Read The Great Arab Conquests Online
Authors: Hugh Kennedy
The Great Arab Conquests (66 page)
The voices of the conquered are scattered and in many cases the impact of the Muslims is of secondary interest to the author. There are no discussions of the new religion of Islam and its doctrines. There is a general agreement on the destructive nature of the actual conquest but views are varied about the merits of Muslim government. The burden of Muslim taxation is a frequent theme. For the Christians of the Fertile Crescent, the coming of the Arabs, and their apparently inexplicable victory, must be the result of God’s wrath and the cause of that wrath was, above all, heresy. In general, the writers saw rival Christian sects and, of course, the Jews as the real enemy to be challenged and defeated. The Arabs, by contrast, could be tolerated and even manipulated to serve sectarian ends. No one even came near to proposing a Christian resistance movement or making concerted efforts to restore Christian rule. These attitudes were an important factor in explaining how the Muslims achieved and maintained their control. The Persian views show a very different reaction, the lament for the loss of old greatness and the old social order, the regrets, in fact, of a dispossessed ruling class. Overall, the most striking feature of these voices is the variety of responses to the coming of Islamic rule. Many people may have been dissatisfied with it but few turned their dissatisfation into active resistance. The fragmented nature of the response of the conquered was an important reason for the success of the Muslims, both in the initial conquest and in the consolidation of their rule.
12
CONCLUSION
By the year 750 the Muslim Empire had reached frontiers that were to remain more or less stable for the next 300 years. The only significant conquests made in this later period were in the Mediterranean, Sicily and Crete. In size and population it was broadly similar to the Roman Empire at its height in the eighth century; only Tang China could rival it. About half the territories ruled by the caliphs from Damascus had been ruled from Rome in the first three centuries AD. These included Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa and Spain. The Romans had, of course, also ruled France, Britain, Italy, the Balkans and Turkey and, while France, Italy and Turkey all suffered Muslim raids and some temporary, limited occupation, they never came under Arab rule. On the other hand, the caliphate included Iraq, Iran, Transoxania and Sind, areas that were always outside the frontiers of the Roman Empire.
The confines of the Roman Empire were defined with firm frontiers, the
limes
. Sometimes, as with Hadrian’s Wall in north Britain, these were really a continuous line of masonry with forts placed at regular intervals. On many other frontiers, in the Syrian and Jordanian deserts, for example, there was no fortified line but a network of small castles and fortifications to shelter garrisons and so police the desert margins. The early Muslim Empire did not develop
limes
in the same way. In many areas the frontier was only very hazily defined, in others it was lost in the desert. Only in a few districts, along the Anatolian frontier with the Byzantine Empire, for example, or the places where Muslim and Christian outposts faced each other in the upper Ebro Valley in Spain, was there a fortified boundary that divided Muslims and non-Muslims.
limes
. Sometimes, as with Hadrian’s Wall in north Britain, these were really a continuous line of masonry with forts placed at regular intervals. On many other frontiers, in the Syrian and Jordanian deserts, for example, there was no fortified line but a network of small castles and fortifications to shelter garrisons and so police the desert margins. The early Muslim Empire did not develop
limes
in the same way. In many areas the frontier was only very hazily defined, in others it was lost in the desert. Only in a few districts, along the Anatolian frontier with the Byzantine Empire, for example, or the places where Muslim and Christian outposts faced each other in the upper Ebro Valley in Spain, was there a fortified boundary that divided Muslims and non-Muslims.
The Mediterranean separated the Muslims from many potential enemies to the north and west. In the two centuries after the initial conquests, the Mediterranean coasts of the Muslim world were almost completely immune from attack. Only occasionally did Byzantine fleets manage to raid ports in the Levant and Egypt and, while they might pillage and burn, they were never able to establish a permanent presence.
The northern frontiers of al-Andalus, Muslim Spain, lay along the foothills of the Pyrenees in the east and the Cantabrian mountains to the west, following the 1,000-metre contour line almost exactly. The Muslims were defended by a series of fortified towns - Huesca, Zaragoza, Tudela, Calatayud, Madrid, Talavera - often protected by Roman walls. In Portugal and the west of Spain there seems to have been a wide belt of no man’s land between the northern outposts of Islam and the small Christian kingdoms sheltered by the Cantabrian mountains, and further east in the Ebro Valley, Christian and Muslim outposts were only a few kilometres apart.
