Conquest of Syria: 634–641 The province of Syria was the first to be wrested from Byzantine control. Arab-Muslim raids that followed the
Ridda Wars prompted the Byzantines to send a major expedition into southern
Palestine, which was defeated by the Arab forces under command of
Khalid ibn al-Walid at the
Battle of Ajnadayn in 634. Ibn al-Walid had converted to Islam around 627, becoming one of Muhammad's most successful generals. Ibn al-Walid had been fighting in Iraq against the Sasanians when he led his force on a trek across the deserts to Syria to attack the Byzantines from the rear. In the
Battle of the Mud fought at or near
Pella (Fahl) and nearby
Scythopolis (Beisan), both in the
Jordan Valley, in December 634 or January 635, the Arabs scored another victory. After a
siege of six months the Arabs took Damascus, but Emperor Heraclius later retook it. At the
battle of Yarmuk (636), the Arabs were victorious, defeating Heraclius. Ibn al-Walid appears to have been the "real military leader" at Yarmuk "under the nominal command of others". Syria was ordered to be abandoned to the Muslims with Heraclius reportedly saying: "Peace be with you Syria; what a beautiful land you will be for your enemy". On the heels of their victory, the Arab armies took
Damascus again in 636, with
Baalbek,
Homs, and
Hama to follow soon afterwards. At the same time, the Byzantines began a policy of launching raids via sea on the coast of the caliphate with the aim of forcing the Muslims to keep at least some of their forces to defend their coastlines, thus limiting the number of troops available for an invasion of Anatolia. The majority of the Byzantine forces in Egypt were locally raised
Coptic forces, intended to serve more as a police force; since the vast majority of Egyptians lived in the Nile River valley, surrounded on both the eastern and western sides by desert, Egypt was felt to be a relatively secure province. In December 639, Amr entered the Sinai with a large force and took
Pelusium, on the edge of the Nile River valley, and then defeated a Byzantine counter-attack at
Bibays. Contrary to expectations, the Arabs did not head for
Alexandria, the capital of Egypt, but instead for a major fortress known as
Babylon located at what is now Cairo. Amr was planning to divide the Nile River valley in two. The Arab forces won a major victory at the
Battle of Heliopolis in 640, but they found it difficult to advance further because major cities in the
Nile Delta were protected by water and because Amr lacked the
machinery to break down city fortifications. The Arabs laid siege to Babylon, and its starving garrison surrendered on 9 April 641. Nevertheless, the province was scarcely urbanized and the defenders lost hope of receiving reinforcements from
Constantinople when the emperor
Heraclius died in 641. Afterwards, the Arabs turned north into the Nile Delta and laid siege to Alexandria. The last major center to fall into Arab hands was Alexandria, which capitulated in September 642. According to
Hugh Kennedy, "Of all the early Muslim conquests, that of Egypt was the swiftest and most complete. [...] Seldom in history can so massive a political change have happened so swiftly and been so long lasting." In 644, the Arabs suffered a major defeat by the Caspian Sea when an invading Muslim army was almost wiped out by the cavalry of the
Khazar Khanate, and, seeing a chance to take back Egypt, the Byzantines launched an amphibious attack which took back Alexandria for a short period of time. Though most of Egypt is desert, the Nile Delta has some of the most productive and fertile farmland in the entire world, which had made Egypt the "granary" of the Byzantine empire. Control of Egypt meant that the caliphate could weather droughts without the fear of famine, laying the basis for the future prosperity of the caliphate.
Arab–Byzantine naval warfare The Byzantine Empire had traditionally dominated the Mediterranean and the Black Sea with major naval bases at
Constantinople,
Acre, Alexandria and
Carthage. In 652, the Arabs won their first victory at sea off Alexandria, which was followed by the temporary Muslim conquest of
Cyprus. As Yemen had been a center of maritime trade, Yemeni sailors were brought to Alexandria to start building an Islamic fleet for the Mediterranean. The Muslim fleet was based in Alexandria and used Acre,
Tyre and
Beirut as its forward bases. The core of the fleet's sailors were Yemeni, but the shipwrights who built the ships were Iranian and Iraqi. In the
Battle of the Masts off
Cape Chelidonia in Anatolia in 655, the Muslims defeated the Byzantine fleet in a series of boarding actions. As a result, the Byzantines began a major expansion of their navy, which was matched by the Arabs, leading to a naval arms race. From the early 8th century onward, the Muslim fleet would launch annual raids on the coastline on the Byzantine empire in Anatolia and Greece. As part of the arms race, both sides sought new technology to improve their warships. The Muslim warships had a larger
forecastle, which was used to mount a stone-throwing engine. The Byzantines invented
Greek fire, an incendiary weapon that led the Muslims to cover their ships with water-soaked cotton. A major problem for the Muslim fleet was the shortage of timber, which led the Muslims to seek qualitative instead of quantitative superiority by building bigger warships. To save money, the Muslim shipwrights switched from the hull-first method of building ships to the frame-first method.
