Episode #217- Did the Siege of Constantinople Even Happen? (Part II)

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Hey everyone, Sebastian here.

Just wanted to let you know that I will once again be participating in this year's Intelligent Speech Conference.

Deception, lies, fakery, fraudulence, and forgery is what they have on the docket for Intelligent Speech 2025.

So obviously, I've got to be there.

For those that don't know, Intelligent Speech is an online conference that highlights the best in history podcasting.

Intelligent Speech 2025 Deception will be taking place on the 8th of February 2025.

So if you want tickets, go to intelligent speechonline.com right now and get yourself to the conference.

Is it just me, Or does it seem kind of weird that at one point in history, the Romans abandoned Rome as their capital?

Now, it shouldn't seem weird.

In the grand scope of history, the moving of a capital city is not at all unusual.

Nations do it all the time.

Take China, for example.

Over the course of its long history, there have been at least nine different cities that have served as the capital of a united China, depending on how you count.

Countries are invaded, dynasties change, revolutions occur, administrative needs evolve, and new cities present themselves as the more natural or strategic seats of power.

Capital cities change.

It's just a fact of history.

And yet, there's still this irrational part of me that feels sad when I reach the part of the Roman story where the Empire decides that Rome is no longer useful as a capital city.

I know I'm not the only one that feels this way.

Many people, even venerable old historians, first get fascinated by Rome as children.

This can often lead to people developing weirdly sentimental feelings about Rome.

I think I'm one of those people.

Now, it might be because the Romans started as a city-state.

In fact, you could argue that Rome was the most successful city-state in history.

The early Roman identity was inextricable from the city they founded on the Tiber River.

The whole Roman project, at least at the start, was about the betterment of the city, be that through the creation of a quasi-representative republican model of government, or by way of loot, land, and slaves captured violently from their neighbors.

Even as the empire expanded and what it meant to be a Roman citizen transformed dramatically, the city itself remained a profound concern and a deep source of pride for the Romans.

Proverbially, all roads led to Rome.

On his deathbed, the the first Roman emperor, Augustus, reflected that his building projects in the capital may have been his greatest achievement.

Allegedly, he quipped, quote, I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble, end quote.

Whether or not that was actually true could be debated, but the quote demonstrates that for centuries, the health, grandeur, and prestige of the city was synonymous with that of the empire.

I mean, not to put too fine a point on it, but you could not have Romans without a Rome.

But then, at one point in history, all that changed.

Being Roman no longer had much to do with being from the city of Rome.

Roman history is marked by bitter, often violent struggles over the question of who got to be considered a Roman citizen.

But in the end, the definition trended towards being more and more inclusive.

In the year 212 AD, the Emperor Caracalla issued an edict granting all free men born anywhere in the empire full Roman citizenship.

Some historians see this moment as the true turning point in the history of the empire.

Historian Mary Beard has argued that after this drastic redrawing of the boundaries of Roman citizenship, the empire became, quote, effectively a new state masquerading under an old name, end quote.

You see, our old friend Emperor Constantine the Great often gets the credit, or sometimes the blame, for permanently moving the capital of the Empire from Rome to the renovated Greek city of Byzantium, redubbed redubbed New Rome, but eventually called Constantinople in honor of its founder.

It is very true that in the year 330 AD, Constantine officially declared that his new city on the Bosphorus Strait would act as the chief capital of the empire from that point onward.

But an important part of the story that often gets glazed over is that Rome had been abandoned as an administrative capital a solid generation earlier.

The Emperor Diocletian, who reigned from 285 to 305, put a definitive cap on a long trend that saw Rome steadily lose its place as the most important base of imperial power.

When Diocletian came to power after a tumultuous period, sometimes called the crisis of the third century, he planned to completely reimagine how the empire would be organized.

Dealing with Rome meant dealing with the old Roman senatorial families.

So, Diocletian completely sidestepped them.

Rome, the city, was simply ignored.

In his new structure, the empire would be divided into two administrative zones, the East and the West.

The Western Empire would be run from Mediolanum, Mediolanum, or modern Milan.

The Eastern Empire would be run from Diocletian's headquarters, the Anatolian city of Nicomedia.

As Diocletian's reign progressed, he nominated a co-emperor and then two junior emperors.

This system, known as the Tetrarchy, was designed, in theory, to better delegate the overwhelming load of imperial duties.

This meant that cities like Antioch in Syria, Smyrnaum on the Danube frontier, and Thessalonica in Greece also started to be used as de facto imperial capitals by the various Tetrarchs.

But a generation later, Constantine brought this system of four-way rule to an end when he emerged victorious from a series of civil wars.

His regime was all about consolidating and centralizing power after the division of the Tetrarchy.

For Constantine, there would be one emperor and one capital.

But when it came time for Constantine to choose the site of his new capital, Rome wasn't even in the top five of potential candidates.

Italy's Rome had been washed as a capital city for a solid forty years when Constantine finally settled on the location of his new Rome.

So, why Byzantium?

In some ways, it seemed like an unlikely candidate for a new imperial capital.

It was tiny when compared to the empire's major urban centers like Alexandria, Antioch, Athens, or Rome itself, which still boasted a population of nearly a million people.

Byzantium likely had no more than 30,000 residents when it became the new Rome.

But this meant that Byzantium came with a lot less religious baggage than the larger cities in the empire.

