Marozzi - The Arab Conquests

Detail of the tilework at the Alcazar Royal Palace, Seville Isambard Thomas.

It goes something like this.

A thousand warriors on a thousand horses gallop full tilt across a shimmering horizon. Rolling thunder and a sandstorm stirred up by four thousand hooves mingle with the martial roars of the horsemen. On and on ride the cavalry in a God-given frenzy of conquest. Menace hangs in the air. Date palms wilt in the heat. Now they descend on a ragged, sun-ravaged settlement. Panic shoots through the beleaguered inhabitants, too slow to react, too weak to resist these invading aristocrats of the desert. Sheep and goats bleat, camels bellow in distress. Cries of terror and flashing steel. Women and children scream. Swords whirl, heads roll and lifeless bodies slump to the ground. Blood drains into the desert. There is the briefest of pauses. A few moments to pillage anything of value before the warriors remount their sleek steeds and ride on, a handful of howling women added to their ranks. New triumphs await the Arabian horsemen, and their sons and grandsons, across the farthest horizons on distant continents. In a few generations they will have turned the world upside down.

This childish mise en scne, a clumsy composite of Quran and Boys Own , is how I have always pictured the Arab Conquests. Yet the truth is there is no way of knowing what they were really like. For all the stirring chronicles and accounts, there are virtually no detailed descriptions of battlefield encounters and precious little visual or archaeological evidence to show us what a seventh-century Arab fighter and his equipment actually looked like. The historian, scouring for evidence and vanishingly elusive first-hand accounts, must make do with partial and patchy records, after-the-event history written much later both by the victors, puffed up with pride, and the stricken losers, who have fallen into the apocalypse. There is only so much to go on when peering into the seventh and eighth centuries.

Yet perhaps that lurid, blood-spattered picture is less far-fetched than we might think. It is not so far removed, after all, from the ancient Bedouin poetry that celebrated the time-honoured desert raids on enemy tribes with great gusto. In a typical example of the genre, the poet Amir ibn al Tufayl, a contemporary of the Prophet Mohammed, recalled a lightning attack on his enemies:

We came upon them at dawn with our tall steeds,

lean and sinewy and spears whose steel was

as burning flame

We came upon their host in the morning,

and they were like a flock of sheep on whom

falls the ravening wolf

We fell on them with white steel ground to keenness:

we cut them to pieces until they were destroyed;

And we carried off their women on the saddles behind us,

with their cheeks bleeding, torn in anguish by their nails.

If we have to exercise our imaginations and reconstruct some scenes to picture what really happened, then that is only to be expected when dealing with events that happened in far-off places almost 1,400 years ago. And besides, lest we become too gloomy about the prospects of establishing how the conquests unfolded with some level of confidence, there is much that does not depend on our imaginative powers, much that is absolutely beyond question.

Bedouin tribesmen and their camel caravan travelling in Wadi Rum, Jordan. Surging out of the Arabian deserts to the south, their warrior ancestors spearheaded the Arab Conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries.

Norbert Eisele-Hein/imageBROKER/Shutterstock.

We know, for example, that the Arab Conquests followed immediately after the Prophet Mohammeds death in 632. By this time, against all the odds, he had managed to unite the disparate, forever-feuding tribes of Arabia at the point of his sword. We know, too, that these great conquests lasted until 750, by which time several generations of marauding Arab armies had carved out an Islamic empire which, in terms of size and population, rivalled that of Rome at its zenith, extending from the shores of the Atlantic and the Iberian Peninsula in the west to the snow-bound mountain passes of Central Asia and the borders of China in the east. In the process, they had completely crushed one great empire and hollowed out another.

Ascendant for more than 400 years across Iran, Iraq, swathes of Central Asia, Anatolia and the Caucasus, the Sasanian Empire of Persia breathed its last under the Arab onslaught. In 651, powerless to repel rampant Arab forces swarming across his kingdom, unable to raise an army to protect his disintegrating empire, Yazdgird III was reduced to ignominious flight. After a valiant last stand near the ancient city of Merv, he abandoned his horse with its golden saddle, his mace and his sword in its golden sheath and took refuge on a pile of straw in a watermill. Here the man who revelled in the ancient title of Shahanshah, King of Kings, was treacherously betrayed and fatally stabbed by the miller. This is the way of the deceitful world, wrote the peerless Persian poet Ferdowsi in his epic Shahnameh ( Book of Kings ), raising a man up and casting him down. When fortune was with him, his throne was in the heavens, and now a mill was his lot; the worlds favours are many, but they are exceeded by its poison. It was the end of the Sasanian dynasty and the demise of Irans last pre-Islamic empire. The country would never be the same again.

Further to the west, the Arabs had also ridden roughshod over vast tracts of the Byzantine Empire, seizing control of Egypt, its breadbasket, and North Africa, together with the fabled Holy Land in Syria and Palestine, while the God-fearing residents of Constantinople had trembled at the appearance of successive Arab armies and even a fleet before the citys mighty walls.

We know, in other words, that the Arab Conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries represented one of the greatest feats of arms in history and utterly changed the world both as contemporaries understood it then and as we, with the benefit of fourteen centuries of hindsight, know it today.