Rise of Islam

The **Rise of Islam** lasted from about 565 AD until 732 AD. It began with Byzantium and Persia rumbling towards an inevitable and chronic war, that left both empires hollowed-out and vulnerable to a new predatory rival; the armies of Islam. It then ended on with twin Arab defeats at either end of their vast empire; against the Byzantines under the walls of Constantinople and against the Franks at Tours.

In the seventh century, Arabia becomes the cradle of the world's third great monotheistic religion; in this case as revealed to the *Messenger of God*, Muhammad. Mohammed was born around 570 in the city of Mecca, both a commercial centre and an important pilgrimage site because of its shrine, the *Ka’ba*. It was in a cave outside Mecca, in 610, that angel Gabriel, that Mohammed reported being visited by the angel Gabriel, and receiving his first revelation from God. On other occasions, he had similar experiences, and the result was one of the great formative books of mankind; the *Qur'an*. From 613, Muhammad started preaching these revelations publicly. His message was essentially the existence of one God, all-powerful but merciful, and he freely acknowledged that other *messengers* (the *prophets* of Israel and Jesus, too) had preached the same truth. But monotheism was not a popular creed with those whose livelihood depends on pilgrims and polytheistic idols. Mohammed, once he began to win converts to the new creed, made enemies among the elites. In 622, he fled Mecca for the city of Yathrib, some two-hundred miles to the north. This *Hegira*, or emigration, was to be the beginning of the Muslim era, and Yathrib was to change its name, becoming the "*city of the prophet*", Medina. There, Muhammad steadily acquired a stronger following. He was now essentially a religious, political, and even military leader. Medina was the base for subduing first Mecca, and then uniting tribes of Arabia for the first time in its history. A unifying principle was available in Muhammad’s idea of the *umma*, the brotherhood of believers. Beyond this it is not clear how far Muhammad wished to go. He had made approaches to Jewis at Medina, but they had refused to recognise him as a true *prophet*; they were therefore driven out, and a Muslim community alone remained. But this need not have implied any enduring conflict with either Judaism or its continuator, Christianity; doctrinal ties existed in their monotheism and their scriptures.

In 633, just a year after the Prophet’s death, the Muslims burst out of Arabia. The speed of their advance was astonishing. The first victim of Islam was Sassanid Persia. The challenge came just as she was exhausted and defeat at the hands of the Byzantine emperor Heraclius, who was likewise to suffer from this new scourge. In 636, the Byzantine forces were driven-out of Syria, and, in 638, Jerusalem fell to Islam. Mesopotamia was wrested from the Sassanids in the next couple of years, and, at the same time, Egypt was taken from the *empire*. The absorption of North Africa was now started, and an Arab fleet created. Cyprus fell almost at once, and, later in the century, the Mediterranean islands were divided between the Arabs and the *empire*. At the end of the century the Arabs took Carthage, too. Meanwhile, after the Sassanids’ disappearance, the Arabs conquered Khurasan in 655, Kabul in 664, and the Sindh, the edge of India, in 708. Constantinople remained the jewel at the end of the quest. But after a second failed siege in 717, the city still lay inaccessible to Islam, blocking the eastern path into Europe. Even the conquest of Visigothic Spain may have begun as an attempt to circle the Meditarranean, and take Constantinople from the east. Finally, in 732, a hundred years after the death of the *Prophet*, an Arab army, deep in France and puzzled by the approach of winter, turned back near Tour. The Frankish leader who faced them, Charles Martel, claimed victory; at any rate, it was the high water-mark of Muslim conquest. Whatever brought it to an end - and possibly it was just because the Arabs were not much interested in Europe, once away from the warm lands of the Mediterranean littoral - the Islamic conquest remains an astonishing achievement; even if Edward Gibbon’s celebrated flight of fancy of Oxford teaching the *Qur'an* was never remotely near realization. The tide had not flowed without interruption. There had been bitter fighting of Muslim against Muslim in the 650s; the *First Fitna* (“Trials”). And conquest was only the beginning of the story of the impact of Islam on the world, for one of the great traditions of civilization was to be built on its empire and conversions.

## History

### Early Roman-Persian War (565-602 AD)

The successors of Justinian the Great inherited great territorial responsibilities and unsolved problems. Many of them had arisen from the recent Plague of Justinian. The loss of so many taxpayers caused imperial revenues to fall. Recruits for the army became harder to find, and led to more reliance on *barbarian* troops once again. Meanwhile, Byzantium was beset by its enemies. Justinian had fought two great wars against Sassanid Persia, which produced no decision. Others followed. In the west, too, in spite of a vigorous diplomacy of bribery and expensive fortress-building, Justinian had never been successful in dealing with the *barbarians*. Perhaps enduring success there was impossible. The pressure from behind on these migrant peoples was too great and, besides, they could see great prizes ahead; "*the barbarians,*" wrote one historian of Justinian's reign, "*having once tasted Roman wealth, never forgot the road that led to it*". The initial threat came from the **Slavs**. The story of the Slavs has been traced back at least as far as 1500 BC, when they appear to have dwelled between the Vistula and Dnieper rivers. For two thousand years, they spread slowly westward coming into contact with Germanic tribes, as well as eastward into modern Russia. The Slavs enter the historical record after the collapse of the Huns, in the 5th century, when they began to move south. taking up residence on the banks of the Danube and threatening to overflow down into the Balkan provinces. Perhaps their direction reflects the pressure from another influx of wanderers: the **Avars**. They were a confederation of nomadic people, ruled by a *khan*, newly arrived from the Russian steppe, whence they had been ousted by the Göktürk Khaghanate (552–603); the Turks making their first major appearance in world history. The Avars are often considered by historians to be the successors of the Huns in their way of life and, especially, mounted warfare. They were still east of the Slavs, but courted both Byzantine and Persian diplomacy. Further west lay the **Lombards**, a Germanic people who had probably come, long ago, from the cold northern lands known to ancients as Scandia (now Scandinavia); their own oral history, set down in the eighth century, testifies to that. This tribe slowly drifted southwards into what we now call Austria. By this time, they were already Christians, but of the Arian variety; like other Germanic peoples. A large number of them had been recruited as mercenaries by the soldier-eunuch Narses for his expedition to Italy of 551. Meanwhile, their numbers continued to grow, largely through conquering of neighbouring tribes, notably the Gepids. Now the Lombards numbered over a quarter of a million, and were seeking more space. Justinian, in his efforts to renew the Roman Empire, had dangerously stretched its resources, while failing to take into account the changed realities of the sixth century.

Justinian's immediate successor, **Justin II** (565-574), believed that with uncompromising firmness the enemies of the empire could be scattered. Within weeks of his accession, he discontinued Justinian's practice of buying off the Avars; he later took a similar line with Khosru of Persia himself. The results of this change of policy were renewed hostility with Sassanid Persia, and upset to the balance of power north of the Danube, The Avars were forced to seek new sources of wealth to maintain their position and client networks. Avar pressure caused the Lombards, led by their king Alboin (d. 572), to migrate *en masse* into Italy in the spring of 568. The peninsula was then recovering from the devastating Byzantine-Gothic Wars, and the small imperial army left for its defence could only defend coastal cities; that could be supplied by the Byzantine fleet. The first important city to fall was Cividale del Friuli. There, Alboin created the first Lombard duchy, which he entrusted to his nephew. By 569, Milan, Vicenza, Verona and Brescia were in his hands. Only Pavia put up much resistance, falling after a three year siege in 572; it became the capital of the new Lombard Kingdom of Italy (568–774). In the following years, they penetrated further south. The Lombard had invaded Italy, not as raiders, but as permanent settlers. They would intermarry with the Italians, adopt their language, absorb their culture, and, doubtless, intended to rule the whole peninsula as a single entity. But it was not to be. Before his Italian invasions, Alboin had folded the Gepids into his realm by force, killing their king, and marrying the king's daughter Rosemund; Alboin apparently used her father's skull as a goblet. Rosemund’s simmering hatred boiled over in 572, blackmailing a court official into assassinating Alboin. The essentially Germanic nature of the Lombards now reasserted itself; Alboin had been less a king than a warleader. The various Lombard dukes elected one of their own to oversee a shared defence, but henceforth tended to act exactly as they pleased; becoming small semi-autonomous kingdoms. Meanwhile, the Lombard had avoided Ravenna and Rome, probably due to their lack of numbers; the southern coasts also remained in imperial hands. The Lombard were, thus, in no sense destroyers of Justinian's achievement; they merely introduced a powerful new element into Italy. Justin II could take no action against the Lombard tide; he was fully occupied with the Avars, who were now ravaging the Danube frontier. After three years of fighting, he was obliged to seek a truce, buying them off with 60,000 silver pieces; far more than the original tribute. That same year, 571, saw dangerous developments on the eastern frontier. Justin's refusal to pay tribute combined with his diplomatic overtures to the Göktürks led to a war with Sassanid Persia. King Khosru was having exactly the opposite experience. His recent conquests, destroying the Hephthalites in the east and extending his power into northeastern Arabia, had brought the empire to its greatest extend since Shapur II. After two disastrous campaigns, in which the Persians captured the key Byzantine fortress at Dara, Justin appears to have lost his mind. John of Ephesus says that he used to bite people in anger, and could only be soothed when pulled around the palace in a little wagon. It had been a long time since the *empire* had suffered from an insane emperor: for decades, the throne had been held by the fit and the shrewd. Fortunately, Justin’s wife Sophia, niece of the celebrated Theodora, convinced her husband to name an able courtier named Tiberius as his *Caesar*, and, until the *emperor*'s death in 578, the pair controlled the *empire* together.