As I'm sure many of you know, Constantine was the first Roman emperor to embrace Christianity, and he planned for his new capital to reflect the primacy of his favored religion.

The big cities like Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch were important centers of pagan worship and were home to the largest and richest temples.

Byzantium's temples were small and could quickly be eclipsed by newly built Christian churches.

This was the kind of place the emperor could put his stamp on, politically and religiously.

But more importantly, the Greek port was located in one of the most strategically perfect spots in the empire, maybe even one of the most strategically perfect spots on the planet.

Byzantium sat on a peninsula that jut out into the Bosphorus Strait.

The Bosphorus connects the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara, which in turn opens up into the Aegean Sea and the Mediterranean.

This makes the Bosphorus one of the most important waterways on the planet.

The city sat at the crossroads of an absolutely essential maritime trade route.

It also sat at a natural crossing place for people who were moving from Anatolia into Thrace.

We now think of this as the border between Asia and Europe.

As such, it was at a commercial hinge point between the Eastern and Western empires.

From that that perspective, the old Rome seemed positively out of the way.

Beyond that, Byzantium was geographically blessed when it came to defense.

The city was at the end of a peninsula.

On the western bank were the open waters of the Sea of Marmora.

On the eastern bank was an inlet known as the Golden Horn, which created a natural, protected harbor.

Future Romans would also discover that the mouth of the golden horn could be effectively closed off with a chain strung from one bank to the other.

All this meant that a land army could only approach the city from one direction.

If you had a city wall closing off the one land approach, your city would become very hard to take.

If you then enclosed the rest of the city with a sea wall, well, then the city became nearly impregnable.

Besieging the city would require both a land army that could effectively threaten the walls and a fleet of ships capable of blockading the city.

And remember, this was a city that could potentially be resupplied from either the Black Sea or the Sea of Marmora, which was connected to the Aegean.

On top of that, the Bosphorus Strait has notoriously tricky currents that can play havoc on navigators unfamiliar with the waters.

Constantine saw that Byzantium, with a few modifications, could easily become a commercial powerhouse and one of the most militarily secure cities in the world.

All of this made Byzantium the perfect choice to become the new Rome.

The Italian capital capital had been called the Eternal City, and so Constantine set out to make his city just as eternal.

While the Emperor certainly had a grandiose sense of his role in human history, one wonders if even he could have predicted just how eternal his city would end up being.

The already formidable defenses of Constantinople were given a serious boost in the early 400s by the Emperor Theodosius II.

The sack of Rome in 410 inspired Theodosius to make some upgrades to Constantinople's land and sea walls.

The new city walls, thereafter known as the Theodosian walls, have been remembered as a marvel of military engineering.

They used a three-layer system of defense.

Potential attackers first faced a 20-meter wide and 7-meter-deep ditch.

This was outfitted with pipes that could be turned on and off to flood the ditch and turn it into a giant moat on demand.

Behind that was an outer wall patrolled by guards who were in charge of killing anyone brave enough to swim the moat.

Behind that was a second wall, which had regular towers in which were stationed archers and soldiers with other projectile weapons, which could cover both the moat and the first wall.

Then came the final inner wall.

This was a formidable final defense that was almost five meters thick and twelve meters high.

On top of that, it was outfitted with 96 projecting towers, each of which could hold up to three artillery machines.

We're talking catapults, trebuchets, etc.

The Roman engineers perfectly calculated the placement of those towers so that every part of the wall was covered, and that no tower was blocking the firing potential of any other tower on the inner wall or the middle wall.

It's no exaggeration to say that the Theodosian walls were one of the greatest feats of engineering ever undertaken by the Romans, a people known for their great feats of engineering.

They would be regarded as a state-of-the-art defensive system right up to the gunpowder age.

Geography had made Constantinople remarkably defensible, but the Theodosian walls made the city nearly invincible.

Well,

nearly.

It's long been believed that one of the most significant tests of Constantinople came three and a half centuries after Constantine's death.

In 674, the armies of Muawiyah and the Umayyad Caliphate bore down on the beleaguered Roman Empire.

The few surviving Greek language sources tell us that this culminated in a brutal seven-year siege of the capital.

But should those sources be trusted?

Was the so-called first Arab siege of Constantinople a historical mix-up, a confluence of misunderstandings, exaggerations, and dating errors by early chroniclers?

Did a later siege of the city make such a huge historical mark that it accidentally created a phantom siege in our sources.

Constantinople certainly seemed like the kind of place that could weather many historical storms.

But just how many storms were there?

Let's see if we can put it all together today on our fake history.

Episode number 217.

Did the siege of Constantinople even happen?

Part 2.

Hello, and welcome to Our Fake History.

My name is Sebastian Major and this is the podcast where we explore historical myths and try to determine what's fact, what's fiction, and what is such a good story that it simply must be told.

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This week, we are continuing what will be a trilogy of episodes on the early Arab sieges of Constantinople.

This is part two in what will be a three-part series.

So if you've not heard part one, then I strongly suggest you go back and give that a listen now.

In the first part, we zoomed out and looked at some of the historical meta-narratives that have influenced the way the medieval Romans, aka the Byzantines, and the early Caliphate have traditionally been presented in Western history writing.

I argued that the same set of stereotypes that were used by generations of historians to denigrate the Byzantine Empire were also used to denigrate the early Muslim empires.

Both groups have been called stagnant, superstitious, and decadent, which, as we have seen before, are tired Orientalist tropes, not to mention inaccurate.

