The envoy of the Roman Emperor in the Court of Yazid In the past 10 days, I was working on writing a historical play about a Roman envoy in the court of Yazid bin Mu’awiya (May Allah curse both of them) after the massacre in Karbala in the year 680. The Roman envoy saw the severed head of Imam Hussein (Peace be upon him) on a silver platter and he asked Yazid about the head. When Yazid told him that it was the head of the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him and his progeny), the envoy expressed his revulsion over this acts of violence against such a holy person. Some Shiite narrations say that Yazid killed that envoy, but others say that there was a Jew present in the court at that time and he was the one killed by Yazid because he also objected the killing of Imam Hussein. I read so many sources in English and Arabic, I could not verify that the Roman envoy was killed. I found out very interesting things that I want to share with you. Some of these things concern Mu’awiya and his peace treaties with the Byzantine emperors. He sent the Islamic army against Constantinople, not because he wanted to spread the religion of Islam but for the spoils of war: ‘Twice did Mu’āwiya stretch out his mighty arm against Constantinople. The main object of these raids into Bilād al-Rūm (the territory of the Romans, Asia Minor) was of course the acquisition of booty’. (‘A CHRONOLOGY OF THE MIDDLE AGES (500-1500)’, Mediterranean Journal of Social Sciences, Vol. 3 (10) July 2012, p. 14.) Mu’awiya signed the first treaty because he pulled the army to fight Imam Ali: Mu’awiya’s struggle with ‘Ali for the caliphate forced him in 659 to sign a three-year truce with (Emperor) Constans requiring weekly payments of 1,000 solidi (pieces of gold), one slave, and one horse’ (Alexander P. Kazhdan, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, (Oxford University Press, 1991, Published online: 2005)) The second peace treaty happened when Mu’awiya became a caliph and he pulled the army not only because of their defeat by the Greek fire of the Byzantine forces, but because Mu’awiya wanted the army to fight any opposition against achieving his aspiration of making the change of an elective to an hereditary kingdom: After that ‘Umayyads followed the practices of those they had succeeded, Persians and Romans. Dynastic succession, a centralized and all-powerful caliph, complex revenue systems and administrative policies reflected how far Islam had moved from the place of its birth’. (Akbar S. Ahmed, Discovering Islam: Making Sense of Muslim History and Society (Routledge, 2002) This treaty consisted of paying a larger tribute to Emperor Constantine IV: It was ‘a 30-year treaty stipulating annual Byz. Payments of 3,000 solidi (pieces of gold), 50 hostages and 50 horses’. (Alexander P. Kazhdan, ed. The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, (Oxford University Press, 1991, Published online: 2005)) The Byzantines considered this peace treaty as a great victory against the ‘rising Muslim tide’, a ‘turning point of world-wide historical importance’. Constantine IV was held as a hero and European kings sent him valuable gifts because Europe was saved ‘from being overwhelmed by the Muslim flood’: ‘This victory halted the Umayyad expansion towards Europe for almost thirty years’. (‘A CHRONOLOGY OF THE MIDDLE AGES (500-1500)’) After that, ‘The successor of Muwaiyah, Yazid (680-685), had to renew the treaty in 680 or 681’, (kassiani.fhw.gr/asiaminor/Forms/fLemmaBody.aspx?lemmaid=10347). It became clear to me that the Roman envoy, who was present at Yazid’s court, was there to renew the peace treaty and it was not likely that Yazid would kill that envoy. Apart from that, I came cross some other interesting things, one of them concerning emperor Heraclius and his exchange of letters with the Prophet Muhammad (Peace be upon him and his progeny). According to Arabic chronicles, Heraclius became Muslim but he kept that to himself: ‘The second position involved the exchange of envoys and letters between Muhammad and Heraclius. The Arabic chronicles show that the Byzantine emperor was very receptive to the letters from the Prophet of Islam and the chronicles include his personal feelings and beliefs. They indicate that the Emperor accepted Islam but feared his subjects and so he kept his belief in Islam hidden’. (M. Tahar Mansouri, ‘Byzantium and the Arabs from the VIIth to XIth Century’) Something else concerning the names given to Arabs and Muslims in the Latin and the Greek texts of the late antiquity and the Middle Ages. They used the names Saracenoi/Saracen and Hagarenoi/Hagareni to refer to the Arabs and Muslims. The term Saracen is derived from the name of Sarah the wife of Abraham, and Hagarenoi derived from the name of the second wife of Abraham or the sons of Agar or Hagar. Both terms were negative because they meant the slaves of Sara or that the Muslims are descended from a woman, which Arab authors regard as not a good origin. They were also called Ishmaelite, a word accepted by the Arabs and used in the Arabic texts when they refer to the origins of Arab people, who are “sons of Ismail”. (M. Tahar Mansouri, ‘Byzantium and the Arabs from the VIIth to XIth Century’) Finely, I decided to postpone writing the play to collect more data. Thank you.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Nov 2014 09:03:26 +0000
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