Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

In short, Arabian religion was diverse, shifting, and heavily localized, and this was only natural. Arabian society was essentially tribal, and despite the nearness of several regional superpowers—Byzantium and Zoroastrian Persia, as well as Christian Ethiopia—none had ever been able to bring the Arabs under their command for long enough to sponsor or enforce the spread of a settled “state” faith. The best the Byzantines and Persians had been able to do was to enlist two northern Arabian tribal groups, the Lakhmids and Ghassanids, into their proxy wars. This was clientelism, not colonialism. In Arabia, change was destined to come from within.

Yet greatness did not arrive until relatively late in Muhammad’s life. He was working as a merchant when, at around the age of forty (ca. 609–10), he began to experience dreams, visions, and visitations from celestial beings. The turning point came while he was in a cave in Mount Hira, on the outskirts of Mecca, a place he liked to go now and then to meditate and reflect. One day he was visited there by the angel Gabriel, who addressed him directly and commanded him to recite. Muhammad came to understand he had been chosen as Allah’s prophet and messenger—the last such in a long line that stretched back through Jesus, Solomon, David, Abraham, Noah, and Moses all the way to the first man, Adam. This was big news, but he overcame his initial terror and confusion. His next visitation took three years to arrive, but when it did, Muhammad began to receive the word of God regularly, sometimes in spoken form and sometimes as a ringing sound that had to be deciphered. The angel showed him ritual ablutions and the best way to pray to Allah. These were the basic rites of a new religion: Islam. Muhammad’s revelations, as he recited them in Arabic, were eventually collected as the Qur’an. Later on, fragments of the Prophet’s speech, along with oral memories of his opinions and actions, known as hadith, were compiled as the Sunna—which contributed to the formation of an Islamic legal code and moral framework.

Muhammad’s message—that all other gods and idols were to be rejected in favor of Allah alone—was hardly a promising commercial proposition in a city whose economy depended in large part on polytheistic pilgrim tourists.

In 622—the foundational year in Islamic history, and the date from which the Muslim calendar begins—Muhammad also left Mecca. He had been approached by tribal elders from Yathrib, who asked him to bring the community of Muslims en masse to their city, where they would be granted an honored place, and Muhammad would be tasked with settling long-running feuds among the pagan tribes and sizable Jewish population of the city.

He drafted a deal known as the Constitution of Medina that united the bickering factions there in a community, or umma, bonded by faith—faith above blood, faith above tribal loyalties, faith above everything. Before long he was the leader of the city and had begun to construct a spiritual and legal polity that was far more than a simple federation of tribal allies. It was, even in its emerging form, the first Islamic state. Within this state, political solidarity, monotheism, and religious obedience were one and the same. Islam informed everything—it was a complete way of life. This absolutism, which became increasingly pronounced during Islam’s early medieval history, would come to be its attraction, its strength, and its inherent menace to those who had not yet submitted to its teachings. When the Muslims arrived in Medina, they were in the habit of praying toward Jerusalem, but soon afterward Muhammad adjusted their sights, and his followers began the practice of praying in the direction of Mecca. They also took aim at Meccan trade, making a living by robbing caravan trains. This was a precarious way to get by, and in March 624 one large caravan raid turned into a full-scale battle—the battle of Badr—a handsome, against-the-odds victory in the face of vastly superior force. More battles followed. Not all went the Muslims’ way: they were defeated by the Meccans at the battle of Uhud in 625, and Medina was almost lost at the battle of the Trench in 627. But as the decade ...

and avenging the insults that had been heaped on him there at the start of his ministry. In 630, with ten thousand men at his back, he marched on his former hometown, swept into the city, smashed the idols in the Ka‘ba, and took political control. Having spent long enough resisting Muhammad, the Quraysh and the rest of the Meccans now converted to Islam.

The momentum and tactical acumen of his campaigning, the purity and clarity of his religious message, and the practical realization that the Muslims now controlled trade routes and essential marketplaces all over western Arabia were the chief factors that underpinned his success. When the Prophet died in 632, he appeared to have achieved the impossible: the Arabs were becoming united, spiritually and politically, in the umma.

