The chroniclers of Zuqnin and their times (c.

720-75)
The Chronicle of Zuqnin is preserved in a single manuscript, which also probably represents
the autograph copy of highly eccentric group of chroniclers. The text, punctuated by
illustrations of astronomical features, represents an attempt to provide a continuation of an
earlier tradition of ecclesiastical history, a tradition that had begun in Greek but that had been
naturalised into the linguistic environment of Syriac-speaking Mesopotamia, the location of
the authors’ Jacobite monastery.

The Chronicle is divided into four major sections, of which the last, the record of the
compilers’ own days, will be my focus here. The first three sections recapitulate the main
narrative of Christian ecclesiastical history: they are dominated by Syriac translations of the
Greek ecclesiastical histories of Eusebius1 and Socrates and continue with the second part of
the ecclesiastical history of John of Ephesus. In addition, the compiler has included additional
material to try to fill in the gaps between these chronicles: modern historians of the sixth
century in particular should be grateful to him for his preservation of the history of Joshua the
stylite, an Edessa-focussed account of the wars of Anastasius and Kavad in 504-6 that blends
ecclesiastical history with accounts of both political affairs and the marvellous and
miraculous.2 All of this material has been transposed into a series of dated lemmas, a structure
that Witakowski has called ‘the developed chronicle’, which expands the sparse format of
lemmatic chronicles such as the Chronicle of Edessa by including material from richer
narrative histories.3

The fourth part of the Chronicle has been seen as the product of the compiler himself. After
the end of the material gathered from John of Ephesus, the text is unable to provide any real
detail for the seventh century: a number of natural disasters, the revelation of Muhammad and
the census of ‘Abd al-Malik in the 690s are the only material the chronicler has been able to
produce. Detail begins again in the 720s, when he informs the reader of Yazid II’s iconoclast
reforms and the wars of the late Marwanids in the Jazira, the region in which his own
monastery was situated. Alongside this narrative of the deeds of the caliphs, and of the
prosecution of the jihad against the Khazars and the Romans, he also presents detailed
accounts of church affairs, mirroring the kind of material found in Michael the Syrian, that
describes the deeds of successive bishops of Amida and patriarchs of Antioch, as well as
accounts of local natural disasters, of famine, plague and price fluctuations.4

The author’s preconceptions of what ought to be included in a chronicle may, to some extent,
be formed by what he had read in John of Ephesus, that is, an account that combined
ecclesiastical and secular affairs, even in an era when the ‘state’ was opposed to Miaphysite
orthodoxy, and that saw natural disaster as a sign of God’s displeasure. But this interest in
history as a guide to changing divine attitudes also reflects the heightened eschatological

1
H. Kesseling, ‘Die Syrische Eusebius Chronik’, Oriens Christianus (1927), 31-47 and 225-39 and (1928), 33-
53.
2
J. Watt, ‘Two Syriac writers from the reign of Anastasius: Philoxenus of Mabbug and Joshua the Stylite’, The
Harp 20 (2006), 275-293; idem, ‘Greek Historiography and the “Chronicle of Joshua the Stylite”’, in G.J.
Reinink and A.C. Klugkist, After Bardaisan. Studies on Continuity and Change in Syriac Christianity in Honour
of Professor Han J.W. Drijvers (Leuven, 1999), 317-327.
3
W. Witakowski, The Syriac Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius of Tel-Mahre: A Study in the History of
Historiography (Uppsala, 1987).
4
C. Cahen, ‘Fiscalité, propriété, antagonismes sociaux en Haute-Mésopotamie au temps des premiers Abbasides
d'après Denys de Tell-Mahré’, Arabica 1 (1954), 136-54.
interest of all monotheist groups in the aftermath of the Islamic conquests, in particular, of the
expectations that surrounded the Abbasid revolution.5

The presence of an Islamic secular narrative in the Chronicle and the interest in eschatology
both indicate the author’s awareness of the concerns of the Arab population of the Jazira in
his own day. His information here is probably oral: he states explicitly that the fourth part of
the Chronicle was his own composition and cites no supporting material. So his treatment of
the actions of the caliphs and their representatives reflects both the attitudes of local Jazira
Arabs and the reception of these accounts by our Mesopotamian Christian author, which were
then embedded and, by implication, interpreted in the broader context of Christian
historiography.

However, I suggest that the accumulation and interpretation of this Arab oral history did not
take place in a single moment, but that it is the product of a series of moments of composition.
A striking feature of the sequence of dated lemmas used in the Chronicle is that they overlap
in the final section: after a given year has already been discussed new, supplementary material
is added to it later in the text, before resuming a year-by-year narrative. Lawrence Conrad has
suggested that the final part of the Chronicle was composed in three phases, but I would like
to extend his analysis a step further and suggest that there were at least six phases of
composition that can be identified by overlaps in dated lemmas and an interest in the same
dramatis personae in the secular narrative.6

These phases are as follows:

Phase B was runs from 718-748. Its secular narrative continues the interest in jihad that we
saw in A, but also discusses the career of Marwan II before his accession as caliph and
describes the civil wars between the different branches of the Umayyads and the opening
phases of the Abbasid revolution.

Phase C is a brief account that runs 742-751: it gives a distinctive local reaction to the
Abbasid revolution, when the chronicler is unable to set local events in a wider context and
focuses on the attempts of Christian rebels to defend themselves in the lawless environment
that persists until the installation of an Abbasid governor.

Phase D runs 749-763. This account records the victories of the Romans during an era of
Arab disunity: in this sense it is a continuation of B, which locates the centre of the narrative
in frontier warfare and ecclesiastical affairs.

