Download PDF | Irfan Shahid Byzantium And The Arabs In The Sixth Century Vol. 2, Part 2, Dumbarton Oaks ( 2009)
418 Pages
Preface
This volume, BASIC II.2, is the last of six volumes that constitute the middle section of a three-part work, Byzantium and the Arabs. Its first part treated ArabRoman relations in the centuries that elapsed from the settlement of Pompey in 63 b.c. to the reign of Diocletian (a.d. 284–305)—the centuries of the pagan empire. The third part and the climax of this project, Byzantium and Islam in the Seventh Century (BISC), will treat in two volumes the rise of Islam and the Arab Conquests. The six volumes of the middle part have their own identity as a contribution to the study of Arab-Byzantine relations in late antiquity, the proto-Byzantine period, but they are also prolegomena to the concluding part. The most relevant as prolegomenon is this volume, since it involves a brief discussion of the economic influences on the prime mover of both Islam and the conquests, the Prophet Muḥammad. This volume builds on its predecessor, BASIC II.1, which is devoted to Ghassānid toponymy, monuments, and historical geography.
Elucidation of the Ghassānid Lebensraum—the limitrophe and the transverse wedge, with their settlements, villages, and towns—is the sine qua non for discussing the three themes of this volume, namely, Ghassānid economic, social, and cultural life and history. The preceding volume revealed a new subdivision of Arab archaeology during the three centuries that preceded the rise of Islam in Oriens that had been terra incognita; it was neither pagan Arab, such as that of Petra and Palmyra, nor Muslim Arab, such as that of Damascus and Jerusalem, but Christian Arab. BASIC II.1 also revealed another aspect of Arab archaeology in the Oriens of the Muslim Arab period, now Bilād al-Shām: the strong Ghassānid substrate in the structure of many Umayyad structures, the so-called desert castles and palaces.
Two of the main strands of continuity between the two volumes may now be pointed out. 1. This volume has unearthed the history of a truly mature and unique Christian Arab culture that arose in the shadow of the Christian Roman Empire. Its birth, growth, and maturation took place in the context of Byzantium’s mission civilisatrice, not outside the limits of the imperium among the “barbarian” peoples that surrounded it, but within Oriens, whither the Ghassānids and other Arab foederati had wandered from regions of the Near East that were physically and culturally disadvantaged and less developed. In the Diocese of Oriens, they inevitably were subjected to the gravitational pull of Byzantium in its tripartite structure of “Romanitas,” Hellenism, and Christianity, all of which deeply affected their life. The third component was the most powerful and pervasive; it transformed innumerable aspects of their life and history.
The result was the rise of a mature Christian culture, which obtained only once in Arab history in Oriens (Bilād al-Shām), then came to an end in the seventh century, when its active and fruitful life ceased to flourish within a Christian political entity. Its flame, independently rekindled some twelve centuries later, has been flickering fitfully and intermittently in present-day Lebanon. In an effort to recover its history from oblivion, traces of this Byzantinized Christian Arab culture in distant protoByzantine Oriens have been ferreted out in this volume and retrieved from the debris of extant sources. 2. Just as Ghassānid structures in the Oriens of the sixth century have been revealed in BASIC II.1 as substrates in many structures that the Umayyads erected in the later Muslim period, much of the Ghassānid contribution to the economic, social, and cultural life of Oriens persisted in the Umayyad state, especially as the Ghassānids, even after their defeat at the Yarmūk in 636 toppled them from their position as the phylarchs and client-kings of Byzantium in Oriens, succeeded in maintaining a strong presence in Umayyad Bilād al-Shām.
Their three fairs, or aswāq, survived in the Umayyad period, as did many aspects of their social life, especially those pertaining to wine, song, and tavern life; these were enthusiastically embraced by the more hedonistically inclined of the Umayyad caliphs, such as the two Yazīds and Walīd, the son of the second Yazīd. Especially important was the survival in Umayyad times of the various forms of entertainments in which the Ghassānids had indulged: namely, their sojourns in the country or tabaddi, the hunt, and horse races. These took place not in Inner Oriens but in the limitrophe, to which the Ghassānids had been consigned by their overlords, the Umayyads—but which the Umayyads, now themselves the lords of Bilād al-Shām, occupied and made the venue of their entertainments. Thus the Ghassānid substrate is disclosed by a strand of continuity in Umayyad social life, just as in the preceding volume it was disclosed by continuities in Umayyad monumental structures.
