The Battle of the Masts (Dhat al-Sawari)

In the final months of 33 AH, ʿUthman ﵁ ordered ʿAbdullah ibn Saʿd ibn Abi Sarh ﵁ to build a navy. The Byzantine fleet had launched repeated attacks on the Levantine coast in recent years, and the Muslims had no naval arm of their own with which to answer. Muʿawiyah ﵁ had already asked permission under ʿUmar ﵁ to build a fleet; ʿUmar ﵁ had refused, wary of the dangers of the sea. ʿUthman ﵁ consented, on the condition that no man be forced to sail.

In the shipyards of Tyre, Sidon and Alexandria, two hundred ships were built. Skilled seafaring tribes from the coastal regions — above all from Ghifar and Mazin — were recruited. Their commanders were men at home on the sea. Supplies from Egypt and the Levant were sent to the ports of Akaba and Alexandria, from which the fleet would sail.

The appointment of ʿAbdullah ibn Saʿd ﵁ as supreme commander stirred some debate. He was the formerly apostatized half-brother of ʿUthman ﵁ on the foster-mother’s side, once banished from Mecca by the Prophet ﷺ and later returned. But ʿUthman ﵁ knew that ʿAbdullah ﵁ was a tactically gifted commander, and the choice stood. In the winter of 33 AH the squadrons from Syria and Egypt were brought to Akaba for the final concentration. The Syrian squadron sailed along the coast under Muʿawiyah ﵁'s officers; the Egyptian squadron was led by ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs ﵁'s men.

By Rajab 34 AH the fleet was ready to depart. Two hundred ships, some twenty thousand battle-ready men, and provisions for two months lay at anchor. ʿAbdullah ﵁ gathered his commanders and spoke to them about their enemy: not the Romans they knew from earlier battles, but a different people sailing under the same imperial flag. The evening salat was performed on deck. At daybreak the anchors were weighed.

The fleet sailed out of Akaba in March 34 AH, coasting southwest along the periphery of Cyprus. Scouts reported Byzantine patrol squadrons in the Cyprus–Rhodes–Lycia triangle. ʿAbdullah ibn Saʿd ﵁ chose a southerly course to evade the larger concentrations, intending to strike near Phoenix (modern Finike), where the coastal routes converge.

Fourteen days of sailing. The fleet moved in loose formation, the heavier ships to windward and the light scouting galleys ahead. The wind was favorable, a steady northeasterly that filled the sails. Each evening ʿAbdullah ﵁ had the commanders gather aboard his flagship. He spoke little of naval tactics; the men knew they would not maneuver the way the Byzantines expected.

The first skirmishes took place off the southern coast of Rhodes. Two Byzantine light galleys intercepted a Muslim scouting detachment; one galley was boarded and captured, the other escaped. From the captured crew came word: the emperor himself, Constans II, was assembling a great fleet at Finike. Five hundred to seven hundred ships, it was said, with the imperial guard itself aboard.

ʿAbdullah ﵁ sent the scouting galleys to probe deeper along the Lycian coast. Patara was avoided; Finike itself was approached from the west. On the southeastern flank of the Phoenix basin, the Muslim fleet came within sight of the Byzantine formation. It was sunset. Anchor was dropped at fishing distance; the salat al-Maghrib was performed. The fleets stared at each other through the evening haze.

Constans II had received word of the approaching Muslim armada weeks in advance. He personally assembled the imperial fleet in the bay of Finike, drawn mainly from the bases on Cyprus, Rhodes and the Cilician coast. On paper the numbers were overwhelming: five hundred to seven hundred ships against two hundred Muslim vessels.

The Byzantine deployment was classical. In the center the heavy dromons, the armored ships with Greek fire and ramming prows, led by the emperor’s own guard units. On the wings light galleys, fast and agile, meant to encircle the Muslims once the main clash bogged down. The emperor himself sailed on the flagship in the rear of the center; from the high sterncastle he could survey the entire battlefield.

The Byzantine plan relied on ramming. The dromons would approach the Muslim line in a crescent formation, then charge the enemy ships at full speed, drive their rams through the hulls, and let the archers on the upper decks shoot down the survivors. It had worked for centuries. It had worked against the Vandals, it had worked against the Slavs, it had worked against the Sassanid attempts at sea. No reason to assume that Arabs — who, according to Constans, had never before fought a serious naval battle — would react any differently.

In the Muslim fleet, ʿAbdullah ﵁ looked through the evening dusk at the crescent unfolding opposite them. He called his officers together below deck, and spoke softly. The enemy would ram; he knew it. The Muslims would not maneuver against the ramming; they would make the ramming impossible.

