The continuation of the conquests in the east under ʿUthman ﵁

Four years in which the horizon shifted once more

In the years 28 to 31 of the Hijra, the Gregorian 648 to 652, the eastern fronts of the caliphate saw a remarkable expansion. These were not the years of one great battle, like Qadisiyyah or Yarmuk under ʿUmar ﵁, but of a series of separate campaigns waged on a broad front, on a geographical scale that the community in Medina had not governed before. In the same years in which Cyprus was opened in the west and the battle of Sbeitla was fought in Ifriqiya, in the east a slow but unstoppable advance took place that brought about the definitive collapse of the Sassanid remnant power and that carried the Muslim banner into regions whose names still lay strange upon the tongue of the Arab soldiers.

Suyuti ﵀ treats these campaigns in the customary brevity that marks his work on the Caliphs. He lists on half a page a series of place names, with the indication of the year in which each of them was opened, and he adds to this enumeration one broader statement about what these conquests meant for the treasury of the caliphate. We follow his structure in this article, and we supplement, where fitting, the geographical and historical context, without overstepping the strict boundary of Suyuti’s account.

The situation on the eastern front at the accession of ʿUthman ﵁

When ʿUthman ﵁ was inaugurated in Muharram of 24 AH, the situation on the eastern front could be summed up briefly. The great Sassanid imperial structure was broken. Yazdegerd III, the last emperor of the House of Sasan, had after the battle of Nahavand in 21 AH under ʿUmar ﵁ become a fleeing sovereign, who with an ever smaller company moved through his own former provinces in an attempt to find allies and rebuild his empire. The Muslim troops had taken Ctesiphon, the old capital, they had taken the wealth of Iraq into their hands and firmly established their administrative seats in Kufa and Basra, and they had expanded as far as Khuzestan and Fars, so that the Sassanid remnant, in the words of a later chronicler, had become a hand without fingers.

But the Iranian plateau was vast, and its geography was not favourable to a swift advance. Mountain ranges, deserts, and isolated valleys made each place a separate conquest. The Sassanid local governors and marzbans were in many regions not yet accustomed to their loss, and they often waged their own small wars against the Muslim presence, without a central command. ʿUthman ﵁ inherited from his predecessor an empire that on its eastern edge had a great but fragmented frontier, and the steps he would permit in the early years of his caliphate were aimed at consolidating this fragmented frontier through gradual conquests.

The year 27 and the opening of Arrajan and Darabjird

In the same year in which Cyprus and Ifriqiya were opened, two other conquests took place in the south of Iran of which Suyuti ﵀ speaks in his passage on 27 AH. He mentions that Arrajan and Darabjird were opened in that year. Arrajan was a city in the province of Fars, situated in a fertile valley, a junction of trade routes between Khuzestan and the Persian Gulf coast. Darabjird, to the southeast of Shiraz, was the capital of an old Sassanid province and possessed a ring-shaped wall that in antiquity was regarded as one of the wonders of Persian architecture.

Who opened these two places, and in what phase of the fighting, Suyuti ﵀ does not relate. We know from other sources that the Muslim commanders in Basra, under the general command of ʿAbdullah ibn ʿAmir ﵁, who would become governor of Basra in 29 AH and who in the following years would be the chief leader of the eastern campaigns, carried out these conquests. The inhabitants of Arrajan offered resistance, but were subdued within a few weeks, while the inhabitants of Darabjird concluded a treaty. In both cases the customary conditions were set: jizyah for the population, freedom of religious practice, retention of property and churches or fire temples, and garrisons of Muslim soldiers in the capitals.

The year 29 and the opening of Persepolis and surrounding places

Suyuti ﵀ writes of the year 29 that in that year Persepolis was opened by force, together with Iʿasa and other places. Persepolis, designated in the Arabic sources as Istakhr, was the old ritual capital of the Achaemenid empire, founded by Darius I in the sixth century before the Christian era. Under the Sassanids the city was no longer the political capital, but it remained an important religious centre and a repository of archives and art treasures. When Alexander the Great took the city in 330 before our era and set fire to its palaces, the old ritual function had already diminished, but Persepolis was not erased, for it remained a centre for centuries, and under the Sassanids it was a junction of priestly schools and sanctuaries.

