With thanks to @Practical Lobster and Chris Stewart of the History of China podcast and Chehrazad and Zam from Sufficientvelocity.com.
Inelid Qaghanate § Background
In the year 628, Khusro II was overthrown and killed by various factions of the Eranian nobility, including his son Sheroe, the Ispabudhan spahbed Färrukh Haurmizd and his son Rustäm Färrukhzad, the Mihranid Shährwäraz, the Armenian Varaztirots II Bagratuni, and the Känaräng Kandbak. Sheroe became Emperor Käwad II, and had all of his brothers and half-brothers executed. A few months later, Käwad II died in the devastating Plague of Sheroe, and his son Ärdäshier III became Emperor. Shährwäraz, along with the Parsieg factional leader Peroz Khusro and the Nemrozi spahbed Namdar Gushnäsp, overthrew and executed him, but was executed in turn by Färrukh Haurmizd, who installed Käwad II’s sister and wife [1] Boran I as Empress. Boran I was then deposed (but not killed) by the general Shahpuhr son of Shährwäraz, who was almost immediately deposed and killed by Färrukh Haurmizd, who installed Azärmiegdukht (another sister of Käwad II and Boran I) as Empress. However, shortly thereafter, Färrukh Haurmizd was killed by Quraysh and Taghlibid forces under Khālid ibn al-Walīd, who raided Mesopotamia. Azärmiegdukht, although ruling in Tisfon, was not recognised by the Pähläwieg noble houses, with the exception of House Mihran and House Suren. When Rustäm Färrukhzad marched an army from Khwarasan to get revenge on the Arabs, he first stopped by in Tisfon to depose Azärmiegdukht and reinstall her sister Boran, who had more approval among the Pähläwieg nobility.
Boran I ruled well, implementing just laws, lowering taxes, repairing infrastructure, establishing diplomatic connections, and successfully assuaging political factionalism to enough of an extent that she was able to call on both Parsieg and Pähläwieg forces during the Arab invasions. However, Eran was still too crippled to resist, and over the course of the 640s and early 650s, Mesopotamia was lost, with much of its treasures and population being moved to the Iranian plateau. However, from this point onwards, the Arab conquests ran out of momentum, and Boran I’s successor, Ärdäshier III’s son Yäzdgird III, was able to stabilise the state, bringing in line all of the Parthian houses except Ispabudhan, gaining support from the rising Táng [唐] empire, and campaigning successfully against the Tokhara Yabghus and the Arabs in the Caucasus. However, following his assassination in 672, the factional rifts reappeared, and Persia fell once again into civil strife, and all Sassanid emperors after Yäzdgird III would be subject to the intrigues of Parsieg and Pähläwieg nobles, Seric generals, and Turkic khans… [2]
ROME: From City to Empire to City Again (Angelo Trapanesco)
Although Heraclius I had managed to defeat the Sassanids and reclaim the eastern provinces, Romania was in a more dire situation than it had been at any point since the Crisis of the Third Century.
The Haemus was undefended against the Slavic tribes, and rapidly collapsed, with only Thessalonica, a strip of Thrace, and some coastal towns not being lost. In Egypt, Syria, and Osrhoene, an entire generation had grown up under Persian rule. Miaphysites had worshipped free of government interference. Many of Anatolia’s cities lay in ruins. Plague stalked the land. The state was nearly bankrupt. Mercenaries, many of whom were Arabs, dissatisfied with the prospect of returning to civilian life, turned to banditry and smuggling.
Heraclius I sought to unify Christendom, promulgating a doctrine which claimed that Christ had two natures but one energy, a compromise known as monotheletism. It found little ground on either side of the religious divide. Additionally, he issued an edict ordering the Jews of the empire to convert to Christendom, although it appears not to have been enforced at any level outside of Africa, which only served to increase Jewish discontent to an even greater extent…
The End of Antiquity (Márk Halas)
In the 620s, the Quraysh were almost certainly the strongest power in intermontane Southwest Asia [3]. The Romans and Sassanids were exhausted from a 26-year-long war, and the latter suffered from a four-year-long war on top of that. The Lakhmid Malkate, the most powerful Arab state prior to the war, had been destroyed by Shah Khusro II, while its western counterpart, the Ghassānid Malikate, had been hollowed out. Aksum, which had owned the Himyaar, had been expelled by the Eranians around 570, and its attempts to regain control over the Himyaar and the Hadhramut had met little success. Meanwhile, the Quraysh had defeated their rivals in the area during the Fiqar Wars, and stood as one of three significant powers in the Hedjaz, the others being alliance networks centred around the Banū Ghatāfan in the north and the Banū Thaqīf in the south. [4]
The military aspects of the rise of Arab power in the early 600s are quite clear. In the mid-620s, the Banu Ghatāfan seized the oasis city of Yathrib [5], and this was responded to with war by the Quraysh. The forces of the Quraysh fought the Ghatāfanids eight times, and five of those times, they were led by Khālid ibn al-Walīd al-Makhzūmī. The Quraysh won, and then went south and defeated the Banū Thaqīf and their allies, unifying the Hedjaz, and afterwards allied with the Banū Taghlib and moved on to the Lakhm. In late 630, Khālid ibn al-Walīd’s forces defeated and killed the Eranian general Färrukh Haurmizd, and then crossed the Euphrates and pillaged Mesopotamia until the arrival of a superior Eranian force, at which point they returned to the Lakhm. After that, the Arabs invaded Syria in several groups. Arab forces invaded from the south, defeating the Ghassānid (who were suffering from a civil war), while Khālid ibn al-Walīd’s force came out of the desert from the east, seizing Palmyra before converging with the other armies in Busra, where Khālid took over general command of the Arab forces and set up an operational headquarters. By this point, he was (or at least was claiming to be) a Miaphysite Christian. The Arabs continued to take cities in Syria until the Roman Emperor Heyrákleios I sent the only remaining Roman field army to defeat them in 636, coordinating with the Sassanid Empire.
Khālid concentrated the entire Arab army in Syria at Jābiya, starting a standoff against the Romans. The Arabs then retreated to the Yarmouk river, where their cavalry could be used more effectively. After a month-long standoff, a battle began. The Arabs won decisively, routing the Roman army, and essentially collapsing all resistance south of the Euphrates, and Khālid’s forces offered him the crown. He refused, but his men insisted, and in the end, Khālid’s son ʿAbd al-Raḥmān was given the title of Malik of Maliks, with lesser Maliks being given rule over Meshan, Asoristan, Khwarwaran, and Cilicia. Afterwards, Khālid fought against the Eranians, defeating an Eranian army before crossing the Euphrates and besieging Tisfon. The siege was, however, broken, and the situation in Mesopotamia turned into a stalemate. The Arab forces lacked sufficient power to decisively defeat the Eranians, but the Eranians were unable to drive the Arabs out. This situation lasted until the reappearance of the Plague forced the Arabs to retreat in 638. The next several years saw a standoff at the Euphrates, with Arab forces controlling the areas to the west south of the Taurus Mountains. Another Arab force under ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ al-Sahmī entered Egypt in 639, and finished the conquest of most of it by 641, barring a small area in the south around the city of Aswan, which was instead seized by the kingdom of Makuria, the northernmost vassal of the Aksumites.
