Battle of Yarmuk (or Yarmouk) Dates: 15-20(?) AUG 636CE (7-12(?) Rajab 15AH)
Forces Engaged: Byzantine (Roman) Empire ("Imperium Romanum" or "Βασιλεία Ῥωμαίων")
We'll
get there when we get to the sources, but we have real problems with
the strength estimates of the troops that met on the high plateau above
the Yarmouk (or Yarmuk) River in the late summer of 636.
We've encountered
this before, of course, when we have to try and reconstruct these
pre-Industrial fights. Aside from the pure lack of genuine and
analytical eyewitness accounts - many if not most of the "original
sources" were written years and even decades after the events they
describe - many of the chroniclers were writing not "history" as we
think of it but something more along the lines of poetry or heroic tales
meant to tell the story their listeners wanted to hear; rousing tales
of warrior glory or divine providence.
Obviously it's more heroic
(or more divine...) if the enemy is more numberless that the waves of
the ocean. Then your heroes are more heroic for beating their ass,
right?
So - since the winner write the history and the Rashidun
Caliphate was the winner of this one - the Arab sources tend to put the
number of Roman troops just a leetle on the high side.
Here's what I think we do know:
The Byzantine - and let's call them that; they would have called themselves "Romaioi",
Romans, but the modern convention for calling the nation centered
around modern Italy by that name is too strong to overlook - army was
divided into five contingents:
1) An Armenian contingent.under the overall Byzantine force commander, the magister militum per Orientem, Vahan,
2) A Slavic contingent under it's own commander, Buccinator,
3)
A Syrian Arab (Ghassanid) contingent under it's own commander, Jabala
ibn al-Ayham (Arabic: جبلة بن الأيهم); Jandora (1985) suggests this
force was predominantly light cavalry,
4) A group of professional Byzantine troops - variously described as "Greek" or "European" - under a commander named Dairjan, and
5) Another European/Greek contingent under another Byzantine officer named Gregory.
Beyond
this breakdown, such as it is, we have no idea how these units were
organized. Presumably each would have had some mixture of light and
medium-to-heavy infantry, light cavalry, and heavy (cataphract) cavalry.
One of the most useful sources we have for the Middle Byzantine army is the Στρατηγικόν, "Strategikon"
or "Strategicon", attributed to the soldier-emperor Maurice but
probably written by a Byzantine officer or group of officers some time between the 6th and
9th Centuries CE.
In it the author says that "in the past, when the legions were composed of large numbers of men..."
(that is, pre-6th Century CE) an individual field army might consist of
a total of 34,384; 16,384 heavy infantry, 8,000 light and missile
infantry, and 10,000 cavalry of various types.
Jandora (1985) has an excellent discussion of this issue, and I can't really do better than cite him:
"The
Arabic sources greatly exaggerate the number of Byzantine troops...from
80,000 to 240,000. Looking to the Christian sources we find figures
which are not only more tangible but more consistent. They indicate that
Theodorus and Baanes were able to muster a force of about 70,000 men,
or which 40,000 fought at Yarmuk."
Jandora (1985)
cites al-Tabari as noting that the Byzantine force was heavily skewed
toward infantry; about 2:1 infantry-to-cavalry.
It's worth noting
that Byzantine armies are often thought of as being characterized by the
primacy of the heavy armored cavalry, the cataphracti, with the scutatoi - the spear-and-shield infantry - acting largely in support and in broken terrain.
This
was certainly true of the high of Late Byzantine armies, but recall
that this was after exposure to mobile mounted opponents such as the
Rashidun Arabs. In the early-middle 7th Century an infantry-heavy force
isn't surprising, although the events of Yarmouk point out how much it
put the Byzantines at a disadvantage to the Muslim invaders.
Still, 2:1 is pretty high, suggesting that Vahan could have used some more horsemen.
So let's assume a Byzantine force of about 40,000 all arms, roughly 26-27,000 infantry and 13-14,000 cavalry.
Presumably
most of the infantry - let's say about 20,000 or so - were "heavy";
armored in lamellar, splint, scale, or chain mail and helmet, round
shield - although the Strategikon does admit that this heavy equipment might not be universal; the "picked men" should have armor, "...all of them if it can be done, but in any case the first two in the file".
Armored
or not, these guys were armed with a long straight sword (spatha) and a
long spear or lance, although exactly which was being carried in the
7th Century is a bit of a puzzle.
The older pilum throwing spear had long since been abandoned along with the classical short gladius
sword as the primacy of the infantry legion began to fade after
Adrianople.
But my understanding is that the long pike that became the
standard for Byzantine infantry by the 12th and 13th Centuries hadn't
been adopted this early; the Strategikon talks about "lances" -
which is also the term used for cavalry polearms that are described as
useful as javelin-like missiles, so perhaps what we're looking at is
something similar to the Macedonian xyston (ξυστόν), a 10 to 12-foot long polearm that would be typically held in both hands but could be thrown if need be.
Interestingly, the Strategikon
describes heavy infantry combat as very similar to the attack sequence
of classical legion; as the unit closes with the enemy the leading ranks
throw their missile weapons - either the plumbata darts (shown below as carried on the inside of the shield) or javelins, imitating the older pilum volley.
After
the javelin-and-or-dart volley the infantry closes even further, throws their polearms
- Maurice says "hurl their lances like javelins" and then "take out
their swords and fight".
The rear
ranks are told to use their lances to "support those in front, which
yields a rather peculiar picture of a line of infantry fighting with
swords in front of their own troops whose lance-points form a hedge at
their backs.
Presumably the Byzantine infantry figured it out.
The remaining 6,000 or so were "light" infantry, which the Strategikon
implies included the functions of bow-armed missile and javelin-armed
peltast-type skirmishers. These mosstroopers seem to be unarmored or, at
best, carry a smaller round shield.
The Byzantine cavalry was also divided into heavy and light troops.
The
Strategikon mentions both but spends little time discussing the
breakdown. Both types are advised to carry the bow and become proficient
in using it. That fits with the development of the true cataphract
heavy horse, which as we discussed when we talked about Panipat, fought some 900 years later.
Presumably
the main difference was in armor. The heavies would have been covered
in lamellar or mail, including leg and arm protection, to the point of
not needing to carry a shield. The artistic images suggest at least some
horse armoring, at least over the head and shoulders.
Light
cavalry would have had a mail or lamellar torso protection and steel
helmet and probably a shield, but would have had to dispense with the
full-on armor protection to gain speed and agility.
There's
a question about the light cavalry at Yarmouk, though; at least one
modern analyst (Jandora 1985) believes that the sources imply that the
Syrian Arab light cavalry either refused to join the Byzantine force or even
joined the Muslim force (we'll get to this in a bit, but suffice
to say that this is attested by only one source, and that was composed
more as a political tract than as a pure history).
Classical Roman armies often marched with field artillery in the form of carroballistae, a torsion bolt-throwing engine mounted on a cart, as many as 50-55 to the classical legio. There is no evidence that the use of these weapons continued into the Late Empire.
So roughly 40,000 all arms; 26,000 to 27,000 infantry, 13,000 to 14,000 heavy cavalry under the nominal command of Theodore Trithyrius (Θεόδωρος Τριθύριος), sacellarius (treasurer) to and brother of the emperor Heraclius (Hράκλειος), but although the sacellarius moved with the army he devolved command to Vahan in view of the latter's experience.
Rashidun Caliphate (Arabic: اَلْخِلَافَةُ ٱلرَّاشِدَةُ, al-Khilāfah ar-Rāšidah)
The
troops that emerged from the Arabian peninsula in the 7th Century were
animated by the faith that their Prophet had extolled to them, and
in that faith had led them to victory in the very first Muslim battle - Badr - only twelve years earlier. The
Prophet himself had gone toes-up only in 632. He was succeeded - not as religious leader but as temporal leader and organizer of the Muslim umma - by the Prophet's father-in-law Abu Bakr, who took the title Khalīfaṫ Rasūl Allāh (خَـلِـيْـفَـةُ رَسُـوْلِ اللهِ, "Successor of the Messenger of God") or "caliph".
That
lasted about a U.S. Congressional term; Abu Bakr followed his
son-in-law in 634. But in those two years he'd been a busy lad, first
unifying Arabia under Islam after what are called the "Ridda Wars" or
"Wars on Apostasy" against anti-Muslim rebellions, and then sending
expeditionary forces to assault Sassanid Persia and Byzantine Syria.
It was this latter force that fell in on the Plateau of the Yarmouk.
Here again we're confronted with conflicting information on both the size and composition of that force.
The Futah al-Buldan states flat-out that the Muslims numbered 24,000.
But
Jandora (1985) says not just no but fuck, no. "...24,000 may be an
acceptable figure for Ajnadayn but not for the later engagement...(i)n
the course of two years the Muslims sustained no costly defeat...(and)
continued to receive reinforcements from Medina and to enlist support of
Syrian Arabs."