These continuities clearly suggest that the better-known and the better-documented Umayyad period can cast light on some aspects of social life among the Ghassānids.
II
The recovery of the life and history of this Christian Ghassānid community prompts the following two observations. 1. Oriens has previously been conceived as bicultural, consisting of the Graeco-Roman and the Syriac/Aramaic. The final part of the present volume, devoted to cultural history, has revealed a third component, the Arab, which flourished not in the old familiar urban venue of the Graeco-Roman establishment in Oriens but in the limitrophe and the transverse wedge; its most important component was poetry. What is more, the Arab culture proved to be the most enduring of the three components, since it survived the Muslim Conquests and enjoyed a Nachleben in Umayyad times, during which poetry experienced an efflorescence that was a continuation of the pre-Islamic Ghassānid poetry of Byzantine Oriens. 2. The recovery of the cultural life of this Byzantinized Arab Christian community in Oriens is also a contribution to the history of the more extensive Oriens Christianus, which comprised the Armenians, Georgians, Aramaeans, Copts, and Ethiopians.
They were all the beneficiaries of the Byzantine mission civilisatrice, and they each developed their own version of Christian culture in which their ethos and mores were married to the ideals of the new faith that they had adopted— a fact most patently demonstrated in their art and architecture. In histories of Oriens Christianus, the Arab element is either missing or unclear, its outlines vague. The present volume has now made the arc of Oriens Christianus a perfect circle, as it has restored the missing segment. This Arab identity contributed to the diversity of early Christian culture in Oriens Christianus and to the birth of some new elements, such as Christian chivalry, which developed in this pre-Islamic, proto-Byzantine period.
Further archaeological research will undoubtedly shed more light on the Arab sector of Oriens Christianus. Methodology and Terminology A BASIC II.2 is also methodologically a continuation of its predecessor, which was written in strict obedience to Nöldeke’s Law for reconstructing the history of Arab-Byzantine relations in pre-Islamic times: namely, the employment of Greek and Latin sources and early Arabic poetry rather than the prose sources of later Islamic times.1 These sources, like all sources of ancient and medieval history, are mostly concerned with wars and politics and thus are not very informative on economic, social, and cultural life. But the information they supply, though scant and intermittent, remains invaluable and indispensable for elucidating these three aspects of the history of the Arab foederati of Byzantium in Oriens in the sixth century. The sources become more revealing when set against the background of Byzantine economic, social, and cultural history, as presented in well-known contributions to the field. The social history part of the present volume has profited from the monumental work of Phaidon Koukoules, Byzantinon bios kai politismos; Cyril Mango, “Daily Life in Byzantium”; Harry Magoulias, “The Lives of Saints as Sources of Data for Sixth and Seventh Century Byzantine Social and Economic History”; Speros Vryonis, “Aspects of Byzantine Society in Syro-Palestine”; and the most recent articles of Apostolos Karpozilos.2 Its discussion of economics has benefited from the work of A. H. M. Jones, The Later Roman Empire; a number of articles in The Economic History of Byzantium, edited by Angeliki Laiou; and the relevant essays in the first volume of Le monde byzantin, edited by Cécile Morrisson, especially Morrisson’s own contribution.3 On culture, especially poetry and rhetoric,
the works of Marc Lauxtermann and George Kennedy—Byzantine Poetry from Pisides to Geometres and Classical Rhetoric and Its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times, respectively—have been valuable.4 With the exception of Speros Vryonis, these scholars focus solely on Byzantium in discussing the three aspects of its history on which the present volume focuses; but because BASIC II.2 is a history not of the Arabs as such but of the Arab-Byzantine relationship, the cited works were important for providing historical background.
Just as the Byzantine background of economic, social, and cultural history presented in these works has been helpful in reconstructing the history of the Arab foederati in these areas, so has been the Arab background of the Lakhmids of Ḥīra in Lower Mesopotamia—the contemporaries of the Ghassānids, and Arabs similar to them in ethos and mores—especially since there are abundant sources on them. Also useful have been the sources on the Umayyads, who immediately followed the Ghassānids as masters of Oriens, and who willingly assimilated the Byzantine experience of their predecessors.
