Umayyad Caliphate

Mu'awiya's arrangement

formationDrafted from Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661-750 (2000)

Mu'awiya had governed Syria for twenty years before he was caliph, and he ruled as caliph the way he had governed: through the Syrian Arab tribes whose loyalty he had spent two decades building, and through the Byzantine fiscal administration he had inherited intact and never dismantled.

This is the arrangement that made the Umayyads and eventually unmade them. Syria's tribal levies were reliable, close to the capital, and paid. Iraq's garrisons at Kufa and Basra were larger, further away, unreliable, and convinced — with reason — that Iraqi revenue was funding Syrian soldiers. Every Umayyad crisis for the next ninety years runs along that seam.

Damascus, Syria · Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661-750 (2000) · Photograph: Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

Mu'awiya's other innovation was to have his son Yazid acknowledged as successor in his own lifetime, taking oaths of allegiance from the provinces in advance. Nobody had done this. It was not defended as a principle and no theory was offered for it; it was presented as a practical measure against another civil war, by a man who had just won one. The theory never really arrived, but the practice held for three generations, which is how a caliphate elected by acclamation at Medina became a dynasty ruling from Damascus without any moment at which the change was announced.

Hawting's warning belongs here rather than in a footnote: nearly everything written about this dynasty was written afterwards, under the dynasty that overthrew it, by people with an interest in the Umayyads having been impious kings rather than caliphs. The hostility is not evidence of the charge.

Damascus, Syria · Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661-750 (2000) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 4.0

Karbala, and the war that remade the dynasty

formationDrafted from Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661-750 (2000)

Mu'awiya died in 680 having spent his last years arranging for his son to succeed him. The arrangement held everywhere except where it mattered.

Husayn ibn Ali, the Prophet's grandson and the son of the fourth caliph, refused the oath to Yazid and set out for Kufa, whose garrison had invited him. The invitation evaporated as the governor's grip tightened, and Husayn was intercepted in the desert near Karbala with a party of perhaps seventy — family, household, a few followers — by a force sent from Kufa in the caliph's name. On the tenth of Muharram he and almost all the men with him were killed, and the women and children of the Prophet's house were taken to Damascus as prisoners.

Militarily it was nothing: a skirmish that took an afternoon. Politically it is one of the few afternoons in the seventh century whose consequences are still legible thirteen centuries later. It gave a constituency that had so far been a political tendency a founding injustice, a martyr, a place, and a date, and it was inflicted by the caliph's own troops on the Prophet's own grandson, which is not a charge any subsequent settlement could answer. The Umayyads did not become illegitimate to the Shi'a because of anything they did afterwards. They had already done it.

Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661-750 (2000) · Photographer unknown · Public domain

The war that followed was longer and messier than the first fitna. Abd Allah ibn al-Zubayr declared a caliphate at Mecca and was for several years the more widely recognised of the two claimants. Kharijite movements held ground in Arabia and southern Iran. Mukhtar rose at Kufa in the name of another son of Ali, on a platform that put the mawali — the non-Arab converts — on the same footing as Arabs. That grievance would eventually help destroy the dynasty; here it is already raised, forty years early, with an army behind it.

The Umayyads survived it by changing branch. The Sufyanid line ended with Yazid's son, and at Marj Rahit in 684 the Syrian tribes acclaimed Marwan of the rival Marwanid branch — a victory won by mobilising the Yaman confederation against the Qays. That worked, and it also converted a tribal rivalry into the permanent organising principle of Umayyad provincial politics. Every governor for the next sixty years was a Qaysi or a Yamani appointment, and the factional arithmetic outlived the dynasty.

Ibn al-Zubayr held Mecca until 692, when al-Hajjaj besieged the city and killed him. The caliphate that emerged was territorially the same and institutionally a different thing, and what it did with itself was to spend a decade conquering.

Karbala, Iraq · Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661-750 (2000) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 4.0

Three frontiers in one decade

expansionDrafted from Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In (2007)

At its height the caliphate covered eleven million square kilometres, and most of that was taken in a single decade. The Rashidun conquests had taken Syria, Egypt and Iran. Everything beyond that — the Maghreb, Spain, Sind, Transoxiana — is Umayyad, and most of it happened in about ten years under one caliph.