Jandora (1985) cites
Sayf ibn Umar al-Usayyidi al-Tamimi (سيف بن عمر) as giving 36,000 as the
"best approximation" of Muslim strength. We'll talk about this in
Sources, but elsewhere al-Tamimi's Kitāb al-futūh al-kabīr wa-l-ridda is dismissed as an unreliable source, so I'm not sure why Jandora is so convinced.
The Futuh al-Sham of al-Azdi provides the ridiculous figure of 400,000, which no modern scholar believes.
From the Byzantine side of the hill Jandora (1985) states that Theophanes' Chronicle puts the Muslim numbers at 40,000. None of the other Christian sources I have read even guess at numbers.
It
does make sense that the Muslim numbers should have been smaller;
Byzantine FOBs like Damascus were close enough to make logistics fairly
simple, while the Meccan contingents (at least) would have had to lug
everything all the way from the Hijaz or loot, beg, or buy locally.
So
accepting Jandora (1985) that 24K is too small and 40+K too big, we're
kind of stuck between about 27-30K to 35-37K. So let's go with about
33-35,000 as a round number and fairly close.
The next question is: "What were these guys?" and the best answer we have is "Arabs".
We
know from the Muslim sources that the force assembled at the plateau of
Yarmouk was cobbled together from several sources, including;
1) The
original Syrian expeditionary force dispatched by Abu Bakr in 634 CE
(13AH); this organization was dominated by the original Ansar and Muhajirun - the Medina-based supporters of Islam - as well as from some other newer Muslim towns in the Hijaz.
2)
The Persian expedition under Khalid ibn al-Walid ibn al-Mughira
al-Makhzumi ( خالد بن الوليد بن المغيرة المخزومي), dispatched by Abu
Bakr in 634 and redeployed to Syria in 636 (15AH). This organization is
supposed to have had a larger proportion of true Bedouin tribesmen along
with a Medinan core and was cavalry-heavy.
3) Local Syrian Arab recruits, possibly including elements of the Ghassanid subunit(s) originally part of the Byzantine army.
The
Muslim sources mention both infantry and cavalry. Jandora (1985) states
that footsoldiers predominated, which makes sense; Muslim Arabia was
largely small-town farmers and pastoralists. As we discussed at Badr;
the romantic vision of desert nomads in flowing robes is a romantic
fiction.
What we don't know is the actual ratio of foot to horse, or much about the details of arms and armament.
Presumably
the infantry were armed like the guy above; shield and spear and/or
sword, possibly with some sort of close-combat hand tool like the belt
axe in the picture or mace.
Armor is something else; my
understanding of Arabia of the period is that 1) the manufacturing base
was nowhere near as large or capable as that of the big empires - the
Sassanid and Byzantine - to the north and west, and 2) the climate made
heavy armor impractical, so the tradition of armored combat hadn't
developed. Jandora (1985) says flat-out: "Both the infantry and cavalry
were short of body armor".
At least some of the footsoldiers would
have carried a bow - we've seen Arab archers already at Badr - but how
many, and whether the infantry were organized into distinct units of
melee and missile infantry, we don't really know.
The Rashidun cavalry, however, is a bit better attested.
For
one thing, to be able to own horses and equip a mounted soldier
required some degree of eliteness, and, like all elites, Arab elites
were better documented in early Muslim times as much as they are today.
For another the eventual Muslim force commander formed a unit of
horsemen who became well-known, both at the time and since.
This "Mobile Guard" ( طليعة متحركة, Tulay'a mutaharikkah or الحرس المتحرك, al-Haras al-Mutaharikkah)
is said to have numbered about 8,000 at the earlier battle at Ajnadayn
was reorganized to include about 4,000 cavalry under Khalid's hand;
basically his tactical reserve and reaction force, by the time of
Yarmuk.
I
suspect that these troops would have been, if not quite as heavily
armored as the Byzantine cataphracts, at the very least medium and
probably "heavy" cavalry by late classical standards; full mail or
lamellar coats, helmets, some with shields but possibly some of the more
thoroughly armored without.
In the well-researched Wiki article on Rashidun cavalry
the authors note that one significant difference between the Mobile
Guard and their Byzantine counterparts was "barding" or horse armor; the
Byzantines tended to have it, the Muslims didn't, at least at the time.
However,
I note that - as attested by the Jandora (1985) quite above - there's
some disagreement about the degree of protection that the Rashidun
troops - both infantry and cavalry - would have had at the time of
Yarmuk.
Here's my thought.
I suspect that the level of armor
protection would have been generally lower amongst the Muslim force,
for the reasons discussed above.
But I also suspect that the
Rashidun cavalry would have been better armored than their infantry
counterparts. For one, they'd have been wealthier, and as such both
better able and more likely to afford the expense. For another, their
horses did the hard work of lugging all that metal around.
So, yeah, I think they did look like the guys in the picture above.
We also know that the Rashidun mounted arm included camelry; soldiers who, at the very least, rode TO the fight on the ships of the desert.
I'm not sure whether these guys would have ridden their mounts INTO
battle, mind. The sources include a passage that suggests that the
camels, or at least, some of the camels, were tied down in or near the
Muslim bivouac area.
We'll get there; it's good, trust me.
Note the horseman at the bottom of the
montage above; at least some of the Rashidun cavalry were mounted
archers. Again, I'm unsure whether these troops were grouped into
separate units or scattered throughout the heavy cavalry.
But one
big advantage of a mounted camelry archer would be height; he can see, and
shoot, well above the group of both horse- and footsoldiers around him.
Conversely, it's difficult to strike with a lance (and nearly impossible
to reach down with a sword) from camel-back.
So my guess is that if there was some sort of combat-camelry at Yarmuk many of the guys on the camels would have been bowmen,
At
least some portion of the horse soldiers must have been genuine
Bedouin-style light cavalry complete with scimitar and turban and Arab
stallion right off the romance novel cover. How many, though, I have no
idea.
Let's make some guesses at the overall Rashidun force.
Let's
accept the 33,000- to 35,000-odd number as pretty close. Smaller than the
Byzantines but not disastrously so, making the outcome "miraculous"
enough to satisfy the Muslim sources.
The footsoldiers
predominated; let's say about 20,000 light to medium
spear-and-shield/sword-and-shield infantry with a scattering of bow- or
javelin-armed missile troops.
Of the 13,000- to 15,000-odd cavalry (we're
going to assume that no more than small number of genuine camel-jockeys)
maybe 10,000 were medium to heavy cavalry.
Their primary weapon would
have been a lance similar to the Byzantines; another scattering would
have been horse archers, although like the cataphracts it's also
possible that even the guys with melee weapons would have had a bow as a
backup.
Close-combat weapons would have included swords
(including both curved single-edge and straight double-edge types), hand
axes, and maces.
The remaining 5,000 or so would have been light
cavalry with little or no armor, sword-and-shield or bow-armed used
primarily for scouting and flank or rear security.
The entire force was under the tactical command of the guy we've already mentioned; Khalid ibn al-Walid, although the overall force commander was the Āmir ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn al-Jarrāḥ (Arabic: عامر بن عبدالله بن الجراح;), more commonly known as Abu Ubaydah.
The Sources:
There are two large groups of original sources; Byzantine (or "Western"
more broadly) and Muslim. We'll taken them in order of regional origin - Western first, then Muslim - and within that, importance.
It's
worth noting that, as always with pre-Industrial battle, none of the
primary sources are truly contemporary. One of the earliest - the Futuh al-Sham
- seems to date from some time in the late 8th to early 9th Centuries
CE (2nd to 3rd Century AH). The most commonly cited Byzantine source,
Theophanes Chronicle, likely dates from a similar period given the author's death in the second decade of the 9th Century CE.
So all of these people were writing some time between at least 100 and 150 years after whatever happened on the plateau above the Yarmuk, and it's worth keeping that in mind.
That said, let's look at the:
Byzantine and Western sources: As noted above, the most extensively cited source in this group is the Chronicle attributed to a Byzantine Greek cleric, Theophanes "Confessor" (Θεοφάνης Ὁμολογητής).
It is in the late classical/early medieval tradition of an "annals" - a compilation of events by year - beginning with late 3rd Century CE
and ending in 814 CE, just before the presumed end date of compilation.
This work is available online in a 1997 edition translated into English by Cyril Mango and Roger Scott.
Per Mango and Scott (1997) there's several salient facts about this work:
1) It is a continuation of a historical compilation written by someone named George, who was another monastic (and a "synkellos", a fairly high-ranking monastery official), by
2) Theophanes, who is presented, even by his admirers, as no great scholar, and
3) The bulk of the work - from the beginning up until about 600 CE - is better attested elsewhere.