After Muhammad died in 632 and was buried in Medina, the unity of the umma he left behind was severely tested. The Prophet’s old friend Abu Bakr claimed to be his successor, but there were a large number of Arab tribes who took the view that their loyalty had been to Muhammad as God’s messenger and was not to be transferred as a matter of course to his replacement. Other prophets, encouraged by Muhammad’s example, laid their own claims to have a special relationship with God, which naturally privileged their own tribal groups. As a result, a short but bloody conflict known as the Ridda Wars broke out, in which Abu Bakr was compelled—somewhat reluctantly—to send the armies of Islam against Arab apostates, to bring them forcibly back into the faith and fold.

Victory ensured the unity of the umma would last beyond the leadership and life span of the Prophet. It also set in motion an Islamic military machine with extraordinary momentum and self-belief, primed to spill out into the lands of the decadent empires to the north.*

They met with initial resistance from the representatives of the Byzantines and Persians. But the two empires were structurally and materially exhausted from long decades of war against one another. Emperors in Constantinople were so short of their own troops that they were forced to recruit the majority of their armies from among the Turks—a new nomadic steppe power that had appeared in the region around the Caspian Sea from the sixth century.18 The Muslims by contrast were battle hardened but not yet battle weary.

Egypt, the breadbasket of the Mediterranean, now no longer fed the Byzantine Empire: it answered to the caliphs in Medina. Meanwhile in Iraq, invasion proceeded simultaneously and at roughly the same pace. In 636 (or possibly later—the chronology is contested) a Muslim army shattered a large Persian force equipped with war elephants at the three-day battle of al-Qadisiyya.

The Sassanian dynasty was now on the ropes. The death blow came in 642. The new king of kings, Yazdegerd III, had painstakingly rebuilt his military forces after the terrible losses of the 630s. But his new army went the same way as the old: at the battle of Nahavand tens of thousands of Persians fell beneath Muslim swords, and in the aftermath Yazdegerd’s state collapsed.

Yet Umar was not successful simply because he was charismatic and capable. He was also the chief executive officer and spiritual leader of a machine built for and fed by conquest, and perfectly attuned to its day. When the Muslims were expanding and consolidating their rule in Arabia under Muhammad and Abu Bakr, conversion to Islam was a prerequisite of conquest. But once they ventured outside the Arabic-speaking world, the Muslims did not attempt simply to repeat this model. Whether they swept through regions populated by desert nomads or drew up their horsemen and siege catapults outside the great cities of Byzantium and Persia, they made it clear that they did not come as a dogmatic army hell-bent on converting or killing every man, woman, and child before them. Their only demand was that communities surrendered quickly and submitted to government by a Muslim ruling elite. Christians, Jews, and other monotheists were not expected to become Muslims—and in some cases were actively discouraged from doing so on the grounds that they would contribute higher tax yields as infidels than they would as believers. They were exempted from military service and obliged only to pay the jizyah poll tax and rule their own communities in an orderly and civilized fashion. Meanwhile, the Muslim soldiers

who formed the conquering armies were largely kept separate from the populace, garrisoned in military towns and paid a stipend known as the ata, funded by taxation. They were not, however, rewarded with tracts of land or confiscated estates, a policy that helped reduce civil tension in the short term, and in the long run meant that the Muslim armies did not blend over a couple of generations into the local population, in the Roman fashion. The roots of this tolerance for conquered people who submitted without resistance was of course not original: it had been, in essence, the package offered by the generals of the Roman Republic and early empire.22 Pragmatic acceptance of local practices—at least in the short term—has always been an effective way of pursuing military expansion without provoking long insurgencies. Yet in the seventh century the offer of religious tolerance may have had particular appeal. Given the poisonous sectarian violence that had swirled around the Christian world in Byzantium, the arrival of a new ruling power that cared little for the tortuous debates over reconciling Christ’s spiritual and human natures—one that taxed unbelievers, rather than persecuting them—may have come as blessed relief. This is not to say, however, that the Arab conquests were wholly heartfelt and peaceful. Cities and tribes that resisted the Muslim armies forfeited their right to be welcomed into the fold in an orderly fashion. During the wars in Arabia, Muhammad had approved ...

