Dumbarton Oaks Makes Irfan Shahid's Mastetpiece Available for Free Download

After Irfan Shahid died in 2016, I lamented the fact that his multi-volume life's work, Byzantium and the Arabs, and its "Prolegomenon," Rome and the Arabs, were in several cases out of print (and not inexpensive when available).

Well, there's great news for anyone interested in the Arabs in Late Antiquity or the pre-Islamic context of the rise of Islam (especially the Ghassanids): Dumbarton Oaks has made all seven of the volumes available for free download.

If you have any interest in the subject, download them all now.

As Tiran Issue Persists, a Historical Sidelight: Was Tiran Ancient Iotabe?

On January 16, Egypt's Supreme Administrative Court ruled that the Egyptian government's effort to transfer the islands of Tiran and Sanafir to Saudi sovereignty was unconstitutional and that the islands were an integral part of Egypt. A great many Egyptians were outraged by the perception that rightfully Egyptian territory had been "sold " to Saudi Arabia in exchange for an aid package. As in most territorial disputes, the Saudis do have a claim, but the Egyptian courts keep backing Egyptian sovereignty.

Despite the ruling, the issue is still in play. The Supreme Constitutional Court will hold a hearing February 12 on whether the State Council, which led the push against transferring the islands, had the proper standing. And the issue is also still before Parliament. While virtually all state institutions are strong supporters of President Sisi, the islands issue has clearly divided institutions.

I will leave it to the courts and Egyptian-Saudi negotiations to determine the fate of the islands. Instead, I want to discuss a sidelight of the history of the islands. Not the 20th Century history, which most Middle East hands will be familiar with given the islands' position allowing Egypt to close the Strait of Tiran, but rather its possible role in late antiquity.

Tiran and Sanafir control the entrance to the Gulf of ‘Aqaba (Gulf of Eilat in Israeli usage) and shipping from the main basin of the Red Sea toward points inside the Gulf must pass through the Strait between Tiran and Sinai. Today the islands have no permanent inhabitants, except Egyptian military and members of the Multinational Force and Observers; they are part of an Egyptian national park and are visited by tour boats from the Sinai resorts and scuba divers.

Arabia and Vicinity 565 AD (Wikipedia)

 

In late antiquity, Egypt and Syria-Palestine were both under the rule of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, then facing its historic rival in Sassanian Iran. Byzantium was in a loose alliance with Christian Ethiopia; the Himyarite Kingdom in what is now Yemen shifted alliances, at various times coming under Jewish, Persian, and Ethiopian rule. I've dealt with this period before, here. During this period, the great powers had their satellite allies or client states in Arabia: the Ghassanids for the Byzantines (a Monophysite Christian Kingdom of Arab origin with its capital at Jabiya in the Golan), and the Sassanians had the Lakhmids, Nestorian Christian Arabs with their capital at Hira in Iraq.

During this period, the ancient incense trade from Himyar north to Syria passed by caravan through the Hejaz, or by sea to the Byzantine port of Ayla near modern ‘Aqaba (the adjacent Israeli port of Eilat is a modification of Aila, the Biblical Elath).

In the fifth and sixth centuries AD we encounter a number of references to a port, usually also described as an island used as a trading station and toll station on the route from the Red Sea to Aila, known as Iotabe (Ἰωτάβη). It is mentioned in a variety of historical and ecclesiastical texts between 451 AD, when a bishop named Macarius attended the Council of Chalcedon, and 536 AD, when it was represented in a Synod at Jerusalem by a Bishop named Anastasius. In 473 it was captured by an Arab who is recorded as Amorkesos (possibly ‘Amr ibn Qays or perhaps Imru'l-Qays, but not the king of Kinda of that name or his more famous son the poet). After a quarter century the Byzantines took it back and gave autonomy to the local population, who are believed to have been Jewish, in return for customs duties. (During Israel's occupation of Tiran after I967, Israel sometimes cited this Jewish heritage, and renamed the island Yotvat.)  In 534 AD the Byzantines took it back again.

But in the 85 years during which Iotabe can be documented, while it is clear it is somewhere in or near the Gulf of ‘Aqaba, only one author gives us a specific description of its location. This is Procopius of Caesarea, the great sixth century historian of the age of Justinian. Procopius accompanied General Belisarius on his campaigns against Persia in the early 530s. In this context, Procopius in his The Persian Wars, Volume I, Book XIX, says the following;

At that time the idea occurred to the Emperor Justinian to ally with himself the Aethiopians and the Homeritae [Himyarites], in order to injure the Persians. I shall now first explain what part of the earth these nations occupy, and then I shall point out in what manner the emperor hoped that they would be of help to the Romans. The boundaries of Palestine extend toward the east to the sea which is called the Red Sea. Now this sea, beginning at India, comes to an end at this point in the Roman domain. And there is a city called Aelas [Aila] on its shore, where the sea comes to an end, as I have said, and becomes a very narrow gulf. And as one sails into the sea from there, the Egyptian mountains lie on the right, extending toward the south; on the other side a country deserted by men extends northward to an indefinite distance; and the land on both sides is visible as one sails in as far as the island called Iotabe, not less than one thousand stades distant from the city of Aelas. On this island Hebrews had lived from of old in autonomy, but in the reign of this Justinian they have become subject to the Romans. From there on there comes a great open sea. And those who sail into this part of it no longer see the land on the right, but they always anchor along the left coast when night comes on. For it is impossible to navigate in the darkness on this sea, since it is everywhere full of shoals. But there are harbours there and great numbers of them, not made by the hand of man, but by the natural contour of the land, and for this reason it is not difficult for mariners to find anchorage wherever they happen to be.

Now Procopius neither says nor implies that he has been to Iotabe himself, but the description clearly seems to come from someone who has. It is where the Gulf (of ‘Aqaba) widens out into the broader Red Sea, after which the Egyptian (Sinai) mountains are no longer on thr right, but with the Saudi coast continuing on the left. If the description were not clear enough, he says that Iotabe lies 1,000 stades from Aila. The Greek stadion could vary in length depending on the period but a common value was around 185 meters; 1000 stades would be 185 kilometers.

Google maps gives the air distance from Aqaba to Tiran as 183 kilometers.

So it seems clear that Procopius is describing an island exactly matching the location of Tiran.

The majority of Classical and Byzantine historians accept the identity of Tiran and Iotabe, but not unanimously. Procopius seems unimpeachable, but...

Tiran (and the smaller Sanafir) today are waterless, without any watercourses. Though Tiran has never been explored archaeologically, there are no surface indications of substantial occupation, no foundations, ruins, or pottery scattered on the surface. How could Tiran have supported a permanent population worthy of a bishopric? Or sustained a customs station? Absent excavation on the island, there is no clear answer.

But the suggested alternatives are weak. One argument advocates Jazirat Fir‘awn (Pharaoh's island), which lies just off the Sinai resort of Taba. It has plenty of evidence of past occupation, but is essentially in sight of Eilat and ‘Aqaba, and at the head of the Gulf, not its mouth. Other suggestions point to some island off the Saudi coast or port on the mainland. But none of these appear to fit with Procopius' description. Until archaeology proves otherwise, Tiran seems to be the likeliest site for Iotabe.

A Belated Appreciation of Irfan Shahid, 1926-2016

Irfan Shahid

I  have learned, rather belatedly, of the passing of Prof. Irfan Shahid, Professor at Georgetown, former Associate Fellow of Dumbarton Oaks, and Fellow of the Medieval Academy of America, who passed away on November 9 at the age of 90.

Professor Shahid was one of the readers of my doctoral dissertation.Though he was the definitive historian of Byzantine-Arab relations down to the Islamic conquests, he didn't actually teach history at Georgetown, where he was the Oman Professor of Arabic and Islamic Literature, teaching the Qur'an, Classical Arabic Literature, and the like in the Arabic department. I really only got to know him from his eager involvement in my doctoral committee.

Born as Irfan Kawar in Nazareth in 1926 to a Palestinian Greek Orthodox family, he read Classics at Oxford and then took his Ph.D. at Princeton in Arabic and Islamic studies. I never did know why he changed his name from Kawar to Shahid.

Although he was a prominent enough figure at Georgetown, I suspect he was really far more at home at Dumbarton Oaks, the Harvard-owned Byzantine studies library in Washington, where he did most of his life's work on Byzantium and the Arabs. He discussed his time there in an interview at Dumbarton Oaks in 2008. His publications included Rome and the Arabs: A Prolegomenon to the Study of Byzantium and the Arabs; Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fifth Century; and Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century, and numerous articles. I am uncertain if his final volume, on the seventh century and the Arab Conquests, might have been far enough along to someday appear. Unfortunately, all his volumes are priced beyond my or most people's reach.

Alfred J. Butler, Egypt, and the Copts, Part II: The Arab Conquest and its Sequels

I'm on vacation. As I have done each year, I have prepared a number of posts on historical and cultural subjects unlikely to be overtaken by events, with at least one appearing daily. Part I of this post appeared Thursday and I had intended for this part to appear Friday, but was delayed.

A.J. Butler

Having introduced A.J. Butler in Part I, and discussed his works on Coptic churches and practices, I want to turn today to the works for which he is best known: his 1902 study of the Arab Conquest of Egypt, and two sequels in which he followed up on the original as new sources became available.

The period of the Arab Conquests of the Middle East in the early Islamic period has notoriously created challenges for historians. Traditional Arab historiography derived its fundamental methodology from hadith criticism, the method devised to determine the practices of the Prophet Muhammad through anecdotal evidence (hadith) documented by a chain of transmission (isnad) of the form "I heard from so-and-so who was taught by so-and-so who heard it from his uncle so-and-so who heard it from the Prophet in person." Recognizing that transmitters might invent these chains, scholars known as mutahaddithun studied biographies and other data to determine if each link in the chain held up (Were they alive at the same time? Were they ever in he same place?) Many modern critics have raised doubts about the method, but Arab historians expanded it to documenting the early years of the faith. Though most of our systematic Arab history dates from a later period, the second and third centuries AH, the traditional chains offer a far more textured and detailed account than is available for, say, Western Europe in the same era.

