The Amazing Wealth of Persia, 638-40

Posted on April 29, 2021 by Ruth

Persian luxury was famous; even then, they put carpets on the ground that others would have prized as blankets or wall coverings. In the negotiations before the Battle of Qadisiyah, Arabs had taken pains to ruin any carpets they were invited to stand on as emissaries. They cut holes and slashed them, just to show their disregard for whatever the Persians considered valuable. But when the cities and country manors were thrown open for looting, the valuable things looked different.

Sa’d’s men chased the retreating Persians and sometimes recovered more treasures, including the royal armor and robes. Gems encrusted anything valuable, gems that the Arabs had never seen. They scooped up a lot of armor, not just the royal set, and many weapons. In the tents, there were rich pillows and blankets and clothes made of silk and spun gold. In houses, they found ceramics from China, and camphor, the precious scent of the Persian court. They found furniture that they didn’t know what to do with, like beds and sofas and chairs. Of course, they also found wine and rich food. Some mistakenly cooked the camphor.

There was a massive carpet in the palace, reportedly 30 meters square. The Arabs somehow transported it to Medina on camels, where it was handed to Umar. He ordered it cut into pieces and shared out with the other Muslim leaders, who mostly sold their pieces. There were countless treasures like this, none of which were prized as they would be now. Nobody had a sense of history, nor even of preserving something as massive as a carpet that required a special one-use loom and hundreds of craftsmen.

The people who were left behind from the Emperor’s retreat were rounded up as booty, too. The Muslims had a firm rule about all booty being shared out by a central arbiter, rather than grabbing whatever any man could take, but women were easily handed out as shares. The first Arab-Persian infants were born soon after, founding a generation that would become extremely important in the development of Arab sciences.

The land between the Euphrates and Tigris Rivers was called in Arabic “the Island,” or the Jezirah. This land was richer than anything the Arabs had ever seen, since it was built of alluvial deposits for thousands of years. It was filled with farms, towns, churches and monasteries, most of which were left alone on the condition that they pay tribute.

A second military wave moved through the southern river region and into the land beyond. Caliph Umar’s concern was that Arab tribesmen were quite capable of raiding and seizing on their own, and he wanted conquests to be in Medina’s name and under central control. There was a growing problem of having way too much booty to keep track of. It was just so much stuff, now liberated from its former buildings. The Arabs scrambled to find literate men who could keep accounting records of all the treasure and coin flowing south.

On the other side of the Tigris River was an Iranian province called Khuzestan. Now Arabs led by a veteran of Qadisiyah moved into this territory. It was the former land of the Elamites, mentioned in the Bible. One vast ziggurat still stood from the Bronze Age. Khuzestan was a rich farming country of hills and valleys, very green with many streams. It was beyond imagining to desert-born eyes. They grew rice and sugar, cotton and linen. There were a number of cities, mostly Christian as in Mesopotamia.

Without imperial military backing, the region had little defense against the new onslaught. There’s a Muslim anecdote about the capitulation of the city of Jundishapur, home of Persia’s greatest doctors. The city was keeping up its defense in a siege as best it could, but then one day the city fathers opened the gates and came out to surrender. It transpired that they thought the Muslims had shot an arrow in with a message, promising mercy if they surrendered. The Muslim commanders knew nothing about it, but they found that an enslaved Persian had sent the message. Perplexed, they sent a rider to ask Caliph Umar what to do. Umar told them to uphold the apparent promise and accept tribute. Again, there was much tribute, much wealth to distribute.

The city of Susa was the ancient Persian capital containing the Tomb of Daniel. It had been sacked and plundered by Alexander the Great, and again by the current Persian dynasty in the 4th century, but its wealth was again great. It resisted for a few days, but the Muslims forced the gates and killed all the Persian nobles.

The Tomb of Daniel was a problem. Daniel had been a prophet, but the Quran did not mention him, so the Muslims at first did not recognize him as anything special. The tomb was broken open; there had been silver and gold stored there since Darius and Cyrus. They found a silver coffin with a mummy, perhaps Daniel’s. Since they did not recognize Daniel as a prophet, they buried the body in the river bed and looted the treasures. Over time, though, the Tomb persisted as an institution, and eventually it was revered by Muslims, too.

The last city of Khuzestan was Tustar (or Shushtar), guarded by a castle and a massive dam built in 260 by Roman prisoners of war (during one of the early Roman vs. Persian wars). The Roman engineers had cut tunnels into the rock, too, for irrigation. The whole installation was one of the engineering wonders of the world, at the time. It was greater than the Marib Dam, the largest previously known to the Arabs. The moats, dams and natural rivers guarded the city of Tustar so that the Persian commander was able to hold the city against the Arabs for two years. Finally, treachery allowed the Arabs to tunnel under the walls; sieges were usually ended by treachery, more often than by brute force.

During this relatively long period when a Muslim army was invested in the siege of Tustar, Persian soldiers defected to the Muslim side. It was very clear that momentum was on the Muslims’ side of the long, wide war, and soon holdouts would be isolated so that even if they won, they could not continue to live independently. Some of the Persian units that defected were elite, well-trained, well-armed cavalry or other special forces. Emperor Yazdgerd still had eastern lands to live in, and cities still under his rule, but nobody could see a real comeback any time soon.

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Conquering the Tigris, 636-7

Posted on April 29, 2021 by Ruth

The Arab general Khalid had moved quickly up the Euphrates River in 634, but he left his gains there and went to Syria. Now, with Damascus and Jerusalem securely held by Muslims and the remaining armies tackling the tougher port cities, Khalid was free to go back. What had been happening while he was gone?

