Читать книгу Looking for Aphrodite - David Price Williams - Страница 10

The date was 622 AD, the date traditionally ascribed by Moslems to the foundation of Islam - the ‘surrendering’ to the One God. Allowing for adjustments for lunar months, fifty or so years from that date in the Christian calendar makes the date the fleet of ships with the lateen sails were sailing to the coast of Asia Minor as 672 AD.

The deadly armada is manned by Arabs. The ships belong to Mu’awiyah, one time Islamic military governor of Syria, now one of the first Caliphs and the founder of the Umayyad Dynasty and scourge of the Byzantine Emperors in Constantinople. Some twenty or more years earlier, in 649, Mu’awiyah himself had already led a successful 1,700-ship invasion fleet against the Island of Cyprus. Its Byzantine capital, Constantia, had been sacked and its population massacred to a man. Five years later, he did the same thing to the Christians on the island of Rhodes. Now he was sending his son, Yazid ibn Sufyan, named for his grandfather, as commander of a naval force raiding even further west towards the Aegean Sea, against the Byzantine settlements on the Island of Chios and the mainland city of Smyrna, today’s Izmir. This is where our story begins, or perhaps it should it be, ends.

To reach the Aegean, Yazid’s fleet must first pass through the treacherous seas off Cape Crio, the south western tip of Asia Minor where an elongated rocky peninsula protrudes abrasively into the sea lanes between the Christian Islands of Rhodes and Kos. As it attempts to round the point, the fleet, like so many before it, will probably have to heave-to for a short while to await favourable winds in the ancient harbour at Cape Crio itself, a temporary safe haven which had once served the mighty classical city of Knidos.

Let us imagine the twenty-seven year old Yazid that day in 672 AD. Yazid’s fleet, built of cedar wood from the snowy mountains of the Lebanon, their planking stitched together with leather thongs and covered with pitch from the banks of the Euphrates, has arrived in the old commercial harbour of Knidos. Since the time of Alexander the Great one thousand years earlier,

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