Because certain terms peculiar to the history of the foederati of Byzantium in Oriens are frequently employed, they must be explained at the outset so that this volume can be more easily understood. The need for such clarification was addressed in the preceding volume, where two of these terms, limitrophe and Ghassānland, were explained. To these were added urbanization and ruralization, two terms that, though not limited in their application to the Arab foederati, were also highly significant.5 A term not explicitly discussed in the previous volume, foederati, is the one most frequently applied to the Ghassānids in this series of six volumes, especially in this one. The publication, after the completion of BASIC II.1, of a monograph specifically devoted to the foederati has also made it appropriate to consider this term at some length here.
Foederati In the course of the three centuries that preceded the rise of Islam and the Arab Conquests in the seventh century, Byzantium availed itself of the services of three Arab groups in succession: the Tanūkhids in the fourth century, the Salīḥids in the fifth, and the Ghassānids in the sixth. And the five volumes devoted to them in this series have correctly described them as foederati. Recently, in his monograph Foederati, Ralf Scharf has raised questions on the application of the term to groups in the Orient.6 Hence the following clarifications are called for. A I have applied the term foederati to these three Arab groups because the Byzantine sources did so, using both the Latin and Greek forms, foederati and ὑποσπόνδοι. 1. In the fourth century, the forms of the term in Greek, such as σπονδαί, were used à propos of Mavia, the Arab queen, and her group, who fought the emperor Valens.7 After her victory over Valens and the conclusion of peace, Mavia observed the terms of the σπονδή.8 Early in the reign of Theodosius, relations soured between the emperor and these Arab foederati, which led to their revolt.
This entailed the dissolution of the σπονδή, referred to in its Latin form, foedus, by Pacatus in his Panegyricus, addressed to Theodosius in a.d. 389.9 2. In the fifth century the Arab foederati of Byzantium are expressly referred to as such in the well-known Novella 24 of Theodosius II, where their annona or food allotment is also mentioned.10 The Novella as it related to the Arabs is also discussed by Scharf.11 3. The sixth-century Arab allies, the Ghassānids, are referred to as foederati by the early ninth-century chronicler Theophanes, who employed the term’s Greek form: in a.d. 502, Emperor Anastasius concluded a treaty, σπένδεται, with two groups, the Arabs of Kinda and Ghassān.12 A quarter of a century later, the Ghassānids are described in a crucial passage in Procopius’ History as ἔνσπoνδοι.13 B In view of such consistent references in the Byzantine sources themselves to the Arab allies as foederati, it is clearly correct to apply the term to them.
These Arab foederati received the annona and they were settled within the Byzantine Diocese of Oriens, not outside it. The Arab foederati of the Orient, especially the Ghassānids, were well integrated in the Byzantine army of the Orient. Epigraphy reveals that the Ghassānid Nuʿmān, the chief phylarch late in the sixth century, had the title στρατηλάτης,14 which made him at least the titular counterpart of the magister militum, even if his title was mostly honorary. It has also been cogently argued, on the strength of the Greek inscription at Qaṣr al-Ḥayr al-Gharbī, that before Nuʿmān, the famous Arethas of the reign of Justinian was endowed with the same title.15 One of the principal duties of the Arab foederati was the protection of the Byzantine frontier from the inroads of the nomads, a task that explains their frequent association with the limitanei, the frontier troops who watched over the limes; another important duty was participation in the wars against Persia, the enemy of Byzantium, to which they contributed an important contingent. The three groups of Arab foederati, in three successive centuries, joined the exercitus comitatensis in its campaigns far away from their headquarters in the Provincia Arabia.
Even Procopius, no friend of the Ghassānids, described the Ghassānid participation at the battle of Callinicum (a.d. 531) as the contribution of an army, στράτευμα (History, I.xvii.7). In the fourth century, the Arab foederati took part in Byzantium’s Persian and Gothic wars. They fought in the Persian wars with the House of Constantine and even more conspicuously in the Gothic wars of the reign of Valens, when they marched to faraway Thrace. After participating in engagements that culminated in the battle of Adrianople in a.d. 378, the cuneus or “wedge” of cavalry sent by the federate queen Mavia saved Constantinople itself from the Goths, as Zosimus described in striking detail.16 In the fifth century, the Salīḥids took part in the two Persian wars of Theodosius II (a.d. 420–422, 440–442), and one historian commented on their creditable performance in those wars.17 Even more remarkable was their participation in the Vandal Wars of Emperor Leo I (468 and 470). And as has been argued, their participation in the battle of Cape Bon, in present-day Tunisia, may have contributed to their downfall later in the century, since the battle was a disaster for the imperial army and its Salīḥid contingent.18 In the sixth century, the Arab foederati performed and even more impressive function, as described in BASIC I.1. Indeed, the famous Ghassānid warrior king, Arethas, not only participated with his contingent in all the wars of Byzantium but also on one occasion in the Assyrian campaign of a.d. 541 commanded Byzantine troops, when Belisarius sent twelve hundred troops of his own guards and, in the words of Procopius, directed them “to obey Arethas in everything they did.”19 Finally, in connection with the limitanei and the associations of the Arab foederati with them in the latter’s garrison duties, it may also be mentioned that the Ghassānid foederati were given the duties of the limitanei when Justinian disbanded the latter.