This was the way of war, and in part the way of Islam. Although there were many examples of Muhammad preaching tolerance and peace, the hadith compiled during Umar’s caliphate also contained striking pronouncements advocating for war and violence. In one, Muhammad was reported to have said, “Allah guarantees that He will admit the Mujahid [holy warrior] in His Cause into Paradise if he is killed, otherwise He will return him to his home safely with rewards and war booty.”25 The concept of jihad (meaning “struggle”) demanded that all Muslims make strenuous effort for the cause of Islam. Very often during the Middle Ages this meant taking up arms and killing other human beings in the expectation of reward in the afterlife.

According to one account preserved in the Hadith, when the blade slipped in, Umar groaned, “The dog has killed or eaten me.”26 He survived four days before dying of his wounds. During those four days, Umar convened an emergency deathbed council of six of the most senior Muslims, all of whom were Companions of the Prophet—the select and slowly dwindling group of people who had met and followed Muhammad during his lifetime. He charged them with picking one from among their number as his successor. The man they chose was Uthman, a merchant of the prestigious Umayya clan of the Quraysh.*

But in electing Uthman the council passed over the claims of Muhammad’s cousin Ali, and this decision would eventually have enormous consequences for the history of Islam and the wider world. During Uthman’s twelve-year caliphate, Muslim armies continued to press out ever farther east and west and to develop their fighting capability in the west. In the late 640s they campaigned in Armenia and eastern Asia Minor. In the east, they rolled ever farther through the disintegrating Persian empire, so that by 651 almost all of it was under Muslim control, with the frontier at the borders of what is now Afghanistan. Meanwhile, in the west, an army of forty thousand men began to chew through north Africa, stripping away Byzantine territory in the Exarchate of Africa, working their way at one point to within a few days’ march of Carthage.

Off the coast of Lycia, in Asia Minor, they won a ferocious and very bloody naval battle against a Byzantine fleet commanded by the emperor Constans II, a clash that is known now as the battle of the Masts.

All of this amounted—superficially at least—to a steady period of growth. Yet one had barely to scratch the surface to see that under Uthman’s rule all was not well. Although the caliph oversaw several important spiritual and domestic reforms, including the compilation of an “authorized” edition of the Qur’an, the caliphate assembled at lightning speed had begun to breed serious tensions and factional rivalries. In the summer of 656 they exploded. Opposition to Uthman’s rule was in equal parts personal and political. As the Islamic state grew, it began to echo with grumblings, heard loudest in Egypt and Iraq, that influence and reward were being concentrated unduly in the hands of the Quraysh. Of course, this was a delicate matter: the Quraysh were both Muhammad’s tribe and the people who had opposed him most bitterly in the beginning. They had provided caliphs and generals of the standard of Khalid ibn al-Walid and Syria’s governor and naval admiral Muawiya. They were, insofar as there was such a thing, Muslim aristocracy. Yet other Arabian tribes who had participated wholeheartedly in the decades of

constant military conquest felt—rightly or wrongly—that they had been denied just return on their investment, and resented the arrogance with which, under Uthman, high-ranking Quraysh seemed to be allowed to help themselves to whatever they desired throughout the conquered lands. The most bitter complaints in this regard were raised by a tribe known as the Qurra. But they were not alone.