The problem is that, when an Arab historian encountered seemingly inconsistent or contradictory versions, he simply listed them both, even if they muddled the chronology or the narrative. For the conquest period, the standard and massive work of al-Tabari follows at least two distinct traditional lines (each with their own internal variations). For the conquest of Syria-Palestine, the chronology and command structure and even the dates of battles is very muddled. Nineteenth-century Orientalist scholars such as Michael Jan de Goeje in Mémoire sur la Conquête de la Syrie and Prince Leone Caetani in his meticulous Annali dell'Islam hammered out a sort of "received version" of the chronology and sequence of events, that dominated Western scholarship and influenced Arab scholars,and still does, though these were not the only possible choices. Modern scholars such as Fred Donner, Hugh Kennedy, and the Byzantinist Walter Kaegi (and many others) have challenged some of the conventional account and elaborated upon it.

There is an exception. Most of these modern reworkings either stop before the conquest of Egypt, or generally follow the broad interpretation put forth by Butler between 1902 and 1914.

His major work, The Arab Conquest of Egypt and the Last Thirty Years of the Roman Dominion, appeared  in 1902, the same year Butler received his Ph.D. (Google books version; various other formats at Internet Archive here.) (Let me add that while the full original edition is available digitally online for free, there is a 1978 Second Edition from Cambridge University Press which collects the book and its two sequels and adds an Introduction and extensive "Additional Bibliography" by P.M. Fraser to bring the state of research down to the 1970s.)


That the book is still of value may seem somewhat surprising, since Butler wrote it without access to some of the key sources. He had seen only parts of Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam's Kitab Futuh Misr, the earliest and fullest Muslim work on the subject, and judged that it contained "a good deal romance mingled with history." While that may hold true for the section on the Maghreb and Spain, Ibn ‘Abd al-Hakam came from a long line of Egyptian mutahddithun and thus was in possession of solid traditions dating from long before his own ninth century. Butler also lacked a full text of Tabari's massive universal history..

He did recognize that the Christian sources were much earlier than the Muslims', and made full use of the Chronicle of John of Nikiu, who wrote in the late seventh century and my have been a boy at the time of the conquests. (John's Chronicle can be found online here.) 

In the 1902 book, however, Butler made a blunder concerning the value of the other key early source, The History of the Patriarchs. Although seemingly aware of the work he was misled by the attribution to Sawirus (Severus) of Ashmunayn and referred to it as a 10th century work. In fact, Severus was merely the compiler of earlier biographies, and that of the Patriarch Benjamin at the time of the Conquest was written by one George the Archdeacon, who flourished in the late 7th century and may also have been a boy at the time of the Conquest; in any event, he would have been able to speak to eyewitnesses. The section of the History of Patriarchs dealing with the period can be found in Patrologia Orientalis Vol. I, fasc. 4 in Arabic and B.T.A. Evetts' English translation (Google Books version here; various formats from Internet Archive here; English text only here).

Despite missing some key sources, Butler was able to offer a chronology of the conquest which still stands, and to put forward an interpretation of the figure known in the Arabic sources as "al-Muqawqis," identified by Butler as the Chalcedonian Patriarch Cyrus. Both of these interpretations still largely stand, though there have always been dissenters on the identification of al-Muqawqis. Still, most scholars accept Butler's view as largely correct. (Al-Muqawqis may be a post for another day.)

As Fraser points out in the 1978 edition and Additional Bibliography, the earlier parts of Butler, on Late Byzantine Egypt and the Persian  occupation, do not hold up as well due to new sources, and the discovery of administrative papyri from the early Islamic period also renders his account of administration outdated. But the basic conquest narrative still largely stands, especially if read with Butler's two subsequent monographs.

For in fact Butler soon gained access to the sources he had missed, and wrote two updates, now usually reprinted together with The Arab Conquest. These were his 1913 The Treaty of Misr in Tabari: An Essay in Historical Criticism (various formats at Internet Archive) and his 1914 Babylon of Egypt: A Study in the History of Old Cairo (various formats at Internet Archive). The three works together remain the essential starting point for any historical research on the conquest period.

Did Punic Survive Until the Advent of Arabic? Part 4: The Post-Augustine Evidence

 I'm on vacation. As I've done in recent years, I've prepared a number of posts on topics of historical and cultural interest ahead of time, posts unlikely to be overtaken by events. There will be one or more of these per day, and I may drop in to comment on current developments as required.

In the third part of this survey of the survival of Punic yesterday, we examined the rather extensive evidence provided by St. Augustine of Hippo of the survival of Punic as a spoken language in his day (d. 430). But the argument that Punic was still a living language when Arabic arrived two centuries and more later requires the assumption that Punic did not die out in the interim. Skeptics have gradually yielded ground as evidence has been assembled, and many scholars accept that Punic may indeed have survived in a few places. But the evidence trail thins out considerably after Augustine. Today we will look at the evidence for the fifth to the 11th centuries; tomorrow this series will conclude with a discussion of some of the interpretations scholars have put forward about the legacy of Punic in North Africa in the Arab period.

Roughly contemporary with Augustine we also have epigraphic evidence of the survival of Punic in the trilingual funerary inscriptions in Sirte, Libya from the fourth and perhaps fifth centuries. I have not seen a standard study of these, Jongeling. Karel; & Kerr, Robert M. (2005). Late Punic epigraphy: an introduction to the study of Neo-Punic and Latino-Punic inscriptions. In part two of this series I did quote excerpts from Kerr's doctoral dissertation on Late Punic. And keep Sirte in mind when we come to the evidence of Al-Bakri below.