But ironically, this sometimes butts up against a different metanarrative, which casts the Eastern Romans as the quote-unquote saviors of the West.

The successful defense of Constantinople in the early medieval period is presented as a historical turning point which blocked Islam's entry into Europe and ultimately allowed for the growth of modern Western civilization.

In the last episode, I did my best to argue that this idea is completely ridiculous.

Islam 100%

made it to Europe, especially in Spain, Italy, and the Balkans.

The Byzantines certainly did not perceive themselves as protecting the cultures north and west of them.

After all, some of those cultures were pagan or simply the wrong kind of Christian from a medieval Roman perspective.

Older generations of historians really liked phrases like, the tide of Islam broke on the walls of Constantinople.

That's only true if you ignore a lot of other history.

We ended off the last episode tracing the rise of the early caliphates that emerged from the Arab Peninsula in the mid-600s AD.

We looked at the traditional understanding of how the advent of Islam in the 610s eventually led to the unification of the Arabian Peninsula under the successors of the Prophet Muhammad, commonly called the Rashidun Caliphate.

I did my best to balance this traditional narrative by pointing to scholarly debates about just how united and even how Islamic this early caliphate actually was.

Still, there's no denying that by the 630s, Arab armies had emerged from their traditional territory and started scoring remarkable victories over their former superpower neighbors.

Those neighbors were the Sasanid Persian Empire and the Roman Empire.

As we saw, in the 630s both of those empires were exhausted after a solid two decades of war.

The Persians and the Romans had been embroiled in a bloody and expensive conflict that completely destabilized both societies.

The Romans ultimately emerged victorious from the war, but only after the Persians had managed to occupy most of the eastern provinces and sacked a number of the most important cities.

When the armies from Arabia arrived, neither the Romans nor the Persians were in a good position to offer an effective resistance.

In 636, the armies of the Caliphate scored a decisive victory at the Battle of Yarmouk, destroying a Roman army that was not easily replaced.

This paved the way for the conquest of the Roman provinces of Syria, Palestine, and Egypt.

But the huge success of the Rashidun Caliphate masked some deep divisions in the Islamic community.

This eventually led to the first Fitna, or Islamic civil war, between the Sunni and the Shia factions of the religion.

The victor in this conflict was the powerful governor of Syria, Muawiyah, who emerged as the chief leader of the Sunni Muslims.

Muawiyah's victory led to the foundation of a new ruling dynasty known as the Umayyad Caliphate and the movement of the capital from Arabia to Muawiyah's power base in Damascus, Syria.

Yet another historical example of how normal it is for a capital to be moved.

When we left off, Muawiyah was ruling over one of the world's largest empires, which stretched from Iran all the way to Egypt.

The Persian Empire had been reduced to little more than a rump state clinging to the shores of the Caspian Sea.

The Romans were just barely maintaining their grip on Anatolia and the territories around the Aegean Sea.

On top of that, the Roman Empire had just been rocked by the assassination of the Emperor, Constans II.

This was part of an attempted coup that was ultimately foiled and led to the ascension of Constan's teenage son, Constantine IV.

Constantinople, the rich capital of the Roman Empire, looked vulnerable, and capturing it would come with enormous prestige.

It seemed like Muawia had the city in his sights.

But this is where our sources get kind of funky.

Everything seems to be leading towards a grand showdown at Constantinople.

And that is exactly what some of our sources say happened.

But not all of them.

So what is going on here?

Well, in our quest to answer that question today, I'm going to need to talk about the geography of the Eastern Roman Empire.

Now, if you're not familiar with the geography in that part of the world, which is more or less the boundaries of modern Turkey, then please consult the maps that I'm going to have up at ourfakehistory.com.

Just go to the episode page for this episode and you will see a number of helpful maps.

For this story to make sense, you're going to need to understand the geography of Constantinople, the Sea of Marmara, the Black Sea, and Anatolia in general.

So as you're listening to this episode, if you find yourself completely disoriented, please consult the maps.

Geography-heavy episodes always run the risk of becoming totally impenetrable to people who don't already have a good sense of what the map looks like.

So, I'm going to keep that in mind and try and keep things as clear as I possibly can.

So, let's head back to the 670s.

First, we need to explore where the story of the first siege comes from.

What allegedly took place?

And why do some think that that story is completely fake?

A phantom siege conjured from a series of misunderstandings, exaggerations, and attempts to synthesize other sources.

Let's get into it.

One of the things that helped the Roman Empire survive in the East, long after the Western territories had been peeled off by other powers, was their navy in the Mediterranean.

Building, maintaining, and operating a navy is a famously hard thing to do.

If your society can keep a fleet at sea, that speaks volumes about its organizational complexity and institutional knowledge.

Shipbuilding is an exacting science that requires a high level of learning.

Marshalling the materials needed for a fleet of warships, even seventh century warships, is a serious undertaking that requires the direction of hundreds of people.

Not to mention the sailing itself, which requires crews of people who have learned a highly specialized set of skills.

It would take centuries before the groups that supplanted the Romans in Western Europe were able to support navies that could seriously challenge the Eastern Romans.

This fact is yet another reason why the Arab conquests of the 600s were so remarkable.

The Arabs themselves, especially those descended from desert nomadic groups, did not have much of a maritime tradition to speak of.

Now, of course, there are exceptions to this.

