Infidels_ A History of the Conflict Between Christendom and Islam - Andrew Wheatcroft [37]
Whatever the etymology, some common factors quickly attached themselves to the Saraceni after the invasions of 634 in the Levant. The first Christian sources stress the apocalyptic quality of the invasion, that this was the symbolic vengeance of God on his sinful people at a time when Christ’s second coming was still confidently anticipated. The Armenian bishop Sebeos, in his History of Heraclius, the only contemporary account of the conquest from a Christian source, said that he feared to tell the full horror of the invasion by the Ishmaelites. He called it a hot poisonous wind (simoom) “burning and lethal, which blew upon us, setting alight the tall and beautiful trees of the garden, the young and burgeoning (leafy) plants of the garden.”34 He also cited the other horrors committed, and suggested that this could be nothing other than the fourth beast of the Apocalypse, “like a flying eagle,” which, unlike the other beasts, never rested day or night, “saying ‘Holy, holy, holy Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.’ ”35
Sebeos elaborated his description of the beast. It was
terrible, wondrous, with teeth of iron, talons of copper, which devoured and crushed and trampled … It came from great and limitless desert where once Moses and the Children of Israel lived, according to the word of the prophet, that is to say from a vast and terrible desert, whence the tempest of the nations arose and filled the earth, conquered the earth and trampled it down. And thus it was accomplished: the fourth beast will be the fourth kingdom on the earth, that will be most disastrous of all kingdoms, that will transform the entire earth into a desert.36
However, the beast was doing the work of God although it was itself an instrument of evil. In the vision of St. John the Divine, the fourth beast was Death: “I looked and beheld a pale horse, and his name that sat upon him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto him over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death.” What followed from the coming of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse, on horses white, red, black, and the last pale as Death, was the fulfillment of God’s prophecy: “For the great day of his wrath is come, and who shall be able to stand it?”37 The inevitable killings and destruction that accompanied the conquest were attested by many sources. In the written record they fulfilled a prophetic vision of Christianity. This instrument of devastation was the bastard line of Abraham: protected by God and yet at an infinite distance from the love of Christ. The metaphoric vocabulary of violence and horror created from those initial contacts carried through into many accounts. Yet as with so much prophetic utterance, the terms were unstable. Sebeos was interpreting events in terms of what needed to take place so as to fulfill the word and will of God. The Muslims were a necessary evil.38
BYZANTINE WRITERS FROM THE SEVENTH CENTURY ONWARD PRESENTED Islam as a mortal danger facing the Christians, greater than Persia had ever been. At the end of his history, after recounting the first assault on Constantinople, Sebeos catalogued the threat that Islam posed: “For just as arrows fly from the well-curved bow of a strong man toward the target, so are the Arabs who come from the Sinai desert to destroy the entire world with hunger, the sword, and great terror.”39
Muslims were characterized in the same negative terms in the Western Catholic polemics as they had been in the East.40 There too they were the quintessence of evil, even the Antichrist himself, but also a necessary instrument of divine wrath and judgment upon God’s sinful people.