Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [36]
In the following spring the blockade tightened. More ships arrived from Alexandria and the ports of Africa. Meanwhile many of the ships damaged the previous autumn were salvaged and repaired. One night, under cover of darkness, a Muslim fleet slipped past the watching Byzantines and landed thousands of soldiers on the eastern flank of the city. But now the besiegers were themselves attacked on both sides. The Byzantines paid the Bulgar tribes in the Balkans to attack the Arabs and a horde of tribesmen suddenly massed around the Muslim camp. In a ferocious battle, the Bulgars overwhelmed the Arabs. Twenty thousand Muslims were left dead or wounded in sight of the great walls of Constantinople. Many more died from disease. On August 15, 718, Maslama reluctantly struck camp and marched back toward the Hellespont.
THE TWO ARAB SIEGES OF 668–75 AND 717–18, AND THE SIMULTANEOUS loss to Muslim arms of the remaining Byzantine territories in North Africa, established the “Saracens,” “Agarenes,” or “Ishmaelites” as the most determined and diabolical enemy the Byzantines had ever faced. Byzantine scholars began to talk of the “arrogant soul of the enemy, the sons of Ishmael,” a “race born of a slave.” The failure of the sieges, they suggested, stemmed from God’s determination to save his people from “the insatiable and utterly perverse Arabs.”30 However, there was a long delay in mounting a full assault by Byzantine scholars on the Muslims because the second attack on the city was almost immediately followed by a civil war within Orthodox Christianity. Those who revered the holy images—icons—and those who thought them blasphemous (iconoclasts) persecuted and murdered each other for more than a century after the defender of Constantinople, Leo III, proscribed images in 726.31 For most of that period the image breakers were in power, and the iconoclast cause was strongly supported by the army. The effective end of the attack on images and the renewal of sustained conflict with the Muslims came more or less simultaneously. In March 843, under the leadership of Empress Theodora, who was regent for her two-year-old son, all the decrees against images were withdrawn, and long-dead iconoclasts were posthumously excommunicated.
It is not surprising that the very similar views of Islam and of the now defeated iconoclasts toward the depiction of God in human form were seen to be connected. “Iconoclasm,” as Nicolas Zernov put it, was “the last Oriental protest within Christianity against Hellenism, which was interwoven with the tradition of the Byzantine Church. It was part of that movement towards Monotheism and simplified theology, the most powerful expression of which was Islam itself.” He also pointed out that the army supported its leaders in their campaign against images, and that most of the soldiers were recruited “amongst Armenians, Mardaites, Isaurians and other Asiatic peoples.”32 Muslims were simultaneously the external and the internal enemy, with their doctrines and ideology challenging what had become the key tenet of Orthodox belief. For some Orthodox scholars Muslims were simply heretics, to be classed with the Jacobites, Nestorians, Copts, and other dissenters. For others, they were the prophesied apocalyptic beast, the flail of God and a hellish instrument of divine vengeance on a failing Christendom. Sometimes they would be equated with the old enemies of Byzantium, and were called “Persians” and their ruler named “Chosroes.” At other times they would be called “Ishmaelites,” to mark their descent from the illegitimate son of Abraham, or “Agarenes,” descended from his mother, Hagar, the concubine of the patriarch. There is no clear answer why they should more generally have been called “Saracens,” that is