The least investigated body of source materials dealing with the history of the Greek-speaking people prior to modern times is undoubtedly that body of historical sources which we might call Islamic. This is doubly lamentable. First, the rise of Islam and the whole course of Islamic history down to the present day have had a profound impact on the history of the Greeks. The progress of Islamic civilization led initially to the circumscription of Greek civilization in Egypt, Syria, and Palestine, then in Asia Minor, and finally it resulted in the destruction of the Byzantine Empire and the Islamization of the medieval capital of Hellenism, Constantinople. Thereafter an Islamic state ruled most Greek-speakers until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The conflict of Islamic and Hellenic traditions was most recently, and most disastrously for the Greeks, manifested in Cyprus. Second, the very body of written materials emanating from the Islamic world and which deal with the historical experience of the Greeks is vast, variegated, and very significant. The explanation for the neglect of these important sources lies in the realm of the historical development of scholarship in Greece, and in the West at large. Up until recently, and indeed even now, there are to be found within Greece substantial numbers of Greeks who as a result of their origins in Turkey or in one of the Arab countries, have an excellent knowledge either of Turkish or of one of the Arab dialects. Thus there is a ready-made reservoir of potential Turkologists or Arabists who might deal with portions of this vast body of Islamic written materials that illumine the history of the Greeks. By and large this ready-made reservoir has not been satisfactorily exploited, though to be sure there are certain exceptions.

1. This is accompanied by the astounding fact that there are no regular university chairs in the languages, history, and culture of the Islamic world to be found in Greece. All this is an outgrowth of the narrow nationalist framework within which the Greek universities and educational systems have evolved.
2. The body of Islamic literature which informs us as to the history of the Greeks breaks down into two basic linguistic and chronological groups. First, there is the corpus of writings in Arabic, which deals with the Greeks down into the fourteenth century. This literature is of a highly diverse nature, including as it does chronicles, poetry, religious polemic, and political treaties. With the notable exception of the papyri and certain other isolated documents, this Arabic material is non-archival, that is to say, it does not emanate from governmental and administrative bureaus. The second body of literature, extraordinarily vast and very little investigated, is in the Turkish language and has emanated from the administrative apparatus of the Ottoman empire. A small number of Greek scholars has begun to investigate this material in the post-World War II era. Among them are P. Hidiroglu, E. Zachariadou-Oikonomidou, V. Demetriades, and D. Gutas. As for the Arabic sources they provide two basic categories of information that are of concern to us here. First, they give us whatever information we have about the fate of Byzantine civilization in those former Byzantine provinces of the Levant which fell to the Arab conquerors in the seventh century. Second, the Arab authors record significant data about the Byzantine empire itself, for example, its system of provincial administration, the military apparatus, trade, the city of Constantinople, political and military relations with the Arabs, and internal events within the empire itself.

It is al-Baladhuri who informs us on the persistence of the Greek language in Arab fiscal administration in Syria during the first Islamic century and then on its replacement by Arabic. This is obviously an important point in any consideration of the fate of Greek influence and elements in the new Islamic empire.

More interesting perhaps is the fate of the Greek intellectual heritage in the lands of the caliphate, a subject on which the Greek sources are relatively silent but on which the Arab texts are particularly eloquent. In this respect and aside from the texts of the actual translations from Greek into Arabic, the most important source is the Fihrist of the tenth-century author alNadim. He attributes the first efforts of translation of the Greek texts to the caliph Khalid ibn Yazid ibn Muawiyah.

Al-Baladhuri and al-Nadim are among the most important Islamic sources that tell us of the fate of the Greeks and their culture in the Middle East during the period. But the Arab texts of the second category tell us much as well about the history of the Greek speakers in Byzantium proper. They are particularly important for the great administrative changes of the middle Byzantine period which centered about the so-called system of the themes. Here the principal texts are those of the geographers Ibn Khurdadbeh, Ibn al-Faqih, and Qudama, and of the historian Masudi. These texts, perhaps ultimately going back to a common source (Muslim alDjarmi) give a detailed delineation of the great administrative divisions known as themes, their officials, their military manpower, and the governmental salaries paid out to the military-administrative personnel. Very often these details are lacking in the Byzantine sources.13 Of similar interest to Arab travellers, geographers, ambassadors, and prisoners of war was the imperial city of Constantinople itself, so that many details concerning its monuments, topography, and court life have been recorded in their writings.14 A central event, and indeed a new turning point in the political and military relations of the Muslims and Byzantines, occurred at the fateful battle of Manzikert in the year 1071. Muslim chroniclers turned their attention to this battle and we have several Arab accounts of it. Of these it will suffice to translate but one, whose author remains unknown. Though it does not have the detailed nature of the Greek account of Attaliates, it gives us the Muslim side, which is lacking in Attaliate.

Professor Barkan has extrapolated the relevant demographic statistics for the taxable hearths in Greek-speaking lands in the early sixteenth century and it is of great interest to look at them briefly:

These hearth figures not only enable us to estimate the population numbers and the proportions of Greeks to Turks, but they indicate those areas in Greek lands where the initial demographic impact of the Turks was greatest. By comparing the hearth census of a given region over an extended period of time one can trace either the progress of Islamization of the Greeks or else their persistence in the Orthodox faith. An excellent study recently completed by Professor Lowry has tiaced this process in the city and district of Trebizond, originally Greek, in the defters of 1486, 1523, 1553, and 1583.

The Turkish scholar Miroglu has recently analyzed the defters for the years 1516, 1520, and 1530, concerning the district of Bayburd, adjacent to Trebizond, where the Armenian element must have predominated over the Greeks, with the following results.