However,
Theophanes seems to have had both an interest in, and a connection to,
the activities of the post-Byzantine Syria and Palestine area. Mango and
Scott (1997) note that:
"We
must assume that Theophanes...was deeply interested in the activities
of the Arabs and their Christian subjects...(n)o other Byzantine
chronicler showed such such an interest or such a breadth of vision."
So
- whether it was Theophanes, George, or some unnamed team of scribes -
the Chronicle is possibly our single most influential
Christian/Byzantine/Western source for the events in the Levant in 636.
Fortunately Mango and Scott (1997) include a thorough explanation of the textural transmission of the Chronicle (Introduction, pages xcv to xcvii) which notes all the usual issues with manuscript copy.
While
the translators suggest that copies of the original manuscript were
"mass produced" none of these first generation versions are known to
exist.
At
least two separate second-generation copy lineages are suspected.
Neither has produced a remaining example, but one produced a pair of
extant manuscripts in Greek currently held in the Vatican. The older of
the two is dated to the 12th Century CE, while the other led to the
remainder of the manuscript lineages, including the "Latin translation
of Anastasius" of which a 9th Century CE copy is (presumably) still in
Rome.
Mango
and Scott (1997) do an excellent job of describing the various issues
with the extant copies, and I recommend you to them if you're
interested.
Here's the full text of what Theophanes tells us about Yarmouk:
"In
this year the Saracens - an enormous multitude of them - (setting out
from) Arabia, made an expedition to the region of Damascus. When Baanes
had learnt of this, he sent a message to the imperial sakellarios, asking the latter to come with his army to his help, seeing that the Arabs were very numerous. So the sakellarios joined Baanes and, setting forth from Emesa, they met the Arabs.
Battle was given and, on the first day, which was a Tuesday, the 23rd of the month Loos, the men of the sakellarios
were defeated. Now the soldiers of Baanes rebelled and proclaimed
Baanes emperor, while they abjured Herakleios. Then the men of the sakellarios
withdrew, and the Saracens, seizing this opportunity, joined battle.
And as a south wind was blowing in the direction of the Romans, they
could not face the enemy on account of the dust and were defeated.
Casting themselves into the narrows of the river Hiermouchthas, they all
perished, the army of both generals numbering 40,000."
There's
that 40,000 number again...but it makes me wonder. Who are "both
generals"? Did the chronicler mean both Byzantine and Muslim "generals"?
Or did he mean "both Byzantine generals", Baanes (Vahan) and the sakellarios Theodore? Jandora (1985) believes the former, and he's studied this engagement much more than I have...but I'm not sure.
Anyway, that's Theophanes.
A second chronicle that mentions Yarmouk comes from 12th Century Syria in the form of the World Chronicle
of Michael I Rabo ("the Syrian"). This work covers what the name
implies, the world from the Biblical Creation to the author's own times.The
original, written in Syriac - an Aramaic dialect - was assembled at
the Jacobite monastery of Mar Bar Sauma (or Bar Saum) of which this
Michael was at least housed, if not being one of the monastic officers.
The
work in its original language is extant only in a single 16th Century
copy now held in Aleppo. Portions of the later books of this copy are
available in English translation, but the publisher warns:
"The
text is not preserved in its entirety, and the layout of Michael’s
chronicle was distorted through the process of copying. Chabot’s edition
is a facsimile of a documentary copy written for him in Edessa (Urfa)
from 1897 to 1899. While the scribes tried to imitate the layout, a
number of mistakes were introduced. Its Vorlage, the only extant
ms., was written in 1598 by a very competent scribe. It is kept by the
community of the Edessenians in Aleppo."
The
Chabot translation is from one of the numerous Armenian translations
like that in the page shown above. Supoosedly the Armenian has some materials not in the Syriac version, but I am unsure of that or what it means.
Unfortunately Michael was more
interested in making theological points than writing history. Here's the
passage concerning Yarmuk:
"Heraclius
sent his brother Theodoricus against the Arabs. The latter came to the
Antioch country, to the village called Ko'sit. Now it happened there was
a stylite named Simeon dwelling there..."
(here
the chronicle goes into excruciating detail about how the Byzantines
tell this joker about how they're going to "eliminate all those who
don't accept the Council of Chalcedon" and how this makes the Good Guys
(the "very Orthodox") sad because they're due for a smiting...
(briefly:
this "Council of Chalcedon" was one of the many early Christian
get-togethers that tried to wrangle out the beliefs in invisible
sky-wizards over which the true believers wanted to kill each other.
Specifically, this one asserted that Christ is both god and man. Feel
free to make war among yourselves over that...)
The Chronicle continues:
"Indeed,
(Theodoricus' troops) set off full of swagger and when the wrath of God
struck them only a few managed to flee. The remainder fell to the
Arabs' swords."
Aaaand...that's it from Syria. Not very helpful.
There's bits and pieces from elsewhere. The fight gets a brief mention in the 7th Century CE Chronicle of Fredegar that we ran into when we looked at the Moors at Tours. Close to contemporary but also far removed physically, so unlikely to have had first-hand reports. And brief? Ready? Here it goes:
"In the ensuing battle the Saracens were the victors and cut of the vanquished to pieces."
Okey-doke. Told'ya it was brief.
The Chronica Minora, another Syriac text, also known as the Chronicle of Khuzestan, has a similarly brief mention of the events of 636CE:
"Heraclius the emperor of the Romans sent against them Roman soldiers,who the Arabs killed more than one hundred thousand of."
You get the idea. There's just not a lot to go on from the Byzantine side of the hill. So what about the winners?
Muslim/Arabic sources: Basically you've got two piles; the Futuh al-Sham and the Futuh al-Buldan in one, and the History of al-Tabari (along with some minor accounts) in the other.
Somewhere in-between is the History of Damascus by Ibn Asakir. This work is troublesome, and we'll discuss why in just a bit.
Let's
look at pile Number One first. But before we go, it's worth taking a
look at the "big picture" of Arabic/Muslim historigraphy. Afzal and Juzar (2014) has a nice explanation of why all of a sudden all these books in Arabic turn up in the 2nd-3rd Centuries AH (8th-9th Centuries CE):
"The
spread of Islam from the confines of Mecca and Medina led to the
realization that the events and conquests had to be recorded. The oral
traditions of the Arabs had up until now sufficed for the transmission
of their traditions and history, but now other races were being included
within the fold of Islam."
So pretty much a Muslim
pre-Industrial "Rise of the Internet"; the old ways had been fine, but
suddenly there was a bigger audience, and a more quick and efficient way
to reach it was needed than old Abu Amal reciting the tales of real-life adventure
in the corner of the
suk.
So; al-Azdi.
The Kitab Futuh al-Sham
(Arabic: كتاب فتوح الشام, "Book of the Conquests of Syria") is s long,
semi-poetic work by someone named Abu Ismail Muhammad b. Abdallah
al-Azdi al-Basri.
Mourad (2000) has a good discussion about this guy,
who is difficult to triangulate, but who Mourad (2000) believes was in
fact a real person, a "traditionist" living in Basra (as his name
implies) in the late 8th and early 9th Centuries CE (2nd to 3rd
Centuries AH) at which time he - presuming that this is the person who
wrote the text - set down the work.
However, the earliest
manuscript copy we have of this work is from only the 13th Century CE
(613 AH), where it was transcribed in Jerusalem. It, and a better
transcription from the 14th Century, both reside in the Bibliotheque National in Paris.
This
work was largely disregarded because of the early scholarship of one
Michael de Goeje working in the mid-19th Century. De Goeje seems to have classified al-Azdi as more of a fabulist and poet than historian but recent studies,
particularly that of Conrad (1987), have begun to change this.
What Mourad (2000) emphasizes is that al-Azdi's work is only part of a tradition of historical work - including that of "...other compilers of his generation, Sacid ibn al-Fadl al-Basri, al-Qudami al-Missisi, and Abu Hu-dhayfa al-Bukhari.",
all of whom appear to have been working from an original source that
was written by 8th century historian Lut ibn Yahya ibn Sa'id ibn Mikhnaf
al-Azdi (Arabic: لوط ابن يحيٰ ابن سعيد ابن مِخنَف الأزدي), better known
as Abu Mikhnaf.
Another in this lineage includes Abū Jaʿfar
Muḥammad ibn Jarīr ibn Yazīd al-Ṭabarī (Arabic: أبو جعفر محمد بن جرير بن
يزيد الطبري), whose History we're going to encounter in just a bit.
The Futuh al-Sham appears to be the source of most of the detailed reconstructions of this fight, including the Wikipedia entry as well as secondary works like Nicolle (1994)...I think.
Huge emphasis on "think"; this is a very troublesome and difficult point about this fight.
