To conceive how the Mediterranean world of Antiquity transitioned to the new world of the European Middle Ages, the fate of the Graeco-Roman Near East first needs to be understood.  We have long ago forgotten that the Near East and North Africa were once integral to Graeco-Roman society and civilization. Indeed, North Africa, Egypt and Syria were not peripheries, they were not alien add-ons to the Roman Empire, but lay at its very heart as a society and a polity. This reality, which we have lost sight of, was long remembered, was ‘known’, by Christendom through much of the Middle Ages. The passionate focus and strivings of the people of the Middle Ages, both in Europe and in the remains of the Roman Empire, to regain the lost half of their cultural realm cannot be understood unless we appreciate this. This episode describes the first phase of the Islamic conquest of the Roman Orient. It was a barbarian invasion like all the others, but with one crucial difference: these barbarians wanted the wealth and the power of the civilization that they had conquered, but not its culture, values and way of life: they had brought their own.