Empire: World History - 294. Gaza & The Islamic Conquest (Part 4)

Episode Date: September 29, 2025

How did the expansion of Islam out of the Arab peninsular affect Gaza in the seventh century? Who was ‘Amr ibn al-As and how did he ambush the Byzantines in Gaza? Why is the Islamic Conquest described as the “invisible conquest” by some historians?  William and Anita are joined once again by Peter Sarris, Professor of Late Antique, Medieval and Byzantine Studies at the University of Cambridge, to discuss the Arab Conquest of Gaza in the seventh century.  Join the Empire Club: Unlock the full Empire experience – with bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to miniseries and live show tickets, exclusive book discounts, a members-only newsletter, and access to our private Discord chatroom. Sign up directly at empirepoduk.com  For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com. Email: [e-mail] Instagram: @empirepoduk Blue Sky: @empirepoduk X: @empirepoduk Assistant Producer: Becki Hills Producer: Anouska Lewis Executive Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpowerpoduk.com. And welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durimple. And we are joined again. I'm very happy to say by the Professor of Late Antique Medieval and Byzantine Study. at the University of Cambridge, Peter Saris, welcome Peter. In the last episode, we talked about Christianity and the impact of Christianity

and these sort of wild monks who really changed the fabric of what Gaza looks like. Sort of this boom time with monasteries and churches springing up in the Holy Land. In this episode, we're going to talk about the great conquests of Islam, because William left us on a cliffhanger at the last episode in the 7th century. and how ideas about this period have, by modern study, been completely overturned in some way. So, I mean, let's start at the very, very basic level. We're talking about a rapid expansion of Islam at this time. We're talking sort of 630s, aren't we?

So just tell us what's going on and what is happening here. Over the course of the 6th and early 7th centuries, cultural, economic, military, religious conditions in the Arabian, Peninsula had been revolutionized and transformed by the growing involvement in Arabia of the two great powers of the Eastern Roman Empire and Sassanian Persia. Partly as a result of this growing superpower involvement, you've seen new religious ideas come into circulation in Arabia, new forms of identity emerging, and in the context of these swirling ideas and new identities in the early 7th century, a prophet has emerged, in the settlement of Mecca, a significant trading centre known to posterity as Muhammad.

Muhammad has preached the imminence of divine judgment, a very strong theme in contently Christianity in Judaism as well in the early 7th century. He's advocating the worship of the God of the Old Testament who has previously revealed himself to the Christians and Jews, but whose worship of that true God, Muhammad believes, would become corrupted. And through a series of political, religious and military struggles, Muhammad has been able to unite many of the tribes of Arabia under the Aegis of his new religion. As Will mentioned at the end of the last episode, Muhammad is believed to have died around the year 632, but the leadership of the community of believers, the Umar that he has established, would then pass to some of his earliest companions,

who would reunite the Arabian Peninsula after some of the peoples who have joined the or try to break away, and who then, from the year 6-3-3-2-4, would begin to lead forces into the empires of the Eastern Roman Empire and Persia to the north, thus initiating the dramatic expansion of Islam over much of the known world, which will then proceed from the 630s down to the 650s in a series of lightning military campaigns. And right at the end of the last episode, William was talking about this sort of flashpoint that takes place in Gaza, where a unit... it called Serios, who's meant to be paying Arabs who have been protecting that frontier for the

emperor. And he says, you know what, we hardly pay our soldiers. We're not going to pay the dogs. It is such an insult. It leads to something that the people of Gaza could not have foreseen. Tell us what happens next. Well, I think that episode is a later dramatization and sort of almost semi-mythologized retelling. I would a shame. It's a good story. It's a fine detail. I think a fine detail of it should be treated with some caution, but it's telling us something that's fundamentally true. Take a step back for a moment. During the course of the Roman Persian warfare of the preceding century, the Romans have built up their own Arabian or Arab clients along the frontier zone, dominantly Christian Arabs or Arabians, the Gassanids or the Jaffinids, and the Persians have

