Rethinking Conquest: Studies on the Late Antique Near East from Byzantium to Islam

The momentous political and social changes that affected the Near East following the death of the prophet Muhammad have traditionally been framed as ‘conquests’. But what did ‘conquest’ mean, if anything, to contemporary and later medieval observers in the Byzantine and Islamicate worlds, beyond the told and retold stories of battles and sieges? What should it or can it mean for today’s historian and area scholar? This volume aims, on the one hand, to record aspects of the wide-ranging conv...