Early Muslim Conquests

The causes

Muhammad had gathered the tribes of Arabia around Islam, and he died in 632. His successors, the caliphs, continued the expansion. The neighbouring Byzantine and Persian empires were exhausted by a long war that ended in 628, and their borders were poorly defended. The mobile, motivated Arab armies took advantage.

Both neighbouring empires were weakened. The Byzantines, in religious conflict with Christians in Syria and Egypt who rejected the decisions of the Council of Chalcedon, levied a heavy tax on provinces already strained. The Arab tribes, settled on the edges of Syria and Iraq, already served as go-betweens for both empires, like the Ghassanids for Byzantium and the Lakhmids for the Persians. After the death of Muhammad, part of the tribes rebelled; the first caliph, Abu Bakr, subdued them between 632 and 633 during the ridda wars. These battles gave the Arabs a united and hardened army, which then turned north and east.

The course of the war

The Byzantines were beaten at the Yarmouk in 636, and lost Syria and then Egypt (in 642). The Sasanian empire collapsed bit by bit: its last king died in 651. Jerusalem was taken around 637. Under the Umayyad dynasty, founded in Damascus in 661, the conquests continued towards North Africa: Kairouan was founded in 670 and Carthage fell in 698.

In 711, an army led by Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and destroyed the Visigothic kingdom of Spain, which was conquered within a few years. The Muslims crossed the Pyrenees, but the Frankish leader Charles Martel stopped them near Poitiers, in 732.

At Qadisiyya in Iraq, in 636, the Arabs defeated the Persian army, and then Ctesiphon, the Sasanian capital, fell in 637. King Yazdgerd III took refuge to the east, and a last Persian army was defeated at Nahavand in 642. The conquerors then faced revolts in the eastern provinces. The caliphs, for their part, sought to avoid plunder and installed garrisons in new towns, the amsars, such as Basra and Kufa, founded around 638. These towns became military and administrative centres that structured Arab rule in Iraq.

The Umayyads also tried to take Constantinople, by sea and by land, from 674 to 678, and again from 717 to 718. The city held out thanks to its walls and to Greek fire, an incendiary liquid hurled at ships. Further east, the Umayyad general Muhammad ibn Qasim entered the Indus valley from 711 and conquered Sind within a few years. These campaigns show that expansion now had two fronts, West and East, and that each depended on an increasingly distant logistics.

In 750, the Abbasid Revolution overthrew the Umayyads: a large part of the family was massacred, and a single prince, Abd al-Rahman, managed to flee as far as Spain, where he founded the Emirate of Cordoba in 756. The Abbasids established their capital at Baghdad, founded in 762. In 751, at the Battle of Talas in Central Asia, their troops clashed with the Chinese Tang army, and the Chinese advance westward stopped in that region. This episode was also a moment of rivalry between two powers competing for influence over the oases of Transoxiana.

The consequences

The Muslim empire stretched from the Iberian Peninsula to the Indus. Arabic gradually became the language of administration and culture, and Islam the religion of most inhabitants. The conquerors often let non-Muslim inhabitants keep their religion in exchange for a special tax. This empire, and its successors, played a major role in the history of science, trade and the arts.

Over the centuries, the caliphate fragmented: the Emirate of Cordoba, then the Fatimid Caliphate, founded in Cairo in 969, and other dynasties broke away from Baghdad. Historians still debate the conditions of the conquest and the pace of conversion. Conversion spread over several centuries, and most of the population of the Near East only became Muslim after many generations. The sources of the period, Byzantine, Syriac and Arabic, give different and often late accounts, which are read today with a critical eye. The very term "conquest" is debated, since several towns negotiated their submission.

Timeline

1. 632Death of Muhammad: the conquests begin
2. 636Victory of the Yarmouk over the Byzantines
3. 642Conquest of Egypt; collapse of Sasanian Persia
4. 711Tariq ibn Ziyad crosses the Strait of Gibraltar
5. 732Charles Martel stops the Muslims near Poitiers

Key figures

• Umar, second caliph, under whom the empire spread from Syria to Egypt
• Khalid ibn al-Walid, military leader, victor of several decisive battles
• Tariq ibn Ziyad, general who led the conquest of Spain in 711
• Charles Martel, Frankish leader, victor at Poitiers in 732