A further triumph for the Miaphysites came on the eastern border of the empire in Syria, where an Arab people known as the Ghassānids had migrated from the south of the Arabian peninsula and set up a formidable independent kingdom. This stretched all the way from southern Syria along the borders of the Holy Land to the Gulf of Aqaba (Eilat) at the north-eastern end of the Red Sea, and its military strength made it a crucial buffer state for Byzantium against the Sassanians, though the relationship was troubled and often fractured, because the Ghassānids, on their initial conversion to
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