The Battle of Yarmuk

The riverbed in which an empire was lost

South of the Sea of Tiberias, on the border of what is today called Syria and Jordan, a river cuts deep through the basalt landscape of the Hauran. The Yarmuk gathers water from the slopes of the Golan and the mountains of Ajloun and pours westward toward the Jordan valley. Along its southern bank run ravines that lie hundreds of metres below the plateau above. Whoever rode along these ravines in the summer of the fifteenth year of the Hijra could see the blue sky above the basalt fields, feel the still hot wind between the black stones, and in the distance on the horizon see the tents of two armies that in the coming days would meet each other.

In the previous article we closed with the first khutbah of ʿUmar ibn al-Khattab ﵁ and the acceptance of his title Amir al-Muʾminin. Three months had passed since then. The Sahaba ﵃ in Medina were occupied with the administration that their new caliph had set up, on the Iraqi border the troops under Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁ advanced toward the Sasanian host, and in the north, in what had once been the Roman province of Syria Palaestina, another, older empire stood ready to give its answer to the Muslim advance that had begun under Abu Bakr ﵁ and was being continued under ʿUmar ﵁. Byzantium, the Eastern Roman empire, had rolled itself in these months into an unprecedented effort. Heraclius, the emperor who years earlier had definitively defeated the Sasanians and brought the True Cross back to Jerusalem, was now confronted on the battlefield once more with an enemy. This time the enemy came not from the east across the Euphrates; he came from the south, from the desert, with the message of Muhammad ﷺ.

Suyuti’s testimony in a single sentence

For whoever wishes to read the battle of Yarmuk from the pen of Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, as this article has obliged itself to do, the basic given is short. Suyuti treats the entire war year 15 of the Hijra in a single summarising sentence. It is remarkable how this great scholar, in his Tarikh al-Khulafa, describes the most far-reaching events not from their grandeur but from their outcome.

A single sentence for what has been one of the greatest turning points in world history. We follow Suyuti ﵀ in this register for the factual core, and for the detailed phase-narratives of the battlefield we turn to the battle-story that we have worked out separately in the cycle of Siera Kaart.

The historical lead-up under Abu Bakr ﵁

For whoever wishes to understand the battle of Yarmuk in its full weight, one must go back to the first months of the caliphate of Abu Bakr ﵁. In the winter of the twelfth year of the Hijra, when the riddah wars on the Arabian peninsula had not yet been fully concluded, Abu Bakr ﵁ had already, in an assembly of senior Sahaba ﵃, raised the question of whether the community, once assured of its internal unity, ought not to turn its gaze toward the horizon. The Byzantine empire had over the past centuries kept the Arab tribes on the Syrian border in its service as allies or as clients; the Sasanian empire had done the same on the Iraqi border. Both empires were, in 632, at the moment the Prophet ﷺ passed away, exhausted and vulnerable from their years of mutual war.

ʿUmar ﵁, at that time still judge and counsellor in Medina, had in these early deliberations taken the position that Islam could not keep its message within the borders of Arabia, because its commission was universal; but at the same time he had warned that hasty expansion might break the young community. Abu Bakr ﵁ had held the middle: he sent first reconnaissance forces to Syria and to Iraq, with instructions to gauge the Byzantine and Sasanian positions and to seek allies among the Arab tribes on both borders. What was at first a reconnaissance became within two years a campaign; and what was a campaign became within four years an empire-wide conquest.

The strategic preparation

Under Abu Bakr ﵁, Khalid ibn al-Walid ﵁, the “Sayf Allah”, had stood at the front in Iraq against the Sasanians. He had taken Hira, he had broken the Sasanian border forts, and he was on the point of pushing further eastward when the order came from Medina: he was to march in haste to Syria to reinforce the troops under Abu ʿUbaydah ibn al-Jarrah ﵁, Shurahbil ibn Hasanah ﵁, ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁ and Yazid ibn Abi Sufyan ﵁. It was Abu Bakr ﵁ who had set this movement in motion; ʿUmar ﵁ inherited the troops on two fronts and confirmed the choice of his predecessor.

