Read The Great Arab Conquests Online
Authors: Hugh Kennedy
The Great Arab Conquests (18 page)
In the river valleys there were a number of ancient cities of which the most famous was Edessa. Edessa was one of the centres of early Christianity. In the first century AD its then king Abgar is said to have been the first monarch in the world to accept Christianity. Its great cathedral, of which nothing now survives, was one of the most magnificent buildings in eastern Christendom. It was also an important political centre, and Heraclius had made it his base in the final stages of his campaign in Syria.
The conquest of the Jazira was an important stage in the consolidation of Islamic rule in the Fertile Crescent. If it had remained in Byzantine hands it would have been a major threat to Syria and Iraq. Despite its strategic importance and the antiquity of its cities, the conquest of the Jazira is recounted in a very laconic fashion in the Arabic sources, and such accounts as there are are more concerned with the terms of capitulation than the course of the military campaign.
55
Most agree that the conquest was led by Iyād b. Ghanam, who was ordered by the caliph Umar to lead a force of Syrian Arabs across the Euphrates. According to one account he had just 5,000 men with him,
56
but despite these small numbers he encountered little serious opposition. It seems that the withdrawal of the Byzantine imperial army left the local people with little choice but to capitulate and agree to the comparatively easy terms the Arabs were offering. Even at Amida (Diyarbakr), whose mighty city walls are one of the great glories of ancient and medieval military architecture, there seems to have been no resistance, and the same was true of the great castle the Byzantines had built in the sixth century at Dara to repel Persian attacks.
57
Edessa seems to have capitulated quickly on condition that the Christians could keep their cathedral but agreed not to build any new churches and not to aid the enemies of the Muslims. The city of Raqqa on the Euphrates also fell after a short resistance. The exact route of Iyād’s army as it toured the province accepting the surrender of smaller cities cannot be determined, but it seems that he may have finished by raiding along the ancient road that led to Armenia before halting at Bitlis. He then returned to Syria, where he died.
55
Most agree that the conquest was led by Iyād b. Ghanam, who was ordered by the caliph Umar to lead a force of Syrian Arabs across the Euphrates. According to one account he had just 5,000 men with him,
56
but despite these small numbers he encountered little serious opposition. It seems that the withdrawal of the Byzantine imperial army left the local people with little choice but to capitulate and agree to the comparatively easy terms the Arabs were offering. Even at Amida (Diyarbakr), whose mighty city walls are one of the great glories of ancient and medieval military architecture, there seems to have been no resistance, and the same was true of the great castle the Byzantines had built in the sixth century at Dara to repel Persian attacks.
57
Edessa seems to have capitulated quickly on condition that the Christians could keep their cathedral but agreed not to build any new churches and not to aid the enemies of the Muslims. The city of Raqqa on the Euphrates also fell after a short resistance. The exact route of Iyād’s army as it toured the province accepting the surrender of smaller cities cannot be determined, but it seems that he may have finished by raiding along the ancient road that led to Armenia before halting at Bitlis. He then returned to Syria, where he died.
Syria had been conquered by Arab armies recruited in the Hijaz. This did not, however, result in a vast influx of new immigrants from Arabia. The Quraysh and their allies in the Muslim elite knew Syria well and they wanted to keep control over its resources. They did not want to share it with a mass of impoverished Bedouin. These were encouraged to move to Iraq instead. In British army parlance it could be said that Syria was for the officers, Iraq for the other ranks. They did not found new Muslim towns as later happened in Iraq and Egypt. All the towns that were important under Muslim rule had been important in Roman times (though some cities, such as Scythopolis, which had been important in Roman times, declined and virtually disappeared in the Islamic period). At one stage there seems to have been a project to establish a new town at Jābiya in the Golan, the old summer camping ground of the Ghassānids. It was here that the caliph Umar had come to meet the leaders of the victorious armies on his visit to Syria. But Jābiya remained just that, a summer camping ground: no mosque was built there, no government palace and no plots were allotted to different tribes. Instead the Muslims seem to have preferred to settle in established towns. We have seen how houses in Homs were made available for them. At Chalkis and Aleppo what were effectively Bedouin suburbs were established outside the walls of the old cities.