While Khalid was gone, the tribal chief Muthanna ibn Haritha was left in charge of collecting the promised tribute. But over the course of a year, the newest Emperor in Ctesiphon was able to recruit and train a new army to face the new threat in the south. Ctesiphon was the Persian capital in the west, not their home base, but the city from which they governed Iraq.

Muslim authority in southern Iraq grew weaker with Khalid gone, and Muthanna asked the Caliph to send another army. Caliph Umar, newly in power, did not find it easy to round up more volunteers. With armies in Syria, they were stretched. But Umar dipped into a reserve that Caliph Abu Bakr had refused to tap: apostates who had rebelled after the Prophet’s death. So they weren’t the best Muslims, so they might be faking faith just to fit in, they can still help fight, right? Eventually, a new Arab army set out for Hirah. This was the former Lakhmid capital that the Muthanna’s men had been occupying.

The attacking and defending armies met across the Euphrates River, with one bridge between them, so it was called “The Battle of the Bridge.” Muthanna pushed his men to be the ones to cross over, forgetting that bridges act as funnels. The army crossing over comes dribbling out, while the army already on that bank can take them out one by one. Pro tip: if you can, always make the other side cross the bridge.

Moreover, on the other side they (the half that had completed the crossing) found that Bahman, the Persian general, had a unit of Indian elephants in his forces. The Arab horses had never seen elephants. The smell and sound of them terrified the horses so that their cavalry was ineffective. In the melée, their commander was trampled. The Muslim fighters were recently recruited, inexperienced, and lightly trained in this type of fighting. They turned to run, but those who had crossed over the bridge mostly ended up in the water, drowning. Crafty old Muthanna had stayed at the back, probably not yet over the bridge, so he lived to fight another day.

The old-model raiding Arabs would have had enough; they would have left off attacking Persia for at least a decade. The Persians were surprised to see that as Muslims, the Arabs had a stronger sense of mission. They were more willing to take losses and try again.

By autumn of 636, two even larger armies faced each other again about 30 miles east of Hirah, on the plain of Qadisiyyah. The top Persian general, a prince named Rustam, was in charge this time. Hugh Kennedy says that he brought along the Persian royal flag, which was 40 meters long and either was made of or looked like tiger skin. A low estimate of Rustam’s force would be 30,000 men, with some estimates ranging to 80,000. They were heavily armed, with even horses wearing chain mail.

The Arab general, Sa’d, probably had no more than 12,000 men (Crawford estimates between 6000 and 12,000). Some forces were called back to Iraq from Syria, and more Arabian tribes were asked to send recruits.

The Battle of Qadisiyah proved to be as decisive against the Persians as the Battle of Yarmouk had been against the Romans. There were many similarities. Both empires were fielding the best army they could, out of an exhausted treasury and new recruits. In both battles, the sides fought conventionally with infantry assaults and cavalry charges, and they were fairly well matched. Both battles lasted for several days. At the Battle of Qadisiyah, the decisive action was Sa’d’s when he chose to push his men to attack yet again when they had been fighting literally all night. Rustam assumed that with a battle ending at daybreak, nobody would be fighting for half a day. The Muslims pushed ahead and attacked unprepared, resting Persians, and one unit ran straight into the center and killed Rustam himself. Then the cavalry pursued fleeing Persian soldiers and cut them down. “Much like Vahan’s army, the force that Rustam led out from Ctesiphon ceased to exist.” (Crawford, 144)

Rustam’s death and defeat left the Persian heartland wide open. There might be smaller army units here and there, but the crushing imperial mega-army was gone. Within a month, the Muslims were advancing on the capital, Ctesiphon, which was on the Tigris River a bit north of where Baghdad is now. An advance force swept most resistance out of the way, until 10 miles from Ctesiphon, a pre-battle set of single combat duels killed the Persian general.

Ctesiphon was a cluster of cities around the Tigris River, so it could not be fully surrounded, the way Damascus had been. It was heavily defended from attacks from the north, but the south had always been guarded by the rivers. There was no bridge, and all ferry boats could be collected on the far side. The Muslims were stopped for the moment by the Tigris River, and there was a stand-off. The Persians had dug ditches around the city they were defending, and they had catapults. But some of the Arabs had used siege engines at Khaybar, and now they got Persians to make a set for them, too. The Persians fell back to Ctesiphon itself, but the Muslims found a point where the Tigris could be forded. They began landing men on the north-east side.

Ctesiphon was not defensible from the south. Emperor Yazdgerd and his army chose to take the bulk of the money in the treasury and flee into the Iranian interior. Sa’d occupied the palace and set up a mosque under the great royal arch. Fleeing Persians had left behind houses, flocks, businesses and treasures.

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Fall of Jerusalem, 637

Posted on April 28, 2021 by Ruth

The Muslim armies captured remaining towns in Syria in the months following the Battle of Yarmouk. They re-occupied Damascus, temporarily abandoned so as to have maximum forces at Yarmouk. The siege of Emessa/Homs took place in the winter, when the people in the town hoped that snow would force the barefoot Arabs to withdraw. They didn’t, so when spring came, the city negotiated its surrender.

Hugh Kennedy provides details of the surrender provisions, interesting in that they tell us what was considered normal at the time. The city’s residents paid tribute, but not all the same rates, so that would have been negotiated. It was personal, rather than a lump sum, as I would have assumed. This may have been part of why conversion to Islam was individually appealing, since tribute as a whole could be paid, while one man’s contribution was suspended. The city walls, churches, and mills were given special attention in the negotiation, so that none were to be torn down. A portion of one church would become a mosque; the same thing happened in Damascus. During the early years of conquest, archeological records show us various churches that shared space with Muslims, as identified by the qibla, the direction pointer toward Mecca.