Al-Walid I ruled from 705 to 715, and in that decade three offensives ran at once on three continents, three thousand miles apart, nominally directed from Damascus: Qutayba ibn Muslim beyond the Oxus, Muhammad ibn al-Qasim on the lower Indus, and Tariq ibn Ziyad across the strait that now carries his name. The two chapters after this one follow the eastern and the western campaigns separately, because they were run by different men on different principles and the only thing they had in common was the treasury they paid into.

Afrasiab, Samarkand · Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In (2007) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 2.0

It is worth being precise about what that directed. The armies were tribal contingents under governors, and the governors were often given wide latitude and a share of what they took. The centre supplied legitimacy, appointments, and reinforcement from Syria, and it took a share of the proceeds. This is a conquest system rather than a general staff, and its coherence came from the fact that everyone in it was being paid out of the same expanding revenue.

Which is the thing that stopped. The northern frontier was the first to say so: Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik laid siege to Constantinople in 717 with a fleet and a large Syrian army and was destroyed there over the following winter, by Greek fire, hunger and a Bulgar attack on the besiegers. The Arab armies never seriously tried again, and the Taurus frontier that resulted stood for three hundred years — long enough that Byzantine writers came to treat it as a permanent feature of the world rather than as something that had been won.

After that the arithmetic ran the other way. Blankinship's argument is that a state whose stipends, loyalty and legitimacy all assumed continuing conquest could not simply stop conquering and carry on. Under Hisham, from 724 to 743, the frontiers were defended rather than advanced, in Anatolia, against the Khazars in the Caucasus, in Transoxiana against the Türgesh, and in the west; and defence is expensive without being profitable. The grievances that follow — the converts' and the Berbers' — are what a fixed revenue looks like when it meets a population that expected a growing one.

Afrasiab, Samarkand · Kennedy, The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In (2007) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 2.0

Two rivers, one treasury

expansionDrafted from al-Baladhuri, The Origins of the Islamic State (Kitab Futuh al-Buldan), Part II (1924)

The eastern conquests under al-Walid are usually given as a list of cities: Bukhara, Samarkand, Khwarazm, and the lower Indus. Baladhuri's eastern volume gives them as a list of transactions, and the difference matters, because it is the transactions that explain how so little manpower took so much ground.

Bukhara, and how it was done

Qutayba ibn Muslim crossed to Paykand in 706. The town rebelled and called on the Soghdians for help; he besieged it, refused terms and took it by force. The following year he raided Tumushkath and Karmuniya, made peace after taking a few small forts, and reduced Bukhara by treaty.

Bukhara, Uzbekistan · al-Baladhuri, The Origins of the Islamic State (Kitab Futuh al-Buldan), Part II (1924) · Photograph: LBM1948 · CC BY-SA 4.0

That is one account. Baladhuri also records another, from Ibn al-Muthanna, and does not choose between them.

In this version Bukhara defended itself successfully, and Qutayba asked only to be let into the city to pray two rakas. Permission was given. He had men concealed in ambush; when he entered, they overpowered the gatekeepers and the army came in behind them. Baladhuri's comment on the money Qutayba took is flat and without excuse: he obtained much of it, dealing perfidiously with the inhabitants.

He then attacked Soghd, and killed Nizak in Tukharistan and crucified him — Nizak, who had been campaigning alongside him at Paykand two years earlier.

Khwarazm, bought

Khwarazm was not conquered at all. It was purchased, by its own king.

The king was weak and had been overpowered by his brother Khurrazadh. He wrote to Qutayba offering gifts and the keys of the country on condition that Qutayba put him back on the throne. The money and the keys arrived. Qutayba sent his brother Abd al-Rahman against Khurrazadh, killed him, took four thousand captives and put them all to death, and restored the king exactly as agreed.

Then the people of Khwarazm, observing that their king was weak, killed him. Qutayba appointed another brother, Ubayd Allah ibn Muslim, as governor.

The whole sequence took a local succession dispute and ended with the province administered from Merv. Nobody in Khwarazm had intended that, and the man who started it was dead within the year.

At Samarkand there was a real battle — the king of Soghd called in the king of Chach, and Qutayba broke them with a charge — and then the usual instrument: Ghurak capitulated on terms of twelve hundred thousand dirhams a year.

