Armies of the early conquests and the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates

[gavindbm]

With reference to the Byzantines and the early conquest. 

It is interesting to note the Byzantines lost control of Syria/Palestine to the Sassanids roughly around the start of Heraclius' reign as well as a large part of Anatolia..but eventually Heraclius' counter attack comes close to or takes the Persian capital (I forget which) and regains all he lost territory.

Then they lose Syria/Palestine to the early conquest...so that bit of he pattern repeats...but this time there is no re-conquest and next Egypt is lost.

So perhaps the question is was the first counter attack (against Persia) unusually lucky...or why wasn't a second launched/successful?  (Rather than debating what the Arabs had which allowed them to succeed ...though it is certainly worth debating what shifted them from being very much less powerful than either Byzantine or Persian empires to being on a par/superior...

Regards,
Gavin

[Patrick Waterson]

Being too lazy to hunt through the period sources, I shall just mention the prevailing wisdom that the Sassanid and Byzantine Empires pretty much fought each other to exhaustion before Heraclius launched an inspired bold stroke that cut the Persians' legs from under them and gained a more-or-less status quo peace arrangement.

Then with both sides on the ropes and gasping, up pops this collection of Arabs who promptly launch a series of slashing blows against the staggering Byzantine and Sassanid Empires.

The standard explanation, if I understand it correctly, is that the utter exhaustion of the principal powers gave the Islamic Arabs a very lucky early break and allowed them to establish themselves as a power of depth and significance.  By AD 636 even an outright alliance of the Byzantines and Sassanids could not stop them.

The Islamic Arabs also benefitted from exceptional (by the standards of the time) leadership, notably that of Khalid ibn al-Walid, without whom we might never have heard of Islam and all that it entails.

[Duncan Head]

One thing Tom Holland's book suggests, perhaps one of the less controversial ideas, is the extent to which, after the strain of the Persian war, local Byzantine forces in Syria were in fact Arabs themselves, Ghassanids and their confederates. Some of these stayed loyal, but not all of them did.

[aligern]

It is a pity that the sources for the early battles are not terribly good. I have some thoughts around why the Arabs win and was hoping to express them in a Slingshot article, though I summarised them earlier in this thread. Summarising those ideas I suggest that Arab Warfare is asymmetric to the warfare of the Sasanians and Byzantines and that neither of the Empires gets to grips with the Arab tactics. It is hard to record that the Arabs win nearly every battle against the Empires. There are several factors that facilitate the  conquests such as internal dissension amongst the opponents upper classes, exhaustion, plague, the Arab penetration of Syria and Iraq, the willingness of heretical Christians and Jews to deliver cities to a conqueror who promised lighter taxes, the jund system which kept Arab armies together without handing out estates that would disperse them. However, none of these is a reason why the Arabs should win all the battles, they are reasons why once the field army was beaten, the territory could be more easily occupied. It is just so surprising that neither Empire could raise a large, non Arab army of professionals and sweep the Moslems off the board. After all, the Persians and Byzantines have strong military traditions, professional forces, well equipped and trained , huge logistical capacities and so on.
Roy

[Justin Swanton]

Working on the premise that the efficacy of an army depends to a large extent on its morale, the fanaticism of the early Islamic fighters would have made it a potent force. Reading the Wiki account of al-Qādisiyyah one thing that comes across is the lack of panic among the Arabs, even when confronting something like elephants which they had probably never seen before (in sharp contrast to the Galatians, say). Islam made the Gihad a religious duty, hence dying in battle was an act of faith, to be rewarded in Paradise. Give 30 000 men this conviction and you have something very difficult to beat.

Normally, an army would break and run when the troops perceived that the formations they were in could no longer protect them (pierced, outflanked or just outfought), not when the body count had become noticeably high. These considerations did not weigh much on the Moslem mind.

[Patrick Waterson]

Regarding this particular battle, one also sees the Arabs making fairly heavy weather of defeating a poorly-deployed and not very good Persian army; the Persians actually seem to have had the better of the fighting until the Arab reinforcements turned up (in a succession of contingents in dispersed order, giving the Persians the impression they were now seriously outnumbered).  What turned the scale seems to have been not so much the desperate and ultimately successful Arab attempts to take the Persian elephants out of the fight but the deliberate attempt to kill Rustam which, when it worked, knocked the props out from under Persian morale.

In essence, the Arabs won by a stratagem as much as anything else.

But if it had not succeeded, and Rustam had lived, would the battle have ended in a draw?

Let us have a look at a few Arab vs Sassanid actions.

1) Battle of the Chains (so-called from the Persians chaining themselves together a la Cimbri).  The Arabs prevail against an exhausted, leaderless Persian army (the C-in-C challenged the Arab commander to a duel and lost).

2) The River Battle (fought next to the Euphrates; the Persian army was assembling after a riverine journey).  The Arabs kill all the Persian generals in duels and shatter the leaderless and unorganised Sassanid army.

3) Walaja.  Here both sides break the pattern.  The Persians send a champion instead of the C-in-C for the customary duel (he still loses).  Khalid (the Arab commander) hedges his bets by encamping two cavalry contingents behind a ridge at the Persian army's back (Sassanids were obviously out-scouted).  When the battle gets underway these pop up and charge into the rear of the Persian cavalry wings.  The result is a Near eastern version of Cannae.

4) Ullais.  Khalid fights a mixture of Christian Arabs and Sassanid scrapings to exhaustion; the Persians, who had declined their midday meal to show the Arabs how tough they were, broke from fatigue.  No great tactical strokes by either side.

5) Muzayyah.  Khalid destroys a Persian-Arab army in a surprise night attack.

6) Saniyy.  Khalid does it again: another surprise night attack; another dead Sassanid army.

