In this chapter, I want to explore the question of Arab-conquered populations’ continued
commitment to inclusion in the East Roman empire with reference to a unique act of political
subversion—the dramatic, perhaps decisive defection to the Romans of Egyptian sailors in
the Arab fleet during the failed second siege of Constantinople in 717/18. It is unclear how
far their defection might be mapped onto an abiding or resurgent ideological commitment to
inclusion in the empire, as Arietta Papaconstantinou suggests for eighth-century western
Thebes, where elites ‘still lived in Byzantium—in the Byzantium their great-grandfathers had
known.’2
I will locate its more immediate impulse in the Arab conquerors’ fiscal innovations,
which had long encouraged resistance and which intensified in the build-up to the siege. But
events at Constantinople further complicate the oft-repeated notion, which has its origins in
contemporary texts, that the anti-Chalcedonian ‘Copts’ saw the ‘Romans’ as unambiguous
aliens, heretics, and oppressors; the events also contextualize intensified attempts to implant
this division in the aftermath of the failed siege.
