By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Early Islam and the decay of Rome

As we have seen according to tradition, in 610 CE, the Islamic prophet Muhammad began receiving what Muslims consider to be divine revelations, calling for submission to the one God, the expectation of the imminent Last Judgement, and caring for the poor and needy. Muhammad's message won over a handful of followers and was met with increasing opposition from Meccan notables. In 622, a few years after losing protection with the death of his influential uncle Abu Talib, Muhammad migrated to the city of Yathrib (now known as Medina). With Muhammad's death in 632, disagreement broke out over who would succeed him as leader of the Muslim community during the Rashidun Caliphate. 

 

As the seventh century dawned, and Muhammad began to bring Khadija’s caravans north into Palestine, the empire was suffering progressive economic failure and profound ideological division. Muhammad’s message of religious unity may have been influenced in part by what he experienced of the divisions within the Roman community. His observations in the Koran that God had no human son look like a reformulation of Chalcedonian theology. He also understood that the intense hostility generated by the controversies over Christ’s nature profoundly weakened Roman society. 

 

Rome’s weakness was not translating into Persian strength. This simple fact raises questions about many later accounts which imply that the Persian kings were fabulously wealthy. This suspicion cannot be tested, as in the case of the Roman Empire, through examination of contemporary documents and a well-articulated archaeological record. What we can do, however, is look at the institutions of the Persian state and at the way the Persians behaved. 

 

One reason to be suspicious of statements that the Persians were wealthy is that the Persian Empire, occupied less, and less productive, territory in modern Iran and Iraq than the Roman Empire did in North Africa and the Near East. Another factor that makes it unlikely that Persia was incredibly rich is the fact that when we can recover actual details of their revenue system, we find that it was based on exactly the same sort of taxes that were characteristic of the Roman Empire; that is to say, a head tax collected from adults, a property tax, and taxes on trade. So, either Persians were much more productive than Romans, or the vast sums of money the Persian kings are said to have raised are a fantasy of later traditions. 

 

There are two considerations that favor the fantasy idea. One is that Persian land and head taxes were paid to an agency that turned the money directly over to the army, suggesting that the Persian kingdom had little discretionary money for infrastructure and other projects. Another issue appears to have been the fact that Persia’s rulers continued a tradition of Near Eastern kingship that stretched for millennia in maintaining a vast royal treasury, probably filled up with gifts from foreign embassies and plunder from successful wars rather than taxes. This was a royal heirloom from which kings, even in extreme distress, were loath to withdraw money. So, even though he might have the resources to alleviate the hardship that increased taxation in time of war caused his subjects, a Persian king was acculturated not to do this. 

 

Lack of liquidity and a tendency to hoard existing resources meant that Persian kings had great difficulty securing their northern borders from Turkic peoples of central Asia. Their repeated efforts to get the Romans to finance the defense of this frontier (only occasionally successful) are indicative of financial problems at the empire’s core. Their failure to reach agreements with these tribes would ultimately play into Roman hands. 

 

Another sign that the Persians were having trouble is that they spent a good deal of time in the sixth and seventh centuries trying to extend their reach into southern Arabia. Yemen, as a result, came gradually under their control in the later sixth century, provoking occasional responses from the king of Ethiopia, a Christian and ally of Rome. One of his most notable interventions was in the very year of Muhammad’s birth. That was the year an elephant was seen at Mecca, the result of one of these interventions.1 

 

The Persian regime was not only poor, it was also divided against itself. The Syriac Chronicle of 660 is written from the perspective of the Christian community. Its members are conscious of living in a mythic land of great antiquity, and of the history in which a Westerner, Alexander the Great, had destroyed an earlier Persian regime. These Christians, divided into two sects which were both considered heretical by the government in Constantinople, fought with each other, had no love for their Persian government, and loathed their neighbors. They believed that Jews, Iraq had a large Jewish population, would crucify their children and that their Manichaean neighbors would eat them. They also loathed the small, highly stratified, and politically potent Zoroastrian community, the group most closely aligned with the interests of the monarchy. It is emblematic of this relationship that the Chronicler of 660 believed Kusru (r. 591–628) pretended to love the Christians because of the emperor Maurice, but in truth he hated them. The feeling was mutual.

