Maronite
Possibly mid- to late seventh century C.E.
The title of this universal chronicle no longer survives. Due to the theological affiliation of its anonymous author, modern scholars most often refer to it as the Maronite Chronicle. Because only fragments remain, basic questions such as the work’s composition date remain unresolved. Nevertheless, the Chronicle’s discussion of Islam, especially of Muʻāwiya’s caliphate, is particularly valuable. In addition to providing data on mid-seventh-century military and political history, the Maronite Chronicle includes three particularly interesting episodes of interreligious encounter.
The first relates a debate between Miaphysites and Maronites that allegedly took place in front of the Umayyad caliph Muʻāwiya. According to the Maronite Chronicle, Muʻāwiya judged in favor of the Maronites and fined the Miaphysites. The Miaphysite patriarch, however, soon turned this to his advantage by continuing to pay Muʻāwiya to protect the Miaphysites from the Maronites. The next episode discusses Muʻāwiya’s visit to Jerusalem, where he prayed at Golgotha, Gethsemane, and Mary’s tomb. The text then refers to Muʻāwiya’s issuing of gold and silver coins that broke from the widely used Byzantine coin type, no longer including the traditional depiction of the cross.
Although none of these anecdotes is innately implausible, scholars continue to debate their historical accuracy. Independent of their veracity, stories of a caliph who adjudicated intra-Christian debates and prayed at Christian holy sites but refused to mint coins with a cross remind one that the characters found in early Syriac sources often defy attempts to pigeonhole them into easily defined, mutually exclusive religious categories.
The Maronite Chronicle survives in a single, fragmentary manuscript. A flyleaf now housed in St. Petersburg contains the Chronicle’s beginning. The remaining leaves come from later folios in the Chronicle and are now found in the British Library, where they have been rebound as part of British Library Additional 12,216. On paleographic grounds, William Wright dated the manuscript to the eighth or ninth century. The extant sections begin in the time of Alexander the Great and continue until the mid-660s, although the discussion of the period between 361 and 658 no longer survives. With the exception of a missing leaf, BL Add. 12,216 does, however, preserve a continuous narrative from 658 until 665/66, when the manuscript breaks off prior to the Chronicle’s conclusion. In 1904 Ernest Walter Brooks published an edition of the surviving text.
The author’s allegiance to the Maronites is made quite clear in the Chronicle. In its depiction of an intra-Christian debate before Caliph Muʻāwiya, the Chronicle champions “those of the faith of Mār Maron” and vilifies the Miaphysites. This has led some scholars to suggest that the author was the famed mid-eighth-century Maronite chronicler Theophilus of Edessa. More recent research on Theophilus has discredited this hypothesis, especially as there is no overlap between passages found in the Maronite Chronicle and the extensive fragments of Theophilus’s Chronicle that later authors quote. As a result, the clear majority of scholars now consider the Maronite Chronicle’s author unknown.
Because the British Library manuscript breaks off in 665/66, there is no indication of how much further the Chronicle originally extended. Nevertheless, some scholars have forwarded several arguments suggesting a composition date not long after the 660s, including the facts that the Chronicle betrays no familiarity with the division between the Maronites and the Byzantine church, which took place in the early 680s, or their intensifying conflicts in the early eighth century; and that the proper correlation of specific dates and days of the week in the Chronicle’s last pages suggest that it was written by a near contemporary of the events it describes. Others have noted that the Chronicle’s dating of Christ’s birth to the year 309 in the Seleucid calendar might betray a knowledge of Jacob of Edessa’s Chronicle, which was not finished until the 690s. So too numismatists debate whether the Chronicle’s reference to Muʻāwiya’s changing of Islamic coinage is plausible. Alternatively, it may be an anachronism based on the author’s knowledge of ʻAbd al-Malik’s famous coin reform in the 690s. As a result, it remains uncertain whether the Maronite Chronicle was written in the mid-seventh century or simply comes from a somewhat later author well informed about the 660s.
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. . . and Muʻāwiya, his nephew H̱udaifa. Muʻāwiya issued a command concerning him and he was killed. Then ʻAlī also threatened to rise up against Muʻāwiya again. They struck him while he was praying at Ḥira [[70]] and killed him. Muʻāwiya went down to Ḥira, the entire Arab army there gave him allegiance, and he went back to Damascus.
In the year 970 [659 C.E.], the seventeenth year of Constans, at the second hour on a Friday in the month of June, there was a devastating earthquake in the land of Palestine, in which many places collapsed.
In the same month, the Jacobite bishops Theodore and Sabuk came to Damascus, and before Muʻāwiya they debated the faith with those of Mār Maron [i.e., the Maronites]. When the Jacobites were defeated, Muʻāwiya commanded them to give up twenty thousand denarii and be silent. And it became customary for the Jacobite bishops to give Muʻāwiya that [much] gold annually lest [his] protection of them slacken and they be punished by the [Maronite] clergy. He who was called patriarch by the Jacobites annually established what share of that gold the inhabitants of all the monasteries and convents would pay. Likewise, he established [the share] for the [other] followers of his faith. And he made Muʻāwiya heir [to his estate] so that out of fear of [Muʻāwiya] all the Jacobites would submit to him. On the ninth of the month during which the disputation with the Jacobites took place, at the eighth hour on a Sunday, [there was] an earthquake.
