The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade (41 page)

B
Y
643,
THE ARMIES OF
I
SLAM
under their commander Umar had conquered more territory, in less time, than any army since Alexander the Great’s. But Umar’s enormous gains ended in 644, when he was stabbed six times by a Persian captive slave as he led morning prayers in Medina. The slave killed himself directly afterwards; Umar died slowly, over several days, which made it possible for him to arrange for a successor. Rather than electing one himself, he appointed a council of six Muslims from Mecca to pick the next caliph.
¹

Once again the supporters of Muhammad’s son-in-law Ali suggested that he be given the title; once again, Ali was passed over. The council selected another of Muhammad’s old companions, Uthman, who was (like them) Meccan and who was (like them) of the Quraysh tribe. In the years since Muhammad’s death, Ali had spent most of his time with non-Quraysh Muslims, and the council wanted to ensure that the Quraysh stayed in control. Tribal loyalties were not yet dead in the
umma
.

As caliph, Uthman began the job of turning the extended conquests into something like a centralized empire. Umar had laid the foundation for an Arabic empire that, like Rome’s, would draw a multiplicity of lands and languages under its banner. But the Arabic empire had sprung up in a matter of years, not over the course of centuries, and there had been no careful assimilation, no granting of citizenship to outsiders who had craved it—there had barely even been time for the Arabs under the banner of Islam to commit themselves to the new idea of empire.

Abu Bakr had provided a shaky cohesion by sending his new converts against the outside enemy. Umar, at the time of his death, had been putting into place an empire-wide hierarchy based on length of service—
saqiba
, “priority in Islam,” giving the highest positions to those who had become Muslim the earliest.
²

Had this continued, converts who persisted would have had the hope of rising to power; faithfulness to Islam over a long period might have provided glue to bind the new conquests to the old. But Uthman was old-school. He planned to keep the entire conquered realm under the tight control of the Quraysh clan—to turn it, in fact, into a fantastically distended mirror of Mecca. This required top-down control. He centered his government in Medina and appointed governors to supervise the outer reaches of the empire; he kept tight hold of the chief governors and military officials, appointing and removing them himself, and they were responsible only to him.

Under his guidance, conquests continued. Arab armies had occupied Alexandria. Now they could use the Alexandrian navy to reinforce their own ground forces. They had gained a grand new power: the use of the sea.
³

The desert hardiness that had allowed them to push through the Makran was matched by a complete ignorance of the water. Umar had been terrified of the sea and had forbidden his armies to use it: “By Him who sent Muhammad with the truth, I shall never send any Muslim upon it,” he had written, at the height of his power. The Arab governor of Syria, Muawiyah, had pleaded with him to change his mind, but he had refused.
⁴

Uthman, on the other hand, granted Muawiyah permission to create a naval force, on condition that he use only volunteers for his sailors. But shaping a sea army from scratch was a slow process. The capture of the Alexandrian fleet catapulted the Arab ability to use the water forward by decades. Muawiyah, now admiral of the Arab navy, began to train his new force to sail across the Mediterranean towards even more distant targets.

Meanwhile, the new Arab governor appointed to run Egypt ordered his men to sack Alexandria and raze its walls. They chose a new city, Fostat (modern Cairo), to be a new capital: a new power in Egypt, a new beginning. A ground force marched from Egypt westward, through the old Roman lands of Libya. They stopped short of Carthage, but the North African towns, both the Romanized ones nearer the coast and the native African ones farther inland, fell under Arab control. The conquered towns paid tribute to the conquerors in slaves; the Arabs called all the natives of northern Africa west of Egypt “Berbers” (a name the Africans did not use for themselves), and the Berber slaves became involuntary recruits to the army—which grew and grew.
⁵

By 649, Muawiyah’s navy was ready to sail. He launched a fleet of seventeen hundred ships and landed on the island of Cyprus, a short trip to the west. Cyprus, which was still in Byzantine hands, fell almost at once.
⁶

The new sea force began to launch raids on Byzantine cities along the coast of Asia Minor. At the same time, a powerful ground force marched through Armenia into the Caucasus Mountains, in a bid to move around the Black Sea and take Constantinople from the north. Constantinople remained the jewel at the end of the quest. Even the North African conquests were ultimately intended to bring the Arab armies to the walls of New Rome: “Only through Spain can Constantinople be conquered,” Uthman had told his commanders.
⁷

But the attempt to circle the Black Sea failed; the Khazars fought back and prevented the Arab armies from passing through.

During all this time, the Persian king Yazdegerd III had been on the run, moving farther east with Arab soldiers behind him and still claiming to rule what remained of Persia. Throughout the 640s he seems to have been in Fars, leading a tiny persistent resistance movement. Towards the end of the decade, Uthman spared a detachment to go in and put the resistance movement down. The soldiers chased Yazdegerd north into the province of Kirman, but the Arab army was caught in a blizzard and froze. “The snow reached the height of a lance,” al-Tabari says. Only the commander, one soldier, and a slave girl survived, the latter because her owner slit open the stomach of a camel and packed her inside it to keep her warm.
⁸

Yazdegerd apparently intended to keep up his resistance, but he hadn’t reckoned with the changed economics of his country. Putting a little more distance between himself and the Arab border, he went down into Sistan, where he ordered the governor to pay the taxes that had not been collected over the past year. The governor indignantly refused, so Yazdegerd travelled north into Khorasan, the last place where he might be able to mount that defense, and demanded shelter for the winter.

