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The Umayyad Advance on Constantinople
The Queen of Cities Besieged, 650-718
Series: - The Medieval Mediterranean, Volume: 149
Author:
In 718, a massive Umayyad army led by Maslama b. Ê¿Abd al-Malik decamped from outside the walls of Constantinople. A terrible set of disasters struck the besieging army, leading to the collapse of the last Arab effort against the Byzantine capital. For the Byzantines, it was a sure sign of the Virginâs divine protection, an interpretation heightened by careful planning of the cunning new emperor, Leo III. But this was not the first such near-conquest the Byzantines had weathered at the hand of an Umayyad general.
This book seeks to explore the strategy and plan of the Umayyad designs on the Queen of Cities, from its inception under then-general MuÊ¿Äwiya b. AbÄ« SufyÄn through to the disaster in 718. Comparing narratives from more than 50 sources in a variety of languages ranging from Britain to China, this work untangles the complex web of narratives surrounding these campaigns and provides a new reconstruction of chronology of the sieges of Constantinople.
This book seeks to explore the strategy and plan of the Umayyad designs on the Queen of Cities, from its inception under then-general MuÊ¿Äwiya b. AbÄ« SufyÄn through to the disaster in 718. Comparing narratives from more than 50 sources in a variety of languages ranging from Britain to China, this work untangles the complex web of narratives surrounding these campaigns and provides a new reconstruction of chronology of the sieges of Constantinople.
Robert J. Olsen, Ph. D. (2021), Saint Louis University, is currently a Visiting Teaching Historian at McKendree University. He has published a variety of articles on Byzantium and the broader medieval world ranging from the Gregorian Reform to Tang diplomacy.
Specialists in Byzantium, early Islam, and the Middle East post-Arab conquests will be chiefly interested, as will scholars in military history and intellectual history, those working on the Greek-Syriac-Arabic translation movement, and academic libraries.