{"id":5819,"date":"2026-02-23T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-02-23T08:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/medievalstudies\/?p=5819"},"modified":"2026-01-19T16:02:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-19T16:02:09","slug":"byzantine-beacons-part-2-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/medievalstudies\/2026\/02\/23\/byzantine-beacons-part-2-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Byzantine beacons, part 2: history"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><em>Last week, Lucas McMahon introduced his recently-published\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/DOP79_09_McMahon\/mode\/2up\">work<\/a>\u00a0on the legendary Byzantine \u2018beacon chain\u2019 of the ninth century, and how his pioneering GIS work shows that such a chain would indeed \u2013 just \u2013 have been possible to construct. This week, he returns to the topic, asking the inevitable follow-up question: why build it in the first place?<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n<hr class=\"wp-block-separator has-alpha-channel-opacity\" \/>\n\n\n\n<p>From the earliest days of Islam, the Roman Empire was the prime, eschatological enemy. After several failed Umayyad attempts at seizing Constantinople, the conquest was shifted further to a vague future date. The Abbasid Revolution in the middle of the eighth century set a new dynasty over the caliphate, and the political centre moved from Syria to Iraq. The Abbasids contented themselves with raiding the Roman Empire, and while a few of these were large and dangerous, we see little in terms of serious Abbasid effort at eliminating their rival. An exception to this was during the caliphates of al-Ma\u02bemun (813-33) and al-Mu\u02bftasim (r. 833-42). Al-Ma\u02bemun engaged in major ideological competition with the Empire, and seems to have been working on breaking open its eastern defenses, which was followed up by al-Mu\u02bftasim.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The establishment of the beacon chain&nbsp;by the Byzantines&nbsp;dates to the later years of al-Ma\u02bemun. While the military threat was real \u2013 al-Ma\u02bemun had even temporarily relocated the capital back to Damascus for the campaigns \u2013 competition was also taking place on another plane. The first hint of this&nbsp;competition&nbsp;is the location of the first beacon, Loulon, which was probably taken from the Abbasids in 831. While on a prominent peak on the frontier, putting the first beacon there made it a sort of trophy.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The second indication goes back to how the chain could send different messages, and the curious statement that it did so within one hour.\u00a0Synchronized clocks at both first and last stations\u00a0meant that different messages would be sent (and expected) at different hours of the day, while\u00a0the solution to\u00a0the latter problem (of speed)\u00a0was proposed by Philip Pattenden and underscores just how cleverly the beacon chain was designed. Loulon is situated about\u00a0six degrees of longitude east of Constantinople,\u00a0meaning that it was around 22 minutes ahead of the capital.\u00a0The longitudinal difference meant that an \u201chour\u201d actually lasted a little over 80 minutes, which extends a little bit of breathing room into the system to get the fires going in time.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-gallery has-nested-images columns-default is-cropped wp-block-gallery-1 is-layout-flex wp-block-gallery-is-layout-flex\">\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-large\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1024\" height=\"768\" data-id=\"5825\" src=\"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/medievalstudies\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/339\/2026\/01\/image-5-edited-1024x768.jpeg\" alt=\"\" class=\"wp-image-5825\" srcset=\"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/medievalstudies\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/339\/2026\/01\/image-5-edited-1024x768.jpeg 1024w, https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/medievalstudies\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/339\/2026\/01\/image-5-edited-300x225.jpeg 300w, https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/medievalstudies\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/339\/2026\/01\/image-5-edited-768x576.jpeg 768w, https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/medievalstudies\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/339\/2026\/01\/image-5-edited.jpeg 1215w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px\" \/><figcaption class=\"wp-element-caption\"><em>Approximate times for sending and receiving messages from the beacons. This map is fig. 8 in the published article.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>Longitude was not calculated accurately until the eighteenth century, but scholars in antiquity had tried to do so. Ptolemy\u2019s calculations were notably flawed but his work needed little correction for Anatolia.\u00a0The Abbasids were also both seeking ancient scientific texts written in Greek, and trying to improve upon them. Under al-Ma\u02bemun, a flurry of efforts were made to calculate the size of the Earth. Observatories were constructed at Sinjar and Damascus, and a number of Arabic works are known from this period on astronomy. Al-Ma\u02bemun was carrying out longitude measurements near the Roman border when he died. The Greek sources also report efforts to bring Leon the Mathematician to Baghdad to gain his learning.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>None of the sources make the explicit connection to longitude, but it is far too much of a coincidence that two neighbouring imperial powers whose courts were in regular contact with each other just happened to have an interest in measuring the Earth at precisely the same moment. The beacon chain thus served an immediate, practical end \u2013 it brought information about when a major Abbasid campaign might be getting under way far faster than a messenger could. However delicate, it was a tripwire. But it was also part of ideological and cosmological competition between two rulers who both claimed global dominion and expressed it by trying to measure the Earth. The Abbasids sought out ancient knowledge, while the Romans made use of what they already had as part of a re-expression of Roman-ness in light of the dawning realization that Islam was an ideological competitor that was not going to go away. The telegraph was this competition made physical, and when the conflict moved northeast in subsequent years, the chain was abandoned as it no longer served either a practical or ideological purpose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"has-text-align-right has-small-font-size\"><strong><em>Lucas\u2019 full article is available Open Access in the latest issue of\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/details\/DOP79_09_McMahon\/mode\/2up\">Dumbarton Oaks Papers<\/a>. Featured image: al-Ma\u02bemun sends a messenger to the Emperor Theophiolos. Madrid, Biblioteca nacional de Espa\u00f1a, MS VITR\/26\/2<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Lucas McMahon returns to the 9th-century Byzantine beacon system, asking why it might have been built in the first place.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2771,"featured_media":5823,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Byzantine beacons, part 2: history - Exeter Medieval Studies Blog<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/sites.exeter.ac.uk\/medievalstudies\/2026\/02\/23\/byzantine-beacons-part-2-history\/\" 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