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The Umayyad Caliphate was the second of the four major caliphates established after the death of Muhammad. The caliphate was ruled by the Umayyad dynasty. The third caliph of the Rashidun Caliphate, Uthman ibn Affan, was also a member of the Umayyad clan. The family established dynastic, hereditary rule with Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan, long-time governor of al-Sham, who became the sixth caliph after the end of the First Fitna in 661. After Mu'awiyah's death in 680, conflicts over the succession resulted in the Second Fitna, and power eventually fell into the hands of Marwan I from another branch of the clan. The region of Syria remained the Umayyads' main power base thereafter, and Damascus was their capital.
Mu'awiya I was the founder and first caliph of the Umayyad Caliphate, serving from 661 until his death. He became caliph less than thirty years after the death of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and immediately after the four Rashidun ('rightly-guided') caliphs. Unlike his predecessors, who had been close, early companions of Muhammad, Mu'awiya was a relatively late follower of the Islamic prophet.
The Battle of the Yarmuk was a major battle between the army of the Byzantine Empire and the Muslim forces of the Rashidun Caliphate. The battle consisted of a series of engagements that lasted for six days in August 636, near the Yarmouk River, along what are now the borders of Syria–Jordan and Syria–Palestine, southeast of the Sea of Galilee. The result of the battle was a complete Muslim victory that ended Byzantine rule in Syria. The Battle of the Yarmuk is regarded as one of the most decisive battles in military history, and it marked the first great wave of early Muslim conquests after the death of Prophet Muhammad, heralding the rapid advance of Islam into the then-Christian Levant.
The Arab–Byzantine wars were a series of wars between a number of Muslim Arab dynasties and the Byzantine Empire between the 7th and 11th centuries AD. Conflict started during the initial Muslim conquests, under the expansionist Rashidun and Umayyad caliphs, in the 7th century and continued by their successors until the mid-11th century.
The Battle of Ajnadayn was fought in July or August 634, in a location close to Beit Guvrin in present-day Israel; it was the first major pitched battle between the Byzantine (Roman) Empire and the army of the Arab Rashidun Caliphate. The result of the battle was a decisive Muslim victory. The details of this battle are mostly known through Muslim sources, such as the ninth-century historian al-Waqidi.
The Battle of Mu'tah was a battle or skirmish fought in September 629, near the village of Mu'tah, east of the Jordan River and Karak in Karak Governorate, between the forces of Muhammad and the forces of the Byzantine Empire and their Arab Christian vassals.
The Battle of Akroinon was fought at Akroinon or Akroinos in Phrygia, on the western edge of the Anatolian plateau, in 740 between an Umayyad Arab army and the Byzantine forces. The Arabs had been conducting regular raids into Anatolia for the past century, and the 740 expedition was the largest in recent decades, consisting of three separate divisions. One division, 20,000 strong under Abdallah al-Battal and al-Malik ibn Shu'aib, was confronted at Akroinon by the Byzantines under the command of Emperor Leo III the Isaurian r. 717–741) and his son, the future Constantine V. The battle resulted in a decisive Byzantine victory. Coupled with the Umayyad Caliphate's troubles on other fronts and the internal instability before and after the Abbasid Revolt, this put an end to major Arab incursions into Anatolia for three decades.
The Battle of Dathin was a battle during the Arab–Byzantine Wars between the Rashidun Caliphate and the Byzantine Empire in February 634, but became very famous in the literature of the period.
The first Arab siege of Constantinople in 674–678 was a major conflict of the Arab–Byzantine wars, and the first culmination of the Umayyad Caliphate's expansionist strategy towards the Byzantine Empire, led by Caliph Mu'awiya I. Mu'awiya, who had emerged in 661 as the ruler of the Muslim Arab empire following a civil war, renewed aggressive warfare against Byzantium after a lapse of some years and hoped to deliver a lethal blow by capturing the Byzantine capital, Constantinople.