**Tiberius II** (578-582) had not had an easy regency. While the Avars laid siege to the important Danube fortress of Sirmium, the Slavs had begun to pour into the Balkans in ever greater numbers. The new *emperor*, who assumed the additional name of Constantine, was occupied everywhere. The great king Khosru died in 579, after a forty-eight-year reign. His ambitious reign had been highly successful. The later Islamic historian al-Tabari, eulogizing him, listed his achievements; "*he conquered new territory; equipped Persia with a strong professional army; founded or rebuilt many cities, palaces, and much infrastructure; promoted the welfare of the people; increased state revenues; and, under his reign, art and science flourished*". Khosru's son and successor, Hormizd IV (579-590) was an aggressive young man, and quick to take advantage of the Byzantine problems in the west. He immediately broke-off peace negotiations. Nevertheless, Tiberius conducted a successful four-year-long campaign into Persian controlled Armenia; albeit also suffering a few defeats. Forced to focus his military efforts on the east, Tiberius finally gave-in to Avar demands and relinquished control of Sirmium in 582. Later that same year, he became gravely ill; apparently having eaten some poorly-prepared (or perhaps deliberately-poisoned) food. The *emperor* initially named two heirs, Maurice and Germanus, each of whom married one of his daughters. Historian have speculated that he intended to divide the *empire* into two; one receiving the eastern provinces, the other the western provinces. On 13 August 582, however, he elevated only Maurice. Tiberius died the next day, and his last words were spoken to his heir, "*Make your reign my finest epitaph*". And indeed, for the next twenty years, **Maurice** (582-602) ruled with a firm and competent hand. He was almost always at war. In Spain, the Visigothic king Leovigild (569-586) was busy reconquering the lands his predecessors had lost. The Byzantines were unable to organize a decent defence. and Córdoba, its last major possession, was lost in 584. But Maurice secured the remaining western territories by establishing the *exarchates* of Ravenna and Carthage, where military governors held absolute power over both military and civilian administration; the inspiration for the later *Themes* (or military districts). There was good news, too, from the east. The war with the Byzantines had been long, expensive, and indecisive, and the Persians were tired of it; Hormizd had further alienated Zoroastrian nobles at court by his attempts to woo the Christian population of his domain. Finally, one of his generals revolted. His name was Bahram Chobin (d. 591), and he had earned a great reputation for himself by beating off a massive Göktürk invasion on the far eastern border. Hormizd, hoping for victory, had then dispatched him to the Byzantine frontier to press the war against Maurice. But in 589, Bahram lost a battle on the banks of the Aras river. Hormizd was furious; and perhaps jealous of his celebrated general. He sent a humiliating letter dismissing him from command. But Bahram refused to give up his post, and, when Hormizd tried to remove him by force, the troops simply defected to the general’s side. Bahram then marched on Ctesiphon, but, by the time he got there, a palace coup had already deposed Hormizd, and put his son Khosru II (590-628) on the throne. This was not quite what Bahram had in mind, and he had most of the army on his side. So Khosru fled into Byzantine territory, and appealed to Maurice for help. The *emperor* seized his chance to bring the war with Persia to an end. He sent a Byzantine army back to Ctesiphon with Khosru, and, after a protracted struggle, Bahram was forced out of the city; he fled eastward to the Göktürks, who first welcomed him and then helped Khosru by assassinating him. Khosru II thus took back his throne. In exchange for the help, Khosru agreed to a peace, in which the Byzantines regained some lost frontier territory, including the fortress of Dara. The treaty was sealed with a marriage; Maurice sent one of his daughters to Ctesiphon to become Khosru II’s wife. As Khosru was a notorious collector of wives, this was not as meaningful as it might seem; nevertheless, peace descended over the frontier for the first time in almost twenty years. The Byzantines were now free to focus on the Balkans, where they took the offensive against Slavs and Avars for the first time in a long time. Maurice's successes on battlefields and in foreign policy were counterbalanced by mounting unhappiness at home. His greatest problem was money. Warfare and tribute had prevented all his predecessor's from ever properly replenishing the imperial coffers. Maurice responded with a stinginess which gradually became an obsession. Already in 588, his announcement of a cut in military wages by a quarter had led to a mutiny on the Persian frontier; army's discipline was only restored when full pay was restored. This episode should have been an abject lesson concerning the importance of maintaining the favour of the army; a lesson that Maurice decidedly failed to heed. In 599, he refused to ransom twelve thousand prisoners taken by the Avars, who consequently put them all to death. And in 602, most disastrously of all, he ordered that the troops should not return home for the winter (as was normal), but should camp beyond the Danube, foraging for food in enemy territory (thereby saving travel costs and supplies). The exhausted army flatly refused. Instead, they elevated one of their own officers, a certain Phocas, as their leader, and began marching towards Constantinople. Phocas was their spokesman, not their *emperor*. Maurice they would no longer tolerate, but they would willingly acclaim either his son Theodosius or his brother-in-law Germanus as his successor. Both men were promptly accused of treason; Theodosius was flogged, while Germanus sought sanctuary in Hagia Sophia. Meanwhile, rioting broke out all over Constantinople, and an angry mob gathered around the palace. That night, Maurice and his family fled across the strait to the city of Chalcedon. There Maurice stopped; he had gout, making travel difficult. But he sent his son Theodosius on towards Persia, with a letter asking Khosru II for help. When Phocas arrived at the capital, the army and the populace proclaimed him *emperor*. An official retorted that Maurice was still alive, so Phocas decided to remedy that problem, A troop of soldiers quickly ran the fugitives to earth; Maurice is said to have watched impassively as his four younger sons were butchered, before he himself faced the executioner; Theodosius was caught and murdered on his path to Persia near Nicaea; the bodies were cast into the sea; the commander returned to the capital with the six heads. In many ways, Maurice had proved a wise and far-sighted statesman. By a combination of determination, clear-sightedness, and sheer hard work, he had left the *empire* immeasurably stronger than he found it. Had he allowed his soldiers only a little more bread, or his people just a few more circuses, he would easily have escaped his fate. Even as things were, it was only a matter of weeks before his subjects were mourning his death.

### Late Roman-Persian War (602-628 AD)

At first **Phocas** (602–610) was popular simply because he was not Maurice. The army was relieved to have a military man in charge; the people of Constantinople hoped for change; and even Pope Gregory the Great wrote a fulsome letter praising the new *emperor* as a "*restorer of liberty*". As a usurper with not ties to the elite of Constantinople. however, Phocas' position on the throne was always shaky. He immediately sought to silence those who might voice opposition left and right. He burned alive one first-rate general, another Narses; no relation to his more famous namesake. Until his day, torture had been rare in the *empire*; it was Phocas who introduced the blindings and mutilations which were to cast so sinister a shadow over the centuries to come. Because of this preoccupation, he was unable to confront another war, this one with Sassanid Persia. Khosru II, who had spent the last few years consolidating his grip over his realm, was only too willing to help avenge Maurice, his "*friend and father-in-law*". While the Byzantines had no doubt viewed Khosru' ceding of frontier territories as a moderate price for restoring him to the throne, the Persian king himself probably saw these concessions as a major blow to his dignity. With the overthrow of Maurice, he now had an honourable pretext for attacking Byzantium; the **Byzantine-Sassanid War** (602-628). Skirmishes began along the border, with the Persians, almost unopposed, capturing the important fortresses of Dara in 604. The following year, Edessa fell into Persian hands as well; and its most precious relic, the *Mandylion* (a cloth similar to the *Shroud of Turin*), was taken off to Ctesiphon. Over the next four years, the Persian armies invaded and plundered much of Syria and then stormed through Anatolia, until, in 608, a raiding-party reached Chalcedon, within sight of the capital. Simultaneously, the Slavs and Avars renewed their move south into the Balkan peninsula. At this point in the crisis, one might expect the *emperor* to encourage feelings of solidarity. Instead, Phocus, who had portrayed his accession as something divinely ordained, sought to advertise his piety by persecuting Jews. Most of his intended victims lived in the eastern provinces; to alienate them at such a time was folly. A pogrom in Antioch in 608 would lead to a Jewish revolts in several cities, and, in their turn, Christian reprisals. Thousands of terrified citizens, Christian and Jewish alike, fled butchery; the latter openly allying themselves with the Persians. As the *empire* sank into anarchy, plot succeeded plot in swift succession. It was from North Africa that deliverance came at last. In 608, the *exarch of Carthage* renounced his loyalty to Emperor Phocas. He was too old to take any decisive action himself, beyond cutting off the grain supplies on which the capital depended. But the next year, he assembled a considerable army and fleet, which he placed under the command of his son Heraclius (d. 641). Towards the end of the year, young Heraclius set out for Egypt, where he secured the province and collected further men and ship, before continuing his advance towards Constantinople. This formidable force sailed into the imperial harbour at Constantinople, in October 610, to find the gates open, the people waiting, and Phocas already under citizen’s arrest. When Heraclius asked him, "*Is this how you have governed the empire, wretch?*", Phocas replied, "*And will you govern it any better?*". It was a good question, but hardly calculated to incline Heraclius towards clemency; he beheaded Phocas on the spot. That afternoon, Heraclius underwent two separate ceremonies; first, he was crowned *emperor*; immediately afterwards, he was married: his wife Eudocia.

**Heraclius** (610-641) found himself at the helm of a mess. “*He found,*” Theophanes tells us, “*that the Roman state had become exhausted. The Avars were devastating Europe, and the Persians had destroyed the Roman army in their battles*”. He began his reign by deciding to sue for peace, even if it came on poor terms. But Khosru II was winning, and refused. A year later, the Persian general Shahr-Baraz entered Antioch. In 613, he added Damascus, and besieged Jerusalem. When the city finally fell after a lengthy siege, the irate Persians stormed in and massacred the population; a fragment of the *True Cross* and other relics of the crucifixion joined the *Mandylion* in Ctesiphon. No clearer mark of divine displeasure could be imagined. The Persians then turned their attention to Egypt; and before long the chief source of the *empire*'s grain had become a Persian province. Things began to look even grimmer for the Byzantines in 617, when Chalcedon fell to the Persians, across the strait from the capital. Such was the despair that Heraclius seems to have considered abandoning Constantinople. He secretly loaded the imperial treasury onto ships, and sent them to North Africa for safekeeping; he would go back to Carthage, and from there rule whatever Byzantine territories remained. The plan was revealed when some of the ships sank in a storm, not long after leaving the imperial harbour. News of the disaster spread back to people of Constantinople, and caused enormous angst. Their horror was voiced by the *patriarch* of Constantinople, Sergius (610-638), who convinced Heraclius that the defence of *New Rome* was his sacred duty. Now the *emperor* was forced to search for a way to dig himself out of an impossible situation. Fortunately, Khosru II sent him an extremely tactless letter demanding his surrender; "*Do not deceive yourself with a vain hope in that Christ, who was not able to save himself from the Jews*". The letter was a major misstep. Casting the war as a religious conflict did not make Khosru’s own soldiers any more determined. Sassanid Persia was a religious unity, only in the sense that Zoroastrianism was the religion of the Persian aristocracy. But when Heraclius told the people of Constantinople that the Persians were blaspheming Christ, they were fired with indignation. Men began to join the army in increasing numbers. Patriarch Sergius melted the treasures from churches and monasteries, turned them into coins, and presented the money to the *emperor*. The war had become a crusade. His political position strengthened by a patched-up agreement with the Avars, by the spring of 622, Heraclius was ready for his counter-offensive.