There is no incontestable literary evidence for Punic after Augustine, but there is a very intriguing, though in a bizarre context, account in the historian Procopius' De Bello Vandalico, "Of the Vandal Wars," from the sixth century. In last month's post about the Nika Riots we talked about Justinian and his efforts to reclaim Italy and North Africa for the Eastern Roman Empire; Procopius is the great historian of the era of Justinian. He actually accompanied Justinian's great General Belisarius on some of his campaigns. In discussing the reconquest of North Africa from the Vandals, Procopius drops an intriguing aside into a story about the legendary settlement of North Africa by the Phoenicians. I take my quote from H. B. Dewing's older translation of Procopius' History of the Wars, because it is available online even on vacation in the Georgia mountains and is free of copyright:

And finding there no place sufficient for them to dwell in, since there has been a great population in Aegypt from ancient times, they proceeded to Libya. And they established numerous cities and took possession of the whole of Libya as far as the Pillars of Heracles, and there they have  lived even up to my time, using the Phoenician tongue. They also built a fortress in Numidia, where now is the city called Tigisis. In that place are two columns made of white stone near by the great spring, having Phoenician letters cut in them which say in the Phoenician tongue: "We are they who fled from before the face of Joshua, the robber, the son of Nun."

Hardly surprising that this passage has often been dismissed; the columns near Tigisis mentioning Joshua of the Bible seem clearly a figment of legend.  But it is not the incredible tale itself but the aside that matters: "and there they have lived even up to my time, using the Phoenician tongue." Again quoting Fergus Millar on this text:

The passage of Procopius is set in the very dubious context of a legend about the settlement of N. Africa, supposedly referred to in an inscription of Phoenician language and lettering at Tigisis; Courtois has argued that the inscription could not have had its supposed contents, and consequently that the people did not understand it (and therefore that in this sentence Procopius refers to Berber). But the argument makes Procopius use 'φοινικικός' in two different senses in the same passage, and proceeds too strictly from what we might presume but cannot know. The sentence is an addition by Procopius himself, who had been in Africa with Belisarius, and (especially when combined with Augustine's evidence) should be taken to mean what it says.

The problem is that the legendary story in which the aside occurs tends to make one dismiss Procopius' possible firsthand testimony that Phoenician (Punic) was still spoken in North Africa "even up to my time, using the Phoenician tongue." Millar is right that in conjunction with Augustine's testimony, this could make a lot of sense.

Procopius, if we accept the testimony, brings us down to just a century before the Arab conquests. There is no mention of Punic, at least as such, in the early Arab histories of the conquest of the Maghreb. In fact there is only one other piece of evidence sometimes adduced to suggest a longer survival of Punic, and this is, intriguingly, quite late: the 11th century AD.

The Arab traveler and geographer Al-Bakri (Abu ʿUbayd Abu ʿAbdullah ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAziz al-Bakri (c.1014-1094) was born in Islamic Spain (Al-Andalus) and wrote several works of which the most important is his Kitab al-Masalik wa'l-Mamalik (Book of the Roads and the Kingdoms), a general geography and description of key routes of the Muslim world. As an Andalusian, Bakri knew North Africa well and his work is particularly valuable as a description of it.

There is a passage in Bakri that raises eyebrows: remember, we are talking here about the 11th century AD, some 650 years after Augustine. Let me quote Lameen Souag on Bakri's text:

The twist in this tale is that Phoenician may have survived into the 11th century AD! Al-Bakri (whom I've mentioned before) enigmatically says of the inhabitants of Sirt in Libya that:

لهم كلام يراطنون به ليس بعربي ولا عجمي ولا بربري ولا قبطي ولا يعرفه غيرهم
‍They have a speech in which they jabber which is neither Arabic nor Ajami (by which he probably means Latin but might mean Persian) nor Berber nor Coptic, which no one but them knows.

The location (in eastern Tripolitania) is about right for it to be Punic, and if it were Greek you would expect him to know, considering he cites (more or less correctly) the Greek etymology of طرابلس (Tripoli) in the next page. So was Punic still spoken in the 11th century? Your guess is as good as mine, but it looks plausible.

Now for a couple of points: the latest epigraphic evidence of Punic we have is in triliteral Greek-Latin-Punic Christian catacombs in Sirte (Sirt), so we know Punic was still known there in the 4th century and maybe the 5th. So it's interesting Bakri found an unusual language in Sirt in the 11the century; he specifically says it isn't Berber or Coptic or ʿAjami. One reason Lameen has crossed out "Persian" is that in Spain and North Africa, ʿAjami, which in the East usually means Persian, was commonly used to refer to Latin or local Romance dialects or the Mediterranean lingua franca. As Millar notes, Bakri seems to have been able to recognize Greek as well, so what was this language?

It may have been Punic. It isn't clear if Bakri had any familiarity with Hebrew, from the Jewish communities in Spain and North Africa; if he had, he should have noted the kinship if the language were indeed Punic.  At best, the Bakri quote tantalizes and perhaps teases a bit.

