Episode #216 - Did the Siege of Constantinople Even Happen? (Part I)

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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.

Okay, everyone, it's time to talk about the end of the world.

The end times, the great tribulation, the final coming apart of existence, the ultimate fate of humanity.

The end of the world has been a human concern for,

well, really since the beginning.

The idea that this existence, this version of the human experience is bound to end appears in countless traditions found all over the world.

Now, of course, there are many cultures that don't go in for the idea of an inevitable destruction of the universe, but we're not interested in them today.

Today, we're talking apocalypse, the great unveiling.

Over the course of history and across cultures, there have been many ways that the end of the world has been imagined.

The pagan Norse had the concept of Ragnarok, a cataclysm brought on by the Gotter Damarong, a final destructive battle between the gods.

The prelude to this final catastrophe is an age of violence and discord on earth.

In the poetic Edda tradition, here translated by the scholar Ursula Dronke, the dark time is described like this, quote, brothers will fight and kill each other.

Sisters' children will defile kinship.

It is harsh in the world.

Whoredom rife.

An axe age, a sword age.

Shields are riven.

A wind age, a wolf age.

Before the world goes headlong, no man will have mercy on another.

Whoa.

For all of you aspiring black metal bands out there, if the name a wind age, a wolf age is not taken, then you may want to make a mental note of that one.

Ragnarok comes to a climax when the chief god Odin is killed fighting against the monstrous world-consuming wolf known as Fenrir.

The wolf is then slain in turn by one of Odin's avenging sons.

The mighty Thor does battle with a horrible serpent, and although he ultimately kills the beast, he is fatally poisoned by its venom.

The earth then sinks sinks into the sea, the stars vanish from the sky, and everything else is consumed by flame.

But then, in the aftermath, the earth reappears from the water, the surviving gods reconvene, and life once again returns to the known world.

The death and rebirth of the cosmos described in the Ragnarok story has a parallel in many Eastern traditions.

In Hinduism and other religions influenced by the ancient Vedic texts, there's a belief that cosmic time is cyclical.

The universe is created, and humanity then passes through four great ages, known as the Yugas.

Each of these ages gets progressively shorter and worse, with human beings becoming progressively less virtuous along the way.

The final and worst yuga, known as the Kali Yuga, is the one in which we all now live.

The Hindu holy text known as the Vishnu Purana describes the Kali Yuga like this, quote,

Social status depends not upon your accomplishments, but on the ownership of property.

Wealth is now the source of virtue.

Passion and luxury are the sole bonds between spouses.

Falsity and lying are the conditions of success in life.

Sexuality is the sole source of human enjoyment.

Religion, a superficial and empty ritual, is confused with spirituality.

While not quite as violent as the Norse wolf age, the Kali Yuga is a superficial, shallow, and greedy era that is bound for collapse.

In the final days, Kalki, the tenth incarnation of the god Vishnu, will appear on earth.

Kalki is described as a virtuous warrior who will build an army made up of the last uncorrupted people on the planet.

This army of righteousness will then eventually face off against an army of sin and darkness.

Good will triumph over evil, and the dark age of the Kali Yuga will come to an end.

This final battle will restart the cycle of history.

We will begin again with the first, best, and most virtuous of the Yugas.

In the Abrahamic religions, that is, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the concept of time is a bit more linear.

And yet, it's striking how their end time stories share many elements with the Norse and Hindu traditions.

In Judaism, there are a number of different traditions concerning the end of days, although many include a belief in a horrific final battle, not all that dissimilar to Ragnarok or the final days of the Kali Yuga.

The prophetic text of Ezekiel speaks of the war of Gog and Magog, sometimes translated as Gog from Magog.

In either case, the army of Gog is a monstrous evil force that will bear down on the armies of the righteous, which, in a Jewish context, are those aligned with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

In the end, good triumphs.

Other Jewish texts speak of a Messianic age where God's chosen Messiah will finally rule in Jerusalem, ushering in an era of peace.

This presages the last judgment, when God Himself will raise the dead and make a final assessment of who had lived a righteous life.

Many of those elements became an essential part of the Christian end times tradition.

But what I want to zero in on is the idea that one city is going to be essential to the end of the world.

For both Jews and Christians, this essential city was Jerusalem.

Medieval rabbis identified Jerusalem as the site of the final battle of Gog and Magog.

The ultimate reclamation of Jerusalem and the building of a third temple became, for some Jewish groups, an important indicator that the Messianic age was upon them.

The centrality of Jerusalem to the end of the world was taken up by Christians.

In the Gospel of Luke, Jesus describes the end of days like this, quote, Nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom.

There will be great earthquakes and in various places famines and pestilence.

And there will be terrors and great signs from heaven.

End quote.

Whew.

Sounds like a wind age, a wolf age.

But he then continues, quote, But when you see Jerusalem surrounded by armies, then know that its desolation has come near.

They will fall by the edge of the sword and be led captive among all nations, and Jerusalem will be trampled underfoot.

End quote.

I'm fascinated by the idea that the conquest of a real geographic location will be a sign of the end times.

This idea is picked up in the book of Revelation.