built up their own clientage network as well. Now, at the height of the Roman Persian struggle, when the Persians think that they've got the Roman Empire beaten, just before the Emperor Heraclius reverses the Persian games, the Persians seem to have dismantled these clientage arrangements along the frontier zones of southern Iraq and southern Syria and southern Palestine. They're probably planning to put something else back in their place, but they never get round to it. So when the Emperor Heraclius suddenly defeats the Persians at the end of the 620s and normally restores Roman control to Syria, Palestine, Egypt, You've got a power vacuum along those desert fringes.

You've got former client peoples of these empires not receiving the pay that they're expecting. And as it were, the emergent forces of Islam and the emergent forces of the Umah are filling that power vacuum. Uma being the Muslim community. The Muslim community. And the first time the Romans spot this is when two Arab forces turn up near Gaza. and we have some later Arabic accounts of this, which don't mention Sergius. We have a later Byzantine account drawing or a now lost source that does mention him. We have a very, very contemporary account written in Syriac,

which is the Christian version of the Aramaic language of the region around Gaza, which not only gives us fragmentary but quite chilling, because of so brutal accounts of the military conflict that ensues, but is also one of our earliest sources to survive from anywhere that mentions Muhammad by name. Really? We have a Syriac source

written around the year 640 that describes how battle occurs about 12 miles to the east of Gaza as a result of which the Romans flee leaving behind their general who is killed.

They sow the general up in a camel or something. That's a horrible story. According to the later sources, but the contemporary Syriac source describes is then the Arabs, as it were, raiding local villages and killing villagers in order to take control of the countryside and ravaging the whole region. But I say the Syriac source describes these as the Arabs of Muhammad, as one of our very earliest mentions of him. So it's a crucial historical document, not just in terms of the military history of Gaza, but for the history of world

religion. Goodness. And the leader, we're always told, is Amr Ibn al-Ass, famous for later conquering Egypt. Absolutely, yes. And there's the mosque he established to go and see in Cairo. These Arab soldiers and warriors are not unknown to the populations of Gaza and southern Syria and and southern Palestine because the empires have become dependent on such

armed Arabs or Arabians for their region's defence for a long time. And they've been bringing in frankincense and stuff. And they've been bringing traitor and Mohammed's family have been merchants. There were some suggestion, for example, that Amr ibn al-Assi's family may have had estates or lands

on the fringes of Roman territory as well. So initially quite hard, I think, for the Romans to work at what's going on here, not least because the Emperor Heraclius has defeated the Persians in the foothills of the Caucasus, with armies made up of Armenians and what have you. The Roman military present on the ground in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, in the year 6th, 3, 3 to 4, is going to be pretty nominal. A lot of their so-called Roman troops are really going to be local levies, local recruiter don't really want to be serving with being press-ganged or armed peasants

or other Arab tribesmen who are being paid to defend it. And it's quite easy then, as it were, for the Arabs being employed by the Romans or the Arabs being employed by the Persians, so then defects to these new Arabs emergent from inner Arabia. And clearly lots of that is happening as well. Well, I mean, you can't imagine Heraclius, who has only had five minutes, well, not literally, but just a little bit of time to sort of bathe in his own success of taking back the one tree cross, which we talked about in the last episode.

He's seeing all of this. What is his reaction? Is he dispatching armies all over the place to try and quell these little fires everywhere? What it seems to happen, after the fall of southern Palestine, the Arab armies will advance. Very rapidly, I think we'll come on to this shortly, the whole of Palestine will be under Arab control. And a series of engagements will then take place along the banks of the Jordan, in which the emperor's own brother leading a Roman force is defeated by the Arabs. And that, in a sense, breaks the backbone of such Roman.