Coastal people everywhere have always had some form of boat building tradition, and there is a long history of maritime trade along the coasts of the Arabian Peninsula, along with maritime contact with Africa and India.

But in general, the people of Arabia were not known as seafarers.

That was until Muawiyah changed all that.

There's an easy counterfactual where the Arabs of the 7th century could appear like the Huns.

A confederation of tribal groups are brought together by a charismatic leader who keeps everyone loyal by generously rewarding his followers with loot pillaged from a series of conquests.

Those conquests then need to keep going so that the loot keeps flowing.

But that is not at all how the Muslims of the 7th century operated.

One of the reasons the caliphates were so successful was their ability to absorb and put to use the existing infrastructure of the places they conquered, not to mention the talents of the conquered people.

For instance, in the former Roman provinces, the Rashidun and then the Umayyad Caliphates kept many of the formerly Roman tax collectors in their jobs.

Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel, the caliphates simply commandeered the existing civil infrastructure.

If you were just a regular Joe living in Egypt in the 640s after the Arab conquest, the same person who collected your taxes for the Caesars in Constantinople was likely the same guy who was now collecting taxes for the caliph.

This consistency helped the new caliphate thrive.

Muawiyah took the same approach to building a navy.

In his conquered territories, there were shipyards, naval architects, and people whose families had been staffing Roman navies for centuries.

Many of these people were Greek, Syrian, and Egyptian Christians.

Muawiyah had no problem putting these people to work for his regime.

This meant that by the 650s, the Caliphate were able to build a navy that could seriously challenge the Romans.

One of Muawiyah's notable victories before the Civil War was the so-called Battle of the Masts in or around 655.

At that naval clash off the coast of Anatolia, the Arab Navy scored a decisive victory over the Romans.

Again, this is something that makes the Caliphate unique in this period.

It was not out of the question for the Romans to lose a land battle against a rising power that suddenly erupted over their borders.

But it was a rare thing for one of those powers to then beat the Romans at sea.

So, this is just another reason to reject the old stereotype that the armies of Islam were little more than marauding zealots whose lucky historical circumstances and wild fanaticism powered an otherwise unexplainable rise.

If nothing else, the existence of Muawiyah's navy should demonstrate just how sophisticated these early caliphates truly were.

After the Battle of the Masts and Muawiyah's victory in the Civil War, the new caliph started building fleets on a truly epic scale.

This is what made the siege of Constantinople an option to begin with.

The city could not be taken unless those besieging it could impose a successful naval blockade.

If the city could be resupplied by sea, then the defenders could simply wait out any besieging army behind the impressive Theodosian walls.

After the murder of the Emperor Constans II in 668, the time seemed right for Muawia to move on Anatolia and then Constantinople.

The death of the Emperor had been part of an elaborate plan that would have ultimately put a disgruntled Roman general, Saborius, on the throne.

Some sources even suggest that Saborius had been promised support from the Caliph himself.

Muawiyah potentially hoped this rebellious general could become his puppet in Constantinople.

While that's a reasonable assumption, thanks to our patchy sources, the truth of that is not entirely clear.

Either way, the whole thing was kiboshed when the rebellious general fell off his horse and died before he could be properly crowned.

Imagine that.

You go to all the trouble to assassinate an emperor and then the guy guy that you're going to put on the throne just falls off his horse and dies.

The untimely death of General Saborius is the main reason why this coup failed, and the forces loyal to Constans and his son Constantine IV were able to win the day.

Byzantine era historians would point to this pathetic turn of events for Saborius as proof that God would punish anyone who rebelled against a lawfully installed Roman emperor.

However, before Saborius died in 668, Muawiyah dispatched an army to support this attempted coup.

After the death of the general, this army stayed in Anatolia and tested Roman defenses.

This army was eventually reinforced by a second force led by Muawiyah's son, the heir to the caliphate, Yazid.

This force managed to push all the way to the town of Chalcedon.

Now, this was significant because you could see Constantinople from Chalcedon.

This town sat on the southern Asian side of the Bosphorus Strait.

Old Chalcedon is actually now part of the Greater Istanbul area.

So this army was right on the doorstep of the capital.

Some Arabic sources even claim that Yazid and his army attacked Constantinople at this time.

But this is not corroborated by any of the Greek language sources.

It's likely that the capture of Chalcedon, a suburb of the capital, was upgraded to an all-out attack on Constantinople by the Arabic historians looking to fluff the resume of Yazid, a man who would eventually become the caliph in Damascus.

Nevertheless, this incursion deep into Anatolia was significant.

After sacking Chalcedon, the army then pulled back to the interior of Anatolia, where they captured the Roman fortress town of Amorium.

There they made camp for the winter.

Now this was another important first, as a Muslim army had never managed to garrison themselves themselves so deep in Anatolia before that point.

But this was short-lived.

Part of the reason why Yazid's army had been so successful was that the new Roman Emperor, Constantine IV, was not yet in the capital.

He was making his way back to Constantinople from Sicily, where the Emperor Constans had been killed.

When Constantine IV finally returned and fully got his hands on the reins of power, he struck back against Yazid's army.

The emperor sent his army to Amorium in a rare winter attack.

Apparently, the Romans were aided by huge piles of winter snow, which allowed them to easily climb up and over the walls of the fort.

The attack was a success, and Yazid and his army were pushed out of Roman territory.

For the Romans, this seemed like an auspicious victory for their newly installed Emperor Constantine.