This shift in responsibility was reflected in the Ghassānid phylarchs’ assumption of the title of ὁρικός, Greek for limitaneus. 20 It has always been clear to me that the terms of the foedus with the Arabs of the Orient were not identical with those of the foedus with the Germans in the Occident. But despite those differences, foederati is a term capacious enough to be applied to both sets of allies, those of the Orient as well as those of the Occident. Irfan Shahîd Dumbarton Oaks July 2009
Acknowledgments
This volume would not have been ready for publication, had it not been for the contribution of the following institutions and individuals who have given generously of their time and expertise. Institutionally, all my publications that have the term “Byzantine” in the title must first and foremost be related to the great center of Byzantine studies in the United States, indeed in the world, namely, Dumbarton Oaks. As an associate fellow, it is there that I have researched and written my articles and six volumes, availing myself of its wonderful library with its unrivalled collection of books and journals, and enjoying the support of those who run and administer Dumbarton Oaks. Its director, Professor Jan Ziolkowski, has helped in expediting the publication of this volume. Alice-Mary Talbot, as director of Byzantine studies, has been the one most intimately connected with it.
Her accipitral eye has scanned the long manuscript and has contributed much to the elimination of certain repetitious passages and the rearrangement of certain sections and chapters. Joel Kalvesmaki, editor in Byzantine studies, has gone through the manuscript and gathered together all that still needed to be attended to, inter alia, precise citations, orthography, and Greek accents. I am grateful to him for all this as I am to Alice Falk, who so very competently copyedited the manuscript, and also to Kathy Sparkes, our publications manager, who in the final stage supervised and expedited its composition and production. The library staff has extended to me the assistance for which they are known to all who have used the library. Deborah Stewart, Bridget Gazzo, Emily Gulick, Kim North, and Sandra Parker Provenzano have been helpful in locating bibliographical items which were difficult to locate or were not at Dumbarton Oaks.
This was especially helpful since my participation in the technological revolution was and still is not above reproach, and in this area Polly Evans was most helpful. Georgetown University, where I had been the Oman Professor for many years, before I retired and became Emeritus in 2007, also contributed much. Its provost, Dr. James O’Donnell, a classical scholar and ancient historian, gave me every administrative and academic support for the successful completion of this volume, as did the associate provost Marcia Mintz, and I should like to thank them both warmly for their support and contribution. Just as the Dumbarton Oaks library and its staff have been invaluable for researching this volume, so has the Lauinger Library at Georgetown, with its full collection of Arabic sources, so important for this particular volume, BASIC II.ii, thus complementing the Byzantine collection at Dumbarton Oaks. Two members of the staff, Brenda Bickett and Mark Muelhausler, were especially helpful in locating certain works in Arabic and getting some through the interlibrary loan service. I am extremely thankful for their help. Outside the confines of the Lauinger Library, I should like to make special mention of Nancy Farley, who skillfully typed some chapters in this manuscript, and Kelli Harris and Meriem Tikue, the administrative assistants of the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies, who always responded so to my calls on their generosity for help in various ways.
The scholars who converge on Dumbarton Oaks as annual fellows or visiting scholars or joint-appointees should be remembered in this context. Foremost among these for this particular volume have been Stratis Papaioannou and Michael McCormick, whose writings and conversations have influenced the course of my thought in writing certain chapters in this volume. In addition to these two scholars, there are those with whom I have conversed and corresponded, and they include: Edmond Bosworth, David Frendo, Kyle Harper, Robert Hoyland, Stephen Humphreys, Elizabeth Jeffreys, Walter Kaegi, Apostolos Karpozilos, Lorice Malouf, Cyril Mango, Leslie MacCoull, Michael Morony, Polyvia Parara, Daniel Potts, Manfred Ullman, Jose van Ess, Jan Geer van Gelder, and Speros Vryonis. Publishing books is expensive nowadays, and in this respect the liberality of Tawfiq and Abla Kawar has been remarkable. They have contributed funds toward the publication of this volume and the research that had been conducted for it in various parts of the world.
