THE CALIPHS' ARMIES The Byzantine writers, who had two centuries of Arab warfare behind them when they wrote their accounts of the Caliphs' armies, have to distinguish between two sorts of collisions with the Saracen enemy. Comparatively rarely, and hardly ever after the year Boo, the Caliph himself took the field with his household troops in addition to the levee en masse of the Muslims of Syria, Mesopotamia and Iraq. More usually the wars consisted of raids into the upland of Asia Minor by the Emirs of the frontier towns —Tarsus, Mejafarkin, Antioch, Mardin or Malatia, which it was the duty of the military governors of the East-Roman themes to ward off, or to avenge by similar raids into Cilicia or North Syria.
The emperors Leo and Constantine in their books describe the Saracens as composed almost entirely of mailed light horse armed with lance and javelin—only occasionally do we hear of black Soudanese archers—and unencumbered by wheel transport—all their baggage was carried by camels. They moved with extra ordinary rapidity, and the governor who had to face a raid would do better by not attempting to follow their track, but rather by besetting the routes by which they must return to their own country. They had only the choice of a limited number of passes, and if provision was made for blocking each of these, the enemy must infallibly be intercepted. And he would be caught when loaded with plunder, and therefore unable to move with the same rapidity with which he had started. Of course if he should besiege a town, and not merely practise the normal circu lar raid, the circumstances would be altered, and an attempt should be made to fall upon him when he had settled down be fore the walls of the besieged place. But this would be exceptional. The last great formal invasion of Asia Minor was that of the Caliph Al-Mutassim in 838, who penetrated as far as Amorium in Phrygia—but even this was only a raid on the very largest scale, in revenge for an irruption of the emperor Theophilus into Northern Syria in 836,—not a serious attempt to win new terri tory from the East-Romans. Al-Mutassim's father Haroun-al Raschid had gone still further into Asia Minor in his campaign of 8o6, having taken Angora, and seen the waters of the Black Sea at Heraclea; but he too had made no attempt at annexation, and contented himself with imposing an ignominious peace on the Emperor Nicephorus. It may be said indeed that the famous
defence of Constantinople by Leo the Isaurian in 717-718, when the formidable attack by sea and land of Muslemah and Soliman had suffered a decisive repulse, marks the end of the first period of Arab invasions, when the conquest of the whole eastern world was still inspiring the hopes of the Muslims. In later wars the ehad might be preached, and the enthusiasm of "True Believers" might be called upon for a desperate effort : but their rulers were no longer fanatics, and preferred a favourable peace to the con tinuance of an effort which had failed.
In the ninth century the strength of the Caliphate began to decline, in the tenth it was so reduced that the East-Romans launched campaigns against it, and reconquered Cilicia, North Syria, and part of Mesopotamia. This falling off in offensive was caused by decay at the heart—a succession of weak caliphs, en gaged in civil war with pretenders, lost control over the outlying provinces, whose governors became practically independent, and only assisted their sovereigns when it was convenient to them with men or money. At Baghdad itself the Turkish royal guards were continually indulging in mutiny, and not infrequently deposing a sovereign in order to finger the accession donative of his suc cessor. The authority of the Abbasides was really confined to Iraq, and sometimes when a specially arrogant governor or vizier was asserting himself, it did not even extend to the walls of their palace. After the Seljuk Tribes had swept over western Asia in the later eleventh century; swamping the provincial dynasties which had preserved a nominal allegiance to the Caliphate, the phantom at Baghdad became a perfectly negligible quantity. The only wonder is that the line of the Abbasides continued to survive in lineal succession, till the Tatars of the 13th century starved the last bearer of the title to death in his own treasure house (1258).
(C. W. C. 0.)