«Тахиййат»: Сборник статей в честь Н. Н. Дьякова

Piracy, Privateering and Maritime Violent Actions m 53 n of sea raids of the Arabs in the Eastern Mediterranean from the middle of the 7 th –11 th centuries were not simple razzias for plundering, but part of the naval warfare between the two most powerful navies of the time, the Byzantine and the Arab. Although those Arab sea raids started by the Umayyads in a rather frantic way in the middle of the 7 th century, they were gradually restricted only to the various encounters of the Arab-Byzantine struggle for supremacy in the Eastern Mediterranean at the time of the Abbasids (750–1258), revived partly by the independent Arab emirate of Crete (ca 824/6–961), which was only nominally attached to Baghdad and its maritime activities took place independently. The emerging of an abrupt series of naval activities of the Arabs in the Eastern Mediterranean in the middle of the 7 th century AD created a burst of accusations in the Byzantine sources. Especially the authors of the Byzan- tine hagiographical sources monotonously illustrate their destructive activi- ties labeling them as piratical (πειρατικαί). For them, as for several modern historians, these are aimless sea raids just for plundering by unruly pirates and/or privateers 1 . Undoubtedly, the hagiographical sources offer invaluable information completing the historical sources, but they should be taken into consideration with special care. The instigator of the Arabs’ naval activities in the Mediterraenan was the Umayyad caliph Mu‘āwiyah (661–680) who, even before he became a caliph, as governor of Syria (641–661), started intense naval warfare against the Byzan- tines. He undertook a series of belligerent sea raids in the Aegean and occupied albeit temporarily the large islands of Rhodes and Cyprus 2 . Mu‘āwiyah correctly understood the unavoidable need for organizing a naval force for the survival of the Islamic state, but his illusory plan to overcome the Byzantine naval power proved to be unrealistically optimistic ending with his failure to conquer Con- 1 For the characterization of the Arab raiders with various insulting comments in the Byz- antine sources, see: Yannopoulos P. The Presence of the Arab Cretans in the Hellenic Region according to the Toponyms, in: Graeco Arabica 11 (2011), p. 123, note 2 (in Greek). For the view that all Arab raids against the Byzantines were piratical see: Sofianos D. Z. Osios Loucas , Athens 1989 (in Greek). Of particular interest is the unpublished study by Vathi, Theodora, Piratical Raids in the Byzantine Seas between the 8 th –10 th centuries through the Hagiographi- cal Sources , Ioannina 2002 (in Greek), in which while in general she considers most Arab raids as piratical, she occasionally accepts the view that certain so-called Arab piratical raids were actually military activities (P. 68–69). 2 For Rhodes see Bosworth C. E., Arab Attacks on Rhodes in the Pre-Ottoman Period, in: Aspects of Arab Seafaring , ed. Y. Y. Al-Hijji and V. Christides, Athens, 2002. P. 63.–-68. For the Arab raids against Cyprus see Christides, The Image of Cyprus in the Arabic Sources , Lefcosia, 2006. P. 11–28; Beihammer, A., The First Naval Campaigns of the Arabs against Cyprus (649, 653): A Reexamination of the Oriental Source Material, in: Graeco-Arabica 9–10 (2004). P. 47–68.