 

The Roman emperor, Maurice, who ascended the throne in 582 was successful in checking the power of the Avars and had won notable successes against the Persians, installing a client, Kusru, whom he adopted, on the throne in 588. In 602, his run of success ended. The Balkan army, commanded by a general named Phocas, mutinied and marched on Constantinople. On November 25, 602, Phocas occupied the imperial palace. Maurice and his children were executed two days later, or so it would seem. Shortly after the massacre, a man named Theodosius, claiming to be the son of Maurice, appeared in Ctesiphon asking that Kusru, who owed the family a debt stemming from his installation and adoption, restore him to the throne. 

 

Below half-siliqua  with the image of Emperor Theodosius:

 

                                                                 

 

Khusro’s war of revenge

 

Whether this Theodosius really was the son of Maurice we cannot know. We do know that his appeal started a war between the Roman and Persian empires. The circumstances leading to war thus are enumerated, (1) gathering crises in the Balkans, Italy, and Armenia, and (2) Persian dissatisfaction with the current line of the frontier in the west. The November 602 coup of Phocas and execution of Emperor Maurice, who had restored Khusro II to the Sasanian throne in 591, provided Khusro with a perfect pretext for going to war.

 

From 603 to 610, the war went slowly but surely against the Romans, so much so that in the autumn of 610, the governor of Africa launched a fleet under the command of his son, Heraclius, to overthrow Phocas. On October 5, Phocas was dead, and Heraclius was emperor. For the next fourteen years, things went from bad to worse, beginning in 611 when Kusru captured Antioch, still Syria’s chief city, and began to establish a permanent administrative system. In 614, the Persians destroyed Jerusalem as an example to cities that might think of resistance rather than surrender, and in 619 they occupied Alexandria. Most cities in fact had simply paid ransom to the Persians, one reason for the brutal treatment of Jerusalem was that having surrendered, it had rebelled, killing its Persian garrison. In the absence of effective imperial defense, the people of the east saw no reason to risk their necks for the regime. The stage was set for the destruction of the empire. Kusru allied himself with the Avars and began a series of immensely destructive invasions of Asia Minor, culminating in a siege of Constantinople (assisted by the Avars) in 626. Heraclius, however, was not in the city. He had taken the bulk of his army into Armenia, and even as the siege of Constantinople fell apart, he advanced, at the head of an army that included a very large number of Turkish auxiliaries, into Persian territory. On December 12, 627, Heraclius destroyed the Sassanian army in a battle at Nineveh, near Mosul in northern Iraq. Negotiations to end the war dragged on for a while, with the result that Persian armies did not finally evacuate Roman territory until 629. This was in part because of the chaos that engulfed the Persian court.

 

Kusru was deposed in the immediate aftermath of the battle at Nineveh, tried, and killed. This happened by the end of February 628. The agents of his deposition were a senior general and one of his younger sons, Kavad. Kavad lived for eight months, during which time he murdered the majority of his male relatives while also presiding over his father’s execution. When Kavad died of the plague, he was replaced by his young son Ardashir, who was in turn murdered by the Persian general who had recently negotiated the restoration of Roman territory to Heraclius. This general was murdered after a reign of forty days and replaced by Kavad’s widow, who finalized the peace treaty and then died, being replaced by Yazdgerd, a grandson of Kusru and the one nephew Kavad hadn’t managed to kill. Yazdgerd was eight years old when he was placed on the throne. 

 

The economic stress caused by the war, and the inherent weakness of the regional economy as a whole, is revealed by the circumstances of Kusru’s removal from power in the months after Heraclius’ victory. At his trial, the king was accused of the murder of his predecessor (true), the ill-treatment of his sons, the brutality of his lengthy prison terms, lack of affection toward his harem, treacherous behavior toward Maurice, and:

 

[Fifth] What you have inflicted on your subjects generally in levying the land tax and in treating them with harshness and violence. [Sixth,] Your amassing a great amount of wealth, which you exacted from the people with great brutality so that you drove them to consider your rule hateful and thereby brought them into affliction and deprivation. [Seventh] Your station the troops for long periods along the frontiers with the Byzantines and on other frontiers, thereby separating them from their families.