Phase E is a very brief continuation of D that runs 760-5

5
R. Hoyland, Seeing Islam As Others Saw It: A Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian
Writings on Early Islam (Princeton, 1999); A. Palmer et al., The Seventh Century in the West Syrian Chronicles
(Liverpool, 1993).
6
L. Conrad, ‘Syriac perspectives on the Bilad al-Sham during the Abbasid period’, in M. Bakhit and R. Schick
(eds.), Bilad al-Sham during the Abbasid Period, 2 vols. (Amman, 1991), II, 24-6.
Phase F is a much more extensive reflection on the imposition of Abbasid rule and their own
efforts at frontier warfare. This author is more exercised than his predecessors by the suffering
inflicted by the caliphal war-machine and by the negative effects of Abbasid government:
over-taxation, expropriation of goods and famine caused by war. Unlike the earlier phases,
phase F also reports the suffering of the local Arab population under ‘Persian’ rule, as well as
addressing the issue of Christian apostasy to Islam, which leads the author to embed the
hagiography of a local martyr, Cyrus of Harran. This phase also has a much keener sense of
eschatology, and identifies the Abbasid governor Musa as the anti-Christ, and his heavy
taxation and the apostasy that accompanies it as an early stage of the apocalypse. It runs from
roughly 762 to c.775, but the system of dated lemmas is increasingly irrelevant toward the
end, as the text begins to transform into a Jeremiad lamentation for the suffering of the
people.

To identify six phases of composition does not necessarily mean that we need to envisage six
authors: several phases may represent the same man updating the sole text of the Chronicle
with new information. Even where phases do represents changes in author, for which C and F
are good contenders because of their shift in focus, we should also remember that the material
they included was still influenced by the text of their predecessors. However, given this
incentive to continuity, the changes in the attitudes and awareness between phases of the
Chronicle are all the more striking, especially in the realm of the changing reception of the
Islamic secular narrative and the changing representation of the Arabs. In particular, there
seems to be a considerable change in the representation of and attitudes to the Arabs in the
period between 730 and 775, years that saw the end of the Umayyad caliphate, civil war, and
the imposition of a new Abbasid administration.

The Frontier War and the Arabs

Phases A and B devote considerable attention to the activities of Maslama and Marwan as
leaders of the jihad against Romans and Turks. Maslama, we are told, was able to wreak
havoc in the Anatolian countryside. Though defied by the new emperor Leo III in 717, he was
still able to defeat rash attacks by Leo’s subordinates and cause substantial damage in the
borderlands.7 In a second scene, dated to 730, the chronicler gives us a second account of
Maslama’s jihad, this time conducted against ‘the Turks’ north of the Caucasus. Here we are
told that they concluded a treaty with Maslama, only to break it ‘since they did not know God
or understand that they were his creatures’. It is here, in Maslama’s war against the Turks, that
we first hear of the future caliph Marwan II, who destroys them after their broken treaty and
establishes Arab rule over Armenia.8

The chronicler has included the two most notable events of Maslama’s career here, but his
omissions are interesting, and possibly significant. The Byzantine chronicler Theophanes, in
his account of the same events, draws attention to Leo’s double-crossing of Maslama,
whereby his promises to act as Maslama’s client to get his initial support and then retracts his
promise once established as emperor in Constantinople.9 And the Arab Muslim sources give a

7
Chronicle of Zuqnin (ed. J. Chabot, Incert auctoris chronicon anonymum pseudo-Dionysianum vulgo dictum
(Paris, 1927-33), 157-60 and tr. A. Harrak, The Chronicle of Zuqnin, Parts III and IV, A.D. 484-775 (Toronto,
1999), 150-2.
8
Theophanes, Chronographia (tr. C. Mango and R. Scott, The Chronicle of Theophanes Confessor (Oxford,
1997), 407/ 563-4; Chronicle of Zuqnin, 169-70/ 159-60.
9
Theophanes, 394-5/ 545. The Syriac chronicler seems overwhelmingly unaware of Byzantine Iconoclasm in
Leo’s reign, the issue that dominates Theophanes’ representation of the emperor.
major role to Maslama in fighting the Kharijites in Iraq in c.719-20, immediately before a
protracted fall from grace at court during the reign of Yazid II.

These omissions suggest that the Chronicler was relatively sealed off from stories of the war
that came from Byzantium itself: there is no interest here in Leo as the founder of the
Iconoclast party within Byzantium, an issue which dominates Theophanes’ account of his
reign. Instead, the story of the Roman war is focused on his legitimate succession from the
cowardly Tiberius III, who willingly gives up his throne, and in his supposed Syrian origins.
Even if the chronicler was actually mistaken about Leo’s birth-place, the sense of Leo as a
Suryoyo may account for his repetition of accounts of the emperor’s heroism, in a section that
is generally politically neutral.

The feature that connects all of these narratives of border warfare is really Maslama as leader
of the jihad, and their origin may well be the Arab army of the Jazira, which was an important
supply base for the war and which was a centre for Maslama’s own patronage network.
However, the Chronicler has not included details such as the war against the Kharijites or
Yazid ibn al-Muhallab that did not pertain to the jihad per se, but that feature Maslama
prominently in the Arabic historical tradition.10 This criteria for inclusion may be explained
by Khalid Blankinship characterisation of the Umayyad caliphate as a jihad state, whose
legitimacy stemmed from successful war and whose centres of government and patronage
were drawn northwards in Mesopotamia away from earlier centres in Syria. The chronicler
certainly has no sympathy with Arab success in jihad,11 and the emphasis in his account of the
war is really the effects of a scorched earth policy upon the people living on the frontier, and
the potential of fate to overwhelm the forces of both sides. But he does seem to present Arab
success or failure in external war as the determining feature of secular politics, and of the
stability of the regime as a whole. And in this regard, he may be following his own sources
and the expectations of his own Arab informants, editing information gained from the Jazira
Arabs accordingly, to fit a contemporary interest in external war that had less time for
politically necessary, but less prestigious, warfare in Iraq.