But for the Caliphate, this was just a temporary setback.

The next year, the Caliphate would return, except this time the attack would be led by Muawiyah's navy.

Now, our old buddy, 18th century Uber historian Edward Gibbon, author of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, who has little love for any of the Eastern Roman Emperors of this period, blames this continued aggression on what he believes was the weakness of Constantine IV.

Here's what Gibbon has to say, and you should note that he calls the Eastern Roman Greeks in this passage, as was the convention at the time.

Quote,

The Greeks had little to hope, nor had their enemies any reason of fear, from the courage and vigilance of the reigning emperor, who disgraced the name of Constantine and imitated only the inglorious years of his grandfather Heraclius.

Gibbon's assessment of Constantine IV once again goes back to that negative meta-narrative about the Byzantines.

Now, this stands in marked contrast to other assessments of Constantine IV, which like to paint him as a savior figure.

Even the fairly sober Encyclopædia Britannica credits Constantine IV with withstanding, quote, a four-year Arab siege of Constantinople, greatly enhancing Byzantine prestige and indeed marking a turning point in European history, end quote.

This is what I was talking about when I was describing these two meta-narratives grinding against each other in the sources.

Depending on who you you ask, Constantine IV was a spoiled, ineffectual coward or a talented, hard-nosed leader who saved the empire and enhanced Byzantine prestige.

But it's worth pointing out that in that one line from the Encyclopædia Britannica, there are a number of potentially massive historical errors.

While the supposed four-year siege is commonly dated from 674 to 678,

that is not at all clear from our primary sources.

As for being a turning point in world history, well, we'll see about that.

You see,

this is the point in the story, my friends, where all our sources get squirrely.

Just as all the pieces fall into place for a showdown, everything gets very fuzzy.

For centuries, Western historians of this period relied heavily on two Eastern Roman chroniclers who wrote in Greek.

These are Theophanes the Confessor and Nicephorus of Constantinople.

These writers were both churchmen.

Theophanes was a monk and Nicephorus served as the city's patriarch.

But, importantly, both men were writing about these events a solid century after the fact.

This meant that they were working from other earlier historical accounts that they were trying to synthesize.

Many of those earlier sources have since been lost.

The account of Theophanes the Confessor has traditionally been the main source cited by historians for information on this alleged first siege.

But as many scholars have pointed out, Theophanes' version of events is confused, vague, and riddled with internal contradictions and logical inconsistencies.

It's also incredibly short.

I was actually a little shocked when I finally read it for myself.

When translated from the original Greek, the entries in Theophani's chronicle that describes this siege consists of eight English sentences.

That's it.

This is one of the main reasons to suspect that something is fishy about all of this.

This potentially world-changing event is glossed over in less than a page.

So, what does our main source tell us about this?

Well, Theophanes writes that in 671, quote, the fleet of God's enemies, that's what he calls the Muslims, by the way, came to anchor in the region of Thrace.

Every day there was a military engagement from morning into the evening.

⁇ End quote.

So in 671, Muawiyah sends an armada to Constantinople.

Theophanes suggests earlier in his account that this consisted of three combined Arab fleets.

According to Theophanes, these fleets met virtually no resistance as they sailed from Syria, north around Anatolia, and through the narrow channel of the Hellespont that connects the Sea of Marmara to the Aegean Sea.

This apparently easy passage into the Sea of Marmara clearly annoyed our buddy Edward Gibbon, who centuries later, citing Theophanes, wrote,

Without delay or opposition, the naval forces of the Saracens, that's what he calls the Muslims, passed through the unguarded channel of the Hellespont, which even now, under the feeble and disorderly government of the Turks, is maintained as the natural bulwark of the capital.

End quote.

Yeah, you heard that right.

The Ottoman Turks of Gibbon's era managed to catch some strays in that passage.

This unfavorable comparison to the 18th century Ottomans was just another chance for Gibbon to hammer home how pathetic the late Romans truly were.

Anyway, back to Theophanes.

He tells us that this Muslim armada brought with it a large land army that were dropped off in Thrace, that is, the European side of the Bosphorus Strait near Constantinople.

Now, Theophanes is blurry on this, but Arabic tradition has it that this army was once again led by Yazid, the son of the Caliph.

This army then attacked the Theodosian walls from April to September of that year.

All Theophanes tells us about those attacks is that they happened with, quote, thrust and counter-thrust, end quote.

Yes, you heard that right.

This battle, which some think was one of the most important battles in history, is described simply as a thrust and a counter-thrust.

That Theophanes really knows how to paint a picture.

Anyway, after making no headway, the Arab fleet captured a town on the strategic peninsula of Kisikus on the southern shore of the Sea of Marmora.

There the army wintered.

Now, if you don't have your map handy, all you need to understand is that Kisikus is on the southern Asian shore of the Sea of Marmora, about a half day's sail from Constantinople.

So, striking distance.

According to Theophanes, Kisikus essentially became the headquarters of the siege.

In the spring, the army was once again taken over to the north shore, where they attacked the walls until the fall, when they would once again return to Kisikus.

According to Theophanes, quote, after doing the same for seven years and and being put to shame by God and his mother, having furthermore lost a multitude of warriors and had a great many wounded, they turned back with much sorrow, end quote.

Yes, this apparently epochal struggle is summed up just that simply.