On June 17 they got it.29 A small band of rebels managed to break into Uthman’s compound, evade the heavy guard, and confront the caliph in his rooms. After a struggle, they overpowered Uthman, beating and stabbing him to death,

Uthman’s successor as caliph was Muhammad’s exceptionally pious and upstanding cousin Ali, a proven warrior and intimate member of the Prophet’s family, who had grown up with Muhammad and was married to Muhammad’s daughter Fatimah. Ali was a widely respected figure, and an impeccably holy character, who had the distinction of having been born inside the Ka‘ba itself, and who had built his reputation as the most Muslim of the Muslims—a paragon of old-fashioned virtue whose partisans, known as the Shia, were entranced by his ability to expound on and espouse the values given to them by the Prophet.

Although he had not connived at Uthman’s death, Ali quickly became a polarizing figure rather than a soothing one. The umma’s unity now quickly fractured, and a civil war known as the First Fitna blazed into life. In the short four and a half years Ali’s caliphate lasted he was sucked into a ceaseless struggle against disaffected Uthmanites whose leaders included such venerable Muslims as Muhammad’s widow Aisha (who on one occasion personally led troops into battle while she was mounted on a camel)* and the worldly, hard-bitten governor of Syria, Muawiya. Because of all the fighting, Ali was forced to uproot the caliphal headquarters from Medina and move to Kufa, a garrison town on the banks of the

Euphrates (in modern Iraq). In the Great Mosque of this city, during the last days of January 661, Ali himself was murdered when a member of a radical fundamentalist sect known as the Kharijites, who thought he had compromised too much, burst in and stabbed him with a poison-tipped sword.

Muawiya fought the late Ali’s forces to a standstill, and browbeat Ali’s elder son Hasan—a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad—until he accepted a large sum of gold to abdicate his claim to be caliph.

He was now the caliph—the first ruler of a dynasty that history has come to call the Umayyads, after his (and before him, Uthman’s) clan, the Banu Umayya. With Muawiya’s rise from leader of Islamic Syria to become commander of all the Muslim faithful, the age of the Rightly Guided caliphs came to an end, and the Umayyad period began.

Arabic and Islam permeated the societies to which the Muslims had staked their claim, while the caliphate became more worldly and less theocratic. The Umayyads were responsible for making the Arab conquests permanent and for building a true empire out of a series of conquered states.

This time power was contested between Muawiya’s son and designated heir, Yazid, and Ali’s surviving younger son, Husayn. When Muawiya announced his intention to hand the caliphate on to his son, Husayn refused to take an oath of allegiance. He set out on a long march of protest, from Arabia toward Iraq, and on his way was killed in a desert skirmish; he was decapitated and his head sent as a trophy to Damascus. Once more, the Umayyads had triumphed. While this bloody piece of theater ensured the Umayyads’ survival, it also cemented a schism within Islam that has survived for more than thirteen hundred years. The sects and factions that formed during the first and second fitnas gave birth to what we now know as the Sunni-Shia divide. Shia Muslims refused to accept the legitimacy of the Umayyad caliphate, or indeed the

legitimacy of Abu Bakr, Umar, and Uthman’s regimes. Instead, they insisted that Ali was Muhammad’s rightful successor: the first imam. This in turn implied an alternative succession, through Hasan and Husayn, then a bloodline of further imams descended from Muhammad. Now this was not solely a dynastic dispute. The Shia framework of Islamic history proposed a significantly different model of organizing the umma, and a different set of leadership values. The Sunni-Shia divide came to be tremendously important during the later Middle Ages, particularly (as we shall see) during the crusading era. But it has lasted far longer than that. During the twentieth century, a revived, poisonous sectarianism established in part along Sunni-Shia lines began to inform world geopolitics—playing a role in the interconnected Iran-Iraq War, U.S.-led Gulf wars, and long-running “Islamic cold war,” which has pitted Saudi Arabia and Iran against one another for regional hegemony in the Middle East since 1979; as well as other, painful and deadly conflicts that have been fought in Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria.* That all this can still be traced back to the machinations of powerful men in the seventh century a.d. may seem astonishing—but as so often proves the case, the Middle Ages remain with us today.