On Easter Sunday, 622, Heraclius celebrated a solemn Easter mass at the basilica of Hagia Sophia, taking the Eucharist at the hands of Patriarch Sergius. The mass was also a send-off; the next morning, he departed at the head of his troops, the first Roman emperor to ride personally into battle since Theodosius I. Heraclius did not try to sail straight across to Chalcedon, where the Persians waited. Instead, he had the army conveyed around the curve of Anatolia, and landed at the Cilician Gates, the narrow pass through the Taurus Mountains; where the mountains protected his troops from immediate attack. Here he spent the summer training to improve the skills of his men, and his own generalship. In the autumn, he began to march towards Armenia, and the Persians were forced to draw away from Chalcedon to meet the challenge. The two armies met somewhere in the Cappadocian highlands. What followed next is not entirely clear, but Heraclius certainly won a crushing victory over the Persians under their foremost general, Shahr-Baraz. The tide of the war had turned. For the next three years, the Persian advances were slowly wiped out, one at a time, as Heraclius and his men reclaimed Anatolia, Syria, and parts of Armenia; Jerusalem, farther south, remained in Persian hands, but the soldiers were nevertheless fired by the idea that God was with them. By 626, Khosru had decided that a drastic move was needed to defeat the Byzantines. He was ready to besiege Constantinople. He prepared for the assault by doing a little behind-the-scenes diplomacy; he sent an embassy to the Avars, offering friendship on better terms than Heraclius had been able to give. Khosru arranged for them to launch an attack on Constantinople’s western walls, while Shahr-Baraz would march across Anatolia to assist from the east. Meanwhile, another general Shahin was entrusted with a smaller force for Persia's defence. Heraclius and the bulk of the army were far away on the northern Persia border. Determined neither to leave his capital undefended, nor to abandon his position, he decided to divide his forces into three. The first left immediately for Constantinople; the second, under his brother Theodore, he sent off to occupy Shahin; the third and smallest would remain with him, and, he hoped, ultimately invade a virtually defenceless Persia. On 29 June 626, the Persians and Avars were ready to mount their coordinated assault on Constantinople. The details are preserved in a sermon preached afterwards by a clergyman named Theodore the Syncellus. On the first day of the attack, the city was completely surrounded by Avar and Persian troops, numbering at least eighty thousand. All of the buildings outside the walls were then set ablaze, pouring forth such dense smoke that those defending the wall could scarcely open their eyes, thus allowing siege engines and catapults to be moved into place. While the official Bonus organized the city’s garrison for defence, Patriarch Sergius began holding sermons, vigils, and services almost without pause in the Hagia Sophia; he was determined to remind the people that they were suffering for Christ. On the tenth day, Shahr-Baraz's plan was for the Avars to occupy the defenders, so that his fleet could enter the imperial harbour without meeting much opposition. But the imperial fleet proved much stronger than he had expected, driving back the Persians and sinking their ships. With the eastern assault effectively over, the garrison could concentrate on beating off the Avar from the west. Thousands fell, until the Avars began to retreat in disorder and chaos. The siege had failed. Shahr-Baraz was forced to evacuate Constantinople, and withdrew in disgrace. Heraclius, still far away, took immediate steps to strengthen the Byzantine position. Since he had lost the Avars as allies, he sent ambassadors north to yet another nomadic tribe; the Khazars. Like the Avars, these nomads had been driven westward by the Göktürk Khaghanate, and made a new home for themselves in Caucasus Mountains. Heraclius dazzled their chief (*Khagan*) by the richness of his presents and a promise of his daughter Epiphania in marriage, in return for some forty thousand men; fortunately for Epiphania, the chief died before the marriage. While Heraclius and his new Khazar allies began to fight their way south into the Persia heartland, his brother Theodore scored a crushing victory over Shahin; the exact battlefield is unknown. Afterwards, the dejected Persian general fell ill and died. Khosru II ordered his corpse to be packed in salt and brought to Ctesiphon; on its arrival, he watched grimly while it was scourged until it was no longer recognizable. For some time now, members of the Persian court had doubted their king's sanity. After this, they doubted no longer. In late 627, Heraclius launched a surprising winter campaign to threaten Ctesiphon itself; without the Khazars, who had remained closer to their homes in the north. He moved with caution; a Persian army was not far away, but its commander, Razates, was waiting for a favourable opportunity to attack. Only at the very end of the year, by the ruins of Nineveh, was battle joined. Heraclius feigned retreat to lead the Persians to the plains, before reversing his troops to the surprise of the Persians. The battle continued for eight hours without a break. At its peak, Rhahzadh was killed; he challenged Heraclius to single combat, we are told, who struck off the his head with a single thrust; an unlikely story. In any case, the Persians then withdrew. Although the victory was not a rout, it prevented further Persian resistance. By the spring of 628, Heraclius had reached the outskirts of Ctesiphon; where he sacked and burned the sumptuous palace at Dastagird. The defenders of Ctesiphon did not have a *patriarch* to unify them in religious fervour. Instead, they turned on Khosru II. He was overthrown and killed in a palace coup led by his son Kavadh II, who took the throne and immediately sued for peace. There followed a treaty, whereby the Byzantines regained all their lost territories, their captives, a war indemnity, and, most importantly for them, the *True Cross* and other lost relics. The war was over, and the landscape had changed. Byzantium had regained its old shape again, but Sassanid Persia had been reduced to a weak and uncertain kingdom. Kavadh II ruled for a matter of weeks before dying of unknown causes, and, for the next four years, a whole series of pretenders and usurpers passed through the Persian palace, none of them reigning for more than a few months at a time. In the Caucasus, the Khazars soon expanded northwards into a political force to be reckoned with; the Khazar Khaganate (650–969). The Avars, weakened by the defeat at Constantinople, lost more land to the Slavs, and their threat began to fade. The Bulgars, near the Azov Sea, had been under the Avar thumb; but now their chief, a young man named Kubrat, sent a message to Heraclius, asking to negotiate as an independent king. Heraclius agreed, and Kubrat established a strong Bulgarian state; which, in a somewhat different form, survives to this day. In September 628, Heraclius entered Constantinople in triumph. Before him went the *True Cross*; the procession threaded its way to Hagia Sophia; and the thanksgiving service that followed was, perhaps, the most moving moment in the history of the great church. Though still in his fifties, Heraclius looked old and ill; but if he had worn himself out, he had accomplished everything he could have dreamed of. And in doing so, he had removed every buffer that lay between his empire and the Arabs to the south.

### Life of Muhammad (570-632 AD)

**Islam** has shown greater expansive and adaptive power than any other religion except Christianity. It has appealed to peoples as different and as distant from one another as Nigerians and Indians; Egyptians and Indonesians. Yet none of the other great shaping forces of world history was based on fewer initial resources; except perhaps the Jewish religion. Perhaps significantly, the Jews’ own nomadic origins lay in the same sort of tribal society, raw and backward, which supplied the first armies of Islam. The comparison inevitably suggests itself for another reason; for Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are the three great monotheistic religions. Each of the later arrivals in this close family of religions claims to build upon the message of its predecessors, bringing a better and clearer version of the truth about the one God; in this case as revealed to the *Messenger of God*, Muhammad.

Below the titanic struggles of great empires, Roman and Persian, the inhabitants of the **Arabian peninsula** carried on the daily battle of surviving in a dry and hostile land. Neither empire had penetrated more than briefly and fairly superficially into the peninsula, and Arabia had undergone little sophisticating fertilization from higher civilizations. Most Arabs were pastoral nomads, collectively known as the *Bedouin*, who wandered in search of grazing and water for their sheep, goats, and camels. All of them descended more or less from the same stock, spoke Arabic, and shared certain customs. Despite these common ties, they had no political unity, no common law, and no central authority. Ties of kinship and tribal affiliation were the essential social cement, which meant that loyalty did not extend outside of tribal boundaries. They lived in competition for resources and in mutual disdain for each other, so raiding another tribe for food, animals, and women was a constant that bore no stigma of moral wrong. Even the tribes themselves were often bitterly divided, with clans within them struggling for dominance. While most of the Arabian peninsula was arid desert, around its fringes, there were little ports, the homes of Arabs who had been seafarers from at least 2000 BC. Their traded by sea with India, the Persian Gulf and East Africa, brought spices and gums up the Red Sea to Egypt, from which they could make their way to Mediterranean markets. There were quite large urban areas too. The most important of these was Yemen, in the south-west corner, where the monsoon winds brought water to a relatively fertile area. In antiquity, Yemen had supported a group of thriving petty-kingdoms, that prospered from the lucrative incense trade; and later from the mining of precious metal in the hinterland. The great wealth of the region is remembered in the biblical tale of the *Queen of Sheba*; modern historians identify Sheba with Saba (1200 BC–275 AD), one of the Yemenite kingdoms. Cities such as Marib and Shabwa boasted fine stone-built temples and palaces. and a well-developed written language and culture. This civilisation survived until the early sixth century AD; both Islamic tradition and archaeological evidence link its disappearance with the collapse of the sophisticated irrigation arrangements. Unpredictable shifts in weather patterns during the 530s had twice caused such sudden rainstorms that the great *Dam of Marib*, to save and channel water, had given way; causing disastrous flooding. Both times, the dam had been repaired. But the entire system had been badly weakened, and, around 570, the dam broke for a third time; and was never repaired. Tribes from the south migrated towards the more welcoming oasis towns of the peninsula. Mecca, where the young Muhammad lived, was such a place. It was important a pilgrim centre, where for centuries tribes had come from the interior to pay homage at a shrine called the *Ka’aba*, which housed the *Black Stone*, a sacred rock (possibly a meteorite); the convention that war was prohibited for twenty miles around the holy place was the only acknowledgment that some greater force might bind the Arabs together. But Mecca was also an important junction of caravan routes between Yemen and Mediterranean ports, especially Gaza. Along them came outsiders and foreigners. Most Arabs were loyal to indigenous polytheism, believing in nature gods, demons and spirits; but as intercourse with the outside world increased, Jewish and Christian communities appeared in the area; there were Jewish Arabs before there were Muslims, however disagreeable such a notion may be to some today. The dispersal northwards meant that Mecca, the home of the sacred *Ka’aba*, was no longer the only largish city. Mecca did benefit from the migration; but Islamic tradition holds that most southern refugees ended up another oasis town about two-hundred-and-fifty miles further north, Medina (then known as Yathrib). Medina was less prosperous than Mecca, but had its own importance; it had a sizeable Jewish community, who had migrated into Arabia long before; while agriculture was far from being the domain of the Arab tribes, the Jews were outstanding farmers, cultivating the fertile land of the oasis. The influx of southern tribes created the Arabia of Muhammad's day, shifting and breaking the existing patterns of alliance and hostility. Mecca, like other Arab towns, was governed by a council of equals, made up of the leaders of the more powerful clans; clan members of the Quraysh tribe dominated its council. But all was not well. Quraysh dominance was resented by other tribes. Indeed, they had been forced to fight a bloody war, just four years before the Marib dam broke, to keep their power in the city. And hostility within the Quraysh was growing too. Some clans were doing much better in commercial enterprises than others. And personal fortunes were on the rise, further straining the unquestioned loyalties of tribal structure. The social relationships had always assumed noble blood and age to be the accepted fellow of wealth and status; but this was no longer always the case. A strong king might have solved some of these knotty problems resulting from this government of equals. But the Arabs were constitutionally anti-king; they had spent too many centuries relying on each other to put all of their trust in any single man.

