by David Keys
Jabiya-Yarmuk ranks among the most important battles in world history. After the defeat, Roman power in the Middle East virtually collapsed, and most of Syria and Palestine fell to Islam almost immediately. Jerusalem was captured and would remain in Muslim hands for most of the subsequent thirteen and a half centuries. Gaza was stormed and its garrison members were executed by the Muslim army—then declared martyrs by the Church at the insistence of the emperor.4
Muslim soldiers swept to victory at the Battle of Qadisiya, not far from what is now the southern Iraqi town of Al Hammam. Most of what is now Iraq (then the western part of the Persian Empire) fell to Islam. The spectacular and bejeweled Persian capital, Ctesiphon (twenty miles southeast of modern Baghdad), was sacked and occupied.
In 639 more Roman towns (Caesarea and Ascalon) were captured, and in 640 the expanding Islamic armies invaded Egypt, Armenia, and the beleaguered Persian Empire’s heartland, highland Persia itself. Persia fell at the Battle of Nehavend, known in Arab tradition as the “Victory of Victories.”
Two years later, in 642, Islamic armies completed the conquest of Egypt, thus robbing the Roman Empire of at least half its remaining wealth and its main source of grain. The Muslim conquerors then invaded and occupied Cyrenaica (modern Libya).
By 652 the Islamic empire had reached the borders of India. In 653 an Islamic navy seized Roman Cyprus, and by 670 the Roman capital, Constantinople, itself was under siege, though the Muslim army never broke through. Indeed, Muhammad’s former standard-bearer—by then a rather aged warrior—died of illness in that abortive campaign and was buried outside the city walls.
In the west, Islamic armies pushed on, ending the Roman Empire’s nine-hundred-year control of North Africa in a seven-year campaign between 698 and 705, and then invaded southern Europe, conquering most of Spain in 711 and penetrating deep (though temporarily) into France between 718 and 732.
Over subsequent centuries, Islam was to spread across the Sahara to West Africa, along the East African coast as far as Mozambique, and east to western China, India, Indonesia, and even the Philippines. Today it is one of the world’s three largest religions, has five hundred million followers, and is a major player on the world geopolitical stage. Yet its emergence 1,400 years ago—like so many other aspects of the modern world—owed much to the political, economic, epidemiological, and religious factors that flowed from the climatic chaos of the mid–sixth century.
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B E H I N D T H E
R O M A N C O L L A P S E
The reasons for the partial disintegration of the Roman Empire in the seventh century were legion, but each of them stemmed from one or more of five sometimes interrelated historical problems: a chronic lack of cash; the Avar/Slav seizure of the Balkans; the Persian occupation; the plague; and religious dissension. Ultimately, those five problems had grown either directly or indirectly, wholly or partially, out of the climatic problems of a century earlier.
Some of the complex factors (specifically the plague and the Avars) that led to the empire’s dire financial problems have been described in Chapter 7, but the way in which lack of cash translated into military disaster in the seventh century was equally complex and almost fatal.
First of all, the lack of funds significantly limited the size and nature of the Roman army. It was both cheaper and more convenient to recruit local Arab tribes to do at least some of the fighting against the Muslim insurgents. The reduced size of the Roman army meant that only small contingents could be allocated on a long-term basis to the Arabian frontier region. This forced the Roman military to opt for a mainly defensive strategy in which most units of troops were stationed inside walled towns—a practice that eroded their will and ability to fight and which, by its very nature, split Roman forces into a myriad of often uncoordinated fragments. Soon this defensive town-based strategy was incapable of denying the Islamic enemy access to the countryside. This, in turn, made communications and coordination between the town-based military units even more difficult.
The empire’s financial problems also produced distortion in the way its Arabian frontier army was run. With cash control probably uppermost in his mind, the emperor, Heraclius, appointed Theodore Trithurios, a pen-pushing accountant (a sakellarios, Greek for “treasurer”), to command this vital, if undermanned, military machine. Though it probably reassured the worried troops that they would at least get paid, the appointment almost certainly meant that budgetary and cash-flow considerations often took precedence over purely military ones.
Poor central funding also meant that food and other provisions had to be obtained from the local Syrian and Palestinian population. This was not a new idea, but the empire’s financial stringency and the appointment of an accountant as senior commander probably led to this local “war tax” being extracted with unprecedented vigor from an area that had not experienced it for more than a generation.
The war-tax system also further restricted military mobility, because the army could not easily be moved too far from war-tax sources. And it certainly won no friends among the local population. Indeed, just prior to one vital battle (Jabiya-Yarmuk, in 636), the local chief civil administrator of Damascus, Mansur, actually refused to supply the army with provisions it had tried to requisition and then went on to launch a fake attack on a group of Roman soldiers in order to frighten them away, presumably so they could not enforce the war tax.
A second long-term imperial problem that affected the army was the Avar/Slav occupation of most of the Balkans, which had started in the second half of the sixth century and intensified in the first quarter of the seventh. This region had traditionally been one of the main sources of individual recruits to the Roman army. Now that source was no longer available, and the imperial government had to seek other options.
