Ближний Восток и его соседи

g 117 h Arabs and Arabia in the Byzantine Sources: Hagiographical Testimonies The entire region, belonging to the provinces First and Third Palestine 10 under Byzantine administration, was to become at later times, by the end of the VII and during the VIII century, part of the Muslim Caliphate. Groups of Saracens were dwelling in First and Second Palestine as well, but they were mostly settled in the Sinai region and Third Palestine. Their attitude towards the monks was ambivalent; some testimonies provide information that they were helping them or assisting them, assigned to concrete duties, while in other cases we have reports of attacking and plundering. The questionable information derived from the two hagiographical testimonies commented above points to this varying picture and confirms that this situation was valid until the sixth century. 11 Obviously, the whole wider area was affected by the Roman-Persian antagonism and this confrontation had an impact on all aspects of social life; religious differences could easily be involved in these tensions and hagiographical testimonies again provided some glimpses as to the conflict. As it has been appropriately noticed: “‘Persian’ Passions became an interesting part of late antique hagiography extending from the persecutions of Shapur to the reign of Khusro II”. 12 The Acts of Anastasios the Persian 13 commemorate the story and the Martyrdom of the Monk Anastasios. Composed before 630, they are part of the Palestinian hagiography, related to the fall of Jerusalem to the Persians and its subsequent recovery and triumph of Emperor Herakleios. The author of the Acts , the Monk Sabas, has followed the Emperor in his return to Constantinople. He was a companion of Anastasios and after his return to Jerusalem he wrote the story of Anastasios’s Life and Passio . Introducing a series of similar hagiographical narrations, the Acts of Anastasios , “prefigured the Acts of Christian martyrs in the face of Islam”. 14 10 On the historical geography of the region, for easy reference, Cambridge Histories Online, H. Kennedy, Syria, Palestine and Mesopotamia, 588–612, available at: https://doi.org/10.1017/ CHOL9780521325912.023 . Further: P. Filipczak, Geography and Environmental Conditions of Syro-Palestine. The Region’s Geopolitical Importance in Late Antiquity, in: Byzantium and the Arabs, the Encounter of Civilizations , eds. T. Wolińska, P. Filipczak ( Byzantina Londziensia XXII), Lodz 2015, 7–21. 11 I. Shahid, Byzantium and the Arabs in the Sixth Century , Washington, D. C. 1995, 167, vol. I, part I, 167. 12 M. Detoraki, Greek Passions of the Martyrs in Byzantium, in: The Ashgate Research Com- panion to Byzantine Hagiography , ed. St. Efthymiadis, vol. II, 61–101, here 76. 13 Anastasios the Persian (BHG 84), ed. B. Flusin, Saint Anastase le Perse et l’histoire de la Palestine au début du VIIe siècle , vol. I, Paris 1992, 17–91; Latin Passio (BHL 408–411), ed. C. Vircillo Franklin, The Latin Dossier of Anastasius the Persian. Hagiographic Translations and Transformations (Pontifical Institute for Mediaeval Studies, Studies and Texts 147), Toronto 2004. 14 Detoraki, Greek Passions , 77.