Brown on the Mediterranean as backwater

"In the eighth century the Mediterranean seaboard came to be ruled from Baghdad; the Mediterranean became a backwater to men who were used to sailing from the Persian Gulf; and the court of Harun al-Rashid (788-809), with its heavy trappings of 'sub-Persian' culture, was a reminder that the irreversible victory of the Near East over the Greeks began slowly but surely with the revolt of Fars in A D 224."

Peter Brown, The world of late antiquity, A D 150-750, History of European civilization library, ed. Geoffrey Barraclough (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1971): 20-21.