In part this was possible because sections of the Byzantine elite had fled to Constantinople or further west, leaving space in the towns. After the fall of Damascus, many people left the city to join Heraclius
58
and prominent Muslims were able to take up residence: Amr b. al-Ās owned several residences in Damascus and estates in Palestine. The treaty Umar made with the citizens of Jerusalem assumed that elements of the Byzantines would leave, either voluntarily or under coercion. It also looks as if many areas of Syria had been depopulated by plague and warfare and the Muslim conquerors had driven out many of the Byzantine inhabitants of the coastal cities.
59
It was hard to find men to garrison the port cities of the Mediterranean coast. Mu
c
āwiya was obliged to settle Tripoli with Jews, in the absence of any Muslims who could be persuaded to take up residence there. Muslims were also settled in villages around Tiberias and were sometimes given deserted agricultural land on condition that they brought it under cultivation. There is no evidence of great tribal migrations of the sort that are well attested in Iraq.
58
and prominent Muslims were able to take up residence: Amr b. al-Ās owned several residences in Damascus and estates in Palestine. The treaty Umar made with the citizens of Jerusalem assumed that elements of the Byzantines would leave, either voluntarily or under coercion. It also looks as if many areas of Syria had been depopulated by plague and warfare and the Muslim conquerors had driven out many of the Byzantine inhabitants of the coastal cities.
59
It was hard to find men to garrison the port cities of the Mediterranean coast. Mu
c
āwiya was obliged to settle Tripoli with Jews, in the absence of any Muslims who could be persuaded to take up residence there. Muslims were also settled in villages around Tiberias and were sometimes given deserted agricultural land on condition that they brought it under cultivation. There is no evidence of great tribal migrations of the sort that are well attested in Iraq.
Something of the day-to-day working of the relationship between the Arab tribes and the inhabitants of the towns and villages can be seen from a group of papyri found in the little town of Nessana in the Negev.
60
Some of these are bilingual, Greek and Arabic, demand notes ordering the Christian people of the town to provide the Bedouin in the area with supplies of wheat and olive oil and, in some cases, cash. The payments seem to have been made directly to the tribal chiefs and there was no complicated bureaucracy involved. How the local people collected the supplies and divided up the burden seems to have been up to them. The documents, which date from 674-5, a generation after the conquest, show how simple and, in a way, informal the Arab occupation could be.
60
Some of these are bilingual, Greek and Arabic, demand notes ordering the Christian people of the town to provide the Bedouin in the area with supplies of wheat and olive oil and, in some cases, cash. The payments seem to have been made directly to the tribal chiefs and there was no complicated bureaucracy involved. How the local people collected the supplies and divided up the burden seems to have been up to them. The documents, which date from 674-5, a generation after the conquest, show how simple and, in a way, informal the Arab occupation could be.
The pattern of Arab settlement in Syria had another consequence. In Iraq and Egypt the Muslim settlers in the towns were directly dependent on the state for their pensions, often their sole means of livelihood. In Syria, by contrast, many of the new elite had urban or rural properties off which they could live. Within a generation members of the Muslim elite in Syria were building themselves luxurious and imposing residences in the countryside, something, again, which seems to have been virtually unknown in Iraq or Egypt.
So, if there was no massive influx of Arabs sweeping away Graeco-Roman civilization, what actually changed in Syria as a result of the Muslim conquests? At the most obvious level, the government and administration were controlled at the top by Arabic-speaking Muslims, but at second glance even this change was not as dramatic as it might initially appear. For the first half-century, the bureaucracy continued to use Greek and was staffed in large measure by local Christians. There was a new elite religion, but it seems to have made little impact on the built environment. In Iraq, in the new towns of Kūfa and Basra, the mosque lay at the heart of the Muslim city; in Damascus at the same time the Muslims had to make do with a half-share of the cathedral church in the city centre.
There is little evidence, either, for the bedouinization of the countryside. The impression that the Arab conquests resulted in hordes of nomads coming in and ravaging the settled lands seems to have been generally untrue, although there may have been incidents of violence and destruction in the course of the invasions. In those fragile, marginal areas such as the Syrian steppe east of Homs, Transjordan and the Negev in southern Israel, areas where the boundaries between cultivated lands and the pastures of the nomads shifted according to political and cultural changes, the evidence suggests that the first century of Muslim rule saw an expansion of settled agriculture. Not until after 750, when the Syria-based Umayyads were overthrown by the Iraq-based Abbasids, did the boundaries of settlement retreat and the Bedouin areas expand.