The opening of Persepolis was not easy. The Muslims encountered a considerable garrison in this city, and the population at first refused to conclude a treaty, so that it came to a siege and to an assault. Suyuti ﵀ uses for the opening the expression “by force of arms”, which in his vocabulary indicates that the city was not taken by a treaty but by a military victory. The Muslim troops plundered the city according to the rules that applied to cities taken by force, and then established their garrison.

Iʿasa, which Suyuti ﵀ names together with Persepolis, was presumably a smaller city or fortress in the region of Fars. Its identity has not been established with certainty in modern historiography, but the pattern that Suyuti ﵀ follows in his enumeration is clear: in the year 29 several places were taken simultaneously in the southern and central Iranian plateau, some by treaty, others by force, and the result was a continuous Muslim presence in the provinces of Fars and Khuzestan.

The year 30 and the Khurasan campaign

The year 30 of the Hijra is, in the eastern campaigns of ʿUthman ﵁, the year of Khurasan. Suyuti ﵀ names in this year the opening of Jur in Fars, and then, in an enumeration astonishing in its sudden scope, a whole series of provinces in the northeast of Iran: Naysabur by treaty, or by force as another narration has it; Tus and Sarkhas by treaty; Marw and Bayhaq likewise. The Khurasan that was opened in this year was a region comparable in its geographical extent to the whole Levant. It lay in the northeast of the Iranian plateau, against the southern border of what today forms Turkmenistan and parts of Uzbekistan and Afghanistan. It was a land of old cities, fertile oases, and trade routes that linked the Central Asian Silk Road with the Persian coastal road.

The campaign into Khurasan was led by ʿAbdullah ibn ʿAmir ibn Kurayz ﵁, the governor of Basra, with subordinate commanders such as al-Ahnaf ibn Qays ﵁ and others. It was a combined operation, partly by a main force over the northern road through Rayy and Damghan, partly by a second column over the more southerly road along the edge of the Dasht-i Kavir. The cities of Khurasan offered varied responses to the approaching Muslim troops. Naysabur, a great city with a central trade junction, chose according to most narrations a treaty that obligated its population to jizyah and permitted it the practice of its faith, although Suyuti ﵀ mentions that there exists a second narration according to which the city was taken by force.

Tus, the old city where in later centuries the scholar Ghazali ﵀ would be born, concluded a treaty. Sarkhas, a junction on the road between Iran and Turan, likewise concluded a treaty. Marw, the old capital of Khurasan and in later centuries one of the centres of the Abbasid movement, concluded a treaty under the same conditions. Bayhaq, a smaller but important place in the southern hills of Khurasan, likewise concluded a treaty.

That most of these openings took place by treaty and not by force is, in the history of Khurasan in this year 30, a remarkable pattern. The Muslim troops, presumably a cavalry army of no more than twenty thousand men, encountered in Khurasan a population that had passed out of Sassanid rule into a state of administrative fragmentation. Local dehqans, the Sassanid landed nobility, had in recent years governed the province in independent units, and their readiness to negotiate with a new power was practical rather than ideological. The Muslims offered them conditions that, in comparison with the Sassanid taxes, were mild, and that moreover preserved their position as local great landholders, so that for most dehqans the choice between a battle of uncertain outcome and a treaty with retention of their position was no difficult choice.

The flight and death of Yazdegerd III

It was in this same Khurasan campaign of 30 and 31 AH that Yazdegerd III, the last Sassanid emperor, met his end. Suyuti ﵀ does not name him explicitly in this passage, but the event is inseparably bound up with the opening of Khurasan, and it is described at length in later sources. Yazdegerd had led, after the battle of Nahavand in 21 AH, a wandering existence, first in central Iran, later in Fars, then ever further eastward, in an attempt to find help from the local rulers of the Iranian periphery, from the Turks on the Central Asian border, and even from the Chinese emperor in a far-famed diplomatic request. No one truly came to his aid.

In the year 31, while the Muslim troops were approaching Marw, Yazdegerd found himself near that same city. He sought shelter with a miller in a village on the edge of the city, and this miller, whether out of greed for the costly garment that Yazdegerd wore, or at the command of a local ruler who did not wish to compromise himself by housing the emperor, murdered him in his sleep. Yazdegerd was the last representative of a dynasty that had ruled over Persia for more than four hundred years. His death in an unknown mill, without retinue and without honour, became in Iranian epic literature a model of human transience, and Ferdausi would devote to it a moving passage in his Shahnameh some centuries later.