Abandoned houses and land in Emesa/Homs would go to Muslim settlers, and up to half of the occupied houses were told to support Muslim guest residents. This was a way of paying Arab commanders with landed property; they sent for their families and flocks, and Syria began to be more heavily Arab from this time. Khalid decided to settle his family in one of the defeated towns that stood in a wide, green, agricultural plain. Although he continued to campaign, this became his home base. Other officers did the same, creating the foundation of the eventual Arab Muslim aristocracy of Syria.

Antioch didn’t attempt to put up a long siege resistance, although as Crusaders were later to learn, it was a city designed to be impregnable. Other towns sometimes welcomed the Muslim army as guests, with drums and cymbals. Gaza and Caesarea on the coast were among the last cities to fall. Amr, who had first approached Gaza before Yarmouk, now came back and conquered it, which positioned him to move into Egypt. Caesarea, another extremely strong port city, was hard to conquer. It may not have fallen to Arab control until 641. Tripoli, too, held out for a long time. These cities would all become major contests when the Christians tried to take them back, nearly 500 years later.

The port of Latakia is said to have been conquered with a ruse; fighting men hid in ditches, out of sight, while the main force appeared to retreat. When the townsmen brought their cattle out to pasture in the morning, the hidden men seized the gate. Hugh Kennedy says that in Latakia, the Muslims chose to build a new mosque, whereas in most of these towns, the existing church was divided. But the northern ports of Tyre, Sidon and Beirut surrendered. When Tripoli finally did fall, it was essentially also a surrender: the men were evacuated by sea, since the city was isolated by then.

The city of Jerusalem was ruled by its Patriarch, Sophronius. The army of Abu Ubaydah set up a siege in the fall of 636, and the city held out for four months. But it was clear that no imperial help was coming, and Sophronius himself had already sent the most important relics away in preparation for defeat. He asked for an unusual condition, though. He would only surrender to the Caliph himself. The Muslims may have tried to pass off someone else as Umar at first, but it became clear that only the real thing would do. So everyone sat by some of the Muslim generals made the journey to where Umar was. Umar may not have been in Medina; he may have been touring Syria’s conquered towns, setting up administrative details. Perhaps that’s why the Patriarch thought to ask for his personal involvement.

Their agreement, later called the Covenant of Umar, recognized Christians as a protected class as long as they paid their tribute/taxes. Jerusalem received special considerations, compared to Emessa/Homs. No churches in Jerusalem were to be divided, and all church property and rites were guaranteed complete safety. They were not to be forcibly converted, and neither were Jews to be placed in their city. Anyone who wished to withdraw and go to live in Byzantine territory was given safe passage. In fact, the terms encouraged them to leave, abandoning city houses and farm estates for Arabs to take over.

The point about Jews is odd, since Jerusalem was the city of the Jews. But when the Romans destroyed it in 70 AD, Jews were expelled, and apparently Roman law had formally never changed. Jews had continued to live in smaller towns and on the outskirts of Jerusalem. I can’t believe that Jerusalem was really “Judenrein,” and by the Crusades’ period, there were certainly Jewish neighborhoods. But apparently it was important to the Patriarch to get this old Roman law upheld. Perhaps Arabia’s reputation as a refuge for Jews made it seem very likely that the Muslims would bring in Jews, just as they were placing Bedouins in other cities. Indeed, later the Muslim governor imported Arabian Jews to populate coastal cities that had been largely abandoned.

Patriarch Sophronius and Caliph Umar toured the city, with the Patriarch making sure all of the necessary renovations were pointed out. Invited to pray in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, Umar refused lest the Muslims interpret this as taking it for a mosque. There was apparently nothing built on the Temple Mount; the famous Muslim Dome was not built until sixty years later. One of his top advisers was a converted Arabian Jew, K’ab ibn Adhar. K’ab suggested that the ruins of the Temple be used as the prayer qiblah that day, but Umar said no, they would turn toward Mecca, the only holy site for Muslims. However, apparently they did clear away rubbish that the Romans had been dumping on the site, and they prayed there.

During the ensuing year, as the rest of Palestine and Syria were conquered, the plague infection had its own campaign. Bubonic plague returned as “The Plague of Emmaus/Amwas” in 638. We don’t know how many of the Muslims died, but we know that Yazid and Abu Ubaydah died of plague. Yazid had been made the administrator of Syria, seated in Damascus. After his death, his younger brother Mu’awiyah became governor of Damascus. Yazid and Mu’awiya were both sons of Hind “the liver-eater” and Abu Sufyan, of the most powerful family in Mecca. As we’ll see, Mu’awiya took to power readily and resisted relinquishing any of it.

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Syria: Damascus, 635 and Yarmouk, 636

Posted on April 27, 2021 by Ruth

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.

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Caliph Umar, 634

Posted on April 13, 2021 by Ruth

When Abu Bakr died, he was careful not to leave the same type of succession crisis as they had faced at the Prophet’s death. He knew exactly what he wanted to do. He named Umar as his successor, therefore Caliph. Umar ruled as Caliph (successor) and added a new title: Commander of the Faithful. He lived for another ten years, sometimes leading the armies himself, and always living simply and according to strict Muslim law. He had his own son publicly whipped for drunken behavior, although the whipping wounded him to death. Ali ibn Abi Talib worked closely with Umar as his second-in-command, filling the power vacuum if Umar left Medina. Most of the news from Umar’s reign is about the intense decade of conquest that began under Abu Bakr but really took off now.