Interestingly, phase A of the text has very little sense of the Arabs as Muslims. Where we do
get a sense of religious difference, it is between the Arabs and the Turks. The latter are seen
as pagans, unable to recognise God and abide by treaties, and, in this regard, a shared
monotheism seems to cause the chronicler to emphasise the shared values of ‘Syrians’ and
‘Arabs’ in contrast to others north of the Caucasus. In his account of Maslama’s jihad at least,
Islam does not feature as a point of difference and sympathy with Byzantium is not explicit.
Where criticisms of Arab tyranny or misbehaviour do occur it is in spite of the instructions of
Muhammad, who is represented as an improving force on the once-pagan Arabs: ‘Every law
instituted for them by Muhammad or any other God-fearing person is despised and dismissed
if it is not instituted according to their pleasure. Any law that fulfils their wishes, even if
instituted by nobody, they accept saying “This was proclaimed by Muhammad, God’s
messenger”.12 Thus, from the earliest phase of the Chronicle, the author is prepared to admit
the improving effects of all forms of monotheism and the idea that some Arabs might act
against their fellows. In an environment where legislation sought to emphasise the legal
differences between Syrians and Arabs, in terms of blood money and court testimony, the

10
For these wars, see P. Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (Cambridge, 1980), 46-8.
11
Kh. Blankinship, The End of the Jihad State: The Reign of Hisham ibn ‘Abd al-Malik (New York, 1994), esp.
5-9 and 50-2.
12
Zuqnin 149-50/ 141-2. This lemma was probably composed as part of phase A and the process of
compilation.
Chronicler seems at times to emphasise their solidarity against the Turks or against tyrannical
commands from Damascus, such as Yazid II’s call for the execution of all blue-eyed men.13

Phase B’s account is much longer, but its focus is less on the course of warfare per se than on
its secondary effects, of plague, famine and the movement of refugees. For the author of B,
natural disaster and war, coupled with the appearance of a ‘false prophet’ serve as indicators
of the apocalypse, and he employs an eschatological language that was absent from A:
speaking of the effects of the plague he remarks ‘The Destroyer struck those in positions of
power, renowned for greatness by their wealth’.14 B continues the account of the war against
the Romans in the 730s, but with occasional hints of sympathy towards the Romans.15 But
this account begins to dry up in the 740s, where the author’s attention becomes focussed on
fighting within the caliphate. Initially this consists of Kharijites in Iraq and local rebellions
against Yazid III in 743, who, the chronicler notes, never managed to establish his own
governors, and the rebellion of the Abbasids against al-Walid II. Here he notes that rule ‘was
not theirs by right and the Arabs, especially those in the Jazira, did not submit to them and
were on their guard’.

This account of civil war, the context for his lengthy excursus on the plague, is continued with
an account of Marwan II’s succession. The chronicler tells us how Marwan seized power from
Ibrahim, brother of Yazid III, ‘who trembled before him’, and how he seized Emesa in Syria
in the course of gaining power. After this, Marwan secretly transferred the treasury from
Damascus to the Jazira, an act that incurred the wrath of the people of the former capital. The
following years saw the rebellion of the Kharijite Dahhak in favour of the Kharijites and the
Abbasid invasion of Iraq, where they defeat Marwan at the river Zab and ultimately appoint a
governor for the Jazira.16

Thus, though he does make an attempt to preserve the interests of phase A in the frontier
wars, the author of phase B is much more immediately concerned by Marwan’s wars within
the caliphate. In this sense, Iraq has acquired a new prominence in the military narrative,
partly because the successes of the Abbasids had made warfare in the east seem much more
significant to an author in c.748/9 than it had to the author of phase A in c.731. Here, the
author’s sympathies are clearly with Marwan, who terrifies the unkingly Ibrahim and who is
the object of rebellions even when faced by the Abbasids: the victory of the revolutionaries is
to be laid at the door of those westerners who opposed Marwan, rather than any mistake of
his. The brief references to Marwan’s exhumation and beheading of the tyrannical Yazid II
and his confiscation of gold from the Jews of Emesa may show the Christian chronicler
adding further details to a narrative drawn from local Arab informants.17 In showing his
distaste for Yazid and the Jews, the chronicler seems to support a positive image of Marwan
that is shared with the Arabic historical tradition, but drawn from his own repertoire of
positive and negative characterisation.18

13
Zuqnin, 163-4/ 155.
14
Zuqnin 183-4/ 171.
15
Zuqnin, 171-2/ 161-2. He reserves his greatest condemnation for Artabastos, a rebel against Leo’s son
Constantine V. These events are described in M. Whittow, The Making of Orthodox Byzantium (Oxford, 1999),
chp. 6, esp.145-8.
16
Zuqnin, 190-1/ 176-7.
17
Zuqnin, 189/ 175.
18
Tabari, III, 38-42.
The Abbasids themselves are painted in uncompromisingly dark colours: they are ‘Persians’
rather than ‘Arabs’, and are condemned in terms of the destruction of the Israelite kingdoms
as ‘Assyrians’ and ‘rods of anger’. The difference between them and the Jazira Arabs is
marked not only by their black faces (i.e. their skin colour, which the author expects the
reader to take for granted) but also black clothes: ‘they were called ‘musawada’ which means
ukame (the black ones) [in Syriac]’.19 Here too, the political-racial stereotype of the ‘Persians’
probably derives from local Arab informants, but it has been supplemented by a Syriac gloss
to make it comprehensible to readers and by an eschatological connection to the events of the
Old Testament.

