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360 Four Years of Corruption
Later in his review (2001: 447), Shaw switches analogy to the
Mandelbrot series, the fractal geometry in which, the more one
‘zooms in’, the more complex and endlessly variable every
outline seems. 23 Our picture is ‘so fluid and so dynamic that it
consequently impedes the understanding of relatively fixed
systems and structures’—such as ‘the city, the state, the army,
and the church and mosque’. We hope that we have not in fact
impeded understanding, and we wonder, in CS chapter IV, at
what level ‘the city’ has existed as a fixed structure. But, as we
have already said with respect to ‘the state’, we do not consider
such institutions except here and there where they fall into the
‘gravitational pull’ of the microregions. 24 We rather prefer the
metaphor of a chess game (Fentress and Fentress 2001: 210) or
our own repeated image of a kaleidoscope. There is a world
outside the chessboard. A kaleidoscope is a small contraption
that one peers into. One can lift one’s eye from the board or the
contraption. In neither case is the particular object likely to be
mistaken for the whole of reality.
In this and the previous section, we have been rehearsing
ways in which our type of Mediterranean historiography
touches on some major subjects while omitting others. In so
doing we have also started to formulate a response to those
critics who mention other topics on which we might—ideally,
should—have had more to say. Our detailed illustrations of our
approach are no more than that: illustrations. Evidence was, as
we said (CS 5), chosen to exemplify a theme rather than fill out
a dossier. (In that respect, as well as many others, our approach
differs from McCormick’s wonderfully exhaustive cataloguing.)
We have not, to our knowledge, been accused of an
unrepresentative selection of material—a relief. Indeed, Shaw
(2001: 420 n. 7) imputes to us a western Mediterranean and
Roman focus, whereas we foresaw the possible cavil that much
of our material was derived from, and best suited to, the Aegean.
We have, doubtless, too little to say about the Black Sea,
23 By contrast, Abulafia suggests that, in effect, we offer a stratospheric
view, and that we need more people in our analysis.
24 Cf. Fentress and Fentress 209, on those ‘pedestrian’ enough to want a
‘straight account of exchange or pastoralism’. To do so is not pedestrian; it is
simply to require a book other than CS.