**Muhammad** (d. 632) was born in Mecca around 570 into the Banu Hashim clan, one of the poorer and more resentful clans of the Quraysh. His father died before his birth; and, when he was six years old, his mother too died, leaving him an orphan. Young Muhammad was raised by his uncle Abu Talib, an ambitious man who did not rate his nephew’s comfort among his personal priorities. Muhammad grew up on the edge of survival, earning his keep by accompanying his uncle’s merchant caravans on their journeys to other cities. At twenty-five, he was employed to lead a caravan to Syria for another Quraysh merchant, a rich widow named Khadijah. He so impressed her that she proposed marriage; and he accepted. Khadijah was fifteen years his senior, but she would bear him three children; the most important of which was a daughter Fāṭimah, an important figure in Shi'a Islam. Khadija’s wealth put Muhammad in the upper crust of Meccan society, but he seems to have been continually tormented by the growing distance between rich and poor in his city, and the rampant materialism of his peers. Several years later, according to a well-known story, he took part in renovations to the wall around the *Ka’aba*; necessary, because “*men had stolen part of the treasure*”. Even the sacred shrine was not exempt from greed. Muhammad, devout by nature, began to spend one sacred month of each year providing for the poor, and then praying alone in a cave named "*Hira*" in the mountains near Mecca. It is said that one fateful day, in 610, the angel Gabriel came to him in an awe-inspiring encounter, and revealed his task; "*Recite in the name of your Lord who created. Created man from a clot of blood. Recite, for your Lord is the most generous...*". For the rest of his life, Muhammad continued to receive revelations from the God (Allah); though there were barren times and periods of self-doubt. The result, recorded by his followers as delivered and put together after his death, became one of the great formative books of mankind; the *Qur'an* (or *Koran*). Its narrowest significance is still enormous; the *Qur'an* crystallized Arabic culture, not only because of its content, but because it was to propagate the Arabic language in a written form. But it is much more: it is a visionary’s book, passionate in its conviction of divine inspiration, vividly conveying Muhammad’s spiritual genius and vigour. Muhammad saw himself as a passive instrument, a mouthpiece through which God made known his will to men. The word Islam means "submission", referring to total surrender to the will of God. But Muhammad was sure that his position was special; though there had been other messengers before him (the *prophets* of Israel and Jesus, too), who brought His word to other people, he was the final *prophet*. Through him, Muslims were to believe, God spoke his last message to mankind.

For three years after his first vision, Muhammad told only his immediate family and friends of his calling. His first followers were his wife, Khadija; a servant Zayd and her children; his cousin Ali, son of the uncle who had raised him; and his close friend Abu Bakr, the future first *caliph*. Not until 613 did he begin to preach his message openly. The essence of his teachings was simple: that no god was to be worshipped but Allah, compassion towards the poor and needy, and share the wealth that had been divinely granted. This was all that was necessary for salvation. Muhammad initially encounters no serious opposition. But, as he gathered more and more followers (primarily the weak, the poor, and the disinherited) tensions arose. The prosperous upper classes of Mecca complained that Muhammad was insulting them, deriding their culture, scorning their faith, and shattering their community. The clan leaders, seeing the spectre of an underclass revolt behind a charismatic and popular leaders, began to persecute and mistreat any clan members who accepted Muhammad’s message. His followers were attacked in alleyways, imprisoned on false charges, pushed outside the city walls. Some of them, afraid for their lives, fled further north for more welcoming Medina. Others went across the Red Sea into the kingdom of Axum (modern-day Ethiopia), and founded a small colony under the protection of its Christian king. But to his credit, Muhammad's uncle Abu Talib refused to turn against his own family, and the members of his clan (Banu Hashim) remained in Mecca, So the other clans of Mecca declared a public boycott against them, even refusing food and drink. In these wretched conditions, both Muhammad’s wife and his uncle grew ill and died. It was at this low point in Muhammad's life that the famous *Night Journey* took place; he is miraculously transported from Mecca to Jerusalem to pray with Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and other *prophets*; and, from there, continues to ascend to heaven, where God imposes on him the five daily prayers of Islam. Meanwhile, another uncle Abū Lahab succeeded to the leadership of Muhammad's clan. When he withdrew his protection, Muhammad and his followers were left completely vulnerable. Muhammad, who believed that he had not yet been given divine permission to leave his city, remained in Mecca long after almost all of his followers had fled. Finally, the Quraysh plotted to assassinate him; one representative of each clan was to do the deed, so that none would bear sole responsibility. "*It was then,*” the *Qur'an* says, “*that God gave permission to his prophet to migrate*”. Only Muhammad’s cousin Ali and his old friend Abu Bakr were left with him in Mecca. Under cover of dark, they slipped out of the city for Medina, The day of his flight, the ***Hijra***, was 16 July 622. This, not the date of Muhammad’s first vision, was to mark the starting point of the Islamic era. It was only when Muhammad came to Medina, that he was able to begin to shape his followers into something new. Almost from the point of his arrival in Medina, Muhammad took on the role, not just of *prophet*, but *de facto* ruler of the city. Like Mecca, Medina was a city unsettled by economic and social change. Unlike Mecca, Medina was not dominated by one Arab tribe, but a focus of competition for two; moreover the Jewish residents were subordinated by both. Such divisions favoured Muhammad’s leadership; and it was accepted. He began to achieve political power, not through conquest, but through his reputation for wisdom. Medina would soon be turned into a strong city with standards of justice and unity never before seen in Arabia. During his early tenure in the city, Muhammad was careful to protect the rights of non-Muslim resident; confident that they would inevitably recognize him as a *prophet*, and be enfolded into the new community of the faithful (*umma*). However, as it became increasingly clear that the Jews were always going to hold themselves apart, the previously congenial relations began to sour. The situation was opposite with the pagan Arab residents, among whom Islam spread remarkably smoothly. From the day of the *Hijra* onward, Muhammad's revelations show a new direction in his concerns, that of organizing a community. From the spiritual emphasis of his Mecca pronouncements, he turned to practical, detailed statements about communal worship (the mosque), food, drink, fasting, marriage, war. From its very beginnings, Islam was unlike Christianity in this way. There was no tension of religious and secular authority, no "Church and State" dualism such as was to shape Christian policies for a thousand years and more. Muhammad, it has been well said, was his own Constantine – *prophet* and sovereign in one.

From their adopted city, the Muslims wanted to fight back against their former oppressors. Beginning in 623, the year after the *Hijra*, they began to raid the caravans that went between Mecca and destinations to the north, passing Medina on the way. For centuries, Arabs had considered the caravans of other tribes to be fair game, so this was not exactly an act of war. But in 624, a grand caravan led by a man named Abu Sufyan, an old enemy of Muhammad’s, was to pass Medina; probably a number of small caravans joined together for greater protection. Muhammad assembled three hundred men, and set out to intercept the caravan at the Wells of Badr, a watering-place south of Medina. Alerted to his intentions, Abu Sufyan sent a message to Mecca asking for reinforcements, and a huge army turned out: a thousand men, representing every Quraysh clan. Rallying his outnumbered forces, Muhammad called out that any man who was killed fighting would certainly enter *paradise*. Driven by loyalty to Muhammad, by religious fervour, and by hatred for their enemies, the Muslims drove off the larger army, and brought back the spoils to Medina in triumph. Between 624 and 628, Muhammed and his followers were involved in a series of battles for their survival. The Meccans made two major attempts to capture Medina. In the first, the Battle of Uhud (March 625), the Muslims had the better of the encounter, until indiscipline turned the tide against them; the Meccans claimed victory, though the outcome was a stalemate. For Medina, the battle held a religious dimension as well as a military one. Muhammad's followers had considers the victory at Badr as a sign of God's favour, so now his detractors said Uhud was proof that his mission was not genuine. Muhammad subsequently drove out two of the three Jewish "tribes". Two years later, the Muslims faced an even greater threat; a thirty day siege of Medina, known as the Battle of the Trenches (March 627). Once again the outcome was a stalemate; cold weather had force the attackers to withdraw. Afterwards, the last Jewish tribe was accused of treachery, and given a choice; convert to Islam or death. They chose the latter, and all the men were beheaded, while the women and children were enslaved. Since then, this event, dubbed as the *Massacre of Qurayza*, has sparked incessant debate. What we do know for certain is that it did not imply any enduring conflict with Judaism; or indeed Christianity. Doctrinal ties existed in their monotheism and their scriptures; even if Christians were believed to fall into polytheism with the idea of the *Trinity*. Later, "*People of the Book*" were usually granted special protection to practice their faith. In 628 Muhammad made the bold move of setting out to perform the pilgrimage to the *Ka'aba*. The Meccans were determined to prevent the Muslims from entering the city, but, instead of conflict, the matter was concluded with a truce. On this first Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, Muhammad's followers impress the local residents both by their show of strength and by their self-control, departing peacefully after the agreed three days. By 630, Muhammad had grown so powerful that he could assemble an army of ten thousand; both from Medina and from outlying tribes who had either accepted Islam or were willing to make common cause with him. As Muslim power grew, the people of Mecca began to lean more and more towards peace with their northern neighbour. When Muhammad's army approached Mecca, even Abu Sufian, leader of the caravan that had been attacked at Badr, favoured surrender; once Muhammad promised to enter the city without bloodshed, the gates were opened. The promise was kept. The only violence done was to the pagan idols in and around the *Ka'aba*, which were thrown down, leaving only the sacred *Black Stone*. An important element of Mecca's peaceful acceptance of the change was Muhammad's assurance of the traditional primacy of the *Ka'aba* as a place of pilgrimage. From this point on, Mecca became the holy city of Islam, while Medina remained the political centre of the growing Islamic kingdom. From Medina, Muhammad directed various campaigns. More Arab tribes began to convert. His conquests reached so far down into the south that Yemen fell under his sway. Yet Muhammad was not a king. He had taken an assortment of competing Arab tribes and provided them with a collective identity; what he had done for them was not unlike what Clovis had done for the Franks. The Arab hatred for kingship meant that Clovis’ role as Christian king were closed to him; instead, he was the *Prophet*, the creator of a new people. In 632, just before his death, Muhammad personally led the pilgrimage to Mecca, the so-called *Farewell Pilgrimage*, and preached his last sermon at Mount Arafat. Upon his return to Medina, he grew ill and within a few days died. Muhammad was buried where he died in his own house. Later, the *Al-Masjid an-Nabawi* ("the Prophet's Mosque") was expanded to include the site of his tomb.