In that famous apocalyptic text, after the last battle between the angels of God and the demonic beast, earth and heaven are created anew, along with a new Jerusalem.

The new Jerusalem will be the home of all those judged worthy after the last judgment, where they will live alongside the holy presence of God Himself.

Now, of course, there's no shortage of discussion around how literally even faithful Christians should take passages such as these.

Was Jesus speaking of the conquest of the literal city of Jerusalem, or was he speaking of a metaphorical Jerusalem?

I leave that question to the theologians in the crowd.

But in either case, there's no denying that that city, whether real or figurative, holds an enormous significance in the end times beliefs of more than one major faith.

The idea that the conquest, rebuilding, or spiritual rejuvenation of a specific place, a real place on a map that you can visit, could trigger the ultimate wrapping up of the human experience, it's kind of amazing to me.

It takes something that is deeply mystical and cosmic in nature and grounds it in the real world, in a real place.

This got me thinking if there was anywhere else in the world that has this kind of significance.

Is Jerusalem one of one in this regard?

Or are there any other apocalypses?

And I don't just mean holy cities.

The world is full of holy places.

I'm talking about the kind of holy city that, if captured, would trigger the end times.

It's certainly a short list of places, but after Jerusalem, the next city I would cite as having the same kind of apocalyptic significance is Constantinople, or today's Istanbul.

The strategic port city of Byzantium was redubbed New Rome in 330 AD by the Emperor Constantine the Great, and thereafter became the political, spiritual, and economic heart of the Roman Empire.

For the next millennium, Constantinople, aka New Rome, came to represent the enduring legacy of the Roman Empire.

Even as the rest of Rome's once vast Mediterranean territories were slowly whittled away, Constantinople held out stubbornly as the final rump of an empire that traced its roots back to Romulus and Remus.

And as the centuries progressed, it was this very holding out that contributed to the city's legendary status.

As the de facto capital of Christendom and the home to one of the world's greatest cathedrals, the Hagia Sophia, Constantinople was revered as a holy city.

But its resilience in the face of repeated attacks transformed it into something even more.

Setting aside Byzantine civil wars, from the years 376 to 1203, the city was besieged an astounding 19 times, and every time the defenders saw saw off the threat.

A millennium's worth of successful defenses is the kind of thing that gives a place a special aura.

It could seem like the city was guarded by some kind of supernatural protection.

It should come as no surprise that some began to say that the fall of Constantinople would be a sign of the end times.

Interestingly, it was not just the Eastern Romans or even Christians who came to believe this.

The fall of Constantinople became a key part of Muslim end-time beliefs.

The Prophet Muhammad was said to have predicted the fall of the city.

One hadith, that is, one of the collected sayings of the Prophet, translates as, quote, Verily you shall conquer Constantinople.

What a wonderful leader will her leader be, and what a wonderful army will that army be, end quote.

This hadith has been interpreted by some Muslims to mean that the conquest of Constantinople was always part of the destiny of Islam.

Another tradition has it that the fall of Constantinople will be a key event in the final days when a figure known as the Mahdi will arise.

The Mahdi will be a leader of a righteous end times army, much like those other figures we've already discussed.

In the final days, the Mahdi will fight a battle against an army of darkness led by a false prophet.

According to one Islamic tradition, after securing this victory, the army of the Mahdi, quote, will conquer Constantinople and will acquire such spoils of war as have never been seen before.

End quote.

In other words, the conquest of Constantinople will be so significant that it will be the final historical event, the last one.

Now, of course, in the world of Islam, there have been many proposed interpretations of this.

Like Jerusalem in Jewish or Christian thought, many question if these traditions refer to the real Constantinople or a metaphorical Constantinople.

However, there's no doubt that for centuries, Constantinople was a prestigious but elusive prize of war for more than one Muslim empire.

It's been argued that the role of Constantinople in Islamic end-times traditions can be traced back to the late 7th and early 8th centuries.

Between the 1670s and the 710s, Constantinople was placed under siege twice by the Arab Empire known as the Umayyad Caliphate.

This Islamic Empire emerged after the astounding Arab-winning streak, which saw warriors from the Arab Peninsula absorb most of the former Persian Empire and many of the former Roman provinces.

However, in both 678 and then again in 717, this seemingly unstoppable empire was blocked at Constantinople.

In both cases, the sources tell us that the defense was aided by a terrifying Roman super weapon, an unquenchable burning liquid shot from the bows of Roman ships, later nicknamed Greek fire.

As you can imagine, these battles became things of legend for both the besiegers and the besieged.

However, the sources can often be contradictory, muddled, and downright confusing.

In recent years, the traditional understanding of these events has been re-evaluated, and some have been left wondering if these sieges even happened at all.

The early Arab sieges of Constantinople have been cited among the most consequential events in world history, the kind of events that could give a city an apocalyptic reputation.

But could it be possible that these sieges were, in fact, the most consequential events in fake history?

Let's find out today on our fake history.

Episode number 216.

Did the siege of Constantinople even happen?

Part 1.

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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Okay, this week we are embarking on a new series, likely a trilogy, that I'm calling Did the Siege of Constantinople Even Happen?

which is one of those titles I hope is charmingly enigmatic and not just annoyingly vague.

