The History of the World · Grades 10–13 · College · University
Byzantium and the Rise of Islam
History · Level band: Grades 10–13 · College · University
English edition — the language editions of the history classes are outstanding and will follow the site’s translation pattern; none is fabricated here.
How to read this class: DOCUMENTED = the fact stands in a named primary or scholarly source. DEBATED = disputed in the sources or the scholarship, carried as a dispute. CLAIM = claim weight only. Each civilisation is met first in its own records: for Byzantium, its chroniclers, its law and its emperors' own governing books; for Islam, the Qur'an, the Arabic historians and the Persian voices of the world it entered.
Part I — The empire that called itself Roman
1. The name, first
DOCUMENTED. No one in these centuries ruled, served or paid taxes to a state called “Byzantium.” The empire centred on Constantinople called itself the Roman Empire, and its people — Greek-speaking by the era of this class — called themselves Rhomaioi: Romans. Their emperor was the Roman emperor; their law was Roman law; their coins named the Roman state. The word “Byzantine” was applied to them by later Western scholarship — it enters print with Hieronymus Wolf's Corpus Historiae Byzantinae of 1557, a full century after the empire fell — in part because Western Europe had its own claimants to the Roman name and found it convenient to rename the older, continuous empire in the East. This class uses “Byzantium” as the reader's map-label, and the Romans' own name wherever the record itself speaks.
2. Justinian: the law, the church, the reconquest
DOCUMENTED. Justinian I (reigned 527–565) made the three works by which the empire still acts on the modern world. First, the law: his commissioners gathered the whole of Roman law into the Corpus Juris Civilis — the Code (529, revised 534), the Digest of the jurists (533), the Institutes for students (533), and the later Novels. When Roman law was re-studied in the medieval West, it was Justinian's books that were studied; the legal systems of much of Europe descend from this codification. Second, the building: after the Nika riots of 532 burned the city's centre, Justinian rebuilt — above all Hagia Sophia, raised in under six years (532–537) by the mathematicians Anthemius of Tralles and Isidore of Miletus and dedicated on 27 December 537, the largest church of its world, whose dome Procopius described in the Buildings as seeming suspended from heaven. Third, the reconquest: his general Belisarius retook North Africa from the Vandals (533–534) and Italy from the Ostrogoths (535–554) — Italy at ruinous length, through siege, famine and plague, so that the recovered province was a shadow of the Italy Theodoric had governed. The Pragmatic Sanction of 554 ordered its restoration.
DOCUMENTED — the sources read against each other. Procopius, Justinian's own legal adviser on campaign, left three portraits that cannot all be the whole truth: the Wars, a public history; the Buildings, a panegyric of the emperor's works; and the Secret History, a venomous private attack on Justinian and the Empress Theodora. The class's rule with Procopius is the rule for all court sources: he is a first-hand witness of the first rank, and he is never read alone or uncritically.
3. Plague, Persia, and the seventh-century storm
DOCUMENTED. In 541 plague reached Constantinople from Egypt. Procopius (Wars II.22) and John of Ephesus describe it at first hand — its symptoms, its speed, the city's burial crisis. It returned in waves for two centuries. Its death toll is DEBATED: the chroniclers' peak figures are witnesses' numbers, and modern scholarship divides between older maximal readings and recent arguments (Mordechai and colleagues, 2019) that the pandemic's demographic weight was long overstated. No figure is taught in this class as a count.
DOCUMENTED. The empire's other great fact was Persia. The Sasanian empire was Rome's peer — in arms, in diplomacy, in ceremony — and the two fought the last and greatest of their wars in 602–628, in which Persia took Syria, Egypt and Jerusalem and stood on the Bosphorus, before the Emperor Heraclius (reigned 610–641) carried the war into Persia's heartland and restored the provinces. Both empires emerged exhausted. Within a decade, Arab armies took Syria and Egypt from the Romans and Persia entire. The eastern Roman state that survived was cut to Anatolia, the Balkans and its sea-lanes — smaller, poorer, and reorganised for survival: its provinces militarised into the districts the sources call themes (the system's exact dating and its attribution to Heraclius are DEBATED in the scholarship). Constantinople itself held — behind the Theodosian walls, with the weapon the record calls Greek fire, named to the Syrian engineer Kallinikos — against the great sieges of 674–678 and 717–718, the second under Leo III, in a winter that starved the besiegers.
4. Iconoclasm: the empire argues with itself
DOCUMENTED. From 726/730, when Leo III first moved against the veneration of icons, to 787, and again from 815 to 843, the empire officially rejected religious images: icons were removed and destroyed, their defenders — monks above all — were persecuted, and the church divided. The Second Council of Nicaea (787) restored the icons under the Empress Irene; Leo V renewed the prohibition in 815; the final restoration under the Empress Theodora in 843 is kept in the Orthodox church to this day as the Triumph of Orthodoxy.
