Episode #216 - Did the Siege of Constantinople Even Happen? (Part I)

December 4, 2024·1 hr 14 min·5 clips

Did the early Arab sieges of Constantinople, key to apocalyptic beliefs, actually occur?

Sebastian Major begins with a comparative survey of apocalyptic traditions across cultures, observing that the notion of a final destructive event appears in the Norse Ragnarok (a wolf age and wind age preceding the consumption of the cosmos by Fenrir), the Hindu Kali Yuga (the last and most degenerate of four cosmic ages, ended by the warrior avatar Kalki), Jewish War of Gog and Magog, and Christian Revelation (a new Jerusalem following the last judgment). The thread connecting these traditions is the role of a specific real or symbolic place — typically Jerusalem — in triggering the end of the age. Constantinople emerges as a second candidate: redesigned as New Rome by Constantine in 330 AD, the city functioned as the political, spiritual, and economic capital of the Roman Empire for a millennium, surviving nineteen sieges between 376 and 1203. This unbroken defensive record gave rise to a belief in supernatural protection, and eventually both Byzantine Christian and Islamic end-times traditions assigned the city apocalyptic significance. A hadith attributed to the Prophet Muhammad predicted that Constantinople would eventually be conquered, and some Islamic traditions identified that conquest as a key event in the final days preceding the Mahdi's battle against a force of darkness. The historical record of the two early Arab sieges is the episode's focus: the first siege is dated to 674–678 and the second to 717–718, but the sources are a mixture of Byzantine chronicles compiled from now-lost originals and early Arabic writing that was just beginning to develop as a discipline. Major notes that Arabic historical writing only matured in the 8th century, that much early Byzantine historiography survives only in medieval compilations, and that the battles involved the legendary weapon known as Greek fire — an unquenchable liquid projected from Roman ships — which itself accumulated mythological status that complicates source evaluation. Major does not resolve the question in this first episode but establishes why the city matters, why its early defenders' accounts became legendarily unreliable, and why historians have recently re-examined whether the first siege in particular happened as traditionally described.

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