And by the way, I love the medieval Christian trope of throwing in that God's mother also got in there to help the Byzantines win, just like picturing the Virgin Mary right in the mix in this battle.

Now, you might have noticed that Theophanes tells us that this event lasted for seven years, from 671 to 678.

The idea of a seven-year siege was taken as the truth, right up to the time of Gibbon, who repeats that fact in his famous history.

Now, this dating was eventually rejected by experts in favor of a four-year siege.

But now, even that understanding has been challenged.

A little more on that later.

First, let's wrap up the tale as told by Theophanes.

Now, interestingly, he gives us two different endings to this siege.

One that is fairly pedestrian, and another that is very dramatic.

After telling us that the Arab fleet, quote, turned back with much sorrow, end quote, he continues, quote, and as this fleet, which was to be sunk by God, put out to sea, it was overtaken by a wintry storm and the squalls of a hurricane.

It was dashed to pieces and perished entirely, end quote.

So, in this version of things, like many storied naval forces, Muawiyah's armada was ultimately undone by some nasty weather.

Or was it?

Because

just two paragraphs later, in a sort of postscript to this entry, Theophanes tells us something remarkable.

He very nonchalantly tags on a story about one of the most discussed super weapons of the medieval era.

I am talking about the unquenchable burning liquid later generations would call Greek fire.

Here's what Theophanes writes, referring to this new weapon as naval fire.

Quote, at the time, Callinicus, an architect from Heliopolis in Syria, took refuge with the Romans and manufactured a naval fire, with which he kindled the ships of the Arabs and burnt them and their crews.

In this way, the Romans came back to victory and acquired the naval fire.

End quote.

Um, what was that, Theophanes?

As you're going out the door, you're gonna slip in the little detail that a miraculous fire weapon was the real reason that the Romans broke the siege?

Dude, way to bury the lead.

You had the origin story of Greek fire up your sleeve this whole time, and you added in as an afterthought?

What's going on here?

The odd tagged-on nature of the Greek fire story isn't the only thing that's suspicious about this entry.

The brevity and lack of detail in Theophani's account raises a number of questions about exactly what went on in the 670s around Constantinople.

Did the siege last for seven years or was it four years?

Did the fleet even manage to properly blockade the city?

Theophanes doesn't mention if the Arabs managed to cut off the traffic from the Black Sea.

What was going on inside Constantinople during all of this?

Where was the Roman army?

And for that matter, where was the Roman navy?

Did they just let the Arab fleet sail around the Sea of Marmora Marmora uncontested for seven years before making one devastating war-winning attack using Greek fire?

I mean, I suppose that's possible, but it seems a little unlikely.

It's especially suspect because Theophanes himself gives us two different stories about the fate of the Arab fleet.

First, he tells us that it was sunk in a winter storm during the retreat back to Syria.

But then he mentions that actually the fleet was burnt by Greek fire.

Later historians, trying to make sense of this story, have assumed that the Arab fleet was burnt with this amazing fire weapon, which forced them to retreat, at which point they were hit by the storm.

That certainly would make more sense, but it's telling that that is not what is explicitly stated by Theophanes.

All of these unanswered questions raised by Theophanes the Confessor have led some experts to consider the whopper of all questions.

Did the siege of the six seventies

happen at all?

Well, let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll get into the debate.

In 1969, the venerable historian of the Byzantine Empire, Georgis Ostrogorsky, wrote this in the fourth edition of his History of the Byzantine State.

Quote,

The significance of the Byzantine victory of 678 cannot be overstated.

For the first time, the Arab advance was really checked, and the invasion, which had swept forward as irresistibly as an avalanche, was now halted.

In the defense of Europe against the Arab onslaught, this triumph of Constantine IV was a turning point of world historical importance.

The fact that Constantinople held saved not only the Byzantine Empire, but the whole of European civilization.

⁇

Now that was quite a declaration, especially coming from a historian like Ostrogorsky, who during his career was regarded as one of the foremost experts in late Roman society.

But the confidence with which Ostrogorsky asserted that the first Arab siege of Constantinople was, quote, a turning point of worldwide historical importance, is remarkable knowing what we know now.

It's a great demonstration of just how prevalent the Byzantium saved Western civilization meta-narrative truly was.

Even the most serious scholars of the medieval Romans were caught up in it.

Ostrogorsky's declaration of the event's importance also seems a touch hubristic given how little is actually known about the event.

Now, he was a man who most certainly had read his Theophanes the Confessor, likely in the original Greek.

And still, he looked at those eight vague sentences and went, yep, most important event of the century.

Hell, maybe even one of the most important events in all of world history.

Now, I don't mean to diminish the work of Ostrogorsky here, because you should know that he was a celebrated expert and a bit of a trailblazer in the field of Byzantine studies.

But I think it shows you just how much the discipline of history has evolved since his time.

For quite a long time, Theophanes' description of the siege of Byzantium was, more or less, taken at face value.

Now, this is despite the fact that it doesn't fully align with the other Greek language source we have for this event, which comes from the patriarch Nicephorus.

As I mentioned earlier, Nicephorus was a 9th century bishop and historian who served as the patriarch of Constantinople in the early 800s.

Nicephorus says even less than Theophanes about this alleged siege.

He tells us that a grand fleet sailed into the Sea of Marmora, bringing with it a large army, who made some attempts to take the city.