You see, the city of Constantinople, which today goes by the name Istanbul, is easily one of the most important cities in the history of the world.

And I know that sounds grandiose, but there are few places on earth that have been as significant for as long as Constantinople.

When the port city of Byzantium was redesigned as the new Rome in 330 AD by the Emperor Constantine the Great, it not only became the new political capital of the Roman Empire, it also became the heart of the Empire's religion and culture.

For a solid millennium, Constantinople remained the living embodiment of Roman civilization, even as the rest of the empire steadily broke away or was peeled off by the empire's many rivals.

But even after the city was captured by the Ottoman Turks in 1453, the city had a remarkable second act as the capital of the Ottomans' vast empire.

This ensured that Constantinople remained one of the most significant cities on the planet for another 500 years.

As such, Constantinople long held tremendous value as a prize of war.

Not only was the city wealthy for much of its existence, occupying it came with enormous prestige.

We've discussed before how the Roman Empire survived as an idea long after it stopped being a consequential world power.

Being able to lay claim to the title Emperor of Rome remained attractive even as the territory of the Roman Empire contracted around the capital city of Constantinople.

A conqueror who took the capital could claim that he was now the emperor and should be counted in a lineage that went back to Augustus.

Whether or not the rest of the world recognized this claim was another matter altogether.

At one point in its history, Constantinople had been an exceptionally wealthy place that held the promise of impressive treasure for a looting army.

But even after the city had been impoverished and the prospects of looting had been greatly diminished, conquering the city remained symbolically important.

The symbolism of the city became especially resonant with with the Islamic empires that dramatically emerged from the Arabian Peninsula in the mid-600s AD.

In a few short decades, the Arabs went from being a collection of mostly nomadic tribal groups living on the edge of the Persian and Roman empires to consuming and replacing those empires on the world stage.

By the 670s, the Arab Empire, now controlled by the Umayyad Caliphate, had expanded across the former Persian Empire in Iran and had fully incorporated many of the former eastern provinces.

This included the rich and highly urbanized territories of Syria and Egypt.

The logical next step in this series of conquests was to take the city of Constantinople itself.

Not only was the Roman capital strategically important, but the symbolic nature of a potential conquest was not lost on anyone.

In the 700s, conquering Rome still meant something.

Hell, in the 1400s, conquering Rome still meant something.

But as we shall see, the early attempts made by the Arab armies to take the city proved to be incredibly challenging.

As such, these sieges became a thing of legend for both the Romans and the Arabs, and then eventually other Muslim powers.

But the legendary status of these sieges played havoc with the historical record.

You see, traditionally it's been held that there were two different sieges of Constantinople in the late 7th and early 8th centuries.

The first Arab siege of Constantinople is typically dated as running from 674 to 678.

Then a second siege occurred 40 years later, running from 717 to 718.

But even those basic basic facts have been contested, especially when it comes to the first siege.

This is because our historical sources from this period are as patchy, inconsistent, and contradictory as they come.

Now, in the past on this podcast, I've challenged the idea of there being a Dark Age that followed the dissolution of the Western Roman Empire.

However, if you are going to make the case that the Dark Age was really a thing, the sorry state of history writing from this period could be presented as exhibit A.

Not only are our Roman sources scarce, but the ones that we do have usually come in the form of chronicles cobbled together from other now long lost sources.

Arabic sources from the period aren't much better.

Arabic history writing was just finding its feet at the time of the sieges and would only come into its own later in the 8th century.

Now, eventually, Arabic language history writing would become quite robust, especially as Baghdad became a world capital of learning and literacy.

But in the late 600s, that was still a few generations away.

It doesn't help that both sieges, be they real or imagined, have been heavily mythologized.

Later European historians would point to these sieges as the moment that, quote, saved the West and allowed for the development of what would become modern Western civilization.

On the other side of the coin, some of the later Muslim histories would claim that the Arab armies actually won strategic victories at these battles.

When it comes to historical events, you rarely get divergences in the sources that are that extreme.

On top of all of that, these sieges have been remembered as the coming out party for one of the most horrific weapons systems to emerge in late antiquity.

The terrible burning substance known as Greek fire.

This burning liquid, perfected by Roman chemists in the 7th century and deployed at sea by the Roman navy, has has become a thing of fascination in its own right.

To this day, no one is exactly sure what Greek fire actually was, although we do have a few good guesses.

As you can imagine, this dramatic and destructive naval weapon has been the source of much speculation ever since it was first deployed in the defense of Constantinople.

So, getting to the bottom of these sieges also means unpacking the secret of Greek fire.

Now, just to set expectations for the rest of part one here, this is going to be one for my context heads.

There's a lot of things I want to discuss that are related to this siege.

There's also a lot of historical groundwork that needs to be laid before we can get into the specifics.

So, buckle up.

This episode is going to be dealing with some big picture stuff that will hopefully help us understand the history, both real and fake, that we're going to be picking apart in the later episodes in this series.

Now, in the 10 years that I've been doing this show, I've started to see certain genres in the world of historical myth.