For both the early phases of the Chronicle the author’s information about events in the wider
world has been transmitted through the Arab armies of the Jazira, and he has retained their
interest in the heroes of the jihad, in Marwan and Maslama, even if he has no sympathy for
the jihad itself. What changes between phase A and phase B is a new awareness of events in
the east, when a second wave of invaders appear in the Jazira and intensify the chronicler’s
sympathy for Marwan.20 Here at least, the chronicler’s interests and sympathies align with
those of the Arabic historical tradition, reflecting the one decade in the eighth century when
the Jazira stood at the centre of the affairs of the caliphate.

John of Pheison and the Christian revolution

Phase C was composed only two or three years later than phase B, but these seem to have
been tumultuous times indeed for the region surrounding Zuqnin. The author of B had
continued to reflect on larger political events, as the Abbasids defeated the forces of Marwan,
but his successor writes with a much reduced awareness of broader political events, reducing
his frame of reference to the activities of the Christian rebels in a nearby valley and their Arab
and Armenian opponents in this period of instability between 749 and 751.

In a lemma for 749, the author observes how the Arabs of Syria put on white to oppose the
Abbasids and rose in rebellion.21 But there is no broader narrative of this war: instead he turns
his attention to a smaller-scale rebellion by the Arabs of Maypherkat, where Qurra bin Thabit
engages in an opportunistic raid against the district of Qulab, Roman Sophanene in the former
province of Armenia IV. The Christian population of the neighbouring mountainous area of
Pheison then rise up to protect themselves, under the leadership of one John of Pheison. He
tells them ‘There is no king to avenge our blood against these people. If we ignore them, they
will gather against us and remove the land from us along with all our possessions’. The
villagers then accept him as their chief, swearing to obey him on the sacraments, and he
organises them into bands with their own officers to guard the mountain passes.22

The next sections of this detailed narrative describe the three-way contest between the
governor, who resided at the fortress of Qulab; the renegade Arabs of Maypherkat and the
Christians. One Sawada promises the Arabs of Maypherkat that he will execute John and

19
Zuqnin, 193-4/ 179.
20  A.  Harrak,  ‘Arabisms  in  Part  IV  of  the  Syriac  Chronicle  of  Zuqnin’,  in  R.  Lavenant  (ed.),  Symposium  
Syriacum  VII  (Rome,  1998),  469-­‐98,  at  471  also  notes  how  the  chronicler  uses  the  term  ‘commander  of  the  
faithful’  for  the  caliph  Hisham,  a  term  that  is  normally  only  used  in  the  attributed  speech  of  Muslims  in  the  
Syriac  chronicles.  This  may  imply  the  re-­‐use  of  pro-­‐Umayyad  Arab  informants,  and  possibly  a  sense  that  
this  term  lacked  Islamic  conotations  for  this  chronicler.  
21
Zuqnin, 195/ 181.
22
Zuqnin, 196/ 181.
fetter his companions, but he is ambushed by the men of Pheison while claiming to seek a
peace treaty and many of his men are killed. Both sides then attempt to get the governor to
come down from his castle, both fearing that he will help the other. He refuses and gathers
‘wicked people’ to himself as advisors and leads his forces to raid the villages of Elul and
Pashpashat, kinsmen or allies of the village of Pheison. They send word to John, who arrives
at the villages and demands to parley with the governor, but he refuses and John’s band falls
upon them, killing them all.

However, not all of the mountain region remains united behind John, and one Stephen bar
Paul, another native of the mountain, goes against his oath to makes a treaty with the Arabs at
the village of Hazra, promising to deliver John to them. Stephen plans an ambush for John in
a house in this village, but he is warned at the last minute by a loyal informant and is able to
surround the village and kill Stephen’s Arab allies. Stephen himself, the chronicler reports,
‘realised that the conspiracy of his father Satan had been exposed and fled to the city, never
returning to the mountain because of his fear’.23

John continues to command loyalty from his followers, in spite of the rebellion of second
Christian opponent, one Grigor the Urtaya.24 Meanwhile, outside the mountain, the land is
troubled by a widespread Kharijite revolt, that strikes many cities and lowland monasteries,
and a period of severe frost during the winter that the rebellion took place. These harsh
conditions, the chronicler reports, drove Armenians and Urtaye from further north into the
region around Zuqnin to forage for food. These migrations may have also contributed to the
pestilence that the chronicler reports among the Syrians in the same year, when the whole
population may have been rendered more susceptible to infection through malnutrition.25

The following year the Abbasids, led by Abdallah, nephew of the caliph, restored order in the
region and killed the leader of the Kharijites. He hears of ‘the evil committed by the Arabs of
Maypherkat against the Syrians, and what the Syrians had done’ and summons John to his
court to give him honours and make him chief over the region. However, Salih, the Abbasid
governor of Armenia, took the opposite political stance and seized captives from all over the
mountain and imprisoned them in Maypherkat, after being bribed by Arabs with a vendetta
against John. It is only through his connections with Abdallah that John is able to free Salih’s
prisoners, and save himself from execution by the new governor. Even so, it is apparent that
John was not the only Christian leader to survive the period of conflict and achieve
prominence: Stephen bar Paul is mentioned again in the context of a visit together with John
to Harran, and the chronicler presents his death by plague as the fulfilment of God’s
judgement.26