resistance as there is. But I think it's partly because there aren't really that many Roman troops there on the ground to start off with. It's interesting with Heraclius that Heraclius, who has restored the true cross will be very well regarded in the Islamic historical imagination and memory. And as I say, the sort of religious milieu out of which Islam is emerging and the Arabs that are joining the Umar are emerging is one that is actually in many ways more pro-Roman than pro-Persion. So there's a verse in the Quran, the verse on the Roman. that seems to be alluding to a battle between the Romans and the Persians that had taken place in southern Syria, in which the Romans have been defeated,

but in which the faithful are reassured that God willing the Romans will be victorious. Peter, so this culminates, this Islamic advance culminates in the battle of the Yarmuk. Tell us about that. Yes, so here we have a great difficulty in that we have a series of much later Arabic sources, which are in very fine detail. We have some later Byzantine sources and a bit more fragmentary, and then we have some more contemporary,

very fragmentary sources in Syriac. And how we piece these together to make sense of the Arab advance is slightly complicated. So just to take a step back to see how we get to Yarmuk. 633 to 4, they have taken control of southern Palestine.

By the end of that year, most of Palestine seems to be under their control. So by Christmas of 633, the Arabs have got control of Bethlehem. We have a letter from the head of the church in Jerusalem complaining, for example, that the Christian clergy can't make their usual pilgrimage to Bethlehem in the Christmas of 64 because of the Arabs. And for those that don't know the geography, Bethlehem is just, you know, five miles to the south of modern Jerusalem. Yeah. Now, in the later Arabic sources, Jerusalem doesn't fall till 639. But that's actually quite unlikely. There's a good case to be

made, that Jerusalem probably falls by the end of 635. And that then with Jerusalem having fallen by the end of 635, the battle line that advances to the west bank of the Jordan with the Arabs and advancing into Roman Syria. And a series of engagements then take place along the northern fringe of the volcanic Haram plain near the River Yarmouk. And these series of engagements then get, I think, tidied up by the later Arabic historical tradition into one big engagement we call the Battle of Yarmuk. But it's probably a series of struggles taking place as the Arab armies are advancing out from Jerusalem onwards into Syria. So Peter, quite soon after the Battle of Yarmuk or that series of engagements that you described, you get the establishment of a centralized Umayyad caliphate. Tell us quickly about that.

After the rapid expansion of Islam from the 630s into the 650s, the Islamic world is suddenly rent by a bitter civil war over the succession to authority and leadership within the communities. It's out of this civil war that the subsequent division between Shia and Sunni Muslims will emerge. We need to go into that, but the crucial point is that the first major civil war is brought to a conclusion around the year 661, with the rise to power of a dynasty that draws its support primarily from the armies of the Umar that are operating in Syria, a dynasty we know as the Umayads, who will dominate the Islamic Empire and establish a more centralized caliphal system ruling from Damascus, which will rule over this world from the 660s

until the mid-eighth century. This is a vast empire, isn't it? It's what, from the Indus to Gibraltar or right into Spain? Yes, by 7-11, Spain has been conquered. So this is now an empire by the early 8th century, stretching, yet from the Atlantic, eating into Central Asia. And Peter, one of my all-time favourite historical passages is my great idol. I'm not sure what you think of Sir Stephen Rundsman. And he opens his famous history of the Crusades in the first volume with this description

of the patriarchs of Phronius, taking the Caliph into Jerusalem. The Caliph arrives on a white camel. Tell us all that scene. Is that true? that now not thought to be. I think a white camel may have been Stephen being a bit euphemistic. By this point, the leadership of the Umar has passed as character Umar, known as Umar al-Fruc, the Redeemer, who makes the formal entry into Jerusalem when it's conquered. Early Islam is a very apocalyptic movement, and this entry into Jerusalem has enormous

cosmological significance for the Muslims, but also for the Christians. And we have our Byzantine account describes how the patriarch of Jerusalem, Muslim Sophronius, negotiated a treaty for the securing of all Palestine. So here he is negotiating Roman surrender. Umar entered the holy city clad in filthy camel hair garments. He's probably wearing something like a monk's robes, yeah, but it's being depicted negatively by the Byzantines, but he's adopting a humble demeanor conveying an ascetic appearance. Peter, when this is sometimes presented the Islamic conquest of Palestine, it's sometimes made to look as if this is an apocalyptic event. You know, the old world.