Sind, and the thread and needles

The Indus campaign began with a piracy incident. A ship carrying women home was taken by raiders off Daybul, and one of the women, of the Banu Yarbu, cried out O Hajjaj! Al-Hajjaj, governor of Iraq, is said to have answered aloud: Here am I. He demanded their release; Dahir replied that pirates were not under his control. Two expeditions sent to punish Daybul lost their commanders.

The third was Muhammad ibn al-Qasim, and what Baladhuri records about the preparation is more revealing than the campaign. Al-Hajjaj reinforced him with six thousand Syrians, told him to sit at Shiraz until everything was assembled, and supplied him with everything he asked for — even to thread and needles. Knowing that vinegar was scarce in Sind, al-Hajjaj soaked clean cotton in it, dried it in the shade, and sent it out with instructions to steep the cotton in water, heat it, and season the food with that.

An empire that could not always say who its next caliph would be was nevertheless a state where a provincial governor solved a condiment problem for an army two thousand miles away, in advance. The conquests were not carried by enthusiasm. They were carried by treaty, by ambush, by buying one brother against another — and by quartermasters.

The leg of the table

expansionDrafted from al-Hakam, History of the Conquest of Spain (1858)

The conquest of Spain took a single campaigning season and produced a quarrel over loot that outlasted it by centuries. Ibn Abd al-Hakam, writing in ninth-century Egypt, gives the earliest Arabic account of both, and he tells them as one story, which is the right instinct.

Getting across

The version he transmits begins with a betrayal. Ilyan, lord of Ceuta and a subject of Roderic, had sent a daughter to Toledo to be educated and she came back pregnant by the king. I see for him no other punishment or recompense, Ilyan is made to say, than that I should bring the Arabs against him.

Tariq ibn Ziyad, governor of Tangier, did not simply accept. He said he could not trust Ilyan without a hostage, and Ilyan sent his two remaining daughters, who were held under close guard at Tlemcen for the duration.

The crossing itself was done by a trick of tempo. Ilyan's vessels carried a party over in the evening; they hid by day, and the ships went back for the next group after dark. Because the same boats were shuttling back and forth on a strait where trading vessels did exactly that, nobody on the Spanish side counted them. Tariq came over with the last division.

Strait of Gibraltar · al-Hakam, History of the Conquest of Spain (1858) · Photograph: Samson Ng · CC BY-SA 4.0

A rumour, deliberately made

What Ibn Abd al-Hakam records next is not a battle. It is a piece of psychological warfare, reported without embarrassment.

On an island the Muslims found only vinedressers, and took them prisoner. They killed one, cut him up and boiled him in a cauldron, in view of the others, while meat boiled in the other cauldrons. When it was cooked they threw the man's flesh away where nobody could see, ate from the other pots, and released the survivors — who went and told the people of Andalus that the Muslims ate human flesh.

An invading force too small to win a fair fight manufactured a story about itself and then let its own prisoners deliver it. The chronicler does not condemn it or dwell on it; it is simply how the thing was done.

Then the fighting, and it was short. A force from Cordoba came out, despised the small numbers, and was broken and pursued to the city walls. Roderic came down from Toledo and met Tariq in the valley the Arabs afterwards called the valley of Umm Hakim, after Tariq's slave. Roderic was killed there with his companions, and the Visigothic kingdom effectively ended in an afternoon.

The leg of the table

Musa ibn Nusayr, Tariq's superior, crossed the following year, and the two men spent the rest of their lives arguing about who had conquered Spain.

The dispute crystallised around a jewelled table taken among the spoils. Musa carried the treasure to Damascus and presented the table to the caliph al-Walid as his own find. Tariq said he had found it. Musa called him a liar.

So Tariq asked the caliph to send for the table and examine it. One leg, he pointed out, did not match the others. Musa, questioned, said he had found it that way. Tariq then produced the missing leg, which he had removed when he found the table precisely so that this moment could happen.

A general who dismantled part of his own loot as evidence, years in advance, against the day his commander claimed it, tells you what the relationship between the conquerors and their governors actually was.

The scramble around it was worse. Walid was dying while Musa was still on the road; the caliph wrote urging him to hurry, and Walid's brother Sulayman wrote urging him to slow down, so that the treasure would arrive after the succession and fall to Sulayman instead. Musa got as far as Tiberias before the news of Walid's death reached him, and handed the spoils to Sulayman, who was delighted with them.

