The auspices appeared good; the odds, heavily in the Arabs’ favour. Sulayman’s brother, Prince Maslama, commanded an army and fleet of astonishing size, unrivalled in strength and resource. They ran roughshod over the empire’s dwindling possessions in Asia Minor (Anatolia), advancing almost unchallenged to the gates of Constantinople.
That was about as far as their luck held. Prophecy or no, Maslama’s massive army seemed pitted against the hand of God almost from the outset. The Byzantines’ diabolically effective weapon – known as Greek fire by their enemies and hydron pyr (‘liquid fire’) by themselves – wreaked havoc on the very day of the Arab fleet’s arrival. (As described.) The wind dropped, the huge war-ships in the rearguard of the fleet found themselves becalmed, and the Byzantine fire-ships coolly destroyed two dozen of them without suffering a single casualty.
The impenetrability of the walls of Constantinople, defending the landward side of the city, was well attested for over a millennium. First constructed during the reign of Emperor Theodosius II in the fourth century AD, they were the brainchild of an architect named Anthemius. The walls stood intact practically until the city’s final capitulation to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. True, Constantinople had been sacked before that, in 1204, although that was achieved through treachery. It took the invention of gunpowder – and a shady arms deal between an unlikely Hungarian and the Turks – to finally blow a breach through the massive stone defences. The rest, as they say, is history.
Maslama, of course, did not have such explosive means at his disposal. Katāros’s attempt to ‘give him the keys’ was an invention of mine – albeit one mixed with a grain of truth since the Emperor Justinian II had somehow snuck into the city through the Blachernae sector of the walls when he seized back the throne for the second period of his reign. Although it remains a mystery exactly how. For the Arabs, there was no easy breakthrough and thus Maslama’s host was forced to settle in for a longer siege. The winter that followed was the hardest in memory. The chronicler Theophanes attests that snow settled on the ground for a hundred days – something unheard of at the time – and given the paucity of cover and dwindling food supplies, this made the hardships of the besieging Arab army almost unendurable. All but cut off from the rest of the Umayyad Caliphate, Maslama’s army languished. When Caliph Sulayman also died suddenly that winter, it seemed the prophecy had proved a false hope. Nevertheless, Sulayman’s successor, a younger brother named Umar, was determined not to abandon his half-brother Maslama and his army to their fate. He promised to send a reinforcing fleet in the spring to re-supply Maslama, hoping to tip the balance back in the besiegers’ favour. Alas, he had counted neither on Emperor Leo’s cunning nor his extensive network of spies. According to Theophanes, when the Arab fleet Umar had assembled in Egypt arrived at the Bosporus straits and anchored offshore from Chalcedon, many of their Christian crewmen deserted and crossed the straits in small boats, hailing their emperor with shouts of acclamation. The imperial fire-ships moved in and destroyed most of the Egyptian vessels – still laden with their precious cargo of grain that was so vital to the Arab army’s relief.
It was the Bulgars who delivered the coup de grâce, albeit not quite in the way I described. There was indeed a treaty existing between the Bulgar nation and the empire, agreed between Khan Tervel, his son Kosmeniy, and Leo’s predecessor Theodosios III (whom Leo had deposed). Whether there was any serious doubt that the Bulgars would honour their part of the agreement, it is not recorded. What is known is that Bulgar raids were a continual thorn in the side of Maslama’s besieging army, and these seemed to culminate in a larger action that took place in midsummer of 717, during which the Bulgars routed the beleaguered remains of the Arab army and left twenty thousand of them dead on the field of battle.
For the purposes of my story, I have the two events occurring on the same day when in fact they probably took place two or three months apart. Nevertheless, together they dealt the death blow to Maslama’s giddy dreams of absolute victory. In mid-August 717, what was left of the Arab fleet evacuated the miserable remains of Maslama’s army. Alas, their troubles were not over. A terrible storm engulfed the fleet and only five vessels survived the voyage home. The expedition’s failure was total and abject. No small wonder that the Byzantine chroniclers attributed the successful defence of the city to the providence of God.
Although wars between the two empires continued, the Arabs never again made an attempt to knock out Constantinople, and no historian, ancient or modern, denies that the repulse of the Arab advance at the doorstep of mainland Europe marked a decisive moment in that continent’s history. It should be added that eventually Arab and Byzantine reached an accommodation with each other, settling into an uneasy coexistence for the next three or four centuries. It took the encroachment of an outsider people – the Seljuk Turks – to upset the balance once again and stir up renewed animosity between Christian and Muslim. In time this development was answered by other outsiders from the West, the Latins, in the form of the first Crusades. This, some four hundred years after the astonishing gains of the early Muslim conquests.
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