For the Muslim troops who in those same months opened Marw and the surrounding cities, the death of Yazdegerd was the definitive end of the Sassanid empire. There was no longer an emperor with whom to conclude treaties or against whom battles had to be fought, and what there was, was local rulers and cities, and the taking of them was a matter of patience and of diplomacy. The empire that under Khusraw II in the time of the Prophet ﷺ had still advanced as far as Egypt and that had taken Jerusalem in 614 had within one generation entirely vanished. The community that in 13 AH under Abu Bakr ﵁ had undertaken its first reconnaissance on the Iraqi border had in 31 AH under ʿUthman ﵁ penetrated as far as Khurasan.

Sijistan and Armenia

Beside the Khurasan campaign, the eastern campaign in those same years also dealt with Sijistan, the desert-like province between Khurasan and what today forms Afghanistan and Pakistan. Sijistan was, in its geography, one of the most inaccessible regions of the Sassanid empire, for it was traversed by vast deserts and hot plains, and it had its own local dynasty that had lived in a semi-autonomous relation to Ctesiphon. The Muslim troops under ʿAbd ar-Rahman ibn Samura ﵁, a commander of Basra, opened Sijistan in these years through a combination of battles and treaties, and the cities of the province, including Zarang as capital, came into Muslim hands.

In the north of Iran, in the same period, Armenia was subdued anew. Armenia had already been attacked under ʿUmar ﵁ by Habib ibn Maslama ﵁, but the Byzantine and Armenian reactions had not made the Muslim presence firm. Under ʿUthman ﵁, in the years 28 to 30, Habib ﵁ and other commanders were sent again to Armenia, this time with larger troops, and Tbilisi (Tiflis), Dvin and the other important cities of the region came into Muslim hands. The Armenian nakharars, the local nobility that had stood in a position between Byzantium and the Sassanids, concluded treaties that placed them under Muslim sovereignty with retention of their local rights and their Christian faith.

The consequences for the treasury

Suyuti ﵀ closes his passage on these campaigns with a statement that is weighty in its significance for the caliphate of ʿUthman ﵁. He writes, in an almost literal translation, that when these vast provinces had been taken, the revenues of ʿUthman ﵁ became abundant, and wealth came to him from every direction, until he established treasuries and let the allowances flow abundantly. He adds that the Caliph could order for a single man a hundred thousand purses, in each of which were four thousand ounces of silver.

In this single statement the scholar sums up the whole financial effect of the campaigns of 27 to 31 AH. The caliphate that under Abu Bakr ﵁ had begun with an empty treasury, and that under ʿUmar ﵁ had been built up in its early years with strict management, had under ʿUthman ﵁ known a stream of revenue that in its scale far surpassed every preceding generation. The jizyah of Cyprus, the tribute of Ifriqiya, the spoils of Sbeitla, the jizyah of Khurasan, the tributes of Armenia, and the continuing revenues of Egypt, Syria and Iraq all flowed together into the same treasury of Medina. The Caliph spent great sums, sometimes in separate gifts to individuals, and he let allowances for the families of the Sahaba ﵃ flow to a degree that had been unheard of in the time of ʿUmar ﵁.

The internal consequences of the abundance

What was experienced in 27 to 31 AH as an overwhelming victory carried within it also the seeds of the tensions that in the last six years of the caliphate of ʿUthman ﵁ would grow into fitna. The wealth that flowed into the community was not, in all eyes, equally distributed. The Caliph, who in his ijtihad held that in the disbursement of the treasure he had room to provide generously for his near ones and his relatives, gave to Marwan ﵁, to his brother ʿAbdullah ibn Saʿd ﵁, and to other members of the Banu Umayya sums that some Sahaba ﵃ judged to be disproportionate. Az-Zuhri ﵀ mentions these decisions in his general characterisation of the caliphate of ʿUthman ﵁, and he connects them to the rise of the first criticism against the Caliph in the course of the last years of his office.