 

There is no obvious reason to believe that taxation was not in fact a serious issue, for Kusru’s successor promptly repealed some of the taxes that Kusru had imposed. And the charge that Kusru hoarded his wealth means no more than that Kusru was a traditionally inclined Persian king. Speaking in his own defense, Kusru says that only a fool does not realize that a king maintains his authority through wealth and armies, but that was not much of a defense. The fact financial issues are at the heart of complaints about Kusru suggests that, although having taken possession of Syria, Osrhoene, and Egypt, he was unable to extract sufficient surplus from these lands to fund war and avoid alienating his subjects. In Roman lands, it is apparent that he retained the Roman tax system and many of the collectors who had been in their posts at the time of the conquest. Persia was essentially ruined by the war. 

 

The situation was not much better for the Romans. The progressive degeneration of western Turkey’s urban fabric, which had suffered severely from Persian invasions, could not be immediately reversed, nor could money be conjured from nowhere in the recently reconquered areas from Syria to Egypt. It did not help that Heraclius saw himself as very much the hero in his own story. An extant narrative of the victory outside Nineveh tells us: 

 

And when he had found a plain suitable for fighting, he addressed his troops and drew them up in battle order. Upon arriving there, Razates also drew up his army in three dense formations and advanced on the emperor. The Battle was given on Saturday, 12 December. The emperor sallied forward in front of everyone and met the commander of the Persians, and, by God’s might and the help of The Mother of God, threw him down; and those who sallied forth with him were routed. The emperor met another Persian in combat and cast him down also. Yet a third assailed him and struck him with a spear, wounding his hip; but the emperor slew him too. And when the trumpets had sounded, the two sides attacked each other, and as a violent battle was being waged, the emperor’s tawny horse, called Dorkon, was wounded in the thigh by some infantryman, who struck it with a spear. It also received several blows of the sword on the face, but, wearing as it did a helmet made of sinew, it was not hurt, nor were the blows effective. 2

 

The passage quoted comes from: C.E. Bosworth (tr.), History of Tabari vol. 5 The Sasanids, the Byzantines, the Lakmids, and Yemen (Albany, 1999): 383; for the sources, see Howard-Johnston, Witnesses to a World Crisis, 347–348. 

 

A less dramatic version simply says that he “descended on the northern territories, destroying, ruining and capturing all the northern lands.” The damage he did to the densely populated hinterland of the Persian capital would not be repaired before the end of the Sassanian dynasty.3

 

Heraclius seems to have believed his own press releases and did little to ease the reintegration of the eastern provinces into the empire. While he advertized his recovery of the “True Cross,” the object Helena had allegedly discovered centuries earlier, from the Persians with a massive celebration, he also installed a Chalcedonian hierarchy in regions whose people were largely anti-Chalcedonian. This was most unwelcome. People had grown used to living without the stress of an administration that treated them as heretics. The leaders of these areas would soon see no reason to sacrifice themselves for a regime that had proved more ineffective than effective in recent decades, and which they had tacitly opposed through years of collaboration with the Persians. Heraclius’ aggressive stance against the anti-Chalcedonian population just added insult to annoyance. It did not help that he had entered an incestuous marriage to his niece a few years earlier. 

 

In addition to alienating his newly reclaimed subjects, Heraclius appears to have broken with the allies upon whom he depended for his victory against Persia: the Turkish tribes who occupied the area between the Caspian Sea and Iran’s northern borders. Given their long-term enmity with Persia, it did not require a diplomatic miracle to acquire their services. But they would be notably absent from the campaigns that would result in the creation of the new Arabic state after Muhammad’s death in 632. They would long resist the invaders from the south, but not in alliance with Rome. Why? Perhaps Heraclius did not pay them what they thought they were owed.

 

 

Muhammad and Mecca

 

Mecca was a commercial and religious center centuries before the arrival of the Quraysh, Muhammad’s people. The city’s prominence, attested as early as the second century CE, was due to a combination of factors. One was its location on the eastern edge of the Hijaz, the region of what is now western Saudi Arabia bounded in the north by the Gulf of Aqaba and in the south by Yemen. Mecca sits in a valley that is forty-three miles east of the Red Sea, at a point where there is a pass through the Hijaz mountains, giving access to the north. For some period before Muhammad’s birth, it was the center for the cult of a god named Hubal, worshiped in the central temple or Ka‘ba. Also prominent among Mecca’s cults were those of three female divinities: Al-Lat, al-‘Uzza, and Manat, who, Muhammad would say in speaking to those who rejected his revelation, “are nothing but names you have invented yourselves, you and your forefathers. God has set no authority for them.” At the time he said this, it was an eccentric point of view. 