The Muslim conquest of the Levant, also known as the Arab conquest of the Levant, occurred in the first half of the 7th century. This was the conquest of the region known as the Levant or Shaam, later to become the Islamic Province of Bilad al-Sham, as part of the Islamic conquests. Arab Muslim forces had appeared on the southern borders even before the death of Muhammad in 632, resulting in the Battle of Mu'tah in 629, but the real conquest began in 634 under his successors, the Rashidun Caliphs Abu Bakr and Umar ibn Khattab, with Khalid ibn al-Walid as their most important military leader.
Khalid ibn al-Walid ibn al-Mughira al-Makhzumi was an Arab Muslim commander in the service of the Islamic prophet Muhammad and the caliphs Abu Bakr and Umar who played a leading role in the Ridda wars against rebel tribes in Arabia in 632–633 and the early Muslim conquests of Sasanian Iraq in 633–634 and Byzantine Syria in 634–638.
Theodore was the brother of the Byzantine emperor Heraclius, a curopalates and leading general in Heraclius' wars against the Persians and against the Muslim conquest of the Levant.
Julian, Count of Ceuta (Spanish: Don Julián, Conde de Ceuta,, Arabic: يليان, was, according to some sources, a renegade governor, possibly a former comes in Byzantine service in Ceuta and Tangiers who subsequently submitted to the king of Visigothic Spain before secretly allying with the Muslims. According to Arab chroniclers, Julian had an important role in the Umayyad conquest of Hispania, a key event in the history of Islam, and in the subsequent history of what were to become Spain and Portugal.
Walter Emil Kaegi is a historian and scholar of Byzantine History, professor of history at the University of Chicago, and a Voting Member of The Oriental Institute. He received his B.A. from Haverford College in 1959 and his PhD from Harvard University in 1965. He is known for his researches on the period from the fourth through eleventh centuries with a special interest in the advance of Islam, interactions with religion and thought, and military subjects. Kaegi is also distinguished for analyzing the Late Roman period in European and Mediterranean context, and has written extensively on Roman, Vandal, Byzantine and Muslim occupation of North Africa. He is known also as the co-founder of the Byzantine Studies Conference and the editor of the journal Byzantinische Forschungen.
Mu'awiya ibn Hudayj ibn Jafna ibn Qatira al-Tujibi al-Kindi was a general of the Kindah tribe under Muawiyah I in Ifriqiya. He led 10,000 troops in the area of Sousse (Hadrumetum).
The Expedition of Usama bin Zayd was a military expedition of the early Muslim Caliphate led by Usama ibn Zayd that took place in June 632, in which Muslim forces raided Byzantine Syria.
Abu al-A'war Amr ibn Sufyan ibn Abd Shams al-Sulami, identified with the Abulathar or Aboubacharos of the Byzantine sources, was an Arab admiral and general, serving in the armies of the Rashidun caliphs Abu Bakr, Umar and Uthman rejecting the fourth Rashidun caliph Ali, instead serving Umayyad caliph Mu'awiyah.
The Battle of Sufetula took place in 647 between the Arab Muslim forces of the Rashidun Caliphate and the Byzantine Exarchate of Africa.
Sufyān ibn ʿAwf ibn al-Mughaffal al-Azdī al-Ghāmidī was an Arab commander in the service of the Rashidun caliphs Umar and Uthman and the Umayyad caliph Mu'awiya I. He fought as a partisan of Mu'awiya against Caliph Ali during the First Muslim Civil War, leading a raid against the latter's forces in Iraq. Throughout his military career, he was major commander in the wars with the Byzantine Empire. Though the medieval Arabic, Greek and Syriac accounts are not entirely consistent, he most likely was at the head of a large Arab army that was decisively defeated by the Byzantines in 673/74 and was slain during the battle.
Faḍāla ibn ʿUbayd al-Anṣārī was the qadi of Damascus and a commander under the Umayyad caliph Mu'awiya I. The Islamic and Byzantine sources variously report several military campaigns, including a number of naval raids, headed by Fadala between 667/68 and 672. His wintering in Cyzicus has been associated with the first Arab siege of Constantinople. He is generally held to have died as qadi in Damascus in 673 by the Muslim sources, though Khalifa ibn Khayyat places his death in 678/79.
References
- 1 2 Kaegi 2010, p. 180.