Let’s review Umar’s biography. He had been an early Meccan convert to Islam, but with a twist. When his sister began following the brand-new strange cult, he grew very angry. He assaulted her, then when she shamed him, he set out to kill the Prophet. When he heard the beautiful verses of the early Quran being recited, he was overwhelmed and immediately converted. So he was a very early convert and friend to the Prophet, and clearly was Abu Bakr’s closest companion as well. But Umar was a violent man. Stories about him always include his calling for someone’s head to roll. He was in charge of forcing Ali to submit to Abu Bakr, so either he personally put his shoulder to Ali’s door, injuring Fatimah, or he ordered one of his bodyguards to do it.

Umar had two wives in Mecca, but in Medina he married a local woman to create alliances. He may have married or at least fathered children by several more, the total coming to as many as nine. But the most interesting story is about the wife he married around the time he succeeded Abu Bakr as Caliph.

Atiqah was a child in Mecca when Muhammad’s revelations began, and her guardian was an early convert. She married a much older man who took her to Medina with the other Muslims, but they must have divorced, for next she married Abu Bakr’s son Abdullah. Atiqah was a poet! She was renowned in the community for the poetry she recited; note, she did not need to be literate, since all poetry was memorized like the Quran. Abdullah ibn Abi Bakr doted on his wife, although she bore no children. They say Abu Bakr was angry because Abdullah listened to his wife too much, both in obeying her and in literally hanging around talking to her, when he should have been out leading armies or collecting taxes. He tried to make Abdullah divorce her. But in the end, she remained Abdullah’s wife. Abdullah doted on her so much that he made her promise not to remarry. He willed her a large property, since she had no son to inherit.

When Muhammad died, Atiqah recited an elegy for him. Her Wikipedia entry gives sixteen lines of it, perhaps the whole elegy. Here is how it begins:

His camels have been lonely since evening;
he used to ride them and he was their adornment.
I have been weeping for the Chief since evening,
and tears are flowing in succession…

When her husband died a year after Muhammad, she turned down several marriage offers. But Umar was a suitor not to be denied. He ordered her guardian to marry her to him, then he argued with her personally until she finally gave in. A’isha sent her a bitter message asking for their family property back, since Atiqah broke her vow. But Atiqah finally bore a child to Umar.

The remarrying cross-overs get dizzying. Umar also married a widow of the Battle of Ajnadayn: Umm Hakim, first wife of Ikrimah, a leading Meccan. But Ikrimah himself had married two women who were almost wives of Muhammad. They probably had been intended brides during his last year of life. One arrived just after his death, and they decided not to return her to her father—but the failure of the marriage alliance to the Prophet may have contributed to her clan’s part in the Ridda Wars rebellion. Ikrimah may have been a big shot in Mecca, but the Prophet he wasn’t.

The other girl might have been the bride that A’isha boasted she got rid of, because it’s not clear how this Asma was (or wasn’t) a wife of Muhammad. In that story, A’isha said she told this new bride that it would really turn Muhammad on if she pretended to be afraid and said to her new husband, “I take refuge from Thee in Allah!” The girl (Asma?) didn’t realize this was a formula for divorce until Muhammad left the room. Whatever happened, now married and divorced without consummation, Asma was a logistical problem for the Muslims. She was married to another man first, but ended up with Ikrimah. We don’t know why Umar didn’t choose one of these Ikrimah-widows to marry, and I don’t think we know what happened to them next.

Abu Bakr left a widow, another Asma. She had been married to Ja’far, Ali’s brother. After he died in the first doomed invasion of Syria, Abu Bakr married her. She bore him a son along the road to Mecca, the infant Muhammad. But now, in 634, she was a widow again. This time, Ali married her, so he became stepfather to his brother’s children and also to Abu Bakr’s toddler. As if Muslim names were not confusing enough, eventually the story will feature this Muhammad, son of Abu Bakr and technically A’isha’s half-brother, but emotionally the son of Ali. He didn’t have an easy life; he was a walking divided-allegiance.

There’s one more tangled marriage story, this time for Umar again. After he became the Caliph, he asked to marry Ali’s daughter, who was known as Umm Kulthum. Shi’ites do not believe this marriage happened, and everyone agrees that Ali intended to marry his daughters to their cousins, Ja’far’s sons. Sunni sources say Umar insisted, but one twist was the girl’s age. It hadn’t been many years since her mother Fatimah died and the child was not yet the age of puberty. Sunni sources say Ali agreed to the match on Umar’s promise that he would be the best husband ever, and that Umm Kulthum lived as a queen in Medina, sending a gift of perfume at one time to the Empress in Constantinople. If this marriage did happen, it’s another example of what ridiculous age gaps they were willing to accept, basing a marriage’s value on rank and wealth, not on age suitability. It’s likely that Umar wanted a public sign of Ali’s support to quell possible rebellions.

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The First Muslim Conquest in Syria, 634

Posted on April 13, 2021 by Ruth

The Arabs were much more familiar with Syria than with Mesopotamia. They had interacted a great deal with the Ghassanids, whose capital city was in the Golan Mountains. They stopped often at cities like Bos(t)ra. Some of the men of Mecca had bought land around cities like Damascus and Jerusalem, installing relatives as branch offices of their trading businesses. It was a no-brainer to begin probing the weak defenses of this “Roman” region that they already knew so well.