From 642 to 646, the self-proclaimed prophets Maslama and Sajah unified the tribes of Yamamma under what would become a new religion and then went on to conquer the southern Lakhm, Oman, and the Hadhramut, while the Quraysh conquered the Himyaar and Aden. 644 also saw the resumption of regular Arab raids into Mesopotamia, which were not enough to seriously threaten conquest, but continued to make the reconstruction of Mesopotamia impossible. The situation turned even further against the Eranians in 649, when Syria and the Hadiyun Imamate simultaneously launched attacks on Mesopotamia, lead by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān and Maslama themselves, overwhelming the Eranian forces in the region and forcing them beyond the Tigris except in parts of Khwarwaran. In 651, the Qurayshi general Muʿāwiya ibn Abī Sufyān invaded Armenia; although this first invasion was repelled, he returned in 653, and this time successfully conquered it. In 653, the combined forces of the Imamate and Umayyad Armenia successfully besieged Tisfon, but Maslama was killed during the final stages of the battle, and the army’s order collapsed into a disorderly sack, resulting in brawling between Imamate and Umayyad forces, which allowed the Eranians to briefly retake the city. Fighting between Imamate and Umayyad forces continued until Sajah and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān arrived to calm the situation down. In the end, four more kingdoms were created in Mesopotamia: Taghlibid Osrhoene, Thaqīfid Meshan, Hāshimid Asoristan, and Fihrid Khwarwaran. All of these were nominally vassals to Makhzumid Syria, but the former two were ruled by adherents of Hanaf.
Seeing that Mesopotamia was now attacked from the north, west, and south, Boran I ordered that the lands east of the Tigris and west of Khuzestan and the Zagros be abandoned, stripped of valuables, and their populations moved to the Iranian plateau, similarly to how Heyrákleios I had abandoned Cilicia.
After this, the Arab conquests largely ran out of momentum. The only further gains that would be made by Arab states during the century of Arab hegemony would be the remaining Eranian territories west of the Zagros (gained during the succession crisis that followed the assassination of Yäzdgird III), some marginal territories in Africa ruled by Sahmid Egypt from the 660s to the 700s, and the establishment of outposts in the Horn of Aethiopia [6] …
… The political situation, on the other hand, is less clear, in part because we do not know what Arab governance looked like beforehand. There are three main schools of thought. The “orthodox” view is that Makhzumid Syria practiced a fairly standard form of Arab kingship, merely on a larger scale and supported by the Roman bureaucracy, while Maslama and Sajahs’ prophetic state was unprecedented. However, there are some inconsistencies between this story and the historical record. The first challenge to it comes from the Wisdom of Maslama and the Khatam themselves, which both refer to ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I as the “Malik of Rome, born in Makkāh”. Although this apparent error is typically justified as referring to “Rome” as an area of land rather than some sort of statement that ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I was a Roman Emperor, the latter interpretation is far less ludicrous than it might at first seem. Khālid ibn al-Walīd’s procession through the streets of Busra after the victory over the Persians and ‘Amr I’s after the fall of Alexandria, as described in the Grand Collected Historical Record of Eran, was clearly based on Belisarius’ Triumph, and many other ceremonies of state appear to have been based off of Roman ones. The opposing camp, therefore, believes that Sajah and Maslamas’ claims of prophecy were merely an Abrahamised extension of Arabian shamanic tradition, while Makhzumid Syria was more Roman than Arab. A variant of this position, most famously expounded by Yīlú Guǎn'ēn, claims that, although Maslama and Sajahs’ prophetic claims were not unusual, their state and ideology were also heavily Hellenised…
A New History of Romania (Yīlú Guǎn'ēn[伊婁 管恩]) [7]
In occidental studies, the Dark Ages is a term used to refer to the period from the mid-400s to the late 700s in western Oecumenia [8], from the mid-600s to the mid-800s in eastern Oecumenia, from the early 600s to the mid-700s in Mesopotamia, and from the early 600s to the late 700s in Persia; this name comes from the scarcity of textual and inscriptional sources from this time period and the deurbanisation that occurred during this period. No time during this period, though, is darker than the period stretching from the last Roman-Sassanid war through around 680, in part due to the severe mythologisation of this period. No histories of eastern Oecumenia survive from between around 630 to around 760, and, by that point, mythologisation had truly set in. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Khālid, ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ, and Muʿāwiya ibn Abī Sufyān are viewed as the restorers of Syria, Egypt, and Armenia, respectively, and (with the exception of Muʿāwiya) as model kings, and Maslama and Sajah as prophets.
The only histories for this time period that avoid this issue are Northern Romanian and Perso-Turkic ones. However, our only surviving Northern Romanian sources for this time period are from the 800s, and give little information of the Arabs beyond military movements. We have better Perso-Turkic sources: the Grand Collected Historical Record of Eran was completed in the mid-700s, and references (mostly lost) Sassanid documentation. However, it, too, focuses almost entirely on the affairs of Persia and the steppe, and largely disregards the Arab-ruled states, although it does provide a substantial amount of information on the Arab administration of Mesopotamia and Khuzestan, and descriptions of some ceremonies in the Southern Romanian Empire and in the Hadiyun Imamate. What can we learn about these states, then? It is clear that both the Southern Romanian Empire and the Hadiyun Imamate retained the bureaucracies of the Romans and the Persians in the areas they controlled - this is most notable in Khuzestan, which was taken from the Eranians by the Southern Romanians in the 650s, retaken by the Sassanids in the 660s, conquered by the Hadiyun Imamate in the 670s, and finally conquered by the Eranians again in the 720s, and yet did not see any substantial change in its bureaucratic organisation. Mesopotamia saw a greater degree of change, but only because it suffered more from the wars of the Dark Ages.
The Southern Romanian Empire under the Makhzumids consisted of a core region of Syria, Ghassania, and Osrhoene[9]. It also maintained a network of vassal states, these being the Malikates of Kairouan, Egypt, Armenia, Osrhoene, Khwarwaran, Asoristan, and Meshan. From 642 onwards, many of these states were additionally vassals of the Imamate.
Of the original set of Arab Maliks who reigned under ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Khālid, the one whose biography is the most ascertainable is ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ, as he left inscriptions bearing biographical details, and because Egypt suffered much less destruction of records. He was born in or around Makkah; his father was a wealthy merchant of the Quraysh, while his mother was a slave. Working as a merchant, he had traveled to Egypt multiple times before 636, as well as to Axum, where he had converted to Miaphysite Christianity. By the time he invaded Egypt, he understood the Egyptian language[10] and Egyptian ways; he was an Egyptian to the Egyptians and an Arab to the Arabs, and as such was well-suited to rule over both. In addition, he was an effective military leader, using settled Arab, Bedouin, Syrian, and Egyptian troops in a carefully-coordinated manner and taking maximal advantage when Romanian forces made mistakes.
In 642, he began the construction of the city of Fustat, modern Yeraray[11]. “Fustat” literally means “the Tents”, as it was the location of a major Arab ordou[12]. The tents were replaced by brick and stone buildings, and a cathedral was built there; although originally fairly small and sparsely decorated, it would be expanded to twice its original size by ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAmr, and towers would be added. ‘Amr also commissioned the construction of two cathedrals in or near Alexandria, neither of which survive to the present, and the renovation of Coptic monasteries in the Valley of Natron.
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I was the son of the decorated general Khālid ibn al-Walīd and the Khathʿamid poet Asma bint Anas, and was installed by Khālid as Malik of Syria and Malik of Maliks in the year 636. He distinguished himself both in administration and in warfare, campaigning against the Romanians in person seven times over the course of his reign, and, like ‘Amr ibn al-As, was known as a patron of the Miaphysite church. He also worked to repopulate many cities, especially coastal ones.