The chronicler’s hero in this section is clearly John- it is he who gives the Christians of the
mountain unity at a time when other places are being ravaged in a time of lawlessness. We
may infer, as well, that Zuqnin lay within John’s sphere of influence, since it is not in the list
of monasteries ravaged by the Kharijites. John’s success, first as an opponent of the Arabs
and secondly as a client of Abdallah, has led the chronicler is present him as the legitimate
chief of the region, against Stephen’s rival claim. Reading between the lines of the account,

23
Zuqnin, 197-9/ 182-3.
24
Zuqnin 183/ 199.
25
Zuqnin, 205/ 188 for the migrations following the famine. For the spread of disease in conditions of
malnutrition see L. Little (ed.), Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541-750, esp. the article by M.
Morony, ‘For whom does the writer write?: The first bubonic plague pandemic according to Syriac sources’.
26
Zuqnin, 207/ 189.
John seems to have engaged in the same kind of ruthless behaviour as his opponents, and
twice his double-crossing of opponents is excused by his foreknowledge of their deceit: in
both cases, John’s eventual victory may lead the chronicler to turn a blind eye to any
malpractice.

John’s rebellion was occasioned by a period of widespread unrest, coupled with scarce
resources in a time of famine. And his position as a local strongman led the composer of
phase C to present him as the obvious leader of the Suryoye against their rivals. Thus the
narrative also sees the wider interests of the earlier phases of the chronicle withering away, to
be replaced by this immediate interest in the territory of the mountain. Yet the rebellion is
always placed alongside a gloss of legitimate action within the caliphate: there is no sense of
solidarity with Byzantines or Armenians in the same period, or of manipulating the difference
between Umayyads and Abbasids. John is said to rebel ‘because there is no king to avenge
our blood’, presenting the caliph as a necessary worldly authority who can provide law and
order. When Abdallah comes, it is presented as a vindication of John’s actions, both against
opportunistic rebels and against unjust governors such as Salih. The unnamed former
governor of Qulab seems to fall into a similar category, as a man given to deceit and therefore
deserving of his death at John’s hands. So there is no denial of the authority of the caliph and
his representatives here: instead John, in the pattern of legendary social bandits such as Robin
Hood, rebels in reaction to injustice and puts down his weapons when ‘the good king’
returns.27 The chronicler, therefore, transmits a myth of John’s reign that blackens his
opponents, while ultimately justifies his eventual compromise with Abdallah as the man who
will restore stability.

Abbasid government in the Jazira

The person of John of Pheison and the local interest in his career are dropped abruptly after
the restoration of government by the Abbasids. Phases D and E are short, perfunctory sections
that continue the interest of A and B in the wars of the frontier, in natural disaster and in the
dealings of bishops. Both were composed in the decade after the crisis of the mid-century, in
763 and 765, and allowed their author to reflect on events with hind-sight and present his
narrative according to the earlier norms of the text. Here the chronicler resumes the earlier
interest in Constantine V, describing his recruitment of the Armenian Kushan, a native of the
region of Zuqnin and former servant of Marwan, and his successful campaigns against the
Arabs. This brief narrative fills in the ‘international events’ that had been lacking in phase C,
describing how Kushan defeated the inexperienced Abbasid governor Akki.28 Following this,
he relates how the Arabs of the Jazira rose in revolt a second time in 752, on this occasion as
supporters of the Abbasid leader Abdallah bin ‘Ali, but that he was killed by Abu Muslim, the
original instigator of the Abbasid revolt in Khurasan. After this the Arabs saw a comet in the
sky, and knew ‘that their defeat came from God’.29

Here again, the author derives his information from local informants, except that by the 760s
several of Marwan’s former followers had gone over to the Byzantines with Kushan and this
has given information from both sides of the frontier, in a world where loyalties were fissile
and temporary, and where Abbasid dominance had yet to be fully re-asserted. Within the
Jazira itself however, the author suggests that local Arab resistance vanished after supporting
a failed Abbasid candidate and losing the power that the region had enjoyed under Marwan.
27
E. Hobsbawm, Bandits (London, 1969).
28
Zuqnin, 208-9/ 190-1.
29
Zuqnin 215/ 196-7.
It is only at the end of the 760s that the negative effects of Abbasid government seem to have
bitten deep into the Suryoye of the Jazira. The chronicler had already observed the census of
‘Abd al-Malik with great disapproval in a lemma for 690, but there is little mention of
taxation as a specific grievance until the 760s and the final phase of the Chronicle. This novel
taxation, and the violent and shaming treatment of the population that accompanied it, are
presented as part of the reign of terror of the ‘anti-Christ’, the Abbasid governor of Mosul,
Musa bin Musab.30

This reign of terror begins with the arrival of a multi-ethnic army to conduct a campaign in
the Caucasus and against Byzantium. It comprises Sindis, Turks, Persians, men of Kufa and
Arabs, who ‘committed many sins through their impiety and impurity…for they did not know
God their creator’. Like the earlier criticism of the Turkish opponents of Maslama, these
foreigners are condemned for their paganism, but here they are servants of the caliph instead
of unknown northerners, and there is no grudging respect for the leader of the jihad as there
was for Maslama.31 Notably, the author includes Kufans in a different category from other,
local Arabs, and here we may discern both the hostility of his local informants and a degree of
sympathy for the established Arabs of the Jazira. Thus, even though he laments the fact that
the Suryaye had to pay a poll tax, he also notes that the Arabs ‘did not receive the jizya paid to
them, so they bought land and became peasants’, and that this in turn destroyed trade within
the villages and led to a shortage of land, creating a shortage of food.32 Thus, while the author
had resented the creation of the poll tax in the first instance, the transfer of the tax from local
Arabs to those residing in Mosul has destructive economic effects, which lead him to echo the
criticism and the new regime by local Arabs, almost implying a nostalgia for a former system,
which had allowed considerable local prosperity.33