The Procopius and Bakri references both raise questions and I suspect the best we can do here is render a Scots verdict of "not proven."

But if indeed Punic did survive, what are the historical and linguistic implications?

Tune in tomorrow ...

The Byzantine Reconquest in 10th Century Syria, Part II

I'm on vacation. As I've done in recent years, I've prepared a number of posts on topics of historical and cultural interest ahead of time, posts unlikely to be overtaken by events. There will be one or more of these per day, and I may drop in to comment on current developments as required.

Coronation of Tzimisces

My opening vacation posting, on Monday, introduced the situation in the Levant in the 10th century AD, when the splintering of the ‘Abbasid Caliphate weakened the defenses of the Islamic world against their Byzantine adversaries, and the Byzantine Emperor Nicephorus Phocas waged several campaigns against the Hamdanid Amir of Aleppo, Saif al-Dawla. If you haven't read Part I, please do so before reading the rest of this.

We stopped at the coronation of the Emperor John I Tzimisces, who had just assassinated his uncle, Nicephorus Phocas. After Phocas' widow, and Tzimisces' reported lover, the Empress Theophano, had been duly packed off to a convent instead of being married to Tzimisces due to the Church's opposition, Tzimisces (the name is Armenian; his mother was a sister of Phocas), who had been one of Phocas' key generals, returned to the Syrian frontier.

But not immediately. After Tzimisces' coronation in 969, he had to spend 970-971 fighting off an incursion from Kievan Rus and otherwise securing his European frontier. In 972 he turned his attention to the Islamic world again. In that year he moved into Upper Mesopotamia.

Hamdanid power had been weakened by the campaigns of the Emperors Romanus and Nicephorus, and the powerful commander who had long controlled the frontier, Saif al-Dawla of Aleppo, died in 967. The growing Byzantine successes had provoked domestic rebellions, and he had taken ill and soon died. His son Sa‘d al-Dawla was soon driven from Aleppo by rivals. Meanwhile, as we saw last time, Antioch had been take by the Byzantines, and now even Aleppo agreed to pay tribute to Byzantium.

But also 969 was the year the Fatimids consolidated their power in Egypt, ending the weaker Ikhshidid rule and providing a major new counterweight to the Byzantines.

Meanwhile Saif al-Dawla's brother Nasir al-Dawla, ruler of the other Hamdanid state in Mosul, had endured problems of his own, fighting off challenges from rivals and seeing his capital captured by the Buyids who ruled most of Iran. Nasir al-Dawla recouped but was deposed in the same year his brother died, 967.

So Tzimisces' invasion of Upper Mesopotamia (the Jazira) in 972 found a weakened polity and met with a number of successes. In 975 he turned again to Syria, and this time advanced farther into the country than the Byzantines had done since the days of Heraclius, taking in turn Homs, Baalbek, Damascus, Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon, Damascus, Nazareth, Tiberias, and Caesarea. His goal was Jerusalem, but he was blocked by the rising Fatimid power. Most of these conquests were for the briefest of times and resulted in a tributary relationship, not Byzantine rule. In these campaigns, however, the much-weakened Hamdanids were reduced to Muslim vassals of Byzantium, which they accepted as a counterweight to the Fatimids. In 976, returning from this campaign, Tzimisces died suddenly. Poison was rumored. He was succeeded by his nephew and co-Emperor Basil II.

Basil II

Basil II is one of the best-known Byzantine Emperors, but he is primarily remembered by his nickname Bulgaroktanos, the Bulgar-killer. But in addition to his final conquest of the Bulgarians, he also campaigned in the East.

For the first decade of his reign, however, Basil had to cope with domestic rebellions, in part due to the long neglect of domestic imperial issues by his predecessors. The growing Fatimid power took advantage  of this preoccupation and regained much of the territory lost under the two previous emperors.  In 987 Byzantium signed a seven-year truce with the Fatimids. In 991, though, the Fatimids attacked the Hamdanids of Aleppo, who as we have seen were by now a Byzantine protectorate. When the Fatimids threatened to take Aleppo and Antioch, Basil took the field. Through the 990s the lines moved back and forth, and with the accession of the Fatimid Caliph al-Hakim in 1000 a truce was established. This held despite the Fatimids' conquest of Hamdanid Aleppo (which continued to pay tribute to Constantinople) and even Hakim's destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in 1009, though that would ultimately lead to the Crusades.

During the Fatimid truce, Basil turned to the campaign that would ensure his fame, against Bulgaria. The border stabilized, with the main long-term gain being Antioch. It remained under a Byzantine duke until after the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, when the Seljuq Turks took eastern Anatolia from the Byzantines, taking Antioch in 1084. In 1098 they lost it to the Crusaders. The Byzantines initially saw the Crusaders as potential allies for the recovery of Jerusalem, though they were eventually disabused of that notion by the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade.

The Byzantine reconquests in Syria in the 10th century were mostly brief, the one major success being returning the ancient Christian Patriarchal city of Antioch to Christian rule for over a century.

A Forgotten Reconquest: The Byzantines in Syria in the 10th Century, Part I

I'm on vacation. As I've done in recent years, I've prepared a number of posts on topics of historical and cultural interest ahead of time, posts unlikely to be overtaken by events. There will be one or more of these per day, and I may drop in to comment on current developments as required.