### Early Muslim Conquests (632-661 AD)

Muhammad left no guide to his succession; he had no surviving sons; no heir had been appointed to receive his spiritual authority, no one to act in his role as ruler of the faithful. At that moment the community he had created, so closely bound up with his own person, was in grave danger of division and disintegration. This threat, however, was averted when Abu Bakr (632-634), the *Prophet*'s life-long friend and father of his second wife Aishah, was chosen as his successor by a gathering of Muslims in Medina. But the election was not uncontested; other Muslims, primarily in Mecca, wanted to appoint Ali, Muhammad's cousin and husband of his daughter Fatima. Ali had been busy washing Muhammad’s body and mourning his death, while the gathering was electing Abu Bakr. It is not entirely clear what Ali himself thought of the situation. According to one version of events, he did not seriously argue with the choice, retreated from the controversy, and eventually offered his support to Abu Bakr. But other accounts suggest that Ali believed he should succeed Muhammad, and disputed Abu Bakr’s election. Either way, a number of Arab clans resisted Abu Bakr’s leadership. He reacted not as a *prophet*, but as a commander, organising his own followers into eleven armed columns under eleven competent commanders, and assigning each to subdue, by force, the areas that resisted him. This was successful; Abu Bakr became the sole inheritor of Muhammad’s power, the first *caliph*; his full title was *Khalīfat Rasūl Allāh* ("successor of the messenger of God"). But the eleven columns did much more than subdue rebellion. Later accounts called the resistance to Abu Bakr’s rule the *ridda* (“apostasy,”), and credit him with conquering all of the Arab tribes, one by one, that had not yet fallen under Muslim domination. Within a year, Arabia was united behind him. This left Abu Bakr at the head of an enormous but unstable kingdom, filled with recent and tepid converts. He decided to turn its energies outwards. Medina had prospered while grappling with outside enemies; nothing welded a people together like a war. Whether Abu Bakr intended a full-out imperial conquest or not is hard to say; he did, however, set in motion an astonishing series of conquests, which continued under his three immediate successors; Umar (634–644), Uthman (644–656), and Ali (656–661). They are collectively known in Islamic history as the ***Rāshidun*** ("Rightly Guided) *caliphs*, in recognition of their personal closeness to the *Prophet* and their outstanding willpower, wisdom, justice, and piety. For a long time circumstances favoured the Arabs. Their first great enemies, Byzantium and Sassanid Persia, were worn down from fighting each other for decades, and were heavy commitments on other fronts. The Arabs fought their way, too, into lands whose peoples were often already disaffected with their rulers; this was especially true fpr the Monophysite community of Egypt (now the Coptic Church). Though their enemies were weak, one should not discredit the tactics and strengths that Islam did possess. Their armies were recruited from hungry fighters to whom the Arabian desert had left small alternative. Their assurance in the *Prophet*’s teaching that death on the battlefield would be followed by certain removal to *paradise* was a huge moral advantage. Their key military strength was mobility. The Arab army could manage long marches without resupply, and surprise the enemy with its sudden emergence from the desert. Their basic tactic was the skirmish to overwhelm more organized and equipped opponents. Mounted on camels and horses, the cavalry arrived at speed in an extended line, flinging javelins and firing off arrows, before wheeling fast away, out of range of retaliation. This tactic was repeated until breaks appear in the enemy's ranks. The infantry and archers would then engage and maintain contact with the enemy, while the cavalry assaulted the enemy's flanks, rear, or base camps. Yet when all such influences have been totted up, the Arab achievement remains amazing. The fundamental explanation must lie in the movement of large numbers of men by a religious ideal; they generated an excitement in themselves like that of later revolutionaries.

    Once beyond the peninsula, the first victim of Islam was Sassanid Persia. After the long bloody war with Byzantium, Persia had been further weakened by protracted quarrels over the crown. Finally, a grandson of the dead Khosru II, Yazdegerd III (632-651), had managed to take the throne. That same year, the first Arab-Muslim raiders swept out of their arid homeland into southern Iraq. At the time, Yazdegerd was an eight-year-old boy at the mercy of his advisers, and his army was scraped thin dealing with rebellions and with more invasions; by the Göktürks in the east, and by Khazars in the north. The circumstances were so chaotic that the Persians never mounted a truly effective resistance. In 633, the Arab general Khalid, once one of the *Prophet*'s chosen companions-in-arms, captured the important frontier city of Kufa, in a series of lightning battles. After the fall of Kufa, Yazdegerd began to pay greater attention to the Arabs; the veteran general Rostam, probably the dominant figure at court, mounted a counter-attack that recaptured Kufa, after seemingly decisively defeating the Arabs at the Battle of the Bridge (634). What Rostam did not know, however, was that Khalid and most of his forces had already departed, redeployed westward to the Syrian front against the Byzantines. The Arab threat re-emerged in 636 via a much larger army under another reputable companion of the *Prophet*, Sa'd. Rostam, perhaps over-confident from his earlier victory, decided to confront the invaders directly near the town of Qādisiyyah. The accounts of the Battle of al-Qādisiyyah (November 636) are confused and contradictory, but they all end in the same way; on the final day Rostam was slain, which heralded the collapse of the Persian army, and a decisive Arab victory. The Arabs then stormed towards the Persian capital of Ctesiphon without meeting any resistance. The Siege of Ctesiphon continued for two months, and the city was finally taken in March 637. Yazdegerd survived the fall of his capital, and fled eastward, still alive, but his vast empire crumbling into small provincial kingdoms. He also left behind him most of the Persian treasury, a powerful financial resource which the Arabs seized. The conquests continued. A number of provincial governors attempted to combine their forces to make a last stand at the Battle of Nihawānd (642), but, crippled by lack of strong central leadership, they were routed. The empire, with its military command structure non-existent, its financial resources decimated, its best soldiers destroyed piecemeal, was now utterly helpless in the face of the Arab invaders. As province after province came to terms with the Arabs, Yazdegerd III seems to have been in Fars, leading a small resistance movement, and still claiming to rule what remained of Persia. Towards the end of the 640s, Caliph Uthman spared a detachment to hunt the Persian king down. Yazdegerd fled further and further east. He is believed to have been murdered by a local miller near Marw in late 451. He had outlived his state. Sassanid Persia had been absorbed into the Islamic Caliphate; though the Arabs still had to contend with a collection of militarily weak but geographically inaccessible pockets of resistance, which took decades to bring under control. By the 660s, Arab armies were conquering lands that lay beyond the far eastern Persian border; the Sindh, the barren land that, almost a thousand years earlier, had killed half of Alexander the Great's army as they marched home from India. But the desert was familiar to the Arabs; they pressed on until they reached the Indus River, the edge of India itself. Upon hearing the news, Caliph Umar decided that the Sindh wasn't worth expending any more energy on, and forbid them to pass over the river. The Arab armies turned back, and the eastern border of the growing Islamic empire remained, for the time being, in the Sindh. Further north, the Arab armies would drive the Indian kingdom of Shahi out of Kabul, its capital city, in 664, The Shahi king kept control of the Khyber Pass, but was forced to move his capital east to Udabhandapura.

Success against the Byzantine Empire was equally swift. Byzantium, like Persia, had suffered from the long war; its soldiers were tired and depleted. In early 634, the Arabs made their way towards the province of Palestine and Syria under four generals, each with their own objectives. However, the Byzantines put up a stronger resistance than expected; which prompted Khalid's redeployment from Iraq later that year. Khalid, who was not officially in command, was given charge owing to his skill in warfare. The notorious general defeated Heraclius' brother, Theodore, at the Battle of Ajnadayn (624), and, a few month later, captured Damascus. At this point, Heraclius realized that he had misjudged his enemy; this was not a bothersome raid, but a serious and terrifying challenge to his power. To meet it, he at once began to raise a full-scale army; and a year later 80,000 men were drawn up outside Antioch. In face of this threat, the Arabs fell back on the Yarmouk river, just south of Galilee. A week or two later, the Byzantine army advanced to meet them. The Battle of Yarmouk (August 636) raged for six entire days, with the Arab forces on the back foot initially, but, on the climactic dawn of 20 August, a violent sandstorm swept up from the south. Khalid saw his chance and charged; the Byzantine troops, caught unawares and blinded by sand, were enveloped with his cavalry and routed in panic; 52,000 imperial troops probably died in the battle. The struggle was over. Heraclius was forced to give up the provinces of Syria and Palestine, which he had just gotten back from the Persians. Jerusalem resisted stoutly for a further year; Heraclius’ only victory was in managing to get the fragment of the *True Cross* out of the city and back to Constantinople, before the Archbishop of Jerusalem agreed to surrender, on condition that he submit only to the *caliph* in person. In February 638, Caliph Umar rode into the *Holy City* on a snow-white camel. This was a moment of profound significance for the young religion, for Islam saw itself as the successor of both Judaism and Christianity. After nearly five-hundred years of Roman rule and oppression, the Jewish community was now permitted once again to reside within the Jerusalem itself, It is said that Umar was invited by the archbishop to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, but he declined; on the grounds that that if he did so, his followers might wish to turn the building into a mosque. Instead, he turned his attention to the Temple Mount, site of both Solomon's and Herod's *Temples*, which had remained in ruins since the Great Jewish Revolt of 70 AD. Here, Umar built a mosque; this original no longer exists, for a later *caliph* commissioned a more magnificent monument, the *Dome of the Rock*. On the battlefront, the armies pressed forward without halting. In late 639, Amr, one of the four generals originally sent to the Byzantine frontier, launched the conquest of Egypt with Caliph Umar's reluctant approval. He took on an imperial army at Battle of Heliopolis (640), and secured a decisive victory. One year later, all of Egypt, except for the city of Alexandria, was under Arab rule. As for Heraclius, he was increasingly broken in mind, body, and spirit. He had brought the *empire* back from the brink of destruction, only to see it fall away again in the face of an unexpected and unstoppable onslaught. His death in 641 left Constantinople in a bad position at a dreadful time. He was succeeded by his eldest son Constantine III (February-May 641), who was in perpetually poor health (probably tuberculosis); as insurance, his fifteen-year-old half-brother was elevated as *co-emperor*. This youth, Heraklonas (February-November 641), was Heraclius' son by his second marriage to his own niece, Martina. This incestuous marriage had been very unpopular in Constantinople, which regarded it as a breach of biblical law. As feared, Constantine III soon died, and Heraklonas became sole *emperor*, with his mother as regent. But the people, who had long disliked her, would have none of it. In the summer of 641, due to mounting pressure, Constans II (641 -668), the young son of dead Constantine III, was elevated as *co-emperor*; and in September, Martina and Heraclonas were arrested; her tongue was cut, and his nose slit, before exiling both to Rhodes. Ritual mutilation had never been carried out in Constantinople before; it seems to have played on the *Old Testament* law that deformed priests could not minister in the *Temple*. Its sudden appearance suggests that the Byzantines saw Heraclius’ incestuous marriage as a sin that was bringing God's judgment upon them; the unknown religion spreading towards them from the south.

