Rethinking Conquest

Overview & Synopsis

The momentous political and social changes that affected the Near East following the death of the prophet Muhammad have traditionally been framed as ‘conquests’. But what did ‘conquest’ mean, if anything, to contemporary and later medieval observers in the Byzantine and Islamicate worlds, beyond the told and retold stories of battles and sieges? What should it or can it mean for today’s historian and area scholar? This volume aims, on the one hand, to record aspects of the wide-ranging conversation around the topic of ‘conquest’ that took place at a conference held in Tübingen in 2017, intersecting the trajectory of the many revisions which have affected Byzantine and Early Islamic historiography in recent decades. On the other hand, by including surveys that deal with interdisciplinary, general and theoretical issues and studies that engage in greater detail with the literary and archaeological source material, the book offers readers a guide to some of the most significant problems that face the historian of every extraction when approaching the events of the seventh century CE.