Caliph Umar confirmed the previous appointments of commanders and pushed for more action. He intended to lead fighters in the field, and probably did sometimes, but I didn’t see much detail about that. The main campaigns during his Caliphate were led by Khalid or Amr; this was so, despite a personal dislike and mistrust he had of these recent converts. He removed Khalid from supreme command, and ordered him back to Medina. There, Khalid was forced to give up all of the wealth he had obtained as booty from his campaigns. But he returned to the field and regained his status through the brilliance of his strategic planning.
We have only a few clear details about the fall of Damascus. The four Muslim armies camped outside its four gates, imposing a siege that lasted until September 635. There’s also record of a major battle, but the timing is unclear. A Roman army sent to relieve the siege was defeated north of the city, and so eventually Damascus’ city leaders decided to open the western gate to Abu Ubaydah, who was nominally the supreme general. Hugh Kennedy notes that the city’s ruling and military elites were Armenian and Roman/Greek, while the populace were Aramaic-speaking Christian Arabs, some with kin in the Muslim army. They must have opposed making the city an example of resistance to the end, just to see themselves ruined, when they weren’t sure they didn’t prefer to be ruled by Arab monotheists.
But during the same few hours, Khalid’s men heard that on the east side, the Roman commander was feasting his men to celebrate his son’s birth. They figured the guard would be weaker, so they mounted an attack. Damascus had a significant moat in this place, and they inflated goat skins as floats to cross. With camel-hair ropes and simple ladders, they quietly got as many men to the top of the wall as they could, then suddenly rushed the few gatekeeping guards and broke in.
Damascus was in Muslim hands, but how should the loot be settled? Khalid’s men believed they had broken in and seized the city, so they should be receiving serious loot. But because the city also opened a gate to Abu Ubaydah, there was room for negotiation.
Damascus was treated as if it had surrendered, which meant much more generous provisions for its citizens, property, and leaders. The city would send tribute—a punitively high tax rate—but not a sum to crush their economy. Roman treasury gold was seized for the Muslim treasury, and some amount of property was shared out for the fighters, since it was their only pay.
Muslim armies then fanned out north of Damascus and took the cities of Emessa (now Homs) and Baalbek. Presumably these provided a bit more income, but surrendering cities were creating a payroll problem that would have to be solved.
In the summer of 636, Emperor Heraclius, commanding from the relative safety of Antioch, summoned the largest army he could put together at that point, made up of Greeks, Armenians, and Ghassanid Arabs. Estimates vary between 20,000 and 100,000; Arab records tend to give their enemies higher numbers than historians think likely. The commander was an Armenian named Vahan. The new forces gathered in the Golan Heights at the Ghassanid summer pasture, al-Jabiya. It was greener than lower-altitude plains, but it was surrounded by rocky mountains and river gorges.
The Muslims came to meet them, camping a few miles away. The flat space where the fighting took place was at the headwaters of the Yarmouk River, so it is known as the Battle of Yarmouk. Peter Crawford notes that the Yarmouk River formed a last-defensive line for the Muslims, keeping their communications with Medina from being cut off. Khalid’s strategic genius chose a site that forced the Romans to fight with a river gorge that had only one bridge at their backs, making retreat unlikely. The Romans could have refused that place, staying at another until the Muslims came to them, but they were suffering internal divisions among their commanders, and they needed to get it over with. The two armies seem to have been well-matched, similar in composition and size, and now the Muslims had experience fighting Roman-style battles. The various wings and blocks were as far as a mile apart, so they probably could not see each other even at the front.
The Battle of Yarmouk was a series of daily battles, skirmishes, and strategic moves that lasted a week. On the first day, the Roman army did things the Arab way, with single combat challenges in the space between the armies. The Muslims won these, since it was for them a strength. The first big Roman infantry offensive was succeeding in pushing its Muslim opponents back toward their camp, until Khalid realized that there was an opportunity for a fast cavalry drive around behind the Romans, attacking the rear and cutting off their retreat. The Roman infantry was typically stronger, so that whenever Vahan was pressing this advantage on some portion of the Muslim army, it fell back. The Romans had shield-locking strategies to prevent the same happening to them. The Muslims had to commit reserve forces each time, just to prevent defeat. But Khalid probably showed more cleverness and fast thinking during these engagements, looking down and spotting opportunities, so the Romans often came out on the losing side at the end of each day.
On the fifth day of such fighting, the Romans asked for a truce. Khalid used this time to gather his remaining cavalry into one massive strike force, not neglecting to send a significant but smaller unit to capture the bridge that the Romans would need for retreat. On the sixth day, with the truce expired, Khalid’s infantry pushed forward as the Romans had done previously. His cavalry strike force swept the Roman cavalry back, leaving the infantry to fight without cover. It was a massive and final defeat for the Romans; with the bridge guarded, anyone who tried to retreat found he had to scale the cliffs of the river gorges. Some Romans did manage the feat and tried to regroup at a fall-back position, but the Muslims had pressed forward to hunt down as many retreating soldiers as they could. Some Romans reportedly sat down, exhausted and dejected, wrapped in their cloaks and waiting for death.
The Roman army’s commanders were all killed in the fighting. The Ghassanid commander defected to the Muslim side, to live to fight another day. Since this defeat at Yarmouk followed on the devastating years of plague and war, it left Constantinople unable to field another army of size for a long time to come. The news of the defeat was carried afar into Europe and Egypt. It pre-demoralized any remaining “Roman” strongholds. Emperor Heraclius withdrew from Antioch by ship, where he is said to have said or written “Farewell to Syria, a long farewell. You will be a beautiful province for the enemy.” Some of Jerusalem’s relics may have been taken away with him, because now it was clear that the entire region was about to fall.
- The War of the Three Gods, by Peter Crawford.
- The Great Arab Conquests, by Hugh Kennedy