I am deeply in their debt. Within this circle of relatives and the list of those to whom this volume owes much is my wife, Mary. She has contributed in various ways to the composition of this volume, which sometimes necessitated the cancellation of weekend activities and the interruption of vacations, for technical assistance in the preparation of the long manuscript, such as typing and corrections. Of all her substantial contributions, I am very sensible and to her I am most grateful. * * * A debt of an entirely different kind is owed to the two dedicatees, the two Franciscan priests, the French P. Francis Demaret and the Italian P. Michele Piccirillo, both closely related to my work on Byzantium and the Arabs. P. Michele Piccirillo, celebrated Christian archaeologist, was the indefatigable laborer in the vineyard of Christian archaeology who recovered the strong Christian presence in Jordan in Byzantine times. He also gave visibility to the contribution of the Christian Arab community to Byzantine monuments of Jordan, as he uncovered and collected the recognizably Arab names of donors and mosaicists involved in these monuments, thus complementing archaeologically what my volumes have done through the literary sources. As important was his excavation of the Church at Nitil in the Madaba region, with its Greek inscription saluting the reigning Ghassānid king, Arethas, and a funereal one remembering the Ghassānid officer Thaʿlaba, buried in the hypogeum of the church. He reported on the church in the many pages of Liber Annuus as an archaeologist and asked me to contribute the article on the historical Ghassānid dimension of the church.
He kindly supplied me with the plates representing various facets of the church at Nitil, which appeared in my volume, BASIC II.i (2002) and appear now in the frontispiece of this volume, a mosaic in the church of St. George at Mt. Nebo. His tragic death at the early age of 64 after he lost his battle with pancreatic cancer was a great loss to Christian archaeology, and to me personally, and it has precluded his further excavation of Ghassānid sites, for which BASIC II.i has provided a map. Although he passed away at his Italian home in Livorno, he chose to be buried at the scene of his other “home,” to which he donated many decades of his short life on earth— Mount Nebo. P. Francis Demaret, friar of the convent of Clarté Dieu, France, was another indefatigable laborer in the vineyard of Arab Christianity. Completely unknown to me, he approached Dumbarton Oaks in 1991 to translate my volumes on Byzantium and the Arabs into French, which he continued to do for almost two decades until recently, when he was taken seriously ill.
But before he was incapacitated, he had translated my six volumes published by Dumbarton Oaks in eleven substantial tomes and also some of my articles, including a long one, “Byzantium in South Arabia,” which appeared in DOP 1979. P. Demaret’s twelve volumes have been truly a labor of love. Not only did he type the translation himself but he also reproduced the volumes and deposited them in various learned and cultural locales in Paris in order to spread knowledge of Arab Christianity, the Cinderella in the circle of Oriens Christianus. In addition to keeping his volumes in my library as a monument to his zeal and industry, I have kept all his letters since 1991, a dossier of single-minded devotion to a theme, the Christian Arab presence in the Byzantine Orient, especially in the Holy Land, which goes back to pre-Islamic times. It is a pity that he could not read what he had looked forward to, namely, this volume, which has recovered from oblivion an entire Arab Christian culture that had flourished in the shadow of Byzantium in Oriens, Bilād al-Shām, before the rise of Islam. I had hoped against hope that his health would be restored to normalcy, but my expectations were dashed to the ground when I received from La fraternité d’Orsay, to which he belonged, the sad news, couched in simple but touching terms, that “Le Frère Francis Demaret, Franciscain-Prêtre est entré dans la Paix de Dieu, le mardi 21 juillet 2009, à AthisMons dans sa 82e année, après 61 ans de vie religieuse et 53 ans de sacerdoce.”
