Read The Great Arab Conquests Online
Authors: Hugh Kennedy
The Great Arab Conquests (63 page)
In this chapter, I have selected a range of responses with the aim of showing at first hand a wide range of different responses to the Muslim conquests.
1
Geographically, they extend from Spain in the west to the account of a Chinese prisoner of war in Kūfa. In tone they range from Sophronius’s denunciation of the Muslims as complete barbarians to Mar Gabriel’s conviction that they were much better masters than his co-religionists, the Byzantines. Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian voices are all heard and the languages include Greek, Latin Syriac and Chinese.
1
Geographically, they extend from Spain in the west to the account of a Chinese prisoner of war in Kūfa. In tone they range from Sophronius’s denunciation of the Muslims as complete barbarians to Mar Gabriel’s conviction that they were much better masters than his co-religionists, the Byzantines. Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian voices are all heard and the languages include Greek, Latin Syriac and Chinese.
The earliest and most hostile reaction to the coming of the Arabs can be found in the Greek letters and sermons of Sophronius, patriarch of Jerusalem, already discussed briefly in Chapter 4.
2
Sophronius was a native of Damascus, which, when he was growing up in the late sixth century, could still offer an excellent education in Greek philosophy and rhetoric. From about 578 to 583 he studied in Alexandria during the final flowering of classical education in the city. His studies completed, he returned to Palestine to become a monk at the monastery of St Theodosius near Jerusalem. In 614 his peace was brutally disturbed by the Persian invasions in which the extra-mural churches around Jerusalem suffered especially badly. In his anger and grief he composed a lament on the fate of the city:
2
Sophronius was a native of Damascus, which, when he was growing up in the late sixth century, could still offer an excellent education in Greek philosophy and rhetoric. From about 578 to 583 he studied in Alexandria during the final flowering of classical education in the city. His studies completed, he returned to Palestine to become a monk at the monastery of St Theodosius near Jerusalem. In 614 his peace was brutally disturbed by the Persian invasions in which the extra-mural churches around Jerusalem suffered especially badly. In his anger and grief he composed a lament on the fate of the city:
Deceitfully the Mede
Came from terrible Persia
Pillaging cities and villages
Waging war against the ruler of Edom [Rome]
Advancing on the Holy Land
The malevolent one came
To destroy the city of God, Jerusalem.
Cry out in grief you tribes of blessed Christians
Holy Jerusalem is laid waste
With fearful wrath a demon has arisen
With the terrible envy of a warrior
To sack God-blessed cities and towns
With murderous daggers.
Sophronius certainly had experience of barbarians long before the Muslim conquests. He was obliged to flee to Rome in 615. He also spent some time in North Africa, where he met another of the great churchmen of his age, Maximus Confessor, with whom he became firm friends, and he also visited Constantinople on at least one occasion. He returned to Jerusalem after it had been reconquered by Heraclius, and in 633 he was persuaded by popular pressure to accept the office of patriarch.
It was as patriarch and effective political leader in Jerusalem that Sophronius confronted the Muslims. His first reference comes in a pastoral letter, probably written in 634 in the earliest phases of the Arab conquest of Syria, in which he hopes that the emperor Heraclius will be given strength ‘to break the pride of all the barbarians and especially of the Saracens who, on account of our sins, have now risen up against us unexpectedly and ravage all with cruel and feral design, with impious and godless audacity’. At Christmas that year the clergy of Jerusalem were unable to process to Bethlehem, as was their custom, because of their fear of the Saracens. ‘As once that of the Philistine, so now the army of the godless Saracens has captured the divine Bethlehem and bars our passage there, threatening slaughter and destruction if we leave this holy city and dare to approach our beloved and sacred Bethlehem.’ In the end he remained optimistic: ‘If we repent of our sins we will laugh at the demise of our enemies the Saracens and in a short time we will see their destruction and complete ruin. For their bloody swords will pierce their own hearts, their bows will be splintered, their arrows will be left sticking in them and they will open the way to Bethlehem for us.’
In many ways, Sophronius was one of the last churchmen of antiquity, brought up in a world that was slipping into oblivion even as he spoke. He had been able to travel the eastern Mediterranean in search of education, friendship and true religion: Jerusalem, Constantinople, Alexandria, Carthage and Rome were all familiar to him. In the late sixth and early seventh centuries, this was quite a normal pattern. By the time Sophronius died in 639 such wide-ranging travels were out of the question and the world he had grown up in was broken beyond repair. He wrote in the high-flown, mannered Greek of late antique rhetoric, a highly educated man talking to a highly educated audience. Sophronius took a very dim view of the Arabs. They were godless or God-hating barbarians. At no point in his writing and preaching does he give any indication that they were preaching a new religion. Their function was as instruments of God’s wrath against the Christians because of their dabbling in heresy, and the way to combat them was not to raise armies or man the walls of the cities with fighting men, but to return one and all to true orthodox belief.