Although it is difficult to say anything bad about his reign while he was alive, ‘Abd al-Rahman I failed in one crucial way: he did not establish a stable succession policy, and, upon his death in 666, Makhzumid Syria fell into civil war between his son Khālid II and his brother Muhājir. Muhājir was initially winning, but Khālid II prayed before a copy of the Khatam and repeated that there was no God but God and the Khatams were the word of God, and with that received the support of the Hadiyun Imamate, and went on to win the war. The Malikates of Osrhoene, Asoristan and Meshan were annexed into the Imamate (as the Malik of Meshan succeeded to the position of Imam, the Malik of Osrhoene had been named, presumably by Sajah, as “Supervisor of Readers”, a position we have no information about the role of, and the Malik of Asoristan had supported Muhājir and been deposed). The remaining Malikates (Kairouan, Egypt, Armenia, and Khwarwaran) additionally became vassals to the Imamate rather than to Syria.
Muʿāwiya ibn Abī Sufyān was a member of the Banu Umayya, one of the three leading tribes of the Quraysh. His father was a merchant who frequently traveled to Syria. He rose through the ranks rapidly during Khālid I’s wars, and was made military governor of Cilicia. In 651 and again in 653, he personally led wars against the Byzantines alongside his brother Yazīd, who had had a navy built. In 651, Yazīd seized three islands in the Aegean, while Muʿāwiya invaded Armenia. His invasion was successful, but the next year, the puppet king he installed on the throne defected to the Romans, who also retook those islands which had been occupied by Yazīd’s forces. Muʿāwiya invaded Armenia again in 653, this time successfully. He was appointed as Malik of Armenia, while Yazīd was reassigned to Cyrenaica. During the mid-650s, Muʿāwiya additionally conquered Nakhchavan and Mardastan from the Sassanians, invaded the kingdom of Iveria and kingdom(?) of Colchis, and had his lieutenant Ḥabīb ibn Maslama al-Fihrī established as the king of Khwarwaran. However, from this point, the historical record dries up: It is known that he participated on neither side of the Makhzumid civil war in 666, instead fighting against the Romans, being defeated, and losing some land, that he reclaimed this land in the early 680s, and that he died in 684, but most documentation pertaining to his life was lost due to the sacking of several Armenian cities during the Second Fitna and its aftermath.
Maslama and Sajah originated from, respectively, the Banu Hanifa and Banu Taghlib tribes. The Banu Hanifa was a settled Samaritan Arab tribe that inhabited eastern Yamamma, while the Banu Taghlib was a Christian Bedu nomadic tribe that inhabited the lands south of the Euphrates west of the Lakhmids. Both of these tribes’ histories have been heavily mythologised: official histories from the 700s describe the Banu Hanifa as having been descended from followers of Moses who remained in Arabia when he and his followers returned to Israel after (according to Ihnafic and Arabian Jewish tradition) 50 years of ruling Arabia as Malik of Maliks; these same histories describe the Banu Taghlib as having been the first Arabian tribe to convert to Christianity, and as being the descendants of occulted Pythagoreans who fled into Arabia to avoid persecution by the Antiochus IV. All of these can be dismissed out of hand, other than perhaps the claim that the Banu Taghlib was the first Arab tribe to convert to Christianity, which is plausible, albeit unlikely.
About Maslama’s early life almost nothing is known, other than that he was born in the 600s or early 610s, became a shaman-doctor, and already had another wife at the time he married Sajah. Traditional accounts claim that he was born in 602 and began to receive revelations from God in 628, but these years correspond too closely with the beginning and end of the last Roman-Sassanid war to be useful. Official histories claim that he was literate, and the Kitāb al-ʿIlal, assuming it is authentic, supports this.
Sajah’s early life is described more thoroughly in the official histories. It is claimed that she was the only literate woman in the Banu Taghlib (something which is entirely plausible - literacy rates among nomadic Bedu were extremely low even among men), that she was knowledgeable in many languages (it is certain that she was literate in both Arabic and Greek; assuming that the Kitāb al-ʿIlal was authentic, one can add Hebrew and Syriac to that list.), and that she was taught to read and write by visions of the angel Elaios. It is also claimed that she was the last inductee into the Pythagorean mysteries, which is obviously false, and that she also became a shaman-doctor, which is certainly true. It is claimed that she received prophetic visions from a young age, but did not know what they were until she heard of Maslama’s declaration of prophecy in 638. From the initial Arab invasion of Mesopotamia in 630-631 up through the second Arab invasion in 637, Sajah lived among the component of the Banu Taghlib which lived in the borderlands between Osrhoene and Khwarwaran. It is presumable that she learned about Hermeticism during this period, though there is little that is actually Hermetic in her writings; most teachings of Sajah attributed to the Pythagoreans or Elaios are more likely to have come from Arab shamanic tradition and been attributed to these figures for added legitimacy.
It is said that Maslama revealed himself as a prophet in 638, when he was able to cure victims of the Plague of Aswan (or, in some more plausible versions, able to prevent plague through proper rituals), and afterwards declared himself as a prophet and began a campaign to unify the tribes of the Yamamma. After hearing of Maslama’s prophetic claims, Sajah (who had apparently performed the same miracles) realised that she was also a prophet, and went out to join forces with him; she supposedly left with 40 men, but by the time she arrived in the city of Yamamma, she had an army of 4000 and the backing of the Quraysh. After entering the city, she destroyed the idols and delivered a poetic speech decrying the idols and praising the One God; this is sometimes identified as the Empty Desert Sutra[13], but that was far more likely to have been delivered in the Hedjaz in the 650s, as it has a far more developed and Hellenised philosophy than would be reasonable for Sajah to have at the time, and names pagan gods that were more prominent in the Hedjaz.
From 638 to 646 in the traditional dating (I suspect this time period was shorter), Sajah and Maslama unified the tribes of Yamamma, southern Lakhm, Maxan, Uman, and the Hadhramut [14] into a single state, which they ruled for three years before beginning a jihad against the Persians in collaboration with the Quraysh, Syrians, and Armenians. Apparently, early on in the jihad, Maslama took upon himself the title of Taheb (Messiah), and granted to Sajah the title of Muhdiy (Divine Guide)[15]. After this, Maslama started claiming moral perfection and demanding his followers worship him in a manner akin to a god, which Sajah opposed, claiming that this was a form of idolatry, and would lead to Maslama being arbitrated against by God[16]. The Arab forces defeated the Persians, but in the siege of the Persian capital of Tesifon, Maslama was killed and the situation fell into a disorganised sack, leading to a brief conflict between Yamamman and Umayyad forces, which was ended through the intervention of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I, Muʿāwiya I, and Sajah. From this point onwards, Sajah became the sole leader of her movement. Sajah had two of her close allies (Dawūd ibn ‘Abd al-Malik[17], a member of the Banu Taghlib, and ʿĀmir ibn Jazʾ, the supposed first convert to Ihnaf from Yemen, respectively) installed as the Maliks of Khwarwaran and Meshan. From this point onwards, Sajah essentially became the hegemon-king of intermontane southwest Asia, although she continued to acknowledge ʿAbd al-Raḥmān’s nominal rule over the area. If the Kitāb al-ʿIlal is authentic, it is likely that it was written during the mid-650s.
