Muslim forays into Europe began shortly after the religion's inception. Soon after the death of the prophet Muhammad in AD 632, the Muslim world expanded westwards, and within less than a century encompassed sizeable parts of what today is considered Europe. Muslim forces easily prevailed over the Byzantines in the crucial battles of Ajnâdayn (634) and Yarmûk (636) and incorporated the province of Syria from them pushing relentlessly to the north and west. At the same time, consolidation of the hold of Islam in North Africa was soon to be followed by incursions into what is now Europe as Muslim armies raided and eventually conquered territories leading to the establishment of Muslim states on the European continent, some of which were quite long-lived. A short-lived invasion of Byzantine Sicily by a small Arab and Berber force that landed in 652 was the prelude of a series of incursions; from the eighth century to the fifteenth, Muslims ruled parts of the Iberian Peninsula, southern Italy, southern France and, several Mediterranean islands, while in the East, incursions into a much reduced in territory and weakened Byzantine Empire continued unabated. In the 720s and 730s Muslim forces fought and raided north of the Pyrenees, well into what is now France, reaching as north as Tours where they were eventually repelled by the Franks in 732 to their Iberian and North African territories.