is wiped out that a bunch of Arabs from the Hajas come and replace the population. The beginning of Arab history in Palestine begins at this point. But historians today have a very different understanding, don't they? They say that the conquest actually is almost invisible. You can't see it archaeologically. That there's just a new ruling class turning up, but that the administration continues for a while in Greek, that the same sort of Christian families are running the bureaucracies. I mean, I've got a book on my shelf here called The Invisible Conquest, which describes this as something that happens very gradually and is not one of the kind of great juncture points of history. The conquest of Jerusalem is apocalyptic in one absolutely crucial sense,

in that I think it has great sort of apocalyptic symbolism within early Islam itself. And what we will see over the course of the 7th century, particularly in the so-called era of the Umayad Karlips in the second half of 7th century, is very major investment in Jerusalem, the building of the Alaksa Mosque on the temple mound. There's a very interesting argument made that Jerusalem is being prepared for gods to come and sit in judgment. So the intensity of apocalyptic expectation in early Islam is very important, I think, to how the early Muslim elite are viewing what they're doing in Jerusalem. Now, you're right that beyond that, partly by virtue of the rapidity of conquest, and the way in which the conquerors initially concentrated, on taking control of the countryside and then negotiating with civic elites, offering those

civic elites continuity of property ownership and rights to worship if they agree to pay tribute to the Arab conquerors. You see very little disruption on the ground, although what is going on is a fundamentally military process. So that's why archaeologically you don't see much by way of destruction. The Arabs aren't turning up and doing what Mongols do of sort of raising cities to the ground. controlling the countryside is the first military priority, and that tends to lead very little by way of archaeological evidence behind. But it's also true, and it's also crucial that their primary goal is to establish control over a region and extract tribute from the local population, with the Arabs or Arabians

establishing themselves as a separately cantoned, almost warrior caste initially, living off the tributes collected from the local population. And they build a new city camp, don't they, at Rumley, which is just kind of inland from Gaza? And that's a very common phenomenon we will see throughout the areas conquered by the Arabs in this way. And this allows for an enormous amount of economic, administrative and cultural continuity on the ground. So, in fact, the area of greatest continuity of literary culture from the ancient into the early medieval world in terms of writing in Greek, for example, is Palestine as it passes into Arab. rule, because both the Persians and the Arabs have conquered Palestine rapidly and have been very happy to leave the existing infrastructure in intact. And in Palestine, as in Egypt, as in Syria,

which we largely have are the same elites administering and dominating the same regions, collecting essentially the same taxes, but then handing those taxes over to Arab masters, instead of sending them off to the Roman authorities in Constantinople or the Sassanian authorities in Sate Sifon. And they're doing so until the end of the 7th century in the same languages. It's only at the end of the 7th century that the Caliph Abdul Malik, who is one of the great caliphs of early Islamic history and who consolidates an imperial system, introduces Arabic as an imperial language and a language of administration. It's at that point that local elites throughout this nascent, caliphal world, whether they're adopting Islam or not, whether they're Christians

or Muslims or not, have to start learning Arabic in order to maintain their positions in local society. So the linguistic Arabization of communities in the Near East shouldn't be read to indicate that old populations have been swept away and replaced by huge numbers of settlers, as it were, coming in from inner Arabia. And in terms of religion, again, we think of Islam as a completely different religion to Christianity or Judaism, albeit that they have Abrahamic roots. But it's not at all clear to the people on the ground that this is not just another Christian heresy, is it? Islam looks quite like the sort of prayer that they're used to. And the way that Muslims pray, prostrating themselves, is what the Greek Orthodox monks did at the time.