The Muslim conquest of Syria did, however, have profound effects on the long-term history of the area. It brought to an end almost a thousand years of rule by Greek speakers with contacts in the Mediterranean world. From this point on, the most important links were not with Rome or Constantinople but with Mecca and Medina, and later with Baghdad and Cairo. The emergence of Islam as the dominant religion and Arabic as the near-universal language could not have occurred without the conquest. These deep changes in language and culture may have taken some time but they could not have occurred without the military conquests of the 630s.
3
THE CONQUEST OF IRAQ
At last you see a thin, hard, dark line on the horizon. It takes twenty days’ riding across the desert from the Muslim headquarters at Medina, days of scorching heat and fierce winds, painfully cold nights, huddled under a cloak or tramping on under the stars. This desert is not the sand dunes and palm-fringed oases of popular imagination, but a hard, bitter landscape of stones and gravel, low undulating hills and occasional gnarled and thorny trees. Then comes the longed-for line on the horizon which shows that the end of the journey is in sight. Over the next day or two, the line broadens out, the weary traveller can begin to pick out the trees and perhaps the houses of the settled lands. For this is the Sawād, the Black Lands of the alluvial plains of central Iraq. It is flat as far as the eye can see, a land of palm trees and grain fields made fertile by the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates. For centuries this had been one of the richest and most productive areas on earth.
For 400 years before the Muslim conquest, Iraq had been an integral part of the Sasanian Empire.
1
Sasanian was the name of the dynasty that had revived and renewed the empire of Iran in the third century AD. Along with the Byzantine Empire, the Sasanian was one of the great powers of the ancient world, but the states had very different imperial styles. At the risk of gross oversimplication, it could be argued that while the Byzantine Empire was controlled by a bureaucracy and a standing army, the Sasanian kingdom was ruled by a warrior aristocracy. When the emperor Justinian had himself and his consort Theodora portrayed in mosaic on the walls of a church in Ravenna, they were on foot, calm, elegant, dressed entirely in civilian clothes. When the Sasanian monarch Chosroes II had himself portrayed in stone carving in the grotto at Tāqi Bustān it was as a man of action, a mighty hunter, mounted on a horse in full armour or showing his skills as an archer.
1
Sasanian was the name of the dynasty that had revived and renewed the empire of Iran in the third century AD. Along with the Byzantine Empire, the Sasanian was one of the great powers of the ancient world, but the states had very different imperial styles. At the risk of gross oversimplication, it could be argued that while the Byzantine Empire was controlled by a bureaucracy and a standing army, the Sasanian kingdom was ruled by a warrior aristocracy. When the emperor Justinian had himself and his consort Theodora portrayed in mosaic on the walls of a church in Ravenna, they were on foot, calm, elegant, dressed entirely in civilian clothes. When the Sasanian monarch Chosroes II had himself portrayed in stone carving in the grotto at Tāqi Bustān it was as a man of action, a mighty hunter, mounted on a horse in full armour or showing his skills as an archer.
The Sasanian monarch ruled as King of Kings,
Shhnshh
, reflect ing the fact that the empire boasted a number of aristocratic families almost as ancient and famous as the Sasanians themselves. Their empire included all of modern Iran, Iraq to the west and much of Afghanistan and Turkmenistan to the east. The kings had a capital in the plains of Iraq at Ctesiphon, just south-east of modern Baghdad, but they seem to have spent much of their time on the move between one country estate and another, up and down the roads that led through the Zagros mountains from the plains of Mesopotamia to the highlands of Iran.
Shhnshh
, reflect ing the fact that the empire boasted a number of aristocratic families almost as ancient and famous as the Sasanians themselves. Their empire included all of modern Iran, Iraq to the west and much of Afghanistan and Turkmenistan to the east. The kings had a capital in the plains of Iraq at Ctesiphon, just south-east of modern Baghdad, but they seem to have spent much of their time on the move between one country estate and another, up and down the roads that led through the Zagros mountains from the plains of Mesopotamia to the highlands of Iran.
