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tribe to depict nobility. Robert G. Hoyland notes, “Islam was born among town dwellers and started out with a town dweller’s stereotyped view of nomads … In early Islamic literature nomadic Arabs were often represented as uncouth. All this was soon to change, however, and they would become characterised as ‘the root of the Arabs and a reinforcement for Islam.’ ” See Arabia and the Arabs: From the Bronze Age to the Coming of Islam, London and New York: Routledge, 2001, pp. 243–7. Hoyland’s earlier book, Seeing Islam…, contains a very extensive range of negative statements on early Islam, but also establishes there was not a completely uniform response. However, he notes (pp. 24–5): “In Greek writings the Muslims were never anything but the enemies of God … the image that an average Byzantine had of the Arabs was conditioned by more than a millennium of prejudice … And their Biblical ancestry, as descendents of the slave woman Hagar, tarnished them religiously as ‘the most despised and insignificant of the peoples of the earth.’ ” (This scornful condemnation is contained on the Syriac Chronicle of 1234, based on an eighth-century source.)

6. For example, at Duma in 634. See Glubb, Conquests, p. 132.

7. Mark Whittrow has pointed to multiple problems with the sources for the first Islamic conquests. See Whittrow, Making, pp. 82–9.

8. Cited in Gil, History, p. 41.

9. Ibid., pp. 38–9.

10. See Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. 5, p. 422. Gibbon uses the often fanciful chronicle of Al Wakidi, and Ockley’s History of the Saracens. But although the details are embellished the essence of the battle seems plausible.

11. See Gil, History, pp. 42–4.

12. This was the pass that Alexander the Great and his armies had traversed.

13. Gil, History, p. 170, asserts the contrary: “One should not assume that the Moslems were in a majority during this period.” However, his Muslims are peninsular Arabs, “tribes who derived their income from taxes from the subdued population,” and so converts do not figure.

14. See Zernov, Eastern Christendom, p. 84.

15. This had been miraculously rediscovered by the emperor Constantine’s mother, St. Helena.

16. Cited in Glubb, Conquests, p. 183.

17. Matthew 24:15–24.

18. See Constantelos, “Moslem Conquests,” p. 325.

19. Cited in Christades, “Arabs,” p. 316.

20. These monstrous creatures were first described by Pliny the Elder in his Historia naturalis, completed in A.D. 77. See Moser, Ancestral Images, pp. 36–7. See also C. Meredith Jones, “The Conventional Saracen of the Songs of Geste,” Speculum 17 (1942), pp. 201–25.

21. See Sahas, John of Damascus.

22. De fide orthodoxa, IV, 11; cited in Khoury, Polémique, p. 11. John’s father had been among those who formally surrendered Damascus to the Muslims.

23. See Jane I. Smith, “Islam and Christendom: Historical, Cultural and Religious Interaction from the Seventh to the Fifteenth Centuries,” in The Oxford History of Islam, ed. John L. Esposito, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 322. She observes: “Scholastic writings coming out of the eastern part of the empire in the ninth and tenth centuries, especially from Byzantium, tended to be contemptuous and even abusive of the Prophet. In general this polemic was apocalyptic (prophesying the end of the Arabs) and highly uncharitable. The work produced in Spain … provided the first attempt at a comprehensive view of the religion of the Saracens, despite its predilection to see Islam as a preparation for the final appearance of the Antichrist.”

24. See Khoury, Polémique, pp. 360–61.

25. See Sherrard, Constantinople, pp. 8–9.

26. Cited in W. R. Lethaby and Harold Swainson, Sancta Sophia Constantinople: A Study of Byzantine Building, London: Macmillan & Co., 1894.

27. Revelation 21:2–3.

28. However, it was difficult to use effectively, except in limited defensive situations. For a balanced view, see Whittrow, Making, pp. 124–5.

29. See Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. 6, p. 8: “The winter proved uncommonly rigorous. Above an hundred days the ground was covered with deep snow, and the natives of the sultry