Roman-Arab Relations and the Arab Adoption of Monotheism Before Islam

Islamic painting from c. 1335 of Ghassanid King Al-Harith ibn Jabalah a.k.a. Flavios Arethas (r. c. 528-69)

Roman interaction with the Arabs starts in the pagan period. There were some trade connections as far back as the last days of the Republic and the first tentative political-military contacts began in the early second century. There would be no Roman relationship with Arabs as a recognised corporate entity until the early fourth century, by which time Rome was well on its way to being Christian. After that, the Roman approach to the Arabs in the East was comparable to the situation with the Germanic peoples in the West, where Barbarians were not only vassalized and employed as border guards, but settled in increasing numbers within the Empire, Romanising and Christianising them, and establishing the foundations of the successor polities.

There were two key differences, as Irfan Shahid writes in Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century. First, the “experiment with the Germans did not last long. After the major breakthrough at Adrianople in 378 … these [Germans] brought about the collapse of the Empire in the West in the following century”, while “the experiment with the Arabs lasted … for three centuries”. Second, resulting in part from the first, the Arab border zone was a shelter and breeding ground for heresies far larger and more various than the Rhine or the Balkans.¹ The coincidence of Rome’s fragility and one of these heresies uniting a significant portion of the eternally fractious Arabs in the second quarter of the seventh century brought about the collapse of the Eastern Frontier (Limes Orientalis).

Early Roman-Arab Contact

Roman political entanglement with the Arabs can be dated from 106 AD, when the Romans annexed the Nabatean Kingdom, refashioning it as the province of Arabia Petraea. Roman garrisons were planted in other Nabatean towns outside the formal Imperial frontiers and a military presence extended the Roman sphere of influence as far as Hegra and Dumat al-Jandal in the northern Hijaz, bringing the Romans into contact with Arabs, some of whom were recruited as auxiliaries.

The Emperor Elagabalus (r. 218-22) and his cousin and successor, Alexander Severus (r. 222-35), were not Arabs, but the rise to power of their priestly family from Emessa (Homs) was an indicator of how integrated the Eastern provinces had become even at this stage. The same story is told by the ability of Marcus Julius Philippus (r. 244-49), amid the Crisis of the Third Century, to seize the throne: he was a Romanised Arab from the Arabia province, hence he is usually known as Philip the Arab. It is of interest that after the Empire was Christianised, stories would be told and endure well into the medieval period that Philip was the first Christian Emperor.² This is clearly untrue, but the traditions built off a truth, namely Philip’s evident sympathy for Christians.

Palmyra had been brought under Roman suzerainty a century before the Nabateans were conquered, but it retained considerable autonomy and by the third century it was favoured over the Nabateans as a buffer polity with the Persians. The Palmyrenes, an Aramaic-speaking Semitic people who were thoroughly Romanised but with strong tribal links to the Arabs, also provided the Romans a portal into the spice trade and other economic activity of the caravan route. The Palmyrenes grew in wealth and prestige, until the 260s when they made the fatal mistake of trying to break from Roman tutelage.

The Emperor Aurelian (r. 270-75) crushed the Palmyrene rebellion; razed their capital, Palmyra, a blow from which their economic and political status would never recover; and annexed their territory.³ The Palmyrene role as intermediaries with the Arabs was over; the Romans would deal with the Arabs directly from now on. Building on Aurelian’s military successes, Diocletian (r. 284-305) knit the Empire back together via a political order that prized defensibility and clarity. Far-flung Roman outposts like Hegra were abandoned and Imperial administration became much more militarised and intrusive.

