Two years later, in 680, Muawiya died at age seventy-eight, and with him the dream of becoming the one to conquer Constantinople—the one he had heard the prophet prophesize of when still a youth. But honors and riches were not the only things that had motivated him. Muslim chronicles say his pivotal role in Islam’s first schism, the First Fitna—which saw Muawiya ascend to the caliphate on a pyramid of dead Muslim bodies—had, as he aged, instilled in him a brooding fear of the hellfire awaiting him; hence the first Umayyad caliph’s obsession with conquering Constantinople, which might appease
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