Nicolle (1994) is...also troublesome, and we'll get to him as well.
We'll
go into this in depth in a bit, but suffice to say here that I'm not
entirely convinced by the detail of al-Azdi's accounteither.
There seems to be
quite a bit more there than anyone without a hell of a big after-action
report section and more sophisticated interview methods that were set
up in the Islamic 2nd and 3rd Centuries.
As the illustration
shows, the 2020 English translation by Hassanein and Scheiner is
available in both print and digitally. I can tell you - ruefully - that I
waded through it helped by a fair amount of coffee and some sugary
pastries. It's, well...I can't say it any better than Philippides and Hanak
(2011) did when we looked at the Muslim battle writers at Constantinople in 1453:
"Little
has been said about the Turkish accounts thus far for the main reason
that they represent meager narratives, with such an overwhelming poetic
imagery that they become difficult, if not impossible, for the historian
seeking facts about the siege."
Ouch.
But it's not wrong, exactly; there's a crap-ton of poetry to a picogram of history in al-Azdi.
The other part of the Big Pile is another early work...
...the
Futūh al-Buldān (Arabic: فتوح البلدان, Conquest of (the) countries), or
Kitāb Futūḥ al-Buldān ("Book
of the Conquest of the Countries/Lands") is a 9th Century CE (3rd
Century AH) work by Ahmad Ibn Yahya al-Baladhuri of Baghdad.
(Weird historical note:
per Hitti (1916) part of this guy's name ("al-Baladhuri") is because he
ate (or drank the juice of) some sort of cashew-related fruit, went
nuts, and died. That's fucked up! Not just the whole "drink cashew
juice" but the "the stupid way you died becomes part of your name".
Imagine
after you died your name would be "John father-of-Nick
Seven-Car-Pileup-On-The-Interstate Jones". Anyway, that's this guy.)
The
account of Yarmuk in this work is mercifully much more brief, although
it is also intrigued by and stuffed with tales of heroism and martyrdom,
including a guy whose leg gets whacked off but is too busy killing
infidels to notice until later.
Sounds like ol' Ahmad wasn't the only dude drinking crazy cashew juice.
Hitti (1916) describes the Futuh al-Buldan
as "...a digest of a larger work that has been lost." although the
translator doesn't clarify, or if he does I cannot find his explanation
for, why he posits the existence of this original work.
I've
looked everywhere I can on-line and cannot pull a chain of transmission
for the al-Buldan. It appears that there is a 2020 work by Ryan Lynch
that discusses the manuscript history, but I wasn't able to find a
reasonably-priced edition of his Arabic Conquests and Early Islamic Historiography: The Futuh al-Buldan of al-Baladhuri (even
the Kindle is over $35!) so I'll have to leave you there.
Presumably
like many of the other Arabic sources the earliest copy we have will
date to the expansion of scholarly writing in the Abbasid period.
The text of the al-Buldan is available on-line as a scan of the Hitti (1916) translation titled as The origins of he Islamic state; Yarmouk is covered on pages 207 and 208.
The smaller pile usually includes:
1) the Chronicle of Pseudo-Dionysius of Tell-Mahre, or Zuqnin Chronicle,
an 8th or 9th Century CE record of the history of Christian Syria,
preserved in a single handwritten manuscript (Cod. Vat. 162), now in the
Vatican, and
2) the Al-Sīra al-Nabawiyya (Arabic: السيرة
النبوية), a group of literature that compose the traditional Muslim
biographies of Islamic prophet Muhammad from which most information
about the early period of Islam is derived, and the
3) Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun (Arabic: مقدّمة ابن خلدون) a 14th Century universal history.
All
these seem to have included some account of the 7th Century CE invasion
of Syria, but necessarily fairly cursory given the breadth of the
subjects.
One more significant Arabic source is the 12th Century CE/6th Century AH The History of Damascus (Arabic: تاريخ دمشق, Tarikh Dimashq) attributed to Ibn Asakir (Arabic: ابن عساكر).
This work is well-discussed in Antrim (2006), who says that "...Ibn
Asakir called on the historical narratives of the 7th century and,
in...the more than 200 pages devoted to the history of the Islamic
conquest of Syria...the sheer size of this freighted interlude begs for
comment."
Unfortunately I have not been able to get my hands
on an English translation of this work; it's some 80 volumes in the
original Arabic, and the translation would be similarly voluminous.
Apparently the portion of the Tarikh Dimashq dealing with Yarmouk is
detailed; it is perhaps the single most commonly cited source in the
reconstruction of Jandora (1985).
Another small-pile source is the History of the Prophets and Kings (Arabic: تاريخ الرسل والملوك Tārīkh al-Rusul wa al-Mulūk) better known as Tarikh al-Tabari
(تاريخ الطبري), The History of al-Tabari, composed in the early 4th
Century AH/10th Century CE.
Information about the composition of the History
seem frustratingly elusive, other than it included a wide range of
contemporary Abbasid-era works that the author compiled in Baghdad.
It
seens worth going into a bit of detail about al-Tabari because he was
the Popular Historian of his times. In the translation I reviewed
(Mazar, 1998) the translator notes that "...1,220 copies of the History were in the library of the Fatimid palace when Saladin took over in 567/1171."
This
suggests both a lot of early interest and a resulting broad swath of
early copyists; the Mazar (1998) translation notes that this included
translation from the Arabic into Turkish and Persian, but also notes
that "...manuscripts became increasingly difficult to find..."
which resulted in corruption and collation of the original text. How
severe this distortion had become by the time the first European
Orientalists (such as de Goeje, who seems to have been the busy little boy
of Eastern scholarship in the middle 19th Century) came across the History is difficult to say.
There's one huge problem with al-Tabari for us, though; he seems to have missed (or ignored) Yarmouk altogether.
His
treatment of the Muslim conquest of Syria is much less extensive that
the earlier invasion of Sassanid Persia. Basically he talks about the
battle(s) of Marj ar-Rum in March of 635CE (14AH) and the following
campaigns in northern Syria (around Hims/modern Homs) and now-derelict
Qinnasrin.
Mazar (1998) states that the Muslim victory at Ajnadayn
is recounted, as well, but I can't find it; in the text al-Tabari goes
from Marj ar-Rum (p. 174 in Mazar 1998) to Hims (p. 175) to Qinnasrin
(pp. 178-181) to Heraclius' retreat from Syria (p. 181).
So I'm
not sure; did al-Tabari lump all the Byzantine defeats into one fight
and called it Marj ar-Rum? Or did he just not have original sources for
the other battles?
Either way, it's difficult to include al-Tabari in the pile of Yarmouk sources, but he usually is, so...
 |
The ruins of Mar Bar Sauma, once home to Mike the Syrian
|
Secondary Sources:
Given the criticality of the Rashidun conquest of the Persia and the
Palestine/Syria regions of Byzantium it's not surprising that there has
been a quantity of scholarship about the events.
Let's start with the most accessible and obvious - the Wikipedia entry.
This
work is among one of the better Wiki articles; well-written and
organized, extensively researched and footnoted. The author(s) have gone
to many of the original sources. It's a very good starting point, and
it's where I began.
However.
I have some real questions.
In
the piece the battle is broken down in tactical detail to an almost
battalion-sized level. This appears to follow the account contained in
Nicolle (1994); it's compelling and looks plausible. There's only one
issue; I can't find any support for this level of detail in the primary
sources I accessed.
Jandora (1985) is perhaps the most intriguing of the secondary sources for what he says he doesn't know; "The unresolved issues concerning the Battle of Yarmouk pertain to combat strength, participants, and sequence of events."
So...pretty much everything below the grand-strategy level, then?
You've
probably noted how often the above work appears in this account. That's
no surprise; I find Jandora (1985) one of the most plausible secondary studies of
this engagement, largely because of the author's honest admission of
the degree of 1) contradictions and omissions found in the primary
sources, and the 2) confusion and uncertainty about the actual events
arising from the former.
As that military savant Donald Rumsfeld
famously said; there are things we know we know, but also "known unknowns" -
things we know we don't know - and we are better off acknowledging what
we lack understanding of rather than inferring knowledge from what is,
in fact, contradiction and omission.
The Wiki entry provides a much longer list of secondary sources, among the ones I reviewed for this post include:
Nicolle, David (1994), Yarmuk 636 A.D.: The Muslim Conquest of Syria, and
Palmer, Andrew (1993), The Seventh Century in the West-Syrian Chronicles (which includes the text of the Zuqnin Chronicle covering Yarmouk).
We're
going to talk more about the sources when we get there, because they're
a big part of what we know, or think we know, or don't know about this
fight.
On the Internet:
The Wikipedia we've talked about.
