Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

Rome was the only power in history to rule every shore of the Mediterranean basin,

effect, Justinian’s diktat had spelled the end for the famous school in the ancient Greek capital—the city of Plato and Aristotle—where students had absorbed the insights of classical philosophy and natural science for generations. The closure of the Athens school was important. It did not kill at a stroke all non-Christian learning in the eastern empire.21 Nor did it immediately throw up an intellectual wall between the classical age and the dawning era of Christian hegemony in Europe and the west. But it was both significant and symbolic. For while scholarship in Persia and other eastern parts flourished, with libraries in Baghdad and other Middle Eastern capitals preserving and transmitting copies of the works of Aristotle and other non-Christian greats, Justinian’s reign, and the sixth century in general, was marked by a self-blinkering in the Christian world.

The Roman Empire had once been a super-spreader of classical learning across its vast territories. But as it fell to pieces in the west and became ever-more doctrinally obsessed in the east, it became an active blocker to knowledge chains across the ages, and the transmission of ancient learning throughout the empire began to fail.

Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom):

Muhammad came to understand he had been chosen as Allah’s prophet and messenger—the last such in a long line that stretched back through Jesus, Solomon, David, Abraham, Noah, and Moses all the way to the first man, Adam. This was big news, but he overcame his initial terror and confusion. His next visitation took three years to arrive, but when it did, Muhammad began to receive the word of God regularly, sometimes in spoken form and sometimes as a ringing sound that had to be deciphered. The angel showed him ritual ablutions and the best way to pray to Allah. These were the basic rites of a new religion: Islam. Muhammad’s revelations, as he recited them in Arabic, were eventually collected as the Qur’an.

When the Arabic speakers of the desert told one another stories of their origins, they traced their lineage back to Abraham. They were the Hagarites: the descendants of Abraham’s union with his wife Sarah’s enslaved person Hagar, which had produced a son called Ishmael. At the time Ishmael’s very existence had been a mixed blessing, for it aroused Sarah’s extreme and lasting enmity. But it had also—so the stories went—produced the Arab people, a race quite distinct from the sons of Abraham’s second son, Isaac, who was revered as patriarch of the twelve tribes of Israel. In one sense all this was ancient history—but in another it mattered deeply.