As it says in the title (thanks, Duncan).
I am not clear when this forum is supposed to end (nor whether it matters). The problem is that few of the Muslim regional states are "caliphates". The first independent Muslim army (discounting short-lived rebel forces) would be the separatist Umayyad emirate, from 756; but the Spanish Umayyads only became a Caliphate in 929. Back in the Near East the power of the Abbasid Caliphate started to break up in the 9th century but no rival Caliphate was ever proclaimed, except when the Fatimid Caliphate (proclaimed in Tunisia in 909, based in Egypt from 969) intervened in the region. So does this forum end in the eighth, ninth or tenth century?
Perhaps "Armies of the early conquests and the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates" might be better.
"Abbasid Caliphate" is a bit ambiguous too, in temporal terms - is it up till the Buyid takeover in the tenth century? To the sack of Baghdad in the thirteenth? End of the Mamluk pet caliphate in the sixteenth? I presume you mean the first, but, that mightn't be obvious from a bare heading "Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates".
ETA: I'm incidentally not quite clear how this subforum is supposed to work. Is it for requests for information, or rather intended as a wiki-like compilation of volunteered information?
Quote from: Andreas Johansson on July 16, 2012, 12:49:22 PM
ETA: I'm incidentally not quite clear how this subforum is supposed to work. Is it for requests for information, or rather intended as a wiki-like compilation of volunteered information?
Mostly the latter, although open to the former.
Patrick
OK, thank you.
OKI'd like to kick off the conversation on these armies by looking at why they won. I have come across several views
1) that the early Arab Muslim armies are fanatics and are undaunted by casualties.
2). That they use the desert to protect them acting as camel mounted infantry, and retiring into the desert where their opponents cannot follow when outmatched.
3) That they are very determined infantry that fight with the desert at their back and that the benefit of their religion is that gives them great staying power so that battles can last several days which their opponents cannot cope with. (my own pet theory).
4) that they have a special tactic of attacking the enemy commander and thus destroying the command of the opponent.
5 )an interesting idea suggested by Michael Lund, that the Arabs had penetrated areas such as Syria and Mesopotamia peacefully and had already achieved a substantial position which they converted into control.
6) another favourite of mine, that the Arabs develop a system based upon raiding in which they degrade the opponent over a long period of time by razzias which have an economic and morale effect and then they try a larger raid which brings on a battle, if they win they conquer, if they lose they break off and resume the raiding cycle.
Of course these methods embrace the strategic as well as the tactical and are not mutually exclusive, but what do others think?
Roy
A tricky one, and the answers might change over time.
I would suggest that 6) is probably wrong for Syria, but might be correct in North Africa but perhaps somewhat later than the period under discussion (my memory fails me in this).
I quite like 5) in that the 'Arabs' were widespread throughout 'Iraq' and 'Syria' anyway and were this population to become Moslem and to think of themselves as a single people, they would be in effective control of a large area.
But I'd like to suggest
7) Their two main opponents, Byzantium and the Sassanids, were in a very bad way anyway. They had fought each other pretty much to a standstill and I suspect that the constant demands for men and money had alienated many of the people in the provinces. Add that to religious schism in the Byzantine Empire and it is perfectly possible to see why a lot of the population just accepted their new Arab rulers.
Also, for the citizens of the Byzantine Empire, would the new Arab rulers be much different from the Ghassanid Princes who had been so influential previously. Especially if they were now cheaper to support.
Jim
I do worry about the Arabs being successful because the Byzantines and Sasanians are exhausted. These are two highly organised rich states with strong militaries the wars against both involve several battles over a period of years and they both have plenty of time to recognise the threat. When the Arabs rip their Eastern territories from the Byzantines the Greeks are incapable of reconquering them.
I suppose support for your view might come from the case of Palmyra. Given a period of chaos in the mid third century the city state of Palmyra suddenly takes a position of power, beats off the Sasanians and is for a brief period dominant in the Roman East. That shows how powerful an entity can suddenly become in this area. If the Arabs have infiltrated these areas extensively over many years they could convert a flurry of victories against weakened opponents into a real power base.