In the late 650s, the Quraysh polity in the Hedjaz collapsed into civil war for unknown reasons, and Sajah used this to take over the Hedjaz and Himyaar, with ʿAbd al-Raḥmān being powerless to stop this.
In 661, Sajah wrote the Khatam, the holy book of Ihnaf. It was her third long-form work that is known of, the others being the Kitāb al-ʿIlal (although the identification of the received Kitab al-‘Ilal as Sajah’s is disputed) and the Empty Desert Sutra. Under her supervision, it was copied either seven or ten times. In 664, by the traditional dating, she named the third Malik of Meshan, Ziyād ibn Abīhi, as her successor. After this, she vanished into the desert with a small number of companions, mostly from the Banu Taghlib and Banu Hanifa, and did not return; hadith claim that some other members of the Banu Taghlib and Banu Murād buried Sajah at an undisclosed location and erected memorial steles for them, which they then hid with magic to prevent the sites from being used as icons…
ROME: From City to Empire to City Again (Angelo Trapanesco)
… Heraclius died in 641, leaving his 29-year-old son Constantinus and his 15-year-old son Heraclonas as co-emperor. However, Constantine III died of tuberculosis shortly afterwards. Foul play was alleged, and, following a tense standoff, Heraclonas and his mother were deposed and disfigured. Constantine III’s 14-year-old son Constans was crowned Emperor. During this chaos, Egypt fell completely, and the next year, Cyrenaica fell, too. Constans II attempted to retake Egypt in 644. Although the Romanians managed to retake Alexandria, ‘Amr ibn al-As [18] defeated them in battle once again, and the Romanians retreated across the Mediterranean. The Arab forces in Syria, meanwhile, launched constant attacks against the Romanians. In 648, the Arabs conquered Osrhoene and raided deep into Africa, and in 649, the Arab fleet attacked Crete. In 651, the Arab general Mu‘Awiya invaded Armenia unsuccessfully; a second attempt in 653 succeeded, though. Also in 653, Constans II had the Patriarch of Rome, Martin I (St. Martin the Confessor), arrested and exiled to Khersonesus for his condemnation of monotheletism. Likely in the 650s, Constans II created the theme system, dividing the Romanian military into several regional commands. By the end of his reign, there would be seven land themes (namely, the Opsikion (in northwestern Anatolia), Thrakesion (somewhat confusingly in southwestern Anatolia rather than Thrace), Anatolikon (in southeastern Anatolia), Kappadokiakon (in northeastern Anatolia), Armeniakon (in Armenia), Kolkhiakon (in Kolkhis), Sikiliakon (in Sicily)) as well as a naval theme, the Kibyrraioton. [19]
From 662 to 663, Constans II campaigned against the Slavs of the Balkans, marching from Constantinople to Athens and regaining control over the coast roads in Greece, before leaving for southern Italy, where he campaigned against the Lombards, to no avail. He spent the next three years based out of Sicily.
Constans II returned to Anatolia in 666 upon the beginning of the Mazkhzumid civil war; after regaining control of Cilicia proper but being stymied in his attempt at reconquering Antioch, he launched campaigns into Armenia in concert with Yazdgird III, which succeeded in gaining at least some territory in Armenia as well as Colchis and the vassalage of Iberia. After a brief stay in Constantinople, he resumed campaigns against the Slavs in the Balkans, resettling many of them into Anatolia. In 671, after a brief stay in Constantinople, he returned to Italy, campaigning against the Lombards once again, and forcing the vassalage of the Duchy of Benevento while the Lombards were embroiled in a succession crisis. However, in 673, Constans II was forced to return to Anatolia due to renewed attacks from the south and east. He defeated an invasion by Mu’awiya’s forces, but a simultaneous strike by Khalid II was able to penetrate deep into Anatolia, possibly besieging Constantinople, before retreating (Romanian sources claim that this was a repelled invasion, while Arab and Syrian sources claim it was a successful raid.)
However, while Constans II was reigning, another power was forming to Romania’s north. The Avar empire had gone into decline after its failed siege of Constantinople in 626. The khan Kubrat unified the “Three-Bulgars”, the Onogurs, Kutrigurs, and Utigurs [20], into a single political entity, the Danube Bulgar Empire, and vassalised the nearby Slavic tribes. Under his successor, Asparukh, they moved south, crossing the Danube into Thracia in the 670s. In 680, Constans II decided to do something about this threat, and led his army into battle against them. It is unknown what occurred, but whatever happened, it ended in an absolute rout, with Constans II being killed and his army destroyed. A contingent of the Bulgar army arrived outside of Constantinople before the remnants of the Roman army and pillaged its suburbs, parading Constans II’s head on a pike outside the Theodosian Walls, but never seriously attempted to give siege. Meanwhile, the bulk of the Bulgar army destroyed the remaining demoralised and isolated Romanian forces in the Balkans east of the Strymon river. The city of Adrianopolis was sacked, and its population moved to the new city of Asparukhopolis [21]. Meanwhile, the situation in Constantinopolis degraded: the Emperor, Constantine IV, was badly ill, and, though he wished to pass the throne to his son Theodosius, but his younger brothers Heraclius and Tiberius had other ideas…
[1] … Yeah, the Sassanids were like that.
[2] I am romanising from Middle Persian, rendering short a as "ä", long a as "a", short e as "ai", long e as "e", short o as "au", long o as "o", short i as "i", long i as "ie", short u as "u", and long u as "ou".
[3] i.e. between the Taurus and Zagros.
[4] I follow the idea that the Quraysh were already a major power that controlled most of the Hedjaz before Muhammad IOTL. I also think that it is likely that Muhammad died in 637 or 638 from the Plague of Amwas and that the Ridda wars took place from 638-642.
[5] Medina.
[6] ITTL, “Aethiopia” refers to Africa, “Abyssinia” refers to Ethiopia, and “Africa” refers to the Maghreb.
[7] Mandarin had different sound changes from Middle Chinese ITTL - the reasons for this will become clear eventually. I have a rough outline of Chinese history ITTL up through the early 1500s.
[8] “Oecumenia” = “the Mediterranean world”.
[9] Basically OTL present-day Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, southeastern Turkey (beyond the Euphrates), and the Ha’il.
[10] Arabic does not displace Coptic in the Nile basin ITTL, so there’s no need to specify “Coptic”
[11] Cairo, from Coptic “Ier a Rē” (Eye of the Sun).
[12] ITTL, “ordou” is loaned into western languages to mean “tent city”.
[13] ITTL, Arabic “sūrah” and Syriac “surṭā” were historically assumed to be cognates or loans of “sutra”, and are typically translated to “sutra”.
[14] Yamamma = Najd, Lakhm = Kuwait and al-Ahsa, Maxan = Qatar and the UAE, Himyaar = northern/OTL Zaidi Yemen, Hadhramut = southern/OTL Sunni Yemen.
[15] The OTL term “Mahdī” seems to be a corruption of this form.
[16] If this reminds you of Khawarij, that’s not a coincidence.
[17] An “OC”.
[18] This is a pop-history work, and so accents are omitted.
[19] Note that the OTL Armeniakon is called the Kappadokiakon ITTL, and the addition of the Sicilian, Colchian, and actual!Armenian themes.
[20] I follow the view that the Bulgars of Kuber came from Avar vassals breaking off, and not a migration from “Old Great Bulgaria”, whose existence I am highly skeptical off.
[21] Silistre, Romania.