After the Arab Conquest of Syria in the 630s AD, the Emperor Heraclius of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire is said to have stared back while departing Syria and bid farewell to the country. Both Arab and Byzantine sources tell of him bidding it farewell in words along these lines:

Farewell, a long farewell to Syria, my fair province. Thou art an infidel's (enemy's) now. Peace be with you, O' Syria – what a beautiful land you will be for the enemy hands.

In the mental narratives of most people, I suspect, that is the end of Imperial Byzantine rule in Syria. But not quite. I suspect most Westerners, other than those very odd people who minored in Byzantine history (yes, I admit to it), and most Syrians, and for that matter all but the most well-read Greeks, have never heard of Nicephorus Phocas, John Tzimisces or Basil Bulgaroktonos, but those three Byzantine emperors managed to reconquer major parts of Syria in the 10th century, though they never reached their goal of taking Jerusalem (though they held Damascus, Beirut, Nazareth, and Caesarea, for a short while). It was a sort of proto-Crusade, a bit over a century before the actual First Crusade, but it was an evanescent recovery at best.

Since the Arab conquest of Syria, Arabs and Byzantines had fought along the frontier, and the frontier warrior became in fact a heroic figure in both cultures: the ghazi in Islam, akritas (plural akritai) in Greek. The Byzantines sought to defend a border roughly along the Taurus range, roughly along or a bit north of today's Turkish-Syrian border. Arab raiders sometimes penetrated deep into Anatolia; sometimes Byzantium raided into Syria, but the Empire long relied on defense along the Taurus or at the Cilician Gates to the west (below).

The Border Zone and Fortresses (Wikipedia)

By the mid-900s, however, there was a growing vacuum of power in the Levant. The ‘Abbasid Caliphs in Baghdad still claimed the Caliphate, but had lost effective governing power over many of their provinces; from the late 800s Samanids and Tahirids exercised real power, and Tulunids and Ikhshidids in Egypt; in 945 a Persian (and Shi‘ite) dynasty known as the Buyids even occupied Baghdad itself, recognizing the Caliph's suzerainty but controlling the state.

In the early 900s Syria and Northern Iraq came under the control of the Hamdanids, another Shi‘ite dynasty, with Nasir al-Dawla (ruled 935-967) ruling from Mosul and his younger brother Saif al-Dawla (945-967) ruling from Aleppo. The latter is the main Arab protagonist in this tale.

While the Hamdanids provided a base of resistance to Byzantine incursions, Egypt was essentially a power vacuum until the Fatimid Dynasty from North Africa took Egypt and founded Cairo in 969 AD, by which time the Byzantine offensive was well under way The Buyids who ruled Baghdad were more concerned with their Persian base. The Hamdanids were more or less alone for the moment.

The Middle East in 970 AD (Wikipedia)

Phocas' Siege of Chanax on Crete

Enter the Byzantine general and later Emperor Nicephorus II Phocas (Nikephoros II Phokas). As a general under Emperor Romanus II Lecapenus, Phocas led an expedition that reconquered Crete from Islam in 961 AD.

Turning back to land, he campaigned in 962-963, taking Cilicia and invaded Hamdanid territory, briefly capturing Aleppo, sacking it and confiscating its treasures, the first great success in Syria. His nephew, John Tzimisces, campaigned with him. They did not seek to annex Hamdanid territory, merely to break Saif al-Dawla's power on their frontier.

In March of 963, Emperor Romanus died at age 26, possibly poisoned by his Empress. The eldest heir (the future Basil II) was only five, and the Empress Theophano, now regent, turned to Nicephorus Phocas and proclaimed him Emperor; he married the widowed (though perhaps not grieving) Empress. (Hey, why do you think we call that sort of scheming "Byzantine"?).

Nicephorus II Phocas

Now Emperor, Phocas campaigned in Cilicia in 964-966 and raided into Hamdanid Syria, while a Byzantine fleet reconquered Cyprus from the Arabs. In 968 he raided as far as Tripoli in Lebanon, and sought to besiege Antioch; he garrisoned a fort at Baghras between Antioch and Alexandretta (Antakya and Iskenderun). The local commander took Antioch against orders.

Phocas' campaigns elsewhere, against Bulgaria and Sicily, were less successful than his campaign against Saif al-Dawla, and his domestic policies generated opposition.

Meanwhile, Empress Theophano had married Phocas to retain power for her sons; Phocas is said to have been unattractive and to have taken a vow of chastity after his first wife's death. For whatever reason, the Empress had (allegedly) begun an affair with her husband's nephew and co-general John Tzimisces, and they began to plot against Phocas. (They're Byzantines, remember?) You can read the details in Wikipedia, but in the end Phocas was assassinated by his nephew/lieutenant/wife's lover John Tzimisces, who became Emperor John I. An inscription on Phocas' tomb reads, "You conquered all but a woman."

