During these same years when Mecca and Medina had a truce, then Mecca surrendered and the idols were smashed, a larger imperial story was playing out to the north. In the end, the battles and personal ups and downs came to mean so little that only specialists even try to learn the names and events. We know in hindsight that the Byzantine and Persian empires were merely exhausting themselves in time for the Muslims to break out of Arabia. But it really didn’t look that way at the time.
The Arabians called the Byzantine Empire simply “Rome,” and at that time, Constantinople still thought of itself that way, too. It was New Rome, but it still nominally ruled from Spain and North Africa to Egypt, to the old Greek colonies on the Black Sea. But the plain reality was that the western regions were not in its control, while its eastern regions still seemed possible. There were two major threats: the chronically invading Turks and Avars from Asia, and the Persians who ruled in Mesopotamia and were always looking to expand into Palestine and Egypt.
During Muhammad’s earlier adult life, the Persian war theater was in Armenia and Georgia, but this war had been settled after the Romans backed the Persian king Khosrau II’s claim to the throne. Now, during the Mecca and Medina years of Islam’s rise, Rome had gone through a coup by an army commander, then a counter-coup by a royal relative whose power base was in Libya. This new Emperor Heraclius set out to retake a lot of territory that the Persians had won, including Jerusalem. Between 602 and 628, many of the cities in Syria and Mesopotamia suffered through sieges that smashed their walls and wrecked their agriculture. As the Roman Emperor campaigned in Mesopotamia, the Avars and Slavs plundered Byzantine holdings in the Balkans (such as modern Bulgaria, now a Slavic nation with a Turkic name).
Heraclius’ war to retake Egypt, Palestine and Syria cost a great deal. He had to melt down gold and silver owned by the Church, devalue the currency and cut back on much state spending, which let infrastructure fall apart. By 628, he had won back much territory, and he stayed several years in Persian territory, where he formed alliances with a Turkic chieftain and a rebellious Persian general. The war ended when the king’s son executed his father and took the throne in a coup, and there were several dynastic marriages among Heraclius, the new Persian king, and the Turks. The Persians returned the fragment of the True Cross that they had taken from Jerusalem. It really looked like the war was over. (The new Persian throne proved to be much less stable than it appeared, but that’s for another story.)
Heraclius again ruled a Palestine that now had small garrisons of about 100-200 men at most, and some of them needed to be rebuilt. City walls all over the region had to be rebuilt, too, but there wasn’t much money. The Christian Arab buffer state, the Ghassanids of southern Syria, was also weakened because the Roman state used to pay them foreign aid but had stopped as a cost-cutting measure. Beefing up the Ghassanids didn’t seem as important when there was peace with Persia.
The Roman armies were physically tired; the men had been away from their homes in the Byzantine heartland of modern Turkey for years. The capital city was exhausted and dispirited, so Heraclius’s first priority was to rebuild some monuments around Constantinople and hold some prestigious and fun events, including the dynastic marriages of his children (expensive!). He also made a processional visit to Palestine to see the returned relic in Jerusalem and visit his Ghassanid Arabic client-king in the Golan Mountains. That year was 629, right about the same time as the surrender of Mecca to Muhammad.
Somewhere in that mix of news and events from the north, the Muslims in Medina received a rumor that Heraclius was actually coming south to crush them. Hindsight and a larger scope shows us that was the last thing on Heraclius’s mind, but they didn’t know it. Normally the Ghassanid rulers would have called in help when they were attacked, as the Muslims had done. Therefore, it made sense to them that maybe the Romans really were coming, in response to Arab raids. So now Muhammad and his advisors—a growing circle that now included prominent Meccans—had to decide what to do about this warning that a huge Roman army was on its way.
In the fall of 630, Muhammad and his advisors decided to raise the largest army Arabia had ever seen and go to challenge Rome. Mecca, Medina, and the many other towns that were now tributaries of Muhammad built a large fighting force. There may have been units from Yemen or Oman, which had given provisional loyalty to Muhammad in recent years. Then the wealthiest Muslims spent much of their money in buying provisions and horses, while Muhammad sent gifts to the Bedouin tribes to persuade them to join. The army that set out from Medina may have numbered as much as 30,000, with the largest herd of horses they had mustered yet, perhaps 10,000. But it was not a popular campaign; if the Roman army was there, it would be a bloodbath, and it was harvest time.
They traveled north to Tabuk, now a city near Saudi Arabia’s border with Jordan. The way battles worked then was that one side would choose a fighting venue and wait there. If the other army let them dominate the region without challenge, they won by default. Armies could play chicken with each other, choosing different fighting plains or valleys and waiting to see who chose to come to them. In this case, the Muslim army camped and waited for about three weeks. Scouts went out to search, and in the end, they concluded that the Romans were not coming. They went home and disbanded. But if Emperor Heraclius had not actually been paying attention, Arabia paid close attention.
- Revelation: The Story of Muhammad, by Meraj Mohiuddin and Sherman Jackson.
- Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, by Martin Lings.