ABSTRACT
According to Eutychius, a Melkite priest from Alexandria, who died in ad940, the following event is said to have taken place in Qinnasrin, in northern Syria, sometime in the latter part of the thirties of the seventh century, during the Muslim conquest of Syria. An Arab force, under the celebrated general Abu ‘Ubaydah, had signed a truce of one year with the Christians of Qinnasrin in order to allow those Christians who so desired to leave Syria and to follow Heraclius into Anatolia. Like most good stories, this one is probably apocryphal, especially in the wealth of its details, since other accounts of the conquest of Qinnasrin do not mention events which could have made it possible and since it comes from the ecclesiastical milieu of Christian Arabs within the Muslim Empire, among whom a whole body of stories developed tending to minimize the tragedy of the Muslim conquest.