Phocas had campaigned deeper into Syria than any Byzantine general since the Arab Conquest, and had earned the soubriquet "White Death of the Saracens," but his successor Tzimisces would see even further successes. I'll deal with that in Part II on Wednesday (an Egyptian post tomorrow for July 23). But first: what about Theophano? Tzimisces wanted to marry her to further legitimize his rule, but the Patriarch of Constantinople denounced the idea and the Empress' reputation was already sullied; Tzimisces apparently decided the Orthodox Patriarch was a more useful patron than the Empress who may have plotted against both her husbands, so she was exiled to a convent on the island of Prinkipo in the Marmara (Büyükada today), where deposed Empresses traditionally were sent. (Yes, the Byzantines deposed enough of their Empresses to need a special convent for them.)

On Wednesday, in Part II: the Campaigns of John Tzimisces and Basil II in Syria.

Erdoğan Thinks He Has Problems? He Should Remember the Nika Riots

Justinian I

Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan has been complaining loudly that the protesters in Istanbul are terrorists, "looters," and such. But Erdoğan, a former Mayor of Istanbul who still wants to micromanage the city from Ankara, ought to know enough about his great city's rich history to know that it has seen real protests in its day. Most notably the "Nika Riots" that began January 13, 532 AD and lasted for five days, at the end of which half the city was burned down, including the original Hagia Sophia, the greatest church in Christendom, built by the Emperor Constantine when he founded the city two centuries earlier, and parts of the Imperial Palace, and there were tens of thousands dead, allegedly including 30,000 rioters killed by the Army, not counting more tens of thousands dead at the rioters' hands or in the fires. The numbers may be exaggerated, but the devastation was not. And the Byzantine Emperor almost fled in terror, until his strong-willed Empress gave him a tongue-lashing and put enough backbone in him to fight back. The Emperor in question, who'd been on the throne only five years at the time and almost ran for exile, fought back and survived. And over the next 30 years in power he reconquered Italy and North Africa from assorted Visigoths, Vandals, Lombards and what not, fought Sassanid Persia, and created an enduring codification of Byzantine Law. He also rebuilt Constantinople, including a newer, bigger Hagia Sophia. His name was Justinian.

Theodora

You've heard of him, most likely, but if he'd cut and run during the Nika riots, you wouldn't have; he'd have been one  more transient general-turned Emperor, deposed and forgotten; the remaining three glorious decades would never have occurred. The Empress Theodora gave him the necessary spine (and maybe a pair of other required body parts) with her famous lecture, and he is said to have always recognized that he owed his throne to his wife's courage and encouragement (see below: she essentially called him and his generals quitters and cowards).

Istanbul was known as Constantinople in those days, of course, But most of this took place only three miles or so from the site of the Taksim Square/Gezi Park demonstrations, in what then was as much the city center as Taksim is now. And what's the point of having a blogger with a doctoral minor in Byzantine history if I can't pull up parallels to the present like this? Of my minor fields, I get to draw on those Byzantine History courses the least by far.

In another parallel to today, when the "Ultras" football support clubs in both Egypt and Turkey have become not just booster clubs but a curious mixture of football fans, soccer hooligans, street gangs, and political movements, and have played key roles in the protests, so too, 1500 years ago, partisan groups supporting various "teams" of chariot racers became surrogate political "parties" of a sort, representing various classes, bodies of opinion, and interests. What had been four such parties or factions in Classical times had become two in Constantinople in Justinian's time, known as the Blues and the Greens. The Blues tended to favor Justinian, the Greens the old Senatorial nobility, with commoners taking sides according to the issue. Justinian, a military man who what risen to the Imperial purple, was still a bit of a newcomer to the throne, and higher taxes created by a war and negotiated peace with Persia had hurt his popularity.

The racing factions became political factions in part because the chariot races were the only time most citizens ever saw their Emperor. The Hippodrome,  the track for horse and chariot races, adjoined the Great Palace south of Hagia Sophia, and from a balcony on the Palace known as the Kathisma, (see the Wikipedia map below), the Emperor would watch the races, visible to his subjects.


The Blues and Greens in 531 AD found common cause when supporters of each were accused of murder in a riot over a race outcome, and condemned to death. Anger over this, higher taxes, and other issues led to rising tensions, which Justinian sought to defuse by commuting the death sentences. But the factions wanted a full pardon. Justinian called for a race on January 13, 532, aimed at calming things down. It did not.

Once the Emperor appeared on the Kathisma, both Blues and Greens began shouting against him and shouting Nika! ("Victory!", or perhaps "Win!" or "Triumph!"), hence the term "Nika Riots" for what followed. (Do you suppose the Nike Shoe folks are aware of this aspect of their sporting ancestry?)

Remnants of the Hippodrome Today

Soon the riots were out of control. The mobs attacked and besieged the Palace, which lay between the Hippodrome to the west, Hagia Sophia to the north, and the Bosporus and Marmara to the east and south. (Later Emperors preferred the Blachernae Palace in the northwest of the city, and the Ottomans would move the palace area to Topkapı).  The surviving remnants of the Hippodrome, a column and an obelisk, are in the Sultanahmet Meydanı, sometimes known as Atmeydanı or in English, as Hippodrome Square.

