dexter
SENIOR MEMBER
- Joined
- Apr 17, 2009
- Messages
- 6,111
- Reaction score
- 25
- Country
- Location
After the end of the Ridda Wars in 633 meant that caliphate had already grown to encompass all of the Arabian peninsula, so in April, with nowhere to go but north, then-Caliph Abu Bakr sent an army under his most capable general, Khalid b. al-Walid (d. 642), to conquer Iraq.
Khalid had dramatic success, defeating the Persians in a series of battles that, by the end of the year, left him and his forces in control of virtually every part of Iraq outside of the Persian capital, Ctesiphon, just southeast of where Baghdad is today. After the Battle of Firaz, in December, Abu Bakr ordered Khalid to go to Syria to assume command of the much less successful invasion of that Byzantine province, so the Persians were off the hook for a short time. In fact, as 634 wore on, the Persians began to take back some of their lost territory and defeated the Arabs in a handful of battles–though only one, the Battle of the Bridge in November, near Kufa, could be called a major victory.
In 635, Yazdegerd and the Byzantine Emperor Heraclius hatched a scheme to put down this upstart Arab incursion once and for all: a union of the two great empires sealed with a marriage between Yazdegerd and Heraclius’s daughter (which would, conveniently for the Byzantines, leave Heraclius in the dominant position as Yazdegerd’s father in-law). Both emperors planned to amass large armies to attack the Arabs simultaneously in both Syria and Iraq.
The Byzantine Emperor, Heraclius (d. 641), alarmed at several smaller Arab successes in Syria (including the capture of Damascus in 634), amassed a large army under the command of an Armenien general named Vahan, to try to pick off several much smaller, dispersed Arab forces in the Levant one by one. Unfortunately for Heraclius, the Arabs were able to find out about his counterattack and adjust their disposition in response. Those dispersed armies were all recalled to join the main Arab army in the region at Jabiyah, under the nominal overall command of a man named Abu Ubaydah b. al-Jarrar.
Heraclius launched his offensive in May 636, before Yazdegerd was ready to move and after multiple skrimishes, they were defeated by the Muslim army under Khalid b. al-Walid.
After Yarmouk, the Byzantines effectively holed themselves up in Anatolia and went on the defensive. It worked, too, more or less; a couple of Arab sieges of Constantinople notwithstanding, no Muslim army was able to take and permanently hold territory in Anatolia until the Seljuk Turks won the Battle of Manzikert in 1071. But Yarmouk meant that the rest of the empire, from Syria to Egypt to the rest of North Africa, would pretty quickly be lost to the Arab conquerors.
The battle of Yarmouk largely defined the fate of Eastern Mediterranean, but to the East, Caliphate had another global power to contend with - the Sassanid Empire. Two empires fought each other for more than 20 years, across dozens of battles with the campaign of the Muslim general Khalid ibn al-Walid in 633 and the battle of al-Qadissiyah that took place in 636 being the most crucial among them.
Whatever finally caused the Persian army to break, it did break, and the way was open for the Arabs to take the last two prizes left in Persian Iraq. First was the Sawad, the rich alluvial plain between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in southern Iraq, which, along with the Nile Valley, became the breadbasket of the caliphate, at least for a couple of centuries until over-farming and over-irrigation began to ruin its soil. Second was Ctesiphon, which fell to the Arabs in March 637. The Persian Empire wasn’t finished yet, but like Carthage after the Second Punic War, it was all over but the shouting. Umar decided to pause the conquests in order to consolidate control over the territories that the Arabs had just won, but when Yazdegerd attempted to reconquer Iraq in 642 (his army was quickly defeated at the Battle of Nahavand), that helped spur a new round of Arab expansion.
Truth be told, the Sasanians were already in bad shape before Qadisiyah — that might help explain why Yarmouk only shrunk the Byzantine Empire, while Qadisiyah ended the Persian Empire.
Last edited:
