Read The Great Arab Conquests Online
Authors: Hugh Kennedy
The Great Arab Conquests (29 page)
Meanwhile there were bitter disputes in Alexandria between two rivals for the post of military commander: Domentianus, the man who had surrendered first the Fayyum and then Nikiu, and Menas, who is said to have been more popular. The two men were each supported by one of the circus factions, Domentianus by the Blues and Menas by the Greens. Rival circus factions, named after colours, originally supported rival charioteers. They were an important focus of loyalty and strife in big cities in late antiquity but none of them survived the Muslim conquest. The two generals could and did call their supporters out on the streets. It is not clear whether this hostility was more than personal rivalry: John of Nikiu speaks of religious tensions but gives no further explanation. There may also have been a difference in policy: Domentianus agreed with Martina and Cyrus about reaching an accommodation with the Arabs.
John does not mention any serious fighting but the Egyptian-Arabic tradition describes a blockade enlivened by occasional sorties by the garrison and by single combats. There was clearly some skirmishing outside the city walls but, it would seem, no general assault. When the end came, it was through negotiation rather than military action.
Cyrus returned to Alexandria on the morning of the Feast of the Holy Cross, 14 September 641. He stopped first at the monastery of Tabensi near the port where a fragment of the True Cross, sent on the orders of the great Heraclius, was kept. Cyrus then took it in procession through the streets to the famous church of the Caesarion. John of Nikiu tells how the people covered the way with carpets and chanted hymns in his honour, and the crowds were so great that they trampled on each other.
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It is interesting that the Coptic historian records the popular welcome given to the arch-enemy of his Church. He preached a sermon on the subject of the True Cross but at the end of the service a deacon gave out the wrong psalm, hoping to please the patriarch with a direct reference to his return. The people shook their heads at this departure from the proper order and sagely predicted that Cyrus would never see another Easter in the city; or so we are told.
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It is interesting that the Coptic historian records the popular welcome given to the arch-enemy of his Church. He preached a sermon on the subject of the True Cross but at the end of the service a deacon gave out the wrong psalm, hoping to please the patriarch with a direct reference to his return. The people shook their heads at this departure from the proper order and sagely predicted that Cyrus would never see another Easter in the city; or so we are told.
In October Cyrus left the city quietly and went to negotiate with Amr in Fustāt. It was the time of the Nile flood and Amr, who had been campaigning in Middle Egypt, had returned to his base. According to John, Amr welcomed the patriarch, saying, ‘You have done well to come to us’, and Cyrus replied that ‘God has delivered this land into your hands: let there be no enmity between you and Rome’. According to a Syriac chronicle, Cyrus explained that he was not responsible for the breaking of the treaty and the non-payment of tribute and ‘he beseeched [the Muslims] eloquently to accept the gold he was offering but Amr replied to him: “Now that we have taken the country, we will not abandon it.”’
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Cyrus felt that he had no alternative but to accept the fait accompli and peace was finally agreed on 28 November 641. The people of Alexandria were to pay tribute. The Roman army was to leave the city with its possessions and treasures and return to Constantinople by sea. There was to be an armistice for eleven months until September 642 for these arrangements to be put into effect. In the meantime, the Muslims would keep 150 soldiers and fifty civilians as hostages to ensure that the terms of the agreement were implemented.
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Cyrus felt that he had no alternative but to accept the fait accompli and peace was finally agreed on 28 November 641. The people of Alexandria were to pay tribute. The Roman army was to leave the city with its possessions and treasures and return to Constantinople by sea. There was to be an armistice for eleven months until September 642 for these arrangements to be put into effect. In the meantime, the Muslims would keep 150 soldiers and fifty civilians as hostages to ensure that the terms of the agreement were implemented.
Cyrus now returned to Alexandria to sell his agreement to the military commander Theodore and to inform the emperor. All the people of the city came to pay tribute to him but he did not dare to explain what he had done. It was not until an Arab force appeared to collect the first instalment of the tribute that the population of Alexandria realized that peace had been made. When they saw the Muslim force, the Alexandrians gathered their arms to make ready for battle, but the military commanders announced that the city had been surrendered. The immediate popular reaction was very hostile and the patriarch was threatened with stoning. At this point Cyrus came clean: with tears of grief, he urged the people to accept the terms, saying that he had made the treaty to save them and their children. Finally they were won over; the money was collected and paid on 10 December 641, which was the first day of the Muslim year 21.
After the fall of Alexandria, there was little more resistance. It seems that Amr had already led an army into Middle Egypt. There had been some resistance from the local governor at Antinopolis but elsewhere the Muslim armies had been unopposed. During the period of truce that followed the surrender of Alexandria, Muslim armies visited the smaller towns of the northern delta. Again, there was sporadic resistance but no sustained opposition.