Inelid Qaghanate § Background
In the year 628, Khusro II was overthrown and killed by various factions of the Eranian nobility, including his son Sheroe, the Ispabudhan spahbed Färrukh Haurmizd and his son Rustäm Färrukhzad, the Mihranid Shährwäraz, the Armenian Varaztirots II Bagratuni, and the Känaräng Kandbak. Sheroe became Emperor Käwad II, and had all of his brothers and half-brothers executed. A few months later, Käwad II died in the devastating Plague of Sheroe, and his son Ärdäshier III became Emperor. Shährwäraz, along with the Parsieg factional leader Peroz Khusro and the Nemrozi spahbed Namdar Gushnäsp, overthrew and executed him, but was executed in turn by Färrukh Haurmizd, who installed Käwad II’s sister and wife [1] Boran I as Empress. Boran I was then deposed (but not killed) by the general Shahpuhr son of Shährwäraz, who was almost immediately deposed and killed by Färrukh Haurmizd, who installed Azärmiegdukht (another sister of Käwad II and Boran I) as Empress. However, shortly thereafter, Färrukh Haurmizd was killed by Quraysh and Taghlibid forces under Khālid ibn al-Walīd, who raided Mesopotamia. Azärmiegdukht, although ruling in Tisfon, was not recognised by the Pähläwieg noble houses, with the exception of House Mihran and House Suren. When Rustäm Färrukhzad marched an army from Khwarasan to get revenge on the Arabs, he first stopped by in Tisfon to depose Azärmiegdukht and reinstall her sister Boran, who had more approval among the Pähläwieg nobility.
Boran I ruled well, implementing just laws, lowering taxes, repairing infrastructure, establishing diplomatic connections, and successfully assuaging political factionalism to enough of an extent that she was able to call on both Parsieg and Pähläwieg forces during the Arab invasions. However, Eran was still too crippled to resist, and over the course of the 640s and early 650s, Mesopotamia was lost, with much of its treasures and population being moved to the Iranian plateau. However, from this point onwards, the Arab conquests ran out of momentum, and Boran I’s successor, Ärdäshier III’s son Yäzdgird III, was able to stabilise the state, bringing in line all of the Parthian houses except Ispabudhan, gaining support from the rising Táng [唐] empire, and campaigning successfully against the Tokhara Yabghus and the Arabs in the Caucasus. However, following his assassination in 672, the factional rifts reappeared, and Persia fell once again into civil strife, and all Sassanid emperors after Yäzdgird III would be subject to the intrigues of Parsieg and Pähläwieg nobles, Seric generals, and Turkic khans… [2]
ROME: From City to Empire to City Again (Angelo Trapanesco)
Although Heraclius I had managed to defeat the Sassanids and reclaim the eastern provinces, Romania was in a more dire situation than it had been at any point since the Crisis of the Third Century.
The Haemus was undefended against the Slavic tribes, and rapidly collapsed, with only Thessalonica, a strip of Thrace, and some coastal towns not being lost. In Egypt, Syria, and Osrhoene, an entire generation had grown up under Persian rule. Miaphysites had worshipped free of government interference. Many of Anatolia’s cities lay in ruins. Plague stalked the land. The state was nearly bankrupt. Mercenaries, many of whom were Arabs, dissatisfied with the prospect of returning to civilian life, turned to banditry and smuggling.
Heraclius I sought to unify Christendom, promulgating a doctrine which claimed that Christ had two natures but one energy, a compromise known as monotheletism. It found little ground on either side of the religious divide. Additionally, he issued an edict ordering the Jews of the empire to convert to Christendom, although it appears not to have been enforced at any level outside of Africa, which only served to increase Jewish discontent to an even greater extent…
The End of Antiquity (Márk Halas)
In the 620s, the Quraysh were almost certainly the strongest power in intermontane Southwest Asia [3]. The Romans and Sassanids were exhausted from a 26-year-long war, and the latter suffered from a four-year-long war on top of that. The Lakhmid Malkate, the most powerful Arab state prior to the war, had been destroyed by Shah Khusro II, while its western counterpart, the Ghassānid Malikate, had been hollowed out. Aksum, which had owned the Himyaar, had been expelled by the Eranians around 570, and its attempts to regain control over the Himyaar and the Hadhramut had met little success. Meanwhile, the Quraysh had defeated their rivals in the area during the Fiqar Wars, and stood as one of three significant powers in the Hedjaz, the others being alliance networks centred around the Banū Ghatāfan in the north and the Banū Thaqīf in the south. [4]
The military aspects of the rise of Arab power in the early 600s are quite clear. In the mid-620s, the Banu Ghatāfan seized the oasis city of Yathrib [5], and this was responded to with war by the Quraysh. The forces of the Quraysh fought the Ghatāfanids eight times, and five of those times, they were led by Khālid ibn al-Walīd al-Makhzūmī. The Quraysh won, and then went south and defeated the Banū Thaqīf and their allies, unifying the Hedjaz, and afterwards allied with the Banū Taghlib and moved on to the Lakhm. In late 630, Khālid ibn al-Walīd’s forces defeated and killed the Eranian general Färrukh Haurmizd, and then crossed the Euphrates and pillaged Mesopotamia until the arrival of a superior Eranian force, at which point they returned to the Lakhm. After that, the Arabs invaded Syria in several groups. Arab forces invaded from the south, defeating the Ghassānid (who were suffering from a civil war), while Khālid ibn al-Walīd’s force came out of the desert from the east, seizing Palmyra before converging with the other armies in Busra, where Khālid took over general command of the Arab forces and set up an operational headquarters. By this point, he was (or at least was claiming to be) a Miaphysite Christian. The Arabs continued to take cities in Syria until the Roman Emperor Heyrákleios I sent the only remaining Roman field army to defeat them in 636, coordinating with the Sassanid Empire.
Khālid concentrated the entire Arab army in Syria at Jābiya, starting a standoff against the Romans. The Arabs then retreated to the Yarmouk river, where their cavalry could be used more effectively. After a month-long standoff, a battle began. The Arabs won decisively, routing the Roman army, and essentially collapsing all resistance south of the Euphrates, and Khālid’s forces offered him the crown. He refused, but his men insisted, and in the end, Khālid’s son ʿAbd al-Raḥmān was given the title of Malik of Maliks, with lesser Maliks being given rule over Meshan, Asoristan, Khwarwaran, and Cilicia. Afterwards, Khālid fought against the Eranians, defeating an Eranian army before crossing the Euphrates and besieging Tisfon. The siege was, however, broken, and the situation in Mesopotamia turned into a stalemate. The Arab forces lacked sufficient power to decisively defeat the Eranians, but the Eranians were unable to drive the Arabs out. This situation lasted until the reappearance of the Plague forced the Arabs to retreat in 638. The next several years saw a standoff at the Euphrates, with Arab forces controlling the areas to the west south of the Taurus Mountains. Another Arab force under ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ al-Sahmī entered Egypt in 639, and finished the conquest of most of it by 641, barring a small area in the south around the city of Aswan, which was instead seized by the kingdom of Makuria, the northernmost vassal of the Aksumites.