One of those genres is what I like to call the sloppy metanarrative myth.

Now, what is that?

Well, when historians talk about meta-narratives, they're referring to stories or ideas that are used to explain large swathes of history.

We've talked about a few of these before on the show.

You might remember the meta-narrative known as Whig history, which proposed that history was always progressing from darkness into light, from tyranny towards freedom, and so on.

In our last series on the gunpowder plot, we talked about English providentialist history, which argued that God had intervened on a number of key occasions to keep England Protestant.

These are just two examples of metanarratives.

There are many more.

Now, a sloppy metanarrative is one of those overarching structural ideas, except it doesn't really line up with the facts.

Or more often, it aligns nicely with some historical facts while ignoring other facts that completely undercut the metanarrative.

In the case of the Eastern Roman Empire and its confrontation with the Muslim caliphates, there are a few of these metanarratives that I believe need to be unpacked.

So before we start wading through the details of these sieges, I want to spend some time looking at how the history of the period has been shaped by metanarratives.

This is the big picture stuff that I really love.

So, hopefully, you're ready to come on this ride before we get into the nitty-gritty of the sieges.

We all on board?

Okay, let's get into it.

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There is a misleading historical narrative at the heart of this story that I think we should address.

This narrative has affected how the late history of the Roman Empire has been traditionally written about, and I would argue it continues to influence the popular understanding of the era that we're exploring in this series.

I have a bone to pick with the Byzantine Empire.

Here's what I mean.

The historical entity commonly called the Byzantine Empire might be one of the most misunderstood medieval cultures.

This is largely thanks to a few hundred years' worth of bad historical press.

Even the name Byzantine is itself an arbitrary label that was first applied to the late Roman Empire in the 1500s.

It was derived from the old Greek name for the city of Constantinople, Byzantium.

But this was notably not a name used by the the Romans themselves.

It was only in the late 18th century that the term Byzantine Empire became a popular shorthand among historians to demarcate the classical pagan Latin-speaking Roman culture with its capital in Rome from the medieval Christian Greek-speaking empire with its capital in Constantinople.

Now, there's no doubt that the medieval Roman Empire was geographically, culturally, militarily, and religiously quite different from the Roman Empire during the reign of, say, the five good emperors a few centuries earlier.

The choice of the Roman Emperor Constantine to move the capital of the empire from its traditional home in Rome to the more strategically important city of Constantinople was obviously a huge turning point in the history of the Romans.

But the use of the moniker Byzantine has a way of emphasizing the differences between these historical periods while diminishing the sense of continuity people living in the medieval empire felt with the Roman past.

Now, the fall of the Western Roman Empire has been dated variously by different historians.

Some have argued that the sack of Rome in 410 by the Visigoths was the true end of the Roman Empire in the West.

Many experts push the date to 476 AD, when the last Western Roman Emperor, Romulus Augustus, was finally deposed.

The fall of the Western Empire has been used as a historical line in the sand to divide the classical history of the Romans from the medieval history of the Byzantine Empire in the East.

But for the entirety of the so-called Byzantine era, people living in Constantinople understood themselves to be Romans, living in a capital founded by one of the great Roman emperors.

They called themselves Romans.

They lived by Roman legal traditions and saw their leaders as part of a tradition that stretched back to the first Caesars, and before them, the Roman Republic.

Now, I understand why we have cut the cake of history in this way.

Having different terms for the early Roman Empire and the later Roman Empire is useful.

Honestly, as I've been writing this series, I've found myself wanting to use the term Byzantine.

It can be a useful shorthand.

But I truly believe that dividing the history of the Romans into Roman and Byzantine eras is kind of like looking at modern modern England and concluding that because current English people are religiously, culturally, and linguistically quite different from medieval English people, that there should be a different name for England now.

Now, obviously, if you're from England, that sounds pretty ridiculous.

You are English because you were born in England and identify as English.

Imagine if in a few hundred years a historian started calling you something altogether different.

So while the word Byzantine can be helpful when trying to organize centuries worth of human history, it encourages a way of viewing history that doesn't allow for cultural change.

The people in our story, who commonly get called Byzantines, saw themselves unambiguously as Romans.

The rise in popularity of the term Byzantine coincided with a trend among European intellectuals in the 18th century to dismiss the later Roman Empire as backwards, decadent, and unworthy of their classical Roman heritage, a classical Roman heritage that those 18th century folks greatly admired.

This essentially meant dismissing roughly 1,000 years worth of Roman history from the 6th century to the 15th.

The Turkish historian Hidir Bamyasi sums up this sentiment like this, quote, According to the Enlightenment thinkers, Byzantine society was a society with no developments of its own, but remained fossilized and unchanging in a world which was destined to change, progress, and reach the Renaissance and the age of reason, end quote.

The famous French philosophe Voltaire saw the Byzantine Empire as emblematic of a period in history that he thought to be a superstitious dark age.

He called late Roman history, quote, a worthless collection of orations and miracles, end quote.

Similarly, the Enlightenment writer Montesquieu called the Byzantine era, quote, only a tragic epilogue to the glory of Rome, end quote, concluding that the late empire's history was little more than, quote, a tissue of rebellions, insurrections, and treachery, end quote.

