three Jewish Arabian clans of Madina: They were the Qurayza, Nadhir, and Qaynuqa. The fate of the first two is discussed in the text. The last, a clan of goldsmiths, were the first to be ejected from Madina, but only after Muhammad had been dissuaded from executing them. There had been a quarrel over a young girl's honor in which a Muslim had been killed. The Qaynuqa's considerable wealth was confiscated. See Rodinson, Muhammad, 172—73.
eating . . . the liver: This custom would have to have been a remnant of a pre-Islamic, if not prehisoric, animism. The liver was chewed, then spat out on the ground. In this instance, an Ethiopian slave was promised his freedom by his Meccan master if he succeeded in killing Muhammad's fearsome uncle, Hamza, a big burly man and formerly a heavy drinker. This the Ethiopian did with a well-aimed javelin; then he left the battlefield, unconcerned about the outcome, a free man. This battle of 625, a reverse for the Muslims, took place just outside of Madina, on the slopes of Mount Uhud. The details are found in Ibn Ishaq.
Hind, the liver-eater, is supposed to have heckled him: Hind is not remembered fondly in Islamic traditions, so the heckling story might just be another way of slighting her. F. Buhl, "Hind Bit Utba," Encylopedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1973), 3:455.
the body of a defeated and defunct general to be packed in salt: Norwich, Early Centuries, 294.
fierce punishment was meted out to all who had sided with the Persians: This included a massacre of Jews in Galilee and Jerusalem. Walter E. Kaegi, Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1995), 117. This is the most thoroughgoing and authoritative of modern scholarly examinations of Yarmuk.
A Muslim tradition . . . holds that Muhammad actually wrote letters to Heraclius and Chosroes: There are several accounts of this tradition, all of which are examined in detail by Na-dia Maria el Sheikh in her Byzantium Viewed by the Arabs (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 39-54. El Sheikh convincingly argues that the different reception given the letters by basileus and shahanshah influenced later Muslim thinking toward their old enemies. The Sassanids, whose leader had torn up the Prophet's letter, were thought to have been deserving of extinction, while the Byzantines, because Heraclius had shown deference to the letter, were treated with indulgence and respect.
a conspicuous latecomer to the cause of the Prophet: Khalid was one of the most famously late Muslims, having commanded the Meccan armies at Uhud (the Muslim defeat in which Hamza was slain and mutilated). P. Crone, "Khalid b. Al-Walid," Encyclopedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1978), 4:928.
Dathin was hardly more than a skirmish: Theophanes speaks of three hundred or so Byzantine dead. Cited in Kaegi, Byzantium, 91.
"diabolic savagery": Cited in David Nicolle, Yarmuk 636 A.D.: The Muslim Conquest of Syria (Oxford: Osprey, 1994), 50. Nicolle, a military historian, incorporates many of the Arab historians and traditions into his account. Unsourced, these accounts nonetheless give a different dimension to traditional western accounts of the battle, which usually do not mention the legends that have been passed on. Nicolle's work is a reminder of the importance of perceptions.
The ride has entered legend: A patient examination of all the problems associated with Khalid's dash through the desert (when? where?) is given in Fred McGraw Donner, The Early Islamic Conquests (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 1981), 120—23.
"I am the death of the Pale Faces . . .": Quoted in Nicolle, Yarmuk, 48-49.
Banu Nadhir: Kaegi, Byzantium, 116-17.
this world-altering event: Francesco Gabrieli, Muhammad and the Conquests of Islam, trans. Virginia Luling and Rosamund Linell (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968), 150: "The battle of Yarmuk had, without doubt, more important consequences than almost any other in world history."
sudden sandstorm blinded the Byzantines: This story, repeated in many standard histories, originated in the Chronographia of Theophanes (trans. Harry Turtledove), in The Chronicle of Theophanes: An English Translation of Anni Mundi 6og5—63o5 (A.D. 602—813), (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1982), and in the Armenian History of Sebeos. Kaegi, Byiantium, dismisses the story thus: "Some Christian sources speak of sand or quicksand at the battle of the Yarmuk. It is quite possible that there was a severe duststorm at the time of the battle. Dust devils are a common occurrence throughout modern Jordan and southern Syria. But the putative area of the battle is not desert and it is not covered with deep sand. There is soil, and it can be very dry in the month of August. But one should be cautious about chroniclers' claims that the Byzantine forces were overcome by sand. The terrain is just not that type. The chroniclers may simply be imagining what kind of territory Arabs might prefer for battle, or they may have heard stories from defeated Byzantines who were trying to explain away their defeat by blaming the nature of the terrain and local conditions" (137). My visit to the area in November 2003 confirmed Kaegi's description. The countryside was stony, grassy, and now intensively cultivated but was by no means of the type associated with blinding sandstorms. Moreover, in the seventh century the Ghassanids used the area around Jabila and Nawa for pasturage, and parts of this region might have been more heavily wooded than they are today. Thus it seems the sandstorm theory, while not beyond the realm of the possible, should be acknowledged as improbable.