In the same year, the emperor Constans issued a command and his brother Theodosius was killed—wrongly, for he was innocent, as many say. Many were distressed by his murder. It is said that the citizens [of Constantinople] made public denunciations against the emperor and called him a second Cain, a committer of fratricide. Greatly angered, [Constans] left his son Constantine [[71]] on the throne, took his queen and all the Romans’ war-waging troops, and departed to the north against foreign peoples.
In the year 971 [660/61 C.E.], the eighteenth of Constans, many Arabs assembled in Jerusalem and made Muʻāwiya king. He ascended and sat at Golgotha. He prayed there, went to Gethsemane, descended to the tomb of the blessed Mary, and prayed there. In those days, while the Arabs were assembling there with Muʻāwiya, there was a tremor and a devastating earthquake. Most of Jericho collapsed, as did all of its churches. Mār John’s house by the Jordon, where our savior was baptized, was uprooted from its foundations. So too the monastery of Abba Euthymius, along with the dwellings of many monks and solitaries, as well as many [other] places, collapsed during [the earthquake].
In the same year, in the month of July, the emirs and many [other] Arabs assembled and gave allegiance to Muʻāwiya. A command went out that he should be proclaimed king in all the villages and cities under his control and that they should make invocations and acclamations to him. He struck both gold and silver [coinage], but it was not accepted because it did not have a cross on it. Muʻāwiya also did not wear a crown like other kings in the world. He established his throne in Damascus but did not want to go to Muḥammad’s throne.
The next year, on Wednesday morning, the thirteenth of April, ice fell and the white vines withered in it.
When Muʻāwiya became king, as he wanted, and had a respite from civil wars, he broke the truce with the Romans and no longer accepted a truce from them. Rather, he said, “If the Romans seek a truce, let them give up their weapons and pay the tax.”
[folio missing in the manuscript]
. . . of the year. Yazīd son of Muʻāwiya again went up with a powerful army. When they camped at Thrace, the Arabs dispersed for plunder, [leaving] their hirelings and young men for the shepherding of livestock and for any sort of spoils that might befall them. When those standing on the wall [saw this], they fell upon them, [killed] many of the young men and hirelings, as well as some of the Arab [men], carried off the plunder, and [re-]entered [the city].
The next day, all the young men of the city assembled, along with some of those who had entered there to take refuge, as well as a few Romans. They said, “Let us go out against them.” Constantine said to them, “Do not go forth. For you have not waged a war and been victorious. Rather, you [just] stole.” They did not listen to him. Instead, having armed themselves, many people went out. In accord with Roman custom, they raised standards and banners. As soon as they went out, all the porticoes were closed and the king set up his tent on the wall, sat, and watched. The Saracens drew back and retreated far from the wall so that when [their opponents] should flee, they could not quickly escape. They stationed themselves by tribe. When [their opponents] reached them, [the Saracens] leaped up and cried out in their language, “God is great.” And immediately they fled. The Saracens ran after them until they reached [the range] of the walls’ ballistae, devastating them and taking captives. Constantine [[73]] was angry with them and wanted to refuse to open [the porticoes] for them. Many of them fell, and others were wounded by arrows.
In the year 975 [663/64 C.E.], the twenty-second of Constans and the seventh of Muʻāwiya, Bar Khālid, the general of the Arabs of Emesa, the capital of Phoenicia, went up and led an army against Roman territory. He made camp by a lake called ʼSqdryn. When he saw that many people inhabited [the middle] of it, he tried to conquer it. He made rafts and boats, sailed the army on them, and sent [the army] to the middle [of the lake]. When those in the middle [of the lake] saw [the Arabs], they fled and hid from them. When the Arabs reached the dry land in the middle [of the lake], they disembarked, tied up their boats, and prepared to attack the people. Immediately, those who had been hiding rose up, ran, cut the boats’ ropes, and steered them into the deep. The Arabs were left in the harbor, on land surrounded by deep water and mud. The [inhabitants] of the middle [of the lake] assembled, surrounded them from all sides, fell upon them with slings, rocks, and arrows, and killed all of them. [The Arabs’] comrades standing on the opposite [shore] saw [what was happening] but were unable to help them. Until this day, the Arabs have not again attacked this lake.
Bar Khālid departed from there and gave a guarantee to the city of Amorium. When they opened [the city] to him, he installed a garrison of Arabs there. He departed from there and went against the great fortress of Sylws, because a master carpenter from the region of Paphlagonia had tricked him and said to him, “If you give me and my household a guarantee [of safety], I will make you a catapult that will capture this fortress.” Bar Khālid gave him [the guarantee] and issued a command. They brought long planks, and [the carpenter] made a catapult the like of which they had never seen. They went up and set up [the catapult] opposite the fortress’s portico. [[74]] Because they trusted its strength, the fortress’s masters allowed them to approach the fortress. When Khālid’s men shot their catapult, a rock flew up and struck the fortress’s gate. Next they threw another rock, but it fell a little short. Again, they threw a third rock, but it fell short of the previous ones. Those above cried out derisively, saying, “Khālid’s men, shoot [harder], for you are shooting badly.” And immediately with [their] catapult they threw down a large stone. It fell and struck Bar Khālid’s catapult, destroyed it, and [then] rolled downhill and killed many people.
Bar Khālid went from there and conquered the fortresses of Psynws, Kyws, and Pergamum, as well as the city of Smyrna.