THE BRIEF that I was given for this workshop was to consider aspects of Byzantine attitudes towards the Umayyads. In an ideal world one would aim at a careful examination of all the sources that are written in Greek or come from areas under Byzantine control and that refer to the period ca . 660 to 750; regrettably this world is not ideal. There are, at the very least, constraints of time, even if not immediately of space, and this discussion will be limited in scope.

The period under consideration falls in the “great gap” in Byzantine historiography, which has been the focus of discussions in previous meetings of these workshops and which has been ably discussed by, for example, Michael Whitby. Nevertheless, there is still a daunting amount of material that provides evidence for this period, as can be seen from the lists drawn up by Robert Hoyland in his survey of the non-Islamic witnesses to the early years of lslam. The headings under which Hoyland categorizes the Greek material covers a range of genres: apologetics, eschatologies, martyrologies, collections of miracles and sermons, as well as histories. Of the material in these lists the most substantial and sustained accounts are, of course, found in the histories-the Chronographia of Theophanes the Confessor and the Historia syntomos of Nicephorus. These are central to the Byzantine historiographical tradition, and the material and attitudes found in Theophanes in particular cont inued to appear in Byzantine chronicles until the twelfth century (in the work of Zonaras), and beyond. This paper will focus on the accounts found in Theophanes, while that of Nicephorus will appear intermittently.

In 1986, in a rather general discussion of the Byzantine image of Arabs, I suggested that there are two clichés produced in discussions of attitudes towards outsiders in the ancient world: that racial origin made no difference to the acceptance of an individual, but that “outsiders” were viewed as inferior. I went on to argue, in broad terms, that the same held in the Byzantine world, but with one major difference. In the Byzantine world, the border between acceptance and rejection, or hostility, lay in religious affiliation: once conformity with the religious stance of the dominant group had been achieved, then ethnic background was irrelevant. In the 1986 paper relatively little attention was given to Theophanes, and none to Nicephorus, an imbalance that is now being redressed. But the question underlying my discussion remains the same: to what extent were racial differences relevant to the Byzantines? How acutely perceptive were they of the religious beliefs and practices of non-Christian communities? Did internal doctrinal divisions within the church have greater significance than conflicts with Islam? Was adherence to orthodoxy, as defined with the hindsight of a writer long after the event, the major criterion for Byzantine perceptions of others?