With its latest effort to illuminate the rather dark and obscure corner that history has made of the Byzantine Empire, The Metropolitan Museum of Art mounted an impressively ambitious exhibition devoted to the period when the empire was coming into contact with Islam — hence the title, Byzantium and Islam: Age of Transition. With the eastern Mediterranean as a political and cultural juggernaut ruled by a Christian capital, Constantinople, the seventh century saw expanded trade routes reaching eastward down the Red Sea towards Jordan and southern India where silk and ivory were purchased and brought back to imperial centres.
When the West met East
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