What to believe

Not all of this is history and the source itself is the reason we can tell.

Ibn Abd al-Hakam also reports a padlocked house in Toledo to which every king added a lock, opened at last by Roderic, who found inside portraits of Arabs and a written warning that when the door was opened these people would invade. That is a folk motif, and it sits in the same paragraph sequence as everything above.

Ilyan is contested too. Jones, translating in 1858, notes that Masdeu and most Spanish critics concluded he never existed, and that Gayangos observed no writer before the eleventh century mentions his quarrel with Roderic. Jones's answer is that this holds for Christian authors and not for Muslim ones: Ibn Abd al-Hakam and Ibn al-Qutiyya both wrote in the ninth century, both name Ilyan, and both give his quarrel as the cause of the invasion.

What survives all of that is the shape. A frontier governor with Berber troops crossed on local shipping, exploited a Visigothic succession quarrel, killed the king in one engagement — and then spent the rest of his career fighting his own side over the proceeds.

What Abd al-Malik built

peakDrafted from Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661-750 (2000)

Abd al-Malik inherited the second civil war in 685, holding little more than Syria and Egypt, and had won all of it by 692. What he did afterwards is the reason his reign, and not the conquests of the one before it, is the peak of this polity.

He replaced Byzantine and Sasanian coin with a purely Islamic coinage: no portrait, no cross, no fire altar, only Arabic inscription. He made Arabic the language of the tax registers in Syria, Iraq and Egypt, displacing the Greek and Persian administrations that had run continuously since before the conquest. He built the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and put on it an inscription addressed pointedly to Christians about the nature of Christ.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York · Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661-750 (2000) · Metropolitan Museum of Art · Public domain

Jerusalem · Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661-750 (2000) · Photograph: Godot13 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Each of these is the same act. A conquest state that taxes through somebody else's bureaucracy in somebody else's language, using somebody else's money, is an occupation collecting rent. After Abd al-Malik it was a state with its own administrative language, its own currency, and its own public architecture making theological arguments. This is the point at which the caliphate stops being explicable as the last phase of late antiquity and becomes a thing of its own.

The cost was legible immediately. Running an Arabic-language administration meant a class of Arabic-literate officials; standardising coin and tax meant pressing the provinces harder and more uniformly; and both meant that the question of who counted as a full member of the community — specifically, whether non-Arab converts owed the land tax — became a fiscal question with a constituency attached. That question is what the mawali grievance grew out of.

Seek another profession

aside?What aside meansDrafted from al-Baladhuri, The Origins of the Islamic State (Kitab Futuh al-Buldan) (1916)

For nearly seventy years after the conquest, the tax registers of Syria were kept in Greek, by the same clerks and the same families who had kept them for the emperors. The conquerors had taken the provinces and left the accounting where it was, because they could not do it themselves.

In the year 81 — 700 in the Christian reckoning — Abd al-Malik ordered the language changed.

The inkstand

Baladhuri gives a reason for the decision, and it is worth repeating exactly because of what it is doing. A Greek clerk, wanting to write something and finding no ink, urinated in the inkwell. Abd al-Malik heard of it, punished the man, and gave orders for the registers to be converted.

Whether or not anything of the sort happened, the story is how the change was remembered: not as policy but as an insult, and the insult is the clerk's contempt for the arrangement he was employed in. A conquest state that cannot read its own accounts is being administered by people who despise it, and everybody involved knew it.

The conversion was contracted out like any other job of work. Sulayman ibn Sa'd asked, as his fee, for the kharaj of the province of Jordan for one year; Abd al-Malik agreed and made him governor of Jordan into the bargain. The year ended, the registers were finished, and he brought them in.

What it was worth

The revenue Sulayman took as his payment is recorded, and so are the neighbouring provinces, which is a rare thing to have: Jordan yielded 180,000 dinars, Palestine 350,000, Damascus 400,000, and Hims with Qinnasrin between 700,000 and 800,000.

That is the price of the change of language, and it was worth paying, because what it bought was the end of an entire profession's hold on the state's money.

Sarjun

Abd al-Malik then called in Sarjun and showed him the new arrangement.