While Khalid captured southern Mesopotamia, four Arab commanders set out to raid at the borders of Arabia. Two were old-time converts who had known Muhammad well. Shurahbil ibn Hasana and Abu Ubaydah ibn Jarrah were such early converts that they had been part of the Abyssinian migration. Abu Ubaydah had been considered as a possible successor to Muhammad at that crucial all-night meeting in Medina. The other two commanders were more controversial, as they were recent Meccan converts, like Khalid. Amr ibn al-As had converted around when Khalid did, before the Fall of Mecca, and Muhammad had appointed him to collect taxes between Medina and Syria. He went on to lead raids in the region. He may have been a recent convert, but he had made his place in the Muslim command structure already.

But Yazid, the fourth commander, was the son of Abu Sufyan and Hind. That family had only converted when Mecca fell, so their faith was suspect. Were they truly Mu’min, believers? Yazid’s younger brother Mu’awiya came along. He had served as a scribe to Muhammad in the short time between Mecca’s fall and the Prophet’s death. The promotions of Yazid and Mu’awiya were part of the campaign to have Mecca’s old leadership become part of Islam seamlessly. They were raised to rule and to fight, and apparently they were pretty intelligent. Their family owned property around Damascus, so they had personal reasons to see through the conquest of this weakly “Roman” area.

Amr led the smallest army, about 3000, up the caravan road to Aqaba, across the Negev Desert to Gaza. He met only disorganized Roman garrisons and won the Battle of Dathin near Gaza. Abu Ubaydah led a larger army, about 7000, into the Golan Mountains to challenge the Ghassanid capital at al-Jabiyah. He captured the Roman town of Areopolis. Yazid and Shurahbil were sent into the middle zone between Amr’s southern march and Abu Ubaydah’s northern one. Shurahbil’s campaign did not leave much news behind so the records kind of forget about him after this.

Abu Bakr commanded Khalid to leave Mesopotamia and go as quickly as possible to Bosra, where Abu Ubaydah and Yazid were to meet him. Khalid’s forced march to Syria in spring 634 is his most famous exploit because it’s both clever and disgusting. The zone between Iraq and Bosra, Syria was extremely dry. The roads around the arid zone took longer, and everyone assumed Khalid would use these. If the local Romans were gathering themselves to defend cities, and heard Khalid was coming, they’d have calculated a certain number of weeks before he could possibly arrive. But Khalid had seen the advantage of speed in Mesopotamia. He decided to cut straight through the desert, even if he would lose some men and horses on the way.

Khalid realized that they had one tool that the Romans never had. They traveled with a large herd of camels for bearing burdens that always included water. But the camels themselves famously tanked up on water and retained it for long periods. Khalid ordered his men to tank up the camels with as much water as they could drink, then tie their mouths shut so they could not chew their cud. They became walking water tanks. When the other water supplies ran out in the middle of the arid lands, they slaughtered the water-camels carefully so that their stomachs could be emptied. I guess if you are very, very thirsty, you don’t mind drinking water mixed with camel stomach-acid and a bit of blood.

Once Khalid arrived, the Muslims quickly conquered Bosra. Then they fought a pitched battle in the south of modern Israel against a regular Roman army. This army was not large, but it was led by the Emperor’s brother, a professional soldier. Its core was made up of Armenians, and it had been stationed at Emessa, now Homs. This area had many Armenians; we’ll meet them again a few centuries later in the Crusades. And Emperor Heraclius himself was at Emessa to watch from a distance.

The Battle of Ajnadayn went on for two days of fierce fighting, with high casualties. The Roman style of fighting was nothing like the traditional Arab battle style. From this time on, the Arab Muslim armies had to adapt to pitched battles with high losses. But the Roman army lost the Battle of Ajnadayn, with survivors scattering toward Gaza or Jerusalem. Emperor Heraclius himself retreated from Emessa/Homs to Antioch, a walled city that could be defended. They presumed that the Arab raiders would loot and then go home.

The Emperor and his brother quarreled about whose fault was the loss. It was obviously the brother’s, since he had led the army; but he blamed Heraclius for marrying their niece, an incestuous union. (Crawford, 115) This quarrel was not good for the Empire; it led to a coup attempt that failed, but various high officers and aristocrats were mutilated or exiled. The Emperor was weaker than ever.

The Muslim armies could range all over the area now; they held the rural areas and many small fortresses. They had only one major city, so far. But while they were soon to besiege and take Damascus, there was a political interruption. In the summer of 634, Abu Bakr died.

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Khalid Takes the Euphrates River, 633

Posted on April 13, 2021 by Ruth

Simultaneous invasions began in 633, with armies heading west into Syria and north into Persia (modern Iraq). The western campaigns had little to note until after Khalid’s eastern army joined them, so we’ll start with Khalid. He was in northern Arabia with his army, having just conquered the last of the rebellions in eastern and northern lands. He left the city of Yamamah and headed north to join a former Ridda Wars rebel who was now raiding southern Iraq in the name of the Caliph Abu Bakr.

Hugh Kennedy, in Great Arab Conquests, describes how it took about three weeks’ riding across the northern Arabian desert from Medina to reach southern Iraq, where suddenly there is plentiful water. “In many places the border between the irrigated lands and the desert is clear and precise: you can virtually stand with one foot on either side of this environmental frontier.” Khalid’s army had a head start on the journey, and they had already been fighting against—and co-opting—-some of the Arab tribes who lived on the border of the irrigated lands. His core army from Yamamah may have been small, about 1000 men. But he added more fighters as he went, bringing border tribesmen with him.

The fortresses that ran up the south side of the Euphrates River from the Persian Gulf were small and lightly manned. Siege warfare depended on holding out until a larger force came to chase away the besiegers, and everyone knew that no larger army would be coming. So each conquest was a combination of force and negotiation. The “Persian” troops were mostly local Arabs who had become regulars for the regime. The locals were happy to see their Persian overlords displaced.

