Chapter 3 The “Persians” and the “Scythians” 1 Historical Background In the seventh to the ninth centuries, with some exceptions, there were three major groups of newcomers from the Muslim Orient to Byzantium: Muslim prisoners of war and hostages, merchants and diplomats, and “political” ref- ugees. In the first centuries of the Caliphate’s existence, when military con- frontation between Muslims and the Byzantine empire reached its apogee, the most numerous group of Muslims in the empire’s territory most likely comprised Muslim prisoners of war. In the second half of the tenth century, Ibn Hawqal referred to Byzantine prisons for Muslim captives in the themata of the Thracesians, Opsikion, and Bucellarians. Some prisoners were kept in Constantinople. Most Muslim captives returned home (being ransomed or as part of prisoner swaps). Some of them, however, were Christianized and settled by the Byzantines in abandoned lands or were enslaved. Both settlers and slaves, being scattered throughout the provinces of the empire, dispersed into the local population, and were quickly assimilated, particularly through marriage. Since the end of the ninth century, Muslim merchants were fre- quent visitors in Byzantine trade centers. Judging by the Arabic geographi- cal tradition, Muslim merchants knew the Byzantine system of international trade including markets and trade routes. Muslim merchants were abundant in Constantinople, possibly the only city in the empire where a permanent Muslim trading colony existed. From time to time, groups of immigrants who were forced out of Muslim territory found asylum in Byzantium. Some belonged to diverse Christian communities and sects. More rarely the Byzantine bor- der was crossed by non-Christian and Muslim refugees who were allowed to remain in the empire provided they adopt Christianity. An example of the latter category are the Iranian Khurramites who fled to Byzantium during the reign of Theophilos (829–42), “the Moors” who most likely came from North Africa and were settled in southwest Anatolia (tenth c.), and 12,000 Arab horsemen with their families who fled from Nisibis in 941. Byzantine authorities, as a rule, divided the immigrants into small groups and sent them to different provinces of the empire to speed up their assimilation with the local population. Usually, the immigrants, scattered in the vast expanses of the empire, lost their ethnic and religious identity by the second generation. A separate phenomenon of the east Byzantine periphery is represented by limitrophe Akritic zones where © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ���6 | doi ��.��63/9789004307759_005 The “Persians” and the “Scythians” 87 the population movement in both directions across the frontier was rather intensive. The defection of warriors of the Arab thughūr to the enemy side was frequent, and these renegades resettled in the Byzantine border regions. Their number most likely increased during the Byzantine reconquest of Syria in the tenth and eleventh centuries. The assimilating factor of baptism, according to the epics Digenes Akrites, played as important a role for these Arab defectors as in other cases. Judging by Byzantine seals, in the middle and upper layers of the Byzantine state hierarchy in the tenth through the eleventh centuries, a sig- nificant number of individuals from the Orient bore Arabic names.1 However, it is difficult to establish whether these immigrants from the east were Muslim renegades or Arabicized Syrian Christians who also used Arabic names. In any case, the Muslim immigrants either soon lost their initial religious identity (as in the case of refugees and defectors) or represented marginal Muslim groups of foreign subjects (as in the case of merchants and prisoners of war) outside the Byzantine social organization and juridical system.2 1 Laurent, Vitalien. Le corpus des sceaux de l’empire byzantin, 2 vols in 5 pts (Paris, 1963–81), 2: nos 106, 208, 253, 380, 407, 558, 591, 808, 904, 916, 922, 923, 1040, 1163, 1204, etc. Some up-to- date information from Byzantine sigillography, see in: Cheynet, Jean-Claude. “L’apport arabe à l’aristocratie byzantine des Xe–XIe siècles,” in Idem. La société byzantine. L’apport des sceaux (Paris, 2008), pp. 627–46. 2 There is still no general study of the Arab immigrants in Byzantium, although some par- ticular aspects of the problem have been discussed in many studies: Canard, Marius. “Les relations politiques et sociales entre Byzance et les Arabes,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 18 (1964), pp. 33–56; Idem. Byzance et les Musulmans du Proche Orient. Variorum (London, 1973), nos 1, 15; Charanis, Peter. Studies on the Demography of the Byzantine Empire. Variorum (London, 1972); Rydén, Lennart. “The Portrait of the Arab Samônas in Byzantine Literature,” Graeco-Arabica 3 (1984), pp. 101–09; Reinert, Stephen W. “The Muslim Presence in Constantinople, 9th–15th Centuries: Some Preliminary Observations,” in Studies on the Internal Diaspora of the Byzantine Empire, ed. Hélène Ahrweiler and Angeliki E. Laiou (Washington, DC, 1998), pp. 125–50; Ditten, Hans. Ethnische Ferschiebungen zwischen der Balkanhalbinsel und Kleinasien von Ende des 6. bis zur zweiten Hälfte des 9. Jahrhunderts (Berlin, 1993); Oikonomides, Nicolas. “L’organisation de la frontière orientale de Byzance aux 10e–11e siècles et le taktikon de l’Escorial,” in Actes du XIVe congrès international des études byzantines, 1 (Bucharest, 1974), pp. 285–302; Balivet, Michel. Romanie byzantine et pays de Rûm turc: histoire d’un espace d’imbrication gréco-turque (Istanbul, 1994), ch. 1, pp. 12–14 and nn. 10–12; Dagron, Gilbert. “Formes et fonctions du pluralisme linguistique à Byzance (IXe– XIIe siècle),” Travaux et mémoires 12 (1994), pp. 219–40. For Khurramites, see: Cheynet, Jean- Claude. “Théophile, Théophobe et les Perses,” in Lampakis, Stelios (ed.), Η Βυζαντινή Μικρά Ασία (6ος–12ος αι.), pp. 39–50; Idem. “L’apport arabe,” pp. 627–46; Letsios, Dimitrios. “Theophilos and his ‘Khurramite’ Policy: Some Reconsiderations,” Graeco-Arabica 9–10 (2004), pp. 249–71; Bibikov, Mikhail V. “К вопросу об иноземцах в византийской государственной элите,” in .