Thanks .

That was one of several areas, I didn’t really want to touch on, but you’re totally right that it led to a lot of later problems and was pretty much a proximate cause of the loss of Egypt, Syria, etc. I suspect that the bureaucratic faction actually relished the loss of those provinces, since they had some pretty strange traditions that they had no control over. And, while the Muslim incursions helped create the Thematic system, they also led to a strengthening of the bureaucratic faction as well, especially in the area of what we would now call “national security”.

The internal divisions within the empire, brought about by the Iconoclasts, was hardly helpful in maintaining a united front vis-a-vis the barbarians and the Muslims