But in the years 28 to 31 themselves, while the reports of the victories came into Medina from the east, the sentiment in the city was predominantly one of gratitude. ʿUthman ﵁ mounted the mimbar in the Masjid an-Nabawi to announce the openings, he ordered thanksgivings, he had the sums for the families of the fallen disbursed generously, and he was in his dealings with the Sahaba ﵃ in these years not yet the isolated figure he would become in the years 33 and 34. The fitna that would arise in the last six years of his office was in these years not yet the surface current of history, for the surface current was, simply and without ulterior aim, the opening of an empire that stretched between Cyprus and Sijistan, between Sbeitla and Khurasan.

The image of the empire in 31 AH

Whoever wishes to picture the caliphate in the year 31 of the Hijra sees an empire that reached from the Atlantic coast of Morocco as far as the Indus, from the Caucasus to the Indian Ocean, from Cyprus in the Mediterranean Sea to the Amu Darya in Central Asia. It was, in its geographical extent, the greatest empire the world had known until then, greater than that of Alexander, greater than that of Rome at its height, greater than that of the Sassanids. And it was, in its administrative connection, held together by one Caliph in Medina, who appointed his governors, sent them instructions, received their reports, and called them to account.

The roads between Medina and the far corners of this empire were covered by messengers who rode in fixed stages and whose mounts were changed at relay posts. A report from Khurasan could reach Medina within three weeks, a report from Egypt within two. The Caliph in Medina worked from sunrise to sunset at his correspondence, surrounded by a few scribes and counsellors. He ate frugally, he slept little, he divided the treasure with his own hand. He was, in these years 28 to 31, a man who carried the geographical imagination of a world empire with the simplicity of his predecessor and with the concern for the community that had accepted him as Amir al-Muʾminin.

The spiritual dimension

For the believers who in these years performed their prayer in the Masjid an-Nabawi, or in the mosques of Kufa, Basra, Damascus, Fustat, or in the newly opened mosques in Marw and Naysabur, the expansion of the empire was no cause for pride, but a sign. The Prophet ﷺ had foretold to his companions that the earth would be folded up for his community, and that it would come to possess the treasures of the emperors of Persia and Byzantium. What had become reality in 31 AH was the literal fulfilment of that foretelling. The golden rings of Khusraw, the silken robes of the marzbans, the silver purses of the Sassanid treasuries, were divided by the Caliph in the mosques of Medina among the poor, the widows, and the Sahaba ﵃ of the first hour.

ʿUthman ﵁ mounted the mimbar repeatedly in these years to remind the community that the victory was of Allah ﷻ, and not of men; that the treasure was a trust of Allah ﷻ, and not a possession of the Caliph or of the soldiers; that the duty of whoever was rewarded with victory was not to live in pride, but to preserve the community in gratitude and in justice for the next testing. It was, in its deepest sense, the same message that his predecessors Abu Bakr ﵁ and ʿUmar ﵁ had carried, but in the particular tone proper to ʿUthman ﵁ in these first six years of his caliphate: a tone of gentleness toward the people, of abundance in the disbursement, and of trust in the governors he had appointed.

The seeds of what was to come

Az-Zuhri ﵀ sums up the caliphate of ʿUthman ﵁ in a well-known statement, which Suyuti ﵀ cites in the same passage surrounding the conquests of the east and which divides the whole tone of his office into two parts.

This was the sharp summary that Muslim historiography ﵀ would later give to the whole period of his rule. The years 28 to 31, treated in this article, fell entirely within the first six years, in the phase of uncriticised acceptance. What would come after, the fitna that would break out in 33 and 34, the siege that in 35 would claim the life of the Caliph, was in these years not yet a subject of concern.

In the next article

In the next articles we follow the turning point of which az-Zuhri ﵀ spoke: how ʿUthman ﵁ in the last six years of his office came under the same pressure that had been absent in his first six years, how the critics raised their voice in the provinces, and how the Caliph, with the same gentleness with which he had ruled in his early years, in the last years was besieged and killed in his own house in Medina by the hand of Egyptian rebels. The openings of Cyprus and Sbeitla and Khurasan, which in 27 to 31 AH had filled the community with abundance, would in the years that followed test the community as to what measure it had learned from that abundance.

Sources

• Jalal ad-Din as-Suyuti ﵀, Tarikh al-Khulafa (tr. Abdassamad Clarke, Ta-Ha Publishers, 3rd ed. 1995), pp. 165–167.