But he was still hauling along with him the remnants of his royal court—four thousand or so secretaries, displaced officials, palace staff, and their women and children. There was no way to support that many idle people during winter, in the mountains, in a province cut off from its former trade partners. Instead of turning the king away, the Khorasan governor hired a couple of assassins to solve the problem. The hired killers arrived in the middle of the night and did away with Yazdegerd’s bodyguard. The king himself fled eastward and took shelter with a stonecutter on the banks of the Murghab river. As he slept, exhausted, the stonecutter murdered him and threw his body into the water.
⁹

He had outlived his state and died trying to assert his authority over the corpse. With him, the entire medieval Persian state perished. The Persian empire was no more.

U
THMAN’S ATTEMPTS
to turn his own conquered realm into a state now took a downturn.

The first six years of his tenure as caliph—the years from 644 to 650, which were spent in conquest—had gone well, but the last six years were increasingly difficult. The Arab historians who chronicle his rule say that the turn in his fortunes came when he lost the signet ring of the Prophet. It was made of silver, with “Muhammad, the Messenger of God” engraved on it; Muhammad had used it to seal his correspondence with non-Arabs. It was passed, according to al-Tabari, from Muhammad to Abu Bakr to Umar to Uthman. Uthman was sitting on the edge of a well in Medina when he

41.1: The Arab Empire Expands

The story suggests not only that Uthman’s legitimacy as the proper successor of the Prophet was called into question, but also that it was ultimately shown to be an illusion.

The difficulties were multiple. He had been unable to halt the continual rebellions of the conquered cities in Persia, and the desert-trained Arab armies did not fight well in the mountains of the provinces. There, the Persian aristocracy continued to survive, and Persian religion, language, and practice were carried out almost without interference. To the west, the conquests had not formed any sort of coherent empire: rather, Arab power existed in separated, highly reinforced areas along the North African coast, and communication between those enclaves required that Arab troops keep on conquering and reconquering the connecting areas.
¹¹

Uthman
had
made some steps towards developing an identity for his empire not based solely on swords. He had begun the project of assembling a definitive version of all Muhammad’s teachings. The Prophet did not write; his revelations, or
surahs
, were conveyed orally and recorded by his followers, sometimes in several different forms. With the expansion of the empire, Muslims widely separated in geography were beginning to compile their own collections. There were differences among these local anthologies, and Uthman knew that without a unified sacred book, the extension of the empire had the potential to destroy the Islamic identity of those within it.

But this was a strategy that took time and a certain amount of peace to accomplish. Even once a definitive Qur’an was assembled, it had to be copied and then taken to the outskirts of the empire—and half of the time, those were inaccessible because of war.

Discontent with Uthman’s rule grew. Revolt in the outlying conquered areas broke out on a regular basis. Uthman sent his governors the message that they should “maintain stringent control of those under their authority” and “keep the people tied up on campaigns” in order to keep them out of trouble. This made things even worse. Strong authority would not have been resented in Byzantium, or Persia, or even the kingdoms of the Franks. But Uthman was supposed to be one Muslim among brothers; he was not supposed to be a king. By 654, al-Tabari says, Uthman’s enemies were writing to each other, planning to meet together and confront him with his inadequacies.
¹²

Actual revolt began in the city of Kufa, on the western bank of the Euphrates. It had been founded by Arabs as military headquarters for the conquest of Persia and had since grown into a large and bustling Muslim city. Its Arab population had emigrated to the city from all over Arabia. But under Uthman’s policies, only Quraysh were promoted into positions of power (and Uthman showed a particular preference for members of his own clan, the Banu Umayya). Resentment deepened when Uthman ordered the city to send all of its surplus revenue to Medina, for use by the Arabs there.

At this point, Ali ibn Abu Talib, son-in-law of Muhammad, reappeared on the scene, commissioned by a group of discontent Muslims to speak to Uthman on their behalf. He, like Uthman, was in Medina, the seat of the highly centralized government that Uthman relied on; the point of conflict was the appointment of one Abn ‘Amir, a relative of Uthman but a man unpopular with many, to a high position in city government in Kufa. “If I have favored kinsmen,” snapped Uthman, “what have I done wrong?” Ali answered, “You have been weak and easygoing with your relatives.” “They are your relatives as well,” Uthman said, and Ali retorted, “They are closely related to me, but merit is found in others.”
¹³

Ali remained the spokesman for the disenfranchised. The year after, in 655, the people of Kufa deposed the unpopular governor. Arab rebels from Kufa marched on Medina and besieged Uthman in his house. They were joined by men from Medina who were bitter over Uthman’s partiality to his own Banu Umayya clan.

Uthman appealed to Ali ibn Abu Talib to intercede with the people on his behalf. Ali, after talking with Uthman, agreed to tell the people that in three days, Uthman would meet all of their complaints by doing “justice, whether it be against himself or anyone else, and that he will abandon everything that you detest”: