid Empire, Heraclius had not been crushed, and indeed he made a number of radical changes in his empire, dividing it into large military zones, the theme system, each under a military officer, and local people rather than mercenaries were enrolled in the armies. A crusade began, supported by the populace as well as by contributions of the church. Since the Byzantines controlled the seas, Heraclius resolved on a bold stroke, and in 622 he sailed into the Black Sea with an expeditionary force which penetrated into Armenia where Sasanian forces were defeated. The Avars were constrained to a peace by payment of a large tribute, but Chosroes still refused to make peace. In the following year Heraclius repeated his previous feat and defeated Sasanian detachments led by Shahin who formerly had reached Chalcedon, and Shahrbaraz, anther top general of Chosroes. Heraclius penetrated into Azerbaijan and captured and plundered the Sasanian fire temple and sanctuary Adur Gushnasp at Ganzak or Shiz. Heraclius did not leave Azerbaijan in the winter as expected but retired northwards into winter quarters_ Chosroes decided to copy the bold stroke of Heraclius, and outdo the audacity of the Byzantines, by capturing Constantinople with the aid of the Avars. But Byzantine sea power prevented any success of the allies; Heraclius did not return, and the gamble failed. Heraclius, still on Iran's territory, was not idle but had made an alliance with the Turkish Khazars, who had established a state north of the Caucasus, and in late 627 the Khazars and Byzantines moved south through Azerbaijan reaping booty with little opposition. Heraclius moved farther south to the plains of Mesopotamia, and in desperation Chosroes recalled all of his forces from Anatolia. Before any opposition to Heraclius could be organized, the latter captured Dastagird in 628, east of Ctesiphon, where Chosroes had a large palace complex and much riches. Then Heraclius again withdrew north in Mesopotamia to winter quarters.

Chosroes had failed but whether he sought a scapegoat in Shahrbaraz,who revolted, or whether a large conspiracy dethroned the ruler, the king was imprisoned and killed with the connivance of his son Shiroe at the end of February 628. Shiroe took the name Kavad and ascended the throne as Kavad II. He at once began peace negotiations with Heraclius and the stalus quo before the war was restored with prisoners exchanged, relics and booty restored, and Sasanian troops evacuated from all Byzantine possessions. Kavad's reign had lasted less than a year when he died, probably in an epidemic, to be succeeded by his infant son Ardashir III. Shahrbaraz, head of a large army, decided to seize the throne himself, and he marched on Ctesiphon, defeated forces sent against him and killed the young king. Shahrbaraz himself was murdered after less than two months' rule. Since no son of Chosroes was alive, the nobles raised his daughter Boran to the throne, but she died after ruling little more than a year. A succession of rulers followed, each ruling only a few months, including Azarmedukht, sister of Boran, Peroz II, Hormizd V and Chosroes IV (since a Chosroes III had ruled for a short time in the eastern part of the empire). At the end, the nobles found a grandson of Chosroes alive, a certain Yazdagird son of Shahriyar, in Istakhr in a fire temple. He was to be the last of the Sasanian kings and, ascending the throne in 632, he had little time to rule.

The long reign of Chosroes II was not only known for the internal as well as external strife but also for the luxury, or even decadence, of the court. For example, the throne of Chosroes II was famous in legend for its luxury and the rock carving of a hunting scene of the king at Taq-e Bustan indicates the sumptuousness of even such a mundane affair. His palaces at Dastagird and at Qasr-e Shirin, supposedly named after his queen, are noted in legends for their opulence. The famous musician Barbad lived at his court, and a certain degeneracy appears from accounts of life at the court, and that more than patronage of the arts or philosophers seem to have been the hallmark of Chosroes II.

The revolts of Bahram Chobin and Bistam reveal weaknesses in the system of Chosroes I, since the nobility was basically unwilling to support the throne, although they were still conservative enough to demand a Sasanian prince as ruler rather than a usurper to the throne. One mistake of Chosroes II, which was to have future consequences, was the imprisonment and execution of Nu'man III, king of the Lakhmids of al-Hira about 600, presumably because of the failure of the Arab king to support Chosroes on his flight to the Byzantines. Afterwards the central government took over the defense of the western frontiers to the desert and the buffer state of the Lakhmids vanished. Soon the Arabs of the peninsula invaded lower Iraq and it was only four years after the accession of Yazdagird that his chief general Rustam was declsively defeated and killed at the battle of Qadisiyya near al-Hira. The following year Ctesiphon was taken by the Arabs. Attempts to rally forces on the plateau failed and in 642 the rest of the imperial Sasanian army was destroyed at the battle of Nihavend. Just as with the last of the Achaemenidsl so Yazdagird fled to the east and took refuge with the marban of Merv; the latter, however, resolved to be rid of an unwelcome guest, but Yazdagird fled and hid in a mill where he was murdered in 651. Thus the Sasanian Empire went on the same road as the Achaemenid, and to the outside observer, removed from both by many centuries, the similarities in their final years strike one more than the differences. Details of the fall of the Sasanian Empire however, belong to the history of Islam and the Arab conquests, of which we have a veritable plethora of sources in comparison with Sasanian history.

The last century of the empire saw an increase in converts to Christianity, and the expansion of bishoprics to the east can be found in the acts of the Nestorian synods. Not only did the richest part of the empire, the lowlands of the Tigris-Euphrates become predominantly Christian, with Monophysites gaining ground against the Nestorians at the end of the empire, but the plateau too saw an increase in churches. Thls does not mean, however, that the Sasanian state was becoming Christian just before the Islamic era, as some have suggested. The state religion was still upheld by all of the rulers, even though it had become a faith primarily of rituals and taboos. It had a great disadvantage in comparison to Christianity and Islam in that it was not an oecumenical religion actively seeking converts, and it was bound too closely to the Sasanian state and its fortunes. One might say that in the later years of the Sasanian Empire the state dominated the church, whereas in the west the reverse seems more true, or perhaps one could say 'used' rather than 'dominated' in both cases. The organization of minority religions in the Sasanian Empire served to protect Zoroastrianism after the Arab conquest, when the change from dominant, state religion to one of minority status was made, and this enabled Zoroastrianism to survive to the present. The status of Jews and Christians changed little under Islam, except that the model of an imperial state and religion, which influenced their organizations and outlooks, changed to a 'democratic' model, which the Islamic state under the early caliphs was in comparison. In Judaism the end of the Sasanian Empire meant the decline and fall of the exilarchate and the triumph of the rabbinate, much like the 'ulama of Islam. For Manichaeans the end of the Sasanians gave them a chance to come into the open in Iraq and Iran, until later in the 'Abbasid Caliphate they fell vlctims of a persecution. The Nestorian church, on the other hand, experienced a revival with missionaries penetrating to China. Only Zoroastrians soon withdrew into ghettoes, to be followed later bx other minority religions in the Islamic world. It was mainly the Zoroastrian clergy which preserved the Middle Persian writings which explains the loss of so much secular literature. The latter, however, was translated, or paraphrased, into Arabic and later New Persian, but with an Islamic reworking of texts, which makes reconstruction of originals difficult. But in these later, secular writings the heritage of the Sasanians was preserved, and it was a powerful force in the making of Islamic culture.

The last holdout of Sasanian Iran was in the east, and it is to this little studied part of the world that scholars need next to approach--for it seems certain to me that the small states of Central Asia, too, were part of the ancient Iranian world, and their role in bringing Iranian influences to China and to Russia should not be forgotten.

n

HST 372 Middle East: Muhammad to 1800

 

Shahid, "BYZANTINISM AND ARABISM: INTERACTION"

Of the three constituents of Byzantinism -- the Roman, the Greek, and the Christian --it was the last that affected, influenced, and sometimes even controlled the lives of those Arabs who moved in the Byzantine orbit. Something has been said on this influence in the fourth century, and these conclusions may be refined and enlarged with new data for the fifth.

1. Christianity presented the Arabs with new human types unknown to them from their pagan and Peninsular life -- the priest, the bishop, the martyr, the saint, and the monk -- and the Arab community in Oriens, both Rhomaic and federate, counted all of them among its members. In the fourth century, it contributed one saint to the universal Church -- Moses, whose feast falls on the seventh of February -- and in the Roman period it had contributed Cosmas and Damian. In the fifth century the Arab episcopate grew in number, both Rhomaic and federate, as is clear from conciliar lists and from the number of Arab bishops compared to those of the fourth century. As a result, the Arab ecclesiastical voice was audible in church councils, and was at its most articulate at Ephesus in defense of Cyrillian Orthodoxy.

2. The priesthood and the episcopate subjected the Arabs to a new form of authority and discipline to which they had not been accustomed. It was a spiritual form of authority, to which even the powerful federate phylarchs and kings were subject, and it thus induced in the Christian Arabs a new sense of loyalty which was supra-tribal, related not to tribal chauvinism but to the Christian ecclesia. This new loyalty was to find expression on the battlefield. The federate troops under their believing phylarchs fought the fire-worshiping Persians and the pagan Lakhmids with a crusading zeal, and they probably considered those who fell in such battles martyrs of the Christian faith.

3. Christianity influenced the literary life of the Arabs in the fifth century as it had done in the fourth. The conclusions on this are mainly inferential, but less so for poetry than for prose. If there was an Arabic liturgy and a biblical lectionary in the fifth century, the chances are that this would have influenced the development of Arabic literary life, as it invariably influenced that of the other peoples of the Christian Orient. It is possible to detect such influences in the scanty fragments of Arabic poetry and trace the refining influence of the new faith on sentiments. Loanwords from Christianity in Arabic are easier to document, and they are eloquent testimony to the permanence of that influence in much the same way that other loanwords testify to the influence of the Roman imperim.

4. By far the most potent influence of Christianity on the Arabs was that of monasticism. The new type of Christian hero after the saint and the martyr, the monk who renounced the world and came to live in what the Arabs considered their natural homeland, the desert, especially appealed to the Arabs and was the object of much veneration. The monasteries penetrated deep in the heart of Arabia, into regions to which the church could not penetrate. Thus the monastery turned out to be more influential than the church in the spiritual life of the Arabs, especially in the sphere of indirect Byzantine influence in the Peninsula. The monastery was also the meeting place of two ideals -- Christian philanthropia and Arab hospitality. According to Muslim tradition, the Prophet Muhammad met the mysterious monk Bahlra in one of these Byzantine monasteries.

5. The Christian mission to the Arabs, especially if it entailed the trans- lation of some books of the Bible such as the Pentateuch, must have acquainted the Arabs with the biblical concept of their descent from Ishmael. This marked them as a biblical people, gave them a new identity, and, what is more, affiliated them with the first patriarch himself, Abraham. This was not an unmixed blessing to the Christian Arabs, since it carried with it the implication that they were "outside the promise." However, their allegiance to Christianity rid them of this opprobrium, since it affiliated them spiritually with the new people of God. There was, however, a pocket in Arabia where the seed of Ishmaelism was sown, and where it had a different meaning to its Arabs, who apparently harbored no regrets whatsoever that they were descended from Hagar. In the following century the Prophet Muhammad appeared in their midst, and forty years after his birth proclaimed Islam as the true religion of the straight path. In the Koran the first patriarch appears as the founder of pure monotheism, and his son Ishmael appears not as a biblical outcast but as a prophet.

6. One of the most fruitful encounters of Christianity with Arabism took place in northwestern Arabia, in Hijaz, the sphere of indirect Byzantine influence. The federate tribe of 'Udra lived in this region and adopted Christianity quite early in the Byzantine period. Among its many achievements was a special type of poetry, known as 'Udrl or 'Udrite, which was inspired by a special type of love, also called 'Udrn It is practically certain that this type of love and poetry appeared under the influence of Christianity in pre-Islamic times, although it may later have had an Islamic component. It represents the fruitful encounter of the chivalrous attitude toward women in pre-Islamic Arabia and the spiritualization of this attitude through the refining influence of Christianity. Through the Arab Conquests it appeared as amour courtois in western Christendom, whose religion had inspired it in the first instance.

VIII. ARABS IN THE SERVICE OF BYZANTIUM

The sources on the Arabs who were important for the Arab-Byzantine relationship in this pre-lslamic period are neither abundant nor detailed enough to make it possible to draw sketches of the more outstanding among them. For the fourth century, it was not possible to recover the features of more than three figures: Imru' al-Qays, the federate king of the Namara inscription; Mavia, the warrior queen of the reign of Valens; and Moses, the eremite who became the bishop of the federates. For the fifth century it is possible to discuss only four of the figures who served both the Byzantine imperium and ecclesi.

1. Aspebetos/Petrus. The career of this Arab chief was truly remarkable, as he moved through one phase to another. He started as a military commander in the service of the Great King, then became the Byzantine phylarch of the Provincia Arabia, then that of Palaestina Prima, then the bishop of the Palestinian Parembole. The climax of his career was his participation at the Council of Ephesus, where he appears not merely as a subscription in the conciliar list but as an active participant in the debates and a delegate of the Council to Nestorius.

2. Amorkesos. His is an equally remarkable career, and reminiscent of Aspebetos in that he too had been in the service of the Great King before he defected to Byzantium. But unlike Aspebetos he remained a servant of the imperium, not the ecclesia, although he used the latter in his diplomatic offensive. The former chief in the service of Persia entered a second phase of his life when he became a military power in North Arabia, and a third when he mounted an offensive against the Roman frontier which culminated in his occupation of the island of Iotabe in the Gulf of Eilat. Ecclesiastical diplomacy followed his military achievements and resulted in a visit to Constantinople and royal treatment by Leo. He returned, having concluded a foedus with the emperor, which endowed him with the phylarchate of Palaestina Tertia. What is striking in the success story of this Arab chief is his desire to become a phylarch of the Romans in spite of the power base he had established for himself in the Arabian Peninsula. The lure of the Byzantine connection is nowhere better illustrated than in the career of this chief, who preferred to serve in the Byzantine army than to be an independent king or chief in the Arabian Peninsula. This conclusion, which may be safely drawn from an examination of his career, is relevant to the discussion of the prodosia charge trumped up against the Ghassanid phylarchs of the sixth century. All these Arab chiefs gloried in the Byzantine connection and preferred it to their former Arabian existence.

3. Dawud/David. The Salihids were fanatic Christians, and they owe this to the fact that their very existence as federates and dominant federates was related to Christianity -- when a monk cured the wife of their eponym, Zokomos, of her sterility and effected the conversion of the chief. His descendants remained loyal to the faith which their ancestor fully embraced, but of all these Dawud is unique in that toward the end of his life his religiosity increased to the point which possibly made him a monk or an ascetic. He built the monastery which carried his name, Dayr Dawud, and he had a court poet from Iyad and a daughter who also was a poetess. The gentleness induced in him by Christianity,apparently was taken advantage of by a coalition of two of the federate tribes, who finally brought about his downfall. His career presents the spectacle of an Arab federate king who loyally served both the imperium and the ecclesia and payed for this service with his life.

4. Elias. Entirely different in background from all the preceding figures is Elias, the Arab Patriarch of Jerusalem towards the end of the century. While the other three were federate Arabs, Elias was Rhomaic, born in Arabia, either the Provincia in Oriens or the Ptolemaic nome in the limes Aegypti, one of the many Rhomaic Arabs in the service of the imperium or the elesia whose Arab identity has been masked by their assumption of either biblical or Graeco-Roman names. His, too, was a remarkable career in the ecclesiastical rss. He started as a monk in the desert of Juda, associated with St. Euthymius, then drew the attention of Patriarch Anastasius, who ordained him priest of the Church of Anastasia in Jerusalem; finally he became the Patriarch of the Holy City, and engaged in a vigorous administration of his patriarchate. He paid attention to both churches and monasteries and laid the foundation of the Church of the Theotokos in Jerusalem, the splendid church completed in the reign of Justinian and dedicated in 543. He was a strong and stern ecclesiastic who was unwavering in his Orthodoxy, to the point of taking on the emperor Anastasius himself. He paid for this by being exiled to Ayla in 516, where he died. It is possible that he was associated with the translation of a simple liturgy and biblical lectionary into Arabic for the benefit of the various Christian Arab communities scattered in the three Palestines which constituted his ecclesiastical jurisdiction.

These are the four large historical figures in the history of Arab-Byzantine relations in the fifth century. Their careers call for two observations.

(1) They were very different from one another: bishop, phylarch, federate king, and patriarch, but all four were involved in both the imperium and the elesia, a reflection of the intimate and inseparable relationship that obtained between the two in the Christian Roman Empire. Three of them were federate Arabs and one was Rhomaic. The four different careers are also a reflection of the wide range of Arab involvement in the life of the empire and of the new opportunities open to them.

(2) Their careers reflect the profound metamorphosis that each of them experienced as a result of the Byzantine connection. Perhaps that of Aspebetos is the most remarkable: from a pagan chief to a Byzantine phylarch, to a baptized one, to a bishop of the Parembole, to a participant at the Council of Ephesus and a delegate to Nestorius expressing the strong voice of Arab Orthodoxy. Thus his career represents the highest degree of assimilation that a federate Arab could experience.

IX. THE IMAGE

Both streams of Byzantine historiography, secular and ecclesiastical, continue to transmit images of the Arabs in the fifth century. Although the negative image of the fourth century is not dead, there is a marked improvement in that image in both streams of fifth-century historiography.

Ecclesiastical

A new generation of ecclesiastical historians appear in the fifth century, emancipated from the bondage of the Eusebian image of the Arabs as uncovenanted Ishmaelites, outside the promise. These ecclesiastical historians expressed the true spirit of the Christian ecclesia in their vision of the peoples of the limitrophe, including the Arabs. Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret remembered the exploits of Queen Mavia on behalf of Orthodoxy and described the progress of Christianity among the Arabs. It is, however, Theodoret who has the most informative passages on the Arabs.

1. Historia Religiosa. The passage on the Arab Abbas, who became the he-goumenos of the monastery of Teleda, occurs in this work. The importance of this passage is that it enables Theodoret to reflect theologically on the Arabs as a biblical people, the descendants of Ishmael and ultimately of Abraham, and provides him with occasion to describe the spiritual metamorphosis of Abbas from an unredeemed Ishmaelite outside the promise, to participation in the patrimony of Abraham, to membership in the New Israel, the gateway to the Kingdom of Heaven. The spiritual path of Abbas is that traversed by all the Christianized Ishmaelites.

2. Curatio. In this work, "The Cure of Pagan Maladies," Theodoret projects an image of the Arabs in the context of a pagan world peopled by Greeks and barbarians, and tries to argue for the unity of the human species affirmed by Scripture. He reviews the various peoples and tries to discover their respective virtues. When he comes to the Arabs, he grants them "an intelligence, lively and penetrating . . . and a judgment capable of discerning truth and refuting falsehood."

The strong affirmative note sounded by Theodoret is supported and fortified by the ecclesiastical documents of the century, especially those of the two ecumenical councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, in 431 and 451 respectively. The number of Arab bishops, both Rhomaic and federate who participated is remarkable, and they expressed the strong voice of Arab Orthodoxy, first Cyrillian Orthodoxy at Ephesus and then Leonine at Chalcedon. Especially prominent in this expression was Petrus I, the bishop of the Palestinian Parembole, who participated actively at Ephesus and was one of the delegates whom the Council sent to negotiate with Nestorius.

The two evaluations of the Arabs in Theodoret are striking, coming as they do from a distinguished theologian and church historian, and so is the evidence from the Acta of the two ecumenical councils. But even as the image of the Arabs was being improved by the Greek ecclesiastical writers, it continued to suffer at the hands of a Latin church father.

1. Jerome, who inherited his image of the Arabs from Eusebius, continued to write about them as unredeemed Ishamelites, a concept from which, as a biblical scholar and exegete, he could not liberate himself. There was another reason behind Jerome's fulminations against the Arabs. He had lived in the monastic community of the desert of Chalcis and later at Bethlehem. Both were subject to Saracen raids that spelt ruin to monasteries, especially at Bethlehem which was actually occupied by the Saracens. Consequently, he fell back on biblical texts which enabled him to refer to these Saracens as servorm et ancillarm nmerus. His older contemporary, St. Augustine, followed in the steps of those who had written on heresies in the East, and naturally the Arabs appear in his De Haeresibs (sec. 83).

2. On the other hand, another Latin author, Rufinus, spoke in complimentary terms of the Arabs in his Ecclesiastical History, as upholders of Orthodoxy. Indeed, he heralded the new generation of ecclesiastical historians in the East -- Socrates, Sozomen and Theodoret -- who were sympathetic to the world of the barbarians, including the Arabs. But the voice of Rufinus was drowned out by those of the two immensely influential ecclesiastics of the West, Jerome and Augustine, and consequently the image of the Arabs remained dim in the West even before they reached it in the seventh century as conquerors of North Africa and Spain.

Secular

As Rufinus opened a new chapter in the history of the image of the Arabs in ecclesiastical historiography, so did Synesius in secular historiography:

1. In one of his letters, written in 404, Synesius praises the courage of the Arabs, soldiers who had been withdrawn most probably from the Ala Tertia Arabum in the limes Aegypti to fight in Pentapolis. In another passage in the same letter he describes the despair of the passengers on the stormtossed ship that was sailing to Pentapolis and lauds the attitude of the Arab soldiers who were prepared to fall on their swords rather than die by drowning. He even grows lyrical and refers to them as "by nature true descendants of Homer."

That a Greek who was nursed in a tradition that viewed mankind in terms of Greek and barbarian should be so emancipated and, what is more, refer to the Arabs as descendants in spirit of the Homeric heroes is surely extraordinary and calls for an explanation. His city, Cyrene, had no Arabs in it and so there was no friction between his community and the Arabs; as a Neo-Platonist he may have remembered that some important Neo-Platonic figures, such as Iamblichus, were Arab; his anti-German sentiments, which he expressed while he was at Constantinople around 400, may have inclined him toward the Arabs, who had saved Constantinople from the German Goths in 378 after Adrianople; and finally, his literary models on the Arabs, most probably, were authors such as Diodorus iculus, who spoke well ot the Arabs, rather than Ammianus, of whom he was probably unaware.

2. Not only in the works of a Neo-Platonist but also in official imperial documents, the image of the Arabs appears reasonably bright and no longer that of raiders of the frontier or traitors to the Roman cause, undesirable as allies or as enemies. In one of the novellae of 443, Theodosius and Valentinian instruct that the limital dues should not abstract anything from the annona of the foederati, especially the Saracen ones. This could only imply that the central government was happy with their performance and loyalty to the state. The date of the novella, coming so close after the end of the Second Persian War of the reign of Theodosius 11, suggests that the Arab foederati had performed creditably in that conflict. Their performance was consistently satisfactory on the battlefield. The prodosia theme elaborated by Procopius in the sixth century was without any foundation and the satisfaction of the imperium was to find expression in the seventh, in the victory bulletin which Heraclius addressed to the Senate after his victory at Nineveh.

3. This bright image in the secular sources was somewhat dimmed later in the century when Malchus of Philadelphia, himself most probably a Rhomaic Arab, wrote and almost neutralized what Synesius had said about the Arabs. In a long and detailed fragment on the emperor Leo in the penultimate year of his reign, Malchus relentlessly criticized the emperor for his relations with the Arab chief Amorkesos, and by implication gave an uncomplimentary picture of the Arabs even though they became foederati of the empire.

The background of this attack on the Arabs, especially as it was voiced by one of them, is as complex as that which inspired Synesius to draw his picture of the Arabs in bright colors. Four main reasons may be detected behind Malchus' hostile attitude. First and foremost comes Kaiserkritik. The historian was not an admirer of the emperor, and expressed his disapproval of Leo's administration by criticizing his Arab policy. Malchus also wrote as a concerned Rho-naios and an analyst of Roman decline. For him, the barbarians had brought about the downfall of the empire in the West in 476. Leo had depended on another group of barbarians, the Isaurians, and now he was also employing the services of the Arabs, represented by Amorkesos. Malchus wrote not in his native Provincia Arabia, but in Constantinople and under Anastasius. He was an assimilated Rho-maios, like others who came from the Provincia and are hardly recognizable as Arabs. Hence he acquired the ethnocentricity of those who belonged by birth to the Graeco-Roman establishment and voiced their racism with a vengeance. Finally, it is possible, judging from his phraseology, that he was w.iting with a literary model in mind -- Ammianus, whose anti-Arab outbursts, expressed in vivid and graphic phrases, have riveted the attention of posterity, endured throughout the ages, and with staggering tenacity retained their hold on those who have dealt with the image.

In spite of the negative image that secular and ecclesiastical historiography, represented by Malchus and ]erome projected, the image of the Arabs experienced a marked improvement. Toward the end of the century, in the reign of Anastasius, there arose another group of foederati, who possibly became involved from the beginning in Monophysitism. This completely blackened the image of the' Arabs in the sixth century during which both secular and ecclesiastical historiography combined to project a most uncomplimentary image which damned them as traitors to the imperim and heretics to the eclesia. Thus the fifth century is the golden period in the history of the Arab image, unlike the fourth and the sixth, during which it was tarnished mainly by sharp friction with the central government on doctrinal grounds. The coin of Arab identity looked good on both of its sides. To the imperim the Arabs appeared as faithful guardians of the Roman frontier; to the elesia they appeared as conforming Orthodox believers.

The Arab Self-lmage

The significance of two ecclesiastical historians, Sozomen and Theodoret, is immense for the Byantine perception of the Arabs in the fifth century. In addition to the improved image that their works provide, they also, especially Theodoret, have preserved data on the Arabs which strongly suggest that the Arabs of this period perceived themselves as descendants of Ishmael. Whether this perception was indigenous among the Arabs or adventitious, having reached them from the Pentateuch either directly through the spread of Judaism in Arabia or mediated through the Christian mission, is not entirely clear. Its reality, however, is clear and certain, and the idiom of Theodoret even suggests that their perception was mixed with pride in the fact of their descent from Ishmael.

This is the important new element that appears in the fifth century and adds a second mirror to the one that reflects the Byantine perception of the Arabs. In this new mirror, Ishmael is rehabilitated. He is no longer a figure that embarrasses the Arabs through certain biblical associations but a revered ancestor of whom they are proud. This image became a most important element in Arab religious life in the seventh century, which witnessed an even more complete rehabilitaion of Ishmael. In the Koran, Ishmael appears not as the pater eponymous of the Arabs but as the son of the First Patriacrh; Ahraham, and a prophet. The precious passage in the Historia Religiosa of Theodoret proves beyond doubt that the eponymate of Ishmael is rooted in the pre-lslamic Arab past and that it goes back to at least the fifth century.

EPILOGUE

The Sallhids endured for almost a century in the service of Byzantium. They represent the golden period in the history of federate-imperial relations. Unlike the Tanukhids and the Ghassanids, the Sallhid doctrinal persuasion was that of the imperial government in Constantinople. Consequently federate-imperial relations were not marred by violent and repeated friction such as vitiated these relations in the fourth and sixth centuries.

The Salihids fought for Byzantium on the Persian front and distinguished themselves in the two Persian Wars of the reign of Theodosius II. It is also practically certain that they participated in Leo's Vandal Expedition, taking part in the battle of Cape Bon, during which their numbers must have been thinned. This is the most plausible explanation for their ineffectiveness in the defense of the limes Arabic around A.D. 470. Finally, the law of generation and decay which governed the rise and fall of Arab polities before the rise of Islam caught up with them. Powerful Peninsular groups such as the Ghassanids and the Kindites had hewn their way through the Arabian Peninsula and had reached the Roman frontier. The Sallhids, already weakened considerably by their participation in the Vandal War, could not withstand the impact of the combined force of the two new powerful tribal groups. They succumbed in the contest for power and the Ghassanids emerged as the dominant federate group in the sixth century.

Although no longer supreme in federate history in Oriens, the Sallhids remained an important political and military fact in the structure of the federate shield. Their history is divisible into the following phases:

(1) 502 to 529, when they constitute one of the federate groups in Oriens, who obeyed their own phylarchs and the dx of the province to whom they were ultimately subordinate;

(2) 529-580, when they were most probably subordinate to the Ghassanid supreme phylarch, who was installed in that position by Emperor Justinian around 529, and must have continued in that subordinate relation- ship until ca. 580, when Ghassanid-Byzantine relations soured considerably and the Arab phylarchate of Oriens was decentralized;

(3) 580 to 610, during the period of much eclipse for the Ghassanids, when the power of the Sallhids may have been revived or at least made independent of the former, since one of their phylarchs appears fighting with the Byzantines in 586 during the siege of Mardm. Not much is known about them after this period until they appear fighting together with the other federates against the Muslim Arabs. The last mention of them during the Muslim Conquest of Oriens occurs in connection with the capitulation of Chalcis. The Muslim commander asks them to accept Islam, but they refuse.

Unlike other federate groups such as the Iyadis, the Salihids remained staunch Christians throughout the Muslim period. This explains why they attained no prominence in Islamic times. Usama ibn Zayd was the exception: he served four Umayyad caliphs in important administrative roles, his durabil- ity in their service being testimony to his talent. After him the sources are silent on the Sallhids, who dispersed in various parts of the Fertile Gescent and possibly affiliated themselves with other tribes. They appear in one of the verses of Islamic times as an example of dispersion and evanescence worthy of the classical lament of the Arab poet: "ubi snt qi ante nos in mundo fere?"

