Local resentment of Byzantine religious coercion eased the Muslim conquest of Syria

Evidence

Moreover, Byzantine Syria and Persia, the two great rival empires, were both weakened by their recent war. The emperor Heraclius had scored a Pyrrhic victory for Constantinople, a victory of little comfort to the inhabitants of Byzantine Syria. Heraclius was hoping to regain control over his eastern provinces and to reassert (by compromise or by force) Constantinople’s control over Christians it considered heretical, who had succeeded in establishing ecclesiastical independence: Armenian and Egyptian Monophysites and Syrian Jacobites. (Monophysites affirmed that Christ had only one nature, rejecting the “orthodox” Duophysite doctrine of distinct divine and human natures in Christ). The emperor also had plans to punish Jews for their alleged role in helping the Persian invaders in the recent war. The various inhabitants of the region felt battered by war and fearful of the reestablishment of Constantinople’s power. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 239

Categorization

• XREF: A structural cause for Islam’s expansion — local disaffection — that complicates the vault’s trope of Islam spreading only by the sword. — connects to: Early Muslim conquests rode on Byzantine-Persian exhaustion as war was then the norm
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how directly did Monophysite and Jewish cooperation with the invaders (or their secessionist restiveness) actually figure in later Christian accounts of Muslim victory?