Conquest of Mesopotamia and Persia: 633–651 After an Arab incursion into Sasanian territories, the
shah Yazdgerd III, who had just ascended the Persian throne, raised an army to resist the conquerors, although many
marzbans refused to help. The Persians suffered a devastating defeat at the
Battle of al-Qadisiyyah in 636. Abolishing the Lakhmid Arab buffer state had forced the Persians to take over the desert defense themselves, leaving them overextended. Despite the complete Muslim triumph over Sasanid Iran as compared to the only partial defeat of the Byzantine Empire, the Muslims borrowed far more from the vanished Sassanian state than they ever did from the Byzantines. However, for the Persians the defeat remained bitter. Some 400 years later, the Persian poet
Ferdowsi lets Yazdgerd III speak in his popular poem
Shahnameh (
Book of Kings): Damn this world, damn this time, damn this fate, That uncivilized Arabs have come to Make me a Muslim Where are your valiant warriors and priests Where are your hunting parties and your feats? Where is that warlike mien and where are those Great armies that destroyed our county's foes? Count Iran as a ruin, as the lair Of lions and leopards. Look now and despair
First Fitna: Fall of the Rashidun Caliphate Right from the start of the caliphate, it was realized that there was a need to write down the Quran, which had been memorized by his followers or written on parchment paper, before they all died. Most people in Arabia were illiterate, and the Arabs had a strong culture of remembering history orally. Disputes had emerged over which version of the Quran was the correct one due to differing dialects of Arab tribes each of whom had their own script however by 644 different versions of the Quran were accepted in
Damascus,
Basra,
Hims, and
Kufa. During this time, the first period of Muslim conquests stopped, as the armies of Islam turned against one another. The
fitna also marked the beginning of the split between
Shia Muslims who supported Ali, and
Sunni Muslims who opposed him. Mu'awiya followed the conquest of Iran by invading Central Asia and trying to finish off the Byzantine Empire by taking Constantinople. In 670, a Muslim fleet seized
Rhodes and then laid siege to
Constantinople. Contemporary Christian writers conceived them as God's punishment visited on their fellow Christians for their sins. Early Muslim historians viewed them as a reflection of the religious zeal of the conquerors and evidence of divine favor. The theory that the conquests are explainable as an Arab migration triggered by economic pressures enjoyed popularity early in the 20th century but has largely fallen out of favor among historians, especially those who distinguish the migration from the conquests that preceded and enabled it. There are indications that the conquests started as initially disorganized pillaging raids launched partly by non-Muslim Arab tribes in the aftermath of the Ridda Wars and were soon extended into a war of conquest by the
Rashidun caliphs, although other scholars argue that the conquests were a planned military venture already underway during Muhammad's lifetime.
Fred Donner writes that the advent of Islam "revolutionized both the ideological bases and the political structures of the Arabian society, giving rise for the first time to a state capable of an expansionist movement." According to Chase F. Robinson, it is likely that Muslim forces were often outnumbered, but unlike their opponents, they were fast, well coordinated and highly motivated. Another key reason was the weakness of the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires, caused by the wars they had waged against each other in the preceding decades with alternating success. It was aggravated by a
plague that had struck densely populated areas and impeded conscription of new imperial troops, while the Arab armies could draw recruits from nomadic populations. Additionally, the Byzantine persecution of Christians opposed to the
Chalcedonian creed in Syria and Egypt alienated elements of those communities and made them more open to accommodation with the Arabs once it became clear that the latter would let them practice their faith undisturbed as long as they paid tribute. The conquests were further secured by the subsequent large-scale migration of Arabian peoples into the conquered lands. Similarly, the difficult terrain of Anatolia made it difficult for the Byzantines to mount a large-scale attack to recover the lost lands, and their offensive action was largely limited to organizing guerrilla operations against the Arabs in the Levant. the first large-scale Arab campaign in the Indus valley occurred when the general
Muhammad bin Qasim invaded
Sindh in 711 after a coastal march through Makran. Three years later the Arabs controlled all of the lower
Indus valley. Arab incursions southward from Sindh were repulsed by the armies of
Gurjara and
Chalukya kingdoms, and further Islamic expansion was checked by the