DOCUMENTED — the record's asymmetry, stated plainly. Almost everything we have about Iconoclasm was written by the winning side. The iconoclast emperors' own theological case survives mainly in fragments quoted by its refuters (above all the Patriarch Nikephoros and Theodore the Studite). The chronicle of Theophanes, our narrative spine for these years, is an iconophile source writing with a verdict already reached. This class therefore teaches what the record can carry — the measures, the councils, the persecutions, the dates — and names the missing voice as missing, rather than reconstructing it.
5. Standing at 1000
DOCUMENTED. The empire that entered the year 1000 was not a relic. Its gold coin, the nomisma, had held its standard for centuries and was trusted from Baghdad to the Baltic. Its capital was among the largest cities of the Christian world, its court the school of diplomacy for every neighbouring people: Constantine VII's De Administrando Imperio (c. 950) — an emperor's own handbook for his son on the peoples of the north and how to deal with each — shows a state that governed by knowledge as much as by arms. Its missions carried its faith and its letters outward: Cyril and Methodios to Moravia in 863, devising an alphabet for the Slavonic tongue; Bulgaria Christianised in 864/865; the Rus' in 988 under Vladimir of Kyiv, in the account the Rus' own Primary Chronicle preserves. And under Basil II (reigned 976–1025) the empire recovered the Balkans entire — Bulgaria annexed by 1018 — and stood at his death among the strongest powers of its world. It would stand for four and a half centuries more.
6. How the Romans of the East lived
DOCUMENTED. Constantinople was a working Roman city of the old kind long after the West's cities shrank: aqueducts and cisterns by the hundred, a free bread distribution inherited from Rome's own practice, guilds regulated in the document called the Book of the Eparch (c. 895) — silk-weavers, goldsmiths, notaries and grocers each under their rules — and a harbour chain of trade reaching to the Rus', the Bulgars, the Arabs and the Italian cities. The countryside of Anatolia, the empire's heartland, was farmed by free peasant-soldiers of the themes alongside great estates; the law codes for farmers (the Farmer's Law) show village communities governing their own disputes over straying animals, theft of crops and boundaries — an ordinary world of neighbours, not an abstraction called an empire. Literacy ran through the church and the administration: wills, saints' lives, military manuals, letters and lawsuits survive in quantity, and the empire's own historians — Theophanes, Nikephoros, Leo the Deacon, John Skylitzes — wrote its history continuously, in Greek, as Romans writing about Rome. That continuity of record is itself a fact of the era: between 500 and 1000, Constantinople never stopped keeping its own chronicle.
Part II — The rise and spread of Islam
7. Arabia and the Prophet, from the sources
DOCUMENTED — as the Islamic sources carry it. The Arabic record is the first voice here. The Qur'an, the revelation as Islam holds it, was recited during Muhammad's lifetime and gathered into its standard written form within a generation of his death. The biography (Sira) compiled by Ibn Ishaq (died 767), surviving in Ibn Hisham's recension, and the histories of al-Waqidi, al-Baladhuri and, comprehensively, al-Tabari (died 923), carry the life in the tradition's own telling: Muhammad born at Mecca about 570; a merchant of the Quraysh tribe; the first revelations traditionally in 610, on the mountain above Mecca; a decade of preaching against his city's gods and its order, and persecution of his small following; the Hijra — the emigration to Medina in 622, from which the Islamic calendar counts its years; at Medina, a community and then a polity under his prophethood, bound by covenant, fighting Mecca and the tribes that opposed it; the taking of Mecca in 630, largely without bloodshed in the tradition's telling; his death at Medina in 632, with Arabia largely united under the new faith.
DOCUMENTED and DEBATED, kept apart. The broad outline — a prophet at Mecca and Medina in these years, a community formed, Arabia united, armies moving outward within a decade — is also visible in near-contemporary witnesses outside Islam: Syriac Christian notices of the 630s and the Armenian history of Sebeos (7th century) name a prophet of the Arabs and the conquests that followed. The detailed texture of the life rests on sources written down generations after the events, transmitted with their chains of authorities — the Islamic science of hadith criticism grew up to test exactly those chains. Where modern scholars debate particulars of the traditional account, this class marks DEBATED and carries the tradition's account as the tradition's account, named as such. The two are never blended into a third thing neither side wrote.
8. The conquests
DOCUMENTED. Al-Baladhuri's Futuh al-Buldan — the Conquests of the Lands — records the expansion town by town, and its own distinction governs this class: town after town came over by treaty (sulh), its people keeping their property, worship and churches for a tax, beside the places taken by force ('anwa). The speed remains startling in any telling. Under the first caliphs (632–661): Syria after Yarmouk (636); Iraq after Qadisiyya (636); Persia finished at Nihavand (642) — the Sasanian empire, Rome's four-century peer, ended, its last shah killed in 651; Egypt taken 639–642. Under the Umayyads the advance ran on: North Africa, then Iberia from 711 under Tariq ibn Ziyad — the Visigothic kingdom fell in years; Sindh in the east (711–713); Transoxiana beyond the Oxus. Twice the armies stood before Constantinople and twice the city held (674–678; 717–718).