The city was burning, and Constantine's Hagia Sophia was destroyed. The mobs were besieging the Palace, and the only escape seemed to be by sea. Procopius, the first-hand witness of it all, tells the story of what happened next (The Wars, Vol. I, H.B. Dewing translation):

Now the emperor and his court were deliberating as to whether it would be better for them if they remained or if they took to flight in the ships. And many opinions were expressed favouring either course. And the Empress Theodora also spoke to the following effect: "As to the belief that a woman ought not to be daring among men or to assert herself boldly among those who are holding back from fear, I consider that the present crisis most certainly does not permit us to discuss whether the matter should be regarded in this or in some other way. For in the case of those whose interests have come into the greatest danger nothing else seems best except to settle the issue immediately before them in the best possible way. My opinion then is that the present time, above all others, is inopportune for flight, even though it bring safety. For while it is impossible for a man who has seen the light not also to die, for one who has been an emperor it is unendurable to be a fugitive. May I never be separated from this purple, and may I not live that day on which those who meet me shall not address me as mistress. If, now, it is your wish to save yourself, O Emperor, there is no difficulty. For we have much money, and there is the sea, here the boats. However consider whether it will not come about after you have been saved that you would gladly exchange that safety for death. For as for myself, I approve a certain ancient saying that royalty is a good burial-shroud." When the queen had spoken thus, all were filled with boldness, and, turning their thoughts towards resistance, they began to consider how they might be able to defend themselves if any hostile force should come against them.

In modern terms, she shamed the Emperor and his generals and ministers by showing she was the only one with the necessary gonads, and it worked. The phrase about "royalty is a good burial-shroud" is also frequently translated as "the imperial purple is an excellent winding-cloth," and the like.

Procopius, the official historian who makes Theodora look so good here, also wrote a Secret History (not paid for by the Emperor, to be sure) in which he portrayed Theodora (a bear-trainer's daughter who married Justinian when he was a soldier) as a former prostitute and dissolute still even as an Empress. Many feel the portrayals are incompatible. I'm not sure they are, though his Secret History suggestion that the Empress was an actual, real demon seems extreme. (First year Byzantine History grad students read The Secret History, which is full of salacious scandal before they ever look a The Histories, to be sure. For the same reasons Classicists prefer Suetonius to Tacitus.)

Justinian, taking new courage from Theodora's "Go ahead and run if you want to, I'm dying here as an Empress" ultimatum, decided to fight back. He called upon a loyal Imperial eunuch (a literal one, not the figurative ones Theodora had implied the Emperor and his generals were), Narses, to act as his agent with the factions. (Narses, of Armenian origin, would later become Justinian's second most famous general, after Belisarius, though eunuchs rarely had military careers.) Narses won over the Blues and they deserted the Greens; then Belisarius, with another general, Mundus, charged with Imperial troops and massacred (it's said) 30,000 rioters. Justinian turned the tide. The city was devastated and tens of thousands dead, but he rebuilt it with more glory than Constantine's, and his new Hagia Sophia rose again as the greatest church in Christendom. It has been a mosque (adding minarets in the process) and is now a museum, but the basic building is still Justinian's. That, the reconquista in Italy and North Africa, the Justinian Code, and much else associated with is reign, would not have occurred if he had fled during the Nika Riots.

This is why I always listen to my wife's advice. Or at least one of the reasons.

560 Years Ago Today, a City Fell ...

Constantine XI

To the Byzantines it was often simply "the city," a capital that had endured for 11 centuries since its foundation by Constantine the Great. Western Europe mght hold that the Roman Empire had fallen  centuries before, but Emperors still reigned at Constantine's  New Rome on the Bosporus. It had resisted sieges by Arabs, by Tamerlane, and its walls were landmarks, running from the Golden Horn to the Bosporus, protecting the city from the landward side. It had endured a period of Latin rule under the Fourth Crusade, and for centuries had watched as its Anatolian hinterland first, and later its European hinterland as well, came under Ottoman rule. The Emperor Constantine XI Paleologus, seeking aid from the West and seeking to rally his people against the big siege guns of the Ottomans, still reigned in Constantinople until a date that echoes in the history of all the Orthodox Christian countries, and of Turkey: May 29, 1453, 560 years ago today. (Leaving out some pesky calendar changes.)

Mehmet II (Fatih Sultan Mehmet)

In many European countries, 1453 was once considered the end of the Middle Ages; certainly the Fall of Constantinople, followed in 1492 by Columbus' discoveries and soon after that by the Protestant Reformation, all served to draw a line under the centuries preceding. And the fall certainly underscored the lesson that siege cannon would mean an end to the static fortification of walled cities. Another invention, the printing press, came to the West at the same time, fueling change.

Constantine XI died on that fateful Tuesday 560 years ago, to be venerated by many Orthodox as a saint, and as the "Marble Emperor" to become a figure in Greek folklore who will come again when Constantinople is Greek again, and Orthodoxy returns to Hagia Sophia.

His adversary, Sultan Mehmet II, was only 21 when the city fell, but is still remembered as Mehmet Fatih, Mehmet the Conqueror. Though the city of Istanbul is no longer Turkey's capital, it is still the country's metropolis and historic heart, and even its Turkish name is said to preserve the medieval Greek phrase εἰς τὴν Πόλιν, "to the city," remembering the days when it was the city par excellence.

A trailer from the recent hit Turkish film Fetih 1453, a dramatization of the fall (from the Turkish point of view, of course):