A global view on Long Late Antiquity, 300-800 AD

The following text is an English translation of the introduction to: Johannes PREISER-
KAPELLER, Jenseits von Rom und Karl dem Großen. Aspekte der globalen Verflechtung
in der langen Spätantike, 300 - 800 n. Chr., Vienna – Mandelbaum Verlag, 292 pp.;
19.90 € / ISBN: 978385476-554-7 (https://www.mandelbaum.at/buch.php?id=777)

Introduction: Emperors, caliphs and channels

The mud was stronger in the end than the future emperor. In 792, Charles, King
of the Franks and Lombards (r. 768-814) ordered the construction of a canal
between the rivers Altmühl and Rezat (in Middle Franconia), which was to
connect the river systems of the Danube and the Rhine. In the summer of 793,
Charles even moved his residence near the construction site and received a
legation from the Pope there to impress them with this project. However, the
construction progress did not meet the royal expectations: the marshy terrain
made it difficult to fortify the canal. Extremely humid weather conditions
exacerbated this problem, causing soil material to flow back into the canal
during the night, as a chronicler observed. In the autumn of 793, King Karl finally
gave up the project and left the region for more promising ventures. Recent
archaeological and geological studies have confirmed both the dating and
the description of the written sources: the canal, about three kilometres long,
was never completed, and parts of the excavated canal proved to be only
half-finished and spilled shortly after the original construction work.1
1700 km southeast, the Byzantine Emperor Constantine V (r. 741-775) in the year
767 in the face of a drought ordered to repair the long distance water pipeline
of Constantinople, which had been damaged in 626 during a siege by the
Avars. To this end, he transferred workers from all parts of his empire in Asia Minor
and the Balkans to the capital, including "1000 masons and plasterers from Asia
and Pontos, from Greece and from the islands (in the Aegean) 500 potters, and
from Thrace 5000 workers and 200 brickmakers." Within a few months, they

1 Ettel et al. 2014.

brought to a happy conclusion the reconstruction of the aqueducts and
pipelines, which stretched over a total length of 336 kilometres up to 120
kilometres to the northwest of Constantinople, thereby securing the capital's
water supply.2
Around the same time, in 767, Caliph al-Mansur (r. 754-775) from the Abbasid
dynasty, which had ruled the Arab world empire since 750, celebrated the
inauguration of the core of his new capital, Baghdad on the Tigris, the so-called
"circular city"; 2.4 km in diameter, it covered 4.5 square kilometres, including the
Caliph's Palace and the main mosque in the centre. Construction work had
begun in 762, and during these five years al-Mansūr employed a steady 100,000
workers. A canal network, extending several hundred kilometres between the
rivers Euphrates and Tigris, served both for the transport of goods and irrigation
purposes. It had existed at the core for millennia, but expanded under the
Abbasids and was aligned to the new capital.3
Twenty years earlier, in 742/743, the Chinese high official Wei Jian initiated the
construction of a new canal that would secure the provision of Chang'an (now
Xi'an), the capital of the Tang Dynasty. Previously, the constant relocation of
the Wei River had repeatedly hindered the transport of goods. Now, the new
channel, along with Chang'an's new "port of long-range transport," provided a
more reliable connection to the more than 2000 km long canal system that had
supplied the surplus of the rice-producing provinces in southern China since the
early seventh century for the capitals and the troops in the north.4
The comparative view on these four construction projects in four (at least in
their claims) world empires of the eighth century illustrates the differences in the
scale of resources that a King of the Franks could mobilize, even when he called
himself "Emperor of the Romans" a few years later, in comparison with the
Caliph of the Abbasids or the Emperor of the Tang, who at that time ruled the
largest empires of Afro-Eurasia. However, although the empire of Charlemagne
may have surpassed the Byzantine Empire in terms of surface area and
population in the 8th century, Emperor Constantine V was successful in a larger