As more forces were required in the Arab frontier region, the authorities recruited more local Arabs and thousands of Armenians. But de facto control of both the Arab and Armenian contingents rested with their leaders, Arab tribal chieftains and Armenian warlords. At the disastrous Battle of Jabiya-Yarmuk, for example, the Armenian general, Vahan, and the overall regional commander, the accountant Trithurios, distrusted each other, and the third military boss, a local monarch called Jabala, may well have been distrustful of both his colleagues.
There was also conflict within the large Armenian contingent. On the eve of the Battle of Jabiya-Yarmuk, a senior officer on the Armenian right flank refused to obey his superior’s orders.¹ A hint of further discord is provided by an Arab source who claimed, somewhat unbelievably, that a top Armenian officer converted to Islam just before the battle.² A further indication of turmoil within the Armenian force on the eve of this vital battle is the equally bizarre report that there was an attempted mutiny designed to put General Vahan on the imperial throne in place of Emperor Heraclius. The details of these stories are probably wrong, but they are almost certainly indicative of severe discord within the Roman ranks.
It was not only the nature and effectiveness of the army that was determined to a significant extent by financial considerations. The morale of some Arab forces in the Roman military machine was no doubt also affected, in a more direct way. There was at least one occasion on which the Roman authorities at the local level simply refused to pay allied Arab troops their wages.
The third background problem to generate a host of negative factors was the Persian occupation itself. Persian forces withdrew from Roman territory after occupying it for fifteen to twenty years. But the Roman authorities took many months to reoccupy all the areas, and even after they had done so, Roman troops were unfamiliar with the territory and the local politics.
In 628 and 629, when the Persian withdrawal treaty had been signed and there was a temporary military and administrative vacuum, Islam was beginning to penetrate the extreme eastern part of the Roman Empire, the area just to the east of the Dead Sea. Indeed, a Muslim was murdered by Christians in the town of Umm al-Rasas (thirty miles south of modern Amman)
in 628, and the first battle between the empire and Islam took place thirty-five miles farther south at Mu’ta in 629, as mentioned in the previous chapter.
Another consequence of the Persian occupation was a real increase in Roman anti-Semitism. The Jews, long oppressed by the Christian imperial authorities, had been delighted when Persia seized much of the Roman Empire in the first quarter of the seventh century. The Jews had seen the Persians as liberators, and the Romans had seen the Jews as anti-Christian traitors.
The Roman-Persian conflict totally destabilized thirty-five years of calm, though admittedly cool, relationships between Christians and Jews in the Middle East. When the Roman Empire turned the tables on the Persian foe, it was the Jews who paid the price. In 630, under pressure from local Christians and their priests, Emperor Heraclius ordered the massacre of Jews in the Jerusalem and Galilee areas. There was even a celebratory liturgy and a fast arranged by the Church authorities to expiate the act of massacre.³ The emperor also ordered a series of forced baptisms.
It’s true that the Muslims had treated the Jews of far-off Medina badly in A.D. 626. But the degree of Jewish enmity toward the Roman state was far deeper; the massacres of 630 were more recent and geographically nearer. So Jewish communities were, on the whole, pro-Muslim and anti-Roman. When a high-ranking Roman officer—probably a friend of the emperor—was killed by Muslims at the Battle of Dathin in 634, the Jewish community in Palestine was overjoyed, according to a near-contemporary account. As noted earlier, some even thought Muhammad might be the harbinger of the Messiah, the one who would herald their liberation from Roman oppression.4
Given these sentiments, the Roman military would therefore not have been delighted that the two towns nearest the site of the battle at Jabiya-Yarmuk, Nawa and Adhri’at, were largely Jewish, and may well have been willing, if clandestine, sources of help for the Muslims.
The Persian occupation must also have played a role in further reducing the already patchy sense of Roman identity felt by the disparate peoples of Palestine, Syria, and Egypt. Although the occupation had lasted only fifteen to twenty years, that was long enough for an entire new generation of citizens to have grown up with minimal recollection of Roman rule.
The region’s sense of Roman identity, strong in the second to fifth centuries, had begun to deteriorate in the sixth with the Roman suppression of a popular local variant of Christianity, the so-called monophysite heresy, which taught that Jesus was not both fully divine and fully human (as the Catholics believe) but was instead fully and exclusively divine. The heresy became the majority religion in Roman-ruled Upper Mesopotamia, Syria, and Egypt.
Persecution of the monophysites was intermittent, but when the domestic and international political situation was destabilized by Phocas’ revolution in 603 (described in Chapter 5), the empire’s religious balance also collapsed. Phocas—an enthusiastic Catholic—presided over the ferocious harassment of the monophysite heartland in the Middle East. This unleashed a tide of anti-Roman feeling and promoted local separatist nationalism, most notably in Egypt. Syria and Upper Mesopotamia (or at least the monophysite majority there) began to increasingly identify themselves as more Arab than Roman. In Egypt, for example, there was a new pride in the ancient pharaonic past, and the story was proudly told of the monophysite bishop who, fleeing from the Persians, hid in the magnificent tomb of a dead pharaoh. The ghost of the pharaoh started to haunt the unfortunate bishop, but the ever-diligent cleric decided in the end to baptize the long-dead ruler. The tale illustrates the growing sense of nationalistic oneness with the glorious Egyptian past and, conversely, the decline in identity with the late Roman Empire’s Greek soul.