From 642 to 646, the self-proclaimed prophets Maslama and Sajah unified the tribes of Yamamma under what would become a new religion and then went on to conquer the southern Lakhm, Oman, and the Hadhramut, while the Quraysh conquered the Himyaar and Aden. 644 also saw the resumption of regular Arab raids into Mesopotamia, which were not enough to seriously threaten conquest, but continued to make the reconstruction of Mesopotamia impossible. The situation turned even further against the Eranians in 649, when Syria and the Hadiyun Imamate simultaneously launched attacks on Mesopotamia, lead by ʿAbd al-Raḥmān and Maslama themselves, overwhelming the Eranian forces in the region and forcing them beyond the Tigris except in parts of Khwarwaran. In 651, the Qurayshi general Muʿāwiya ibn Abī Sufyān invaded Armenia; although this first invasion was repelled, he returned in 653, and this time successfully conquered it. In 653, the combined forces of the Imamate and Umayyad Armenia successfully besieged Tisfon, but Maslama was killed during the final stages of the battle, and the army’s order collapsed into a disorderly sack, resulting in brawling between Imamate and Umayyad forces, which allowed the Eranians to briefly retake the city. Fighting between Imamate and Umayyad forces continued until Sajah and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān arrived to calm the situation down. In the end, four more kingdoms were created in Mesopotamia: Taghlibid Osrhoene, Thaqīfid Meshan, Hāshimid Asoristan, and Fihrid Khwarwaran. All of these were nominally vassals to Makhzumid Syria, but the former two were ruled by adherents of Hanaf.
Seeing that Mesopotamia was now attacked from the north, west, and south, Boran I ordered that the lands east of the Tigris and west of Khuzestan and the Zagros be abandoned, stripped of valuables, and their populations moved to the Iranian plateau, similarly to how Heyrákleios I had abandoned Cilicia.
After this, the Arab conquests largely ran out of momentum. The only further gains that would be made by Arab states during the century of Arab hegemony would be the remaining Eranian territories west of the Zagros (gained during the succession crisis that followed the assassination of Yäzdgird III), some marginal territories in Africa ruled by Sahmid Egypt from the 660s to the 700s, and the establishment of outposts in the Horn of Aethiopia [6] …
… The political situation, on the other hand, is less clear, in part because we do not know what Arab governance looked like beforehand. There are three main schools of thought. The “orthodox” view is that Makhzumid Syria practiced a fairly standard form of Arab kingship, merely on a larger scale and supported by the Roman bureaucracy, while Maslama and Sajahs’ prophetic state was unprecedented. However, there are some inconsistencies between this story and the historical record. The first challenge to it comes from the Wisdom of Maslama and the Khatam themselves, which both refer to ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I as the “Malik of Rome, born in Makkāh”. Although this apparent error is typically justified as referring to “Rome” as an area of land rather than some sort of statement that ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I was a Roman Emperor, the latter interpretation is far less ludicrous than it might at first seem. Khālid ibn al-Walīd’s procession through the streets of Busra after the victory over the Persians and ‘Amr I’s after the fall of Alexandria, as described in the Grand Collected Historical Record of Eran, was clearly based on Belisarius’ Triumph, and many other ceremonies of state appear to have been based off of Roman ones. The opposing camp, therefore, believes that Sajah and Maslamas’ claims of prophecy were merely an Abrahamised extension of Arabian shamanic tradition, while Makhzumid Syria was more Roman than Arab. A variant of this position, most famously expounded by Yīlú Guǎn'ēn, claims that, although Maslama and Sajahs’ prophetic claims were not unusual, their state and ideology were also heavily Hellenised…
A New History of Romania (Yīlú Guǎn'ēn[伊婁 管恩]) [7]
In occidental studies, the Dark Ages is a term used to refer to the period from the mid-400s to the late 700s in western Oecumenia [8], from the mid-600s to the mid-800s in eastern Oecumenia, from the early 600s to the mid-700s in Mesopotamia, and from the early 600s to the late 700s in Persia; this name comes from the scarcity of textual and inscriptional sources from this time period and the deurbanisation that occurred during this period. No time during this period, though, is darker than the period stretching from the last Roman-Sassanid war through around 680, in part due to the severe mythologisation of this period. No histories of eastern Oecumenia survive from between around 630 to around 760, and, by that point, mythologisation had truly set in. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Khālid, ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ, and Muʿāwiya ibn Abī Sufyān are viewed as the restorers of Syria, Egypt, and Armenia, respectively, and (with the exception of Muʿāwiya) as model kings, and Maslama and Sajah as prophets.
The only histories for this time period that avoid this issue are Northern Romanian and Perso-Turkic ones. However, our only surviving Northern Romanian sources for this time period are from the 800s, and give little information of the Arabs beyond military movements. We have better Perso-Turkic sources: the Grand Collected Historical Record of Eran was completed in the mid-700s, and references (mostly lost) Sassanid documentation. However, it, too, focuses almost entirely on the affairs of Persia and the steppe, and largely disregards the Arab-ruled states, although it does provide a substantial amount of information on the Arab administration of Mesopotamia and Khuzestan, and descriptions of some ceremonies in the Southern Romanian Empire and in the Hadiyun Imamate. What can we learn about these states, then? It is clear that both the Southern Romanian Empire and the Hadiyun Imamate retained the bureaucracies of the Romans and the Persians in the areas they controlled - this is most notable in Khuzestan, which was taken from the Eranians by the Southern Romanians in the 650s, retaken by the Sassanids in the 660s, conquered by the Hadiyun Imamate in the 670s, and finally conquered by the Eranians again in the 720s, and yet did not see any substantial change in its bureaucratic organisation. Mesopotamia saw a greater degree of change, but only because it suffered more from the wars of the Dark Ages.
The Southern Romanian Empire under the Makhzumids consisted of a core region of Syria, Ghassania, and Osrhoene[9]. It also maintained a network of vassal states, these being the Malikates of Kairouan, Egypt, Armenia, Osrhoene, Khwarwaran, Asoristan, and Meshan. From 642 onwards, many of these states were additionally vassals of the Imamate.
Of the original set of Arab Maliks who reigned under ʿAbd al-Raḥmān ibn Khālid, the one whose biography is the most ascertainable is ʿAmr ibn al-ʿĀṣ, as he left inscriptions bearing biographical details, and because Egypt suffered much less destruction of records. He was born in or around Makkah; his father was a wealthy merchant of the Quraysh, while his mother was a slave. Working as a merchant, he had traveled to Egypt multiple times before 636, as well as to Axum, where he had converted to Miaphysite Christianity. By the time he invaded Egypt, he understood the Egyptian language[10] and Egyptian ways; he was an Egyptian to the Egyptians and an Arab to the Arabs, and as such was well-suited to rule over both. In addition, he was an effective military leader, using settled Arab, Bedouin, Syrian, and Egyptian troops in a carefully-coordinated manner and taking maximal advantage when Romanian forces made mistakes.
In 642, he began the construction of the city of Fustat, modern Yeraray[11]. “Fustat” literally means “the Tents”, as it was the location of a major Arab ordou[12]. The tents were replaced by brick and stone buildings, and a cathedral was built there; although originally fairly small and sparsely decorated, it would be expanded to twice its original size by ʿAbd Allāh ibn ʿAmr, and towers would be added. ‘Amr also commissioned the construction of two cathedrals in or near Alexandria, neither of which survive to the present, and the renovation of Coptic monasteries in the Valley of Natron.
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I was the son of the decorated general Khālid ibn al-Walīd and the Khathʿamid poet Asma bint Anas, and was installed by Khālid as Malik of Syria and Malik of Maliks in the year 636. He distinguished himself both in administration and in warfare, campaigning against the Romanians in person seven times over the course of his reign, and, like ‘Amr ibn al-As, was known as a patron of the Miaphysite church. He also worked to repopulate many cities, especially coastal ones.