At the break of day on the first morning of battle, ʿAbdullah ibn Saʿd ﵁ gave the order from which the entire engagement would take its name. He had the Muslim ships bound together — bow to starboard, stern to gunwale — with heavy cables and hooks, so that groups of four, five, sometimes six ships formed a single floating fortress. Tabari describes it plainly: “They bound the ships at bow and stern, so that they could not be torn apart. Each cluster became a fort, floating on the sea.”

The Byzantine dromons attacked. At full stroke, four rowers per oar at the highest tempo, the heavy ships came storming down on the Muslim line. The moment the first dromon struck the Muslim cluster, what the Byzantines had not expected happened. The ram bored into the side of the outermost ship, but the cluster as a whole did not come apart — the cables held. Instead of smashing the Muslim ships asunder, the Byzantine dromon itself sat clamped fast against the Muslim cluster. And then — and this was the second half of ʿAbdullah ﵁'s tactic — the Muslim fighters came for the pinned dromon.

They were for the most part men raised in the Hijaz and Najd, desert fighters. But ʿAbdullah ﵁ had trained them for months in boarding combat. With sword, knife and thrusting spear they leapt across onto the Byzantine deck. In the narrow space of a ship, a Bedouin with a seif is as dangerous as a Spartan with a spear. The Byzantine marines — trained for bowshot from the high decks, not for hand-to-hand fighting — were cut down in great numbers. By midday, dozens of Byzantine dromons had been captured, clamped fast in the Muslim clusters, their crews dead or taken prisoner.

The Byzantine center formation fell into disorder. Ships that could not ram without being pinned veered away; ships that veered away got in each other’s way. ʿAbdullah ﵁ had the archers take position on the Muslim clusters, and the cut-off Byzantine ships were kept under fire from a distance. The sea before Phoenix filled with floating wreckage and bodies.

After six hours of ship-to-ship fighting, the Byzantine formation began to break. The Muslim boarding parties had built up a chain of captured dromons; from each captured dromon, the archers of the higher deck were turned against the next Byzantine ships. The imperial guard ships around Constans II held firm, but the wings began to give way.

Constans II gave the order to withdraw. It was an orderly attempt, with the imperial guard units as rearguard, but the scale of the disorder made real coordination impossible. Ships collided with one another in the attempt to break free; ships that did not give up their oars quickly enough were overtaken by Muslim pursuit galleys and boarded.

The Muslim fleet divided. One group under ʿAbdullah ﵁ personally kept to the main formation of the imperial guard, and pursued Constans II’s flagship eastward toward Cyprus. Two other groups of pursuit galleys swarmed out, ramming or boarding the scattered Byzantine fugitives. The sea before Phoenix filled with drifting masts — broken, capsized, drifting with the current — and it was from those masts that the battle would take its name.

By sunset the Byzantine fleet had ceased to exist as a fighting force. Constans II escaped with about thirty imperial guard ships, wounded in his arm and with half of his personal staff killed. The rest — between two hundred and three hundred ships sunk or captured — was lost. The Muslim fleet regrouped on the western side of the bay. The salat al-ʿAsr and al-Maghrib were performed in succession on the deck of ʿAbdullah ﵁'s flagship, with the remaining commanders in rows behind him.

At dawn the Muslim fleet regrouped in the bay of Phoenix. The casualty reports came in. The Muslim losses were moderate — about five hundred shahada and several hundred wounded — a small number for an engagement of that scale. The Byzantine losses were catastrophic: between two hundred and three hundred ships sunk or boarded, and captured crews enough to fill several Muslim ships bound for Levantine ports with prisoners of war.

ʿAbdullah ibn Saʿd ﵁ gave the order for a proper Islamic burial for the Muslim shahada. Their bodies were retrieved from the sea, washed, wrapped in shrouds and laid in group burials on the Lycian coast, with a simple prayer; the sea itself had been their tomb, and the burial was symbolic. The Byzantine dead were likewise respected; their bodies were laid together by the Muslim troops, and their prisoners of war were treated according to Islamic law.

A swift messenger was sent to Medina. Two weeks later the message arrived in the Masjid an-Nabawi: “Ya Amir al-Muʾminin, the sea has become a Muslim domain.” ʿUthman ﵁ had the message read aloud after the Jumuʿah salat. The Muslims proclaimed the takbir; the Prophet ﷺ’s earlier dream of Muslim warriors upon the sea had been confirmed. For the first time in its history, the Muslim state had a fleet that could fight the Byzantine navy on equal footing.

The strategic consequences of Dhat al-Sawari played out in the decades after ʿUthman ﵁'s khilafah. Cyprus would be consolidated anew; the raids on Constantinople would begin in earnest under Muʿawiyah ﵁'s khilafah; and the sea between Egypt and the Levant would be safe for Muslim trade for the next century. The fleet was born.