That famous and sacred complex had been reduced to rubble after a siege in a.d. 70, when the Roman general (and future emperor) Titus came to Jerusalem to put down a Jewish rebellion and instigated a clash of arms and arson that entirely razed the city. The loss of the temple was a near-apocalyptic disaster for the Jewish people: its destruction had broken the back of the rebellion, scattered the Jewish people far and wide across the Middle East, and left a permanent black mark on Jewish cultural memory.

The Dome of the Rock is the most dazzling of these three structures, and in modern times it has gained iconic status—a symbol of supranational Arab fraternity that appears on knickknacks, trinkets, postcards, and cheap wall prints all over

the Muslim world and beyond.

The vast expense lavished on such a monumental construction project, the care and craftsmanship that went into its decoration, and the very impulse to build it at all are tangible hallmarks of the Umayyad caliphate, which tell a story of ninety critical years in history, during which the dar al-Islam was transformed from a military machine into a full-fledged early medieval empire, infused with elements of the cultures it encountered, yet highly distinctive in its own right.

Under the Rightly Guided caliphs, the supreme leader of the umma was by definition a spiritual guide entrenched in Islam’s historical heartlands, as well as a political and military commander in chief. But once the Umayyad caliphs left Arabia, these two roles were not quite so easily combined. The caliph was not suddenly stripped of his religious dignity—but he looked very much more like an emperor than before.

Once the Umayyad caliphs set themselves up next door to the old Roman state, their rule came to absorb a distinct flavor of Roman religious imperium.

The Umayyads were so intent on emulating Byzantium that between the 660s and 710s they repeatedly tried to take over the old Roman state wholesale.

These battles were nothing short of a war for the world, as the Umayyads strove to claim for Islam the most magnificent city in the Western Hemisphere, and the beating heart of Byzantium. The outcomes of these clashes would shape geopolitics across eastern Europe and the Balkans for centuries.

So year after year, he sent ships, often crewed by Christian sailors fighting under Muslim commanders, to attack islands and ports in the Aegean Sea, menacing the sea routes around the Byzantine capital and setting up a command center at Cyzicus, which lay directly across the Sea of Marmara from Constantinople.

Military technicians working for the emperor Constantine IV (r. 654–85), led by a scientist from southern Syria known as Kallinikos, had perfected a deadly, oil-based jelly known variously as Roman fire, marine fire, artificial fire, or (most famously) Greek fire.

Greek fire was a game-changing weapons system, and a military secret the Byzantine state would guard closely for nearly five hundred years,

It was a triumph for Byzantium—a pivotal point in the history of warfare, and a round humiliation for the Muslims. The second fitna of 680–92 interrupted the Umayyads’ arm wrestle with Byzantium, but not for good.

The Byzantine capital was saved—again.

The experience ended Umayyad ambitions in Asia Minor, and in retrospect, many historians have seen the failure of the second siege as a turning point in western history: the moment when the spread of the first Islamic armies toward the Balkans was halted.

what is incontestable is that the shape of the Umayyad caliphate, and of the Muslim near east, was determined by the failure of the two sieges of Constantinople in 677–78 and 717–18.

Instead of expanding through Asia Minor and the Balkans, then, under the Umayyad caliphs of the late seventh and early eighth centuries, Islam branched out east and west. Having seized Persia, Muslim armies eventually made their way into what is now Pakistan, Afghanistan, and “Transoxania” (the

central Asian “-stans” of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan). They also marched through north Africa, eventually overrunning Byzantine Carthage in 698, which sounded a death knell for Byzantine control in the region. Then they pressed on through Algeria toward what is now Morocco: the western coast of the continent. In 711 they crossed the Strait of Gibraltar and began to ride through the Iberian Peninsula. The arrival of Islam in modern Spain and Portugal created the territory known for centuries as al-Andalus.

Under the energetic leadership of the general Musa

ibn Nusayr, the Umayyads forces ran the Visigoths out of Spain inside three years.

At the battle of Guadalete in 711, the Visigothic king Roderic was slain and his kingdom lay open to the invaders.

The great levers of change in this respect were language and architecture. And the two most influential figures