The Role of the Ghassānids
The contribution of the Ghassānids and the other Arab foederati of Byzantium to the economic life of the empire and to Oriens in particular is terra incognita to Byzantinists, largely because these Arabs are usually referred to as foederati and often as symmachoi, “fighting allies”; consequently, their military role has been emphasized over all others. Procopius’ bias, his ira et studium, has further obscured their role in the economic history of the region. But as the present volume will clearly demonstrate, their role was considerable, especially during the reign of Justinian. The nature and extent of their contribution will be examined as it relates to Oriens itself and also to international trade, involving the world of the Indian Ocean and the Arabian Peninsula on the one hand and that of Mediterranean Rome on the other. The investigation of their role must rely on sources that, regarding economic and social history, are far from copious. Nevertheless, when set against the background of the better-known economic history of the empire and of Oriens in particular, the sources become more revealing and shed more light on the role of the foederati, especially the Ghassānids of the sixth century.
The standard work on the economic history of the empire has recently appeared in three massive volumes, which treat the period from the seventh through the fifteenth century.1 The editor explains the reason for omitting the previous three centuries;2 one article, however, gives a general overview of that time, providing good background for a future detailed and concentrated account of the sixth century in Oriens.3 The seventh century is touched on by other essays.4 For the economic history of this proto-Byzantine period, the monumental Late Roman Empire by A. H. M. Jones is still the standard work, although the author practically ignored archaeology in discussing rural life.5 To this “great synthetic work” may now be added two chapters in the new Cambridge Ancient History.6 Even more recent are two articles in the first volume of a new collection, Le monde byzantin.7 Against the background of these general works, the economic history of Oriens and the role of the Ghassānids in the sixth century will be set and will become clear. Because the Arabs or the Ghassānids appear in the Byzantine sources as foederati, soldiers fighting the wars of Byzantium, the studies cited hardly mention them as a force in the economic history of the region and the century. The Arabic sources, however, have important relevant data on the Ghassānids.
A 1971 work in Arabic on the economic history of the Arabs and Arabia before the rise of Islam contains much useful material, although it does not specifically deal with Byzantine involvement in this history.8 A more recent and more accessible work is Robert G. Hoyland’s Arabia and the Arabs, which devotes a welcome chapter to the economic history of the Arabs, although again without focusing specifically on the Byzantines or Ghassānids.9 Until the manuscript of the lost Akhbār Mulūk Ghassān is discovered,10 archaeology will remain the most important source for enhancing knowledge about Ghassānid participation in the economic life of Oriens and Byzantium. The mineral wealth of Arabia has been revealed by Gene W. Heck’s publication of The Precious Metals of West Arabia,11 which has shed a very bright light on the keen interest of Byzantium in the Arabian Peninsula. That interest began in the days of Leo I (457–474) and of the adventurous phylarch, Amorkesos, of the fifth century, and reached its climax during the reign of Justinian.12 More directly and concretely related to the Ghassānids has been the discovery of a Ghassānid church at Nitil;13 its excavation has provided much evidence for Ghassānid involvement in the art and architecture of sixthcentury Byzantine Oriens and demonstrates the region’s prosperity, to which the Ghassānid protection of trade routes that led to Oriens contributed. Other archaeological excavations—perhaps guided by the preceding volume in this series, which has provided a road map to and onomasticon of Ghassānid sites—may reveal more information.
II The Ghassānids and the Security of Oriens
The Ghassānids were a group employed by Byzantium as foederati in the army of the Orient to defend that diocese and fight the wars of the empire in the east. But they and other Arab foederati also performed nonmilitary duties, just as the regular Roman legionaries always did in peacetime. A passage in the Cambridge Ancient History details some of the nonmilitary duties of those legionaries: Detachments of soldiers were involved in major civilian projects like building the road from Carthage to Theveste, harbour-dredging in Egypt, or supplying stone for the forum at Colonia Ulpia Traiana at Xanten in the Rhineland. One sphere in which the military will have been always involved was administration.
The commanders of auxiliary units in Britain or Judaea might find themselves in charge of the census at local level, which centurions on secondment from their legions served as district officers (centuriones regionarii).1 The Ghassānid foederati, it is almost certain, were called upon to perform similar duties in Oriens. Unlike the Ostrogoth troops in Italy or the Franks in Gaul or the Visigoths in Spain, the Ghassānids were not alien to their congeners— Arabs of Nabataea and Palmyrena who had become Rhomaioi after their territories were annexed by the Romans. Hence no tension such as that which arose between a Germanic alien army of occupation and the native populations of the Roman Occident was present between the Ghassānids and these Arab Rhomaioi; thus, it was easy for them to engage in civilian nonmilitary works and contribute to the economic life of Oriens. Their civilian, nonmilitary duties included building bridges;2 they also acted as umpires in disputes that erupted among the Rhomaioi.3 Moreover, as enthusiastic Christians they took part in the construction of many monasteries and churches, as when in the fifth century the phylarch of Parembole aided St. Euthymius with the construction of his monastery in the Jordan valley.4 The role that the Ghassānids played in the economic history of Byzantium in the sixth century was complex and was related to the significance of the diocese that they protected. In this late antique, proto-Byzantine period, the Pars Orientalis became more important than the Occidentalis. This shift was reflected in Diocletian’s choice of Nicomedia as his capital, and the eastward move culminated in the foundation of Constantinople as the new capital, the new Rome.