The first battle was named “The Battle of Chains” by the Muslims, because the Persian fighters were rumored to be chained together to prevent flight. It was fought at Uballa, a port on the Tigris River near the Persian Gulf. All of the four main battles with Persians are recorded in Muslim sources as having been fought against great numerical odds. They also began all of the battles with challenges to single combat, which was the Arab model of battle that we saw in the Battles of Badr and Uhud. Khalid challenged the commander to fight him, and he is recorded as always winning these duels.

Losing fighters fled each battle upriver, where they were collected into the next force to face the Muslims. Khalid’s men moved quickly, going up the Euphrates River within a few months. Their speed forced the Persians to move faster than they were set up to move, so they arrived at battles exhausted. The fourth battle of this type was probably the largest, and it resulted in vast casualties on both sides. It’s hard to know how much to tell about such battles; of course, each one cries out for attention with its particular story, but the next set of years are so chock full of battles that only the really unusual ones are worth telling. Be it noted: the locals and some imperial troops from Ctesiphon did try to stop them at times. But although they had the home advantage and sometimes greater numbers, they lost every encounter.

The last one, the Battle of Ullais, took out the largest army the Persians could manage at that time. Muslim records suggest as many as 70,000 fighters on the Persian side lost their lives, and one of their stories explains how Khalid beheaded a large number of them by a tributary of the Euphrates until it ran red. After that, there wasn’t any organized resistance.

The city of Hira, halfway up the river, was Khalid’s target. It was the capital of the Arab buffer state ruled by the Lakhmids, whose job it was to hold the frontier against the matching Roman Arab buffer state, ruled by the Ghassanids. The Muslim Arabs wanted to capture both capitals so that all of the Arabs would be under their rule.

Hira was a city on the model of Medina: it was a collection of fortified houses and palaces, without a wall around the city limits. Everything was made from mud brick, since it was not a region with much stone; buildings could go up to two stories and not much more. Clan chiefs lived in walled houses/palaces, and among these fortifications, there were also monasteries and churches, as well as ordinary village dwellings. Hira had a Nestorian bishop; the Lakhmids had generally converted to Christianity.

In Hira, the clans pulled inside their fortresses, while the small fry watched Khalid’s men moving freely through the unwalled spaces. The leaders cared most about their castles and churches, and they knew no army was coming to their relief. They negotiated with Khalid for an amount of tribute to pay in exchange for nothing being ruined. Hira collected taxes from other towns on the southern Euphrates, so tribute from Hira had the potential to add up. Khalid sent the first tribute from a Persian zone to Medina.

After Hira, Khalid went north to Anbar, where he again conquered. But instead of setting out to conquer more of Persia, Khalid received orders to head to Syria. The Lakhmid towns along the Euphrates were being easily held by Muslims, but the Ghassanid towns of Syria were causing more of a problem to the commanders who had been sent in that direction. So the Muslim invasion of Mesopotamia ended for now.

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Persia in 632

Posted on April 4, 2021 by Ruth

Rome vs. Persia: In the 610s, Persia was racking up victories, and in the 620s, Constantinople began reversing them. By 630, under pressure of war expenses, both empires had meddled in the other side’s revolutions, supporting either a rebel or the son of an overthrown ruler. It happened more than once, so that for being enemies, both at times were under obligations to the other. Heraclius had been Roman Emperor long enough now to seem pretty stable, but Persia was a mess.

The Persian king who received Muhammad’s letter was Khosrow II, and he bore the brunt of the Roman Emperor Heraclius’s victories. War had disrupted his economy and taxation, and of course had also made him spend a lot on fielding several armies. He came down with dysentery in the field, and named a successor. He passed over his oldest son and chose a younger one. This decision became one more vulnerability that Heraclius could exploit; the Romans probably assisted in some way when the oldest son overthrew his father and brother in a sudden coup. That’s the coup that they heard about in Yemen.

Khavad II executed his brother, of course. But he went further, chasing down all of his half-brothers and other male relatives, about twenty targeted family deaths. He made peace with Heraclius and agreed to give back the fragment of the True Cross that the Persians had removed from its basilica in Jerusalem. Heraclius restored the relic with pomp and devotion in 630. But Khavad II ruled for less than a year, then he died, leaving a son who was only seven. In a stable period, men can rule for a child, but in an unstable time that won’t happen. A man who has just killed all of his brothers can’t really expect the family to be loyal to his young child. A rebel general seized power.

On the eastern edge of the Persian lands, a new force was taking bites off their territory. This new force was an early wave of Turks, who would become a major issue in the Muslim Empire as well. A Turkish army seized Tiflis, the capital of Georgia, and killed everyone. When the Persians sent out an army, the Turks managed to trap and kill them, too. These losses were too heavy for a newly-crowned rebel general-king to sustain. He was assassinated, and the previous royal family was sought out.

But Khavad II had killed so many of his brothers that it was hard to find anyone to make into a king. Two of his sisters served as kings! By the time of Muhammad’s death in far-off Medina, both sisters had ruled and died, and the family then tried out five other relatives as kings. Yazdgerd III became king while Arabia was fighting out its Wars of Apostasy.

When a country falls into a situation like this, central government loses control. Taxes are not collected and transported reliably, so the capital is short of funds. Strongmen in various regions seize control, partly because someone has to be in charge to prevent chaos. By the time Yazdgerd III was calling himself king, there was not much Persia left to rule over. Turks were invading Georgia and Armenia, and most Persian cities had little connection to Ctesiphon. The Persian military had been devastated by its many losses and the major rebellion of its general. The great advantage of an empire is that it can field a very large army, supported by taxes, and able to move anywhere that it’s needed. Persia had lost most of this advantage by 633, when the Arabian civil war wound down.