This was an unfortunate time for an eleven-year-old boy to assume control of the Byzantine Empire, which continued to shrink east and west. In 642, the energetic Lombard king Rothari (636-652) carried out a quick and savage conquest of the remaining Byzantine territory in Italy, leaving only the Ravenna marshes and southern Italian coast under imperial control; in Rome, the *pope* was the real master. That same year, Alexandria fell to the Arabs. The defenders had held out for fourteen months, before accepting surprisingly generous terms; the Byzantines agree to leave peacefully; the Arabs give them a year in which to do so; and, in September, the handover duly occurred. One of the richest of Byzantine provinces had been lost to the Arabs with barely a fight. Christian tradition has blamed the Muslims for the destruction of the famous *Library of Alexandria*, but that had already dwindled during the Roman period from a lack of funding and support; the city of Alexandria was sacked by Emperor Caracalla in 215 AD, which probably destroyed whatever remained of the *Library*, if it still existed at that time. The Muslims did raze the walls of Alexandria, and establish a new "provincial capital", Fostat (modern Cairo); a new power in Egypt, a new beginning. The Arabs could now use the Alexandrian navy to reinforce their own ground forces. Despite a complete ignorance of the sea, by 649, an Arab fleet was ready to sail. Cyprus, which was still in Byzantine hands, fell almost at once. Buoyed by this initial success, the new naval force began to launch raids on Byzantine cities all along the coast of Anatolia. At the same time, a powerful ground force marched through the Caucasus Mountains, in a bid to circle the Black Sea and take Constantinople from the north. But the attempt to failed; the desert-trained Arab armies did not fight well in the mountains, and the Khazar Khanate subjected them to their worst defeat yet. Seeing a chance to take the initiative, Constans II launched an amphibious counter-attack to take back Egypt. While the Byzantines were able to take Alexandria by surprise, they were soon expelled permanently, with the help of the locals who felt no compunction in live again under their former tormentors. Meanwhile, the desert hardiness that had allowed the Arabs to push through the Makran was matched by a march westward from Egypt, through the old Roman lands of Libya. They stopped short of the *Exarchate of Carthage*, but the towns, both the Romanized ones nearer the coast and native African ones farther inland, fell under Arab control. The Arabs called all the natives of northern Africa west of Egypt “Berbers”; the towns paid tribute to the conquerors in slaves, who became involuntary recruits to the army, which grew and grew.

The Arab tide did not flow without interruption; on 17 June 656, Caliph Uthman was assassinated in his house at Medina. He had begun the job of turning his expansive conquests into something like a coherent empire. He centralized his government in Medina, appointed governors to supervise provinces, and kept tight hold of the chief generals. He had also taken steps towards developing an identity for his realm, not based solely on swords. He began the project of assembling a definitive version of all Muhammad’s teachings. The *Prophet*'s revelations, or *surahs*, were conveyed orally, and recorded by his followers, sometimes in several different forms. Uthman knew that without a definitive *Qur'an*, the extension of the empire had the potential to destroy the Islamic identity of those within it. But this was a strategy that would take time, and, in the meanwhile, discontent with his rule grew. Strong central authority would not have been resented in Byzantium, or Persia, or even the kingdom of the Franks. But Uthman was supposed to be one Muslim among brothers; he was not supposed to be a king. At this point, **Ali**, son-in-law of Muhammad, reappeared on the scene. Tribal loyalties were not yet dead in the community of the faithful. Uthman was (like Muhammad himself) Meccan, and was (like him) of the Quraysh tribe. As he imposed top-down control, only Quraysh were appointed to positions of power, with a particular preference for members of his own clan (Banu Umayya). In contrast, Ali had spent most of the years since Muhammad’s death among non-Quraysh Muslims. In 654, Ali was commissioned by a group of discontent Muslims to speak to Uthman on their behalf; the point of contention was the appointment of one Abn ‘Amir, a relative of Uthman but a man unpopular with many, as governor in Kufa. Kufa had been established by Arabs as military headquarters for the conquest of Persia, and had since grown into a large and bustling Muslim city, thanks to migration from all over Arabia. “*If I have favoured kinsmen, what have I done wrong?*”, Uthman said, and Ali answered, “*You have been weak and easygoing with your relatives*”. “*They are your relatives as well,*” Uthman snapped, and Ali retorted, “*They are closely related to me, but merit is found in others*”. The next year, the people of Kufa revolted, and deposed their unpopular governor. The rebels then marched on Medina, joined by many Muslims who were not from the Quraysh, and besieged Uthman in his house. During the siege, Uthman's supporters, who probably outnumbered the rebels, begged him to let them fight, but he refused; in an effort to avoid bloodshed among Muslims. Unfortunately, bloodshed still occurred; the rebels broke into his house and stabbed him to death. Not long after, a gathering of Ali’s supporters declared him to be the next *caliph*. But the voice of protest began at once, and it was a strong voice: Aishah, widow of the *Prophet* and daughter of the first *caliph* Abu Bakr. She was in Medina at the time, and insisted that Ali had no right to rule. Ultimately, Ali accepted the title of *caliph*. Later, he wrote to all the provincial governors explaining his decision; that for the Quraysh tribe to continue to hold all the power for itself would destroy the close brotherhood of Islam and Muhammad's mission. Yet to prevent this from happening, he would be forced to fight. Aishah and her supporters had already left Medina, heading for the city of Basra, at the head of the Persian Gulf. Ali gathered soldiers and followed them. In December of 656, he met his opponents outside Basra’s walls in the Battle of the Camel; he won, Aishah’s supporters were killed, and she was forced back into private life. But this victory began a civil war: the ***First Fitna*** (“Trials”). Ali moved the seat of his *caliphate* from Medina to Kufa; much more central to the newly conquered empire and solidly behind him. He sent new governors, friendly to his cause, to take over the administration of the empire. But one of them. Mu'awiya, governor of Syria and Uthman's cousin, refused to relinquish his post, unless Uthman’s murderers were put to death. Although Ali had not been directly involved in the bloodshed, the culprits were some of his strongest supporters; executing them was not an option. The two men traded increasingly testy messages until it became clear that only armed confrontation would sort out their differences. They met at the Battle of Siffin (July of 657), on the upper Euphrates. Neither commander seems to have been comfortable with the idea of fighting fellow Muslims; the battle dragged on inconclusively for three days, until Mu'awiya’s men pulled back, impaling leaves of the *Qur'an* on their spears, and calling for arbitration; Ali’s soldiers joined in the demand. Negotiations, carried on through intermediaries, were long, drawn-out, and unsatisfactory for both sides. Ultimately, Ali ended up with the title of *caliph*; Mu'awiya remained in Syria, without a title but effectively ruling independently. Ali’s tenure remained troubled. In 658, a segment of his army broke away, accusing Ali of injustice for not avenging Uthman’s murder; known as the *Kharijis* (“Seceders"). Ali first tried to arbitrate with the rebels, and then to attack them; but the soldiers still loyal to him had little stomach for the fight. And his power began to dwindled. In 661, a *Khariji* assassinated Ali during the morning prayers at the Mosque of Kufa. His supporters tried to arrange the election of his son Hasan as *caliph*. But far more Arabs were arrayed behind Mu'awiya. Hasan, a mature man in his forties who was not suicidal, agreed to come to terms with Mu'awiya (and his sixty thousand soldiers); on the condition that the latter would rule in compliance with the *Qur'an*, and a council (*Sunna*) would choose his successor. The *Fitna* had ended, and Mu'awiya became the fifth *caliph*. Hasan retired from politics in Medina, where he died in 670, either from illness, or more likely from poison; instigated by Mu'awiya to clear the way for naming his own son Yazid crown prince. This "usurpation", then, introduced the hereditary dynastic principle; the **Umayyad Caliphate** (661–750). This was also the beginning of a schism within Islam, for a dissident group, the *Shi’a*, henceforth claimed that the right of interpreting the *Qur'an* was confined to Ali’s descendants. The murdered *caliph*, they said, had been divinely designated as *imam* to transmit his office to his descendants and was immune from sin and error. The Umayyad *caliphs*, correspondingly, had their own party of supporters, called *Sunni*, who believed that doctrinal authority changed hands with the *caliphate*. Mu'awiya rapidly suppressed challenges to his authority, and the *Shi’a* movement was driven underground for several years. The Islamic Empire, which had once been centred around the community of the faithful, was beginning to look more and more like any other medieval state: a population, some prone to rebellion; a “royal family” (the Banu Umayya clan); ongoing struggles for power at the top; and an ever-present tendency for the whole thing to fly apart.

### Late Muslim Conquests (661-715 AD)

Mu'awiya (661–680), the first Umayyad *caliph*, was forced to spend more energy fighting rebels who resented his power, rather than the rest of the world. He was followed by a string of short-lived *caliphs* (four within five years), until finally a *caliph* with the ability to both administer the increasingly chaotic empire and direct campaigns came to the throne: Abd al-Malik (685-705). This allowed Byzantium almost thirty years to breathe again; apart from the first Arab Siege of Constantinople (674–678). By all accounts, this was more accurately a four-year loose blockade, rather than a proper siege. The city was able to continually refresh its supplies by sea, and conditions never became desperate. Finally, Emperor Constantine IV (668-685) managed to force the Arab fleet to withdraw using a new invention, the famous *Greek Fire*, a chemical concoction launched through tubes that kept burning even when it met the water, and almost impossible to extinguish. The failure before Constantinople prompted the Arabs to agree a truce, even paying the Byznatines yearly tribute. Justinian II (685-695), only sixteen, inherited an *empire* that had slowly been reorganized over the previous decades. Rather than the unwieldy provinces of the earlier *empire*, Byzantium was now divided into more efficient, more easily defensible *themes* (or military districts). Instead of being defended by troops dispatched from the capital, under commanders unfamiliar with the territory, *themes* were defended by native soldiers: since Heraclius, the emperors had gradually been awarding land in the *themes* to soldiers in return for lifelong service, and the tax system had been reorganized so that the citizens in each *theme* paid the local troops directly. The armies in each *theme*, thus, had strong motivation to protect it. There were four themes in Anatolia, another in Thrace, and two more in Greece. Justinian II also inherited a somewhat more stable situation in the western half of the empire. His grandfather, Constans II, had launched a series of campaigns in Italy, taking advantage of a brief Lombad civil war. His intention to reclaim Rome hadn’t survived first contact with the enemy, but, thanks to his efforts, Byzantium kept control of the southern Italian coast and Sicily, which helped protect the *Exarchate of Carthage*. Justinian's father, Constantine IV, had turned his attention to another enemy; the Bulgars. Decades earlier, Heraclius had recognized the kingship of the Bulgar chief Kubrat, north of the Azov Sea. Kubrat had died in 669, after a long reign during which he pushed the boundaries of his domain up to the Donets river and down to the Danube. Like a Frankish ruler, he divided the kingdom among his five sons. This worked out about as badly as one might expect; almost at once, the Khazars swallowed the old Bulgar homeland. But the third son, Asparukh, led his thirty thousand followers first to the Danube, and then fought his way down into imperial territory; while Constantinople was distracted with the Arab siege. Constantine IV had led a combined land and sea operation against Asparukh, that was at first successful. But the *emperor, s*uffering from gout, had to leave the army, which panicked and fled. By 681, Constantine IV had decided that he’d better make peace. The treaty gave Asparukh more than temporary settlement; his group of refugees, funded by Constantinople’s annual tribute, became the First Bulgarian Kingdom (681–1018). This peace allowed Justinian II to launch his own campaign against the Slavs, who had been treatening Thessalonica, the second most important Byzantine city in the Balkans. The subdued Slavs were resettled in Anatolia, where they were to provide a military force of thirty thousand men.

