In 718, a massive Umayyad army led by Maslama b. ʿAbd 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 Virgin’s 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 Muʿāwiya b. Abī Sufyān 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.