The majority of descriptions of the invaders written by contemporary Christians portray them along the same lines as Sophronius: not as men—even uncompromising men on a religious mission, as Muslim sources written later claim—but as godless savages come to destroy all that is sacred. Writing around the time of Yarmuk, Maximus the Confessor (b. 580) said the invaders were “a barbarous people of the desert… wild and untamed beasts, whose form alone is human, [come to] devour civilized government.”40