Arabs began to settle on either side of the border in the Eastern limitrophe (frontier) provinces to secure Rome’s flank against its great Sasanian Persian rival, albeit within an initial administrative structure meant to keep them too divided to unite against Rome as the Palmyrenes had. The Romanisation of these populations, under the heavy tread of the post-Diocletian bureaucracy and surveillance, was extensive and by the sixth century complete: these were cives (citizens), considering themselves and being considered Romaioi (Romans).⁴ The Arabs in the no-man’s land between the two superpowers had a “satellitic existence” from here on out, with Roman power determining the political order of Arabs in the Levant beyond the frontier, and the Sasanian Persians’ Lakhmid clients holding down Mesopotamia.⁵ “The Arabs [of the Fertile Crescent] ceased to have an independent existence”.⁶

There were other Arabs defined as foederati, treaty-bound “friends of the Roman people” (amici populi Romani), effectively mercenary border guards and a pool of manpower that could be called upon to reinforce the legions. It is often said the Arab foederati were the next layer out, stationed outside the Roman borders, in the deserts, and that the distinction with the Arab cives only blurred over the fourth and fifth centuries, before essentially dissolving by the sixth. In this narrative, the growth in numbers of the foederati—as nomadic Arabs from the interior were drawn to the gold, weapons, and military training on offer—and their transition to being sedentary created sprawling encampments and tent cities that were eventually allowed to reach within the Syrian frontier. This does not seem to be correct.

As far as can be told, Arab foederati were settled on both sides of the border from the earliest days,⁷ and by the end of the three-century experiment with Arab foederati the Romans even allowed them an urban centre, which had been banned earlier as a lesson learned with the Palmyrenes. The physical gap between Arab cives and foederati, therefore, was always somewhat hazy and for reasons explored below the ideological gap was always even thinner. The Arab foederati became so devoutly Christian that in their own estimation they were joined in a sacral bond to the Emperor in Constantinople as the shield of God’s own Empire.⁸ The interesting thing is how quickly this process occurred.

The Fourth Century

The Arab tribe that had gained predominance in the limes (border zone) by 300 AD was the Tanukhids, who became the first Arabs formally enrolled as foederati, probably during the reign of Constantine (r. 306-37), the first Christian Roman Emperor.⁹ From Constantine’s time onwards, a core element of Romanisation was Christianisation. There was undoubtedly a special intensity to this among the Arabs in the Eastern limitrophe provinces as the area gained prestige on the one hand, with Jerusalem—a backwater since the second century¹⁰—revived after Constantine’s mother “mapped” out the loca sancta (holy places), and on the other hand the Roman legion was pulled from Palaestina itself to thicken the lines further north. The Romans needed reliable Arab troops to protect the pilgrims in Jerusalem and the monastics who spread into the southern deserts, near the most concerning pockets of hostile nomads in the Negev and Sinai.¹¹

Reflective of this, Christianity spread rapidly and deeply among the Tanukhids and other Arabs settled in or near the Roman frontiers, and Roman acculturation likewise. Intertwined as these components were, they did not always move in exact parallel: of the two, Christianity proved to be far more ‘contagious’. Christianity embedded more quickly than Roman culture in areas under Roman domination, and Christianity reached zones where the imprint of Romanitas was slight. Thus it was that among the nomadic Arabs out in Mesopotamia, and to a lesser extent among the city-dwellers of northwest Arabia “proper” (not the Roman province), the “influence [of Christianity] was considerable”.¹²

A crucially instructive episode demonstrating how swift, far, and intense was the spread of Christianity among the Arabs in the Oriens (East)—the formal Roman provinces of Arabia Petraea and Syria (with its Palaestina subdivisions), plus Mesopotamia—is, paradoxically, the rebellion of the foederati in early 378.¹³ The Queen of the Tanukh, Mavia (or Mawiyya), led a ferocious insurgency that had its centre of gravity in the deserts, both south of the limitrophe provinces, in the Sinai and what was by then Palaestina Tertia (including the Negev), and further north around Arabia Petraea and Phoenice Syria, where she led her troops in person to a stunning battlefield victory, turning Roman warfare techniques back on them. Mavia stayed away from the major concentrations of Roman legions in places like Antioch, but she did make incursions into the cities because “this was a war of religion”—for Nicene Orthodoxy, against an attempt by the Roman Emperor Valens (r. 364-78) to impose an Arian bishop on the Arabs of the Oriens.¹⁴