The other tribes of the federate shield took part in the defense of the limes orientalis and in the Persian Wars. They also protected the caravans that moved along the arteries of international trade in north and northwestern Arabia. The Sallhids did not control these tribes as the Ghassanids were to do in the sixth century. The Arabic sources record feuds among these federate tribes. Two of them, Kalb and Namir, united against the dominant group Sallh, brought about the downfall of the Sallhid king Dawud, and must have weakened the power of Sallh, thus contributing ultimately to the victory of the Ghassanids over them and the emergence of a new federate supremacy, the Ghassanid, which controlled most or all of the other tribes of the federate shield in Oriens for almost half a century.

In addition to their military role, these federate tribes made some impor- tant contributions to Arabic culture in pre-lslamic times. The names of Iyad, Kalb, and 'Udra stand out in connection with the rise of the Arabic script in Oriens in the fifth century and of a new type of love and love poetry, called 'Udrite in Arabic, which represented the confluence of the pre-lslamic chivalrous attitude with Christian ideals of chastity and continence.

All these federate tribes fought on the side of Byzantium in the period of the Arab Conquests. After the crushing defeat at Yarmuk in 636, they dispersed and their history as foederati came to an end. Some of them emigrated to Anatolia, some stayed on in Oriens, now Arab Bilad al-Sham, and formed part of the Umayyad ajnad system. While the Sallhids remained staunchly Christian, some of the other federate tribes accepted Islam, which enabled them to participate actively in the shaping of Islamic history.

Before they made their Byzantine connection, these tribes had moved in the restricted and closed orbit of the Arabian Peninsula. In all probability they would have continued to move in that orbit, and history would not have taken notice of them and their achievements. It was the Byzantine connection that drew them into the world of the Mediterranean and gave an international dimension to their history. One of the three constituents of Byantium, Christianity, termmated their isolation and peninsulailsm by making them members of the large world of Christendom and its universal ecclesia.

Islam was to do what Byzantium had done but in a more substantial way. It made the tribes assume a more active role in shaping the history of the Mediterranean world in both East and West. In the East they formed part of the ajnad, participated in the annual expeditions against the Byzantine heartland, Anatolia, and took part in many sieges of Constantinople. In the West some of them settled on European soil, but their more important role in Spain was cultural. One of these tribes, Iyad, produced the talented family of the Zuhrids, known to medieval Europe as physicians and to Arabic scholars as composers of strophic odes. The influence of another, 'Udra, crossed the Pyrenees, and either gave rise to, or formed one ingredient in, the rise of that attractive type of love known to medievalists as amour courtois. Few readers of the medieval literary works that this type of love inspired realize that they are owed to an Arabian tribe which in the fifth century defended the southern approaches to the limes orientalis of Byzantium as a tribe of the outer shield. And it is mainly to the well-known Iyric of the German-Jewish poet with its haunting couplet that modern Europe owes its vague recollection of that Arab tribe of the fifth century which inspired the rise of this love and gifted it with its own name:

Und mein Stamm sind jene Asra,

Welche sterben, wenn sie lieben.

n n

HST 372 Middle East: Muhammad to 1800

John Haldon, "Pre-industrial States and the Distribution of Resources: the Nature of the Problem," in Averil Cameron (ed), The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East, vol. III, States, Resources and Armies (Papers of the Third Workshop on Late Antiquity and Early Islam), The Darwin Press, Princeton, NJ, 1993, pp. 1-24.

That states need armies, and that they must in consequence dispose of effective means of recruiting, equipping and maintaining them, hardly needs to be demonstrated. But different states have adopted different means of achieving this, and the papers in the present volume seek to explore some aspects of the mechanisms through which the late Roman/early Byzantine and the early Arab Islamic states organised the distribution of resources and structured their armies. The relationship between states and their armies is important both for the state centre, as well as for the state as a wider political and territorial entity. In pre-modern states this is generally mediated through the relationship between the centre and its bureaucracy and administrative apparatus, on the one hand, and between the centre and the dominant social-economic elite(s) and/or locally-rooted power structures, on the other. Bureaucratic elites and dominant local power elites may or may not overlap or be drawn from the same social sources. Depending upon the variations in the equation represented by the three or four elements: state - administrative apparatus - social elite locally legitimate non-central powers - a wide range of possible state formations and legal-constitutional systems has evolved. But the key issue is state power, that is to say, the degree to which the centre can achieve or maintain a monopoly of coercive force, and hence exercise direct control over the resources necessary to its own reproduction and of the administrative machinery through which this is achieved. There is also the question whether states necessarily need to maintain this sort of control or authority in order to survive as states. In addition, certain social-economic and ideological interests are built into this relationship, which will be represented through the factional and political identities evident in the sources.

How do we define a "state"?

[Note: See Haldon's The State and the Tributary Mode of Production (London, 1993); also his "The Army and the Economy: the Allocation and Redistribution of Surplus Wealth", Mediterranean Historical Review, VII/1992, pp. 133-153.]

It seems almost impossible to arrive at a universally accepted general definition which has any real analytic value. But we need to do it, since although our definitions may vary, the idea of the state is central to our attempts to explain how the political formations with which we are concerned evolved. Historians and anthropologists tend to define the state in terms of the questions they wish to ask. As with any definition, therefore, the notion of "the state" must be used as a heuristic tool, rather than as a conceptual strait-jacket which ignores the fundamentally dynamic and dialectical nature of human social praxis. A useful reminder that this is the case is suggested by the fact that forms of rulership reflect the already socially inscribed nature of power relations: whether we describe these relations in terms of Weber's notion of patrimonial or professional bureaucratic structures, for example, should make no difference.

Debate on the state in the last fifteen or so years has tended to place greater emphasis on the autonomy of state structures and institutions to function independently of, or on occasion in opposition to, other elements in the social structure as a whole. At the same time, the non-bounded nature of many aspects of social power has been stressed, so that states can no longer be seen as entirely co-terminous with "societies". This is the more important in view of recent challenges to traditional assumptions about how "societies" are themselves to be conceptualized, according to which the notion of a limited and limiting pool of social practices, forming a distinct social-structural entity, or "society", is being eroded by the suggestion that societies in this monolithic sense rarely exist, that they are more heterogeneous and diffuse in their structuration, and that they should be seen rather as sets of "sociospatial networks of power which overlap and intersect", in which blocks of social power and social-cultural identity are in a constant process of coalescence, consolidation and dissolution. For some scholars, the state has been conceptualised as the key explanatory variable in the historical development of Western society since the late medieval period, particularly where the examples chosen have been of "strong" states, which have evolved interests of their own, not necessarily in accordance with those of the rest of society, and which are able successfully to impose their priorities over those of other social and economic interests, hence forming distinct, bounded socio-political entities. For others, this view has seemed too state-centred, so that an alternative approach has been elaborated, in which state institutions are seen as more closely enmeshed in social-economic structures and the vested interests inscribed in these structures. This approach has led in turn to the suggestion that these relationships are always contested, and that tensions and contradictions existing between the various interests mark out an arena for the resolution of a struggle between a range of (potentially) mutually antagonistic social-economic powers. Particularly important in this context is the notion that states may be autonomous only in certain restricted domains or areas, thus leading to the position that different aspects of state power will come into conflict with each other within the framework of a single state. This is relevant in considering the function of armies in bureaucratic-administrative states such as those under consideration here.

Such reflections are especially important for the question of how preindustrial or pre-modern states have evolved, since patterns of exchange between centres of production at the local and international levels may not necessarily observe political frontiers, nor be easily subordinated to systems of political (fiscal) control. 'Me relation between "centres" and "peripheries" becomes interesting at this point. "Dependency Theory" and "World-Systems Theory" have been evolved to attempt to relate the development of particular centres of political and economic power at certain times to the wider history of the regions which they either colonised. or otherwise dominated and exploited, whether economically, militarily or both. Much of the work in this respect has dealt with the early modern and modem world (taking its cue from the work of Wallerstein, for example), in which the notion that underdevelopment is generated as an effect of the political and economic primacy of a particular zone (a "centre") has been very important, although much criticized when applied to the pre-modern era.

[note: See Eric Wolf, Europe and the People without History, Berkeley, 1982.]

In particular, the much lower levels of technological specialisation and control over exchange and production, especially as regards transport and communications, have been cited as constraints on the ability of centres to exploit dependent and/or peripheral zones as intensively or as effectively as European states have done since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Nevertheless, empirical examination of the ways in which peripheries have reacted back upon centres as the result of a complex process of primary exploitation, the re-siting of centres of production, and the parasitism of the original centre upon its outer margins, has informed a number of recent interpretations of the evolution of ancient empires, exemplified in the work of Hopkins and Whittaker on the imperial economy of Rome.

[note: See C.R. Whittaker, "Late Roman Trade and Traders," in P. Garnsey, K. Hopkins, C. R. Whittaker (eds), Trade in the Ancient Economy, Berkeley, 1983; K. Hopkins, "Taxes and Trade in the Roman Empire (200 B.C. - A.D. 400)", Journal of Roman Studies, LXX/1980, 101-25.]

It has also played an important part in the ideas on the "legionary economy" outlined by Michael Mann, and the strategy of the Roman state argued (much more contentiously) by Luttwak, and in this respect is directly relevant to the issues concerning this colloquium in respect of the ways in which states can extract, control and redistribute resources.

[note: N. E. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire, Baltimore, 1976; for criticism, B. Isaac, The Limits of Empire: The Roman Empire in the East, Oxford, 1990.]

Although our prime concern in these papers is the role of the systems evolved to resource armies and warfare in the context of state or political formations which had already come into being, war-making and military organisation have themselves been considered by some to be constitutive elements in the process of state formation. For example, it has been argued that warfare and war-making are the main mechanisms through which states come into being and consolidate their power, although I would prefer a more open-ended approach in which these elements are part of a context- and conjuncture-determined set of generative factors in which warfare and military organisation are elements in a complex totality of interacting mechanisms. But especially important is the fact that, while the state, on the one hand, as identified and perceived by its members through a specific political ideology, can be understood as existing in a situation of potential conflict with neighbouring political formations, its requirements in terms of manpower and resources may equally bring it into conflict with elements in the society in which it is itself rooted unwilling to contribute to this effort. Conflict with external powers is thus not the only route by which states acquire power over the social networks on which they are founded, although this has been emphasised by several recent writers. Consensus, co-option, coercion or temporary bargaining may result from this, with all the consequences for the evolution of state-social relations and inter-factional conflict which this may produce in each specific social formation.

