Armed conflict and the proximity of soldiers and other combatants shaped late ancient monastic communities in diverse ways that reflected not only the vulnerability of victims but also the resourcefulness of innovators. Monks were wounded, captured, and killed, and some became the objects of veneration as martyrs; monastic communities built walls and towers for protection and offered help to victims of violence; monks interacted with barbarians peacefully and violently and integrated their fears of barbarians into their spiritual lives; monks formed new and often beneficial relationships with military men, some of whom chose to become monks themselves; and the military may have provided one of the models for the organization of monastic communities. Monks saw themselves as soldiers of the heavenly king, not entirely different from the nearby soldiers of the earthly king.

This chapter compares great power interventions in Libya and Syria, investigating why Western powers intervened directly and swiftly in Libya but indirectly with some delay in Syria, despite similar civilian atrocities in the two cases. Hierarchical intervention theory provides a compelling explanation for these differences, highlighting how great powers defend their clients and avoid direct intervention in their rivals’ spheres of influence. Using comparative-longitudinal analysis and pattern-matching of great power rhetoric and intervention policies, we show that human rights violations rhetoric primarily served as a rationalization for intervention. In Libya, Western powers employed this rhetoric to justify offensive actions, while in Syria, Russia escalated its human rights violations framing just before direct defensive action. By contrast, civil war rhetoric was used to justify Russia and China’s nonintervention stances. These findings align with our model’s predictions, suggesting that both offensive and defensive interventions may be justified through humanitarian intervention rhetoric. This provides further support for hierarchical intervention theory over rival explanations based on ideology, humanitarianism, or resources.

This chapter examines the US and Canadian government’s programs that allow for the sanctioning of countries as State Sponsors of Terrorism. The chapter also provides views into why countering countries engaged in state sponsorship of terrorism efforts are so difficult to counter.

IIn the LH I period a social organization appears and a wealthy ruling class emerges. The foundation of the ‘palace’ structure is laid and the ‘ideology of power’ as well. The period is mainly known from tombs, the shaft graves excavated by Heinrich Schliemann in Mycenae being the most celebrated. The finds produced by the two Grave circles of Mycenae, remarkable for their variety and wealth, give plentiful information about the burial customs, the identity of the deceased and the art of the period. Stonework for precious vases, metalwork in gold, electrum or silver show sophisticated techniques – repoussé, inlaying, cloisonné – in the fashioning of cups, rhyta, weapons with decorated hilts. Outstanding are the Silver Siege Rhyton, the daggers with elaborate inlaid blades and the funerary masks, a special offering; also the distantly coming amber used in jewellery. Faience items bear Minoan influence, as do the seals and signet rings, a special category.

I open with Robert Sturmy’s disastrous 1458 voyage. I introduce Sturmy, and set the scene of the trials of the Genoese, before listing his cargo. I establish the terms of my study, introducing my key frameworks: the concept of ‘Syriana’, the phenomenon of ‘post-Acre melancholia’, and the category of ‘Arabo-English literature’. I introduce the medieval geographical imagination of ‘Syria’, showing how the label was used variously in reference to the former Roman province, the crusading settlements, the Mamlūk administrative district and the broader region of the Holy Land. These materials are framed through analysis of artist Michael Rakowitz’s Trafalgar Square Fourth Plinth commission, The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist (2018), a lost Assyrian Lamassu recreated from tins of Iraqi date syrup. The structure and approach of the book draws this artwork, which articulates the entanglement of trade, conflict, consumption, dialogue, and human mobility.

Chapter 1 describes the restoration of Damascus in the fifth/eleventh and sixth/twelfth centuries under successive Seljuk, Zangid, and Ayyubid dynasties, with a focus on the revival of religious and intellectual life in the city through the patronage of political elites and the influx of scholars from other parts of the Muslim world. The chapter traces the formation of two competing Shāfiʿī legal traditions in Damascus. The dominant and longer-established tradition was formalist, traditionalist, and transmission-oriented, and it combined centuries-old indigenous Damascene scholarly culture with the Iraqi Shāfiʿī tradition, which had taken root in Damascus starting in the second half of the fifth/eleventh century. The second minority tradition drew on the Khurasani strand of Shāfiʿism, which had arrived in Damascus in the second half of the sixth/twelfth century, and it was more analytical, exploratory, and rationalist in orientation.

