The Byzantines easily repulsed Mu'awiya’s exploratory foray in the direction of Constantinople in 649, but the thought of the Arabs taking to the waves worried the emperor Constans enough to request a three-year truce (ca. 650-53). We can pick up the story from Sebeos, who gives a particularly detailed account.4 The death of the Persian emperor Yazdgird in 652 emboldened Mu'awiya to renew hostilities against Byzantium “so that they might take Constantinople and exterminate that kingdom as well.” He is even said to have composed a letter to Constans offering to let him remain “the great prince” in his lands and to retain a quarter of the wealth of the realm if he would submit and “abandon that vain cult which you learned from childhood, deny Jesus and turn to the great God whom I worship, the God of our father Abraham.” For the next two years, Mu'awiya threw himself into preparing a huge naval and land attack force. He levied troops from all the garrisons throughout the lands the Arabs had conquered. They constructed warships in Levantine ports and in Alexandria, and this is reflected in contemporary papyri, which depict a scene of frenzied activity as carpenters, caulkers (joint-sealers), blacksmiths, and oarsmen were press-ganged into service and supplies were commandeered for the soldiers and crew. There were the usual large troop-carrying vessels, numbering some 300, which were able to transport a thousand elite cavalry on each one, and they also bore various items of military hardware, such as catapults and towers, which would enable them to breach walls or to scale them. In addition, however, there were special light ships, with only a hundred men aboard, “so that they might rapidly dart to and fro over the waves of the sea around the very large ships,” which would, it was hoped, give the Arab fleet a tactical advantage.
The plan was that Mu'awiya would march by land as far as Chalcedon, which lay across the Bosphorus from Constantinople, while the general Abu l-A'war would command the Arab armada and sail up to the Byzantine capital (Map 4.1). There was some delay because of a minor incident in Levantine Tripoli. Two men broke down the gates of the city prison and liberated numerous Byzantine captives, and together they slew the governor of the city along with his retinue and burned all the ships moored in the port before escaping in a small boat to Byzantium. Mu'awiya was furious but refused to let his plans be derailed. He went ahead to Chalcedon while Abu l-A'war oversaw the completion of the shipbuilding before he too set off, probably in the summer of 654. When they were approaching Phoenix, off the coast of Lycia, south of modern Antalya, they encountered a Byzantine fleet led by the emperor Constans himself and his brother. That both of them accompanied the fleet in person is a measure of how seriously they viewed the threat. In the event the light vessels of the Arabs easily outmaneuvered the large cumbersome Byzantine ships. It looked like the emperor himself might be captured, but one foresighted soldier whisked his master onto another ship in time to make a fast getaway, while another man courageously put on the imperial robes and “stationed himself bravely on the imperial ship, killing many of the enemy before giving up his life on behalf of the king.” The emperor and his brother sailed as swiftly as they could back to Constantinople, while the rest of the Byzantine fleet was cut to pieces “on a sea so violent that it was said that dense spray ascended
MAP 4.1 Constantinople.
Among the ships like dust from dry land and that the sea was dyed with blood.” Abu l-A'war ordered that they fish out the corpses of the Byzantines and their number was estimated at some 20,000.
The Arab fleet continued toward Constantinople, chasing the surviving Byzantine ships as far as Rhodes. The capital’s inhabitants were now nervous, since they knew about the Arabs’ approach by land and by sea, and were shaken by the naval defeat at Phoenix. The emperor entered the church of Hagia Sophia and implored God to aid the city; he lifted the crown from his head, put aside the purple, donned sackcloth and sat on ashes, and ordered a fast to be proclaimed in Constantinople. As the Arabs drew near in the early autumn of 654, Abu l-A'war ordered the ships to be deployed in lines and to attack the city, but out of nowhere a storm brewed, a miracle worked by God to save the Byzantine capital, said its inhabitants. The sea was stirred up from the depths; its waves piled up high “like the summits of very high mountains,” and, together with the raging wind, broke up the Arab ships and sent their war machines and sailors plunging headlong into the seething ocean. When the Arabs encamped at Chalcedon saw the power of the storm and the destruction it wrought, they slipped away by night and began the long march home. A contingent that Mu'awiya had left near Cappadocian Caesarea, modern Kayseri, to safeguard his rear attempted to salvage some honor and attacked the local Byzantine garrison, but even here the Arabs were defeated and they were obliged to flee to safety in northern Mesopotamia. Muslim historians do not mention this defeat, focusing instead on the victory at Phoenix, which is called in Arabic the Battle of the Masts. However, there are good reasons to give Sebeos's narrative credence. He was a contemporary of these events, writing in the early 660s, so less than a decade after they occurred. Moreover, he recounts the whole affair with such a wealth of detail that it is difficult to believe it could all have been manufactured. It also explains what otherwise would seem to make no sense, that is, why the Arab fleet, having got the Byzantines on the run, would have simply given up at this point and gone home.
