World History I

Chapter 10: Islamic Civilization and Byzantium
600-1300 CE

46: Mon, Feb 23, 2026

Please read the chapter and take the quiz by midnight on Sun, Feb 22, 2026.
Please also post in the forum for the day a short essay in response to this question:

• What can we do with the records we do have surviving if we can understand them? How much does loss of context interfere with the larger picture?
• How do we deal with idiosyncratic records that we aren’t sure about how to interpret? (For this, you may want to look at this article at Wikipedia on the Cascajal Block.)
• What does the tendency to obliterate old history in order to rewrite or simply destroy the narrative say about the society and culture that does so? This has happened at Rome, in China, and a number of other places.

The area of the world occupied by Byzantium (which includes Egypt and Italy at the start of our chapter) had long been a center of agricultural and urban wealth with all that means: a food surplus, trade in luxury goods and ideas, well developed bureaucracies and military forces -- recources it shared with its Sasanid rivals in Persia.

The area of the world where Islam first came into existence [the Arabian Peninsula] (and had) very few material resources, but it was a crossroads of world cultures and a convergence of multiple civilizations. At its inception, and later as it expanded into the wider world, Islam encountered and either suppressed or assimilated elements of an ever-widening range of cultures.

How do Islam and Byzantium exploit rather than destroy what they conquer in this period, especially as they gain and lose territory to each other? What do they chose to preserve? What changes over the period from 600 to 1400 in each region? Consider:

• What agricultural and trade resources exist for each civilization in 600 AD? Do these remain constant, or do they change over time? How?
• What resources does each have to form governments and bureaucracies? What resources do they borrow? What new forms do they develop?
• What intellectual resources can each draw on? How do these shape the forms of government and community?
• What religious resources does each have? How do these benefit Islam and Byzantium? How do they restrict each civilization?
• What happens to the language in each region? Why?

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