Whereas the upper classes of the Byzantine Empire tended to live in cities, in the Persian Empire they were based more in their country estates and palaces. The towns, too, seem to have looked very different from the cities of the Byzantine world. To begin with they were mostly built of mud brick or rubble masonry, they rarely had regular street plans and there had never been town councils to spend money on embellishing them. The typical urban settlement in Sasanian Iraq and Iran was a country town, possibly with a fortress and a walled city centre, known as the
shhristn
, serving as marketplace and manu facturing centre but devoid of any pretensions to civic greatness or self-government.
shhristn
, serving as marketplace and manu facturing centre but devoid of any pretensions to civic greatness or self-government.
The Byzantine Empire was overwhelmingly Christian in religion, whereas the state religion of the Sasanian Empire was Zoroastriansim.
2
Zoroastrians believed that there were two great powers struggling to dominate the world, a good god called Ohrmazd and a wicked one called Ahriman. The worship was centred on fire-temples, for fire was believed to be a sacred element which should be kept pure and not contaminated. The fire-temples were tended by a caste of priests known as magi: it is possible that the three wise men who came to visit the infant Christ were Zoroastrian priests. The magi were supported by the Sasanian shahs and the fire-temples were granted extensive landed estates for their maintenance. Whereas in Byzantine Christianity the main churches were in the centres of population and were designed to accommodate large congregations who gathered to join in worship, the most important fire-temples seem to have been found in remote rural locations, and the small domed chambers that sheltered the sacred fires were certainly not designed to welcome large numbers of worshippers. The impression is of an elite-established religion, secure in its wealth and hierarchical structure but with little popular appeal. There were no Zoroastrian hermits to compare with the heroic ascetics of the Christian world and, as far as we know, no great Zoroastrian preachers whose words could move men to intense and passionate devotion. This was especially true in Iraq, where there were large Christian and Jewish populations. There were no major fire-temples in Iraq and it seems that the faith was confined to Persian administrators and soldiers.
2
Zoroastrians believed that there were two great powers struggling to dominate the world, a good god called Ohrmazd and a wicked one called Ahriman. The worship was centred on fire-temples, for fire was believed to be a sacred element which should be kept pure and not contaminated. The fire-temples were tended by a caste of priests known as magi: it is possible that the three wise men who came to visit the infant Christ were Zoroastrian priests. The magi were supported by the Sasanian shahs and the fire-temples were granted extensive landed estates for their maintenance. Whereas in Byzantine Christianity the main churches were in the centres of population and were designed to accommodate large congregations who gathered to join in worship, the most important fire-temples seem to have been found in remote rural locations, and the small domed chambers that sheltered the sacred fires were certainly not designed to welcome large numbers of worshippers. The impression is of an elite-established religion, secure in its wealth and hierarchical structure but with little popular appeal. There were no Zoroastrian hermits to compare with the heroic ascetics of the Christian world and, as far as we know, no great Zoroastrian preachers whose words could move men to intense and passionate devotion. This was especially true in Iraq, where there were large Christian and Jewish populations. There were no major fire-temples in Iraq and it seems that the faith was confined to Persian administrators and soldiers.
Christianity had spread far in the Sasanian Empire. Iraq, the wealthiest and most populous part of the empire, was probably largely Christian, though there was a significant Jewish population as well.
3
Most of the Christians belonged to the Nestorian, eastern Syrian church, which was regarded as heretical by the Byzantine authorities. This had some benefits for the churches under Sasanian rule because it meant that they were not tainted by connection with the Byzantine Empire. The fact remained, though, that a large proportion of the population of the Persian Empire did not share the religion of the ruling Persian aristocracy and that there could be no common bond against the claims of Islam.
3
Most of the Christians belonged to the Nestorian, eastern Syrian church, which was regarded as heretical by the Byzantine authorities. This had some benefits for the churches under Sasanian rule because it meant that they were not tainted by connection with the Byzantine Empire. The fact remained, though, that a large proportion of the population of the Persian Empire did not share the religion of the ruling Persian aristocracy and that there could be no common bond against the claims of Islam.
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