Armenian perfidy: There is no reason to believe a story that, if true, would have figured prominently in all accounts. A mutiny of such a scale would hardly have passed unnoticed. The story originated with Theophanes, in Chronographia, and was repeated by Nicephorus, the patriach of Constantinople. See his Short History, trans, and ed. C. Mango (Washington: Dumbarton Oaks, 1990). Both authors sought to deflect blame from Heraclius and his command decisions.
near Yaqusah: This is Kaegi's {Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests) assertion. His account of the battle is generally supported by other scholars of his stature. Hugh Kennedy, in The Armies of the Caliphs: Military and Society in the Early Islamic State (London: Routledge, 2001), writes: "The most detailed reconstruction we have on one of the major battles of the conquests is Kaegi's account, which is itself based on Caetani's account [Annali dell'lasam, 10 vols. U. Hoepli, Milan, 1905-26]. It benefits from the fact that the battlefield was visited both by Caetani and Kaegi and that the topography is clear and marked by definable features, notably the steep-sided valley of the Yarmuk itself. . . . The reconstruction is ingenious and may well be correct in its broad outlines, but the Arabic texts need to be used selectively to give so clear a picture" (5-6). An example of the chronic disagreement over Yarmuk concerns Yaqusah as the site of the encampment. In Antonio Santosousso, Barbarians, Marauders, and Infidels: The Ways of Medieval Warfare (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 2004), we read: "It is likely that at this stage the Byzantines established their camp near Jabiya or across the right side of the upper Wadi Ruqqad between the wadi and the old Roman road" (93-94). The Jabiya hypothesis, following Donner, Early Islamic Conquests, makes the ultimate debacle less explicable: i.e., that of troops falling into the Yarmuk gorge, as Jabiya is near Nawa and thus far to the north of that river. In most details, I follow Kaegi.
armed-to-the-teeth Kibbutz Meizar: I visited this locale, given current tensions, in an entirely separate trip, which took place several months after I toured the Syrian side. A small kibbutz with a brave little bunker system facing east, Meizar offered a view of a battlefield that was tantalizingly out of reach. The locales I visited a few months earlier were plainly visible. Wadi Ruqqad, moreover, was out of bounds, fenced off as part of the security system. When we asked the leader of the kibbutz where precisely the village of Yaqusah had been located, he smiled and said, "You're standing on it!"
Khalid had been deprived of overall command: The overall commander was Abu Ubaida, a pious grandee who in all probability deferred in matters military to Khalid. Caliph Umar may well have been wary of Khalid's growing fame.
Niketas . . . was the epitome of an enemy turned collaborator: Kaegi, Byzantium, 118.
He is even thought to ha
ve organized a night raid on a Byzantine camp: Mansur, the Christian Arab governor of Damascus, is a somewhat enigmatic figure, although there is no doubt he had little patience with the demands of the Byzantine armies in his bailiwick. According to the contemporaneous Christian Arab historian Eutychius, the raid in question was a clever ploy using cymbals, drums, and shouting in the middle of the night (i.e., imitating the Muslim army) to scare the Byzantines away from the vicinity of Damascus. See Kaegi, Byzantium, 124-25. Interestingly, Mansur's son, Sergius, became an important Damascene official for the Umayyad caliph—and his grandson, who first started his career in the civil service, became known as John of Damascus, a Doctor of the Church, enemy of the iconoclasts, and one of the first known polemicists against Islam. See Richard Fletcher, The Cross and the Crescent: Christianity and Islam from Muhammad to the Reformation (London: Penguin, 2003), 23—26.
the colors of Arabia: Neither green nor the crescent was then indissolubly linked to Islam. The Turks would do much to bring the crescent into Islamic iconography. Historically, black was associated with the Abbasids, green with the shia, white with the Umayyads and Fatimids, red with the Ottomans. David Nicolle, Medieval Warfare Source Book: Christian Europe and Its Neighbours (London: Brockhampton, 1998), 281-82.
