Staying Roman: Conquest and Identity in Africa and the ...
Jonathan Conant
... to Egypt each winter.256 The following thirty years saw further raids and counter-raids, through the course of which the empire seems generally to have maintained its grasp over the cities of the coastal littoral, but gradually to have lost control of the interior.257 As Vassilios Christides has recently observed, though, the Arabic sources indicate that the Af ̄ariqa, the Romano-African population, consistently and wholeheartedly sided with the Byzantines in these struggles.258 Finally, ...