 

Mecca’s location made it a hub for one of the caravan routes leading north into Roman territory. Muhammad himself mentions the winter and summer journeys of the Quraysh in which he must have participated. They would have traded in leather goods from their own district, and in spices that came from Yemen with the people to their north, probably more of the former than the latter in Muhammad’s time, as there was less money for luxury goods in the post-plague poverty of the northern lands. Lack of profit might also be a reason why the emperor, or Nagus, of Ethiopia, gave up on trying to dominate Yemen and the Hijaz before the end of the sixth century, and why the subsequent Persian takeover of Yemen yielded them no appreciable gain. That said, Mecca was still a center for trade and the exchange of ideas. In addition to the worshippers of Mecca’s ancestral divinities, Muhammad would have met members of the substantial Jewish community in southern Arabia, Christians, and a few Zoroastrians in the Persian-occupied zones. 

 

Prior to the reign of Maurice, contact between southern Arabia and the great empires to the north was mediated by two coalitions: the Roman-supported Jafnids, based at Jabala in southern Syria, and the Nasrids, based at al-Hira near the Persian border. Of these two groups, the Jafnids had the greatest contact with the Hijaz. Even before the outbreak of the great war in 602, the Roman relationship with the Jafnids had collapsed. This was Maurice’s doing, and the result was that Rome lost its traditional point of contact with the political groups in the peninsula’s south and center. Kusru had wrecked Persia’s association with the Nasrids, claiming they were insufficiently obedient. He then tried to claim control over Arabia. That was impractical, and Persia was now no better off than Rome. 

 

It was against a background of war and dislocation that Muhammad began to have his visions. His point, initially, appears to have been that proper understanding of the one God was necessary for salvation, and this God was the God revealed to Abraham, and Jesus too was his prophet. In a city that profited from the pilgrims who came to view its holy sites, this message was not uniformly welcomed. “If they call you a liar” he said, “many messengers before you were called liars: it is to God that all things will be referred.” “Those who disbelieve will have severe torments; those who believe and do good deeds will have forgiveness and a rich reward.” Those who worship idols are deluded, he said, asking what part of the earth those false gods had created. “When will this promise be fulfilled?” asked his critics. Muhammad’s revelation was nothing more than poetry he had made up. 

 

As Muhammad’s group of followers expanded, relations worsened with the authorities at Mecca. Muhammad urged his followers not to respond with violence, for “the servants of the Lord of Mercy are those who walk humbly on the earth, and who, when the foolish address them, reply ‘Peace’. ” Muhammad’s message of unity between his followers, Christians, and Jews became more complicated after the Sassanid army captured Jerusalem, slaughtering many of the inhabitants, allegedly with the assistance of the area’s Jewish population. Still, Muhammad would say, even well after the fall of Jerusalem, that “the believers, the Jews, the Christians, and the Sabians, all who believe in God and the Last Day and do good, will have their rewards in their Lord.” The Sabians mentioned here are another group of monotheists. Belief in the one God, for Muhammad, should be a unifying force, and he warned the Jewish community to be moderate in success, saying that they had in the past been punished for arrogance. Christians were told to stop fighting each other: “If God had so willed, their successors would not have fought each other after they had been brought clear signs. But they disagreed: some believed and some disbelieved.”

 

The power of Muhammad’s message and his increasing success in building his community of supporters, as well as the death, both in 619 CE, of Khadijah and his uncle Abu Talib, who had insulated him to some degree, led to a thorough break with the authorities governing Mecca in 622. He was mad, so people said. He lied about God. 

 

As the situation in Mecca deteriorated, Muhammad reached out to the authorities at the city of Yathrib, later known as Medina (the name comes from the Arabic Madinat al-nabi, “the city of the Prophet”). In June of 622, he departed Mecca for Medina with his followers, by night. 