Khalid ﵁ had accomplished the desert march through the Samawa, a march that ranks among the most daring movements in any military history of the seventh century. Nine days through waterless land, with camels that in the first days had been filled with water that they held in their stomachs, and that on the hardest stages were slaughtered to give their stomach contents to the horses and the men. At the end of that march stood a man who astonished the Byzantine forward positions in Syria by suddenly finding himself in their rear. From that moment the battles of Marj as-Suffar, Ajnadayn, Fihl and the capture of Damascus were already behind the Muslims when ʿUmar ﵁ took over his office.

In Medina the new caliph received the reports of his commanders with the strict meticulousness that would characterise him. He gave his instructions in writing. He oversaw the distribution of the spoils according to the rules that Abu Bakr ﵁ had established and that he himself would extend. And in one of his early acts of administration he took a decision whose wisdom would only become clear later in this battle: he moved Khalid ﵁ from the supreme command to the subordinate command, and set Abu ʿUbaydah ﵁ at the head of the troops in Syria. It was no removal out of displeasure; it was a reordering, because ʿUmar ﵁ wished that no one in the community could imagine that the victory hung upon the hand of a single person. The sword of Allah ﷻ remains in the struggle; the supreme command rests with whomever the caliph calls to it. Abu ʿUbaydah ﵁ accepted the appointment with the modesty that made him known throughout the field, and Khalid ﵁ accepted the demotion with the recognition that he was in the service of the cause, not of his own rank.

The military force on both sides

Heraclius had positioned his supreme commander Vahan, an Armenian in imperial service, with an army of assembled troops on the Yarmuk plain. The figures that come down to us from the Byzantine and Arab sources vary widely, and we hold to restraint in this article. What is certain is that the Byzantine force comprised a multitude of fighting groups: Armenian foot soldiers, Slavic auxiliaries, Ghassanid Arab allies under Jabalah ibn al-Ayham, Greek cavalry, armoured cataphractarii, and a large body of mercenaries who had been recruited in the past years. It was an army that in its size and in its composition was the largest that the Eastern Roman empire would raise in the seventh century.

The Muslim fighting force was smaller, in every conceivable proportion, and it was more simply armed. Their cavalry was less armoured, their foot soldiers wore no plate armour but leather or woven protection, their arrows were short of shaft and strong of point. What they lacked in material equipment they brought in mobility and in spiritual orientation. Among the men who stood on the Yarmuk plain were some of the best known Sahaba ﵃ of the first hour: Abu Sufyan ibn Harb ﵁, who despite his advanced age stood on the battlefield and whose cry would be heard above the tumult; ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁, who would later become the conqueror of Egypt; Yazid ibn Abi Sufyan ﵁; Shurahbil ibn Hasanah ﵁; Saʿid ibn Zayd ﵁; and hundreds of others whose names have come down to us through the transmitters.

The lead-up in months

Between the bayʿah to ʿUmar ﵁ in Jumada al-Akhirah of the year 13 of the Hijra and the outbreak of the battle of Yarmuk in Rajab of the year 15 lay about two years. In these two years the situation on the Syrian theatre changed thoroughly. Under Abu Bakr ﵁ the first expeditionary corps under Abu ʿUbaydah ﵁, Yazid ibn Abi Sufyan ﵁, Shurahbil ibn Hasanah ﵁ and ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁ had arrived in the south of Syria, each with several thousand men, in four separate army units that operated across a broad front. They had won the first skirmishes with Byzantine troops, but they stood against a Byzantine empire that during the winter of the year 13 and the spring of the year 14 gathered its armies in Antioch for a counter-offensive. It was in this situation that Khalid ibn al-Walid ﵁ with his desert march from Iraq united the separate Muslim corps under a single command.