Sarjun — Sergius — was the head of the Greek financial administration, from the family that had run Damascus for the emperors before the conquest and had gone on running it for the caliphs afterwards; his son is the theologian known as John of Damascus. He went away in distress, and when he met some of the Greek clerks he told them to find their living in some other profession than this one, because God had cut it off from them.

It is the most exact sentence in the whole business. A bureaucratic caste that had outlived the empire it was created for, and had made itself indispensable to the empire that replaced it, was dispensed with in a single year's work by a man who was paid in tax revenue to do it. Everything the dynasty is admired for building — its own coinage, its own architecture, its own theological claims — belongs with this. So does everything it is blamed for, since a state that can count in its own language can also press its provinces harder and more uniformly, and did.

Los Angeles County Museum of Art · al-Baladhuri, The Origins of the Islamic State (Kitab Futuh al-Buldan) (1916) · LACMA · Public domain

What they called themselves

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Hinds, University of Cambridge Oriental Publications 37 (1986)

The Abbasid-era tradition is clear about the Umayyads: they were kings, muluk, who held the caliphate as a worldly possession, and religious authority properly belonged to the scholars who were forming the law at the same time. It is a tidy account and it was written by the people who replaced them.

Crone and Hinds went looking for what the Umayyads said about themselves in material that was not transmitted through that filter — court poetry, coin legends, inscriptions, chancery formulae — and found a different title. Alongside khalifat rasul Allah, successor to the Messenger of God, the early caliphs are addressed and describe themselves as khalifat Allah: deputy of God, God's caliph. Not the Prophet's successor in an administrative sense but God's appointee on earth, with authority over the interpretation of His religion as well as over the army and the tax.

British Museum, London · Hinds, University of Cambridge Oriental Publications 37 (1986) · Photograph: PHGCOM · Public domain

If that is right, the later picture inverts. The Umayyads were not impious rulers who neglected a religious authority that lay elsewhere. They claimed that authority, straightforwardly and in public, and lost the argument — after which the winners wrote a history in which the argument had never been open. The scholars' monopoly on defining Islam is then not the original arrangement but the outcome of a fight, and this dynasty is on the losing side of it.

The thesis is contested and is not settled. Critics argue that khalifat Allah was honorific rather than constitutional, that the poetry is panegyric and reads accordingly, and that Crone and Hinds pressed thin evidence hard. What is not much disputed is the narrower and still awkward point: the title is attested, early, in material the Abbasid tradition did not curate, and the tradition's silence about it is itself something to explain.

It matters because the alternative is worse. Any account of these caliphs has to say on what public ground they claimed the right to rule, and answering that from the version written by the dynasty that overthrew them means repeating the charge sheet and calling it the claim.

The converts problem

contractionDrafted from Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century (2004)

The conquest settlement assumed a small Arab military class taxed lightly and paid stipends, living on the revenue of a large non-Arab, non-Muslim population taxed heavily. It worked as long as the two categories stayed the same size.

They did not. Non-Arabs converted, attached themselves to Arab tribes as clients — mawali — and then discovered that conversion did not reliably move them into the paying-less category, because the provincial treasuries could not afford it if it did. A convert who moved to a garrison town to claim a stipend was a double loss: revenue gone from the land register, expenditure added to the diwan. Governors responded by continuing to tax converts, which was defensible fiscally and indefensible in any other terms, since the community's own claim was that Islam was what mattered.

Damascus, Syria · Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century (2004) · Photograph: Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

Umar II's reforms in 717–720 attempted the honest version — convert, pay Muslim rates — and the fiscal arithmetic promptly failed. Later governors quietly reverted. The grievance did not.

By the 740s the caliphate was carrying that grievance in every province at once, alongside a Syrian army stretched across a frontier that had stopped producing booty, tribal factionalism between Qays and Yaman that had become the organising principle of provincial politics, and a succession of short reigns and disputed accessions after 743. The third civil war began as an intra-Umayyad quarrel. It finished as something else.

Where it broke first

contractionDrafted from Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987)

The converts' grievance was not confined to one province: the caliphate carried it everywhere at once. The province where it broke first was not Khurasan, and it broke four years before the quarrel that became the third civil war.

The Berbers had done most of the conquering in the west. The Maghreb was taken largely by Berber troops under Arab command, and so was al-Andalus: the army that crossed the strait in 711 was overwhelmingly Berber. They then converted, and found themselves administered as a conquered population anyway — taxed at non-Muslim rates, and levied for slaves as though the conquest were still in progress. This is the mawali problem, applied to the people who had carried out the conquest, in the province furthest from anyone who might be argued with.