Nicephorus writes, and by the way, he also uses the term Saracens for Muslims in this passage: quote,

so the war lasted seven years, and finally the Saracen fleet met with no success.

On the contrary, they lost many fighting men.

Badly injured and grievously defeated, they set out on their homeward journey, and when they came to the region of Silion, they were overtaken by violent winds and a tempest at sea, which destroyed their entire armament.

⁇

So he describes a partial siege and a seven-year campaign, but notably he does not mention the fleet being burned by Greek fire.

His account ends much like that of Theophanes, with the fleet being wrecked in a storm.

That is until Theophanes adds, ONPS, the Romans had this super cool fire weapon.

Oh, anyway, gotta go.

But given that Nicephorus was writing many decades later than Theophanes, his account has generally not been given the same weight by experts.

Also, that story about Greek fire, however vague, was zeroed in on by many later historians who wanted to pinpoint the origin of this marvelous and mysterious ancient napalm.

But in recent years, experts have completely reassessed these two traditional accounts of the siege.

In 2010, the Oxford scholar James Howard Johnston published his Tour de Force look at the Middle East in the 7th century called Witnesses to a World Crisis.

In that book, he looked beyond the traditional Greek sources and incorporated Syriac, Arabic, Arabic, and sources from other regional languages relevant to the period.

By bringing in these other sources, he was able to construct a much clearer picture of what probably took place.

Howard Johnston also explains exactly why Theophanes' account was so muddled.

You see, Theophanes was doing the best with what he had.

He was trying to write a nice, clear chronicle that had an entry for every year that could be easily referenced.

To do this, he was cobbling together a number of different sources that used different dating systems, or sometimes no dating system at all.

In his attempt to reconstruct the 670s, Theophanes likely had two sources that he was working from.

One was an older Roman source that's now lost, credited to a guy named Trajan the Patrician.

Most scholars, Howard Johnston included, think that the parts of the story that appear in both Nicephorus and Theophanes come directly from Trajan the Patrician.

Howard Johnston argues that Theophanes was also working from another source that told a very different story, that he then did his best to reconcile with Trajan, even if that created a weird and logically flawed narrative.

It's been guessed that this second source was from the Syrian historian called Theophilus of Edessa.

Theophilus was a Christian who found work in the caliphate as an astrologer and chronicler.

Now, Theophilus' work has only survived in fragments, and for generations it was either inaccessible to or ignored by Western scholars.

Howard Johnston has shown that the surviving bits of Theophilus of Edessa give us a much more coherent and far more likely version of the events in the 670s.

Now,

I know this can get confusing for those of you that are new to this stuff.

We now have a Theophanes and a Theophilus in the mix here.

So, just just remember, Theophanes the Confessor is our flawed Roman source, and Theophilus of Edessa is our more detailed Syrian source.

I'll do my best to keep this on the rails, but hopefully, you're with me.

So, according to Theophilus of Edessa, Muawia did indeed make a number of daring naval strikes against the Romans in the year 670.

First, he attacked Roman holdings in Africa.

And yes, at this point the Romans still had an African province.

This attack lured the bulk of the Roman navy away from the capital and towards the north coast of Africa.

With the Roman navy distracted, Muawia then sent another large fleet to the Sea of Marmara.

Now, remember how Edward Gibbon was so disgusted by the fact that the Hellespont was totally undefended?

In his mind, the channel that takes you from the Aegean Sea to the Sea of Marmara should always be locked down.

Gibbon just assumed that this was an example of Byzantine incompetence.

Theophilus gives us a good explanation for why this happened.

The Romans weren't just sleeping at the switch.

They were legitimately outmaneuvered.

They had been lured to where they thought the action was.

But this meant that the Arab fleet only had so much time to operate unopposed in the sea near Constantinople.

Eventually, the Roman fleet would make its way home.

So, Theophilus tells us that the Arab fleet stayed in the Sea of Marmora, threatening the capital for about a year.

He agrees with Theophanes that the fleet did indeed capture the strategic base of Kisikus on the peninsula on the southern shore.

But they stayed only one winter and then they left.

From there the Arab fleet headed back down the Anatolian coast, raiding as they went.

According to Theophilus, this fleet was especially destructive in a region called Lycia.

That's the southern coast of Anatolia.

So picture the underbelly of modern Turkey.

The fleet was so successful that the Caliphate temporarily occupied a good chunk of southern Anatolia.

That was until 674.

and what James Howard Johnston calls one of the most decisive battles of the 7th century.

Now, I'm sure you're wondering, did this decisive battle happen under the shadow of Constantinople's Theodosian walls?

Is this the real siege of Constantinople?

Well,

the answer is no.

The battle, we are told, was fought in Lycia, that region along the southern coast of Anatolia.

In that year, the Roman military made a decisive counter-strike against Malawia's occupying force.

Theophilus tells us that an army commanded by three Roman generals scored a huge victory over the Arab expeditionary force.

Notably, the Roman navy was able to wreak havoc on the Arab fleet off the south coast by using fire ships.

Now, I should be very clear about this.

These ships were described as fire ships, not as ships equipped with the unquenchable flammable liquid known as Greek fire.

Theophilus' account suggests that they were traditional fire ships, that is, ships loaded with straw and other flammable materials set on fire and then sailed into the body of a fleet.

Fans of the podcast might remember that the English famously used fire ships like these against the Spanish Armada around 900 years later.

The success of the Roman fire ships, paired with the decisive victory of the ground army, led to a full retreat of Muawiyah's forces out of Roman territory.