Many of the earliest responses to the Arab conquest found in the eastern Christian tradition took the form of apocalypses, that is predictions of the last days and the end of the world.
3
In these, the coming of the Arabs is sometimes seen as one of the signs of the end. They rarely contain hard and fast historical information but, as a recent authority has observed, ‘apocalypses are extremely effective and sensitive indicators of a people’s hopes, fears and frustrations’.
4
One of the most eloquent and developed of these texts is the apocalypse of the pseudo-Methodius,
5
so called because it is ascribed (wrongly) to Bishop Methodius of Olympus, martyred in 312, more than three centuries before the actual composition of the text. In fact it probably dates from the first two generations after the Muslim conquest. The second Arab civil war (683-92) was a period of violence and unrest, compounded by plague and famine in 686-7, and it was against this background that the apocalypse was written. Originally composed in Syriac, it was translated into both Greek and Latin, showing its widespread appeal among different Christian communities. The author offers his readers, presumably the Christian community of northern Syria, an elaborate wish fulfilment, shot through with biblical references and allusion. The final days begin with the arrival of the Ishmaelites (the Arabs) who will defeat the kingdom of the Greeks at Gabitha (a reference to the battle of the Yarmūk). There then follows an account of the effects of the Muslim invasions as perceived by a late-seventh-century Christian, though because it is apocalypse, it is told in the future tense.
3
In these, the coming of the Arabs is sometimes seen as one of the signs of the end. They rarely contain hard and fast historical information but, as a recent authority has observed, ‘apocalypses are extremely effective and sensitive indicators of a people’s hopes, fears and frustrations’.
4
One of the most eloquent and developed of these texts is the apocalypse of the pseudo-Methodius,
5
so called because it is ascribed (wrongly) to Bishop Methodius of Olympus, martyred in 312, more than three centuries before the actual composition of the text. In fact it probably dates from the first two generations after the Muslim conquest. The second Arab civil war (683-92) was a period of violence and unrest, compounded by plague and famine in 686-7, and it was against this background that the apocalypse was written. Originally composed in Syriac, it was translated into both Greek and Latin, showing its widespread appeal among different Christian communities. The author offers his readers, presumably the Christian community of northern Syria, an elaborate wish fulfilment, shot through with biblical references and allusion. The final days begin with the arrival of the Ishmaelites (the Arabs) who will defeat the kingdom of the Greeks at Gabitha (a reference to the battle of the Yarmūk). There then follows an account of the effects of the Muslim invasions as perceived by a late-seventh-century Christian, though because it is apocalypse, it is told in the future tense.
This chastisement is not being sent only upon human but also upon everything which is on the face of the entire earth - on men, women, children, animals, cattle and birds. People will be tormented by that punishment - men, their wives, sons, daughters and possessions; the old who are weak, the sick and the strong, the poor with the rich. For God called their [the Arabs] forefather Ishmael, ‘the wild ass of the wilderness’ and the gazelles, along with all the animals, both of the wilderness and the cultivated land will be oppressed by them. People will be persecuted, wild animals and cattle will die, forest trees will be cut down, the most beautiful mountain plants will be destroyed and prosperous cities will be laid waste. Regions will lie desolate without anyone passing through: the land will be defiled by blood and deprived of its produce.For these barbarian tyrants are not men, but children of desolation. They set their face towards desolation and they are destroyers . . . they are destruction and they will issue forth for the destruction of everything. They are defiled and they love defilement. At the time of issuing forth from the wilderness, they will snatch babies from their mothers’ arms dashing them against stones, as though they were unclean beasts.They will make sacrifice of those who minister in the sanctuary and they will even sleep with their wives and with captive women inside the sanctuary. They will appropriate the sacred vestments as clothing for themselves and their children. They will tether their cattle to the sarcophagi of martyrs and to the graves of holy men. They are insolent murderers, destructive shedders of blood: they are a furnace of testing for all Christians.
The author then goes on to talk of the hardships that will be inflicted by plague and by taxation. ‘A person will sleep in the evening and rise up in the morning to find outside his door two or three men who use force as they demand tribute and money. All accounting of what is given and received will disappear from the earth. At that time people will sell their bronze, their iron and their burial clothes.’
Then, just when things are as bad as they can be, a miraculous deliverance occurs, the King of the Greeks will attack them: ‘He will be awakened against them “like a man who has shaken off his wine.”’ Now it is the turn of the Arabs to suffer: ‘They, their wives, their children, all their encampments, all the land of the wilderness which belonged to their forefathers shall be delivered into the hands of the king of the Greeks: they shall be given over to the sword and devastation, to captivity and slaughter. The yoke of their servitude will be seven times more oppressive than their own yoke,’ and he goes on to describe the hardships that will be inflicted on them. Then a universal peace will be established: ‘churches will be renovated, towns will be rebuilt, priests will be free from tax. Priests and people will have rest at that time from toil, fatigue and oppression’.