Under ʿUmar ﵁ in Medina the instructions to the commanders in Syria were brought together in a streamlined correspondence. Every two weeks a messenger departed from Medina to the north, with letters, with instructions, with appointments, with additions to the rules for the treatment of the population. Every two weeks a messenger returned, with reports, with names of the fallen, with figures of conquered lands, with questions that had to be answered in Medina. It was a system of communication that in its speed and in its precision matched the Sasanian and Byzantine imperial post, and it was borne by some dozens of trusted messengers who exchanged their mounts at relay posts along the way.

The Byzantine answer came in the summer of the year 15. Heraclius had raised an army in Antioch whose composition made Vahan supreme commander, with at his side Theodore Trithyrius and Jabalah ibn al-Ayham as commander of the Ghassanid Arab allies. This army marched southward. The Muslim corps, at that moment spread over Damascus, Hims and the Beqaa, received through messengers from Khalid ﵁ and Abu ʿUbaydah ﵁ the order to gather on the Yarmuk plain. The withdrawal from the newly conquered cities took place in good order; the jizyah payments were refunded to the inhabitants for the duration of the absence, with the pledge that they would be resumed after the battle. It was this unusual act, which Suyuti ﵀ mentions elsewhere in his work as characteristic of the first generation, that showed the Levantine population the goodwill of the Muslim rulers before the battle was fought.

The battlefield

The Yarmuk river forms in its western course a deep gorge, the Wadi ar-Raqqad, which runs perpendicular to its bed and ends in an abyss of basalt walls. The Byzantines had drawn themselves up on the eastern plain, with their backs to this gorge. The Muslims had placed themselves opposite them, on terrain that offered them a better retreat. Vahan hoped to drive the Muslims to the east and to pin them between his cavalry and the Euphrates; it would be Khalid ﵁ who, in the course of the six days that the battle lasted, would reverse this design and drive the Byzantines themselves onto the gorge.

What happened in the phases of the battle is described at length in the sources of Tabari ﵀ and Ibn Kathir ﵀, and we tell it in detail in our battle-story that is linked above this article. It suffices here to summarise the broad line: for six days the two armies stood opposite each other; the first four days were a gradual probing, with attacks by one of the Byzantine wings on the Muslim line, followed by counter-attacks in which the Muslim men each time managed to hold their position. Khalid ﵁ led the Muslim cavalry, while Abu ʿUbaydah ﵁ held the general command over the main force. On the fifth and sixth days Khalid ﵁ turned the battle by a focused attack on the Byzantine left wing, which fled in disorder to the north and the west. The Byzantine right wing was then cut off from its rear and pressed in an enveloping movement against the gorge. The Wadi ar-Raqqad, which should have offered the Byzantines safety, became their grave.

The sixth day in detail

The sixth day, the day on which the battle was truly decided, began with a Fajr prayer that Khalid ﵁ led in the mosque-tent of the camp. Men who had been wounded in the preceding days knelt beside men who would go into the struggle still unharmed. Khalid ﵁ read from Surah al-Anfal, the chapter of Badr, and after the prayer he let the men sit in silence for a few minutes before he ordered them to rise. Then he divided his cavalry into four groups. He held the centre himself. He placed Qaʿqaʿ ibn ʿAmr ﵁ on the right flank, ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁ on the left flank, and he sent Dirar ibn al-Azwar ﵁ with a smaller group to attack the Byzantine rear from behind.

When the sun stood halfway in its course, Khalid ﵁ gave the order for the coordinated charge. The Muslim cavalry struck the Byzantine lines like a hammer on an already cracked cup. The Byzantine left wing, which had already been thinned in the previous days, broke its ranks after the first thrust. What followed was no longer an orderly struggle but a confusion of fleeing men, fallen horses, driven wagons, and a ravine on the southern side into which the fugitives were driven one by one. By evening the Byzantine army was no longer an army. By night the Muslim men, dead tired but with their steadfastness unlost, had returned to their camp to count their martyrs.

