acknowledgements

this book was the product of a British Acade­ my Mid-­career Fellowship that I held 2018–19 at Aga Khan University, Institute for the Study of Muslim Ci- vilisations. I would like to thank every­one at the Institute, especially the dean, Leif Stenberg, for their convivial support. My thinking on Dionysius of Tel-­Mahre was first stimulated by a work- shop on elites in the caliphate that was or­ga­nized by Stefan Heidemann and Hannah Hagemann at Hamburg for the ERC proj­ect ‘The Early Islamic Em- pire at Work’. ­Here I presented an early version of what became chapter 3 of this book, and the discussions I had ­there ­were very impor­tant for thinking through my ideas. I also benefited from my involvement with Petra Sijpesteijn’s Leiden ERC proj ­ect, ‘Embedding Conquest: Naturalising Muslim Rule in the Early Islamic Empire (600–1000)’, where I presented an early version of chapter 4. Audi- ences at Oxford, Cambridge, London, Frankfurt and Milan provided feedback on many aspects of the work. Peter Van Nuffelen, Maria Conterno and Marianna Mazzola kindly shared with me their work on the fragments of Dionysius and I am very grateful to them indeed. I should like to show my par­tic­u­lar thanks to Hannah Hagemann and Phil Booth, who read the entire manuscript of the book and made many valuable suggestions. I would also like to thank Averil Cameron, Andrew Marsham, Liza Anderson, Chip Coakley, David Taylor, Salam Rassi, Ed Hayes, Ed Zychowicz-­Coghill, Fanny Bessard, Jan van Ginkel, Srecko Koralija, Daniel Hadas, James Montgomery, Andy Hilkens, Peter Sarris, Jack Tannous, Ben Tate, Sara Lerner, Hanna Siurua, Greg Fisher, and the anonymous reviewer from Prince­ton University Press. Fi ­nally I should like to thank my ­family for their enduring love and kind- ness: My parents, George (1930–2000) and Felicity, who nurtured my love of history; my ­brother Stephen, who has brought out the best in me; my ­children,

vii viii acknowledgements

Charlotte, Jamie and Max, for keeping me on my toes; and my wife, Katherine, for every­thing.

An e­ arlier version of parts of chapter 3 was published as ‘Christian Elite Net- works in the Jazira, c. 730–840’, in H.-­L. Hagemann and S. Heidemann (eds.), Transregional and Regional Elites: Connecting the Early Islamic Empire (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2019), 359–83. Parts of chapter 4 ­were published as ‘Christian Authority unde­ r the Early Abbasids: The Life of Timothy of Kakushta’,Proche- ­Orient Chrétien 61 (2011), 258–74. They are reproduced­ here by kind permission of the publishers. Where Arabic terms have been included in Syriac sources, I have presented them ­here as if transliterated from Arabic, rather than attempting to preserve the (eccentric) Syriac spelling. I have not included diacritics for proper names and titles in the main text. Full transliterations are provided in the bibliography. The Chronicle of Michael the Syrian is a significant source for this book. I have provided references to Chabot’s publication, which is widely available. However, Chabot published a black-a­ nd-­white photo­graph of a manuscript that he commissioned in 1888. A superior text is now available in the form of a high-­resolution digital photo­graph from an earlier manuscript of Michael’s Chronicle, which had been held in Aleppo. This manuscript was produced in 1598 and was the model for the manuscript that Chabot commissioned. A high- ­resolution digital photo­graph of the Aleppo manuscript has been pub- lished by Gorgias Press, as the first volume of a series of texts and translations of Michael’s Chronicle. It is much easier to read than Chabot’s text and pre- serves the rubrication and marginal notes. Sebastian Brock provides a useful conversion ­table in volume 11 of the Gorgias Press series ‘Texts and Transla- tions of the Chronicle of Michael the Great’. This table allows references to Chabot’s text to be converted to the Aleppo text. I have not seen any substan- tial differences between the two texts, though Chabot’s text employs more frequent abbreviations for common words. D I O C E S E O F P O N T U S L. Van INGILENE Martyr opoli SOPHANEN s E MESOPOAmida D I O C E S E CILICIA II O F Germanicia TAMIA I A S I A Samosata Mopsuestia CILICIA I Edessa Tella ISAURIA Tarsus Dara Nisibis Cyrrhus OSRHOENE Seleucia E U P H R Harran

Antioch SYRIA I A T Callinicum E N S Laodicea Rusafa Hatra habur SYRIA II I K THEODORIAS Apamea S CYPRUS Circesium Euph

ra Tigris tes . S Paallmmyyrraa

BANON MT ANON MTS. LE NTI ANTI-LEBANA Damascus

PAL. II A ABI Bostra ARABI PAL. I Umm al-Jimalal-J

Damietta Jerusalem Alexandria Gaza

Tanais Pelusium Nessana PALAESTINA III

Petra

Ayyllaa S I N A I

400 km / 249 mi valley

Nile

Map 1. The Roman Levant c. 550 L. Van A L - J I B Melitene

Maypherkat A L

Kaishum Amida Arzun Resh-Kepha Germanicia L. Urmia (Marash) Mardin Samosata MT. QARDU Mopsuestia Serug Edessa Tella Qartmin Gubba Barraya (?) Beth Abhe MARGA h Hah Tamarna (?) Nisibis . . ik Reshaina Qenneshre l Cyrrhus Ba Mar Mattai Mabbug Harran b Mosul Za MT. SINJAR (Nineveh) eat Antioch Eusebona (?) Gr Qinnasrin Raqqa (Callinicum) b Kakushta (?) Za q le tt Slou Mar Zakkai Khabur Li Apamea Beth a de Kark CYPRUS Hama Euphrate

T igr . Homs s Ana Takrit i Palmyra s I R

ANON MTSANON MTS. A Q LEB Damascus ANTI-LEB Baghdad

Boundary between districts of the Jazira Abbasid provincial boundary Bostra AL-JAZIRA Abbasid province Monastery Mar Zakkai Kufa Eusebona (?) Location uncertain Joppa Jerusalem Damietta 400 km / 249 mi Alexandria Gaza s Mar Saba Tanais Pelusium Map 2. The Abbasid Caliphate c. 800 Basra

Cairo Petra

I A Ayla

S I N y lle va

Nile the imam of the christians