Christian chroniclers framed Saracen conquest as divine punishment for imperial hubris

Evidence

The Chronicle of 754 offers a more detailed, dramatic, and moralized version of the same events. Heraclius’s defeat seems to be divine punishment not (this time) for heresy or sexual debauchery but for hubris. “Seduced,” after his victory over the Persians, “by the praise of his people who heaped the honor of victory not on God but on Heraclius himself he feared that rebuke which was being gravely presaged in his recurring visions.” For the emperor had recurring dreams of an invasion of rats from the desert and foresaw impending disaster in the course of the stars. The Saracens again become the divine scourge punishing the emperor and his people, who do not give due credit to God. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 467

Categorization

• XREF: Shows the providentialist historiography mechanism — Saracens as ‘flagellum Dei’ — that Tolan elsewhere argues feeds later interpretations. Echoes the Aziz-era genealogies of moralized Islam-Christian conflict framed as divine justice.
• BMF: The emperor’s recurring prophetic dreams of invasion prefiguring catastrophe parallel the prophetic dream devices in ‘2001’ and especially in Zamyatin’s ‘We,’ where foresight of punishment hovers over rulers — a cross-domain resonance of the ruler’s ominous dreams motif.