By 692, Abd al-Malik had finished putting down his enemies, and was, without competition, the only *caliph* of the Muslims; and he was ready to go back to conquering. That years, he decided to provoke Constantinople by paying tribute in Arab coins rather than Byzantine currency. He had been working for some time to stabilize the financial affairs in the Islamic empire by creating a standard Arabic coinage. Justinian II at once announced the coins counterfeit and unacceptable, and declared war. He was confident in his Slavic mercenaries, certain he could meet al-Malik in battle with success. He was wrong. The Arab forces pushed into Anatolia; when the armies met at the Battle of Sebastopolis (694), on the southern shore of the Black Sea, the defection of the Slavs ensured a comprehensive Byzantine defeat. Al-Malik had sent them money behind the scenes. Al-Malik, flushed with victory, began a series of raids deeper into Anatolia. Justinian II, still only twenty-four, took vengeance on the traitorous Slavs by massacring their wives and children. But his own army was inclined to blame him, not the mercenaries. In 695, the officers rebelled, taking him captive, mutilating him by cutting off his nose, and then sending him in chains to Cherson, the notorious fortress where military prisoners languished. They acclaimed one of their own generals, Leontios (695–698), as emperor in his place. The deeply undistinguished reign of Leontius is notable for one thing only: the final loss of Carthage in 698. Al-Malik appointed an Arabic governor to the new Muslim province. And in Constantinople, Leontios was overthrown in turn; he was taken prisoner, mutilated, sent to a monastery, and the army chose another soldier, Tiberius III (698–705), as emperor. By 702, the Islamic conquest of North Africa was virtually complete. The Berbers, the native North Africans, converted in remarkable numbers. Their tribal structure made conversion a mass event, rather than an individual decision; when the tribal leaders converted, the rest of the tribe followed. The Arabic realm itself was beginning to cohere a little more tightly under al-Malik’s expert administration. He had already introduced standard currency; he put his brothers, whom he trusted, into the most vital provincial offices; and he began to construct the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, to protected the place from which Muhammad was said to have ascended into heaven. Al-Malik also decreed that the Arabic language would be the official language of the empire, something no previous caliph had done. This provided a desperately needed glue for the widely scattered realm. Islam and the Arabic language were the two constants throughout the lands of the Arab conquests.

The latest general-turned-*emperor* of Constantinople, Tiberios III, sat uneasily on the throne. He had proved a good deal more effective than Leontios, In 698, he actually invaded Muslim-held Syria, defeating an army sent from Antioch, and then raiding as far as Samosata before pulling back. But five years later, he received bad news: the emperor who had been dethroned and mutilated, the noseless Justinian II, had escaped from his prison in Cherson, and was at the court of the Khazars, plotting to regain his throne. The Khazars had been allies of the Byzantines since the days of Heraclius. In order to convince the current khan, Busir Glavan (d. 711), to help him overthrow the man who currently wore the *purple*, Justinian promised to marry his sister. Shortly afterwards, a secret message came from Tiberios; he would pay the khan handsomely to assassinate Justinian. Busir Glavan was a realist; a political alliance now was worth more than a uncertain future blood alliance. He accepted Tiberios’s money, and sent two men to murder his new brother-in-law. But he had underestimated Justinian. Sensing something was afoot, Justinian killed to two assassins, and fled again, this time to the Bulgar court. Asparukh’s son Tervel (700–721) now ruled, and he was an enemy of the Khazars, who had ravaged the old Bulgar homeland farther east. Justinian convinced him to support him with promises of alliance, money, and an eventual marriage of his own daughter; and, in 705, Justinian was able to lead a Bulgarian army to the walls of Constantinople. The ex-emperor led his army in through the city's drainage system, stormed the palace, seized Tiberios, and put him to death. Justinian II reclaimed the throne, and reigned until 711. He wore a silver nose to cover his mutilation, and the people of Constantinople found it useful to pretend that it was real. Justinian's second reign became a reign of terror, as he ordered enemies and suspected enemies to be hung, trampled, drowned, poisoned, and beheaded. In 711, the army rose up once again and murdered him. He was followed by a string of short-lived emperors. But the armies of Islam, occupied elsewhere, did not immediately take advantage of this weakness. The *caliph* Abd al-Malik had died, and been succeeded by his son, Al-Walid (705-715). Expansion from the westen frontiers was overseen by Musa ibn Nusair, governor of North Africa. His miilitary commaner was a Berber named Tariq bin Ziyad, who had once been a slave but had earned his freedom through military service. In 708, they conquered the city of Tangier, which they hoped could serve as a staging point for the Arab armies to move into Europe.

    The Visigothic Kingdom of **Spain** was ready to fall. An early hint of their difficulties had already appeared in 589, when the *Third Council of Toledo* - the assembly of powerful nobles and clergymen that made the kingdom’s laws - officially renounced Arianism for orthodox Christianity. In a desire for unity under the new religion, the Visigoths adopted an increasingly severe policy concerning the Jews; the most extreme Jewish persecution anywhere in Europe until the 12th-century. Everything seemed so serious to the Visigoths. In 636, the *Fifth Council of Toledo* went on to regulate the process by which kings were elected. This wrote into law the old Germanic custom of electing warleaders to be kings; a practice that most other Germanic kingdoms were slowly abandoning. That was a principle which suited a wandering people well, but in a settled state with laws and property, it was a volatile one. An elected monarch comes to the throne owing favours; he has no continuity with the pevious administration; and must exercise autocratic power with caution. The opportunities for making enemies are endless. Disputes regarding the succession were not infrequent; sometimes there occurred intervals with apparently no king at all, followed by another period when there were two. It was the beginning of the end when, at the close of the seventh century, the Visigothic king, Egica, raised his own son Wittiza as co-ruler. This clear attempt to introduce dynastic succession was resented by nobles, who both prized their right to choose a king and thought they had a chance to be chosen. Egica died shortly afterwards, possibly from an outbreak of plague. We know little about Wittiza’s solo reign, but one contemporary chronicler mentions that he returned land his family had claimed to the “royal fief", which suggests he did face resistance to his father's innovation. The gesture did not save him. By 711, Wittiza had disappeared from the historic record, and another king, named Ruderic, sat on the throne. But the struggle was not over. The accounts are confused and contradictory, but mention two other kings in different parts of Spain, so clearly Ruderic was not unanimously accepted and civil war erupted. The system of succession had broken down just at the moment that an attacking army was on its way. That army was a mix of Arabs and Berbers commanded by the Berber general Tariq bin Ziyad. Coastal raids on southern Visigoth towns had already begun. Ruderic assembled what defence he could muster, but some sources hint that his competitors for the throne had already allied themselves with the invaders. Tariq departed from North Africa in early 711 across the Strait of Gibraltar; a feat commemorated in that name, which comes from *Jebel Tariq* ("mount of Tariq"). He met Ruderic at the Battle of Guadalete (July 711), and, in a shattering defeat, Ruderic, his noblemen, and his officers were wiped out. This one battle brought an abrupt end to the Visigothic Kingdom; not because the king was dead, but because almost all of the men who held the right to elect a new one were. No one had the authority to organize a resistance, or even negotiate a treaty with the invaders. For the next seven years, the Arab and Berber army fought its way across the country, conquering and negotiating with local officials; the persecuted Jews flocking to the new standard and aiding in the conquest. Tariq himself was recalled from Spain after a single year, and the newly conquered territory - now known as al-Andalus - was placed under the control of a provincial governor. Almost no roadblocks had been flung into their way by the Visigoths. In 718, a flicker of resistance was to appear; a Visigoth noble named Pelayo retreated into the northern territory of the Cantabrian Mountains with his followers, and declared himself king of a Christian kingdom. The Kingdom of Asturias (718-924), tiny and poverty-stricken, survived repeated Arab attacks, thanks to its mountain defences; becoming the nucleus of the future kingdoms of Castile and Aragon, and also of the *Reconquista*.

### End of Muslim Conquest in the East (715-732)

    In 715, the caliph Al-Walid died, leaving as his legacy the Arab entrance into Europe. His younger brother Suleiman (715-717) took up the caliph’s mantle, and immediately refocused the energies of Islamic armies on Byzantium. Constantinople remained the jewel at the end of the conquest. The Byzantines were still suffering from turnover at the top. With the accession of Theodosius III (715-717), the *empire* could look back upon no fewer than six *emperors* in twenty years, of whom five had met violent ends. Theodosius was a harmless tax official, who had been elevated much against his will, and had little stomach for facing the gathering Arab attack. But salvation was on the way; and its instrument was a certain Leo, commonly known as "the Isaurian", although he was probably nothing of the sort. He was, however, a first-rate general, who had been appointed commander (*stratēgos*) of the *Anatolikon Theme* in central Anatolia. In the spring of 717, Leo joined forces with his fellow *strategos* Artabasdos to make a bid for ultimate power. Facing defeat, Theodosius abdicated the throne, and accepted exile in a monastery; he later bishop of Ephesus, a job much more to his liking. The general Leo, now Emperor Leo III (717-741), brought an end to the chaos in Constantinople. He prepared at once for an expected Arab assault, and, within a matter of months, an Arab army of eighty thousand marched across Anatolia under the Suleiman's brother Maslama; and, on 15 August, he stood before the *Theodosian Walls*. Two weeks later, a general-turned-admiral named Suleiman (not to be confused with the *caliph* himself) drew close to the city from the south, at the head of a massive fleet, said to number eighteen hundred ships; and the ***Siege of Constantinople*** began. The entrance into the Golden Horn, the imperial harbour at Constantinople, was protected by a giant chain; the ground forces would have had to assault the *Tower of Galata* at the northern end, and then lift the chain to allow the ships into the harbour. Before they could do so, Leo III launched an attack force of burning ships, set alight with unquenchable *Greek Fire*, into the approaching fleet. The wind was with him. Hundreds of the Arab ships were set on fire, and either sank or went aground. The Arab fleet became reluctant to engage the Byzantines, and withdrew to a nearby inlet of the Black Sea. Before they could regroup and renew their assault, disaster struck: the cruellest winter that anyone could remember. Inevitably, it was the besiegers who suffered most, having no protection but their flimsy tents. Soon, they were reduced to eating their horses, camels, bark, roots, and, reportedly, dead men's flesh. Famine, as always, brought disease; the frozen ground making burial impossible, hundreds of corpses were flung into the Sea of Marmara. On this sombre note, Caliph Suleiman grew ill and died in Damascus, He had made the unconventional choice of nominating his cousin, Umar II (717-720), as *caliph*, rather than a son or a brother. The Arab situation looked set to improve in spring when Umar sent a second fleet to assist in the siege: eight-hundred ships from Egypt, all laden with supplies and arms. Most of the fleets' crews, however, were composed of Christian Egyptians, who began to defect upon arrival. Informed of the disposition of the new Arab fleet, Leo III launched his fleet once more from the Golden Horn. Crippled by defections and helpless against *Greek Fire*, the Arab ships were nearly all destroyed or captured, Constantinople had retaken naval supremacy for the time being. It was, however, a Bulgarian army that delivered the *coup de grâce*. The Bulgar khan, Tervel, had no love for the Byzantines, but was determined that Constantinople should not fall into Arab hands. As spring turned to summer, he marched down from the north, fell on the sick and demoralized Arabs before the walls, and killed, we are told, twenty-two thousand of them. Caliph Umar II sent word that the siege should be abandoned. After thirteen months of siege, on 15 August 718, they departed. The retreating Arabs were not hindered on their return home, but their fleet, much of it by now dangerously unseaworthy, lost more ships in a storm. Once again, Constantinople had resisted the Arab tide; it still lay inaccessible to the Islamic conquest, blocking the eastern path into Europe.