The revolt began at Tangier in 740 and took its idiom from Kharijism, which supplied exactly the doctrine the situation wanted: that the community's leadership belongs to the worthiest Muslim and not to an Arab lineage. An Umayyad force of the Arab nobility was destroyed near Tangier that year. A Syrian army sent to retrieve the situation, thirty thousand men under Kulthum ibn Iyad — a Qaysi noble of Qushayr, the same confederation Marj Rahit had made a byword sixty years before — was destroyed on the Sebou the next, and Kulthum himself was among the dead.

Tangier, Morocco · Abun-Nasr, A History of the Maghrib in the Islamic Period (1987) · Photograph: Khammal92 · CC BY-SA 4.0

His nephew Balj led the survivors across to al-Andalus. The Syrian regiments that settled there kept the same tribal identity that had killed their commander, and it is exactly that Qaysi loyalty — the factional landscape Marj Rahit had made permanent, arriving now at its furthest province — that a fugitive Umayyad exploited fifteen years later to found a dynasty out of a defeat, which is where the Cordoba pages in this section begin.

Umayyad authority was never restored west of Ifriqiya. When the Abbasids took the caliphate in 750 they inherited an empire that had already lost its western third, and they never recovered it: the Rustamids from 776 and the Idrisids from 788 were established in the space the revolt cleared, and Ifriqiya itself was held from 800 by Aghlabid governors on a hereditary grant — which is a way of being paid to stop pretending you govern a place.

The same grievance produced both endings. In the west it produced secession, and the rebels wanted out. In the east it produced a revolution, and the rebels wanted the centre. The east went the same way.

The revolution came from Khurasan

endDrafted from Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661-750 (2000)

The movement that ended the Umayyads was organised in Khurasan, the far north-eastern province, and it was organised for twenty years before it moved.

Merv, Turkmenistan · Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate AD 661-750 (2000) · Photograph: Kalpak Travel · CC BY-SA 4.0

Its agents propagated in the name of an unnamed member of the Prophet's family — al-rida min al Muhammad, the acceptable one from Muhammad's house — a formula vague enough to hold Shi'i expectation and general Umayyad grievance in the same coalition without either being told which one had won. Its recruits were the Arab settlers of Khurasan, long resident, intermarried, and holding land, plus the local Iranian gentry and the mawali the settlement had never accommodated. This was not a conquered population rising against Arabs. It was a provincial society that no longer fitted the categories Damascus taxed it by.

Those settlers were themselves Iraq's own overflow. Fifty thousand families had been shipped out of the overcrowded garrisons of Basra and Kufa to Khurasan in the 670s, given land at the empire's furthest edge rather than a stipend at its centre — Iraqi manpower, resettled rather than paid off. Two generations on they were as fixed in the province as anyone, and no happier than Basra or Kufa had ever been about what Damascus took from provinces it did not garrison itself.

They were also still Qaysi and Yamani, and that quarrel did some of the revolution's work for it. The governor Nasr ibn Sayyar spent his last years trying to hold Khurasan's two factions together and failed: when war broke out between him and the Yamani leader Juday al-Kirmani, Abu Muslim moved his own men between the two camps and let the province's oldest grievance finish weakening the man who might have stopped him. Kirmani was killed; his son joined the revolution rather than avenge him on the governor's side. Marwan II, fighting Kharijites of his own in Iraq, had nothing to spare for Khurasan.

Abu Muslim raised the black banners in 747. The Khurasani army moved west, took Kufa in 749, and destroyed Marwan II's forces at the Great Zab in 750. Only when Kufa was held was the unnamed candidate named, and he turned out to be an Abbasid — a descendant of the Prophet's uncle al-Abbas, not of Ali. The Shi'i element of the coalition had been used and now discovered it.

The Umayyad house was hunted down. One grandson of Hisham escaped to al-Andalus, where he founded an emirate at Cordoba that lasted longer than the caliphate his family had lost, and whose rulers eventually claimed the caliphal title outright in 929 — the one recorded successor claim on this polity's page, and one of the few things in this section that is a claim rather than an inheritance.