[note: See especially the work of Hintze, edited in F. Gilbert (ed), The Historical Essays of Otto Hintze, New York, 1975, who stressed the role of early modern European states in compelling and coercing support through the (military) mass conscription of the opulation; and contrast especialy with F. Lane, profits from Power, Albany, 1979 and R. Lachmann, "Origins of Capitalism in Western Europe: Economic and Political Aspects", Annual Review of Sociology, XV/1989, 47-72, who emphasise economic relations between states and elites and the ideological and consensual aspects of the problem in the same period.]

For the purposes of the present debate, drawing on both the older and and the more recent historical and social anthropological work, a state can be understood at the most basic level to refer both to a relatively shortlived grouping of tribal or clan communities united under a warlord or chieftain who is endowed with both symbolic and military authority - in anthropological terms, a "big-man" confederacy; as well as to a more-or-less territorially unified political entity, with a "centre" (which may be peripatetic) from which a ruler or ruling group exercises political authority, and which maintains its existence over more than a single generation. A key element seems to be that the authority of the ruler is recognised as both legitimate and exclusive, and that it is more than simply a reflection of the personal attributes of an individual. In more concrete terms, states might be defined in the first instance as territorially demarcated regions (although there is always the possibility that lands were geographically dispersed and frontiers ill-defined or fluctuating) controlled' by centralised governing or ruling establishments of some sort, which may have a monopoly over the use of coercion, and which may have the power to assert their authority over the territories they claim. How exactly such central authorities achieve these ends varies enormously from state to state and society to society. In most historical states there have been gaps in the extent of state authority - border or mountainous regions, for example, difficult of access and untouched by state supervision; "tribal" groups nominally owing allegiance and occupying territory claimed by the state, but not always easily brought under the state's authority or control. Thus in areas where geography favours a tribal pastoral and/or nomadic economy, the latter have generally formed important elements in the armies of conquest states, certainly in the initial stages of their evolution; but this has also meant that, because of the mobility of such pastoralists, their internal social cohesion and self-sufficiency, and the fact that their wealth is generally easily moved away from the reach of state officials, they are both able and sometimes inclined to resist any central authority that does not directly favour their own interests. While ideological commitment can overcome this at certain times, it remains a short-term means of cementing such power-relationships.

[note: This is not only a pre-modern phenomenon: see, for example, U. Fabietti, "Sedentarization as a Means of Detribalization: Some Policies of the Saudi Government Towards the Nomads", in T. Niblock (ed), States, Society and Economy in Saudi Arabia, London, 1982.]

The very different configuration of power-relationships within the Byzantine, Sasanian and Umayyad states which forms part of the subject of the papers of this colloquium, provides striking examples of the ways in which these features combined.

Perhaps most importantly of all states tend to erect, or try to erect, more complex ideological and legitimating systems for themselves, more impersonalised and institutionalised modes of surplus extraction than, for example, do clan or tribal groupings. They tend to move away from administration based on kinship and lineage relationships and the exploitation of kin-based modes of subordination - necessarily, if they are to maintain their supra-tribal existence and cohesion, on the one hand, their authority on the other. This is a point made by Ibn Khaldun, for example, who saw this process as generally following the initial formation of a supra-tribal political entity from tribal elements under a chieftain of some sort, in which a crucial role was played by religion as a unifying element providing a new, supra-kinship set of relationships, identities and loyalties.

Too precise and prescriptive a definition of what constitutes a state will exclude features found in some state formations but perhaps not in others, however, and so a relatively open-ended account is to be preferred to a closed and descriptive formulation. It is clear that there exist many different shades of "state-ness", both in respect of the degree of actual physical control, in their longevity and in the degree of ideological integration of the varying and often antagonistic elements occupying the territory claimed by a given central authority. As Charles Tilly has pointed out, the differences between the some 500 or so minor or less autonomous political units of Europe in the year 1500, and the major "states", are not so great as to exclude all of the former from being defined under certain' conditions as state-like.

[note: Charles Tilly, "Reflections on the History of European State-Making", in Charles Tilly (ed), The Formation of National States in Western Europe, Princeton, 1975.]

Some historical states have been represented by claims to legitimacy based on consensus, having little or no power of coercion, and have survived generally for only a relatively short time. Those which have military coercion at their disposal, at least in their early stages, may remain relatively isolated from the social structures they live off, surviving only as long as they are able effectively to coerce or persuade support and resources. Others may move towards the establishment of a permanent and self-regenerating body of administrators, which draws its recruits from either specific groups within the state (tribal groups, for example) or from those of a particular social or cultural background (which includes the establishment of slave bureaucracies and armies, deracinated from their original social and cultural context and dependent entirely on the system to which they owe their position). They tend thus to evolve institutional structures - fiscal systems, military organisations and so forth - which establish their own sets of roles and discourses, divorced from the daily practices of "ordinary" society. The state becomes a specialist, and dominant, set of institutions, which may even undertake the creation ab initio of its own administrative personnel, and which can survive only by maintaining control over the appropriation and distribution of surplus wealth which this specialized personnel administers. It is the processes of elimination and selection between different sets of institutions and practices through which this occurs, processes which further or hinder the generation of state power along with the institutional and legitimating characteristics described above, and permit some political formations to survive and evolve into states, and others not, which it is the historian's task to elucidate.

[note: There has been a great deal of discussion in recent years on the nature and form of state power in pre-modern state formations. See in particular, Mann, The Sources of Social Power, who discusses the ways inwhich structures of social power are generated within the institutional framework of state apparatuses, on the one hand, and social praxis, on the other.]

This last point is especially important in respect of the potential for state formations to reproduce themselves, compared with the potential of a particular dynasty with its retinues based upon personal loyalties and notions of honour, obligation and reciprocity, to maintain itself in power over a number of generations. 'Me evolution of a bureaucratic elite which has a sense of its own function within the state/society, identifies with a particular set of ideological and symbolic narratives, and can recruit and train its personnel into the institutional roles and behavioural patterns relevant to the maintenance and even expansion of these structures is a crucial factor, as both Marx and Weber, in the course of very different analyses, long ago pointed out. The relative success of the Roman and Byzantine, Chinese and Ottoman states in this regard, to name just a few examples, provides good illustrations of the ways in which some states evolved stable yet flexible structures sufficient to permit their survival over a long period regardless of often major shifts in dynastic arrangements and the nature of the central authority itself; the failures of the Frankish kingdoms illustrate the fate of political formations which failed to generate such structures. In both cases, the relations between the state in all its forms and the social-economic structures which support it were crucial. In some states problems of both regional and lineage identities (however spurious or artificial the latter may usually in fact have been) dramatically vitiated attempts by a central authority, even when supported by elements of a permanent civil or military bureaucracy, to maintain itself as an effective power with real coercive potential over more than a few generations. The 'Abbasid Caliphate itself can be understood from this perspective, for already by the later ninth century the central power was heavily compromised by the growing autonomy of provincial governors and by generals commanding armies in the central lands. It could be argued that it was only the need to attain ideological legitimacy within Islam which held the wider polity together, and successful religious -ideological opposition in Africa, Egypt and the Arabian peninsula threatened even this. It is important to understand that this was not simply a factor of geography and distance (although they certainly played a role). A whole complex of social, cultural and ideological issues were also involved. A number of medieval and early modern Indian states exemplify similar structural developments (the Vijayanagar empire in the Deccan from the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries, for example); while the Sasanian kingdom, whose Iranian element proved so powerful an influence in the development of Islamic culture and political structures, provides a good example of a remarkably successful dynasty in which these features combined very clearly. For the actual power of the Sasanian royal house depended very largely on two key factors. In the first place, there was an ideological commitment by a powerful group of regional clan or dynastic chiefs (the Sasanian "aristocracy", from whom the royal house was itself drawn) to the legitimacy of the dominant dynasty (which claimed also a certain politicoreligious authority sanctioned both by a claim to ancient lineage and military leadership). In the second place, and as can be found in all state formations, this dominant elite supported the claims to legitimate power and followed the authority of that dynasty as long as the results of Sasanian rule were not in contradiction to their own interests, whether ideological, political or economic. Personalized dynastic rivalries, questions of honour, shame and competition are inevitably also part and parcel of such a picture.

Here we may return to the formula expressed at the beginning of this introduction: namely, that the success or failure of states to survive over a longer or shorter period depends ultimately upon the relationship between other actual or potential centres of social power (spatially or socially) and the rulers and their dependent elite, for control over the appropriation and distribution of resources, whether economic or ideological. In the study of modern states, this has been couched in terms of relationships between strong or weak states and societies, descriptions which attempt to explain variations in the success of states and societies to achieve autonomy from each other in terms of the structure of state apparatuses and institutions, and of social relations, in each case and according to the degree of fragmentation and class conflict. In some cases, a central authority can survive for a long time purely through the manipulation of key ideological and symbolic elements in the cultural system of the social formation as a whole. South Indian temple culture and the attendant state structures, particularly as exemplified in the Chola and Vijayanagar empires, provide classic examples. They also illustrate the central importance of the priesthood and of ideological legitimation in such cases, and illustrate the ways in which a degree of equilibrium between the interests of central state apparatus and various social groups - merchants, priestly groups, warriors and farmer elites - contribute to the maintenance of a relatively strong political formation. It is interesting that the debate on the nature of the modern Indian state, which is strong and plays a visibly directive role in economic development, and yet faces equally strong, highly organised societal structures (kinship/caste groups representing vested economic interests and relationships), is split on the degree of autonomy to be accorded the state.