Meanwhile, Alexandria was adjusting to the new situation. Many Romans, including we must suppose the bulk of the army, set sail for Constantinople or other areas still in Byzantine hands. Cyrus himself died peacefully of natural causes. It is a measure of the normality that reasserted itself that his successor as Chalcedonian patriarch was duly elected. Meanwhile the Coptic patriarch Benjamin reappeared from hiding and was able to return to the city. The last Byzantine troops under Theodore set sail for Cyprus on 17 September and the final act was played out when, at the end of the eleven-month truce, Amr formally entered the city without meeting any resistance on 29 September. A thousand years of Graeco-Roman rule were at an end.
In many ways Islamic rule was a continuation of what had gone before. We know from the administrative papyri that tell us so much about everyday life in Egypt that the same tax collectors collected much the same taxes under Byzantine and Muslim rule and they continued to use Greek as the language of government. It was to be another half-century before Arabic became the language of administration.
In a number of ways, however, the Muslim conquest did mean major changes. Most obviously, orders now came from Medina not Constantinople, and the governors were Arabic-speaking Muslims, not Greek-speaking Christians. Indicative of this change was the shift in the direction of grain exports. Grain from Egypt had sustained first Rome, then Constantinople. After the conquest, it sustained Medina and Mecca. One of the first projects undertaken by the new Muslim government was to reopen the ancient canal that ran from the Nile at modern Cairo to the Red Sea. Grain could now be shipped directly from the fertile fields of Egypt to the capital of the new empire.
The story goes that Amr had intended to make Alexandria his capital, which would have been the natural move, but that he was prevented from doing so by the caliph Umar, who feared the Christian and Hellenic influence of the city. Instead, the governor and the army of conquest were established just north of the fortress of Babylon, on a site that became the nucleus of old Cairo. The Egyptian-Arab tradition claims that the decision was made by the caliph Umar, who, as in Kūfa and Basra, did not want the Muslim armies to be separated from Arabia by water. It was also in a superb strategic position at the head of the delta, only a few kilometres away from the capital of the pharaohs at Memphis. Here the first mosque was built. Although most of its fabric is later, the mosque is still known as the Mosque of Amr and occupies the site on which he built it. Around it the Arabs pitched their tents and built their shelters. The names of the different tribal groups who settled there were lovingly preserved in the Egyptian-Arabic tradition, and for at least two centuries to have ancestors who had come over with the conquest meant not just social prestige but entitlement to a share of the tax revenues. The list shows that the overwhelming majority of the settlers were southern Arabs, from the settled areas of the Yemen and the Hadramawt in south Arabia. The settlement became known as Fustāt, either from one of the numerous Arabic words for tent or as a corruption of the Greek word
fossaton
or ditch. Compared with the Islamic new town at Kūfa in Iraq, which seems to have been laid out with broad streets and an open urban centre, Fustāt was much more haphazard and organic. Different tribes and families settled where they liked and the streets developed from the winding paths they walked to go down to the Nile for water or to find their way to mosque and market. The settlement was very spread out, running about 5 kilometres from north to south along the banks of the Nile and at least a kilometre from west to east. People settled in their kinship groups, each 300 to 350 men being allotted a
khitta
or plot on which to build their houses. The first Fustāt was, according to its greatest historian, ‘a conglomerate of thirty or forty tribal (or multi-tribal) settlements of several hundred tents and huts made of reeds or clay, set more or less close together and separated by vast expanses of uninhabited land’.
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More recent archaeological research has confirmed that much of the site was open and unbuilt on at the time of the Muslim conquest and that the building of permanent, brick houses was begun at a very early stage.
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fossaton
or ditch. Compared with the Islamic new town at Kūfa in Iraq, which seems to have been laid out with broad streets and an open urban centre, Fustāt was much more haphazard and organic. Different tribes and families settled where they liked and the streets developed from the winding paths they walked to go down to the Nile for water or to find their way to mosque and market. The settlement was very spread out, running about 5 kilometres from north to south along the banks of the Nile and at least a kilometre from west to east. People settled in their kinship groups, each 300 to 350 men being allotted a
khitta
or plot on which to build their houses. The first Fustāt was, according to its greatest historian, ‘a conglomerate of thirty or forty tribal (or multi-tribal) settlements of several hundred tents and huts made of reeds or clay, set more or less close together and separated by vast expanses of uninhabited land’.
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More recent archaeological research has confirmed that much of the site was open and unbuilt on at the time of the Muslim conquest and that the building of permanent, brick houses was begun at a very early stage.