This was the turning of the tide.

Howard Johnston explains that Theophilus's fairly clear account didn't really mesh with Trajan the Patrician's account of the siege of Constantinople.

So, our Roman, Theophanes the Confessor, did his best to mash them together.

Interestingly, Theophanes' account includes a description of a decisive battle where three Roman generals overcame an Arab force.

He even claims that, quote, 30,000 Arabs were killed, end quote.

But he fails to mention mention that this battle likely happened quite far away from the capital in southern Anatolia or Lycia.

His account doesn't really specify where this battle took place, but given that the rest of the entry is about the siege of Constantinople, the reader is led to believe that this showdown happened just outside of Constantinople.

It's also quite possible that Theophanes read the detail about the fire ships and assumed that it meant that the Romans had used Greek fire.

This would not have been an unreasonable assumption because by the time Theophanes was writing, Greek fire was a well-known part of the Roman arsenal.

And significantly, the terrible substance had played a major part in the breaking of a later siege, the siege of 717,

which happened to be much closer to Theophanes' own time.

It's quite possible that Theophanes the Confessor placed the origin of Greek fire a few decades too early in his chronicle.

The memory of the siege of 717, traditionally called the Second Siege of Constantinople, likely colored his interpretation of the events of the early 670s.

James Howard Johnston is convinced that the attack on Constantinople in 670, 671 should not be considered a proper siege or a blockade.

While the sources all seem to agree that this fleet captured Kizikus, It's unclear just how seriously the Arabs attacked Constantinople.

Howard Johnston has argued that this so-called siege was more like a naval raid and a test of Roman defenses.

It certainly did not go on for seven years or even four years.

He sums up by writing, quote, the blockade of Constantinople in the 670s is a myth, which has been allowed to mask the very real success achieved by the Byzantines in the last decade of Muawiyah's caliphate, end

So, according to one of our best experts, that first siege is a myth.

Now, since 2010, other experts have weighed in on Howard Johnston's research and have added to it and brought even more nuance to the historical picture.

In 2013, the historian Merik Jankoviak demonstrated that an obscure church source from 681 makes reference to a long-lasting incursion by Arabs near Constantinople from 667 to 669.

According to that source, this incursion made it impossible for the bishops in Constantinople to send letters to Rome.

So, while Jankoviak mostly agrees with Howard Johnston, he has argued that the traditional dating of the Arab naval attack is off by a few years.

He also argues that whatever happened with the Arab fleet that threatened the capital, it made enough of an impact on the people of the city that in 681, more than 10 years after the fact, a council of churchmen were still talking about it.

With that in mind, Jankoviak has pushed back on labeling the siege a total myth, as there's good evidence that the Arab fleet managed to legitimately scare the people of Constantinople and disrupted their lives.

But there's still no doubt that Theophani's account is a garbled mess that hugely exaggerates the event and conflates it with another battle that happened in a different part of the empire.

So

Did the siege of Constantinople happen?

Well, if you're talking about the first Arab siege of Constantinople, the answer is not really.

Calling what happened a siege would be a massive upgrade.

It was not a seven-year operation that saw annual campaigning against the Theodosian walls.

At most, the Arab fleet remained in the Sea of Marmora for one year.

And perhaps most significantly, that fleet was not dispersed using Greek fire.

With all that in mind, the hyperbolic claim that, quote, the fact that Constantinople held saved not only the Byzantine Empire, but the whole of European civilization,

I mean, that's kind of absurd.

So if the first Arab siege of Constantinople was a bit of a non-event, then what about the second Siege?

Well,

that, my friends, is a very different kettle of fish.

While the first siege seems to have been hugely exaggerated, the events of the 670s ultimately demonstrated that the Roman Empire still had some fight left in it.

Muawiyah's retreat from Anatolia and a surging rebellion in Syria meant that by the end of the decade the two empires managed to sign the first peace treaty since the emergence of the Umayyad Caliphate.

This pause in hostilities would not last long, and soon the Umayyads would be pushing into Roman Africa and beyond.

By the early 700s, Constantinople was once again in the crosshairs of the Caliphate.

And this time, the Arabs would come in force.

This siege would end up being so significant that it convinced later writers that whatever happened in the 670s clearly had been a bigger deal than it actually was.

The second siege would invent

the first siege.

Okay,

that's all for this week.

Join us again in two weeks' time when we will wrap up our look at the early Arab sieges of Constantinople.

Before we go this week, as always, I need to give some very special shout outs to the following people.

Big ups to Brittany Brinton, to Dan W.

to

Rosemary Braithwaite, to

Jason Sams, to Noah Fry,

to Jatorius, to Thomas Glass,

to Jefferson T,

to Steve, to Chase Baker, to Dan,

to tortured Broke Girl Department,

to Jules Everson, to Shimon Bollinger, to Joe Norris, and a very special shout out to Kellen Lynch.

Kellen, I'm glad you're listening to the show, dude.

I hope you enjoy your Christmas present.

You're the best.

Your whole family seems super cool.

Thank you to everyone who supports this show at all levels.

Your support means absolutely everything to me.

You are the people that keep this show going.

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Take care of each other out there.

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Check out more from Dirty Church at dirtychurch.bandcamp.com.

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My name is Sebastian Major.

And remember, just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't real.

One, two, three, four,

there's nothing better than a one-play side.