The on-line resources other than that are fairly slim. Several appear to have been copied more-or-less directly from Wikipedia. A good example is this piece from "The Collector" blog in 2022. It's fine in a "popular history" sort of way, but ignores the contradictory and missing accounts to tell a seamless tale of the supposed events so as not to perplex a general audience.
Most of the primary sources - except for Ibn Asakir, goddammit! - are available on-line. The Wiki article is good for providing open-source links to them. The one other major exception is, as noted, the original Syriac World Chronicle; it's behind a publisher's paywall and is not accessible.
There's a fun little blog post written by someone going by "syassakii" in 2011 that decribes the modern site and what looks like the Jordanian battlefield park. The text is more or less the conventional (i.e. Wikipedia) story, but the pictures are nice.
The Campaign:
The roads to Yarmouk should probably be traced back to the earliest
decade of the 7th Century CE, when a middle-aged guy living in the
little town of Mecca (pronounced "Makkah" in the Arabic tongue of the
region known as the Hijaz or Hejaz) in the western part of the Arabian
peninsula where it borders the Red Sea was having a bit of a religious experience.
Something New Out of the East
We've
discussed the story - and the hadīths ( حديث), the tales of what
happened in and around Mecca and Medina in those early Muslim days are
stories, spoken word accounts until damn near two hundred years later
when the first were written down - of the beginnings of Islam back when
we discussed Badr. All that remains unchanged, and you're welcome to go
back and look over what we talked about.
The next big things
happened not under the Prophet himself but under the first of his
caliphs, Abu Bakr, who set about not just establishing a faith -
Muhammad himself had done that in and around Mecca and Medina by 620s CE
(0-10 AH) - but building an empire.
First across the Arabian peninsula; these were the so-called Ridda Wars, which had begun late in the Prophet's own time, that consolidated Islam as the uniting force throughout the Arab heartland.
But simultaneously the Muslim headshed of Abu Bakr had bigger ambitions.
An expeditionary force had been sent to the Byzantine Levant to whack the Romans there for beheading a Muslim emissary.
Another was dispatched to what is modern Iraq to see about doing something to the Persians who ran the place at that time.
Which,
when you stop to think of it, was either brilliant or insane, because
it was the 7th Century CE equivalent of Belgium sending two armies to
invade France and Germany in 1914. Because here's what the Middle East
looked like around the early 600s CE:
The
little lighter green blob there on the left side of the "Islamic
Empire" green rectangle is where the Muslims were around 622 CE. The
larger green are the gains from the expansion of the 620s and the Ridda
Wars of the 630s.
But look north.
That big blue blob? That's
the "Sassanid" Persian empire that had been around for some four
centuries or so and was the big player in southwest Asia.
To the
northwest, the red is our Byzantines, the successor (they'd have said
"continuation") of Imperial Rome of the classical period.
Both
were immense, rich, powerful states under more-or-less unified imperial
houses, packed with economic heft and bursting with well-trained,
well-equipped troops in organized units that in many cases had been
around for decades or more.
In the green you had a bunch of guys
who a generation ago had been trading spices and ivory and whose
military might consisted of town guards and caravan escorts.
Okay, when you look at it that way, "insane" does seem like a better description.
Only...as
we know now, it wasn't. It all worked for the new Rashidun Caliphate,
and as my old drill sergeant said, if it's stupid and it works, it's not
stupid.
Why did it work?
Well, for one thing...
...between them, the Persians and Byzantines were all fought out.
Let's You and Him Fight
As
irascible and grabby neighbors the two empires had been fighting on and
off since classical times, when the eastern outfit was "Parthia" and
the Romans were, well, Romans. The story would take (and has taken)
whole volumes to tell, so I'll just link to the Wiki article about it and you can go take a look if and when you want.
The two had just fought a 26-year-long war that had ended with a Byzantine invasion of Persia that decapitated the Eranshahr and produced a Sassanid civil war. Both sides were gutted; the Wiki entry for the war sums it up pretty well:
"Allied
with the Avars and Slavs, the Persians made a final attempt to take
Constantinople in 626, but were defeated there. In 627, allied with
Turks, Heraclius invaded the heartland of Persia. A civil war broke out
in Persia, during which the Persians killed their king, and sued for
peace.
By the end of the conflict, both sides had exhausted their human and material resources and achieved very little."
I'd argue that Heraclius & Co. didn't see it that way.
From
their vantage point they'd finally broken their most dangerous rival;
it was their "Fall of the Soviet Union" End of History - now it was a
unipolar world and Constantinople could make it's own reality. They
can't be blamed for not foreseeing that an Arab visionary would invent a
whole new religion that in barely a decade would produce an explosion
of holy warriors out of the unfruitful wastes of Arabia.
And it's worth noting that there were more problems in Byzantium than just wars.
For one, the first waves of what we believe were bubonic plague were tearing up the empires, beginning with the "Plague of Justinian" in the 540s CE. This sucker tore up the cities of the eastern Mediterranean and Anatolia; estimates of the mortality run as high as 40%, but whatever the actual toll, it hit the Byzantine and Sassanid empires hard. The peoples of the Arabian peninsula, living as many did in small towns, farms, and semi-nomadic communities, presumably suffered much less.
Another pandemic, the "Plague of Sheroe", hammered mostly the Sassanids; it killed the reigning monarch in 628 CE (6 AH) and is generally thought to have greatly assisted the Muslim invasions there.
Then there were the earthquakes. A massive moment magnitude VIII tremor pretty much destroyed Antioch in Syria in 526 CE. Another, larger - moment magnitude X - hit Constantinople in 557 CE. Both did both tremendous physical damaged as well as adding to the plague fatalities.
So things were shaky - in more than one sense - in Byzantium in the 630s just when they didn't need those troubles.
Allah has Entered The Chat
To make a long story short, in 634 CE (13AH):
1)
The Muslim Persian Expedition went through the broken Sassanids like a
dose of Islamic salts. Led by our man Khalid idn al-Walid the Muslim
army took most of Mesopotamia from the Sassanids.
2) A Syrian
Expedition, led by Abu Ubaydah) was dispatched to push
up through Palestine and into Syria.
Long
before Napoleon invented the army corps, the Muslim army in Syria moved
separately - probably a must given the terrain and relatively scanty
sustenance along the routes - to combat and combined when they encountered the
Byzantine main field force. Shades of Ulm to come, eh?
Again, the Wiki does a fine job summarizing what we know about the initial invasion of the Levant.
This
collision was forming in the Spring of 634 CE/13 AH. The Caliph, concerned about
the relative inexperience of his Syrian officers, pulled Khalid out of
Iraq with orders to join the Abu Ubayda force.
Khalid did so by one of
those "epic marches", in this case through the western Iraqi/eastern
Syrian desert, in time to meet - and defeat - the main Byzantine field
force at Ajnadayn in the summer of 634 CE/13 AH.
How the Hell Did They Do It?
It's
worth pausing a moment to ponder this and the subsequent
Byzantine-Muslim fights, because when you think about it, the whole
business seems crazy lopsided.
On the one hand you had professional
soldiers, probably many of them veterans, organized, trained, and
equipped by the largest and strongest polity in the Mediterranean world
that had been fighting wars for centuries.
On the other, an ad-hoc force of, as we said, largely tribal fighters who'd been small-time/part-time soldiers a decade before.
How'd
that work out well for the challengers? How do you just come storming
out of the desert and do a Rocky on the heavyweight champ of the Levant?
The
thing is, it's hard to just slag off on the Byzantines. Yes, they get
whipped again and again in the 7th Century. But remember they were still
in there kicking until the final takedown eight hundred years later!
That's not too shabby. These Romans, they weren't out of it yet. So why DID the Muslims beat them like a war drum?
Was
it motivation? Did having God on your side make the Muslim troops that
difficult to beat? Conversely, were the Byzantines worn out from years
of fighting the Persians and all PTSD'd out?
Was
it leadership? Khalid seems to have been the Desert Fox of his day,
running the table in Arabia, Persia, and the Levant before his own
political leadership took him down.
Was there some additional
technical or tactical advantage the Muslim forces brought with them?
It's hard to see from here, but maybe there was something that took the
Byzantines by surprise.
Obviously the Muslim and Byzantine accounts emphasize the religious
factors; God's favor on the side of the Muslims, God's wrath (presumably
for impiousness or just being Jesus-slackers) against the Byzantines.
But whether it really was faith, or generalship, or tactics, or some combination of both? It worked for the Muslims and failed for the Byzantines.
Why?
We will probably never precisely know.
