Muslim conquests seemed unremarkable to contemporaries who had seen many

Evidence

Historians now recognize the Muslim conquests of the Sassanian Persian empire and of large swathes of the Roman (or Byzantine) empire as a fundamental watershed of world history. This was not clear to those who lived through the conquests, the largely Christian inhabitants of the Middle East. They had seen their share, after all, of conquerors, most recently in the back-and-forth struggles between Persian and Roman empires that had so weakened both. From Constantinople, the invasions must have seemed the latest of a series that had lasted several centuries: Rome had lost its western provinces to Germanic barbarians and had weathered the coordinated as- Early Eastern Christian Reactions to Islam • 41 sault of the Avars and the Sassanian Persians. — John V. Tolan, Saracens, 290

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Early Muslim conquests rode on Byzantine-Persian exhaustion as war was then the norm