Late Antiquity : Development

Title: The religious culture of the classical world

- The classical world had a polytheistic religious culture that involved multiple cults.

- Roman/Italian gods like Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, and Mars were worshipped along with numerous Greek and eastern deities in thousands of temples, shrines, and sanctuaries throughout the empire.

- Polytheists did not have a common name or label to describe themselves.

- Judaism was the other great religious tradition in the empire but it was not a monolith, and there was a great deal of diversity within the Jewish communities of late antiquity.

Title: The process of Christianization

- The Christianisation of the empire was a gradual and complex process that lasted for several centuries.

- Polytheism did not disappear overnight, especially in the western provinces where the Christian bishops waged a running battle against beliefs and practices they condemned more than the Christian laity did.

- The boundaries between religious communities were much more fluid in the fourth century than they would become thanks to the repeated efforts of religious leaders to enforce a more rigid set of beliefs and practices.

Title: Eastern Vs Western Roman Empire

- The general prosperity was especially marked in the East where the population was still expanding until the sixth century despite the impact of the plague which affected the Mediterranean in the 540s.

- In the West, by contrast, the empire fragmented politically as Germanic groups from the North took over all the major provinces and established kingdoms that are best described as 'post-Roman'.

Title: Important kingdoms of the post-Roman world

The Post-Roman kingdoms foreshadowed the beginnings of a different kind of world that is usually called 'medieval'.

- The most important kingdoms of the post-Roman world were that of the Visigoths in Spain, destroyed by the Arabs between 711 and 720, that of the Franks in Gaul (c.511-687) and that of the Lombards in Italy (568-774).

Title: The reign of Justinian

- In the East, where the empire remained united, the reign of Justinian is the high-water mark of prosperity and imperial ambition.

- Justinian recaptured Africa from the Vandals in 533 but his recovery of Italy from the Ostrogoths left that country devastated and paved the way for the Lombard invasion.

- By the early seventh century, the war between Rome and Iran had flared up again, and the Sasanians who had ruled Iran since the third century launched a wholesale invasion of all the major eastern provinces (including Egypt).

- When Byzantium, as the Roman Empire was now increasingly known, recovered these provinces in the 620s, it was just a few years away, literally, from the final major blow which came, this time, from the southeast.

Rise of Islam :

The expansion of Islam from its beginnings in Arabia has been called ‘the greatest political revolution ever to occur in the history of the ancient world’.

By 642, barely ten years after the Prophet Muhammad’s death, large parts of both the eastern Roman and Sasanian empires had fallen to the Arabs in a series of stunning confrontations.