The publication of Volume II, The Age of Napoleon, in 1975 concluded five decades of achievement. Ariel Durant died on October 25, 1981, at the age of 83; Will Durant died 13 days later, on November 7, aged 96. Their last published work was A Dual Autobiography (1977).
* An occasional hiatus in the numbering of the notes is due to last-minute omissions.
* Blackened with time and fire, it is now known as the Burnt Pillar.
* The story that he died exclaiming, “Thou hast conquered, Galilean,” appears first in the Christian historian Theodoret in the fifth century, and is now unanimously rejected as a legend.56
* Our chief authority here is still the moralistic Tacitus (Germania, 18–19); but cf. a letter of Bishop Boniface, c. 756: “In old Saxony if a virgin in her father’s house, or a married woman under the protection of her husband, should be guilty of adultery, they burn her, strangled by her own hand, and hang her seducer over her grave; or else, cutting off her garments to the waist, modest matrons whip her, and pierce her with knives, till they destroy her”2—an extreme device for pegging a price.
* Our sole authority here is the Historia Ecclesiastica (v, 20) of Theodoret of Antioch; the tale may be a pious fraud.
* Jerome’s translation was mostly direct, from the original Hebrew or Greek; at times, how-ever, he translated from the Greek versions of Aquila, Symmachus, or Theodotion. His translation, revised in 1592 and 1907, is still the standard Latin text of the Bible for the Roman Catholic world. The “Douai Bible” is the English version of this Vulgate.
* Copt is a Europeanized form of the Arabic Kibt, which is a corruption of the Greek Aigyptos, Egyptian.
* St. Nicholas, in the fourth century, modestly filled the episcopal see of Myra in Lycia, never dreaming that he was to be the patron saint of Russia, of thieves and boys and girls, and at last, in his Dutch name as Santa Claus, to enter into the Christmas mythology of half the Christian world.
* We cannot find in the extant works or reliable traditions of Augustine the words often attributed to him on this occasion—“Roma locuta est, causa finita” (Rome has spoken, the case is finished).
* Cf. the theme line of Dante’s Paradiso (iii, 85): “La sua voluntate é nostra pace” (His will is our peace).
* The Salic Law (xiv) equates the denarius as one-fortieth of a solidus, which then contained one sixth of an ounce of gold, or $5.83 in the United States of America in 1946. The medieval scarcity of gold and currency gave to the sums mentioned in the text a much greater purchasing or punishing power than they would have today.
* Chlodwig, Ludwig, Clovis, Louis are one name.
* A purple cloak had long been the distinguishing garment of the emperor; to “assume the purple” was already a synonym for acquiring the throne.
* San Paolo fuori le mura was destroyed by fire in 1823, but was restored on the old lines in 1854–70. Its perfect proportions and stately colonnades make it one of the noblest creations of mankind.
* In 558 an earthquake caused half the central dome to crash into the church. The dead Isidore’s son Isidore rebuilt the dome, strengthening its supports, and raising it twenty-five feet higher than before. Cracks in these supports suggest that the dome now lives a precarious life.
† The Turks, after capturing Constantinople in 1453, covered the mosaics of St. Sophia with plaster, abhorring the “graven images” as idolatry; but in recent years the Turkish government has permitted a corps of workers from the Byzantine Institute of Boston, Massachusetts, to uncover these unsurpassed examples of the mosaic art. The Turkish conquerors almost atoned by adding four graceful minarets, completely harmonious with the domical design.
* Miniature is from minium, an Iberian word for the cinnabar that Rome imported from Spain; hence it came to mean vermilion—a favorite color in book illumination.
* A squinch is a diagonal arch mediating between the upper corner of a polygonal structure and the rim of a superimposed circular or elliptical dome. Creswell thinks this device was invented by the Persians.50
* Ceramic luster is an overglaze of silver, copper, and manganese, fired in a muffle kiln to shield it from direct flame, and simulating the effect of gold or silver on pottery or glass.
* The rediscovery of Arabia by modern Europeans illustrates the internationalism of science in the nineteenth century. It began in 1761–4, when Carsten Niebuhr traveled through the peninsula under the auspices of the Danish government; his published account (1772) was the first comprehensive description of Arabia. In 1807 Domingo Badia y Leblich, a Spaniard disguised as a Moor, visited Mecca, and gave the first accurate account of the pilgrimage ritual. In 1814–15 Johann Ludwig Burckhardt (1784–1817), a Swiss disguised as a Moslem, spent several months in Mecca and Medina; his learned reports were corroborated by later travelers. In 1853 Richard Burton, an Englishman dressed as an Afghan pilgrim, visited Medina and Mecca, and described his perilous journey in two absorbing volumes. In 1869–70 J. Halévy, a French Jew, explored the sites, and recorded the rock inscriptions, of the ancient Minaean, Sabaean, and Himyarite kingdoms. In 1875 Charles Montagu Doughty, an Englishman, traveled from Damascus in the pilgrimage caravan, and recorded his vicissitudes in Arabia Deserta (1888), one of the peaks of English prose. In 1882–8 E. Glaser, an Austrian, in three arduous expeditions, copied 1032 inscriptions, which are now our chief source for the history of pre-Islamic Arabia.
* The term Semitic is due to the legendary derivation of the peoples so called from Shem, son of Noah (Gen. x, 1). No clear definition of Semite can be given. In general the populations of Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Arabia, and the Arab populations of Africa, may be called Semitic in the sense that they use Semitic languages; the ancient peoples of Asia Minor, Armenia, and the Caucasus, and the peoples of Persia, North India, most of Europe, and all of the Europeanized Americas may be called “Indo-European” as using Indo-Germanic tongues.
† Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Everyman Library edition, IV, 322. It was one of the major achievements of Gibbon that he recognized the importance of Islam in medieval history, and recorded its political career with remarkable erudition, accuracy, and eloquence.
* The nomad women, says Doughty, “wash their babies in camel urine, and think thus to help them from insects; … and in this water both men and women comb their long hair.”4
* Preferable spellings of Mohammed and Koran would be Muhammad and Qur’ân; but it would be pedantry to insist upon them.
* A river bed or valley usually dry in summer.
* It was later sold to Muawiyah for 40,000 dirhems ($3200), is still preserved by the Ottoman Turks, and is sometimes used as a national standard.40
* In the following sketch certain passages from the Islamic traditions will be used in elucidation of the Koran, but will be specified as such, usually in the text, always in the notes.
* The term and policy were later extended to the Persians as also having a sacred book, the Avesta.
* Mutassim (833–42), Wathiq (842–7), Mutawakkil (847–61), Muntasir (861–2), Mustain (862–6), Mutazz (866–9), Muhtadi (869–70), and Mutamid (870–92), who, shortly before his death, returned the royal seat to Baghdad.