[note: A. Kohli (ed), The State and Poverty in India, Princeton, 1986; B. Bardhan, The Political Economy of Development in India, Oxford, 1984.]

The implication of these considerations is that states may have an ideological life which is not necessarily tied to their actual political and institutional efficacy or power. Political ideologies and other belief systems, once in existence, are perfectly able to adapt and to survive in conditions which have evolved well away from those within which they originally developed, provided the contradictions between the two are not too extreme or insurmountable in terms of social praxis and psychology. Those which respond to long-term functional needs in human society provide the best examples, and include religious systems in particular, such as Hinduism, Islam or Christianity, for example, which do, to a greater or lesser degree, free themselves in certain respects from both the political and the social and economic conditions which produced them (although they may at the same time constrain the direction of social-economic evolution within those societies). But "political" ideologies too can be extremely flexible. They may provide a rationale for conflict where no visible or obvious reason in terms of competition for material resources exists, for example. And they can also be extremely powerful. Many states were, in effect, little more than territories under the nominal authority of a ruler, but in which actual power was exercised by a tribal-, clan- or family-based. socio-economic elite. The position of such an elite. might originally have depended upon the central ruler and/or the conditions in which the state came into being (by conquest, for example) but, because of their actual control over resources, and other historical conditions, they became in practice independent of the centre. Yet in such cases we find that the very idea of a centralized kingdom or state, together with the residual power of concepts such as honour, loyalty to a particular dynastic succession or set of constitutional arrangements, were enough to maintain at least a fictional unity of identity. I would suggest that the later history of the Byzantine state from the thirteenth century to its final extinction in 1453 exemplifies this particular type of development.

These points suggest that a crucial element in all state formations is that of the degree of consensus and reciprocity (between its own demands and structures, those of social elites, and those of society in general) upon which the state is built, or upon which it comes to depend. This differed enormously between state formations. Some survived only by virtue of their ability to coerce submission and the extraction of surplus wealth on a more-or-less continuous basis. But over the longer term this has not been a particularly effective way of evolving or maintaining state power. Although most states first evolved in the context of such an imbalance, those that have been most successful have usually generated increasingly complex relationships of reciprocity, consensus and interdependence with other elements of society, in particular with leading elements of conquered groups or previous political formations, whether these are tribal and clan leaders, merchant elites, or aristocracies. Many states, established after a relatively brief period of military expansion and conquest, came to rest heavily on such structures, and the Indian examples mentioned already very provide a good illustration of such systems. Equally, the Merovingian kingdom during the sixth and seventh centuries depended very heavily on the support and goodwill of the pre-existing Gallo-Roman elite and the episcopal establishment (the two were anyway very closely integrated), especially in its southern regions,

[note: See especially the valuable discussion of I. Wood, "Kings, Kingdoms and Coonsent", in P. H. Sawyer, I. N. Wood (eds), Early Medieval Kingship, Leeds, 1977/1979; A. R. Lewis, "The Dukes in the 'Regnum Francorum' A.D. 550-751", Speculum, LI/1976, 381-410. Bishops represented a very important focus of spiritual power and authority, backed by sometimes quite extensive ecclesiastical revenues, quite independent of the royal and lay establishment. By the middle of the seventh century, the blending of Frankish and Gallo-Roman elites meant that the episcopate was more closely connected, through kinship, to the secular elites of the Merovingian kingdom.]

while the Ottoman rulers during the fifteenth century in particular relied on their Christian vassals as a counterweight to the power of the Turkish tribal and clan elites both in the Balkans and Asia Minor.

One way of modelling states in which such structures play a fundamental role is as a series of concentric zones of power distribution, focused around a political core. State formations of this type have also been described as "segmentary" states, intended to suggest a multi-centred, confederated political structure in which ideological elements and consensus play as great a role as centrally exercised coercive power. In the southern Indian state of Vijayanagar, such a core region was the source of immediate royal income, while the areas furthest away from the centre of military and political coercion were attached primarily through occasional military expeditions and by connections of a ritual nature. Royal rituals were centred on key religious centres and temples, through whose' religious-ideological authority the rulers reinforced their legitimacy and claims to overlordship, and in return for which they undertook to support such institutions through a variety of endowments, regular gifts in cash and in kind or grants of labour services. It was through their involvement in such rituals that members of dominant social groups could be incorporated within what was in practice a network of royal and spiritual patronage. At the same time, the rituals legitimated more localised authority and power, so that the system as a whole provided a rationale for the prevailing political institutions and social-economic relations. In the Negara state in nineteenth-century Bali it was ceremony and symbolic exemplification of the unity of social and state functions through such ceremony (or "theatre") which kept an otherwise relatively underdeveloped institutional state structure alive, and which thereby reproduced through itself the loyalty of its members.

[note: See Burton Stein, Vijayanagara, Cambridge, 1989, on the evolution of the Vijayanagar state and on the nature and function of ritual incorporation. See also S. J. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer, Cambridge, 1976.]

Very similar points, from the structural perspective, can be made in respect of the 'Abbasid Caliphate from the tenth century: the central zone and its revenues were crucial to the continued existence of the ruling house (and its military patrons), while occasional military coercion, combined with a structured set of ritual and symbolic loyalties and obligations, contributed towards the maintenance of a largely fictional political unity.

The political relationships which are represented by those of the Vijayanagar state, in which religious/priestly elites and temple economies play such an important role, have been described by the concept "ritual polity", or through the notion of the "intense ritual penetration of everyday life". It should be stressed, however, that there inheres a danger in this notion of turning a specifically structured system of social praxis, which reflects and maintains also a given symbolic universe, into an idealist notion of theocratic, "Asiatic" stability, in which the rise and fall of states and power elites is determined by "religion", and in which economic relationships are created by the demands of religious observance and beliefs or perceptions. In fact, it is clear that rulers were generally quite aware of the process of religious-political manipulation necessary to the maintenance of their power, and especially of the need to maintain control over resources in order to invest in this ritual system on a grand scale in order to continually legitimate their position. Such "ritual" consists not simply in ideas or attitudes. It was itself constitutive of, and reproduced by, social reproductive practice and represented in consequence an aspect of the social relations of production. It is less the fact that such interactional networks existed that is important, than the role they played: they might function as networks of distribution and redistribution of surplus wealth, for example, organised in favour of a particular centre at a given moment. Indeed, the "ritual penetration" of a society as represented by specific sets of social practices, which are themselves the expression of the structure of social relations of production (expressed through a given religious and symbolic vocabulary), is common to all pre-capitalist social formations, but in different degrees. In some societies, they have come to be the dominant expression of relations of production, since as Godelier has pointed out, each social-cultural formation represents and practices economic relations in different forms, the location and origins of which must be the subject of specific empirical analysis. In each case, the combination of a specific political universe, ecological context, kinship structure and religious configuration promoted the varying role and position of such ritual, transactional networks. Their importance was enhanced or diminished by the structure of political demands of state centres and rulers in respect of control over surplus distribution. In southern India, the incorporation of social praxis into a temple-orientated system of redistribution of surplus wealth and political legitimacy, combined with the particular, highly fragmented character of the political geography of the region, meant that the process of state formation was always inscribed within such relationships and the structures they generated, producing a highly inflected set of political-religious structures in which legitimacy depended to a very great extent on consensual acceptance. In this particular case, however, an additional factor must also be recognised. The ideological structures of Hinduism, and its contingent social practices, which marked every aspect of Hindu social and political life across the whole sub-continent, tended under certain conditions to render the functions normally assumed and required of any state structure, especially those of maintaining order and internal cohesion, dangerously redundant. If we assume that states provide both centralized authority and, more importantly, normative rules or legal, social and economic relationships, then it becomes clear that in the Hindu context these characteristics of state organization are already present in the internal order of religious and social life - the lineage structures and caste attributions alone provide for much of this. While the historical situation is rather different, similar points might be made in respect of the western Church in Gaul during the fifth and sixth centuries. For it is clear that the role of bishops and the networks of political power and patronage, on the one hand, and the economic wealth of the Church, on the other, in the context of the need for the first Merovingian kings to secure and maintain ideological legitimacy for their rule, played an absolutely crucial role in episcopal power. At the same time, Christian morality functioned as an important element in the internal coherence of the conquered a Gallo-Roman populations, in the South in particular.

[note: See in particular B. Stein, "Politics, Peasants and the Deconstruction of Feudalism in Medieval India," Journal of Peasant Studies, XII/1985, 54-86; and in general B. Saraswati, Brahmanic Ritual Tradition in the Crucible of Time, Simla, 1977.]

State centres which are unable to maintain control and participation in the process of primary surplus distribution (through direct taxation, for example, or the ability always to coerce militarily), must attempt to survive by promoting their interests through alternative, secondary means of surplus re-distribution. Such means include both the "devolution" of military and other authority, for example, to the level of the fief or an equivalent institution, as in western Europe during the period from the sixth to the eleventh century. They include also networks of redistribution reinforced and operated through primarily religious structures.

Of course, both Islamic and Christian rulers in East and West legitimated the extraction and distribution of surplus - which is to say, in effect, the continued existence of their respective states - through political theologies, ideologies which highlighted the necessary duty of the state and its rulers to defend the faith and to promote the variety of associated activities which this entailed. At the same time, they had to be seen to reinforce and re-affirm their particular symbolic universe through ritualised expressions of faith and the redistribution of considerable amounts of surplus wealth to religious foundations of various types, or through certain ideologically legitimating ritual actions. In the Byzantine world, the complex ceremonial of the imperial palace, the close relationship between the emperor (with the state) and the Church, and the supervision by the Church of popular beliefs and - eventually - kinship structures, created an impressive ideological and symbolic system of legitimation. Yet, in this particular formation, in contrast with the South Indian examples, it did not itself express also, or serve as, a key institution of surplus distribution necessary to the economic survival of the state institution. Similar networks can be seen in the Islamic world, in western Christendom, and in the Chinese empire. And in the case of both Christianity and Islam, ritual incorporation (that is to say, conversion) served as a fundamental tool of political integration and domination. The "segmentary" states of South and Central America provide closer parallels to the South Indian case, for here temple-centred redistribution of surplus and tribute was a crucial means through which surplus appropriation and political authority were maintained.