Abu Futrus

afterlifeDrafted from Wellhausen, The Arab Kingdom and its Fall (1927)

The Abbasids did not merely take the caliphate from the Umayyads. They set out to make the family harmless, and they were thorough about it.

The dynasty was outlawed and its estates seized. The chief scene of what followed was Syria, where Abdallah ibn Ali held the command, and Wellhausen is careful about the responsibility: it was not the doing of the Khurasanian troops, who were disciplined and did nothing without orders, but was ordered from above.

The graves

Even the dead were punished. The tombs of the caliphs and other Umayyads at Damascus, at Dabiq, at Rusafa, at Qinnasrin and elsewhere were broken open and what was in them was violated, where anything remained to violate.

Rusafa, Syria · Wellhausen, The Arab Kingdom and its Fall (1927) · Photograph: Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

Two were spared. One was Umar II, the caliph the pious tradition had already decided to approve of. The other, more surprisingly, was Mu'awiya.

The worst of it fell on Hisham, who had died recently enough for the hatred to be personal. His body — of which, it was said, only the nose was still intact — was scourged, crucified, burned, and the ashes scattered.

The dinner

At Abu Futrus, where Abdallah ibn Ali stayed after driving out the last caliph, more than eighty Umayyads are said to have been brought in under promises of safety and invited to a meal. Verses were recited; he was roused to fury by them; the guests were clubbed down, leather covers were spread over the bodies, and the dinner was served on top of them, to the sound of the dying underneath.

Wellhausen doubts the staging and not the substance. The recited verse as a trigger and the murder of enemies at a feast are motifs that turn up elsewhere in the same literature, and other versions name other Abbasids in Abdallah's place. The great slaughter itself he takes as entirely authentic. Masudi dates it to 15 Dhu al-Qa'da 132, which is 25 June 750.

Who was left

The survivors did not dare show themselves. They hid, lived meanly, and went in constant fear of being recognised and declared outlaws.

One grandson of the caliph Hisham got out to Spain, and there made himself a sovereign.

That is what was left, ninety years on, of a family whose writ had run from the Atlantic to the Indus: some frightened men in hiding, a set of broken tombs, and one young man at the far western end of everything they had taken, starting again.

The Sufyani

afterlifeDrafted from Wellhausen, The Arab Kingdom and its Fall (1927)

The Syrians had let it happen. They had abandoned the last Umayyad caliph, whom they disliked, and had not moved against the Abbasids while moving was still possible. By the time the extermination of the family woke them up, the position could not be altered: black had won and white had lost.

They rose anyway, in 750 and 751, Qaysites and Kalbites together — the two tribal blocs whose quarrel had been tearing the caliphate apart for seventy years, finally on the same side and too late. At their head was Abu'l Ward, a distinguished Qaysite of Qinnasrin. They were beaten at Marj al-Akhram, and Abu'l Ward fell with five hundred men of his own house.

The man they raised

What is remarkable is whom they raised, because it was not a Marwanid.

The claimant was a descendant not of Marwan and Abd al-Malik, whose branch had held the caliphate for the last sixty-six years, but of Mu'awiya and Yazid — the Sufyanids, who had been out of power since 684. He was not generally known by his own name at all. He was called simply as-Sufyani, the Sufyanid, which is to say that what was being acclaimed was a branch of a family rather than a man.

He fled to Palmyra with his Kalbites, wandered as a fugitive in the Hijaz, and was eventually caught and put to death under the second Abbasid caliph.

Palmyra, Syria · Wellhausen, The Arab Kingdom and its Fall (1927) · Photograph: Alen Ištoković · CC BY 3.0

And then he grew

His importance did not end with his execution. It increased.

He became the Messiah of the Syrians, the figure whose return they attached their political hopes to. And then, as the years passed and their opponents stayed in possession of the field, the expectation curdled: the Sufyani turned into a figure of the end of days, the one who comes before the Antichrist.

The dynasty, in other words, went on. Not as a claim to the caliphate — that was finished, and everyone knew it within a decade — but as a name in the eschatology, a thing Syrians waited for and other Muslims warned about.

The Abbasids called their government the dawla, the new era, and it was a prodigious revolution. But a defeated house that has been driven out of history does not always stay out of it. Sometimes it moves into prophecy, where it cannot be beaten again.