The Battleground
Regardless of how I feel about his historiography, Nicolle (1994) writes well and does a fine job describing the setting of our Byzantines-versus-Muslims fights. Here he is:
"A great deal is known about Syria in the last decades of Byzantine rule. As now, it consisted of three distinct zones - a westward-looking Mediterranean coast, a rich agricultural hinterland, and a much larger region of semidesert. The coast was largely Greek speaking, Syriac and Aramaean speaking Semitic peoples inhabited the agricultural zone; while the semi-desert steppes were already Arab. Big cities were dominated by Greek speakers...(but) the Greek language did not...prove a sense of identity with the Byzantine Empire and the effectiveness of Byzantine rule in this remarkably complex region is open to doubt"
Remember, too, that much of Syria had been overrun by the Sassanids in the second decade of the 600s CE; Damascus fell in 613 CE and Egypt between 618 and 622 CE.
This was a contested border when the Muslims arrived, and they tore into it.
The Empire Strikes Back
By
635 CE (14AH) the Muslim forces were in control of much of Syria.
Damascus had fallen some time between the autumn of 634 CE and the
spring of 635. From there the Muslim forces divided, some moving south
to secure the Palestine region, others moving north into what is today
Lebanon. The sources claim that these reavers encountered Byzantine
forces several times, including battles at Ablah, Fahl, Marj ar-Rum, and
Emesa.
The Byzantine emperor's plan was supposedly to assemble
another large field army and to coordinate the re-invasion of Syria from
Anatolia with a Persian drive southwest from Iran.
This
envelopment never materialized; the Persians didn't move, whether
through clever Muslim diplomacy and/or subterfuge, or simply military
exhaustion. But the Byzantine force did manage to drive south, retook
Damascus in the spring of 636 CE/15AH.
Abu Ubaydah - supposedly
advised by Khalid - responded with a Fabian strategy, retreating south
first to Jabiya and then to Yarmouk.
The Byzantines
followed...cautiously. Imperial policy was to avoid risking defeat in
the field if diplomacy, theats, or treachery would work. Supposedly the
Muslim and Byzantine leaders met several times over the summer of 636
CE.
Presumably this would have been the Byzantines trying to figure out a
way to buy off or drive out these invaders, while the Muslims - given
their priors - kept telling the Romans about how cool their God was and
how the best thing would be for everyone to get down with the Shahada (Arabic: الشَّهَادَةُ aš-šahādatu) and all be brothers in Allah in a big ol' Islamic kumbaya.
Well,
nobody convinced anyone, so finally everyone formed up on the plateau
of Yarmouk to have a go and decide who was hard enough.
The Engagement: And here's where things kind of fall apart.
I direct your attention back to the Wiki "Battle of the Yarmuk" page and its lovely tactical dissection of the fight.
It's
full of tremendous detail, breaking down the battle into six days with
multiple phases in several of the days. There's cool battle maps like
the one above, and descriptions of the movement and encounters of the
different sub-units on both sides.
Here's the thing, though: I
have no idea where all this detail comes from, and neither do many of
the other secondary sources who have looked at this fight.
I've given you Jandora (1985) and his opinion. Here's Decker (2013): "Full reconstruction is impossible due to source problems". Here's Wakeley (2017) on al-Azdi: "Invention was not necessarily conscious fictionalization. It captures what a later age...thought must have happened."
Nowhere
in the sources I've read is there anything like the level of detail
laid out in the Wikipedia article. From the citation I'm guessing this
comes largely from the work of Nicolle (1994), but where that author
derives his sequence I am perplexed.
It took me some time to get a physical copy of this work, and I had hoped that somewhere in it the author would specify where he got his elaborate multi-day tactical breakdown of this fight.
He doesn't.
I honestly don't know from where the Nicolle (1994) - and from it, the Wikipedia page - of Yarmouk are derived. It's possible that this account is contained in the one source I cannot access; Ibn Asakir.
However, I find it difficult to believe that if such a detailed account existed by the 12th Century CE/6th Century AH that all of the other chroniclers would have missed it.
Nicolle (1994) is in many other aspects very thorough. He must have encountered the narrative he uses somewhere.
But...since I can't find Nicolle's source, and many other researchers state unequivocally that the level of detail in Nicolle (1994) is not testified in any of the primary sources.
I'm going to go with the most detailed description I've encountered in the primary sources; from al-Azdi's Futuh al-Sham, and, broken down to outline form, it says that this happened:
1) Heraclius forms his armies to retake Syria,
2) The Muslims get that intel and retreat from Hims to Damascus,
3) After some debate the Muslims retire further to assemble at Yarmouk,
4) The Byzantines follow and camp at Dayr al-Jabal, where they lager up for three or four days
5) Finally on a foggy day the two sides clash,
6) There's a description of the two forces and various commanders, and a tactical adjustment made by the Muslims before...
7) ...the Byzantines advance to contact.
8) The Byzantine left pushes back the Muslim right.
9) The Muslim right-wing cavalry led by Khalid counterattacks and defeats both Byzantine cavalry and infantry.
10)
On the Byzantine right the same thing happens; the Muslim left is
pushed back until the Muslim left-wing cavalry commander (Qays)
counterattacks and the Byzantines are driven back.
11) Both Muslim cavalry wings converge and the Byzantines collapse.
12) The Byzantines rout, and many die falling into the ravine of the Yarmuk river.
13) The Muslims win.
And that's it.
Lines 1 through 4 are primarily operational, so for the actual engagement let's break this down and look at the remaining eight line items one by one.
5) Finally on a foggy day the two sides clash
Al-Azdi says "Bahan (the Arabic name for the Byzantine Armenian officer named in the Western sources as Vahan) came out to us on the battle-day of al-Yarmuk, a foggy day. He marched out to us in command of twenty lines numbering about 400,000 fighters."
We've talked about the numbers; that's ridiculous and probably an order of magnitude larger than the largest single field army Byzantium ever raised.
The fog thing is interesting. the "holiday weather" site for Syria says that "On average the month of August is not affected by foggy conditions."
Which makes sense; August is dry season in the Levant, and a foggy morning - foggy enough to be that memorable (and play such a large role...) - would seem pretty freakish. That is, something a devout Muslim might have attributed to God's working for His people.
Al-Azdi doesn't, just mentions it and moves on.
Hmmm
Also worth noting that al-Azdi neglects, or considers insignificant, the supposed negotiations between the Byzantines and the Muslim commanders.
5a) Chains?Here I wanted to add the peculiar tale about this fight found in al-Baladhuri's Futūḥ al-Buldān;
"The Greeks and their followers in this battle tied themselves to each other with chains, so that no one might set his hope on flight."
Couple of things here.
First, this isn't the first time a Muslim author tells this "chains" story. al-Tabari's History says it happened in 633 CE/12 AH in what is now Kuwait between Sassanid forces and the invasion army of Khalid ibn al-Walid. The story was so good that the whole engagement is called "The Battle of The Chains". So, chains; it's a Muslim story thing.
Second, the whole notion seems implausible; both on it's face as a technique - the Fightin' Chain Gang? I don't think so - and that it conveniently shows up almost simultaneously in two early Muslim imperial opponents seems too pat, to much like a good story.
Note that al-Azdi mentions this chain thing, but here's how he describes it:
"Many of them had pledged allegiance to death and 30,000 of them aligned, ten by ten, into a chain so they could not flee".
Get the difference? "Into a chain". Not "with chains". A tightly-formed infantry unit is like a chain in its formation. To an enemy more used to fighting in more open order it might well seem like these weird ferenghi were actually chained together.
That seems like the sort of thing that might well have, through repeated storytellings, gone from "into a chain" to "with chains" to "chained together", which is my suspicion.
Could it have actually happened?
Well...weird things happen in war.
Do I think it actually happened?
No. I think our boys al-Tabari and al-Baladhuri never let a good story go to waste.
6) There's a description of the two forces and various commanders, and a tactical adjustment made by the Muslims
Al-Azdi gives the positions of several Byzantine officers:
"Ibn Quanatir" is in command of the Byzantine right, and "Jirjis, ruler of Armenia, with him". Apparently "Quanatir" is the Arabic name for a Slavic officer who appears in Western sources as "Buccinator". I cannot find any other reference to a "Jirjis", who, if he were indeed the "ruler of Armenia" would have been sovereign over Vahan, the supposed Byzantine force commander. I cannot resolve this paradox.
Someone al-Azdi calls "al-Durunjar" is reported to be the left-flank commander. I cannot find a Western cognate for this individual, and that's it for the enemy acccording to al-Azdi.
He then lists a whole bunch of Muslim commanders, whom I'll spare you.
(Although here's another example of the strange detail in Nicolle (1994) and its conflicts with al-Azdi. On page 67, Nicolle (1994) says "Yazid Ibn Abu Sufyan commanded the left flank". However, al-Azdi writes: "Then Abu Ubayda led them out, positioned Mu'adh b. Jamal in command of his right flank and Qubath b. Ashyam in command of his left flank. The other commanders were Yazid Ibn Abu Sufyan commanding one quarter..."
Someone's confused here, or just wrong. I'm not sure whom...but it's this kind of thing that makes me nervous about Nicolle (1994) and the Wiki.)
