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With ‘decline and fall’ no longer a satisfactory model for long-term change in the Late Antique Near East (400-800 A.D.), attention has shifted to alternatives, here dubbed the ‘Fiscal’ model and the ‘Intensification and Abatement’ model. In the light of new evidence which makes the fiscal model less persuasive, that of intensification and abatement is attracting growing attention. However, its practical application will require the sort of longterm multi-period, and multi-disciplinary regional projects that have become very hard to organise under current UK funding arrangements.

The PmbZ is now complete, should I be pleased? Yes, you should be absolutely delighted. It is a tremendous achievement. The need for such a prosopography has long been recognised, above all in Berlin, where during the late nineteenth century Mommsen and von Harnack at the Prussian Academy of Sciences effectively created modern prosopographical research. The tradition lived on through the twentieth century, and in the late 1970s Friedhelm Winkelmann and a distinguished team of East German Byzantinists set about tackling the Middle Byzantine period. East Berlin in those years, dogmatically Marxist and intellectually isolated, was hardly a conducive environment for such a project. Under-funded, and for ideological reasons limited to the Byzantine laity, progress was slow, but these years did see a substantial gathering of material and the publication of some enormously important preparatory work. Winkelmann's two short volumes,

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