DOCUMENTED. The conquest was not, in its own record, a forced conversion of the conquered. The subject peoples — Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians — stood as protected communities (dhimmi) under their own religious authorities, paying the jizya tax; conversion spread over generations, at different speeds in different lands, and Arabic spread with administration and settlement. The grievances the record also carries — taxation burdens, Arab privilege over non-Arab converts (mawali) — became fuel for the revolution that ended the Umayyads.
9. The caliphates: Damascus, then Baghdad
DOCUMENTED. The Umayyad caliphate (661–750), ruling from Damascus under Mu'awiya and his house, made the new polity an empire in form: Arabic made the language of administration under Abd al-Malik, coinage reformed to an Islamic standard bearing words in place of images (696–697), and in Jerusalem the Dome of the Rock raised (691–692, dated by its own inscription) — the oldest great monument of Islam standing. The era also fixed the community's deepest division: in 680 Husayn, the Prophet's grandson, was killed with his small party at Karbala by the caliph's forces — the martyrdom at the heart of Shia Islam, carried here plainly, at its record.
DOCUMENTED. In 750 the Abbasid revolution — raised in Persia's name and the mawali's grievances as much as in Arabia's — overthrew the Umayyads (one prince escaped to Iberia, where Umayyad Córdoba rose from 756). The Abbasid caliphs built a new capital: Baghdad, founded by al-Mansur in 762 as Madinat al-Salam, the City of Peace — a round city on the Tigris that within generations was among the largest cities on earth. Persian administrators, Persian court forms and, increasingly, Persian scholars shaped the empire whose official tongue was Arabic and whose civilisation became the joint work of Arabs, Persians and every people inside it.
10. What was preserved, and what was made new: the translation movement
DOCUMENTED. Baghdad's caliphs — al-Ma'mun (reigned 813–833) above all — sponsored the systematic translation of the Greek, Persian and Indian inheritance into Arabic: the medicine of Galen and Hippocrates, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle, the astronomy of Ptolemy, the mathematics of India with its numerals. The translator Hunayn ibn Ishaq (died 873), a Christian of the Church of the East working at Baghdad, and his circle set the standard — collating Greek manuscripts, translating whole libraries, and being paid, in the famous report, the weight of their books in gold. The caliphal library and translation bureau known as the Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom, is DOCUMENTED as an institution of al-Ma'mun's court; its scale as a formal academy is DEBATED (Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture, 1998, is the standard modern account).
DOCUMENTED. What came back was more than preservation. Muhammad ibn Musa al-Khwarizmi (c. 780–850), working at Baghdad, wrote the book whose title gives us algebra — his Kitab al-Jabr wa'l-Muqabala — and his own Latinised name gives us algorithm; his astronomical tables and his transmission of Indian numerals carried that mathematics onward. Al-Kindi, al-Razi (Rhazes) in medicine, al-Farabi in philosophy, and at the era's far edge Ibn Sina (980–1037) — Persian-born, writing in Arabic — whose Canon of Medicine taught physicians for centuries, mark a civilisation producing new knowledge at the head of its world. The learning was confessionally mixed in its making: Christian translators, Sabian astronomers, Jewish physicians and Muslim patrons worked in the same cities on the same books.
11. One civilisation, several states, at 1000
DOCUMENTED. Politically, the Islamic world of 1000 was divided — Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad under the shadow of their Buyid protectors (from 945), Fatimid caliphs in their new Cairo (founded 969), Umayyad caliphs in Córdoba. Civilisationally it was one: Arabic the tongue of learning from Iberia to Central Asia, Persian rising again as a literary language within it — Ferdowsi completed the Shahnameh, Persia's epic of its own kings, in 1010, just past this era's edge — and the trade, law, scholarship and faith of a single world moving along the same roads. Beside it, wholly independent and wholly itself, stood the Romans' empire at Constantinople. The next volume's centuries begin with these two old neighbours still facing each other across Anatolia and the Mediterranean.
Sources
Byzantium: Procopius, Wars, Buildings, Secret History; Theophanes, Chronicle; Nikephoros, Short History; Constantine VII, De Administrando Imperio; the Corpus Juris Civilis; John of Ephesus, Ecclesiastical History. Scholarship: Judith Herrin, Byzantium: The Surprising Life of a Medieval Empire (2007); Jonathan Harris, Constantinople: Capital of Byzantium; Leslie Brubaker and John Haldon, Byzantium in the Iconoclast Era (2011); Mordechai et al., PNAS (2019), on the plague debate. Islam: the Qur'an; Ibn Ishaq / Ibn Hisham, Sira; al-Baladhuri, Futuh al-Buldan; al-Tabari, History of the Prophets and Kings; Sebeos, History (7th-century Armenian witness). Scholarship: Hugh Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates (3rd ed. 2016) and The Great Arab Conquests (2007); Dimitri Gutas, Greek Thought, Arabic Culture (1998); Jonathan Berkey, The Formation of Islam (2003). Full citations per section stand in the research file named in the Record line.
Read beside this class: The Missing Millennium — The World 500–1000 · The Millennium World — Tang China, the Post-Roman West, the Americas · The Chronology
Record: THE_MISSING_MILLENNIUM_RESEARCH_2026-10-28.md (study_materials/world_history), §§2–3 — classes carried unchanged.