The women on the battlefield

An element that recurs in every transmission of Yarmuk and that is also mentioned within Suyuti’s circle of sources is the presence of the women of the Sahaba ﵃ behind the lines. Hind bint ʿUtbah ﵂, the mother of Muʿawiyah ﵁ and the wife of Abu Sufyan ﵁, was present on the battlefield, together with other women from the Quraysh and the Ansar. When at one moment on the second day of the battle a group of Muslim soldiers fled back from the front line in panic, the women came to meet them with sticks and with tent poles, and they drove their men with sharp words back to the enemy. Asma bint Yazid ﵂ is named in some transmissions as the one who is said to have defeated a Byzantine soldier with a broken tent pole. The spirit that speaks from these episodes is no schoolbook romance; it was the reality of a community that in these days stood in its entirety, men and women, on the battlefield for its existence.

The role of Khalid ibn al-Walid ﵁

Suyuti ﵀ does not name Khalid ﵁ in his single Yarmuk sentence, but in the broader literature that has been gathered around this battle his name takes a central place. On the fifth day, when Vahan made an offer of withdrawal through a negotiator, and the Muslim commanders considered whether they would accept this offer, it was Khalid ﵁ who intervened with the words that an enemy who asks for peace after he has lost seeks not peace but time. He convinced Abu ʿUbaydah ﵁ of the necessity of pressing on. The next day he brought the cavalry to a breakthrough in the Byzantine left wing, which decided the battle for the Muslims.

What was united in Khalid ﵁, and what Suyuti ﵀ emphatically mentions in other passages about him, was a military instinct that scarcely finds its equal in Arab military history. He read a battlefield as a chess master reads a board. He knew which movement at which moment would bring the other party into an untenable position. And he combined this with a spiritual orientation that made him into what he wished to be: not a commander for himself, but an instrument in the service of the cause. When after this battle he received news of the passing of Abu Bakr ﵁ in Medina, which reached him in the midst of the fighting but which he kept hidden from the men until after the victory, he spoke no word of complaint. When he was moved by ʿUmar ﵁ from the supreme command back to the subordinate command, he likewise spoke no word of complaint. What he did speak was the supplication that Allah ﷻ would grant him the martyrdom that he had sought on so many battlefields and that would never fall to his lot.

The Qur’anic context

The battle of Yarmuk was not experienced by the believers as a merely military confrontation. It was experienced as a testing in the sense that the Qur’an had already laid down in the Meccan and Medinan revelations. When on the eve of the sixth day the Muslim army commanders called their men to the final offensive, the verse of steadfastness was repeatedly recited from Surah al-Hashr, and from Surah al-Anfal the verses about Badr:

This verse, which the believers had heard at Badr and at Uhud and at Hudaybiyyah, sounded once more on the bank of the Yarmuk. The men who stood before the Byzantine force were not only warriors; they were believers who understood their position in history in a specific way. They knew that the outcome did not lie in their numbers, and not in their armour, and not in their cavalry. They knew that the outcome lay with Allah ﷻ, and that their task was to be steadfast.

The news of the passing of Abu Bakr ﵁

An element that has its own place in the transmissions about Yarmuk is the moment at which Khalid ibn al-Walid ﵁ received news of the passing of Abu Bakr ﵁ and the bayʿah to ʿUmar ﵁. Unlike in the chronological reckoning that this article follows, this news reached Khalid ﵁, according to some transmissions, during the battle itself. He had had the messenger intercepted before the news could be spread through the ranks. He did not want the men, in the critical moment of the struggle, to divide their attention between the battlefield before their eyes and the events in Medina behind them. The news comprised two parts: the passing of the first caliph, and the appointment of ʿUmar ﵁ as his successor with the addition that ʿUmar ﵁ had moved Khalid ﵁ from the supreme command and appointed Abu ʿUbaydah ﵁ in his place.

