A CHANGED WORLDecclesiastical writers did from Greek.^49 The Church of the East, or Assyrian
Christians, often wrongly labeled as Nestorians, stressed the human rather
than the divine nature of Christ.^50 All these groups have survived until the
present day.
In the sixth and seventh centuries the numerous monasteries of the
Judaean desert were important centres, ranging from small hermitages to very
large coenobia such as the monastery of Martyrius. Some remained in use
until the nineteenth century, and St Sabas, east of Bethlehem, continues even
today, though it has been extensively rebuilt and lost much of its monastic
library to collectors in the nineteenth century. St Catherine’s monastery at the
foot of Mount Sinai is in a more isolated position and was able to maintain
itself without interruption throughout the various vicissitudes of succeeding
centuries. It still displays a letter supposedly from Muhammad, guarantee-
ing the freedom and protection of the monastery. St Catherine’s also houses
extraordinary collections of manuscripts and icons, and many more manu-
scripts were discovered in the course of restoration work in 1975. St Sabas
is very differently positioned, not far from Bethlehem and within close reach
of Jerusalem. In the eighth and ninth centuries it was a centre of learning and
attracted monks with a wide variety of backgrounds and languages. By the
ninth century Arabic was displacing Greek, but like St Catherine’s, St Sabas
remained in modern terms Greek Orthodox, i.e. Melkite. John of Damascus
was almost certainly a monk at St Sabas, though the direct evidence for this is
in fact rather slight, and St Sabas became a powerhouse for religious debates
even in Constantinople in the eighth and ninth centuries.^51 Monasteries in
Mesopotamia and the Tur Abdin also remained centres of learning for many
centuries, and of these also some continue today.
The general condition of Christians and Jews under Islam has been much
debated. As Peoples of the Book they were technically protected, but occu-
pied a lesser status as non-Muslims and were subjected to various constraints
including the poll-tax (jizya).^52 Christians naturally tended to produce stories
of ill-treatment and even some accounts of martyrdoms at the hands of the
Muslim authorities, whether of individuals or groups, such as the tale of the
sixty martyrs of Gaza, soldiers imprisoned while defending the city of Gaza in
637, who subsequently refused to convert to Islam; but such cases were few in
number, and the accounts are ideologically driven.^53 At the same time Christian
communities in the Umayyad period were still engaging in church building and
restoration, to the extent that the paradoxical term ‘Umayyad churches’ has
been coined for the new or remodelled churches of this period. Robert Schick
has produced long and impressive lists of churches that remained in use and
churches that were newly built or restored in the period 640–813, as well as a
corpus of sites, and some of the most spectacular and interesting of the mosa-
ics already mentioned date from this period (Chapter 7).^54 The built landscape
changed slowly. Church building work, as at Palmyra in Syria or at Umm er-
Rasas in Jordan, coexisted with the so-called desert palaces and bath-houses
(qusur) at Qasr al Hayr al-Gharbi, Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi, Hallabat or Qusayr