Although it is difficult to say anything bad about his reign while he was alive, ‘Abd al-Rahman I failed in one crucial way: he did not establish a stable succession policy, and, upon his death in 666, Makhzumid Syria fell into civil war between his son Khālid II and his brother Muhājir. Muhājir was initially winning, but Khālid II prayed before a copy of the Khatam and repeated that there was no God but God and the Khatams were the word of God, and with that received the support of the Hadiyun Imamate, and went on to win the war. The Malikates of Osrhoene, Asoristan and Meshan were annexed into the Imamate (as the Malik of Meshan succeeded to the position of Imam, the Malik of Osrhoene had been named, presumably by Sajah, as “Supervisor of Readers”, a position we have no information about the role of, and the Malik of Asoristan had supported Muhājir and been deposed). The remaining Malikates (Kairouan, Egypt, Armenia, and Khwarwaran) additionally became vassals to the Imamate rather than to Syria.
Muʿāwiya ibn Abī Sufyān was a member of the Banu Umayya, one of the three leading tribes of the Quraysh. His father was a merchant who frequently traveled to Syria. He rose through the ranks rapidly during Khālid I’s wars, and was made military governor of Cilicia. In 651 and again in 653, he personally led wars against the Byzantines alongside his brother Yazīd, who had had a navy built. In 651, Yazīd seized three islands in the Aegean, while Muʿāwiya invaded Armenia. His invasion was successful, but the next year, the puppet king he installed on the throne defected to the Romans, who also retook those islands which had been occupied by Yazīd’s forces. Muʿāwiya invaded Armenia again in 653, this time successfully. He was appointed as Malik of Armenia, while Yazīd was reassigned to Cyrenaica. During the mid-650s, Muʿāwiya additionally conquered Nakhchavan and Mardastan from the Sassanians, invaded the kingdom of Iveria and kingdom(?) of Colchis, and had his lieutenant Ḥabīb ibn Maslama al-Fihrī established as the king of Khwarwaran. However, from this point, the historical record dries up: It is known that he participated on neither side of the Makhzumid civil war in 666, instead fighting against the Romans, being defeated, and losing some land, that he reclaimed this land in the early 680s, and that he died in 684, but most documentation pertaining to his life was lost due to the sacking of several Armenian cities during the Second Fitna and its aftermath.
Maslama and Sajah originated from, respectively, the Banu Hanifa and Banu Taghlib tribes. The Banu Hanifa was a settled Samaritan Arab tribe that inhabited eastern Yamamma, while the Banu Taghlib was a Christian Bedu nomadic tribe that inhabited the lands south of the Euphrates west of the Lakhmids. Both of these tribes’ histories have been heavily mythologised: official histories from the 700s describe the Banu Hanifa as having been descended from followers of Moses who remained in Arabia when he and his followers returned to Israel after (according to Ihnafic and Arabian Jewish tradition) 50 years of ruling Arabia as Malik of Maliks; these same histories describe the Banu Taghlib as having been the first Arabian tribe to convert to Christianity, and as being the descendants of occulted Pythagoreans who fled into Arabia to avoid persecution by the Antiochus IV. All of these can be dismissed out of hand, other than perhaps the claim that the Banu Taghlib was the first Arab tribe to convert to Christianity, which is plausible, albeit unlikely.
About Maslama’s early life almost nothing is known, other than that he was born in the 600s or early 610s, became a shaman-doctor, and already had another wife at the time he married Sajah. Traditional accounts claim that he was born in 602 and began to receive revelations from God in 628, but these years correspond too closely with the beginning and end of the last Roman-Sassanid war to be useful. Official histories claim that he was literate, and the Kitāb al-ʿIlal, assuming it is authentic, supports this.
Sajah’s early life is described more thoroughly in the official histories. It is claimed that she was the only literate woman in the Banu Taghlib (something which is entirely plausible - literacy rates among nomadic Bedu were extremely low even among men), that she was knowledgeable in many languages (it is certain that she was literate in both Arabic and Greek; assuming that the Kitāb al-ʿIlal was authentic, one can add Hebrew and Syriac to that list.), and that she was taught to read and write by visions of the angel Elaios. It is also claimed that she was the last inductee into the Pythagorean mysteries, which is obviously false, and that she also became a shaman-doctor, which is certainly true. It is claimed that she received prophetic visions from a young age, but did not know what they were until she heard of Maslama’s declaration of prophecy in 638. From the initial Arab invasion of Mesopotamia in 630-631 up through the second Arab invasion in 637, Sajah lived among the component of the Banu Taghlib which lived in the borderlands between Osrhoene and Khwarwaran. It is presumable that she learned about Hermeticism during this period, though there is little that is actually Hermetic in her writings; most teachings of Sajah attributed to the Pythagoreans or Elaios are more likely to have come from Arab shamanic tradition and been attributed to these figures for added legitimacy.
It is said that Maslama revealed himself as a prophet in 638, when he was able to cure victims of the Plague of Aswan (or, in some more plausible versions, able to prevent plague through proper rituals), and afterwards declared himself as a prophet and began a campaign to unify the tribes of the Yamamma. After hearing of Maslama’s prophetic claims, Sajah (who had apparently performed the same miracles) realised that she was also a prophet, and went out to join forces with him; she supposedly left with 40 men, but by the time she arrived in the city of Yamamma, she had an army of 4000 and the backing of the Quraysh. After entering the city, she destroyed the idols and delivered a poetic speech decrying the idols and praising the One God; this is sometimes identified as the Empty Desert Sutra[13], but that was far more likely to have been delivered in the Hedjaz in the 650s, as it has a far more developed and Hellenised philosophy than would be reasonable for Sajah to have at the time, and names pagan gods that were more prominent in the Hedjaz.
From 638 to 646 in the traditional dating (I suspect this time period was shorter), Sajah and Maslama unified the tribes of Yamamma, southern Lakhm, Maxan, Uman, and the Hadhramut [14] into a single state, which they ruled for three years before beginning a jihad against the Persians in collaboration with the Quraysh, Syrians, and Armenians. Apparently, early on in the jihad, Maslama took upon himself the title of Taheb (Messiah), and granted to Sajah the title of Muhdiy (Divine Guide)[15]. After this, Maslama started claiming moral perfection and demanding his followers worship him in a manner akin to a god, which Sajah opposed, claiming that this was a form of idolatry, and would lead to Maslama being arbitrated against by God[16]. The Arab forces defeated the Persians, but in the siege of the Persian capital of Tesifon, Maslama was killed and the situation fell into a disorganised sack, leading to a brief conflict between Yamamman and Umayyad forces, which was ended through the intervention of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān I, Muʿāwiya I, and Sajah. From this point onwards, Sajah became the sole leader of her movement. Sajah had two of her close allies (Dawūd ibn ‘Abd al-Malik[17], a member of the Banu Taghlib, and ʿĀmir ibn Jazʾ, the supposed first convert to Ihnaf from Yemen, respectively) installed as the Maliks of Khwarwaran and Meshan. From this point onwards, Sajah essentially became the hegemon-king of intermontane southwest Asia, although she continued to acknowledge ʿAbd al-Raḥmān’s nominal rule over the area. If the Kitāb al-ʿIlal is authentic, it is likely that it was written during the mid-650s.