Khalid ﵁ read the news. He let no one perceive what he had read. He fought on until the victory had been secured. Then, after the last fighting, he went to Abu ʿUbaydah ﵁ and handed over the command to him. He made no scene, he did not protest, he did not request a postponement. He accepted his new position as subordinate commander under Abu ʿUbaydah ﵁ with the same calm with which, many years before, he had undergone his conversion to Islam: without drama, with direct obedience. When he was later asked by a Sahabi ﵁ why he had not insisted on the supreme command, he answered that his fighting was not for his own rank, but for the cause of Allah ﷻ; and that a commander who fights for his rank instead of for his commission is, in the hour of victory, already lost.

This detail became, in the centuries that followed, a touchstone for the spiritual nature of the figure of leadership in Islam. Whoever clings to an office misses it. Whoever clings to his commission fulfils it, whether the office is in his hand or in the hand of another.

The outcome and the geography of the victory

On the evening of the sixth day the Byzantine army was no longer an army; it was a scattered crowd of survivors who tried to reach the north. Vahan himself, according to some sources, perished on the battlefield; according to others he fled to Antioch, where he later died in disgrace with Heraclius. The emperor himself, in Antioch, received the news of the defeat with the resignation of a man who knew that his empire had lost a province to which centuries of Byzantine policy had been unable to put an end.

Suyuti ﵀ sums up the geographical outcome in the sentence that we quoted above: all of Jordan was opened to Islam. What this means in concrete place names became visible in the following months. Damascus, which had already been taken under Abu Bakr ﵁, was now definitively held. Hims, Baalbek, Antioch, and the whole Levantine coast came into Muslim hands. Tiberias, which Suyuti ﵀ excepts, was taken in by treaty. The Holy City of Jerusalem would give its surrender to ʿUmar ﵁ personally in the following year, in an event treated in its own article of this cycle. Egypt would fall three years later. The lands that came into Muslim hands in these years form the basis of what is to this day called the Arab-Islamic world.

The political consequences for Byzantium

For the Eastern Roman empire, Yarmuk was the end of a long Levantine presence that reached back to Pompey and the first century before the Christian era. The provinces of Syria Palaestina, Syria Phoenice, Syria Coele and Arabia, which had stood under Roman and Byzantine flag for hundreds of years, were lost in a single battle. Heraclius spent the rest of his years in Constantinople, a broken man who in his young years had defeated the Sasanians and in his old years was defeated by the Muslims. He died four years after Yarmuk. His successors would confine themselves to the defence of Asia Minor and the Aegean coast. The empire that continued to call itself “Roman” into the fifteenth century was, after Yarmuk, an Anatolian empire, no longer a Levantine or an Egyptian one.

For the old Levantine population the change was less shocking than one would have expected from Constantinople. The Muslims had proposed in their treaties, from the treaty that Khalid ﵁ had concluded in Damascus, an exceptionally mild arrangement: preservation of life, property, religious practice and ecclesiastical institutions, in exchange for the jizyah, a tax that for most Levantines turned out lower than the Byzantine taxes they had previously paid. The miaphysite and monophysite Christians, who under Byzantine rule had been persecuted as heretics, found under Muslim rule a peace they had not known for centuries. Jewish communities, who in Antioch and in the Galilee had suffered under heavy Byzantine repression, likewise experienced a relief. What is often designated in the modern press as “conquest” arrived in the lives of the inhabitants of Syria and Palestine as a change of administration that touched their daily life only in an administrative sense.

The spiritual meaning

For the believers who had stood on the Yarmuk plain and for those who in Medina had looked out for the news from Syria, this victory was not a military achievement but a sign. When the messenger from the north reached Medina with the news of the victory, ʿUmar ﵁ did not sit down to dine with the notables of the city. He thanked Allah ﷻ in the mosque, ordered that the families of the fallen martyrs be provided for immediately from the bait al-mal, and gave the order that no one in the community should speak in pride about this victory, for pride is the gate through which the first defeat enters after the first victory.