Valens had purged Nicene bishops, some of whom it seems ended up in the foederati areas,¹⁵ materialising the Christology issue that would otherwise have been too abstract to be meaningful, and Mavia drew a line at Valens doing that in her area, insisting on the appointment of a monk named Moses, who had gained celebrity among Arabs as a holy man. Syrian holy men and ascetics always had always impressed Arabs, living in the harsh desert conditions with them and doing miraculous deeds (and would continue to: Saint Simeon nearly a century later is a classic case). But these were non-Arabs, and Moses was one of their own.¹⁶ Mavia’s Arab foederati were in no mood to compromise, and they would not have to. After inflicting a defeat on the Romans, and with Valens trying to manage the threat of the Persians and trouble with the Goths, she was given her way: Moses was consecrated as bishop, to the delight of the persecuted Orthodox ecclesiastical majority. With peace on her terms, Mavia returned to duty as a friend of the Roman people, dispatching an Arab cavalry unit to assist in the Gothic War.¹⁷

There are historians who doubt that Christianity had spread all that widely among the Arabs by the 370s, and dispute that issues of doctrine significantly motivated Mavia, contending that Moses’s status as an Arab was more important, but even they agree that the war and the terms of settlement entrenched Christianity among the Arabs.¹⁸ If Mavia did not wage her war as a Crusade it would suggest that the spread of Christianity was slower among the Arabs, but there is a certain amount of hair-splitting about this, since nobody doubts there was still a lot of paganism among Arabs in the Levant and Mesopotamia at the end of the fourth century. Similarly, whether or not Christianity was a cause of the war, all agree a consequence of the war was to further Christianise the Arabs: “Moses gave an impetus to the process”.¹⁹

If Mavia had challenged the ruler of the world on God’s behalf, she must have felt some vindication when Valens was killed soon after, in battle against the Goths in August 378, and his successor, Theodosius I (r. 379-95), not only restored the primacy of Orthodoxy: he made Nicene Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire, calling all subjects to this True Faith (Vera Fides). Any satisfaction was short-lived, however.

The end of the Gothic War in 382 brought favourable terms for the Goths: they were allowed to settle within the Empire, given large amounts of money to behave themselves, and awarded magistracies the Arabs had previously held.²⁰ For the Arabs, who had fought in front of the walls of Constantinople to defend Orthodoxy against the heretical Goths, making the decisive difference by some accounts,²¹ this was intolerable. Theodosius’s coolness towards the Arab foederati might well have been for straightforward strategic reasons: the worst crisis he inherited was the Goths, and a Germanophile policy, even at Arab expense, might have seemed the most sensible way to resolve it.²² It is conceivable there was an edge to it, though. Doctrinally sound the Tanukhids might have been, they were still rebellious provincials and Theodosius was still a Roman Emperor.

The Fifth and Sixth Centuries

If the Tanukhids saw their second revolt in 383 as a way to make themselves a problem deserving concessions from Rome equivalent to those given the Goths, they badly miscalculated.²³ While the exact precipitating circumstances and course of the rebellion are hidden from us, the resentments animating the Tanukhids are plain enough, as is their defeat. Relations with Constantinople were shattered and without Roman subsidies the Tanukhids, already weakened by the Gothic war and the doubtless-fierce Roman reprisals of 383, decayed from within, fighting each other over what remained of their land and treasure, and some departed to the Persian-dependent Lakhmid Kingdom.²⁴

