I recently gave a paper at the Forced Movement in Late Antiquity, c. AD 300-700 conference, hosted by the German Historical Institute in London on 6—8 April 2017. It was nice to be back in London, even if only for a short stay, and great to reconnect with UK-based colleagues. The full program is available here. Many thanks to the hosts for a very well-run event. My abstract, titled ‘Roman loyalists in early Umayyad Lebanon,’ read as follows:
Although the Eastern Roman Empire was driven out of Syria early in the seventh century – first by Persian armies in the 610s and then, after a brief reoccupation, by Muslim forces in the 630s – some local individuals and groups maintained loyalties to the Empire through the final decades of the century. This paper explores the dynamic of political loyalties and group categorization in the latter half of the seventh century, and how people negotiated them through movement and migration, through two events. First, the ‘trumpeter’s sons’ led a revolt of Roman prisoners-of-war in Phoenician Tripolis in AD 653/4, who then went on to play a key role in the Roman-Arab naval campaign of 654/5. Second, the Mardaites were soldiers and civilians who violently resisted Muslim control of Lebanon and Palestine for over a decade from the mid-670s through the mid-680s. They were eventually removed to Roman lands as part of a negotiated agreement between Emperor Justinian II and Caliph ‘Abd-al-Malik, where they were resettled as a group.
These episodes allow us to explore themes of group formation, cohesion, and leadership in response to the violent political change characterizing the withdrawal of Roman rule and the gradual establishment and legitimation of Caliphal authority in the later seventh century Levant. Although religious communities and identities have rightly received a great deal of attention and study in the early Islamic Near East, this paper explores movement of populations and prisoners of war made explicitly on account of political loyalties to, and identification with, what remained of the Eastern Roman Empire.
Conference themes addressed: prisoners of war, legally exiled groups, followers of warrior leader
April 14th, 2017 by DC Whalin