What's interesting about al-Azdi is how he breaks down the Muslim army:
1) Two officers command the "left" and "right".
2) Two others are told off, one to command the infantry, the other - that's our boy Khalid - the cavalry.
3) Then four more are said to each command "a quarter of the army".
That's it, and that's all very weird,
Were the infantry and cavalry broken down into the quarters (hint: no, as we'll see....)?
Were the left and right each one quarter? (Not unless Mu'adh - on the right - and Qubath on the left shared command with two of the four "quarters" officers...) so the whole Muslim front is four units? You'll note in the lovely illustration above from the Wiki (here, I'll reprint it):
...that's what it shows.
But that's kind of military nonsense; you don't give two people command of the same unit unless you want, as the Fat Controller would say, confusion and delay.
And what about the whole separate "infantry" and "cavalry" commanders thing?
Anyway, it doesn't really matter, for down the page a bit al-Azdi reveals that the whole tactical setup gets a makeover in the face of the enemy:
"Khalid came to Abu Ubayda and said to him: "Those (the Byzantines) came in large numbers...I swear by God that my cavalry would not stand at all because of the severity of their attack, their cavalry and their infantry." At the time Khalid b. al-Walid's cavalry was stationed in front of the lines of the Muslims who were in three lines."
"Khalid said: "I am of the opinion that I should divide my cavalry so that I take command of one and Qays b. Hubayara the other. Then our cavalries should stand behind the right and left flanks."
Ubaydah agrees, so that when the two forces collide what we know of the armies looks like this;
Somewhere behind the Muslim lines is the camp complete with women and camels, as we'll see.
We know that the Byzantine forces advanced, both infantry and cavalry, how many of each, in what order or formation(s), we have no idea.
7) ...the Byzantines advance to contact.
8) The Byzantine left pushes back the Muslim right.
Al-Azdi says that the first Byzantine attack came from their left at the Muslim right, and was, at least initially, successful:
"The the Byzantines fell on them like mountains and displaced the Muslims from the right flank to the center until a party of Muslims withdrew to the encampment."
There's some fun mayhem in al-Azdi's account - someone named Abd Yaghuth roars our
"O men, O men!" and
"500 of the toughest men" proceed to come to his call and counterattack.
All this fighting sound pretty chaotic; some on the Muslim right manage to push their way back "...until they stood in the same line where they had stood before." but others beat cheeks to the safety of their hootch but run smack into the Real Housewives of Yarmouk and the Battle of the Tentpoles.
This story occurs twice in al-Azdi, in both the Byzantine flank attacks, so either it really happened - to the point where it passed into lore - or it was, like the chains, such a great story that no Muslim chronicler worth his hummus could pass up on it.
The right flank version goes like this:
"Holding poles - he said: "al-anahir means tent poles" - the women received the defeated Muslims who were fleeing and started hitting their faces with them.
Khawla bt. Tha'laba b. Malik b. al-Dakhsham took one of those poles and moved towards the defeated, declaiming in the rajaz meter:
"Oh fleer from God-fearing Women,
May you be shot with poison and death;
In a little (while) you will see captive women
Neither favored nor satisfied."
We're not told how the defeated Muslims responded to this chastisement - probably not gleefully; bad enough to have Byzantine mountains falling on you but when the Domestic Six whales on you with tent poles ranting about how pretty soon she's gonna be a dissatisfied captive it's pretty goddamned much - because then al-Azdi goes off on a warrior poetry rant about individual heroics featuring lots of bloody swords and falling skulls.
But apparently the Tent Pole Morale Beatings didn't work so well; some of the Byzantine left is said to have got in amongst the camp and the families - "about 20,000 of them entered into our encampment...entered into the Muslims' tents inside the encampment, wounded and some unwounded."
9) The Muslim right-wing cavalry led by Khalid counterattacks and defeats both Byzantine cavalry and infantry.
The description in al-Azdi is, well...frankly comical:
Then Khalid intercepted the Byzantines, of whom more than 100,000 were next to him. In command of about 1,000 horsemen only, he launched and attack on them.
This attack - outnumbered 100 to 1 - magically succeeds:
Thus they were put to flight and we pursued them, killing them the way we wanted. Their left flank could not protect itself against our right flank.
This is, or course, nonsense, war-porn for Muslims. But I can see what could easily have happened; the Byzantines attack - probably with their heavy cavalry leading - and smash through the lines of Muslim infantry.
But the infantry dies hard, and slows the Byzantine cataphracts. Worse, the Byzantine horsemen get hung up in all the ash-and-trash of the camp, possibly even including Arab housewives with tent poles.
Here's an interesting possibility, described in Jandora (1985) as recounted in the 7th Century CE history attributed to one Sebeos (or Sepeos is how his name is spelled by Jandora); the Muslim camp was fortified by camels.
Seriously. Here's Jandora (1985):
Sepeos relates that the Arabs had placed their camel herds so as to form several defensive perimeters within their camp. When the cataphracti entered the camp, they found the Arab infantry defending from these positions. The camels were hobbled; thus the positions could not easily be overrun.
Camel antitank berms? Go figure!
As the Byzantine attack slows and starts to break up, Khalid's horsemen punch into the Byzantine force, taking many from the side or behind where they can't defend themselves - "killing them the way we wanted".
This is where I kind of wonder about the reporting in the al-Buldan that the Ghassanid light cavalry "sided with the Ansar".
Heavy cavalry, like heavy infantry, needs protection from fast-moving counterattacks to their flanks and rear. In front they can smash down opponents; from behind or the side their very weight of arms and armor can make them slow to react and dead if caught facing the wrong way.
So the left flank cataphracts should have had light cavalry screening their left which was "in the air", unprotected, against Khalid's counterattack. That should have been Jabala ibn al-Ayham's job, or one of his subordinates'. Why weren't they there?
Jandora (1985) thinks that they weren't because they were, if not rallying to the Muslim side, sitting this one out.
I have no idea one way or the other. Whatever the reasons, though, that light cavalry screen wasn't there and the Muslim horseman smashed in.
The Byzantine cavalry breaks in a bloody welter, riding through and possibly down their own infantry. Shaken, the infantry is meat for the Muslim cavalry, and the broken survivors flee back towards their own start lines.
Somewhere in this mess the Byzantine left-flank commander, "Durunjar", wraps himself up in his own shroud, complains that "this is a bad day", and is hacked down by Khalid and his horsemen.
Fuck yeah, buddy; that IS a bad day.
10)
On the Byzantine right the same thing happens; the Muslim left is
pushed back until the Muslim left-wing cavalry commander (Qays)
counterattacks and the Byzantines are driven back.
Here al-Azdi is a lot more difficult and long-winded, so I'll try and bake it down a bit.
He starts by describing a little tiff between the two Byzantine officers; Ibn-Qanatir and Jirjis argue over who's got precedence. According to al-Azdi they don't settle anything and finally Ibn-Qanatir hoicks the Byzantine right forward, and the Muslim left gives way; "...the Muslims were put to flight and the left flank withdrew from its lines."
Here, though, the account meanders through a bizarre little tale of "...Byzantine men on Arab horses, but they did not look like the Byzantines..." and one of the Muslim troops who gets into a fight with one of these jokers and kills him. Then there's a lot more fighting, spears breaking, and the Muslim women show up whacking people with tent poles again.
(Oh, and someone named Umm Habiba bt. al-As asks God to do a damn-damn on anyone who beats cheeks:
"May God make ugly man who runs away from his spouse, may God may ugly man who runs away from his daughter.")
There's more of this sort of stuff, until al-Azdi says Qays intervenes with the left-flank cavalry:
"...he intercepted the Byzantines with his cavalry...he made them crash into one another, and the Muslims returned in pursuit of the Byzantines, fighting them."
11) Both Muslim cavalry wings converge and the Byzantines collapse.
Here's how al-Azdi describes it, right after talking about the Muslim left-flank cavalry routing the Byzantine right:
Khalid b. al-Walid also launched an attack on the Byzantines who were next to him on the right flank of the Muslims. So he launched an attack and he struck them until he forced them to their lines. When Khalid saw that Qays b. Hubayara had put the Byzantines who were next to him to flight and that the Muslims had launched a fierce attack on them, he attacked the Byantines who were next to him and made them crash into each other...all of the Muslims advanced on them little by little.
When they (the Muslims) drew near to them, they launched an attack on them, and thus the Byzantines started tearing down their lines and began to flee.
That's pretty much it; the Byzantines rout, the Muslims "kill them the way they wanted", and the actual fight is over.
That's the whole tl:dr version - Byzantine flanks attack, Muslim cavalry counterattacks, envelops the Byzantines, who break, and the army disinegrates.
Oh, yeah. there's this:
12) The Byzantines rout, and many die falling into the ravine of the Yarmuk river.