7) Zumail. Khalid makes it a hat-trick: a third night attack destroys a third Sassanid army.

8 ) Firaz. Back to daytime fighting: Khalid entices a combined Sassanid-Byzantine army across the river, encircles it and wipes it out.

9) Battle of the Bridge.  A Persian victory for a change.  The Sassanid general Bhaman Jaduya entices an Arab army (not led by Khalid) across a bridge spanning the Euphrates, falls upon it (his elephants doing much damage) and wipes it out.

This takes us up to Qadisiyah.

[aligern]

Unfortunately Akram tends to swallow legendary accounts whole cloth without any critique.Do we really believe the accounts of three  battles would be so similar?
Roy

[gavindbm]

Reading all this makes me wonder if some of our questions are:

What was the basis of the Arab tactical (ie battle) success against Persia/Byzantines?  With starting possible options:
A) army composition/equipment based answer
B) army cohesion/will/training based answer
C) army control / articulation / combined armies based answer
D) leadership based answer
E) stratagems ...(or similar) based answer

What was basis of change in strategic threat posed by and success of Arabs against Persians/Byzantines?

My subtext is to tempt Roy to write an article for Slingshot ... As I really want to read it.

Gavin

[aligern]

It is a pity that there is no good source for the battles from the other sides. There is no contemporary Procopius or Agathias. In arms and armour the Arabs are likely to be behind their opponents. They do appear to have a lot of bows.
Battles last , quite often, for two days or more. This is not completely new, but it is relatively rare. That seems to me to be a consequence of the coherence that Islam gives them and could well be responsible for stressing the morale of opponents who expect a battle to last only a day. However, battles in this period do appear to have a skirmishing and duelling component at the beginning and that may take up time leaving the real fighting to next day.
It looks as though killing the opposing general is a frequent Arab tactic, whether this be by a duel, by seeking him out during the combat, or by a commando raid round the rear of his army.
The difficulty I have is with the Arab sources. Firstly, they are not history as we understand it. They are likely to embroider the story of particular individuals or clans to seek a benefit from those people, or to  justify some privilege or put in a claim for it. They are also making polemic moral points and the story may be invented. As we said earlier, is it likely that three armies are destroyed in three night attacks?  It is possible, but it would take someone with a good critical knowledge of the sources to make progress with that and I do wonder if the author of the descriptions that Patrick so kindly found is at all critical!

Roy

[rodge]

What's the view on the best figures to represent these armies.

I've just done an army for (loosely) 632-641 in 15mm.
The majority of the figures are Khurasan with conversions, but also include some Essex and Viking Forge (1 heavy cavalry figure). Post the defection of some Sasanian units it's easy to expand the army.
Gone for a desert look, off white, pale fawns, tans etc with some units in black (so they can work for later armies), some with yellow head dress.
Seem to feel about right.

[Mark G]

any photos Rodge?

[Patrick Waterson]

The difficulty I have is with the Arab sources. Firstly, they are not history as we understand it. They are likely to embroider the story of particular individuals or clans to seek a benefit from those people, or to  justify some privilege or put in a claim for it. They are also making polemic moral points and the story may be invented. As we said earlier, is it likely that three armies are destroyed in three night attacks?  It is possible, but it would take someone with a good critical knowledge of the sources to make progress with that and I do wonder if the author of the descriptions that Patrick so kindly found is at all critical!

This is, sadly, a problem when dealing with the events of the period, the one reasonably good yardstick being that if the Arabs reckon they were beaten, or had a hard time, it is probably true.  We do notice that despite Khalid being depicted as a sort of second Scipio Africanus the Persians did manage to scrape together an amazing number of troops and armies for a power so recently reduced to exhaustion by the Byzantines.

To my mind there is nothing inherently implausible about three night attacks in succession defeating three successive Sassanid forces: Persians were traditionally vulnerable to night attacks, and so had a habit of encamping at a healthy distance from the enemy.  After the first incident the immediate thought would probably have been to encamp further away rather than attempt to change procedures, and after the second it may have been considered sufficient to add yet more distance.  Thereafter the message seemed to sink in and there were no more night-time surprises.

Despite the questionable nature of Arab sources we may be able to extract some pointers regarding technique: as Roy mentions, killing the enemy general seems to have been a favoured option, especially at the outset of a battle.  With Khalid, sneaking a force round the enemy flank or rear and/or launching a night attack seem to have been favoured techniques.  Enticing an opponent across a river seems to have worked well for both sides.

Battles last , quite often, for two days or more. This is not completely new, but it is relatively rare. That seems to me to be a consequence of the coherence that Islam gives them and could well be responsible for stressing the morale of opponents who expect a battle to last only a day. However, battles in this period do appear to have a skirmishing and duelling component at the beginning and that may take up time leaving the real fighting to next day.

The duration of battles also suggests deep-ish formations, hesitant commitment and indifferent leadership on at least one side.  That Islam gave considerable cohesion to its adherents is an excellent observation, and where another army would have called it a day Muslims were happy to carry on for another day.  This in itself suggests that they may not have had the best of the day's fighting, otherwise their opponents would have decamped.

I do wonder if the author of the descriptions that Patrick so kindly found is at all critical!

The Wikipedia commentator(s) did note that the later popular Arab historian Tariq seems to have a lot of additional happenings that were not present in the earliest sources, so I think a bit of critical faculty has been employed.  There are also reservations about the practicality of a stated 15,000 Arabs encircling and defeating a stated 100,000 Sassanids, Byzantines and general hangers-on (Battle of Firaz), but like a good commentator the source account seems to have been summarised as is and a question mark added rather than the source being overridden and replaced by an opinion.

[rodge]

any photos Rodge?

Sure, once the basing is done Mark