The redoubtable and by now inevitable Hind: For the story and song, see Nicolle, Yarmuk, 72. Donner, Early Islamic Conquests, gives a nod to these striking stories of female intervention (i35n). In an entirely different context, the stories of the heroism of the women at Yarmuk came to inspire Muslim women of Spain. During the War of Alpujarras, a sixteenth-century revolt of the Moriscos (Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity after the fall of Granada), the combatant rebel women were apparently inspired by an old tale known as the Battle of the Valley of the Yarmuk. See Mary Elizabeth Perry, The Handless Maiden: Moriscos and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Spain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University, 2005), 90—92.
Strategikon: Written by Emperor Maurice, who was beheaded to make way for Phocas.
The foremost historian of Yarmuk thinks: Kaegi, Byzantium, 121.
Its commander may have been Zarrar Ibn al Zawar: This is unclear. Nicolle (Yarmuk, 76) believes Zarrar to have been the leader of this detachment. Other historians prefer to leave this open and even question the idea of a small detachment lurking as a secret weapon.
the raiders of Ayn Dhakar had ridden under cover of night to Yaqusah: Nicolle, Yarmuk, 77. There is, as with most events of the battle, some dispute about when the camp was captured and by whom. (We have seen earlier that there is disagreement over where the camp was.) If we follow Nicolle and his sources from among the Arab historians and traditions, then Zarrar would have been the likeliest candidate to press on after his capture of the bridge at Ayn Dhakar. The capture of the bridge and the camp is attributed in other histories to Khalid Ibn al Walid. The result, however, was the same.
Some just sat down where they were and awaited their fate: Citing Arab chroniclers al-Tabari and Baladhuri, the main Muslim sources for the period, Kaegi, Byzantium, 135—36.
Vahan and his remaining troops were overtaken and slain: A lone source, the Christian Arab chronicler Eutychius, has him escaping to Sinai and retiring to a monastery. See Kaegi, Byzantium, 278.
"Dispute not with the People of the Book . . .": Quran, 29:45 (trans. A. J. Arberry).
Isa (Jesus) was important to his faith: Many Christians, even today, do not fully appreciate this. See Kenneth Cragg, Jesus and the Muslim: An Exploration (Oxford: Oneworld, 1999).
He had somehow developed a morbid fear of water: The tale comes from the Chrono-graphia of Theophanes. Warren Treadgold, A History of the Byiantine State and Society (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997) p. 304. Norwich, Early Centuries, tells the story of the pontoon bridge but avers that it might be fanciful; given the width of the strait, a boat with tall sides might have been more practicable (308). Ostrogorsky, Byiantine State, plumps for a boat with "sand and foliage" (100—01).
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"A victorious line of march . . .": Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Random House, 2003), 964.
The snide genius of Voltaire: Quoted in Elisabeth Carpentier, Les Batailles de Poitiers: Charles Martel et les Arabes (La Creche: Geste, 2000), 36.
nineteenth-century tableaux of swarthy Moors being felled in the presence of under-dressed Amazons: Puvis de Chavannes's canvas hangs in the Hotel de Ville of Poitiers; that of Charles Steuben, in the Musee de Versailles.
Poitiers remains a touchstone: A recent example of the tenacity of the Poitiers image occurred in an amusing article by Alain Badiou that appeared in Le Monde on February 22, 2004, called "Derriere la Loi foulardiere, la peur" (Behind the Scarf Law: Fear): "Oui, la France a en-fin trouve un probleme a sa mesure: le foulard sur la tete de quelques filles. On peut le dire, la decadence de ce pays est stoppee. L'invasion musulmane, depuis longtemps diagnostiquee par Le Pen, aujourd'hui confirmee par des intellectuels indubitables, a trouve a qui parler. La bataille de Poitiers n'etait que de la petite biere, Charles Martel, un second couteau. Chirac, les socialistes, les feministes et les intellectuels des Lumieres atteints d'islamophobie gagneront la bataille du foulard. De Poitiers au foulard, la consequence est bonne, et le progres considerable" (13). (Yes, France has finally found a problem worthy of its talents: the scarf on the heads of little girls. We can say it now—our national decadence is over. The Muslim invasion, so long foreseen by Le Pen and today confirmed by indubitable intellectuals, now has found an adversary. The Battle of Poitiers was small potatoes in comparison, Charles Martel a small fry. Chirac, the socialists, the feminists and the Enlightenment intellectuals stricken with Islamophobia will win the Battle of the Scarf. From Poitiers to the scarf, the result is good, our progress considerable.)