In this Pars Orientalis, the Ghassānids were established in Oriens, a diocese of great importance economically and otherwise. Historians noted its prosperity in the sixth century, before, according to one view, decline set in later in the century.5 But prosperity requires security. And it is within this framework of security as the key to the prosperity of the diocese that the first contribution of the Ghassānids has to be sought. The diocese was especially exposed and vulnerable, and the Ghassānids, together with the regular stratiōtai of the Roman army of the Orient, shouldered the responsibility of shielding it from three major threats.6 1. A nomadic threat originated from the Arab Peninsula. The creation of the supreme phylarchate in a.d. 529 extended the power of the Ghassānids from Ayla on the Red Sea to the Euphrates, enabling them to meet the threat along that long frontier in its entirety.
Their role was especially significant after they superseded the limitanei who had been engaged in performing that function, which more naturally suited the Arab foederati than the Roman stratiōtai under the direction of the various duces.7 2. A better organized and more concentrated threat emanated from the Lakhmids of Ḥīra, especially during the long fifty-year reign of their king Mundir (504–554), who terrorized the diocese with his brutality and anti-Christian outbursts. But he met his match in the Ghassānid Arethas, who overpowered him at the decisive battle of Chalcis in 554, when the Lakhmid king was killed. 3.
A third threat, the most serious, gave the Ghassānids a special place in the Byzantine defense system. Unlike those allies who were defending the Roman Occident along the Danube and the Rhine, and were facing barbarians such as the Germans, Huns, and Sarmatians, the Ghassānids, as a contingent in the army of the Orient, were facing a world power—Sasanid Persia, which even captured Antioch, the capital of the diocese, in 540. The Ghassānids distinguished themselves in all these military encounters; particularly notable was their performance at the battle of Callinicum in a.d. 531.8 Even within Oriens, the Ghassānids helped enforce law and order when they participated and were sometimes the principal agent in pacifying certain areas; for example, they crushed a dangerous revolt around 530 after the Samaritans laid waste parts of Caesarea and Skythopolis.9 When, in the fourth century, Christianity became a religio licita and later, the official religion of Byzantium, the status of one of its provinces, Palestine, was immediately elevated to being a holy land, whose capital, Jerusalem, became the spiritual capital of the entire Christianized empire and the destination of pilgrims.
Thus, Palestine and the Diocese of Oriens, within which Palestine was located, assumed great spiritual importance in the perception of the entire Christian oikoumene. The Ghassānids bore the major brunt of the defense of the Christian Holy Land because they were stationed in the three provinces that surrounded it, the Provincia Arabia, Palaestina Secunda, and Palaestina Tertia, through which ran the two gateways of the nomads from the Arabian peninsula to Oriens: Wādī Sirḥān and the Tabūkiyya in northern Ḥijāz. In addition to protecting the Holy Land against the threat of the nomads, the Ghassānids protected it from the Lakhmid scourge, Mundir, who celebrated his accession to power in Ḥīra by launching a bold campaign that brought him to the borders of the Holy Land around a.d. 503.10 The Ghassānids effectively protected Palestine from the south and southeast through the efforts of Abū Karib, the energetic phylarch of Palaestina Tertia, and from the east and northeast through those of Arethas, his brother. This led to the prosperity of both provincial Arabia and Palestine, reflected in the efflorescence of Christian art and architecture.1
Security, provided to a considerable extent by the Ghassānids, was conducive to a prosperity that enabled the Rhomaioi in the region to finance and subsidize the erection of many churches and monasteries on both sides of the Jordan. The foederati, especially the Ghassānids, took part in this sixth-century explosion of Christian art and architecture, including the recently excavated church of Nitil in the Madaba region of the Provincia Arabia.12
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