By the second decade of the reign of Theodosius II (r. 402-50), the Romans had taken the Christian Salihids as their primary Arab foederati. The Salihid tribe had moved into the Oriens during the time of Tanukhid supremacy but remained on the margins.²⁵ To prevent a repeat of the Tanukhid experience, this time the Arab foederati were prevented from becoming so centralised and strong. Helped by the long peace with Persia, signed in 387 and lasting virtually uninterrupted until 502, it worked: the Salihids served as the “Inner Shield” throughout the fifth century without incident.²⁶ When the break came, it was by neither side’s design. Increasing numbers of Arabs migrated north, including essentially whole tribes, pulled by the opportunities available in Rome’s shadow. Some of the newcomers thought they would make better masters and internal divisions weakened the Salihids in this competition. The Romans accommodated themselves to the winners of the intra-Arab contest.²⁷

In the late fifth century, in response to Persian machinations in Himyar (modern Yemen), the Romans recruited the Kindites, a mixed Arab tribe of pagans, Jews, and Christians—the lines not always totally clear—centred on Qaryat al-Faw, north of Yemen, to buffer them. A Jewish dynasty had taken power in Himyar in 390 and inclined towards the Persians. The Himyarite regime’s massacre of Christians in Najran in 523, an event so resonant some have argued an echo of it appears in the Qur’an, was the trigger for a Roman-backed Ethiopian intervention that installed a Christian King in 525. The Himyar issue apparently resolved, the need for the Kindites waned, and in tandem with the tribe’s own troubles, the federation collapsed by the end of the 520s. It turned out the story was not over. The Persians recovered and conquered Himyar in 570. Of note: the Sasanians introduced Zoroastrianism but did not enforce it on Himyar because it would have provoked the population.²⁸ It is another indication of how profoundly monotheism had permeated the Arabian periphery. Paganism seems to have disappeared in Himyar in the early fifth century,²⁹ and Ioudaismos was decisively overshadowed by Christianity in the sixth century,³⁰ but the Jewish and Zoroastrian elements remained, and spread in various ways to the sectarian milieu in the north, shaping nominally Christian factions. What we cannot know is what was happening in central Arabia: the degree of its paganism and isolation remains a contentious subject.³¹

At the dawn of the sixth century, the Romans bowed to the reality of the Ghassanids’ primacy in the Levant, establishing relations with them, and around 530 the Ghassanids officially replaced the Salihids as the Inner Shield of the Roman Empire. This was under Justinian I (r. 527-65), who reversed course on the idea of creating a powerful Arab buffer State—he was very much in favour. It should be noted that the Tanukhids and Salihids were still around in the Oriens, but they were diminished and subordinate to the Ghassanid Phylarch (Chief, as recognised by the Romans) and the Ghassanid King, who, most unusually, acquired a capital city within Roman territory, at Bosra. The Ghassanid King’s brother also had a semi-recognised status in Palaestina Tertia and Ghassanid tribesmen spread throughout the limitrophe provinces.³²

A point to note about the Ghassanids is the militancy of their Christianity, reflected in the fact they held to Monophysitism, which was regarded as heretical by the Roman ecclesiastical hierarchy after the Council of Chalcedon (451). The Ghassanids made “their stand against … the Chalcedonian Emperors of the sixth [century] on purely doctrinal grounds, since none of their interests, material or other, could have been served by opposition to the Empire on whose subsidy they depended”.³³ That Arab foederati were prepared to do this is worth bearing in mind when considering the contested historiography about Mavia’s motives, without, of course, denying the wider and firmer hold Christianity had over the Arabs in the Oriens by the sixth century as compared to the fourth.

Doctrinal tensions notwithstanding, the Ghassanids were the culmination of the Roman foederati strategy with the Arabs. As mentioned, the Ghassanids were formally brought within the Empire, given a recognised status in Arabia Petraea, and their influence went much further into the interior. The Ghassanid Kingdom beyond the frontier was highly integrated in practice with the Roman Empire, and the Ghassanids’ devout Christianity bound them tightly to their sense of mission in defending Rome. The situation was destabilised by the horrific plague that began in the 540s, which shifted the balance of population and power in favour of the periphery and the deserts: stripped of manpower, the Romans were more reliant than ever on the Arabs for border security by 600. This combination of monotheism, plague, and the generational war with the Persians that began in 602 set the stage for the Roman Levant to be conquered by the Arabs in the 630s and for the subsequent emergence of Islam in the Empire the Arabs forged.