Al-Azdi goes into paroxsyms of ghoulish delight describing this, as the Byzantine fugitives race panicked through the fog to "a place overlooking abysses beneath them" where "they started falling heedlessly therein" because "the last of them did not know what the first were facing".
Al-Azdi conjures up a gruesome comedy where the first bunch of terrified soldiers reach the edge of the cliff and are then launched into the void by the frantic group of fugitives tear-assing up behind them who can't see the guys in front through the fog and just boink them off the cliff. Third group boinks second into the air, crash, repeat.
This happens over and over until "about 100,000 men fell into them" - so many they could only be counted "with reeds".
This is another one of those "good stories" I really doubt.
I'll bet that some of the routed Byzantines were killed preferring the drop in front to the swords and spears behind. Okay. But the whole fog thing is suspicious to begin with, given the Syrian climate in August, and this?
It's just too good a "Story".
Nope. I think the Byzantines died like troops in routed armies die; by the hand of the soldiers on the winning side.
13) The Muslims win.
That's pretty much it.
Al-Azdi's account describes some Muslim pursuit of the broken remnants of the Byzantine force:
"In command of the cavalry, Khalid b. al-Walid pursued them, killing them in every valley, on every defile, on every mountain and in every direction..."
The emperor of Byzantium, disgusted by all this winning, says see ya wouldn't want to be ya amd buggers off to Constantinople. The Futuh al-Sham adds the Byzantine emperor's famous "farewell to Syria" as Heraclius grabs a hat:
"...he turned his face towards Syria and said "Oh, Syria, peace be upon you! A greeting from a departing person who realized he will never return to you again."
FWIW, Runciman's 1987
History of the Crusades: The First Crusade is cited in the Wikipedia as making Heraclitus' farewell a bit more poetic and less pissy:
"Farewell, a long farewell to Syria, my fair province. Thou art an infidel's (enemy's) now. Peace be with you, O Syria—what a beautiful land you will be for the enemy's hands."
Whatever.
The destruction of the Theodore/Vahan army opens all of Syria to the Muslims; Damascus and Homs/Hims are retaken and the Islamic armies push into the southeastern marches of Anatolia itself. The Muslim rule in the Levant has begun as it will last, with some Crusading interruptions, for the next 1,300 years or so.
With that, let's leave al-Azdi for a moment to discuss a weird incident detailed in Theophanes' Chronicle.
Theophanes and the Mutiny
Here's Theophanes again from Sources; remember this part?
"Battle was given and, on the first day, which was a Tuesday, the 23rd of the month Loos, the men of the sakellarios were defeated. Now the soldiers of Baanes rebelled and proclaimed Baanes emperor, while they abjured Herakleios.
Then the men of the sakellarios withdrew, and the Saracens, seizing this opportunity, joined battle. And as a south wind was blowing in the direction of the Romans, they could not face the enemy on account of the dust and were defeated. Casting themselves into the narrows of the river Hiermouchthas, they all perished, the army of both generals numbering 40, 000."
Couple of things about this.
First, notice the "first day" reference in the opening sentence? I think this is part of the "multi-day battle" trope we find in Wikipedia, Nicolle (1994) and, presumably, whatever source Nicolle is using. Theophanes is really the only other reference I can who mentions this thing.
It's not impossible, mind. But, as noted, 1) I can't find it detailed in any of the other primary sources, and 2) it contradicts al-Azdi, the most detailed account I can find, that suggests the whole fight happend in a relatively short time.
So in the same way I'm dubious about the Wiki/Nicolle account, I'm not sure that Theophanes has this right.
Second, the "mutiny" thing itself is pretty bizarre. Theophanes breaks this down into three major pieces.
1) "...the men of the sakellarios were defeated."
To me this is an odd phrasing. Yes, the sacellerios Theodore was the notional commander-in-chief; all the men were his, at least in name if not in fact. But he's supposed to have turned over direct command to Vahan.
(BTW, Theophanes' account mentions two Byzantine officers leading the force engaged at Yarmouk; Theodore, whom he tags "the sakallerios" so we know he's the same guy in the other accounts, and someone named "Baanes" who is described as a co-commander. Presumably this has to be the Armenian we've been calling "Vahan" and al-Azdi calls "Bahan". This might be someone else! But given the bulk of the primary materials and the agreement of most secondary sources I'm willing to go with Theophanes' Baanes-is-Vahan...)
Is Theophanes implying that Theodore was actively commanding a portion of the army in the field? That seems to contradict every other source which has Vahan/Baanes as field commander; if any troopers were going to blame one of their leaders for fucking up, you'd think it'd be either Vahan or one of the flanking commanders, Buccinator/Qanatir or Durunjar.
But let's roll with this for now.
Anyhow, Theodore's guys - the cavalry? - were defeated, presumably in the flanking attacks. Then:
2) "...the soldiers of Baanes rebelled and proclaimed Baanes emperor, while they abjured Herakleios."
Seems like a pretty odd time to be picking and choosing emperors, what with a pack of howling Muslims bearing down on the...infantry? But Jandora (1985), who's put some time into studying this fight, doesn't dismiss this out of hand:
"According to most sources the rout of the Byzantine infantry followed the defeat of the heavy cavalry. Only Theophanes reports that a mutiny occurred in the interim. It is quite plausible that, after seeing the Sacellarius mishandle the cavalry attack, the remaining troops...rebelled and proclaimed Baanes emperor."
Okay, well...I guess. Again, the whole business seems really implausible to me. It assumes that there's a tactical pause between the defeat of the flank attacks and the Muslim attack on the Byzantine center, long enough for the grunts to take a knee, chatter about who to blame for the goatscrew along the wings, and decide that the best option is to make their CINC the emperor in place of the guy who's hundreds of miles away.
What would they have done then, marched on Constantinople? The Muslims were unlikely to have been chill with that, to say the least. Why even bother?
Except...in combat people do do weird things. So...
3) "Then the men of the sakellarios withdrew, and the Saracens, seizing this opportunity, joined battle. And as a south wind was blowing in the direction of the Romans, they could not face the enemy on account of the dust and were defeated."
The implication here is that the cavalry(?) withdrew (retreated/routed?), the Muslims attacked the infantry(?) and beat them.
The whole "south wind/dust" thing is just Theophanes trying to make excuses.
So about this whole thing? As you guessed - I'm skeptical.
Again, Jandora (1985) is much more familiar with the sources than I am, and he doesn't dismiss Theophanes out of hand. But as a working soldier, I find the whole story peculiar; it's the sort of thing that a cleric writing long after the events might have heard as a war story ("This is no shit..!") and wrote it down because good story, right?
The Outcome: Decisive Muslim victory
The Impact: Huge.
Now, mind, Yarmouk is one of those "if not here and now, somewhere else sometime soon" kinds of things. As we've discussed, the eastern edges of the Byzantine Empire were in bad shape in the 600s CE, and the Rashidun Caliphate were the new bad boys in town. If the Muslims hadn't beaten the Byzantine field army in Syria in August of 636 they'd almost surely have won somewhere on some other day.
For the counterfactual "Byzantines win at Yarmouk" you have to reverse or avoid a whole series of priors; plagues, earthquakes, decades of war with Persia...the Byzantine problems weren't just military. The 7th Century CE was a rough patch for the Romans, and it's unlikely that they'd have been able to do more than put off the Muslim expansion for a decade or two even with a solid win in Syria that year.
But the collapse did come on the plateau above the Yarmouk that summer, and the ensuing Muslim conquest of Egypt, the Levant, and the remnants of Sassanid Persia set the stage for the succeeding Ummayid and Abbasid empires that saw the greatest expansion of Muslim power in world history.
Which, in turn, tied into a whole series of events coming out of Europe and Asia, ranging from the Mongol invasions to the Crusades that eventually ended up with Muslims outside Constantinople in 1453 CE, and outside Vienna some 230 years after that.
And eventually to British MPs in Jerusalem...
...and French tanks below the Golan Heights of Syria.
I find Yarmouk both fascinating and infuriating.
Fascinating because, as we've discussed, it's such a critical piece of human history, and the event itself is such a shocking example of overthrow, a group of what would seem most unlikely conquerors shattering a centuries-old military power.
The day at Yarmouk changed the whole political, military, religious, and social history of huge chunks of Europe, Asia, and north Africa. As a crucial event in the "Rise of Islam" it's immensely central to human history.
Infuriating because for all it's importance we know so little about it.
Not the physical events of the day, not what was going on in the minds of the soldiers and officers, not even the physical reasons why what happened militarily happened...we are left with rumors and tales and conflicting testimony, often from people far removed in place and time from the events of that foggy August on the heights of the Hauran, on the day the slow-flowing waters of the Yarmouk ran dark with blood.
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