eight thousand pounds of gold: Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 113.
seven million bushels of grain: To be paid promptly before October 10 each year. See Thierry Bianquis, "L'Egypte depuis la conquete arabe jusqu'a la fin de l'Empire fatimide (1171)," L'Histoire generale de I'Afrique (Paris: UNESCO, 1990), 3:190. Bianquis gives the metric measurement of two and half million hectoliters, which unfortunately is meaningless to me; hence the conversion.
an expeditionary force of four thousand horsemen: V. Christides, "Misr," Encylopedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1993), 7:153. Misr is Arabic for "Egypt."
whose name, Copt, is a variant of the word Egypt: "Most of Egypt's Christians belong to the Coptic Orthodox Church—whose name, like Egypt's, stems from the old name for Memphis, Hikaptah, House of the Ka of Ptah." See Max Rodenbeck, Cairo: The City Victorious (New York, Vintage, 2000), 17m
monothelitism: It came to be adopted by the Maronites, who for their pains were eventually driven as heretics into the mountains of Lebanon. See William Dalrymple, From the Holy Mountain: A Journey in the Shadow of Byzantium (London: Flamingo, 1998), 197. The Maronites dropped monothelitism in the twelfth century when, as their land was occupied by Latin crusaders, they became associated with Roman Catholicism.
Cyrus, the Orthodox patriarch: This Cyrus of Alexandria should not be confused with Cyril of Alexandria, a bishop of the early fifth century who was a famed monophysite. See Leonard George, "Monophysitism," in The Encylopedia of Heresies and Heretics (London: Rob-son, 1995), 213-14.
the former with her tongue cut out, the latter with his nose slit open: See John Julius Norwich, A Short History of Byzantium (New York: Vintage, 1999), 98. Norwich explains: "The slitting—effectively the amputation—of the nose was an ancient oriental practice, introduced for the first time in Byzantium by Heraclius. Its purpose was to invalidate the victim's claim to the throne since the Byzantines maintained that their Emperor must be free of all obvious physical imperfections." Nonetheless, less than a century later the basileus Justinian II, who had had his nose cut off and been sent into exile, returned to rule in Constantinople for six bloody years (7
05-11) after his disfigurement.
the brother of the city's monophysite bishop tied up in a sack: The unfortunate fellow was a certain Menas, brother of the monophysite bishop Benjamin.
a city of some 600,000 people: Bianquis, "L'Egypte depuis la conquete arabe," 191.
that tale has been debunked by impartial scholarship: See Bernard Lewis, The Arabs in History (Oxford: Oxford University, 1993), 53.
"Everyone knows that the defeat of the Greeks . . .": H. Zotenberg, "Mémoire sur la chronique byzantine de Jean, évéque de Nikiou," Journal asiatique 7 (1879), 383? quoted in Andre Raymond, Cairo, trans. Willard Wood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 10.
another monophysite history: It was written by Michael the Syrian, a twelfth-century monophysite.
"The God of vengeance . . .": Quoted in Raymond, Cairo, 7.
"I will send to Madina a camel train so long . . .": Quoted in Raymond, Cairo, 16.
the oldest continuously inhabited city on earth: Aleppo, its eternal rival, also makes this claim.
Mentioned by name by none other than God himself: Saul, soon to be Paul, stayed in a house there just after being blinded on the road to Damascus. Ananias, the man destined to restore his sight, is given divine directions to the house: "The Lord told him: 'Go to the house of Judas on Straight Street and ask for a man from Tarsus named Saul, for he is praying.' " See Acts 9:11, The Holy Bible: New International Version (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1979), 1115. Older versions of this passage have God saying, "Arise, and go into the street which is called Straight."
Qasyun Hill: This is the anglicized version of Jabal Qasiyun. Other authors call it Mount Qassiun. The verdant hinterland of Damascus, fed by seven streams, is known as the Ghuta.
Caliph Uthman authorized raids into the Cyrenaica, today's Libya: This act represented a clear break from those of his predecessors, one of whom declared north Africa west of Egypt as "the country that leads men astray." See Charles-Andre Julien, Histoire de VAfrique du Nord, Des origines a 1830 (Paris: Payot, 1994), 344.
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