On August 15, 718, Constantinople hurled back the greatest assault the forces of Islam had ever mustered — and in so doing, preserved Western civilization.
The irony of this date runs deep: The Muslims’ siege of that great city had begun on the same date a year earlier. And deeper still is the bitter fate that Constantinople — once the shield of Christendom — went on to suffer.
The story is worth retelling in full.
For All the Marbles
After several failed sieges of Constantinople, in 715 the Umayyad Caliphate decided that enough was enough. This time it would vomit forth everything it had in a single, all-consuming effort to bring down the ancient Christian capital.
Caliph Suleiman summoned his younger brother Maslama, commanding him to lead Islam’s combined might to Constantinople and “stay there until you conquer it or I recall you.” The young emir accepted the task as a sacred honor; he vowed, “I [will] enter this city knowing that it is the capital of Christianity and its glory; my only purpose in entering it is to uphold Islam and humiliate unbelief.”
Maslama crossed into Christian territory with 120,000 jihadists and, as one near-contemporary chronicler records, “with both sword and fire, he put an end to Asia Minor.” On August 15, the Muslim host began its assault on the city, which was under the command of the newly crowned emperor Leo III. Just weeks earlier, judged the ablest man to face the crisis, Leo — a former general — had been consecrated in the Hagia Sophia itself, the beating heart of Eastern Christendom (though today a mosque).
Unable to breach Constantinople’s cyclopean walls, Maslama waited for 1,800 ships carrying an additional 80,000 warriors to arrive, hoping to choke the city into submission.
It was then that Leo acted. He ordered the massive harbor chain — the city’s ancient maritime gate — cast aside. As the Muslim fleets hesitated, wondering whether to seize the apparent opening, “the ministers of destruction were at hand,” writes Theophanes the chronicler: Leo had unleashed the fire-bearing ships. Theophanes describes the scene: “some of them were cast up burning by the sea walls, others sank to the bottom with their crews, and others were swept down flaming.”
Greek Fire, the empire’s closely guarded weapon, turned the waters into an inferno (as captured in the above twelfth century illustration on the naval battle).
On Their Own
Soon after, Maslama learned that his brother, Caliph Suleiman, had died of “indigestion” after gorging on two baskets of eggs and figs, followed by marrow and sugar. His successor, Caliph Omar II, preoccupied with consolidating his own rule, initially paid little attention to the starving army encamped before the Christian capital.
Then came “one of the cruelest winters that anyone could remember.” Snow covered the ground for 100 days. Maslama’s men froze, starved, and prayed for supplies that never came. Bulgars — warlike tribesmen from the north — harried any Muslim detachment that ventured out in search of food.
When spring finally arrived, reinforcements trickled in, but frost, famine, and disease had already decimated the host. Theophanes records: “Since the Arabs were extremely hungry, they ate all their dead animals: horses, asses, and camels. Some even say they put dead men and their own dung in pans, kneaded this, and ate it. A plague-like disease descended on them, and destroyed a countless throng.”
Even so, Omar could not bring himself to abandon the siege. To be the one to capture the one remaining infidel kingdom that mocked Islam’s advance was too great a temptation. A fresh navy — 800 ships strong — was fitted out in Alexandria and Libya and sailed to blockade the Bosporus. Having learned to fear Greek Fire, they kept their distance.
But salvation came from an unexpected source: the crews manning the new fleet were not Arab Muslims but Egyptian Christian (Coptic) conscripts. In the dead of night, the two Christian fleets conspired, seized the transports’ skiffs, and defected to the city, hailing Leo as their sovereign. Theophanes writes that “the sea appeared to be covered with timber” as the Copts sailed to their coreligionists.
The defection stripped the Muslim fleet of crucial manpower and handed Leo valuable intelligence on enemy plans. Once again the boom was lifted, the fire-ships were loosed, and the confrontation — better described as a conflagration—was a rout.
A Pivotal Date
Leo pressed his advantage. He persuaded the Bulgar tribes to strike the now retreating Muslim land forces, killing as many as 22,000 half-starved and exhausted men.
At last Omar recalled Maslama. On August 15, 718, the great Muslim host lifted its camp. But its tribulations were not over: a violent storm wrecked many ships in the Sea of Marmara, and a volcanic eruption on Santorini rained fiery ash on others. Of the 2,560 ships that had set out for Damascus and Alexandria, only 10 reached their destinations — five to tell the tale. Of the 200,000 Muslims who had marched and sailed to subdue the Christian capital, only some 30,000 straggled home by land.
Contemporaries saw the hand of divine providence in the city’s salvation. God Himself, they believed, had turned back “the insatiable and utterly perverse Arabs.”
The caliph’s fury fell instead upon the Christians under his rule. Chronicler Bar Hebraeus writes: “And because of the disgrace which came upon the Arabs through their withdrawal from Constantinople, great hatred against the Christians sprang in the heart of Omar and he afflicted them severely.” Theophanes is more blunt: “Omar … set about forcing the Christians to become converted; those that converted he exempted from tax [jizya], while those that refused to do so he killed and so produced many martyrs.”
Constantinople’s repulsion of the hitherto unstoppable forces of Islam ranks among the most decisive events in Western history. The last time a Christian army had suffered such a defeat — at Yarmuk in 636 — vast territories were lost forever. Had the city fallen, large parts of Europe, perhaps all of it, might have become the northwestern frontier of the caliphate before the eighth century was over.
Historian John Julius Norwich puts it starkly: “Had the Saracens captured Constantinople in the seventh century rather than the fifteenth, all Europe — and America — might be Muslim today.”
Medieval chroniclers grasped the point and called August 15 an “ecumenical date” for all Christendom to rejoice.
And yet, for all its glory as the bastion of the faith, the city once hailed as “the capital of Christianity and its glory” now bears the name Istanbul — a bitter irony, the onetime bulwark of Christendom transformed into the seat of modern-day Turkdom.
This article was partially excerpted from Raymond Ibrahim’s book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West.