Persia tended to be more decentralized than the Eastern Roman empire, too. Its nobles and king moved about among their country houses, rather than gathering in a large city like Constantinople. They had cities, but these were not built up quite the way they were to the west. The religion, too, tended to decentralization. Zoroastrian religion had fire temples, but the most important fire temples were not in central places, nor did they have large buildings. Hugh Kennedy suggests Zoroastrianism may have been an elite religion mostly followed by the aristocracy. If so, there were many peasants without any firm tie to a native religion.

Persia also had large Jewish and Nestorian Christian populations. Jews came to the region in the original Babylonian captivity, and then again after the destruction of Jerusalem. Nestorians had been fleeing eastward since the church council that outlawed their theology. It’s likely that both religions had found willing converts among the native Iraqis, the working poor who were left out of the fire religion. The Assyrian Christian Church was strong at that time. There were probably also many who practiced some sort of close-to-the-earth animism, which seems to be the natural religion of most of the world.

The Roman and Persian empires had in common a trait that left them vulnerable to Muslim conquest: the ruling class was alienated from the peasants, who often spoke another language. Persia’s society was highly stratified. The elite spoke Farsi, but the peasants of Iraq spoke Aramaic, as did the peasants of Syria. Their culture and religion were set up to offer the peasants and working class nothing. Islam, on the other hand, was set up as an egalitarian system that welcomed everyone. It offered everyone a way to participate by prayers and alms.

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The Early Muslim Army

Posted on March 28, 2021 by Ruth

Around the time of the Ridda (Apostasy) Wars, a lot of men began to realize that they weren’t about to disband and go home. After the fall of Mecca, some of them had tried out the idea. It’s possible that the first expedition to Syria that was sent out even as the Prophet was dying was a means to keep the need for armed men alive. Arabia is pacified? Yes but not really, what about the Arabs in the north? Don’t go home yet…keep that armor…

Arabian practice had been for all men in the clan or tribe to go out to war, but only some of them fought. That’s how you get a Battle of Uhud where 3000 men rode from Mecca, but only 22 died. We can see this pattern all through the early battle stories during Muhammad’s life: much of the battle was gained or lost by showing up, and by showing up in force. These early amateur armies had a tendency to run when the odds were too great.

But after six months of constant fighting, the men who were still in the ranks had become battle-tough fighters. Their commanders had gained experience, with tactical wisdom and a chain of command. It was clear to Abu Bakr, anyway, that when the last Ridda battle was fought, in early 633, it was time to move these forces onward and forward.

What were these forces like? There are not a lot of written records, but we know a little. They still fought in clan and tribal units, just as a matter of course. (Similarly, in the US Civil War, regiments consisted of men who all knew each other from back home.) They carried banners that showed insignia of their tribes, pre-dating Islam. As we know from the Muslim battles in Arabia, they had many good archers, and they used spears with steel points. But their primary weapon was a short, straight sword, not a curved scimitar as in later wars. Every man was expected to be proficient in sword use. Armor was chain-mail, and probably for most it only guarded the neck or other vital areas. It was expensive. The cheaper covering was just very tough leather, which could stop glancing blows but not a direct thrust.

One significant change that occurred during Muhammad’s time, and continued with the Caliphs, was that the ruler appointed a general commander over all of the tribes or city units. This commander was chosen for strategic experience, not clan hierarchy. Muhammad had set the army on its ear by appointing a teenager to lead, just before his death. He also appointed commanders without regard to how long they had been Muslims, so that recent enemies might now be leading into battle. These commanders organized the clan units into left and right wings, and advance and read guards. As long as they fought only other Arab clans, they didn’t need much innovation of military form. As soon as they began to face Roman or Persian armies, they had to counter that type of organization by copying it.

The Arabs traveled very light, since speed was their greatest friend. Attackers who can arrive a day before expected have a significant advantage. Each Arab warrior was expected to have his own camel and horse, following the Bedouin model. He could ride his camel or use it for provisions, while his horse was not ridden until they got close enough to need a lightning attack. His personal equipment was his set of weapons and armor, and some needles and linen thread. Large needles could fix saddle straps, while small needles could sew up a wound as well as fix sacks or tunics. Wealthy Muslims in Medina and other cities used their power to provide provisions for an expedition, and sometimes they provided personal equipment to a man who wanted to fight but could not afford these things.

But the army was not at first paid a regular salary. Once the Caliph’s treasury had provided for camels, horses, and food, the army would go forward and earn its own keep with loot. A city or tribe that lost could always expect to have its possessions taken wholesale. No exceptions, since that is how the army was paid. In the Muslim army, they paid a lot of attention to how the loot was distributed. Instead of every man grabbing for himself, they collected it all in a central place, and divided it fairly. Slaves were a major part of the payout, but in the coming conquests, herds of animals were not a large part (as they had been in the battles within Arabia). Armor and weapons were also assumed as part of the loot that would be handed out, so that victories kept the army’s equipment refreshed and increasing.

The armies of Abu Bakr would have units from the Bedouin tribes, as well as foot soldiers from South and East Arabia. Foot soldiers traveled slower, but they were the backbone of the army. Although later Arab armies were famous for riding into battle and fighting on horseback, it doesn’t seem like that’s what they did at this time. They rode to a battle quickly, perhaps rode into the battle, but fought on foot.