In the late 650s, the Quraysh polity in the Hedjaz collapsed into civil war for unknown reasons, and Sajah used this to take over the Hedjaz and Himyaar, with ʿAbd al-Raḥmān being powerless to stop this.
In 661, Sajah wrote the Khatam, the holy book of Ihnaf. It was her third long-form work that is known of, the others being the Kitāb al-ʿIlal (although the identification of the received Kitab al-‘Ilal as Sajah’s is disputed) and the Empty Desert Sutra. Under her supervision, it was copied either seven or ten times. In 664, by the traditional dating, she named the third Malik of Meshan, Ziyād ibn Abīhi, as her successor. After this, she vanished into the desert with a small number of companions, mostly from the Banu Taghlib and Banu Hanifa, and did not return; hadith claim that some other members of the Banu Taghlib and Banu Murād buried Sajah at an undisclosed location and erected memorial steles for them, which they then hid with magic to prevent the sites from being used as icons…
ROME: From City to Empire to City Again (Angelo Trapanesco)
… Heraclius died in 641, leaving his 29-year-old son Constantinus and his 15-year-old son Heraclonas as co-emperor. However, Constantine III died of tuberculosis shortly afterwards. Foul play was alleged, and, following a tense standoff, Heraclonas and his mother were deposed and disfigured. Constantine III’s 14-year-old son Constans was crowned Emperor. During this chaos, Egypt fell completely, and the next year, Cyrenaica fell, too. Constans II attempted to retake Egypt in 644. Although the Romanians managed to retake Alexandria, ‘Amr ibn al-As [18] defeated them in battle once again, and the Romanians retreated across the Mediterranean. The Arab forces in Syria, meanwhile, launched constant attacks against the Romanians. In 648, the Arabs conquered Osrhoene and raided deep into Africa, and in 649, the Arab fleet attacked Crete. In 651, the Arab general Mu‘Awiya invaded Armenia unsuccessfully; a second attempt in 653 succeeded, though. Also in 653, Constans II had the Patriarch of Rome, Martin I (St. Martin the Confessor), arrested and exiled to Khersonesus for his condemnation of monotheletism. Likely in the 650s, Constans II created the theme system, dividing the Romanian military into several regional commands. By the end of his reign, there would be seven land themes (namely, the Opsikion (in northwestern Anatolia), Thrakesion (somewhat confusingly in southwestern Anatolia rather than Thrace), Anatolikon (in southeastern Anatolia), Kappadokiakon (in northeastern Anatolia), Armeniakon (in Armenia), Kolkhiakon (in Kolkhis), Sikiliakon (in Sicily)) as well as a naval theme, the Kibyrraioton. [19]
From 662 to 663, Constans II campaigned against the Slavs of the Balkans, marching from Constantinople to Athens and regaining control over the coast roads in Greece, before leaving for southern Italy, where he campaigned against the Lombards, to no avail. He spent the next three years based out of Sicily.
Constans II returned to Anatolia in 666 upon the beginning of the Mazkhzumid civil war; after regaining control of Cilicia proper but being stymied in his attempt at reconquering Antioch, he launched campaigns into Armenia in concert with Yazdgird III, which succeeded in gaining at least some territory in Armenia as well as Colchis and the vassalage of Iberia. After a brief stay in Constantinople, he resumed campaigns against the Slavs in the Balkans, resettling many of them into Anatolia. In 671, after a brief stay in Constantinople, he returned to Italy, campaigning against the Lombards once again, and forcing the vassalage of the Duchy of Benevento while the Lombards were embroiled in a succession crisis. However, in 673, Constans II was forced to return to Anatolia due to renewed attacks from the south and east. He defeated an invasion by Mu’awiya’s forces, but a simultaneous strike by Khalid II was able to penetrate deep into Anatolia, possibly besieging Constantinople, before retreating (Romanian sources claim that this was a repelled invasion, while Arab and Syrian sources claim it was a successful raid.)
However, while Constans II was reigning, another power was forming to Romania’s north. The Avar empire had gone into decline after its failed siege of Constantinople in 626. The khan Kubrat unified the “Three-Bulgars”, the Onogurs, Kutrigurs, and Utigurs [20], into a single political entity, the Danube Bulgar Empire, and vassalised the nearby Slavic tribes. Under his successor, Asparukh, they moved south, crossing the Danube into Thracia in the 670s. In 680, Constans II decided to do something about this threat, and led his army into battle against them. It is unknown what occurred, but whatever happened, it ended in an absolute rout, with Constans II being killed and his army destroyed. A contingent of the Bulgar army arrived outside of Constantinople before the remnants of the Roman army and pillaged its suburbs, parading Constans II’s head on a pike outside the Theodosian Walls, but never seriously attempted to give siege. Meanwhile, the bulk of the Bulgar army destroyed the remaining demoralised and isolated Romanian forces in the Balkans east of the Strymon river. The city of Adrianopolis was sacked, and its population moved to the new city of Asparukhopolis [21]. Meanwhile, the situation in Constantinopolis degraded: the Emperor, Constantine IV, was badly ill, and, though he wished to pass the throne to his son Theodosius, but his younger brothers Heraclius and Tiberius had other ideas…
[1] … Yeah, the Sassanids were like that.
[2] I am romanising from Middle Persian, rendering short a as "ä", long a as "a", short e as "ai", long e as "e", short o as "au", long o as "o", short i as "i", long i as "ie", short u as "u", and long u as "ou".
[3] i.e. between the Taurus and Zagros.
[4] I follow the idea that the Quraysh were already a major power that controlled most of the Hedjaz before Muhammad IOTL. I also think that it is likely that Muhammad died in 637 or 638 from the Plague of Amwas and that the Ridda wars took place from 638-642.
[5] Medina.
[6] ITTL, “Aethiopia” refers to Africa, “Abyssinia” refers to Ethiopia, and “Africa” refers to the Maghreb.
[7] Mandarin had different sound changes from Middle Chinese ITTL - the reasons for this will become clear eventually. I have a rough outline of Chinese history ITTL up through the early 1500s.
[8] “Oecumenia” = “the Mediterranean world”.
[9] Basically OTL present-day Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, southeastern Turkey (beyond the Euphrates), and the Ha’il.
[10] Arabic does not displace Coptic in the Nile basin ITTL, so there’s no need to specify “Coptic”
[11] Cairo, from Coptic “Ier a Rē” (Eye of the Sun).
[12] ITTL, “ordou” is loaned into western languages to mean “tent city”.
[13] ITTL, Arabic “sūrah” and Syriac “surṭā” were historically assumed to be cognates or loans of “sutra”, and are typically translated to “sutra”.
[14] Yamamma = Najd, Lakhm = Kuwait and al-Ahsa, Maxan = Qatar and the UAE, Himyaar = northern/OTL Zaidi Yemen, Hadhramut = southern/OTL Sunni Yemen.
[15] The OTL term “Mahdī” seems to be a corruption of this form.
[16] If this reminds you of Khawarij, that’s not a coincidence.
[17] An “OC”.
[18] This is a pop-history work, and so accents are omitted.
[19] Note that the OTL Armeniakon is called the Kappadokiakon ITTL, and the addition of the Sicilian, Colchian, and actual!Armenian themes.
[20] I follow the view that the Bulgars of Kuber came from Avar vassals breaking off, and not a migration from “Old Great Bulgaria”, whose existence I am highly skeptical off.
[21] Silistre, Romania.
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