This sentiment was echoed by the contemporary historian Charles Lambeau, who declared that the Byzantine period was, quote, a thousand years of decline of the Roman Empire, end quote.

This negative assessment of the medieval Roman Empire ultimately found its way into the most influential work on Roman history ever written in the English language, Edward Gibbon's monumental decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

Gibbon saw in the Byzantines everything he believed had caused the titular decline and fall, namely decadence, a loss of civic virtue, and an uncompromising type of Christian religion.

He would famously remark of the medieval Romans, quote, In the revolution of ten centuries, not a single discovery was made to exalt the dignity or promote the happiness of mankind, end quote.

In many ways, the use of the name Byzantine reflects this attitude and slyly suggests that the medieval Romans don't deserve to be called Romans.

Such was the enormous influence of Edward Gibbon that, at least in the English-speaking world, there was an overwhelmingly negative perception of the medieval Roman Empire that I would argue still lingers today.

This is despite many decades of scholarship that has actively tried to challenge and undo this fairly limited understanding of a millennium's worth of history.

So we need to start by recognizing that what we're talking about here is Roman history, not just Byzantine history.

And we should also acknowledge that the story of the medieval Romans is not simply 1,000 years of decline.

That is a sloppy metanarrative.

On the contrary, after the 6th century, the Romans had many periods of renewal and territorial expansion, not to mention eras when art, culture, and theology flourished.

The fall of the East was not inevitable after the fall of the West.

1,000 years of Roman survival attest to that fact.

Now, ironically, this overwhelmingly negative perception of the Byzantines awkwardly sits beside another, somewhat contradictory, historical metanarrative.

And that is that the Byzantines saved, quote-unquote, Western civilization.

You see, if the medieval Romans were presented negatively by many 18th, 19th, and even 20th century Western historians, that was nothing compared to how those same historians wrote about Muslims.

In Europe, there was a very long tradition of presenting Islam and the various Islamic empires as the natural enemies of Christians.

It's hard to pinpoint the start of this, but it certainly has its roots in the early early successes of the Islamic armies in the period that we're going to be exploring in this series.

By the time we get to the era of Edward Gibbon, there was already a long tradition of European history writing and literature that had presented the rise of Islam as a negative historical force.

As the scholar Edward Said famously argued in his influential book Orientalism, the whole idea of the quote-unquote West was created through art, literature, and history writing in opposition to an imagined version of the Muslim East.

If the West was supposed to be naturally rational, scientific, and progressive, then the Eastern empires of the Muslims were emotional, superstitious, and stagnant.

From that perspective, the worst thing that could have happened in the history of Europe would have been if the Muslims had been even more successful in their initial conquests.

If Constantinople had not repelled the sieges of 674 and 717, perhaps all of Christian Europe would have been absorbed by Islamic armies.

And as a result, Western culture as we know it to day would not have developed.

Or so goes the narrative.

When this meta narrative is applied, applied, then the medieval Romans, all of a sudden, become heroes.

While this narrative is now widely dismissed by serious scholars, it still pops up in popular histories of the era.

During my research for this series, I dipped into a book first published in 2009 called Lost to the West by Lars Brownworth.

The book is meant to be an approachable survey of the the Byzantine era, but it's steeped in an outdated metanarrative.

In his introduction, Brownworth says of the Eastern Romans:

For more than a millennium, its capital stood, the great bastion of the East, protecting a nascent, chaotic Europe as one after another would-be world conquerors foundered against its walls.

Without Byzantium, the surging armies of Islam would surely have swept into Europe in the seventh century, and, as Gibbon mused, the call to prayer would have echoed over Oxford's dreaming spires.

Now, I did not care for Brownworth's book.

But I should thank him for laying out this historical myth so neatly.

First, to present the Eastern Roman Empire as protectors of a, quote, nascent, chaotic Europe is ridiculous and unhistorical.

Europe as a distinct geopolitical or cultural entity barely existed in the period we are discussing.

In fact, throughout much of its history, the Eastern Roman Empire found itself at odds and sometimes at war with the post-Roman Western kingdoms.

This is to say nothing of the fact that the Eastern Romans felt little kinship with the parts of Europe that were still pagan.

In the period we're discussing, the Byzantines' neighbors to the northwest were the Bulgars, a nomadic and semi-nomadic Turkic people who likely worshipped Tengri, the sky god of the steppe, before dabbling with both Christianity and Islam in the 9th century.

So, the idea that west of Constantinople there were quote-unquote Europeans that the Byzantines were protecting is just ridiculous.

Then there's the idea that the Muslim armies never made it to Europe, thanks to the Romans.

Uh, yes, they did.

The same Umayyad caliphate who besieged Constantinople in 717 successfully invaded Spain just two years later.

The Muslim-dominated society that was established there, known as Al-Andalus, was arguably one of the most sophisticated, healthy, and literate European kingdoms in the early medieval period.

There would eventually be a Muslim empire in southern Italy, known as the Emirate of Sicily.

This is to say nothing of the later Ottoman domination of the Balkans.

In short, Islam made it to Europe.

Islam is part of European history.

Now, to be fair to Brownworth, he does present the idea that the Romans were the only thing between England and Islam as a light-hearted musing.

But I feel like I need to say that that just was not the case.

All of this presupposes that the empires that embraced Islam as the state religion were unambiguously bad, or rather worse than contemporary Christian empires.

I would say that this value judgment is based on old prejudices.

The medieval empires in question were just that: medieval empires.

Both the Muslims and the Christians could be brutal, violent, and uncompromising.

Similarly, both societies fostered beautiful works of art, architecture, and literature.

In my humble opinion, one does not seem in any way morally superior to the other.

It's not like on one side of the line there were good and righteous people, and on the other side there were demonic, tyrannical people.

On both sides, there were empires trying to get their empire on, with all the baggage that comes with that.

Now, even though I'm using Lars Brownworth as a bit of a punching bag here, I want to stress that he did not invent this narrative.

He was simply repackaging a very old and frankly inaccurate narrative about East and West.

I think it's notable that as late as 2009, this metanarrative can be found animating a popular history about the Eastern Romans.

Now, as a lover of history, I think there's a delicious irony in the fact that the stereotypes used to denigrate and and dismiss the medieval Romans are the exact same stereotypes used to dismiss and denigrate their Muslim opponents.

The Enlightenment-era historians saw the Byzantines as stagnant, superstitious, religiously fanatical, and spoiled by the luxury of the East.

But also they were heroes because they protected Europe from an Islamic culture that was superstitious, religiously fanatical, and spoiled by the luxury of the East.

You can't make this stuff up.

Now, of course, the Muslim histories come with their own set of biases.

It should probably go without saying that Muslim historians present this era of history quite differently when compared to their Western counterparts.

For Muslims, the 600s represent the first century of Islam, the start of the most significant and glorious chapter in human history.

The Arab conquests of the former provinces of the Eastern Roman Empire are presented as very good things indeed.

As historian Nadia El-Shek has pointed out, the Arab view of the Roman Empire in this period was much like their view of Christianity.

It was an admirable precursor to their empire that even had elements worth keeping.

But now that Islam and the Islamic caliphates had arrived, the empire of the Romans had been superseded by a more righteous, more divinely guided civilization.

However, the early sieges of Constantinople seem to have been a turning point in this perspective.

After that point, any grudging respect for the Romans that may have existed in the Muslim sources melts away.

From that point on, according to Al-Shek, quote, the struggle against Byzantium was an unceasing campaign against a rival religious and political system that challenged the very foundations of Islam's universal mission, end quote.

All of this is to say that all of our sources are colored with some fairly robust biases that need to be carefully considered as we move through this tale.

All right, thanks for indulging me.

I love a good unpacking of a metanarrative, and I couldn't resist in this case.

But it's time to move from a widescreen view towards the specifics.

So let's head to the seventh century and set the stage for the first potential siege of Constantinople.

In the 670s AD, Islam was not yet 100 years old.

And yet, in less than a century, the movement that had been started by the Prophet Muhammad in Arabia had completely reshaped the political and religious life of huge swaths of Asia, Africa, and Europe.

Islamic tradition holds that the Prophet started receiving divine revelations from the angel Gabriel in 610.

For the next 12 years, he preached this new revelation in his home city of Mecca, before famously fleeing the city in 622 with his followers for the city of Medina.

This event, known as the Hidra, is recognized by Muslims as year one in their calendar.

It touched off a journey that would eventually see the entire Arab peninsula united by Muhammad's followers, inspired by the new religion of Islam.

Now, for the purposes of our episode today, I'm not going to get into the nitty-gritty of Islam's early days.

This is one of those situations where sacred history is at play, much like the Exodus for Jewish people or the life of Jesus for Christians.

Just like those events, there are many secular scholars who have critiqued the traditional faith-based version of events.

There's much debate about the evolution of Islam as a faith, and by extension, the unity of this new Arab society.

It's been argued that the religion was still evolving even as Arab armies started to venture out of the peninsula.

there's even a debate around just how Islamic these early armies truly were.

Did all of the people involved in these early campaigns identify as Muslim?

It's unclear, or at least hotly debated.

As historian John Halden has pointed out, quote, Recent studies of early Islam have suggested that a fully Islamic identity was still in many respects a work in progress at the end of the 7th century.

⁇

So there's a school of scholarly thought that suggests that the Arabs who swept into the former territories of the Roman Empire were still negotiating what it meant to be Muslim, and political allegiances were part of that negotiation.

Now, to be clear, this is not the view of practicing Muslims.

The consistency of the religion going back to the time of the Prophet is often emphasized by the faithful.

But I would be remiss if I didn't at least point to the scholarly debate about the religion in this period.

Islamic tradition tells us that in 632 the Prophet Muhammad died.

He was then succeeded by a figure known as the Caliph.

That comes from the Arabic word calipha, which translates to successor or deputy.

These caliphs became the leaders of the Muslim community and the burgeoning Arab Empire.

In Sunni Islamic tradition, the first four caliphs are recognized as the rightly guided caliphs.

As such, the early caliphate is referred to as the Rashidun Caliphate, which is derived from the Arabic word for rightly guided.

These early caliphs all knew the Prophet personally, and as such were believed to be guided by the same righteous vision.

The first of these caliphs was the Prophet's close companion, Abu Bakar.

He is credited with uniting the Arabian Peninsula under the Caliphate, which was now based in Medina.

From there, he directed the first push beyond Arabia and into Mesopotamia, or Iraq.

However, Abu Bakr's time as caliph was brief, and in 634, he was succeeded by Umar, a hand-picked successor who built on Abu Bakr's military successes and pushed the Nasid Empire even further beyond the traditional power base of Arabia.

Now, of course, this is the traditional Islamic understanding of this history.

There's some debate around just how centralized and united the Arabs of this period truly were.

But there's no denying that by the mid-630s, Arab armies were on the move and were pushing deep into the territory of their two superpower neighbors.

These neighbors were the Romans and the Sasanid Persians.

In the 630s, both of those empires were in particularly rough shape.

For 26 years, from 602 to 628, the Romans and the Persians had been embroiled in a brutal and destructive war.

The Persians had managed to get the upper hand in the early phases of the conflict and had overrun most of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, and even parts of Anatolia, threatening the very existence of the Roman Empire.

However, the Roman Emperor Heraclius managed to dramatically turn the tables and mounted a world historical comeback.

By the year 628, Heraclius had managed to retake all the territory that had been lost and defeated the Persians in a number of decisive pitched battles.

Then he brought the fight into traditional Persian territory and sacked one of the Persian Shah's palaces at Dostagerd.

This astounding reversal in the war led to the the assassination of the Shah and a favorable peace with the Romans.

But this massive conflict had completely exhausted both victor and vanquished.

The amount of blood and treasure that had gone into this clash of superpowers left both empires deeply wounded and in need of time to recuperate and rebuild.

Enter the newly energized Rashidun Caliphate from Arabia, or at very least, a loose confederacy of Arab tribal groups ready to make a name for themselves.

Our friend Robin Pearson over at the History of Byzantium podcast has called the Roman Emperor Heraclius the man who lived too long.

And honestly, I think that's pretty appropriate.

If Heraclius had died after orchestrating one of the greatest comebacks in military history and winning the war with the Persians, he would have been remembered as one of the greatest Roman leaders, period.

But he lived too long.

He was not given time to rebuild his recently reclaimed provinces.

By 634, the Arabs had arrived in force.

In that year, the key Syrian city of Damascus was captured by an Arab army.

In 636, Heraclius used what resources he still had at his disposal to assemble a force strong enough to push the Arabs out of Syria.

But when the Roman army and the Caliphate forces met at the Battle of Yarmouk, a pitched battle of the type Heraculus had hoped to avoid, the Arab forces won a decisive victory and destroyed much of Heraclius' army.

The defeat tarnished Heraculus' reputation so badly that it really hasn't recovered since.

He could have had name recognition on the level of a Constantine, but now he's pretty much only known by keen students of the period.

With that army lost, the Romans no longer had much ability to resist the armies from Arabia.

So it was that over the next ten years the Caliphate managed to capture all of Syria, Egypt, and Palestine, including, crucially, the holy city of Jerusalem.

By the 640s, almost all of Rome's former eastern provinces were being controlled by the victorious Arabs, the big exception being Anatolia, or modern Turkey.

The Persian Empire did not fare any better.

Similarly exhausted from the war with the Romans, the Persians were unable to mount an effective resistance to the energized Arab armies.

But the Persian Empire was vast and famously hard to govern, so it would take a solid 30 years before the last remnants of the Sasanid Persian state were relegated to the dustbin of history.

But by the 650s, the Rashidun Caliphate had been able to capitalize on the relative weakness of their former superpower neighbors, and in doing so had created an empire even larger than that of Alexander the Great.

However, the immense success of the Arab armies masked a growing discord between rival groups within the Muslim community.

In 656, the Caliph Uthman, the third of the so-called rightly guided caliphs, was assassinated.

This assassination led to the ascension of Ali as the the new caliph.

This would prove to be controversial.

For some Muslims, this was seen as a very good thing, as Ali was from the family of the Prophet.

He was both Muhammad's first cousin and his son-in-law through marriage.

There were some in the Muslim community who believed that Ali should have been the first caliph, as he was a member of the Prophet's family.

The belief was that only someone from the family of the Prophet should lead the Muslim people.

Further, they believed that those first three caliphs should have never been allowed to claim the title.

It should have always been Ali.

These folks would eventually become known as the Shia Ali, or the Party of Ali, aka

Shia Muslims.

Those who identify as Shia today trace their history back to this dispute.

On the other side of this divide were the Sunni Muslims, those who believed that the early caliphs were indeed rightly guided, and that the caliph need not necessarily come from the Prophet's family.

With the death of Uthman, Ali now had the top spot in the caliphate.

However, there were many who wanted to see justice done for Uthman's murder.

Ali did not seem to be taking enough action to avenge the death of his predecessor.

This created an anti-Ali faction.

