How was the world that recovered from the crises of the third through the seventh centuries a world of civilization?

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary but correct responses should include: Despite continuities that survived the barbarians, the world that emerged in the last three centuries of the first millennium C.E. was genuinely transformed. Rather than the world of empires that had dominated the densely populated belt of the age of sages, it might be proper to speak of a world of civilizations. Western civilization was a hybrid—partly Germanic, partly Christian, partly Roman in heritage. Islam was more innovative but had a similar profile: with a biblical heritage (reinterpreted by Muhammad), and the learned legacies of Rome, Greece, and Persia, under an elite established in conquest but susceptible to the cultural influence of its victims. In both Islam and Christendom, notions of universal empire survived: the caliphate, Byzantium. Neither could maintain unity in practice, and their regions became arenas of states that contested or ignored the imperial legacy. In India, political fragmentation was more thoroughgoing, in China less so. In both, however, invaders and immigrants were like chameleons, taking on the cultural hues of their new environments. In both, moreover, the traditional culture spread into neighboring areas and new states. Nowhere, by the eighth century, except in Ethiopia, was there any longer a civilization that was confined to a single state.