The author’s dislike of the new army also has an effect in terms of the religious
characterisation of the conflict. The war-crimes of the army are ascribed to their ignorance of
God, and the chronicler does not hesitate to emphasise the Muslim identity of the Persians and
the Christianity of their opponents. This is seen most clearly in the battle cries of Allah al-
akbar and Kyrie eleison that both sides use and in providential reading of the Persians’
failure: ‘The cupbearers (of Sennacherib) derided the Romans saying “Who has escaped the
hands of Abdallah bin Muhammad? Did you not hear how he caused Marwan and the family
of Hisham to vanish? Where are now the king of Egypt, Africa, the Nubians and the
Moors?”…But the deeds of the Persians were all in vain, because the help of the Romans was
the Lord’.34 Thus there is a novel awareness of the frontier war as a religious conflict: the
relatively neutral accounts of A and B on the heroism of Leo and Maslama have been
replaced by an image of the frontier war that stands as an external sign of God’s truth. The
chronicler’s depiction of a war between Romans and Persians may have been fuelled by his
reading of the Chronicle of Joshua the Stylite, where the Suryoye are bystanders to larger
political events, but here the protagonists have also taken on a wider significance as

30
On the novelty of state imposition in the Jazira after a long period of absence see C. Robinson, Empire and
Elites after the Muslim Conquest: the Transformation of Northern Mesopotamia (Cambridge, 2000), 50-62 and
169. H. Kennedy, ‘Central government and provincial elites in the early Abbasid caliphate’, BSOAS 44 (1981),
26-38 stresses both the punitive tax gathering campaigns of the early governors of Mosul and their reliance on
local notables. For Musa as anti-Christ see Zuqnin, 252-3/ 223.
31
Zuqnin, 228-9/ 206-7.
32
Zuqnin, 232/ 208-9.
33
For earlier prosperity see Zuqnin 242/ 215-6.
34
Zuqni 232/ 208.
metonyms for their religions, and the war provides a political-religious backdrop that gives
significance to the sufferings of the Suryoye.

Christianity is confirmed on the battlefield in this sequence, and confirms the Chronicler’s
hope and faith in spite of the suffering around him. But the frontier war is only one part of the
eschatological imagination employed in phase F. If God is seen to guarantee the victory of his
followers, then the suffering of the local people is less a consequence of divine testing than
direct punishment for misbehaviour. The chronicler observes that monks live in great luxury,
accumulating property and riding around on horses ‘like the pagans (i.e. Muslims)’.35 He also
objects to the fact that laymen were beginning to criticise the monks immediately after Musa
includes monasteries in his census and proposes to tax the monks.36 It seems that this
initiative met with support from within the Christian community ‘What is the church’s
suffering after all? We are in need because we have many children and pay the poll tax’.37
Some laymen are even accused of looting church property and using it to pay the taxes.38

Musa’s reign was associated with a number of innovations in taxation: the collection of taxes
on merchandise for the grocers and textile merchants of Mosul; the raising of tithes for fishing
and trading rights; tax farming and the branding or sealing of poor men who were subject to
the jizya.39 These initiatives were part of a general tightening of Abbasid centralised
government, and they were bitterly resented by the Chronicler who used them to create his
image of Musa as the anti-Christ. But they also seem to have brought out tensions between
monks and laity and between rich and poor within Christian society, and it is these that the
Chronicler highlights in his image of the double causation of the desperate plight of society:
Musa’s coming is, in part, a response to the greed of rich laymen and monks, in contrast to the
sympathy for the poor that the chronicler recommends.40

It is this kind of divided social environment, when the patronage ties of the institutional
church were correspondingly weaker and its resources under pressure, that prophetic
movements of the kind denounced by the Chronicler are also explicable. He relates how an
unnamed monk of Mar Mattai, a major Jacobite monastery in Iraq, toured the countryside and
performed miracles, ‘that came from the Devil’.41 In spite of the chronicler’s antipathy, this
prophet seems to have acquired a wide popular following, and crowds of villagers would beat
up any monk or emissary of the bishop who tried to visit them.42 This prophet fits into a
pattern of indigenous asceticism that avoided the norms of the institutional church, by
avoiding its control of sacraments, dispensing holy oil and challenging the authority of
bishops.43 In a situation where rifts between lay and ecclesiastical rulers threatened older ties

35
His observation that the men of Mosul had ‘consumed almost all the produce of the Jazira’ is directed against
Christian landowners as well as just Muslims: Zuqnin 254/ 224-5.
36
Zuqnin. 261/ 230.
37
Zuqnin 259/ 228.
38
Zuqnin, 280/ 246.
39
Zuqnin, 261/ 230.
40
See especially Zuqnin 242/ 216 and 261-2/ 230, which also criticize the litigious conflicts of prosperous
Christians in the villages.
41
For earlier antipathy to Mar Mattai (as a beneficiary of eastward shift in patronage) see Zuqnin 259/ 229,
where the abbot of the monastery accuses western Jacobites of being associates of the Umayyads and concealing
the treasure of Marwan.
42
Zuqnin 282-8/ 248-51.
43
Cf. the observations on extreme ascetics in fifth and sixth-century Syria by D. Caner, Wandering, Begging
Monks: Spiritual Authority and the Promotion of Monasticism in Late Antiquity (Berkeley, 2002); and P.
Escolan, Monachisme et église: le monachisme syrien du IVe au VIIe siècle: un ministère charismatique (Paris,
1999).
of patronage, or where monks were resented for their attempts to avoid the jizya,44 the appeal
of such a miracle-worker is readily comprehensible in a social and political environment that
anticipated an imminent apocalypse in the wake of the Abbasid revolution.45