Both the resurgence of antimonophysite persecution at the beginning of the century and the Persian occupation that almost immediately followed it eroded the Middle Eastern population’s loyalty to the empire. And these factors, combined with the unpopular local war tax, produced a lethal cocktail of civil disloyalty, apathy, collaborationist ideas, and even anti-Roman sabotage.
As outlined at the beginning of this chapter, the Roman disintegration at the hands of Islam had five original interrelated causes: chronic lack of cash; the Avar/Slav seizure of the Balkans; religious dissension; the Persian occupation; and the plague. All five were the direct or indirect consequences of the climatic problems of the mid–sixth century. And just as the Avar hordes had moved west following the climatic destabilization of Mongolia, another central Asian people, the Turks, were to make their mark on the world as a direct result of that same chaos.
PART FIVE
THE TURKIC
DIMENSION
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T H E T U R K I S H
T I M E B O M B
Just as the climatically induced political changes on the Mongolian steppe had helped to reshape Eastern European and Middle Eastern history through the agency of the defeated Avars, so it was that those same changes, this time through the good offices of the victors, the Turks, led ultimately to huge changes in the Balkans, North Africa, and the Middle East, and even in India and in the Jewish world.
However, whereas the Avar-associated changes took only 150 years to unfold (see Chapters 3 and 4), equally dramatic changes in the Turkic world took nearly a thousand years to do so. How did a climatically induced political and ethnic revolution in sixth-century Mongolia end up a thousand or more years later affecting so much of humanity from Bohemia to Bangladesh?
The sequence of events was complex, but the trigger that set it in motion was almost certainly the climatic chaos of the 530s. As already described in Chapter 3, it was the differences in their respective vulnerability to drought that led to the mighty Avar empire being overturned by the Avars’ vassals, the Turks. Whereas the Avar leader committed suicide and many of his people fled west, the victorious Turks set about creating their own steppe empire. Within a decade, it stretched from the borders of Korea to the Crimea. At its heart was a royal clan, an emperor (known as the kagan), a mysterious legend, and a sacred cave.
The royal clan of the Turks, the Ashina (literally, “noble lord”) family, traced its ancestry back through legend in typical totemic style to an animal, not a human. Their family origin myth tells the story of a young child who was the sole survivor of a tribal massacre. All his family and friends having been slaughtered, he alone escaped and hid in a nearby cave. There he encountered a she-wolf and, like Romulus and Remus of ancient Rome, was adopted and suckled by her. The pair became inseparable, and when the child grew into a man, he had sex with the wolf, which then gave birth to a son—the first Ashina.
The sacred cave—where, according to legend, the sole survivor of the tribal holocaust was suckled by the wolf and where the first Ashina was conceived—became the religious and ritual epicenter of the empire. Although the supreme deity of the Turks was Tengri, the sky god, it was the cult of the wolf that was politically far more important. The cave—the exact location of which has now long been forgotten—lay somewhere in the sacred core territory of the Turk nation, a sort of Turkic holy land, the area of Mongolia known as Outuken Yish (literally, “forested mountain of the Otuken”).
According to ancient Chinese sources, the cave of the wolf ancestor was a place of sacrifice and ritual.¹ It was probably there that the bizarre coronation rituals of the kagans took place. Riding across the steppe, their long black hair streaming out behind them, their giant mustaches rigid and stiff despite the relentless wind, thousands of Turk noblemen and their families and retainers would have converged on the holy ground. An aura of dust whipped up by countless horses’ hooves and the massive high wheels of heavily laden ox-drawn carts would have begun to envelop the city of round felt tents that had begun to spring up around the sacred cave.
When all had arrived, the new kagan was brought out, held aloft on a large felt rug. He was spun around and thrown into the air nine times, then placed on a horse that he had to ride in a circle nine times. Next he was lifted off the horse, placed upon the ground, and half
strangled with a silken cord. As he gasped for air, his consciousness beginning to alter and reduce, he had to answer one ritual royal question: “How long will you reign?”²
The answer, uttered by the semiconscious kagan-elect, was seen as having divine authority. The assembled multitude may well have seen the reply as emanating from the spirit of the first Ashina or his wolf-mother rather than merely from the mouth of their new monarch. His destiny now mapped out, the silken noose was loosened and the new kagan was free to breathe again and rule for the allotted time.
Although the kagan was the overall ruler of the Turkic empire, he governed in conjunction with a powerful, though technically junior, partner known as the Yabghu. This co-ruler was responsible for governing the whole of the western half of the empire. The first Yabghu was the extraordinarily talented Ashina Turk general who first conquered the 2,500 miles of steppe between Mongolia and the Ukraine. His name was Ishtemi, and as the brother of the first kagan, Bumin, he had almost unchallenged political authority in the Turkic world.