In North Africa, from Morocco in the far west to Egypt in the east, the frontier of the Muslim state lay along the northern fringes of the Sahara desert. In Egypt, too, the desert was the frontier. In the Nile Valley Muslim rule ended at Aswan. Here diplomacy with the Nubians secured the narrow and easily defended border. Around Arabia, along the Gulf and Indian Ocean shores of Iran, the sea coast formed the frontier and, despite occasional outbreaks of piracy, the Muslim world was never threatened from that direction.
In Sind the position was more complex. Muslim rule disappeared north of Multān but the frontier seems to have been comparatively peaceful; certainly there is no indication of major fortifications or the establishment of garrisons to defend the Muslim lands. The position in modern Afghanistan was, as ever, much more complex. The Muslims held a number of positions in the lowlands, to the north and south of the Hindu Kush. Bust, Herat, Balkh were all more or less frontier towns, but the unconquered people of the mountains were more an occasional nuisance than a serious challenge to Muslim rule.
In Transoxania the frontier was defined not so much by lines on the map as by points of control, the Muslims holding the cities and settled areas while the Turks roamed the deserts. In many areas the Muslims established
ribts
, fortresses inhabited and defended by
ghzis
, warriors who devoted themselves to the service of Islam.
ribts
, fortresses inhabited and defended by
ghzis
, warriors who devoted themselves to the service of Islam.
In the Caucasus, it was again the 1,000-metre contour line which marked the limits of Muslim control. They dominated the plains and river valleys as far as Tblisi in the heart of the mountains, but the snowy peaks of the high ranges prevented them from going further and the plains of what is now southern Russia remained beyond their power. Only at the eastern end of the Caucasus, where the mountains come down to the Caspian Sea, was there a fortified border. The great stone fortress now known as Derbent but called Bāb al-Abwāb (Gate of Gates) by the Arabs had been established by the Sasanians to guard the border, and it was taken over by the Muslims, an Arab garrison being established there at a very early date. Beyond the gate lay the steppe lands of southern Russia, dominated by a Turkic people, the Khazars, who periodically made raids into the Muslim areas to the south.
The frontier with the Byzantine Empire in south-eastern Anatolia was the most heavily fortified of all the borders of the Islamic world and it occupied a unique place in the Muslim consciousness.
1
By the year 700 this frontier was almost static. Again the Muslims controlled the lowlands while the mountains above 1,000 metres were in the hands of the Byzantines. The Byzantines, despite their defeat at the time of the first conquests, remained the enemy par excellence, the only power with whom the Muslims felt they competed on equal terms. Alone among the peoples who lived along their borders, the Byzantines had a highly developed state apparatus, a regular army, a state religion and an emperor who could correspond on equal terms with the caliphs. The Muslims knew that they were the possessors of the only true religion, but some of them at least also knew they had much to learn from the culture, philosophy and science of the Greeks.
1
By the year 700 this frontier was almost static. Again the Muslims controlled the lowlands while the mountains above 1,000 metres were in the hands of the Byzantines. The Byzantines, despite their defeat at the time of the first conquests, remained the enemy par excellence, the only power with whom the Muslims felt they competed on equal terms. Alone among the peoples who lived along their borders, the Byzantines had a highly developed state apparatus, a regular army, a state religion and an emperor who could correspond on equal terms with the caliphs. The Muslims knew that they were the possessors of the only true religion, but some of them at least also knew they had much to learn from the culture, philosophy and science of the Greeks.
In the years immediately after the conquest of Syria, and the Jazira, the Muslim provinces that bordered on the Byzantine Empire, the frontier was fluid and marked more by a no man’s land than by a firm line. The low-lying and potentially rich area of Cilicia, at the north-eastern corner of the Mediterranean, was effectively deserted. Gradually, during the eighth century, the Muslims established frontier fortresses, defended by men paid from government funds. There was no wall but a series of fortified towns from Tarsus in the west to Malatya in the east, in which Muslim garrisons were established. These Muslim outposts were always in the plains or river valleys: the mountains of the Taurus and anti-Taurus belonged to the Byzantines. It was from these fortresses that the Muslims launched their summer, and occasionally winter, raids into Byzantine territory. Often these amounted to little more than cattle rustling, but sometimes there were major campaigns. These were the only wars in which the caliphs and their heirs actively participated, and many of the campaigns had an almost ritual character, the caliph leading the Muslims against their hereditary enemies.