A particular feature of the divisions between rich and poor that the chronicler comments on is
the prominence of Mosul, the base of Musa’s administration. The men of Mosul are said to
profit from the heavy taxation of the Jazira, ‘they devoured all their produce by forfeit and
usury’ and owned slaves and vineyards ‘including almost all the land of the speech of
Aram’.46 Later on, Musa is said to use men from Mosul to extract money from the poor, i.e. to
act as tax farmers,47 and the city’s prominence is further underlined by the flight of peasants
here in the aftermath of famine and loss of property, suggesting that it was identified as a
centre of patronage and a place where work might be found.48 Though the chronicler does not
identify this trend himself, the emphasis on Mosul contrasts with the focus of the rest of part
IV, which has tended to be more interested in the cities of Edessa, Amida and Maypherkat, or
in the villages surrounding Zuqnin, that is, in former Roman Mesopotamia. Lying at the
background to this shift in interest is, I suggest, the change in the caliphate’s economic and
political centre of gravity, towards its new capital in Iraq.49

Interestingly this trend is not just limited to the narrative of Islamic secular history, but
applies equally to ecclesiastical history, where the monastery of Mar Mattai becomes
increasingly prominent.50 This shift might be explicable if we presume that the author of
phase F had eastern origins, but this seems unlikely if we consider the resentment he feels
towards the monk of Mar Mattai, who denounces the monks of Zuqnin to the tax collectors,
‘for holding the gold of Hisham and Marwan’.51 A rivalry between east and west is already
visible in the contested elections for the patriarchate in phases D and E,52 but the author of F
has abandoned the claims of neutrality made by his predecessors: for him, the new power of
the greatest Jacobite monastery in the east was resented for its monopoly over links to the
caliph, which it used to its own advantage in associating the western monasteries with the
sponsorship of the Marwanids. Thus the much greater emphasis on religion and religious
identity in this final phase of the chronicle, coincides with greater social divisions between
Jacobite Christians, between rich and poor, easterners and westerners and monks and laymen.

Apostasy and the end times

44
Zuqnin, 262/ 230.
45
This eschatological anticipation is a theme of the survey of seventh sources by Hoyland, Seeing Islam as
Others Saw It.
46
Zuqnin, 261/ 230.
47
Zuqnin, 253/ 224 and 289-304/ 253-64.
48
Zuqnin 328/ 283.
49
On the foundation of Baghdad and its aftermath see the collection of articles in Arabica 9 (1953) and the
assessment of H. Kennedy, The Early Abbasid Caliphate (Worcester, 1981).
50
On the Jacobite presence in Iraq see J. Fiey, ‘Syriaques occidentaux du Pays des Perses’, Parole de l’Orient
17 (1992), 113-27; idem. ‘Tagrit’, l’Orient Syrien 8 (1969), 289-341.
51
Zuqnin, 259/ 229. Also note the bad reception given to the patriarch by the men of Takrit and Mosul, to the
chronicler’s great disapproval: Zuqnin 249/ 221. The conflict between traditional centres of power in the
Jacobite monasteries of former Roman Mesopotamia, Qenneshre and Gubba Barraya, and emerging centres of
Takrit, Mosul and Mar Mattai is an important theme in the patriarchs of the early eighth century such as
Cyriacos. See the comments of M. Oez, Cyriacus of Takrit and his Book on Divine Providence (Oxford,
unpublished D.Phil, 2010), chp. 1.
52
Zuqnin, 226/ 204 and 212-3/ 193-5.
The issue of conversion to Islam is also a novel feature of the final phase of the Chronicle,
and it too is associated with a double causation, in which the wicked behaviour of Christians
brings misfortune upon themselves. Amir Harrak has observed that the fragmentary end of the
Chronicle is drawn from the account of Christian martyr, Cyrus of Harran. But, notably, the
cause of his martyrdom was his return to Christianity after earlier apostasy to Islam: though
celebrated as a martyr, apostasy itself, and the transcending of social categories, was
identified as the key source of discord.53 The account of Cyrus’ martyrdom was drawn from
an independent hagiography, and we should not expect that there was any a specific
condemnation of apostasy in an account intended to edify a saint. But the chronicler does
include a more direct condemnation of an apostate priest who, resisting the entreaties and
presents of his friends, goes to an Arab in Harran (?) and recites an anti-creed to renounce his
baptism, even adding insults against Christ and the Virgin that the Arab had not asked for. In
a moving coda, he describes how the Holy Spirit, in the form of a dove, left the mouth of the
apostate after he had abandoned his religion.54 Apostates such as these, the chronicler warns,
can never be accepted as Muslims and continue to live in a liminal state in their own apostate
communities, the ‘Aydouli.55

Importantly, the chronicler ascribes most of the blame in these situations to Christians who
seek to avoid taxation, and differentiates between the blasphemies added by the apostate of
his own accord. Instead of presenting local Muslims promoting conversion, or highlighting
religious differences, the Chronicler emphasises how all religious communities, Christian,
Muslim, Magian, Manichaean and Sabaean, all suffered from fiscal oppression and natural
disaster, and how both Christian and Muslim notables suffered under Musa’s regime. He
observes that if Christians alone had suffered then he would have compared them to the
martyrs of old, but instead all people suffered together.56 When Muslims are engaged as tax
agents, he is careful to point out that ‘they did this not for Islam, but for their own greed’.57
Where the Chronicler had emphasised the wickedness of Christian notables at the beginning
of this phase of composition, by the end, their common suffering with the poor and with
Muslims serves to evoke a later phase of the apocalypse, where all former social distinctions
were rendered meaningless as the anti-Christ carried out his reforms.