Byzantium enjoyed a period of relative calm while Mu'awiya was distracted by civil war at home, but then in 667 the Byzantine commander of the Armenian army, a man named Shabur, rebelled against Constans and sought the aid of the caliph Mu'awiya in his bid to win the rule of the Byzantine Empire for himself. This event is narrated very vividly and at great length by a near contemporary Syrian author.5 The drama takes place at the court of Mu'awiya in Damascus. An envoy of Shabur named Sergius arrives there to plead his master's case before the caliph. On receiving news of this mutiny, Emperor Constans dispatches his chamberlain, the eunuch Andrew, to appeal to Mu'awiya not to become involved in this plot. Sergius is portrayed as weak and fawning; he initially prostrates himself before his superior, Andrew, but then, goaded and mocked by Mu'awiya for his cowardly obsequiousness, he taunts Andrew for his lack of the appurtenances of manhood. Andrew is the hero of the story; he does not tremble before the caliph, but upbraids him for failing to distinguish between a legitimate sovereign and a perfidious insurgent, and he sternly warns the rebel's messenger of the consequences of his disrespectfulness. All works out well for the hero, for Sergius is captured on his return to Armenia and killed with his testicles placed next to him—a fitting punishment for one “so proud of his private parts”—and Shabur has his brains dashed out when his horse rears up as he was passing through a city gate*
This left Mu'awiya in something of a quandary, for he had already sent troops to Shabur under the command of the highly respected Fadala ibn 'Ubayd al-Ansari. When the latter learned of the death of Shabur, he wrote to Mu'awiya asking what he should do. The caliph determined to take this opportunity to launch another major assault on the Byzantine capital. He ordered Fadala to winter in Melitene, in southern Anatolia, and dispatched his son Yazid with a large body of cavalry to catch up with Fadala and then for the two of them to march on toward Constantinople. This they did and by the summer of 668 they had reached Chalcedon. In the meantime, a fleet was readied and dispatched. The emperor Constantine IV, on being informed of this major expedition advancing toward Constantinople, had large bireme boats built and ordered them to be stationed at the city’s eastern harbor. In the following year, the Arab fleet set sail and came to anchor in the region of Thrace, to the southwest of the capital, on the European shore. “Every day there was a military engagement from morning until evening, with thrust and counter-thrust,” and this went on from spring until autumn. Neither side landed a fatal blow on the other, and so, as the weather deteriorated, the Arabs looked for somewhere to spend the winter. They captured the ancient city of Cyzicus, just across the Sea of Marmara from Constantinople, and there made secure their fleet. The following spring they set out once more and the naval jousting match recommenced.
For two years, in 668 and 669, the blockade of the imperial city continued. We know this from a contemporary archivist who went to retrieve some documents during a council at Constantinople in 681 and found a synodical letter of the patriarch Thomas (667-69) to the pope, which was still sealed and which he had not been able to send for the two years that he was patriarch “because of the prolonged incursion of the impious Saracens and their siege.”6 It is not certain what led to the end of this blockade, but one early chronicle says that the Arabs maintained it “until they could no longer bear the pain of hunger and pestilence,” at which point the land force returned, plundering Anatolian towns along the way. Two other factors might have tipped the balance in favor of the Byzantines. The first is that the emperor Constantine had ships brought from the central Mediterranean, still outside the control of the Arabs, then along the coast of Greece and finally driven on rollers overland across the Gallipoli peninsula—an arduous task, but presumably the only way to bring in naval reinforcements while the Hellespont was blocked by the Arabs. The second is that the Byzantines had invented a new weapon, namely, Greek fire. Its discovery is attributed to a certain Callinicus, an architect or carpenter from Baalbek in Syria, who had come from there as a refugee to the Byzantine Empire; he concocted a flaming substance, called naphthalene, which could be directed at enemy ships by means of a long metal siphon (Figure 4.1).7 This weapon the Byzantines were to put to good effect time and time again. In 673, for example, an Arab raiding party reached Lycia by boat, but those who disembarked were routed by a substantial Byzantine force headed by three generals, and those who escaped by sea were treated to a dose of Greek fire administered by some Byzantine skiffs that had managed to catch up with them.8
FIGURE 4.1 An example of the use of Greek fire from illustration in Ms Matritensis gr. Vitr. 26-2, fol. 34v. © Madrid National Library.
World History