This is further complicated by the fact that it is quite clear, and this comes across from a close reading of both the Arabic and non-Arabic sources, that the armies of conquest, although the leadership is made up of Arabians or Arabs who have been called to monotheism in what we might call a sort of proto-Kuranic or proto-Islamic form, that there are also individuals and groups fighting in those armies of conquest who are still thinking of themselves as Christians or thinking themselves as Jews. Also Jews taking part in the conquest. And indeed, we're told that when Sergius, or whoever the Roman commander is, is killed by the Arabs, we're told by another 7th century source that the Jewish community near Gaza celebrates,

because they regard the Romans as persecutors and these Arabs as liberating them from Roman control. To some Roman onlookers, they're saying, well, what do these people preaching? They're preaching the worship of the God of the Old Testament, but they seem to deny the divinity of Christ. They sound like Jews. So some people are assuming their Jews, made more complicated by the Thuner Barclay Jews in the armies of conquest and the first governor of Jerusalem appointed by the authorities is Jewish. Others look at the same claims and say these are claims made by Christian heretical groups. They must be Christian heretics. And Islam itself is acquiring greater definition and form over the course of the 7th century in the same way that Christianity adopted greater definition and form over the course of the 4th century, as each of these religions had become.

imperial religion. Islam acquires greater theological definition that people come to understand it as a separate and rival religion rather than something derivative of one of the existing religions. Peter, when I was writing my book from the Holy Mountain and reading about this period and hanging around Jerusalem talking to archaeologists, I met this Franciscan called Michalie Piccherillo, who dug up a lot of the churches from this period. And his view was that there was a great wave of church building after the conquest, particularly around the Jordan and in the desert, and that far from being a period when Christianity goes into decline, that the new conquerors have lighter taxes, less money is being sent off to Constantinople, and that many of the,

particularly the non-Orthodox Christian groups, are actually flourishing at this point. I think the level of taxation issue is more complicated, but the point is that the taxes are being collected still by Christian elites. And as is always the case, the people collecting the taxes take a cut. So it's a good time for Christian elites, and they're investing a lot of that in church building, a magnificent wave of church building, particularly in what is now Jordan, particularly for those Christian communities who had been regarded as heterodox or non-conformist by the increasingly persecutory imperial authorities in Constantinople, the period of Arab rule is something of a golden age. And changes the way we think about this, particularly because early Islam

isn't terribly interested in conversion. If we're looking at the Mediterranean world in the Near East around the year 700 AD, the majority of Christians are subjects of the carliff of Damascus. Well, look, let's take a break there. And after the break, we're going to introduce you to an unexpected, perhaps, figure from this period of history. He's a saint. He's St. John of Damascus, who lives just a few miles away from Gaza. Join us then. Welcome back. Peter, just tell us St. John of Damascus. First of all, where does he stand in the pantheon of saints in Christian belief? And who was he? He's regarded as one of the greatest theologians in the Eastern Orthodox tradition and is a fascinating figure who really embodies and epitomizes how, despite the Arab conquest, the establishment of Khalifal rule, the Christian communities of the Near East still remember. remain part of a broader Christian universe and cosmos and world that still embraces Syria,

Palestine and Constantinople. John belongs to a family of Syrian Christians who have probably been serving as the bureaucratic class, who probably for centuries were serving as bureaucrats under Roman emperors in Syria, and who then simply continue their bureaucratic lifestyle under Arab rule, operating as bureaucrats ultimately at the court of the Umayad-Kaliffs ruling over this new empire from Damascus. He then retires, as many civil servants did in this period, Christian civil servants did in this period, to a monastic cell. He becomes a monk and theologian. At Masaba, the monastery is still there, isn't it? Exactly, is still there. And is particularly important for two aspects of his thought. First of all, I say by this point at the end of