I think the June's and such foundations as Basra and Kairouan also have a part to play as the Arabs keep their armies together and avoid being dispersed and absorbed.
Roy
This history of the area is of 'waves' of Arabs spilling out of the desert and drifting slowly north. Some would settle and congregate around cities, some would remain more nomadic, but the process was constant.
It is interesting that whilst there is a tendency to regard the cities as 'Greek', Syriac and other 'aramaic' languages were increasing in use. In some of the churches the Sermon was delivered in Greek, but with Deacons translating it into Aramaic for those in the congregation who didn't speak Greek.
Jim
This pattern survived the conquest, and was still present in 1917-18, according to T.E. Lawrence in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, which is incidentally an interesting source for logistics for an Arab army.
I think the pattern goes back to 'Old Testament' times at the very least.
Jim
What's the view on the best figures to represent these armies. Essex do a range of pre Conquest Arabs that look good as the poor Saracens with just a draped cloth for clothing that fit with Ammianus' description and the Saracen from the carvings on bishop Maximian's chair in Ravenna. I also used an Essex Visigoth cavalry figure for Arab cavalry as it was bearded, had long sleeved tunic, mail armour, plain shield and a spangenhelm.
I see the Arabs of this period as ranging from semi naked Bedouin types to men in Palmyran looking costume and indeed Persian and Roman costume. Essex do some suitable Palmyran figures of LC and I find their bare legged Pictish cavalry also make good Arabs as do the Old glory early Arab Conquest cavalry. The most difficult to get right are the mass of infantry to get figures to mix in with the Essex Saracens. I have made units from the robed figures that Museum Miniatures supply, but frankly I doubt the whole concept of long robed Arabs at this time.
Roy
(All the above are 15 mm figures.)
For my Pre-Islamic Arabs, I discovered I'd got a heap of Lancashire games Heavy and Light cavalry and infantry, so I've used them. But the armoured cavalry I've given shields and painted them to look 'late Roman'. For the Bd(O) (in DBMM terms) I've actually made up some bases of various armoured infantry, some of whom were once Legionaries, even a few with Lorica Segmentata but with a big round shield.
Jim
For 28mm (* = SoA discount)
- * Musketeer do "Armies of the Caliphates".
- * Gripping Beast (who these days distribute the Musketeer range also) do a Seljuk range and also Moorish armies for "El Cid". They also have a very small "Desert Frontier" line (including camelry).
- The Perrys do Islamics for their crusades line.
- As do Essex
- * Artizan (available via North Star) do Moors
- Miniature Design Studio do Berbers
- A&A do later Romans, Sasanians and Palmyrans
You can probably put together something from mixing and matching the above. I have a combination of the Musketeer and GB Islamic/Desert Frontier, for a relatively flexible (in that it can be used for different periods) Arab army, but I doubt it would pass muster as something so early.
How about using figures from a Biblical range? Essex do archers in kilts and bare chests. Also, sword and spearman wearing the same plus others in tunics, both types wearing turbans, carrying large round shields. These should make up as Sp, and Bd or Wb, depending upon your preference.
As to the Arab conquests, I believe that a combination of factors, as outlined by Roy, came into play. A key one IMHO was the conquerors' tolerance of the customs of the conquered peoples. Crucially this encouraged fortified places to surrender quickly, sparing the Arab forces long sieges, and so speeding their movements on campaign.
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
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.
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.
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
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-QÄdisiyyah 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.
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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_River) (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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Muzayyah). Khalid destroys a Persian-Arab army in a surprise night attack.
6) Saniyy (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Saniyy). Khalid does it again: another surprise night attack; another dead Sassanid army.
7) Zumail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Zumail). Khalid makes it a hat-trick: a third night attack destroys a third Sassanid army.
8 ) Firaz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_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 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
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
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
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
Quote from: aligern on August 04, 2012, 05:11:48 PM
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.
any photos Rodge?
Quote from: aligern on August 21, 2014, 08:37:17 AM
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.
Quote
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.
Quote
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.
Quote from: Mark G on August 21, 2014, 10:59:31 AM
any photos Rodge?
Sure, once the basing is done Mark