But it is not over yet. The ‘people of the north’ will invade, causing great devastation and slaughter, but God will send one of his angels, who will destroy them in a single moment. Then the King of the Greeks will go to live in Jerusalem before standing on Golgotha, putting his crown on the holy cross as a symbol that he is resigning his sovereignty, and cross and crown will be taken up into heaven. There is then an account of the appearance of an Antichrist figure in Palestine, the ‘son of Perdition’ and more mayhem before the coming of our Lord finally puts an end to him and the vision fades.
The apocalypse is both faintly absurd and curiously moving. In it we can hear the voice of the subject population. A solitary priest, probably writing in a northern Syrian monastery, is dreaming of the day when a miraculous intervention will put the hated Arabs in their place. The Arabs are accused of murder and mayhem, destroying cities and the rural environment, of disrespecting churches, of sexual licentiousness and oppressive taxation. It is an eloquent indictment, all the more so because it dates from the period when Muslim rule was being consolidated. At no point, however, does he envision the Christian people taking matters into their own hands and fighting back against their oppressors. For him, the Arabs are an evil and malevolent presence. Like Sophronius, he never mentions that they brought a new religion; they are simply godless but, at the same time, the instruments by which God punishes his people for their wickedness. Many of the people conquered by the Arabs in the seventh century must have shared these very negative perceptions.
But not all Christians shared such black views. Both Sophronius and the author of the apocalypse of the pseudo-Methodius were men for whom the restoration of Byzantine rule was something to be hoped for. The Nestorian John bar Penkāyē, writing in the 690s, agreed that the Arabs were the instruments of God, sent to punish the Christians for moral laxity and, above all, for heresy; but for him both the Chalcedonian Church supported by the Byzantine authorities and their Monophysites were the real enemy. ‘We should not think’, he wrote,
of the advent of the Arabs as something ordinary, but as due to divine working. Before calling them, God had prepared them beforehand to hold Christians in honour; thus they also had a special commandment from God concerning our monastic station, that they should hold it in honour. Now when these people came at God’s command, and took over both kingdoms [the Byzantine and Sasanian empires], not with any war or battle, but in a menial fashion, such as when a brand is rescued out of the fire; not using weapons of war or human means, God put victory into their hands.
God was punishing the Church for flirting with the heresy and the Arabs were his instruments of punishment. But the Arabs, too, were subject to divine wrath for the sins they committed during the conquests, and their empire was divided into two hostile powers, a reference to the civil war between Alī and Mu
c
āwiya that followed the assassination of the caliph Uthmān in 656. John has nothing but praise for the first Umayyad caliph, Mu
c
āwiya (661-80), of whose reign he says ‘the peace throughout the world was such that we have never heard, either from our fathers or from our grandparents, or seen that there had ever been any like it’. Needless to say this happy state of affairs could not last. In this atmosphere of peace and prosperity, the Church turned again to moral laxity and heresy. God again used the Arabs to punish their behaviour, causing the destructive civil war that broke out in 683 after the death of Yazīd I (the same civil war that forms the background to the apocalypse of the pseudo-Methodius), with which his history ends. Famine and plague were everywhere, further signs of God’s displeasure. For John the Arabs were God’s instruments; their rule might be either good or bad depending on the behaviour of the Christians.
c
āwiya that followed the assassination of the caliph Uthmān in 656. John has nothing but praise for the first Umayyad caliph, Mu
c
āwiya (661-80), of whose reign he says ‘the peace throughout the world was such that we have never heard, either from our fathers or from our grandparents, or seen that there had ever been any like it’. Needless to say this happy state of affairs could not last. In this atmosphere of peace and prosperity, the Church turned again to moral laxity and heresy. God again used the Arabs to punish their behaviour, causing the destructive civil war that broke out in 683 after the death of Yazīd I (the same civil war that forms the background to the apocalypse of the pseudo-Methodius), with which his history ends. Famine and plague were everywhere, further signs of God’s displeasure. For John the Arabs were God’s instruments; their rule might be either good or bad depending on the behaviour of the Christians.
John does not mention any personal contacts with the Arabs but other Christians in the area were more purposeful in establishing good relations. The saintly Mar Gabriel (d. 667) was abbot of the monastery at Qartmin.
6
Qartmin stands in the mountains of the Tur Abdin in south-east Turkey, close to the plains of the Jazira. By Gabriel’s time it was already an ancient establishment and, remarkably, it still survives as one of the most venerable centres of eastern Christian monasticism down to the present day. Qartmin was the stronghold of those who rejected Byzantine Orthodox Christianity, and he regarded the coming of Muslim rule as an opportunity rather than a calamity.
6
Qartmin stands in the mountains of the Tur Abdin in south-east Turkey, close to the plains of the Jazira. By Gabriel’s time it was already an ancient establishment and, remarkably, it still survives as one of the most venerable centres of eastern Christian monasticism down to the present day. Qartmin was the stronghold of those who rejected Byzantine Orthodox Christianity, and he regarded the coming of Muslim rule as an opportunity rather than a calamity.
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