 

It is at the time of the establishment of Muhammad’s community at Medina that we get the clearest documentary evidence for the way Muhammad envisioned the relationship between his followers and those around them. This document, known as the Constitution, or community document (umma) of Medina, sets out the obligations the immigrants from Mecca, the Muslim (believers) who follow the Islam (teaching) of the Koran, have to each other and to “those who follow them and attach themselves to them and struggle alongside them.” Full members of the community, those who believed Muhammad’s message replaced earlier revelation, we're expected to live morally upstanding lives, to pray regularly (before dawn, during the day, at sunset, and at night), fast during the year’s ninth month, and provide alms to support the poor. The associated groups include “allies” from among the Quraysh, who must have come with the believers from Mecca, as well as a number of pagan tribes in the area of Medina and one tribe that is Christian. Included in the broader community are a number of Jewish groups affiliated with the otherwise pagan tribes. 

 

 

Muhammad’s immediate followers, the believers, swear to exact vengeance for members of their community who are killed and to aid the poor among them in matters connected with ransom or the payment of the blood-money due in the event of a killing. Believers will act against those who seek to divide their community; they will not kill each other; they will honor the obligations members of the community undertake to outsiders, and they will not make separate treaties. It appears that they agree to raid in an orderly fashion and only with Muhammad’s permission, to treat Jews fairly and that the center of Medina will be a sacred area. This sacred area, “the place of prostrations” or masjid, was the first mosque (the English word derives from masjid). Disagreements both among the believers and between the believers and their allies will be resolved by Muhammad, who is the messenger of God. 

 

The Constitution of Medina suggests Muhammad was a well-known figure by the time he and his followers arrived in their new home, and that he was trusted as a person to deal fairly with people. Crucially, the Constitution reveals Muhammad’s comfort in leading a group that included people with differing degrees of belief in his message. And it shows that the community was shaped by the persistent violence surrounding it. The authorities of Mecca are identified as obvious enemies, but the emphasis in the document on raiding reflects a generally combative environment. Muhammad’s community seeks to unite people of different beliefs. It was plainly a powerful message even before Muhammad proved himself as a strategist as well as a prophet. 

 

                                                                   

From Medina back to Mecca

 

It would be eight years before Muhammad triumphed over the Quraysh at Mecca. There are numerous indications in the Koran that neither Muhammad’s army nor that of his Meccan rivals was especially well disciplined. Muhammad appears to have found it necessary to point out that it behooves people to do what they are told if their commander is the messenger of God. In a Sura reflecting an early conflict, he says, “Believers, when you meet the disbelievers in battle, never turn your backs on them: if anyone does so on such a day, unless maneuvering to fight or to join a fighting group, he incurs the wrath of God, and Hell will be his home, a wretched destination.” On another occasion, after he was nearly killed, Muhammad said that, “he is only a messenger before whom many messengers have been and gone.” He also found it necessary to forgive those who had run away: “you fled without looking back while the Messenger was calling out to you from behind, and God rewarded you with sorrow for sorrow. [He has now forgiven you] so that you will not grieve for what you missed or what happened to you.” Moments like these were, however, less frequent than moments of victory as Muhammad’s movement grew in strength. 

 

 

After six years at Medina, Muhammad announced that he would make a pilgrimage back to Mecca. The return was put off while Muhammad negotiated with the Quraysh. In the end, the two sides agreed to the Treaty of Hudaybiya, according to which Muhammad would be allowed to make a pilgrimage to Mecca in ten years’ time. Two years later, Muhammad claimed the Quraysh had violated the agreement and announced that he would come immediately to Mecca. His power was also now irresistible, and so the return in 630 was without violence. Muhammad’s peaceful entry into Mecca marked the end of the struggle, and his former rivals among the Quraysh, able soldiers such as ‘Amr ibn al-‘As and Khalid ibn al-Walid, now joined him. “God has truly fulfilled His messenger’s vision: ‘God willing, you will most certainly enter the Sacred Mosque in safety, shaven-headed or with cropped hair, without fear,’ God knew what you did not, and he has granted you a nearer triumph.” 

 

Now Muhammad becomes ever clearer that his new revelation corrects errors and replaces the old. Jewish and Christian teachers are now people who have promoted ignorance of divine truth: 

 

They take their rabbis and their monks as lords beside God, as well as the Messiah, the son of Mary. But they were commanded to serve only one God: there is no God but Him; he is far above whatever they set up as his partners! They try to extinguish God’s light with their mouths, but God insists on bringing His light to its fullness, even if the disbelievers hate it. It is He who has sent his Messenger with guidance and the religion of truth. Sura 9.31–3. 

