'Abd Al-Rahman Ibn Khalid's Invasion, Saporio

Appendix three: Arab Grand Strategy, 663-669 439 APPENDIX THREE ARAB GRAND STRatEGY, 663-669: ‘ABD AL-RaHMAN IBN KHALID’S INVASION, SaPORIOS’ REVOLT, AND THE BattLE FOR ANatOLIA Arab and Byzantine activities between the end of the first Arab civil war in 661 and the “first” Arab naval expedition against *Constantinople in the 670s have received little attention and lie in relative obscurity. According to older works on events in Anatolia, the raids reported those years were little out of the ordinary— rapid Arab advances across the Taurus range to take and destroy one or two urban settlements, a slightly unusual attempt to hold Amorion over winter, and a rather obscure Byzantine counterattack. The emphasis is on slow attrition, typical of Arab-Byzantine warfare during the Umayyad period, which inexorably resulted in the decline of urban civilization in central Anatolia. Lilie in contrast recognizes the ultimate Arab goal of capturing Constantinople, but following Greek and Ara- bic sources, his reconstruction of Arab strategy appears somewhat diffuse. Only Treadgold links Arab raids to political developments in Byzantium, most notably the revolt, traditionally dated to 668, of the stratēgos Saporios, general of the newly created Armeniac military command, later strategis. Following this dating, and placing an earlier Arab raid against Pontic Koloneia trather than Cappadocian Koloneia, Treadgold constructs an image of an exasperated stratēgos who turned to his tormenters for support.1 These reconstructions are based on the sources traditionally used for Arab- Byzantine relations, the large number of chronicles and compilations written in Greek, Arabic and to a lesser extent Syriac from the 9th to the 13th centuries.2 Due to their bulk, number and relative coherence, the events, perspectives and chro- nologies taken from minor eastern chronicles written in the 7th-8th centuries are often dismissed out of hand as doubtful or even “fabulös”.3 This has created a long- standing historiographic distortion of events in the mid-7th century, where late and numerous sources take precedence over few contemporary ones. Recent advances in source criticism have turned this basic premise on its head,4 since typi- cally “corroborative” information, such as dating and the naming of commanders 1 Lilie 1976: 57-96, esp. 68-74; also Brandes 1989: 48ff; cf. Treadgold 1997: 320. 2 The most frequently quoted sources are Theophanes and Tabari, as well as the Islamic histories of Mas‘ūdī and Ya‘qūbī, and the eastern Christian sources deriving from the Syriac Common Source (see next but one note). 3 Thus both Lilie 1976: 70 and Brandes 1989. 4 The late Christian sources provide no independent confirmation of events reported in later Arabic sources. Theophanes and his cousins in Syriac (Dionysius, preserved in Chr. 1234 and Michael the Syrian) and Arabic (Agapius of Manbidj) have been shown to derive in part from the emerging Arabic tradition, especially during these years. For this and the following, see Conrad 1992, Hoyland 2011. 440 Appendix three in the Christian sources were in many instances influenced by the emerging Is- lamic historical traditions. Furthermore, dating schemes in Christian as well as Arabic sources are often demonstrably inaccurate. While the Islamic chronicles frequently provide multiple alternatives for the same event, in the Christian sources (especially those derived from the Syriac Common Source), events are rather arbitrarily assigned to a year in later derivations. In the original Common Source, most events were simply left undated but placed in a specific chronological con- text before or after dated entries. In later redactions, such as Theophanes, these events became assigned to a specific year, with the result that the same event appears to happen twice with slightly differing contexts or is simply off by one, two, three, four or even five years. Indeed, narratives were often broken up, reassem- bled, assigned to different dates and personalities, and related to new political constellations and religious developments, often mixed with materials from other sources. Segments relating embarrassing events, such as catastrophic defeats or religious views rejected by later generations, were simply scuttled and covered up by importing new events from other entries.5 Constans II’s reputation—indeed the whole period of his reign (641-669)—has languished doubly. He suffered a near universal damnatio memoriae in Byzantine sources due to his promotion of the Monothelite creed, as he continued Herak- leios’ attempt to create a compromise between Monophysites and Chalcedonians. The complete silence of Nikephoros is an extreme case, but Theophanes and other Common Source derivates only provide disjointed facts, mostly concerned with failures, since his religious policies were condemned in 680 and his success- es were ostensibly purged from historical records. Arabic sources, in turn, have reinforced the minimalist Byzantine perspective by ingenious distortions of their own. Instead of presenting complex, deliberately planned campaigns, events were broken up into discreet, yearly entries, with a single objective and assigned to single commanders.6 This was patterned on the summer raids, sa’ifa, which became highly ritualized during the 8th century and with which the later Islamic historians were familiar. Much of this process could have been an honest attempt at making sense of apparent contradictions in these historians’ eyes. For example, armies moving in several columns would have had several commanders, but in- 5 See in general Howard-Johnston 2010 for a recent, more systematic attempt at re- dating events based on strict, testable criteria; for the structure and dating scheme (or lack thereof) in the original Common Source, now known as The Chronicle of Theophilus of Edessa, see Palmer’s 1993 translation of “Dionysius reconstituted” (the lost Syriac interme- diary source for Michael the Syrian’s Chronicle and the Chronicle of 1234), Hoyland’s 1997 concordance of the entries that were derived from the Common Source in Theophanes, Agapius, Michael the Syrian, and the Chronicle of 1234, and most recently, his 2011 recon- structed translation. Further observations and cross references (with multiple examples of misdating found passim throughout the 7th century) are to be found in Mango and Scott’s introduction to their translation of Theophanes as well as Vassiliev’s edition and translation of Agapius. 6 See e.g. the volumes of Tabari covering these years and the analysis in Lilie 1976, who to a certain extent follows the same logic but is able to discern several long-term Arab strategic objectives..

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