Chapter 2 examines Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s life in Damascus, with an emphasis on his intellectual formation. I reconstruct his formative influences in the Damascene milieu to show that he was a prominent representative of Khurasani Shāfiʿism who was linked to that tradition through his teachers, the works he studied and taught, and the ideas of leading Khurasani Shāfiʿīs that he adopted and transformed. Beyond shedding light on Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s life, the biographies of Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām, his teachers, and his contemporaries illuminate the politics of Ayyubid state patronage and call into question the depiction of post-Abbasid scholars on the state payroll as quietist and obsequious to the political establishment.

Chapter 5 returns to Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s biography to examine his attempts to embody, apply, and disseminate his legal philosophy among diverse classes: scholars, students of the law, and a non-specialist public in Damascus and later in Cairo, where he retired. I demonstrate that Ibn ʿAbd al-Salām’s public activism and frequent embroilment in political controversy are best understood as manifestations of these efforts. I outline the connections between his legal philosophy and the socioreligious goals he pursued, highlighting the continuity between his theoretical scholarship and his embodied activism.

Palmyra is usually studied for one of three reasons, either its role in the long-distance trade between Indian Ocean and Mediterranean, its distinctive cultural identity as visible in the epigraphic and material record from the city or its rise as an independent regional power in the Near East in the third quarter of the third century AD. While Palmyra was indeed a special place, with a private sorte, or destiny of its own, as Pliny famously expressed it (HN 5.88), the city’s ability to maintain its distinctiveness arguably rested on deep entanglements with her local and regional surroundings. This chapter addresses how the city engaged with its neighbours and its Roman imperial overlords. Actions, events and policies attested in the epigraphic record from the city and from the Palmyrene diaspora in the Roman Empire are discussed in light of theoretical insights from archaeology, sociology and economics. It is argued that Palmyra’s remarkable success built on the city’s ability to connect with the range of social networks that constituted the Roman Empire.

This chapter examines the transition of pagan architecture and religious practices in Late Antiquity, focusing on the treatment of Roman temples under Christian emperors. Drawing on legal texts, literature, inscriptions and archaeological findings, it evaluates whether temples were preserved, repurposed or destroyed. Challenging the common assumption of widespread temple destruction, it argues that such actions were neither systematic nor state-enforced. Instead, the chapter presents a nuanced perspective, demonstrating that many temples remained intact and were gradually adapted for secular or Christian purposes. Archaeological evidence suggests that abandonment and natural decay played a greater role in their decline than deliberate demolition. It also highlights how Christian emperors often sought to suppress pagan rituals while preserving architectural heritage, with legal measures typically prohibiting sacrifices rather than mandating temple destruction. By emphasising regional variations in temple transformations and critically assessing sources that exaggerate instances of destruction, the chapter challenges traditional narratives, offering a more complex understanding of religious and architectural change in Late Antiquity.

The chronological history of Eustathius of Epiphania (in Syria) covered events from Adam until AD 503. It consists of two parts, probably a part with sacred history from Creation until the Sack of Jerusalem and a second part with secular history from Aeneas until Eustathius’ own time. Eustathius is the only known Greek chronographer who preferred the chronology of the Hebrew Bible to that of the Septuagint. As a consequence, he defends a very early start of the Christian era in AM 4350. Eustathius relied on earlier histories and summarised these: a summary of the Jewish Antiquities of Flavius Josephus is preserved. Scholars have argued that Eustathius was a major source for a range of later authors (including John Malalas and Theophanes the Confessor), but we argue for a more cautious view.

Chapter 8 traces the dynamics of our argument about the causes and consequences of IO suspensions with three qualitative case studies: Honduras’ suspension from and return to the OAS (2009–2011), Syria’s suspension from and return to the Arab League (2011–2023), and Guinea’s suspension from ECOWAS (2021). Honduras’ and Guinea’s suspensions both occurred after coups d’état violated IO commitments. Syria’s suspension was in response to gross human rights violations that stemmed from government-sponsored violence. Each case shows how IO members used suspension as a multilateral diplomatic sanction, signaling peer disapproval, to push states to halt/change behavior. The suspensions catalyzed other international actors to also punish the countries’ political backsliding as seen through follow-on economic sanctions and the withholding of ambassadors. Each of the suspended countries engaged in stigma management after their forced exits. But the cases also show a range of different outcomes: Honduras returned to the OAS after meeting all of the IO’s stipulations for reinstatement; Syria was readmitted to the Arab League even without behavior changes (largely because of shifts in other members’ domestic politics and an intractable stalemate); and Guinea remains suspended from ECOWAS at the time of writing.