After the defeat of the settlement of Khaybar, the Muslim armies could use siege engines. These seem to have been the sort of catapult that is fired by having a team of men pull suddenly down on a rope, raising the arm to fling a rock. They were only useful in the case of assaulting a really fortified city.

With each region that was brought into the Caliphate, they got a fresh crop of engineers who knew how to use walls, water and wheels in war.

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The Ridda Wars of Apostasy, 632

Posted on March 28, 2021 by Ruth

After Fatimah died, Ali finally chose to swear allegiance to Abu Bakr as the Successor, or Caliph. It must have been very bitter, but time had passed and it was the new reality. To disrupt the new status quo and assert his own right would have meant provoking fitna, the troubles of civil war, and Ali knew that Muhammad had considered dissension among believers as the greatest evil. So he began to lead a public life again, now as a top aide to the new Caliph.

Besides, fitna was already upon them. As the news of the Prophet’s death spread, a number of tribes and cities decided that their commitment to send tribute or taxes to the Prophet had been good for his lifetime only. It had been a personal commitment, to him. Some of them maintained belief in Allah but wanted to break away from the political alliance.

In other cases, it was genuine apostasy: there were some wannabe prophets claiming to be as great as Muhammad. Even before Muhammad’s death, one such prophet had sent him a letter from East Arabia, suggesting that since they were both God’s messengers, they should split the territory. There were similar threats in North Arabia and South Arabia from “prophets.” In some ways it looks like a last reflex toward not uniting as Arabs, or at least not uniting under the leadership of Medina or Mecca. The regions of South Arabia and East Arabia had their own cultural histories and expectations of leadership.

And so the rebellions began. It’s a very complicated situation with uncertain timelines. I like to have a sense of the time and place causation of things, but for these Wars of Apostasy (Ridda), it would take a great deal of study to get it in order and it’s not clear that it’s even possible. I can give you the gist of it.

In North Arabia, the expedition force to Syria found itself managing the first wave of desertions from the Muslim cause in Syria, conquering rebels and persuading others to return to the cause. Other tribes closer to Medina chose to advance on the city, thinking to overthrow Abu Bakr while his main army was away. They scrambled enough fighters to defend Medina while young Usamah brought back his forces. It took a number of battles to reduce these tribes to submission. It was probably around this time that Ali came out of his state of mourning and rejoined his companions in supporting the Islamic state.

In Yemen, the “prophet” Aswad al-Ansi had raised an army and attacked Sana’a. The Persian governor of Yemen was Shahr, the son of the governor who had led them to convert to Islam. He defended his capital but died in battle, and Aswad al-Ansi actually married his widow and declared himself king. Abu Bakr sent Abdullah Fairuz al-Dailami, a Persian who had come from Yemen to study with Muhammad. Fairuz’s forces disrupted the takeover of Yemen and killed the prophet. It still took a few months to quell other rebels.

In North Arabia, Tulayhah was a clan chief who had been defeated six years previously. Now he claimed to be a prophet like Muhammad, and he had a confederacy of clans in rebellion, ready to ride on Medina. Abu Bakr sent an army led by Ali and other top companions of Muhammad. (It’s worth mentioning the names of his two co-commanders, because they will have a prominent role in some later troubles. Talha and Zubayr were cousins of Muhammad, and they were on the short (10) list of people that the Prophet said would go to Paradise with absolute certainty.) By the end of October 632, northern and central Arabia had been reconquered. Chief/Prophet Tulayhah escaped to Syria.

In East Arabia, the prophet Musaylimah had already defeated two Muslim armies sent against him. So one of Muhammad’s top generals, Khalid ibn Walid, led an army into East Arabia to tackle it. In his ranks was the Abyssinian who had been rewarded for killing Muhammad’s cousin/uncle Hamza back at the Battle of Uhud. This man, a convert to Islam since Mecca’s surrender, is said to be the individual who killed Musaylimah in battle. Khalid’s army fought a number of battles around East Arabia, moving into central and South Arabia, where they defeated a woman who led her tribe into battle on a camel.

Although Musaylimah had been killed in battle, and his movement had been defeated, his religion had gained enough genuine converts that it stayed around in the area for a long time. He came from the Arabic Haneef (monotheist) tradition, and his people had become at least nominal Christians before adopting Islam. He taught that they should pray three times a day, not five, and fast at night, not in the day. He outlawed polygamy and cousin marriage, but permitted premarital sex. His teachings were a mix of Christian, Muslim, and Gnostic ideas called Sadakia. We don’t know that he had a wide following, but when a Mughal Emperor commissioned a research project to catalog all religions in the Middle East and South Asia, some of Musaylimah’s followers could still be interviewed for the book.

Another army led by Ikrimah went east into Oman. Ikrimah was a recent convert whose father had been Muhammad’s most hardened enemy in Mecca, but he had embraced Islam enthusiastically and served both Muhammad and Abu Bakr in extending Medina’s reach into other Arabian regions. Now he was chasing down the rebellion of the al-Azd tribe, some of those Yemenis who had moved north into Oman—and who are still the main population and rulers there. At the Battle of Dibba, he reconquered them.

The last rebellion was in the southern region of Hadramut, where the Kindah tribe led the revolt. By now it was early 633, and the forces of Ikrimah and Khalid were freed up to put down this rebellion. The Ridda Wars had lasted about six months, from late summer 632 to winter 633. The Arabian Peninsula remained united after this, and the reconquered regions of Yemen, Oman, Bahrain, and north/central Arabia sent armies to serve Caliph Abu Bakr. The war at home had ended, but the war of expansion had just begun. Ikrimah, Khalid, and many of Muhammad’s companions would spend the rest of their lives in the saddle.

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