The Political Geography of the Last and Largest Empire of the Long Late Antiquity

Stefan Heidemann is a Professor of Islamic Studies at Universität Hamburg

The Department of Jewish, Islamic, and Middle Eastern Studies invites you to a lecture on the Caliphate and governance in the 7th Century CE.

The Caliphate that emerged following the Arab conquests of the early seventh century functioned as a new Late Antique empire, characterized by a bureaucratic and tax-based system. However, its internal political structure diverges significantly from that of Rome, particularly at the regional level—an aspect often obscured by our centralizing historical sources. Examining the role of provinces raises key questions about capital cities and the ways transregional elites contributed to maintaining cohesion. In this sense, the Caliphate represents the rise of a second imperial model in Western Eurasia.

About the Speaker:

Stefan Heidemann is a Professor of Islamic Studies at Universität Hamburg and serves as the director of the RomanIslam Center of Comparative Empire and Transcultural Studies (2020–2026). He was the Principal Investigator of the ERC Advanced Grant project The Early Islamic Empire at Work – The View from the Regions Toward the Center (2014–2019) and is the editor-in-chief of the journal Der Islam. His publications include Das Aleppiner Kalifat (1994), Die Renaissance der Städte (2002), Raqqa II: Die islamische Stadt (2003), and Transregional and Regional Elites – Connecting the Early Islamic Empire (2020), along with numerous contributions to books and academic journals.