[note: For the function of "ritual enclosure" in pre-Columbian South American sultures, see J. Marcus, Emblem and State in the Classic Maya Lowlands, Dumbarton Oaks, Washington D.C., 1976, and his "Lowland Maya Archaeology at the Crossroads", American Antiquity, XLVIII/1984, 454-88.]

Especially problematic for the questions about states and resources asked by the papers in this volume is the nature of power-relations both within state apparatuses and between them and society at large.30 How independent of society were state functionaries, individually or as a group? How limited were state apparatuses by the social and economic relationships which dominated a given society? Was the state, as a set of institutions, dependent upon a social and economic elite or ruling class, or upon an alliance of tribal lineages and identities (which may or may not have had any historical substance), or upon some combination of these?

[note: I have discussed some of these issues in "The Ottoman State and the Question of State Autonomy: Comparative Perspectives", in Halil Berktay, Suraiya Faroqui (eds), New Approaches to State and Peasant in Ottoman History (Library of Peasant Studies, X, London, 1992, 18-108.]

To what extent did emergent states incorporate existing elites? 'Me relationship between these considerations and the appropriation, allocation and distribution or re-distribution of resources constitutes a focal issue.

These considerations are important also because the state, while it provides a framework for, or sets limits to, the development of certain social and economic relationships, through its need to establish and then maintain a regular and predictable structure of surplus extraction, also enabled or facilitated the evolution of new practices and relationships. This is clear in the way in which the East Roman/Byzantine state transferred the focus of its attention in fiscal matters away from urban centres to village communities during the course of the seventh and eighth centuries, thereby radically altering the ways in which social relationships between landlords and tenants, on the one hand, and between peasant producers, the state and towns, on the other, functioned.

[note: See J. F. Haldon, Byzantium in the Seventh Century: the Transformation of a Culture, Cambridge, 1990.]

Similar examples exist in the cases of the Ottoman and Mughal states. In the Ottoman case, the growth of a local nobility (the a'yan), together with the garrisoning of imperial salaried troops and Janissaries in the provinces on a permanent basis, radically altered the relationship between central government and regions (generally seen as to the disadvantage of the former); yet such changes were made possible precisely because of the state's perceived fiscal and military requirements.

[note: See, for example, D. Goffman, Izmir and the Levantine World, 1550-1650, Seattle, 1990.]

Thus the state also created spaces in which new developments could take place - the role of tax-farmers in the Byzantine, Ottoman and Mughal contexts, for example, both as extractors of surplus and as potential stimulants to changed patterns of investment or consumption of wealth, to changed structures of money-use on the part of both producers and state administrations, and so on. The role of kommerkiarioi in the evolution of a new state fiscal apparatus in seventh-ninth century Byzantium illustrates the point very clearly.

[note: See A. Dunn, "The Kommerkiarios, the Apotheke, the Dromos, the Vardarios and The West", Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies, XVII/1993, 3-24.]

In some cases, the existence of a central fiscal administration may have given hitherto unimportant local leaders - village headmen, small-scale local landlords - a more significant role in the process of surplus appropriation and accumulation, leading to shifts in the political order of power at the local level and ultimately reacting back on the state itself. In sixteenth/seventeenth-century Indian states the role of pre-imperial village Mites and rank-attributions had a significant influence on the ways the Mughal state, for example, and its regional predecessors and successors, could organise, just as the existence of centralised state apparatuses and their demands for surplus in turn affected the ways in which these local relationships worked, opening up new social space within which they could evolve.

[note: See on these issues the excellent discussion of Frank Perlin, "State Formation Reconsidered: an Essay on Method and on the Genesis of Authority and Popular Institutions", in his The Invisible City: Monetary, Administrative and Popular Infrastructures in Asia and Europe, 1500-1900, Aldershot, 1993.]

These all represent complex issues of social and economic history which are crucial to understanding how states work, and how they form part of a social totality, especially since these elements must be understood in the context of both local and international pools of influence - the concentric, overlapping and reciprocally (but unevenly) influencing relationships which cross the boundaries of social formations.

[note: For the "overlapping" character of socio-economic and cultural structures, and the ways in which such reciprocal influences are hierarchized according to the relative strengths of the state, social, or cultural forms, see M. Rowlands, "Centre and Periphery: a Review of a Concept", in M. Rowlands, M. Larsen, K. Kristiansen (eds), Centre and Periphery in the Ancient World, Cambridge, 1987, 1-11; and Lotte Hedeager, "Empire, Frontier and the Barbarian Hinterland: Rome and Northern Europe from A.D. 1-400", in the same book, pp. 125-40.]

Finally, it is worth remembering that states experience very different problems according to how old they are, in other words, how well-established and entrenched they become, and how rooted in the society which supports them. In some cases, especially where newly formed conquest states are concerned, the conquerors are not integrated into the wider structure of social and economic relationships: they remain, in effect, parasitic consumers of wealth extracted by force, or the threat of force, alone. The role of the previously dominant social and cultural elites and state apparatuses, the rate at which institutional, social and cultural assimilation and integration occurs, or does not occur, must play an important part in any discussion of the evolution of such new states, a point directly relevant to the nature of the early Arab Islamic empire and the Umayyad state. "Primary state formation" in the context of previously stateless regions will again be very different, affected by the nature of kinship structures, war-making and traditional patterns of political organisation thrust into unfamiliar circumstances. In older states, while all these elements may once have played an important role, centuries of "state-embedding" have occurred, so that the state elite, its apparatuses and its ideology are inextricably interwoven into the social fabric of society at large. Fundamental differences in their histories, together with features such as the relative strengths of different methods of productive activity especially as between sedentary peasants and nomadic pastoralists - can have very important implications for the direction in which states develop.

[note: See, for example, the discussion by Halil Berktay, "Three Empires and the Societies They Governed: Iran, India and the Ottoman Empire," in Berktay, Faroqui (eds), New Approaches to State and Peasant in Ottoman History, 242-63.]

Finally, in this context, the position of a state formation in the international network of economic relations, not simply in relation to "trade" at a formal, inter-state level, plays an important role. Especially at times, or in regions, where central supervision of peripheral or marginal districts is difficult, or non-existent, the possibility of the growth, or continued existence of, patterns of exchange which pre-date political boundaries and represent both economic communities and kinship groups, must be borne in mind, even if there is not always good evidence for their presence (given the bias of sources towards "centres"). Such patterns of sub-state communal organization may play a fundamental role in the evolution of local cultures and in the effectiveness of centrally imposed policies, as well as modifying the effects of religious and linguistic divisions accompanying new political divisions. They play a role, therefore, in the way a given state centre can appropriate, distribute and employ resources. The case of the Syrian/Armenian border districts along the Christian-Muslim "frontier" throughout the period of the Umayyad dynasty is a case in point.

[note: See J. F. Haldon, H. Kennedy, "The Arab-Byzantine Frontier in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries: Military Organisation and Society in the Borderlands", Zbornik radova Vizantoloskog Instituta, XIX/1980, 79-116.]

It is important to bear in mind that the "organic" state, in which social classes, economy, religion and culture were particular to specific states in a "national" sense is a modern - post eighteenth century development.

I have avoided discussing the notorious term "tribe", or raising the issue of how we should determine the nature and extent of kinship-based social structures, since that would necessarily instigate a very different sort of discussion from that with which the papers of this Workshop are concerned. But these questions must obviously be borne in mind; indeed, they inform, explicitly or implicitly, much of the discussion, since much of the history of the "Islamic state" has revolved around precisely the question of the position of such only partially-integrated groups within the state. 'Me history of the Umayyad state in particular illustrates this, as it also illustrates the central importance of both the ideological construction of lineage identities, on the one hand, and the effects of the partial ritual incorporation (conversion, but not social/cultural equality) of conquered groups - the mawali - on the way the state evolved, on the other. The relationship between central authority, tribal groups which represent the original power base of that central authority, peasant producers and nomads and central authority, and the crucially important ideological structures and practices with which people identify, in different ways according to their own perceptions of their position, are all relevant here. Once again, Ibn Khaldun's discussion of "tribal solidarity" foreshadows much modern analysis of tribe- state relations.

[note: For a useful collection of articles dealing with aspects of this topic, see Khoury, Kostiner, Tribes and State Formation in the Middle East, particularly those by Khoury and Kostiner, Lapidus, Tapper, Caton and Gellner. See also I. M. Lapidus, "The Arab Conquests and the Formation of Islamic Society", in G. H. A. Juynboll (ed), Studies on the First Century of Islamic History, Carbondale, 1982, 49-72; and P. Crone, Slaves on Horses: the Evolution of the Islamic Polity, Cambridge, 1980.]

In addition to identifying the basic structural relations of wealth appropriation and distribution in states, and in the context of states and their armies in particular, we have also to consider a variety of "infrastructural" but very important and sometimes determining features. The technology of communications and transport is especially relevant, not simply to the effectiveness of war-making and military organisation, but also to the ability of any state to exercise authority over its territories, an issue which, as we have seen, is central to much of the recent debate on the nature of the early modern as well as the pre-modern state. It is generally accepted that long-distance bulk transport by land in ancient and medieval times was too expensive for any but the wealthiest institutions or individuals. States can and must pay for such movement of goods and people, however, if they are to deploy their armies and survive. The ability to move troops very quickly, and across difficult terrain, and to take enemy forces by surprise is still considered a crucial part of the explanation for the early victories of Islam in the Middle East. But we need to take into account a whole range of variables, for many of which we have very little evidence.