Now, there were a number of different leaders of this group at different times, but as the conflict dragged on, eventually the powerful governor of Syria, Muawiyah, emerged as the most significant adversary to Ali.

Now, I know I've been hitting you with a lot of names, but Muawiyah is one we should remember.

Not only is he one of the most important leaders in Islamic history, he's also going to play a key role in the rest of our story.

The conflict between these two factions, led by Muawiyah and Ali, is known in Arabic as the Fitna, or the First Islamic Civil War.

In the end, Muawiyah emerged victorious in this struggle for Islam's massive new empire.

However, the split between the Shia and the Sunni would endure to this very day.

Muawiyah's victory redrew the lines of the Muslim world.

His new dynasty was dubbed the Umayyad Caliphate, and its headquarters was moved out of the Arab Peninsula and to Muawiyah's power base in Syria.

His capital would be Damascus.

So, within 30 years of the Prophet's death, the Islamic Empire had transformed from an insurgent Arabic regional power into an empire that straddled three continents.

Muawiyah's establishment of Damascus as his capital truly signaled that this new empire was more than simply an Arab phenomenon.

This was an international empire with an international vision.

It was Muawiyah who would be the first caliph to turn his attention to Constantinople.

In the 670s, he was feeling understandably confident.

Syria and Egypt had for centuries been two of the richest and most densely populated Roman provinces.

They were essential parts of the empire, perhaps even more essential than Italy after the capital moved east.

But in just a few decades, these two bedrocks of the Roman Empire had been transformed into the heartland of Muawiyah's Islamic Caliphate.

Muawiyah had won a civil war on the basis of his strength in those former Roman provinces, not in Arabia.

Conquering what remained of the Roman Empire must have seemed like a natural next step.

In six hundred seventy four, the Roman Empire looked like it might be on its last legs.

The once mighty Roman navy was now being challenged by Muawia's growing fleets in the Mediterranean.

The Roman Emperor kept a tenuous grip on small holdings in North Africa, Italy, Greece, and a patchwork of Aegean islands.

But the heart of the Roman world was now Anatolia and the capital of Constantinople.

What's more, Roman leadership was shaky.

A few years previous, the Roman Emperor Constans II had been murdered in his bath.

One source tells us that he was bludgeoned to death with a bucket by a bribed chamberlain.

This assassination was part of an attempted coup that was ultimately put down by those loyal to Constans before the usurpers could fully establish themselves.

Once the dust settled, Constans' 18-year-old son was hailed as the new emperor, taking the name Constantine IV.

From Muawia's perspective, the already weakened Romans were now being ruled by an emperor who had just emerged from childhood.

Constantine IV was a kid.

Muawiyah was a war hero.

But the leader in Damascus didn't want to be remembered simply as the man who had destroyed Ali, the cousin of the Prophet.

Ali's place in the Prophet's household had always made the victory in the civil war bittersweet.

Many Muslims didn't know exactly how to feel about that.

But

being the conqueror of Constantinople, well, that was the kind of legacy one did not need to apologize for.

And the city seemed ripe for the taking.

Or did it?

Okay,

that's all for this week.

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

Before we go this week, I just want everyone to know that I'm now on Blue Sky.

So if you're Blue Skyan, feel free to follow along.

I'm at ourfakehistory.bsky.social or just search for our fake history on blue sky and you will find me.

As always, I also need to give some very special shout outs before we go this week.

Big ups to Joannosaurus Rex.

Ha ha, I like that one.

Big ups to Jake, to Connor Wegner, to Clover Spriggs,

to Joan Lloyd, to William Brown, to Erica Larson, to Cassandra Sennett, to Evan Calder,

to

Juliano Bruni,

to

Lily Hoskin, to Tristan Brueggemann,

to Sam Buis, and that's Buis like Lewis, not Bowie,

to Cameron Doe, to TRJP,

to Jason Goss,

and to Akalia.

All of these folks have decided to pledge at $5

or more every month on Patreon.

So you know what that means.

They are beautiful human beings.

It also means that they are going to get access to that brand new patrons-only extra episode on the Bronze Age Collapse when I have it finished.

Again, thank you, thank you, thank you to everyone supporting at all levels.

The Patreon support truly keeps this show going.

I would not be able to do it without you.

I love you all.

I love you all.

Thank you so much for your continued support.

If you ever want to get in touch with me, don't be afraid to send me an email at ourfakehistory at gmail.com.

I respond to most of the emails I get, unless they're mean, in which case I don't always respond.

But seriously, feel free to reach out.

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As always, the theme music for the show comes to us from Dirty Church.

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

All the other music you heard on the show today was written and recorded by me.

My name is Sebastian Major, and remember, just because it didn't happen doesn't mean it isn't real.

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And we're back live during a flex alert.

Dialed in on the thermostat.

Oh, we're pre-cooling before 4 p.m., folks.

And that's the end of the third.

Time to set it back to 78 from 4 to 9 p.m.

Clutch move by the home team.

What's the game plan from here on out?

Laundry?

Not today.

Dishwasher?

Sidelined.

What a performance by Team California.

The power truly is ours.

During a flex alert, pre-cool, power down, and let's beat the heat together.