Further east, the conquest of the **Sindh**, begun back in 643, had halted when the Caliph Umar realized how desolate the area was. In 712, the governor of the eastern reaches of the Islamic empire sent his son-in-law, bin Qasim, towards the Indus River to finish the job. His first target was the port city of Debal, the most important trading centre in Sindh. At this time, the port seems to have been ruled by a local tribal leader named Dahir. Rather than simply attacking him, bin Qasim manufactured an excuse for his aggression; Dahir had failed to punish the pirates that had been attacking Arab ships setting off from the coast of the Sindh. Dahir retorted that he had no authority over the sea raiders, which was undoubtedly true; but bin Qasim took this response as hostile. This exchange suggests that the invasion into India may not have been sanctioned by the Caliph Umar II in Damascus. After a potracted siege, bin Qasim took Debal. left a garrison at port, and kept marching eastward. Dahir had fled to the other side of the Indus with most of his men. He believed, the Arab historian tells us, that bin Qasim would attempt to cross the river. But bin Qasim stationed a boat full of archers on the near bank, and began laying a pontoon bridge across the Indus. The archers kept Dahir’s men at bay until the line of roped together boats reached the far shore. When bin Qasim marched his men across the bridge, a dreadful clash ensued, with Dahir's soldiers mounted on elephants, and the Arabs shooting flaming arrows. Towards evening, Dahir was knocked from his *howdahs* (the reinforced carriages on the elephants’ backs) by a well-placed arrow. His men retreated upriver to the city of Brahmanabad, well to the northeast. But over the next three years, bin Qasim conquered a swath of territory across the Indus, including Brahmanabad which became his provincial capital.

Meanwhile back in Damascus, Caliph Umar II had led the *Umayyad caliphate* into its first major administrative reform. The *empire* was less than a century old, but already tensions were stretching it to breaking point. Muhammad, long before, had instituted the *Jizya* (“head tax”); ordering non-Muslims within the communities to pay a fee in return for Muslim protection. Theoretically, converts to Islam were at once freed from the obligation. But the *caliphs* after Muhammad, administering a burgeoning empire that Muhammad had probably never envisioned, were reluctant to give up such a lucrative tax. More and more often, local officials “forgot” to exempt new converts from the *Jizya*.  As a result, almost all non-Arab Muslims were still paying it. Umar ordered governors to cease collection of the tax from all Muslims, no matter their race or length of commitment to Islam. This made him immensely popular, but it ruined the empire’s tax base; particularly since huge numbers of conquered peoples suddenly converted *en masse* to avoid the tax. But Umar II did not have to deal with the consequences of his reforms; he died a natural death. His successor, Yazid II (720-724), immediately reimposed the tax before the empire went bankrupt. At this, the biggest group of recent converts rebelled; the Persians. Whereas many of the élites of the former Byzantine territories emigrated to Constantinople, those of Persia could not; they had nowhere to go, and had to remain, irritated by their subordination to the Arabs, who left them much of their local authority. The most serious rebellion was in Khorasan, the old Persian province on the western side of the Oxus river, where the rebels allied with the Türgesh, a prominent Turkish confederation. The caliph Yazid II died after four short years, and his brother Hisham (724-743) took over his post. He began to bring iron-handed order to turmoil in the frontier lands: sending strike forces into Khorasan to fight against the rebelling converts. With the Arabs occupied elsewhere, the Byzantine *emperor* Leo III took the opportunity to do some reform of his own. He began to campaign against a religious practice that had long disturbed him: the use of icons in Christian woship (the *Iconoclastic Controversy*).

### End of Muslim Conquest in the West (715-732)

By 718, the Arab armies reached the edge of the old Visigothic territory, and came within hailing distance of the Frankish land known as Aquitaine. The Franks, like the Byzantines, had been suffering a crisis in leadership. The Merovingian system of a three-way division of the realm (Neustria, Austrasia, and Burgundy) had come dangerously near to destroying the kingdom. For example, we have Chlothar’s second son Chilperic, who took as his wife the Visigothic princess Galswintha. The marriage was not successful; one morning Galswintha was found strangled in her bed, probably the work of Fredegund, the king’s mistress, in order to replace her as queen. Now it happened that Galswintha had a sister, Brunhilda, who was the wife of Chilperic’s brother Sigebert. The murder caused a series of fearsome wars between the two brothers, until in 575, just when he had Chilperic at his mercy, Sigebert was poisoned by two assassins sent by Fredegund. Chilperic lived on for another nine years, before being stabbed to death in 584 by an unknown assailant; probably one of Brunhilda’s men. But he was posthumously avenged by his son Chlothar II, who seized Brunhilda and had her butally executed. This outcome was orchastrated by two "*Mayor of the Palaces*"; Warnachar for Austrasia, and Rado for Burgundy. The *mayor* was a Frankish title for the king’s right-hand man; the official who took care of the royal household, managed the royal estates, supervised the other officials, and generally acted as prime minister. Neither Warnachar nor Rado wanted to see their domains taken over by Brunhilda, so together they invited Chlothar II, who had ruled Neustria since 584, to invade. In 613, he accepted the invitation, and, largely unopposed, the Franks were under a single ruler once again. Chlothar set about trying to bring some sort of order to the chaotic landscape. The Edict of Paris (615) promised that the offices of *mayor* of Austrasia, Neustria, and Burgundy would not be combined into one, and the king would not try to overrule the authority of the local *mayor*. This had probably been part of the deal made by Warnachar and Rado; each *mayor* now had more authority than before Chlothar’s invasion. This authority grew even more entrenched when Chlothar agreed, two years later, to make the office of *mayor* a lifetime appointment. Chlothar had made a devil’s deal; he had the crown of the Franks, but two-thirds of his kingdom was ruled by *mayors*, who could not be removed from office. This began a slow transformation of the *mayors* into rulers; a transformation that would leave the Merovingian kings without much of importance to do. Shortly after 617, Chlothar made his eldest son, Dagobert, ruler of Austrasia. thus satisfying the Austrasian desire for more separation from Neustria. Perhaps ancient tribal differences lay behind this continued hostility; the western Franks insisted on calling their land Francia, and referred to the eastern half as the “East Land” or Austrasia; in return, the eastern Franks called their land Francia, and referred to the western half as the “New West Land”, or Neustria. When Chlothar died in 629, his younger son Charibert tried to claim the throne of Neustria, but Dagobert first threatened him into withdrawing to the small territory of Aquitaine, and then ordered his assassination. Now the entire Frankish realm was under one king again, and again the nobles of Austrasia objected. Dagobert was forced to follow his father’s strategy; he made his own three-year-old son, Sigebert III, king of Austrasia, and now the *mayor of the palace* held more power than ever. Dagobert died in 639, and the kingdom remained divided; Sigebert III kept control of Austrasia, and his younger son Clovis II was crowned king of Neustria and Burgundy. Later chroniclers would call these two rulers the first of the *rois faineants* (“do-nothing kings”); what really mattered was the power of the local *mayor* in each realm, not which royal son occupied the throne.

In 680, the Austrasian nobles chose a Frankish official named Pepin "the Fat" as mayor of their palace. When his do-nothing Merovingian king died, Pepin refused to accept a new candidate for the vacant throne, and henceforth ruled alone. This did not please the other Merovingian kings, but, when they attacked Austrasia, Pepin defeated them so thoroughly that he secured the *mayoral* offices of all three palaces: Austrasia, Neustria and Burgundy. After this, Pepin began to call himself *princeps* (principal leader) among many *duces* (dukes). He ruled for nearly thirty years, outliving various Merovingian kings, and died in 714, at age eighty, just as the Arab armies were storming towards the Frankish border. This was bad timing. The various royal cousins who wore the Frankish crowns were not powerful enough to spearhead any effective defense, and Pippin’s death left the *mayoral* offices empty as well. Both of his legitimate sons, born to his wife Plectrude, had died before him. He did have an illegitimate son, born to his mistress Alpaida; **Charles Martel** (d. 741 ). But Plectrude insisted that the *princeps* should go to her young grandson, with herself acting as regent. She imprisoned Charles in Cologne in Austrasia, the city which was intended to be her capital. He soon escaped and went Neustria, from which he had to fight Plectrude. The civil war lasted two years, but by 717, Charles Martel had made himself *princeps*, with a Merovingian cousin installed as *do-nothing king*. He had control, although it was shaky, over most of the Frankish lands. But to the south-west, a local nobleman named Odo (d. 735) had taken the opportunity to make himself more or less the independent ruler of Aquitaine. He professed his loyalty to the *do-nothing king*, but was suspicious of Charles Martel’s ambitions. As a result, when the Arab armies appeared on his southern border, Odo of Aquitaine had no friends to come and help him. His tiny army met the Arabs at the Battle of Toulouse (June 721,). With staggering self-absorption, the Frankish chronicles make almost no mention of this battle; they are preoccupied with Charles’s rise to power, and Odo appears in them merely as his enemy. But Odo of Aquitaine defeated the Arabs at Toulouse, killed the governor of al-Andalus, and halted the Arab advance into Europe. The dead governor was replaced with the military man al-Ghafiqi, who governed al-Andalus for a decade or so, before leading an army back across the Frankish border. This time, Odo was horribly defeated at the Battle of the River Garonne (732). and the Arabs plundered first Bordeaux, then Poitiers. Odo, in desperation, sent to Charles Martel, offering to swear his loyalty if Charles would come and help. Up until this point, it seems, the Franks had not fully appreciated the danger of the Arab advance. But to his credit, Charles Martal marched south at once, and met the Arabs at the Battle of Tours (October 732), immortalized by Frankish chronicles. The evidence strongly suggests that the troops encountered were simply a raiding party, which had ventured ahead of the main army, and that the so-called battle was little more than a protracted skirmish. They lost the battle, but were not routed; and burned and looted their way back into al-Andalus, more or less unhindered. Modern historians are quick to point to a Moorish revolt in al-Andalus (similar to the Persian revolt in Khorasan) as the real reason the Arab advance halted at the border of Aquitaine, and did not again press forward. If Charles' nickname *Martel* ("the Hammer") was not completely deserved, then more important for us is what he did with his victory.

On all fronts - in western Europe, Central Asia, Anatolia and the Caucasus - the tide of Arab conquest at last came to an end. At one time it looked as if Islam might be irresistible everywhere. That was not to be, They pressed their conquests to the limit of geographical possibility or attractiveness, and sometimes their defeat showed they had overstretched themselves. And conquest was only the beginning of the story of the impact of Islam on the world, for one of the great traditions of civilization was to be built on its conquests and conversions.