Don’t imagine that Medina and Mecca took the news of Husayn’s head on a lance quietly. They may have imagined that Yazid’s men would not dare to hurt the Prophet’s grandson, or they may have been prepared for news of his life lost in a battle. The actual series of events, the brutality with which his family and tents had been destroyed, shocked them to the core and ended any chances Yazid had.
In Medina, the leader of the Ansar was Abdallah ibn Hanzala, whose father had died in the Battle of Uhud just before his birth. (This will be a story with far too many Abdallahs in it; clearly it was the baby name of choice for new converts.) The original emigrants who came to Medina with Muhammad also opposed Yazid; they were not Umayyads, but they were of the Quraysh tribe with ties to Mecca. They had an additional reason to oppose the Umayyads, since recent “fiscal reforms” had threatened the loss of their pensions. The Umayyad power in Damascus had bigger fish to fry than just paying out tax money to the children of Muhammad’s companions.
Together, the Ansar and Quraysh of Medina turned against the Umayyad governing apparatus; about a thousand Umayyads fled to the large house of Marwan, just outside the city. It was probably defensible; Marwan was no fool. Marwan sent messages to Yazid asking for an army to deliver them, and Yazid did send one. It was drawn from the tribes in Syria and Palestine, led by the tribe that Yazid’s mother came from, so none of these invaders had personal memories of Medina or Mecca.
The Medinans let the Umayyads go north to Syria, on condition of taking an oath not to assist the invading army. Marwan’s son, Abd al-Malik, broke his oath to assist them with inside knowledge of the city’s defensives. (Abd al-Malik later became Caliph himself.) Father and son turned back to ride with the Syrian army to their former home. In the most ironic event of this rebellion, the Ansar and Quraysh of Medina re-dug the trench that had defended Medina from attacking Umayyads back when they were still Meccan pagans. The lines were drawn for the Battle of al-Harrah.
Muhammad’s defense of Medina in the Battle of the Trench had depended on unity among all residents, since a disloyal tribe could allow enemies to enter the oasis through their lands, elsewhere. And that’s what happened now. After three days of fighting, Marwan’s battalion entered from the back, and Medina was lost. The Quraysh leaders fled to Mecca, as once they had fled from Mecca to Medina.
Medina was probably sacked by the Syrians. I say “probably” because some historians think reports of the destruction were exaggerated, the way claims about wars often are. But it was a rich city by now, and it looked like the biggest obstacle to establishing a stable Umayyad rule in Damascus. The commanders let their men overrun the city, destroying, taking, and raping. On Yazid’s orders, Ali ibn Husayn was not harmed: they had enough trouble with martyrs already. The greatest claims are that thousands of Medinans died; the smallest claim is that there were public executions of their leaders. But “Medinat al-Nabi,” the City of the Prophet, was now reduced to a much lesser town, its riches carried away. It remained a center of Islamic scholarship where Ali ibn Husayn lived quietly.