The poorly documented Byzantine–Arab border acquires a real visibility moulded through various literary works that relate it to places, people, events, and social practices, especially warfare. The way the border has been defined over the last century, as a region with its own representations and characteristics, is largely a historiographical construction, to which two articles of the scholar Henri Gregoire, ‘L’age heroique de Byzance’ and ‘Etudes sur l’epopee byzantine’, both published in 1933, have largely contributed by considering the frontier as closely related to epic literature. More recently, when Gilbert Dagron comments on the military treatise De Velitatione, a treatise on the Arab–Byzantine wars and border written at the end of the tenth century, he also contributes to the creation of common representations of the border. Not only does he evoke the landscapes of the Taurus mountains’ canyons and mention military contacts and skirmishes between Arabs and Byzantines, well-known thanks to the book of Vasiliev and Canard, but he also describes the bilingual, even bicultural, society that lives on the frontier. For him, the Arab–Byzantine border is not a gap that separates two civilisations, but a space between them, that creates continuity and unity from one empire to the other.

Most of these stereotypes, shaped by modern historians, share a common source, the late work Digenis Akritas. Yet this poem is as problematic as the border itself. Not only do several forms of it exist, but we do not know when, where, and by whom the two medieval versions were composed. The story collates many confused allusions to historical events and people which belong to the ‘Byzantine heroic age of the wars against the Arabs’. However, the world it creates is impressive enough to be accessible to modern readers. It is a peculiar world, both Arab and Byzantine, made of war, violence, and wealth. It gives no place to central institutions, emperor, or church; on the contrary, it is dominated by local powers, outlaws, and fabulous or legendary creatures, like dragons or Amazons. Digenis Akritas’ romance has been viewed as a distorting mirror of a reality that, in fact, we know very little about.