 

Monks and rabbis are now people who take the property of others, monasticism is something “they” invented. Such a statement does not mean that Christians and Jews were no longer welcome. What it meant was that their teachers were leading them astray. Given that Muhammad had earlier expressed horror at the outrages committed in the name of Judaism by a chieftain named Dhu Nuwas, memorable even at a century’s distance, and that he plainly objected to what he considered Christian misunderstanding of the nature of God’s relationship to Jesus, such statements represent a development rather than a departure from his other teachings. 

 

Muhammad’s more strident tone was accompanied by the dispatch of armies to bring more of Arabia under the sway of the believers. Just as he was strengthening his condemnation of what he saw to be “false teachers” for Christians and Jews, so too he was changing his position on the acceptability of continued pagan practice among allies to the community. He decreed an end to treaties between the believers and these people, warning them that: 

 

On the day of the Great Pilgrimage [there will be] a proclamation from God and His Messenger to all people: ‘God and his Messenger are released from [treaty] obligations to the idolaters. It will be better for you [idolaters] if you repent; know that you cannot escape God if you turn away.( Sura 9.3.)

 

These pagans are given four months to repent, after which it will be open season for the believers to kill them. If, however, they did repent, pray to God, and pay tax, they would be forgiven. At no point, even now, does Muhammad appear to envision a world in which there will only be believers. He is concerned that the believers will live moral lives, that had always been a theme of his revelations, but he does not lay down a specific code of conduct they must follow. The believers will be received in “the Garden that those mindful of God have been promised: flowing streams and perpetual food and shade. This is the reward that awaits those who are mindful of God; the disbelievers’ reward is the Fire.” As had been true of Jesus’ earliest followers, Muhammad had been taught that the Day of Judgment was imminent. Added to this was a doctrine that self-sacrifice for the faith would be especially rewarded. 

 

The interconnection between the Medinan clans that supported the Prophet with those settled in the northwest of the Hijaz is particularly interesting in relation to a couple of aspects: their trade collaboration and the impact of the belligerent attitude of the pro-Byzantine Arab Christian forces in the framing of the early concept of a Jihad.

 

Muhammad’s effort to subdue the Bedouins took his forces into areas once controlled by the Jafnid and Nasrid federations, shadows of their former selves in the postwar period. How would Persia and Rome react? Muhammad’s early ties with Palestine had left him with a distinctly pro-Roman bias. Even as Syria was being overrun by the Persians, he had said, “The Romans have been defeated in [their] nearest land. They will reverse their defeat in a few years’ time.” It is possible that Muhammad made this observation as Heraclius was beginning his counteroffensive against the Persians. This was in 626. Did he see Heraclius’ struggle as somehow parallel to his own? Could the good feeling continue? There were signs that they would not. There had already been conflicts before Muhammad died in 632. 

 

Through his period of success, Muhammad remained accessible to his followers. He did wish they would not yell outside his private chambers. But he had led from the front and been visible to his followers. There is no sign that changed in the last years of his life. He was still trying to find new believers up to the very end.

 

 

1. Marco Demichelis, Arab Christian Confederations and Muhammad’s Believers: On the Origins of Jihad, ORCID Centre for Interreligious Studies, Pontifical Gregorian University, 00187 Rome, Italy Academic Editor: Brannon Wheeler Religions 2021, 12(9), 710; https://doi.org/10.3390/rel12090710 Peter Edwell, Rome and Persia at War Imperial Competition and Contact, 193–363 CE, 2021.

 

2. The passage quoted comes from: C.E. Bosworth (tr.), History of Tabari vol. 5 The Sasanids, the Byzantines, the Lakmids, and Yemen (Albany, 1999): 383; for the sources, see James Howard-Johnston, Howard-Johnsto n, Witnesses to a World Crisis: Historians and Histories of the Middle East in the Seventh Century, 2011, 347–348. 

 

3. Less dramatic version: see Nasir Al-ka'bi, A Short Chronicle on the End of the Sasanian Empire and Early Islam: 590-660 A.d. (Gorgias Chronicles of Late Antiquity), 2016, 60.

 

 

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