Suyuti ﵀ connects this victory, in his general characterisation of the caliphate of ʿUmar ﵁, to the words of Anas ibn Mālik ﵁ that we have already cited in a previous article: He took up the command in full, and in his days there were very many openings. Yarmuk was the first of those openings under his office. It was not the last. In the same calendar year the battle of al-Qadisiyyah would be fought on the Iraqi border, and in the next article we follow that event, in which Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁ would meet the Sasanian supreme commander Rustam on a plain that would receive its own place in Arab military history.

What Yarmuk left to the community

Whoever stands today on the bank of the Yarmuk and looks out over the basalt plain where the battle took place sees a landscape that in its physical form has scarcely changed. The same wind blows, the same stones lie there, the same river seeks its way to the Jordan. What is preserved in that landscape is the memory of six days in which an army out of Medina, average in size and simple in armament, definitively defeated the imperial army of one of the two greatest empires of the seventh century.

The consequences were immediately geographical and political, but they were also spiritual. For the generations of Sahaba ﵃ and Tabiʿun ﵀ who remained living in Syria after the battle, the victory was not a justification of pride, but an obligation. Whoever had been rewarded with the opening of a land was obliged to bind himself to the justice that had to be carried out in that land. ʿUmar ﵁ would, in the years that followed, repeatedly use the victory of Yarmuk on the minbar in Medina not as a reason for self-satisfaction, but as a reason for gratitude and as a warning. He would say that a community that takes in its victories without accompanying them with its justice will not be able to withstand its next test.

The return of the messengers to Medina

When the first gathered reports from Syria reached Medina, ʿUmar ﵁ received them in the same austere style in which he conducted his daily administration. A messenger, covered with the dust of a journey of many days, dismounted from his mount before the mosque of the Prophet ﷺ. He asked where the caliph was, and the men who stood in the shade by the wall pointed to a man in a simple cloak who was drawing water from a well for a group of poor bedouin who had arrived in the city. The messenger did not immediately recognise in this man the ruler of an empire that had just taken Syria; he asked for the caliph, and received the answer that this was he himself. ʿUmar ﵁ received the news, knelt down before Allah ﷻ in the open space before the mosque, and remained for some time in this posture before he rose to communicate the content of the news to the Sahaba ﵃ around him.

He ordered at once that the names of the fallen martyrs be recorded, that their families be provided for from the bait al-mal, that the spoils carried out of the Byzantine army camp be distributed fairly among the fighters, with observance of the established rules: a fifth for the bait al-mal, four fifths for the men, with allotment per person, with double shares for the horsemen on account of the care of their horses. He sent letters to Abu ʿUbaydah ﵁ in the north in which he instructed him not to put pressure on the population of the newly conquered regions, not to make the jizyah payments heavier than what had been laid down in the treaties, and to treat the churches and monasteries that stood in the area with respect.

These instructions, in their style of the first months of ʿUmar’s khilafah, would become the blueprint for what was applied in all later conquests under the Rashidun caliphs. No plunder. No destruction. No forced conversion. A change of administration in which the inhabitants could keep their faith, property and way of life, in exchange for a tax that funded the care of the Muslim state for their safety.

In the next article

In the next article we follow the second great victory of the year 15, at al-Qadisiyyah on the Euphrates, where Saʿd ibn Abi Waqqas ﵁ stood opposite the Sasanian supreme commander Rustam. What held at Yarmuk for Byzantium would hold at al-Qadisiyyah for the Sasanian empire: the end of an empire that had existed for centuries, in a battle of a few days. The community that on these summery Rajab days of the year 15 had for the first time taken the name Amir al-Muʾminin upon its lips would in the same months receive for the first time the treasure of an empire into its hands, and it would thereby learn for the first time the true nature of its responsibility for mankind.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (trans. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd edition 1995), p. 135.
• For the phase-narratives of the battlefield: see the battle-story umar-yarmuk in this cycle, which draws on at-Tabari ﵀, Tarikh ar-Rusul wa-l-Muluk (trans. Yarshater, SUNY) and Ibn Kathir ﵀, al-Bidaya wa-l-Nihaya.