Two Heirs of Rome: How Byzantium and Islam Each Carried the Ancient World

The idea

The exam files Byzantium and Islam together under medieval history, and the anchor's two chapters explain why: each inherited a piece of the ancient world and carried it while the West lost its own. Byzantium inherited the Roman state. It kept the emperor, Constantinople, the coin and the law, and Justinian's code purged Roman law into the form most of Europe would later adopt. It survived by the anchor's four reasons, city, gold, identity and luck, and when Persia and then the Arabs took its southern half, Heraclius and the theme system rebuilt it as a Greek kingdom of self-armed farmers. It converted the Bulgars and the Rus and gave them Cyril's alphabet, and it quarreled with Rome over icons and pre-eminence until the Schism of ten fifty-four made two churches. Then it declined for four centuries, Manzikert in ten seventy-one, the Fourth Crusade in twelve oh four, the Ottomans in fourteen fifty-three, and the anchor calls that the end of the last vestige of Roman civilization. Islam inherited the Greek learning and the Persian administration. Muhammad united Arabia by six thirty-two; the first caliphs took Persia, Syria and Egypt in twenty years because both empires were exhausted and their subjects preferred lower taxes; the Umayyads added Africa and Spain and were stopped at Constantinople, Tours and Talas. They ruled as a minority through Byzantine and Persian bureaucracies, taxed dhimmis instead of converting them, and split over succession into Sunni and Shia. The Abbasids moved to Baghdad, opened the House of Wisdom, and translated and advanced what Byzantium kept but did not use, until the Buyids, the Seljuks and the Mongols took the power and then the city. The two heirs traded with each other in wartime, and Europe, barter-poor and small-citied, received the ancient world back through Cordoba and Sicily.