57
This haphazard settlement was to have a glorious future. From the time that Amr founded it in 641 to the present day, the city at the head of the Nile delta has never ceased to be the capital of Egypt. True, the centre of power has gradually shifted north, through the ninth-century official quarter laid out on the northern boundaries of Fustāt to the walled city of Cairo (al-Qāhira, the ‘Victorious’), founded by the Fatimids in 969, but despite this slow migration north, Fustāt remained a centre of population and commerce until 1171, when much of it was burned at the time of a threatened Crusader invasion. Since then much of the site has been a ruin, where low mounds of debris conceal the remains of houses, mosques and baths. But the old fortress of Babylon has remained a centre of the Coptic cult and culture, and Muslims still worship in the mosque that bears Amr’s name, venerated as the oldest in Egypt.
The foundation of Fustāt put an end to the role of Alexandria as a capital. For almost a millennium, Egypt had been ruled from this Mediterranean city by a Greek-speaking elite. Contact across the Mediterranean with Rome and Constantinople was easy and frequent. In the truce between negotiation of the surrender of the city and the arrival of the Arab garrison, many of this elite left. Alexandria became a frontier town. In late 645 a Roman force under the command of a General Manuel landed in Alexandria and took the city with ease. From there they set out to ravage the delta but failed to strike home their advantage and attack Fustāt. Amr, who had by this time lost his position as governor, was hastily reappointed, and led the soldiers he had led so successfully in the first conquest. The Romans were driven back to Alexandria. In the summer of 646 the city was besieged. Some say the attacking Muslims battered down the walls with siege engines, others that it fell through the treachery of one of the gatekeepers. It is impossible to prove whether either of these versions is true. What is clear, however, is that the city was taken by force: some of the Roman soldiers escaped by ship, many more, including Manuel, were killed in the fighting. This time the arrival of the Arabs was accompanied by the burning of much of the city and widespread slaughter until Amr put an end to the killing at a place known ever since as the Mosque of Mercy.
This second conquest confirmed the status of Fustāt as the capital and sealed the fate of Alexandria, which now became a provincial city. In some ways this was a return to a much older pattern: Fustāt was the successor to the pharaonic capital at Memphis.
Arab settlement remained very limited. It is unlikely that there were more than 40,000 men
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and their families, say a total Arab immigration of around 100,000 souls.
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Once they had secured the country and learned how to manage its wealth to their own advantage, they had no incentive or desire to encourage further immigration: that would just have meant spreading the resources more thinly. Nor did they have any desire to encourage the conversion of the Copts, for they too would have demanded shares. For most of the first century after the conquest, Arab settlement was restricted to Fustāt, the garrison at Alexandria and another at Aswan to defend Upper Egypt from attacks from Nubia. The overwhelming majority of the population remained Coptic Christians and the lower ranks of the administration were largely drawn from the same families and groups who had served the Roman and Persian imperial administrations before. Only the military and the highest ranks of the administration were Arabs.
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and their families, say a total Arab immigration of around 100,000 souls.
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Once they had secured the country and learned how to manage its wealth to their own advantage, they had no incentive or desire to encourage further immigration: that would just have meant spreading the resources more thinly. Nor did they have any desire to encourage the conversion of the Copts, for they too would have demanded shares. For most of the first century after the conquest, Arab settlement was restricted to Fustāt, the garrison at Alexandria and another at Aswan to defend Upper Egypt from attacks from Nubia. The overwhelming majority of the population remained Coptic Christians and the lower ranks of the administration were largely drawn from the same families and groups who had served the Roman and Persian imperial administrations before. Only the military and the highest ranks of the administration were Arabs.
The main protagonists in the drama of the conquest of Egypt met very different fates. Cyrus was the first to go, dying of natural causes in the period of truce between the treaty of surrender and the final Arab occupation. Basing himself imaginatively on John of Nikiu, Butler reconstructs his last months:
Cyrus was now a broken man in mind and body. All his dreams of ambition had dissolved: his very hopes of personal safety were gone [because of the emperor’s anger at what he had done]. As he felt the shadows closing around his life, his conscience awoke to a sense of his crimes as well as his failures. Torn by unavailing remorse, he deplored his betrayal of Egypt with ceaseless tears. So plunged in gloom and despondency he fell an easy victim to a dysentery, which seized him on Palm Sunday and on the following Thursday, 21 March 642, he died.
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In reality, Cyrus may have been right to agree to pay tribute and play for time rather than risk military defeat at the hands of the Arabs. If his policy had been followed, the history of Egypt might have been very different.
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