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NOTES

1. Irfan Shahid (1984), Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, pp. 8-9. Christian chroniclers regularly referred to “Arabia haeresium ferax” (Arabia, the breeding ground of heresies) in the Patristic period (p. 201).

2. The prolific Eusebius, writing early in the fourth century, refers to reports that Philip the Arab was friendly to Christians and suggests he might have taken prayers with them. The great translator Saint Jerome and the Archbishop of Constantinople John Chrysostom later in the fourth century were explicit in claiming Philip had been a Christian, as was Paul Orosius in his popular Historia Adversus Paganos (History Against the Pagans) in the early fifth century. The work of Jerome and Orosius in particular remained widespread into the medieval period, perpetuating the myth of Philip’s Christianity, and this was reinforced by many other Byzantine chroniclers who said the same thing, either relying on these authors or simply repeating what was by then an entrenched tradition.

3. It is not totally clear how much of the vanquished “Palmyrene Empire” was annexed by the Romans. See: Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, p. 478.

4. Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, pp. 17-19.

5. Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, p. 12.

6. Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, pp. 13-14.

7. Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, p. 478.

8. Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, p. 21.

9. Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, pp. 49-52.

10. F.E. Peters (2003), The Monotheists: Jews, Christians, and Muslims in Conflict and Competition, Volume I: The Peoples of God, p. 21.

11. Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, pp. 480-81.

12. Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, pp. 17-19.

13. The course of the war is described in: Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, pp. 142-58.

14. Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, p. 147.

15. Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, p. 154.

16. Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, p. 153.

17. Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, p. 158.

18. Noel Lenski (2002), Failure of Empire: Valens and the Roman State in the Fourth Century A.D., pp. 205-08.

19. Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, p. 156.

20. Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, p. 206.

21. Ammianus Marcellinus reports that after Valens was killed at Adrianople, the Goths marched on Constantinople, but the cries of a single Saracen, followed by him charging nude out of the city, killing a Goth, and drinking his blood, caused the Gothic host to flee. Perhaps one of the Tanukhids did do something like this, but it certainly was not the decisive factor in driving the Goths back. See: Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, pp. 255-57.

More likely, this horror story is fabricated, a testament to the prejudice against Arabs of a pagan Roman consciously writing in the tradition—one of the last to do so—of Suetonius and especially Tacitus, historians who would not have countenanced a barbarian army in the Roman capital.

22. Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, p. 207.

23. There is some debate about whether the disturbances in 383 were a second revolt, properly speaking, or more like embers of the prior Tanukhid revolt. The literary evidence is absent and archaeology has not turned up any more information, but the circumstantial evidence of what happened afterwards suggests there was a rebellion, probably on a similar geographic scale to the first. See: Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, pp. 212-14.

24. Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, pp. 203-14.

25. Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, p. 385.

26. Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, pp. 214-15.

27. Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, p. 215.

28. Peter Sarris (2011), Empires of Faith: The Fall of Rome to the Rise of Islam, 500-700, pp. 139-45.

29. Eric Maroney (2009), The Other Zions: The Lost Histories of Jewish Nations, pp. 92-93.

30. Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, p. 24.

31. Holger Zellentin, ‘The Rise of Monotheism in Arabia’, in, Josef Lössl and Nicholas J. Baker-Brian [eds.] (2018), A Companion to Religion in Late Antiquity, pp. 157-80.

32. Irfan Shahid (2002), Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century: Volume Two, Part One, p. 52.

33. Byzantium and the Arabs in the Fourth Century, p. 18.