Muslim Expansion and Byzantine Collapse in North Africa.

• Author: Merrills, A.H.
• Position: Book review

Muslim Expansion and Byzantine Collapse in North Africa. By WALTER E. KAEGI. New York: CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY Piss, 2010. Pp. xx + 345, illus. $99.

In this important book, Walter Kaegi examines the processes by which the provinces of North Africa were lost to the Byzantine empire, and were incorporated into the Islamic world, over the long middle decades of the seventh century. The struggle for North Africa was crucial to the balance of power within the eastern (and western) Mediterranean, and yet remains poorly known. Primary textual sources relating to the subject are tangential, lacunose, or late (and frequently all three); archaeology remains in a problematic state, thanks to a patchy history of excavation and publication over the last century and a half. And many modern synthetic studies have been motivated primarily by much grander narratives--most frequently the inevitable victory of Islam, or the baffling failure of Christianity to solidify resistance in a region in which it had sunk deep roots. Kaegi's sensible, sober, secular history does much to redress these imbalances and presents a thoughtful synthesis of a period of massive social and political change.

Kaegi's care to shift the focus of his history away from purely religious concerns also challenges the cultural emphases of much late antique historiography. As he notes on p. 93 (in what might be seen as a leitmotif for the study as a whole), "It may be more pleasant to dwell on culture, society and religion, but war formed the environment in which those existed." This, then, is very much a history of a war. Kaegi argues persuasively that religious issues were important--on the one hand in the creation of social fissures that prevented coherent patterns of political or cultural resistance, on the other in the creation of an ideological purpose behind the conquest--but that they should not be ascribed a causal significance that they do not warrant. Instead, his study focuses most fully on military and political operations on the ground, and on an impressive range of scales. Here, the expansion of Islam is placed within its fullest geo-political context; the reader will be in little doubt as to the significance of the winter campaigns in Anatolia, or of political perfidy in Constantinople, on the resolution of affairs in the Maghreb. Excellent on the big picture stuff, the study is still better on the minute dissection of specifics. In his opening discussion of the landscape of...