This style of writing, deeply influenced by the images of the Book of Revelations, shares
several features with the apocalypses composed in Syriac at the end of the seventh century,
the pseudo-Methodius and the History of John of Phenek. Both accounts, written in West
Syrian and East Syrian circles respectively, had anticipated the imminent end of the world
against the context of Muslim civil war.58 For John, writing amidst the slave revolts of al-
Mukhtar in Iraq, the end times seem to have been brought on by moral laxity among the
faithful, while for pseudo-Methodius, it was anticipation of Roman victory against a
weakened caliphate that prompted his expectation of the last emperor and the defeat of the
anti-Christ. The author of phase F shares with John his condemnation of the Christian

53
A. Harrak, ‘Christianity in the eyes of Muslims of the Jazirah in the eighth century’, PdO 20 (1995), 337-56.
54
Zuqnin 387-92/ 325-9. The account of Cyrus runs from 393/ 330 to the end.
55
Zuqnin 392/ 329.
56
Zuqnin 316/ 273. He also shows sympathy for Musa’s extortion from local Arabs, as well as from Suryoye,
over matters of inheritance (376-7/ 318).
57
Zuqnin 341/ 293.
58
P. Bruns, ‘Von Adam und Eve bis Muhammad. Beobachtung zur syrischen Chronik des Johannen bar
Penkaye’, Oriens Christianus 87 (2003), 47-69; G. Reinink, ‘Pseudo-Methodius: a concept of history in response
to the rise of Islam’, in Averil Cameron and L. Conrad, The Byzantine and Early Islamic Near East. Volume 1:
Problems in the Literary Source Material (Princeton, 1992), 149-97, esp. 160-3; P. Alexander, The Byzantine
Apocalyptic Tradition (Berkeley, 1985), chp. 1.
community itself as the source of corruption, and the heightened religious awareness of his
narrative of the Byzantine wars may show a similar use of war as a means of understanding
God’s attitude to mankind. In both cases, we see the author of phase F resurrecting earlier
concerns that had circulated in the second fitna and deploying them in the aftermath of the
third, an era with its own eschatological expectations. In doing so, he rejected the tone of the
earlier parts of chronicle, blending history with apocalypse and hagiography to create his
apocalyptic denouement.

However, an important difference between the apocalyptic conclusion to the Chronicle and
the pseudo-Methodius are their different expectations of Byzantium. The coverage of the
Byzantines, even if occasionally sympathetic, never anticipates their victory and re-conquest
of Syria and the Jazira. By contrast, even if Yazid II or the Arabs of Maypherkat are hated,
Umayyad rule, especially in the reign of Marwan II, is seen as a source of security. The
attitude to the rulers of the Jazira changes markedly with the Abbasids, but, even then, there is
reluctance to tar all Muslims with the same brush, and the newly-arrived easterners are clearly
differentiated from the local Arabs. The tales of the heroism of the army of the Jazira, and the
nostalgia that exists for Marwan’s reign (and even for an era when local Arabs received the
jizya) may be explicable by the creolisation of Arabs into the Suryoyo population. This
process is highlighted by the actions of Musa, who tries to root out Arabs who have married
Suryoyo women and gone to live in their villages.59 It is unclear whether these men were
Muslims who became Christians, or whether they were members of Christian tribes such as
the Banu Taghlib,60 but Musa’s actions, and the Chronicler’s shocked response, suggests that
they had become a feature of local society that was not perceived as strange or alien.61

The Chronicle as a whole has its origins in a universal Christian tradition, and their
inheritance of this tradition was no doubt a source of prestige for the Chronicler and other
Suryoye who were aware of it. And the reception of this tradition, which made Jacobite
Christianity the inheritor of the orthodox religion described by Socrates or Eusebius may have
helped to enforce boundaries against other Christian denominations. But the final
continuations of the Chronicle reveal a much more blinkered world, with boundaries that do
not go far beyond Melitene in the west and Mosul in the east. Even within this world, the fate
of the Suryoye, especially the Suryoye of the villages surrounding Zuqnin, is the chief
concern, and other Christian populations, such as Armenians and Urtians, are unwelcome
competitors for resources even if they live nearby.62 Given this distrust of outsiders who enter
this isolated mountain region, it is striking that, by the 770s, Arabs settled among the Suryoye
could be considered a natural part of the social landscape. And it is through such men, we
might imagine, that the stories of the heroism of Maslama and Marwan may have entered the
early phases of the Chronicle, stories, brought by a process of settlement and inter-marriage,
which cut across the boundaries of religious and ethnic affiliation.

59
Zuqnin 256/ 226; On Arab settlement in Iraq in general see F. Donner, Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton,
1981), chp. 5.
60
See the comments of J. Fiey, ‘Tagrit’, L’Orient Syrien 8 (1963), 289-341, at 320. Also see J. Ferré, ‘Chrétiens
de Syrie et de Mésopotamie aux deux premiers siècles d’Islam’, Islamochristiana 14 (1988), 71-106 on the Banu
Taghlib, as well as the article by M. Lecker in EI2 (s.v. Banu Taghlib).
61
Various sources report Khalid ibn al-Walid’s surprise that the men of Hira saw no difference between ‘Nabat’
and Arabs, in indication of how easy it might be for populations to ‘Aramaicise’, though the original author of
this fictional discussion clearly saw the process in a negative light. See further discussion in M. Morony, Iraq
after the Muslim Conquest (Princeton, 1984), 176-7.
62
E.g. Zuqnin 199/ 183 on Grigor the Urtian and 205/ 188 on unwanted Armenian and Urtian refugees.