In general, the Muslim Empire did not suffer the external pressures that threatened the Roman Empire on the Rhine, Danube and Euphrates frontiers. Christians from the north of Spain, Khazars from the plains of southern Russia and Turks in Transoxania might make occasional raids into Muslim territory, but their impact was limited and could be shrugged off by the inhabitants of Baghdad and Cairo. The empire established by the great Arab conquests was economically self-sufficient and militarily self-confident. In the ninth and tenth centuries, this Muslim society survived the collapse of central government in a way in which the western Roman Empire, of the fifth century, threatened by barbarian invaders, had been unable to do.
Now is the time to return to the question asked by John bar Penkāyē with which this book began: why were the Arab conquests so swift and far reaching and why did they turn out to be so permanent?
Let us start off by looking at the lands they conquered to see how and in what ways they may have been vulnerable. There were long-term factors at work, difficult to pinpoint or quantify, but certainly important. Demographic decline may have been significant here. Of course, we have few useful figures for population in this period, but the impression given by a variety of sources is that many of the areas conquered had suffered from a declining population in the century after the first appearance of the bubonic plague in the Mediterranean world in 540, and that this loss of population was most severe in cities and villages. The Arab armies sometimes seem to have moved through an empty landscape. The rapid conquest of vast areas of Iran and the Iberian peninsula, with minimal resistance from the people, suggests this. The fact that so much of the booty taken in war was in the form of human captives again suggests that people were at a premium. When the Persians conquered Antioch in 540 or Apamea in 573, they deported large numbers of citizens to settle new or expanding towns in the Sasanian Empire, a policy that makes sense only if there is a population shortage. The large numbers of slaves taken in North Africa and imported to the Middle East show that people were a valuable and perhaps scarce resource. Towns of great antiquity and fame were apparently taken without any serious resistance. The fate of three of the most important cities of the late Roman world illustrates this clearly. Antioch surrendered with minimum resistance, probably in 636; Carthage seems to have been largely uninhabited when the Muslims eventually occupied it in 698; Toledo, despite its position as the Visigothic capital and its superb natural fortifications, failed to delay the Muslim armies for any length of time in 712. The evidence of demographic decline is scattered and often indirect, but it does, in the end, seem convincing. This decline did not, of course, cause the Arab conquests, but it may have meant that resistance was less fierce, that the way of the Arab armies was not barred by numerous populous cities whose inhabitants manned the walls, determined to resist. It was perhaps only in Transoxania that we find this sort of spirited defence mounted by a highly motivated local population.
Along with these long-term factors, there were the short-term effects of war and the dislocation it caused. There had been many conflicts between the Roman and Iranian empires since Crassus and his forces were defeated by the Parthians in 53 BC, but the war that broke out after the assassination of Emperor Maurice in 602 was the most far reaching and destructive. The effects of the Persian sweep through the lands of the Byzantine Empire affected society at many levels. It destroyed Byzantine imperial control over the lands of the Near East, it severed the links with Constantinople; governors were no longer appointed, armies were no longer dispatched and taxes were no longer paid. The Chalcedonian Orthodox Church lost its imperial patronage and became one Christian sect among many others. Many churchmen and other members of the elite fled to the comparative safety of North Africa or Italy. Archaeological work has suggested that, in Anatolia at least, the advance of the Persian armies did enormous damage to urban life and that people abandoned the spacious cities of the plains to take refuge in mountain-top fortresses.
2
The restoration of Byzantine imperial control came only a year or two before the Arab armies marched from Medina, and in many areas there may have been no Byzantine military and political structures in place at all.
2
The restoration of Byzantine imperial control came only a year or two before the Arab armies marched from Medina, and in many areas there may have been no Byzantine military and political structures in place at all.
A distinguishing feature of this ‘last great war of antiquity’ was that it devastated both of the great empires with even-handed brutality. Heraclius’s invasion of the Persian Empire was as destructive as the Persian invasions of the Byzantine Empire had been; the great fire-temple at Shiz, where the Sasanian shahs had been inaugurated, was destroyed and the royal palace at Dastgard sacked. More crucially, the great king Chosroes II (591-628) was killed by his own generals. The Sasanian Empire, unlike the Byzantine, was formally a dynastic state; Heraclius’s assault undermined the prestige of the dynasty and the confidence of the Persian ruling elite. Infighting among the members of the royal family caused a period of great instability. By the time that Yazdgard III (632-51) was widely accepted as shāh, the Arab armies were already attacking the Iraqi frontier.
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