Cambridge Ancient Hi.. - Index of

preface xix
identity that created the Arab and Islamic Near East and North Africa,
and destroyed for ever the political and cultural unity of the ancient
Mediterranean.
Although strong and valid arguments can be made for continuities in
many fields of life up to around a.d. 600, it is also undeniably the case that
the political and military upheavals of the fifth century in the west began a
process whereby separate regions of the former empire went their separate
ways and developed their own distinctive identities. Furthermore, in
cultural and social life there was a great deal of diversity even within the
politically united eastern empire. It is our hope that this volume brings out,
particularly in its long regional section (Part iv), not only the ways in which
the fifth- and sixth-century Roman world was still united and identifiable
as ‘ancient’, but also the ways in which it was diverging from older patterns
of life and fragmenting into separate units.
In contrast to earlier volumes that cover Roman history, the two volumes
of the CAH that deal with late antiquity are probably more eastern than
western Mediterranean in their focus. In part, this merely reflects the establishment
of a specifically eastern polity during the fourth century, so that
political ‘events’ now take place in the east as well as in the west. But it also
reflects the way that the eastern empire came to dominate the political and
mental worlds of the fifth and sixth centuries. The earliest barbarian successor-states
in the west were, for the most part, in theory still part of a
Roman empire, and after 476 this was an eastern-based power. Furthermore,
the reality of eastern wealth and military muscle was brought home
to the west very forcibly during the sixth century, when Justinian ‘reconquered’
Vandal Africa, Ostrogothic Italy and part of Visigothic Spain.
The centring of this volume on the Mediterranean and its leanings
towards the east are in fact fortunate, given the decision, subsequent to the
initial planning of CAH, to recommission the Cambridge Medieval History
and to have a first, overlapping volume, running from a.d. 500 to 700.The
CMH, inevitably and reasonably (from the perspective of later history), is
essentially a history of what was to become Europe, and offers only partial
coverage of events and developments in the Byzantine and Arab regions
of the Mediterranean. By contrast, the CAH, including this volume, is
equally correct (from the perspective of antiquity) to centre itself firmly on
the Mediterranean, and to treat northern Europe as somewhat peripheral.
The work of editing CAH XIV was a genuinely collaborative venture, and,
as a result, both pleasant and instructive. The three editors together were
responsible for the overall shape of the book, and subject matter and
length of the chapters, and their allocation to individual authors (aided at
an early stage by John Matthews). All three editors subsequently read and
commented on both first and second drafts of each chapter.
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