2 Theophanes 1997, AM 6259 = 766/767 AD; Crow/Bardill/Bayliss 2008.

3 Lombard 1992; Kennedy 2011.
4 Xiong 2006; Thilo 2006.
scale project, while the Carolingian failed. Of course, under medieval
technical conditions, it was probably easier to transport men and material
across the Mediterranean to Constantinople than to the eastern inland
periphery of the Frankish Empire. However, the different results of the
construction projects of 767 and 792/793 also point to differences in the state
institutions and their organisational complexity, which enabled (or did not allow
for) the mobilisation of sufficient knowledge and workforce. Similar
comparisons were made by Chris Wickham in his masterpiece "Framing the
Early Middle Ages," in which he distinguished between the "weak" monarchies
of post-Roman Western Europe and the "strong" empires of the East, such as
Byzantium and the Caliphate. 5
In any case, this comparison legitimises to look at the late antique world
"beyond Rome and Charlemagne". Such a shift in perspective has recently
been undertaken several times even with great "public success", as in Peter
Frankopan's "The Silk roads", and therefore does not require an extended
explanation as perhaps a few years earlier.6 The present book was inspired,
however, by a work that focuses more on Western Europe and its relations with
the Mediterranean, namely Michael McCormick's "Origins of the European
Economy".7 Of course, with its more than 1100 pages, the present book cannot
and does not want to compete. However, according to the subtitle of the series
in which it is published, it intends to convey in six "global historical sketches" at
least an impression of the extent, density, effect and development of the
interconnections between more or less distant parts of Afro-Eurasia, in which
Western Europe participated just as the westernmost periphery and not in the
centre. After all, when Charlemagne sent ambassadors to Constantinople and
Baghdad (see Chapter 1), he not only interfered in the regular exchange of
envoys between these established world powers in the Mediterranean. From
the court of the caliph, delegations frequently travelled to India, Tibet or China
(and from there back to Baghdad). The world rulers of the eighth century were
aware of each other's existence and competing claims, and so the building

5 Wickham 2005; Wickham 2009, 4-10.

6 Frankopan 2016.
7 McCormick 2002.
projects described above may also have been parts of a "display of power
over long distances," as Matthew Canepa puts it. 8 In particular, Chapters 1, 2
and 6 will discuss the political history of these empires and the mobility of nobility
and diplomats, as well as aspects of courtly culture between their capitals.
Chris Wickham noted that "there is no need for a particularly dense
communication network so that one region can influence another's material
culture. A single princess can accomplish this, or a single craftsman or a group
of craftsmen traveling to another region." 9 However, a look at these artisans
and other travellers "below" elite levels in Chapter 4 may make it clear that their
number and the spatial extent of their travels should not be underestimated.
This includes the mobility of nonhuman "actors" such as objects or new crops,
whose movement from one place to another, along with the necessary
manufacturing or cultivation techniques, again required human travellers, but
also the emergence of new production chains or new rhythms of agriculture
outside the palaces (chapter 5). The scope and sustaining effects of these
"global" interconnections are also not affected by the results of latest
quantitative research, such as the determination of the proportion of ceramics
coming through long distance routes undertaken by Seth M. N. Priestmann for
sites in the western Indian Ocean; even for central hubs of the 7th-9th centuries
such as Siraf in the Persian Gulf, their share was less than five percent.10 Of
course, under ancient and medieval transport conditions, also such an
international port depended on the supply of food and bulk goods from the
near hinterland; but the availability of "exotic" goods made a special
contribution to its appeal and prestige.11 However, the most impressive result of
the "vertical" dimension of these connections (in addition to their "lateral"
distance-bridging dimension)12 was, without a doubt, the diffusion of new
religious ideas, such as of Buddhism from India or of "Nestorian" Christianity,
Zoroastrianism or Manichaeism from Persia to China, but also of Hinduism to

8 Müller/Preiser-Kapeller/Riehle 2009; Bielenstein 2005; Canepa 2010.

9 Wickham 2004, 161, 165.
10 Priestmann 2013.
11 Preiser-Kapeller 2015.
12 Cf. Bayly 2004.
Southeast Asia. These affected not only the most intimate imaginations of the
“afterworld” of masses of people, but also the mutual perceptions of distant
regions of the world, so that the remote province of Palestine even for
aristocrats in Gaul or distant India for Chinese emperors became "sacred lands"
in central position in the "maps in their heads" (see Chapter 3). Finally, changes
in climatic conditions affecting the entire Afro-Eurasian region enforce a global
perspective; the transitional period between the "Roman Climate Optimum"
and the "Medieval Climate Anomaly” culminated between 536 and 660 AD in
a "Late Antique Little Ice Age" (LALIA). And even the "microbial union of the
earth" postulated by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie for the late Middle Ages13 is
already evident in epidemics like the waves of the "Justinianic" plague
between 540 and 750 AD (chapters 1, 5 and 6).
In all the following chapters, the density of the discussion will not be consistent
chronologically and geographically, but will become more detailed where
entangled phenomena culminate and can also be scrutinized more closely
due to the number of sources. Despite the concomitant privilege of some times
and places, one aim is at least to cover entire Afro-Eurasia and not only Eurasia,
as it is still the case in many global historical publications.14 Thus the history of
Africa as far as possible may come to its right. For even from the perspective of
Baghdad or Chang'an, the courts of Nubia or Ghana may have been as
remote or as close as the residences of Charlemagne.

13 Le Roy Ladurie 1973.

14 Cf. for instance Kulke 2016.