the 7th century, is now become apparent to Christians and others that Islam is a rival religion. It is acquiring much greater definition at the court of the Umayyads at Damascus, where the caliphs are presiding over formal disputations between Christian, Jewish and Muslim scholars over theological issues, which is making it clear of what the differences between these religions are, what they have in common, but crucially, where they stand apart. And John writes one of our first detailed critiques of Islam from a Christian perspective, from an Orthodox perspective, where he emphasizes what it has in common with earlier Christian heresies, but he is treating it as a separate religion. He clearly knows Islam as religion in detail up close. He is referring to verses of the Quran,

including interestingly some verses that seem to have been lost since then, which is an interesting historical feature. But John's critique of Islam is particularly important because it's so close to events and he knows Islam so intimately up close that actually his critique then provides a sort of intellectual scaffold around which subsequent generations of Muslim scholars will then compose and draft their own justifications of Islam. So in that sense he makes a very important contribution to the emergence of Muslim theology. At the same time, the end of the 7th century, one of the major points of division that emerges between Muslims and Christians, and particularly Christians in the Roman Empire, is the place of religious images in worship.

Images or icons, such as those that survive from St. Catharines in Sinai, our best preserved 6th century icons of Mary and the saints, have come to play a central role in Christian worship. At the end of the 7th century, the Caliph Abdal Malik denounces the Christian use of images as idolatrous and affirms that Islamic opposition to the veneration of images is a cornerstone of the Islamic faith. This will then spark off a nervous reaction in the Byzantine Empire, which finds itself on a back foot militarily, and in the 730s and 740s, the Byzantine authorities will themselves crack down on the use of images in Christian worship. And John of Damascus, writing in Syria and in Palestine, having probably engaged in this dispute with the Arabs earlier, writes our most

detailed and influential justification of the veneration of icons in the place of Orthodox worship. Again, he's ready for this debate because he's already probably engaged in it with the Arabs. And just again, to clarify this, John of Damascus, in his youth, there was a story in I think one of those Rutherland books that he was a drinking companion of the future Kali Fali-Azid. He's right there in the court. Yeah, I absolutely know. He knows this world intimately up. But if you've got John of Damascus or John Damascis, as he's sometimes known, who's saying, you know what, this religion, Islam, it's heretical, let's say that, but it doesn't feel so different. One would assume then that it would be easy and, you know, just a smooth transition to convert. But conversions don't happen in great numbers, do they, Peter? Why not? Islam isn't interested in conversion at this formative phase. What is it interested in doing? really is extracting tribute from the subjugated populations, which can then be shared out

amongst the Muslims. If anything, that then provides the Islamic leadership, the Khalifal leadership, with a disincentive to see widespread conversion, because widespread conversion would lead to a diminution in your tax revenues. Right. So when you do start getting large-scale conversion, it actually causes political crisis. The Christian communities of Palestine, Syria, Egypt will remain probably in a majority in each of those areas, down to the period of the First Crusade and beyond. Really? So majority Christian till the 11th, 12th century. That's the position I would take, yes. That's so different from conventional views.

So Palestine remains majority Christian right through this period. And yet there are important things going on. And you mentioned the building of the Alaksa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock. Take us there for a minute, because these are substantial projects and really the first mosques of Islam. In the fourth century, if we go back to the age of the Empress Helena and Constantine, with adoption of Christianity, we've seen as it were, the monumental reappropriation of the Holy Land and Jerusalem by the Christian Roman authorities with the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or the Church in the Timothy in Bethlehem.