Rashtrakuta dynasty, which gained control of the region shortly after. Byzantine rule in northwest Africa at the time was largely confined to the coastal plains, while
Berber kingdoms and tribes controlled the rest. In 670 Arabs founded the settlement of
Qayrawan, which gave them a forward base for further expansion. The Berber king
Kusayla and an enigmatic leader referred to as
Kahina (prophetess or priestess) seem to have mounted effective, if short-lived resistance to Muslim rule at the end of the 7th century, but the sources do not give a clear picture of these events. After the fall of Tangiers, many Berbers joined the Muslim army. After a series of defeats, the caliphate was finally able to crush the rebellion in 742, although local Berber dynasties continued to drift away from imperial control from that time on. After the Visigothic king of Spain
Wittiza died in 710, the kingdom experienced a period of political division. Taking advantage of the situation, the Muslim Berber commander,
Tariq ibn Ziyad, who was stationed in Tangiers at the time, crossed the
Strait of Gibraltar with an army of Arabs and Berbers in 711. In 712, another larger force of 18,000 from Morocco, led by Musa Ibn Nusayr, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to link up with Ziyad's force at
Talavera. By 713 Iberia was almost entirely under Muslim control. In 674, a Muslim force led by Ubaidullah Ibn Zayyad attacked Bukhara, the capital of
Sogdia, which ended with the Sogdians agreeing to recognize the Umayadd caliph Mu'awiaya as their overlord and to pay tribute. The expansion lost its momentum when Qutayba was killed during an army mutiny and the Arabs were placed on the defensive by an alliance of
Sogdian and
Türgesh forces with support from
Tang China.
Expeditions into Afghanistan Medieveal Islamic scholars divided the area of modern-day Afghanistan into two regions: the provinces of Khorasan and
Sistan. Khorasan was the eastern
satrapy of the Sasanian Empire, containing
Balkh and
Herat. Sistan included
Ghazna,
Zarang,
Bost,
Qandahar (also called
al-Rukhkhaj or
Zamindawar),
Kabul,
Kabulistan and
Zabulistan. Before Muslim rule, the regions of Balkh (
Bactria or
Tokharistan), Herat and Sistan were under Sasanian rule. Further south in the Balkh region, in
Bamiyan, indication of Sasanian authority diminishes, with a local dynasty apparently ruling from
late antiquity, probably
Hephthalites subject to the
Yabghu of the
Western Turkic Khaganate. While Herat was controlled by the Sasanians, its hinterlands were controlled by northern Hepthalites who continued to rule the
Ghurid mountains and river valleys well into the Islamic era. Sistan was under Sasanian administration, but Qandahar remained out of Arab hands. Kabul and Zabulistan housed Indic religions, with the
Zunbils and
Kabul Shahis (for the most part) offering stiff resistance to Muslim rule for two centuries until the
Saffarid and
Ghaznavid conquests. The Umayyad Caliphate regularly claimed nominal overlordship over the Zunbils and Kabul Shahis, and in 711
Qutayba ibn Muslim managed to force them to pay tribute.
Other expeditions Cyprus, Armenia, and Georgia In 646 a Byzantine naval expedition was able to briefly recapture Alexandria. The same year
Mu'awiya, the governor of Syria and future founder of the
Umayyad dynasty, ordered construction of a fleet. In 639–640 Arab forces began to make advances into Armenia, which had been partitioned into a
Byzantine province and a
Sasanian province. There is considerable disagreement among ancient and modern historians about events of the following years, and nominal control of the region may have passed several times between Arabs and Byzantines. This period also saw a series of clashes with the
Khazar kingdom whose center of power was in the lower
Volga steppes, and which vied with the caliphate over control of the Caucasus.
Later sieges of Constantinople in
668–669 (674–678 according to other estimates) and
717–718 were thwarted with the help of the recently invented
Greek fire. In the east, although Arabs were able to establish control over most Sasanian-controlled areas of modern Afghanistan after the fall of Persia, the Kabul region resisted repeated attempts at invasion and would continue to do so until it was conquered by the Saffarids three centuries later.
End of the conquests By the time of the
Abbasid Revolution in the middle of the 8th century, Muslim armies had come against a combination of natural barriers and powerful states that impeded any further military progress. The wars produced diminishing returns in personal gains and fighters increasingly left the army for civilian occupations. The priorities of the rulers also shifted from conquest of new lands to administration of the acquired empire. Although the Abbasid era witnessed some new territorial gains, such as the conquests of
Sicily, the period of rapid centralized expansion would now give way to an era when further spread of Islam would be slow and accomplished through the efforts of local dynasties, missionaries, and traders. ==Aftermath==