For example, transport of men and materials depended, obviously, on the geography and climate of a region as well as on the relative costs involved - costs which include also the construction and maintenance of various types of road. Speeds varied enormously - mounted individuals moving with a limited number of stops could cover well over 30 miles per day. Footsoldiers on the march moved at between 7 and 18-plus miles per day, depending on terrain and climate. Mounted troops moved faster, but could not maintain high speeds without damage to the animals or regular changes of mount (a problem solved by pastoral nomads by taking several remounts, an option not usually open to the armies of sedentary cultures, and one which also limited classical nomadic warfare to those areas which could provide adequate pasturage).

[note: Compare, for example, the figures deduced from the western medieval sources for the movement of crusader forces in the eleventh-twelfth centuries by J. Nesbitt, "The Rate of March of Crusading Armies in Europe: A Study and Computation", Traditio, XIX/1963, 167-81.]

Camels, which are slightly inferior to mules in terms of carrying capacity, are more cost effective in the long run because they live longer, move faster (25 miles per day) and cost less to maintain, provided they are in contexts to which they are suited. Thus they dominate the Middle East, but not Asia Minor or the Balkans, where for the most part the terrain and the costs of breeding make them less desirable. In these regions, it has traditionally been the mule which has dominated medieval transport: oxen are more expensive, less efficient and very slow in comparison (6-9 miles per day);

[note: useful comparative statistics in R. W. Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel, Cambridge, 1975; see also S. Faroqui, "Camels, Wagons and the Ottoman State in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries", International Journal of Middle East Studies, XIV/1982, 523-39. For late Roman statistics, see A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire 284-602: A Social Economic and Administrative Survey, Oxford, 1964, 830-32.]

and although the Roman government undoubtedly tried to maintain major military paved roads, and Roman armies certainly used carts for transport, their use does decline in the period stretching from the seventh to the eleventh century, a feature which it has usually been assumed goes hand in hand with a decline in the technology of road-building in the Byzantine world at this time. To what extent one caused the other remains unclear. It may have reflected limited resources; it may equally have reflected culturally-determined choices about which we know nothing. There is some evidence that non-military use of carts was fairly constant where there were adequate surfaces. Interestingly, pack-mules cost more than pack-horses in Byzantine armies, a reflection probably of the cost of breeding; but horses seem to have cost a great deal more to maintain in good condition.

[note: A useful introduction to problems of roads, transport and travel in pre-industrial societies is to be found in F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, vol. I, 276ff, 355 ff. ]

Finally, there is the question of relative efficiency, that is to say, the relative merits of different ways of appropriating and distributing surplus wealth according to the historical situation. On the face of it, as we shall see, the Roman government in the period from the middle of the seventh to the middle of the ninth century, approximately, adopted methods which were both extremely labour intensive and cost-ineffective in order to maintain and supply its armies, in comparison with the system prevailing before the 650s and in the sixth century. This reflected both a lack of cash resources and the economics of a largely demonetised and devastated or at least very insecure hinterland, in which direct consumption at the local level, with all the implications for military organisation and recruitment that this had, was actually more viable than exchange of resources through the money medium. We should bear in mind, therefore, that apparently inefficient logistical arrangements reflected not just pre-industrial technologies, but in addition the economic, fiscal, and ecological contexts which prevailed at different times within a given state and society. Thus whether soldiers were paid in cash, supplied in kind, or had to provide for themselves, or whether some combination of all these methods was employed, will be directly related to this wider context. This can be seen especially in the period and the area with which we are concerned: the changes in late Roman or Byzantine administrative arrangements, and the ways in which the early Islamic state responded to the need to recruit, maintain, and provision its soldiers has provoked a great deal of discussion in this respect, especially in respect of Byzantium with regard to the question of the so- called "military lands", the origins of the themata or military provinces, and the relationship between military and fiscal structures during the seventh, eighth and ninth centuries.

***************

It is apparent from an examination of any pre-industrial state and its history that the effective resourcing of a centrally controlled army depends upon an effectively controlled fiscal system, which assures the state of the required revenues, on the one hand, and the consumption of provincial revenues in the interests of the central power on the other. This in turn depends in particular on the nature of the relationship between the rulers and their immediate advisers, the agents of the state, and local structures of socio-economic power (whether represented by lineage- based modes of subsistence and wealth-production or by local/indigenous landowning elites, or both), a relationship in which ideological/symbolic elements play a decisive role. To survive over the long-term and to maintain central authority and the power to exercise that authority, states must inevitably attempt to eradicate or reduce to powerlessness or otherwise limit the power of those elements which have the potential to withdraw their resources or to turn to an alternative source of authority. How this process occurs varies, of course. But in the end it is those states which can establish a relatively constant ideological and integrative hegemony over both elites and regional social sub-systems, based ultimately on a real power of coercion, that survive. In this respect the analysis of states, armies and resources must inevitably address questions of the nature of political power, of the ideological hegemony and authority of state centres and/or elites the degree to which power is concentrated or diffused, the nature of the relations between central dynasties claiming rights to royal power and other, potentially competing families, as well as between sedentary elites and semi-nomadic or nomadic groups whose economic and therefore military independence of the central power makes them a focus of state ideological attention.

n

HST 372 Middle East: Muhammad to 1800

Byzantine versus Sasanian Empires

When you compare this map, of the Byzantine Empire (Rome) in the middle of the 6th century C.E., with a map of the Sasanian Empire (Iran) at about the same time - below - it should be fairly easy to see why these two empires would have had interesting and often hostile relations over a very long period of time.

This map shows the Sasanian Empire in green, with its border with the Byzantine Empire (in yellow).  And you can see at the south-east corner of the Arabian Peninsula the region in which Muhammad began his work to gather around him his "believers."  Muhammad was born at about the time these two maps are picturing.

The competition was between two empires, societies, each with dreams and even plans for establishing "world domination. The Romans/Byzantines considered themselves in part the heirs of classical Greece, and especially of Alexander the Great.  And they had conquered a few of the kingdoms which had been established by and just after the rule of Alexander:  Ptolemaic Egypt, Macedonia, Pergamon and western Asia Minor;  and in the 6th century C.E., the Byzantines began a project to conquer the heirs of the Selucid Kingdom (which had also be established by Alexander), the Sasanian monarchy in Iran.  The Sasanians, on their side, saw themselves as the heirs of the Persian Achaemenid Empire, which had conquered Greek lands in Asia Minor, and had tried to conquer mainland Greece in the 6th century BCE. 

Each of the two empires employed excellent engineers, architects, artisans, and bureaucrats.  Each had the resources to fulfill their plans for expansion.  But since each were fairly equally resourced and administered, it is not surprising that neither was able to conquer the other.  The images on the top of the module for unit 2 show perhaps the greatest architectural accomplishments of each - the great palace in Ctesiphon (now only in ruins, and thus I can't really offer an image showing its full glory, and the great Cathedral in Constantinople of Haghia Sophia (The Holy Wisdom) which has survived the eons of time and war and earthquakes. 

Below see some examples of the production of their great artisans.  And both mpires were rich and engaged in lots of commerce, domestic and international.  So I have included representative coins - the money which was used at the time.

A silver plate with gold gilt from Sasanian Iran. From Edith Posada, Art of the Sasanians.

A sasanian silver coin, with the image of the Emperor Hormuzd II on one side, and the everlasting fire in a fire temple. One of the most important duties of a Sasanian Emperor was maintaining the fires in Zoroastrian temples.

 

A Byzantine silver plate, showing David vs. Goliath (currently in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY.)

A Byzantine gold coin from the reign of Justinian II (currently in the collection of Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC.)

"History" and its claims often foreshadow war.  And in the case of the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires, it was hundreds of years of warfare that lasted virtually from the beginning of relations between the two until one was destroyed and the other greatly diminished in size.  This was from the 3rd century C.E. to the middle of the 7th century C.E. As you saw from your reading in Donner for unit 1, it was the Arab armies with the banner of Islam which accomplished both of those feats - the destruction of the Sasanian Empire and the cutting in half of the Byzantine Empire.

In a recent excellent book by Beate Dignas and Engelbert Winter, Rome and Persia in Late Antiquity, 2007, the two authors (pp. 1-2) argue:

"On both sides war was accomplanied by complex attempts to justify their respective goals, in active and reactive ways.  Rome's claim for world domination was accompanied by a sense of mission and pride in Western civilization;  it was met by Eastern myths and oracles prophesying the downfall of Western power. [Do these claims and goals ring a modern bell?  Taliban/Al-Qaeda vs. NATO?] Most sources of the time reflect strong Roman ambitions to become a guarantor of peace and order.  Simultaneously, they reflect long standing prejudices with regard to the Iran's different customs, religous structures, languages and forms of government.  As a consequence, a wide gap separated the two cultures and negative attitudes that stemmed from existing political, military and economic rivalries were constantly reinforced.  In the company of most ancient - and often Western - observers, it is tempting to associate our theme with an 'everlasting' conflict between West and East, between a "civilised" Roman world and a barbarian enemy, and hence to describe the struggle between the two super powers as a clash of fundamentally alien cultures."

 

Sasanian Zoroastrianism and Byzantine Christianity

Both of these monotheistic religions were very important for many centuries in the Middle East; each was the "official" religion of a universal empire.  These religions served as the bases for much of the legal system of each empire.  And despite the dominant position that Islam holds today in the Middle East, both religions remain important in many areas.  Byzantine (Eastern Greek Orthodox) Christians make up a large part of the populations of Greece, Cyprus, Lebanon, and maintain minority positions in Israel, Iraq, and Syria.  Coptic Christians (who were declared a heretical group by one of the Byzantine Church Councils) are a large minority of Egypt's population today too. And there are Zoroastrian minorities in India, Pakistan and Iran today, known as Parsis.

A Zorastrian fire temple in Azerbaidjan (in an area once in the Sasanian Empire)

The oldest existing Christian church in Iraq (in an area once in the Sasanian Empire)

See " Religion and Politics During the Sixth and Seventh Centuries  [C.E.]" for further discussion of the roles that religion played in Middle Eastern international relations in the years before Muhammad.