Christians imagine themselves of the New Israel reappropriating the Holy Land on behalf of God's new chosen people. In a sense, what we're seeing in the second half of the 7th century with the Umayad-Kalifts, the investment in Jerusalem, the Umar with their new revelation doing the same. The great centerpiece of this is the construction of the Al-Aksa Mosque, the great mosque on the temple mound, which is, at the time it's built, is regarded by some of the Caliphate's Jewish subjects, many of the Christian subjects, and possibly even by some of the Muslims themselves, as an actual restoration of the ancient Solomonic temple. So, for example, I was recently in Turkey, if you look at the frescoes at the Sumer monastery, one of the finest Byzantine monasteries in Pontus,

it has a depiction of Jesus in Jerusalem, and you look at the depiction of the temple on the temple site, and it's actually depiction of the Alaksa Mosque. Crusaders visiting Jerusalem centuries ahead will regard the Alaksa Mosque as actually being the temple, and hence that's why the night Templars partly end up there. Now, the Alexa Mosque, however, is very, very interesting, and there's something about it. There's a mystery there which hasn't quite been resolved, because what we see in these great urban centres in Jerusalem or Damascus is the Umayad-Khalyves conveying the majesty of their new religion and the majesty of their new empire by appropriating key aspects of Roman and Greco-Roman monumental architecture to convey their authority to their former Roman subject. in terms they understand. The Alaksa Mosque in Jerusalem, it seems to be modelled upon an earlier Byzantine church, the church of the Kakismar, a much smaller structure that was located between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, where the Virgin Mary supposedly rested on her way to Bethlehem to give birth to Jesus.

But it's one of a tradition, isn't it, Peter, of these octagonal Byzantine churches. In your own town of Thessaloniki, there's one there. But the similarity in structure between the Church of the Kathesma and the Alaksa, is particularly striking, and this is important because the verse in the Quran on the Virgin Mary bears very close resemblance to the liturgy that was celebrated at the Church of the Catholicism in the pre-Islamic period. So there's some sort of fascinating connection between early Islam, Al-Axa and the Church of the Catholicism and the Virgin Mary. And people may not know that there's more mentions of Mary in the Quran than there is in the Bible?

This is one of those aspects of, as a were, popular piety that late antique Christianity and early Islam very much have in common is very high regard to the Virgin Mary. And what we see in the Dome of the Rock is the first sort of public presentation of Islam, isn't it? And of the Islamic conquest. So you've got the diademes of the Byzantine emperors and the Persian emperors up on the wall as sort of trophies. What you have is the declaration now of the faith in a public space, as we're, denouncing Christian Trinitarian. doctrine, saying, do not say three. Do not say three. God is only one. The idea of the Trinity, three gods in one. At the same time, we're getting the Islamic Declaration of the faith, the Declaration of Muhammad as a prophet of God, on the coinage being minted by the Caliph

fate at the same time. This is now becoming clear to people that the Holy of a living in a new empire is an empire dominated by a new faith, and this is being conveyed to them by the great monuments and the cities they're passing through, but also in the coins in their pocket. How interesting. Now, as well as the Dome of the Rock and as well as the Alaksa Mosque, there's also another great Umayad building in Palestine further into the desert away from Gaza, which is the Kiribat al-Mafjad, is that how it's pronounced, Kiribat al-Mafjad, Hisham's Palace, the hunting lodge outside Jericho. And there you have images that look not unlike the images of Justinian and Theodora at Ravenna. They're now in an Islamic context.

These desert palaces are fascinating. My favourite one is a place of Kasser Amar in Jordan. First of all, it's very interesting that a lot of these desert palaces have figurative images in them. That's because, as it were, the hostility to images of living things that would be associated with some strands of Islam has not yet been consolidated or set in stone, hence some of which may have religious significance as well. But when you see the quality of art in these desert palaces, what you're seeing is a sense of both the way in which this early Santa Claus is comfortable with naturalistic art, but you also see it's extraordinary wealth. Because these people are buying up the best quality art, the best quality artists that are available anywhere in Western Eurasia at this time. So if you want to see the best quality art, you can get anywhere around the year 700, you go to these desert palaces. They're not just there for people to sort of chillax in, yeah.

these are serving a very important political function. In the great urban centres, like Damascus or Jerusalem, that's where the Khalifal authorities negotiate with the former Roman urban elites. You go to these desert palaces to maintain contact on the fringes of the desert with the existing, surviving, Bedouin tribal leadership there. That's where you negotiate with them.

That's where you have your parties, drinking wine. The one in Kazan Amar has a hamam, a tamar. attitude with a large depiction of a female nude at the entrance of the Hamas. A Hamam, just in case people don't know the word, is of course a Turkish bath. It's a steam bath. And everyone's naked in there, and there's pictures of naked women. Some people interpret this large female nude as a being of political significance. I think it's something a bit more loose than that.

In Indian Muslim history, Hamam's Turkish baths are places where negotiations take place, partly because everyone is naked and they can't bring arms in. So it's just a place where everyone's sort of stripped down. and to their essentials. And what goes on in Hamams? Stays in Hamams. Exactly. Okay, got it.

So Peter, I mean, this all seems to be thriving. There's all seems to be a template for, you know, harmony. What about the economy? I mean, is Gaza still this exporting hub that it used to be? I think by the time we're dealing with the golden age of the caliphate, as it were, Gaza is still extremely prosperous. The countryside is prosperous. Wine production is continuing.

Lots of the wine being consumed, of course, by the local Christian and monastic population and monasteries are still there. How amazing. There's no stopping of that. Indeed, we even know we have documentary sources from Egypt showing that wine estates owned by the Caliph, ascending wine to Damascus. The wine culture isn't quite one might necessarily imagine. Pictures of naked women in the soda and wine exports to Damascus. That's not what you imagine, no. But I think that the circulation of these goods is diminishing.

For example, we look at the evidence from Constantinople. Constantinople is no longer sucking in goods from these areas on a large scale in the way they did before. It's much more dependent on trade with the Aegean and much more interested in the Adriatic. I think, as it were, the Garzan trade has become more locally concentrated, but it's still very prosperous. By the 8th century population levels arising again in the 6th century, there had been a major impact on the region of bubolic plague. So from the mid 6th century to the mid 8th, population levels have been down. By the mid-8th century, the plague has burnt itself. and population levels are rising again.

Peter, during the Roman Empire, it was always the East that was the richest half. The luxury and the really fancy lifestyles were taking place in cities like Antioch and Constantinople and Alexandria, as well as Gaza. After the Islamic takeover of the Eastern Mediterranean, do both sides of the Mediterranean remain out of contact with each other? I mean, would you still have traders going from Gaza and delivering wine? to Marseille or to the Aegean, or do you get an impression of a cut-off, the, you know, sort of Mohammed and Charlemagne idea that terrain is cut in half? People wouldn't argue anymore that Mediterranean trade is brought to an end in the way that was once argued, but that it is operating at a much lower ebb, I think, is the crucial point.

If anything, the developmental differences between East and West are exacerbated because Syria, Palestine, Egypt are conquered so rapidly that that's where you find, as it were, ancient levels of economic sophistication and complexity surviving in their healthiest and most fully formed manner into the medieval period. That is wonderful, Peter. So we're coming to an end of this period of stability and prosperity now in this series on Gaza. After the invisible conquest and the prosperity of the Umayah period, which should come after, the prosperity of the Byzantine period, the whole of Palestine sees a century of instability from really from the kind of 9th, 10th century onwards. And you get different Muslim powers,

Toulunids, Fatimids, Bedouin and Turkmen coming in. The towns begin to go into a bit of a decline. Gaza changes hands again several times as it had done in the earlier centuries. And the instability is only beginning because in the 11th century, a whole new movement comes out of Europe that's going to change the history of Palestine very significantly for two or three centuries. And that is the rise of the Crusaders. And in the next episode, we're going to talk about Saladin, about Richard the Lionheart, and about what happens when the Crusades land in the Holy Land. That's next time. But for this time, thank you so much, Peter Cyrus. That was extraordinary and so interesting, comprehensive, very, very good. Until the next time, we

meet, it is goodbye from me, Anita Arnon. And goodbye from me, William Durhampool.