And to be sure—whether they were tempted by heaven, plunder, or both—there was clearly no lack of Arabs who were prepared to answer the summons. “You are the best community ever brought forth among mankind, commanding virtue and forbidding vice, and believing in God.” So the Prophet hailed the Muhajirun: as a band of warriors who had it within them not only to found a whole new order of society but to inherit, as their reward for doing so, the earth itself.
A claim that was to be proved, and in short order, quite spectacularly correct.
Why?
Early in AD 634, alarming news reached Caesarea, the handsome city on the coast of Palestine that had long served as the hinterland’s capital. A war band of Saracens, trespassing directly on Roman territory, had crossed into the Negev, and was now aiming northwards for the rich fields and villages of Samaria. A most tiresome intrusion—and one that the provincial authorities were naturally anxious to nip in the bud. No matter that the Roman military, in the wake of plague and war, remained extremely stretched: a task force of infantry, summoned hurriedly to arms, marched out into the open, and swung briskly south.106 At their head, resplendent in the white uniform that marked him out as a personal favourite of the emperor, rode a patrician by the name of Sergius.107 He had particular cause to relish the challenge ahead. Already, he had been looking to replenish the finances of the exhausted province by restricting the profits that Saracen merchants were permitted to take back across the frontier. Now, with the barbarians seemingly provoked to open larceny by this measure, it was time to reacquaint them with the brute facts of Roman might. The region’s ancient mistress, after her temporary absence, was back.
Sergius and his small army met the invaders in the afternoon of 4 February, some twelve miles east of Gaza.108 The result was utter debacle. The infantry were ambushed and Sergius himself, having reputedly fallen three times from his horse, was taken prisoner. His fate, according to one report, was a peculiarly unpleasant one: sewn up inside a freshly flayed camel hide, he was suffocated to death as the stinking skin dried out. Further calamities quickly followed. The Saracens, with devilish cunning, turned out to have launched a pincer movement against Palestine. The second war band, crossing the eastern frontier even as the first was rampaging through the Negev, joined exultantly in the scouring of the province. Over fields thick with thistles, weed-covered highways and crumbling walls they swept. “Saracens,” Roman strategists had always asserted with imperious complacency, “are by nature unable to conduct sieges”109—but now, to the horror of the authorities, this reassurance was proving a worthless one. If it was cities, with their dense populations and rat-infested byways, that had always proved most vulnerable to the scythings of the plague, then the distinction between town and countryside, after whole decades of visitations, was one that had come increasingly to be blurred. Sheep grazed amid toppled pillars, while cattle, tethered against the depredations of bandits, spent their nights in abandoned shops and foundries. If the average city of Palestine was not yet wholly a ghost town, then it certainly had one foot in the grave.110 Unsurprisingly, then, in the wake of Sergius’s defeat, and with Roman field armies nowhere to be seen, ambassadors from settlement after settlement sought to follow the path of least resistance, and buy off the invaders.
Not that many could seriously have thought that the Saracens would be around for long. As with Samaritan uprisings, so with incursions from the desert: the imperial authorities had seen it all before. Inveterately barbarian as the Saracens were, perhaps it was only to be expected that they would once in a while turn rogue. Back in 582, for instance, when Ghassanid resentment at the exile of their king had provoked the foederati into open revolt, they had inflicted a crushing defeat on an imperial army in open battle and then ranged at will across Syria. A couple of centuries before that, an Arab queen named Mavia, “long celebrated in song by the Saracens,”111 had launched a series of devastating raids that had taken her all the way to Egypt. The Roman response, on both occasions, had been the time-honoured one of dazzling the barbarians with bribes. Both Mavia and the Ghassanids, despite the undoubted scares that they had given the provincial authorities, had been successfully pacified with a whole range of exotic gewgaws. Golden furnishings and fancy titles had, as ever, proved their worth. No reason, then, for Heraclius to feel particularly perturbed by the defeat outside Gaza. Alarming though the swift return of warfare to Palestine clearly was, the Saracens hardly rivalled the Persians as foes. After all, if history had taught Roman officials anything, it was that the wolves of Arabia, no matter how much of a passing threat they might be on occasion, could always be muzzled in the end.
This latest invasion would prove very different, though. The Saracens did not content themselves with the extortion of subsidies and silken cloaks. Rather than wait to be graced with treasure from the hands of Caesar, they aimed instead to rip it brutally from his grasp. With Palestine effectively secured, they immediately flung themselves against the defences of Syria. Fifty years later, a monk writing in Sinai would record what ensued: two terrible battles, one at the Ghassanid camp city of Jabiya, and the other a few miles to the west, on the Golan Heights above the River Yarmuk.112 The details are slight—and it is the measure of how impossible it has proved for historians to agree on the actual progress of the Arab invasion, and the struggle of the Romans to resist it, that not a single earlier reference to these fateful clashes exists in either Arabic or Greek.g The dates, the details and the course of the Syrian campaign—all are veiled by contradiction and confusion.113 Nevertheless, if the particulars of what happened during the campaigning have defied repeated attempts to arrive at a consensus, then not so the result. “For the Roman army,” as the monk in Sinai would note with bleak finality, “it proved a defeat as fatal as it was terrible.”114 By late 636, with the campaigning season drawing to a close, Heraclius seems to have bowed to the inevitable. Burning villages and fields as he withdrew, he abandoned the very provinces that he had moved heaven and earth to retake just a few years previously. “Peace be upon you, Syria!” he is said to have cried, as he paused for one last yearning look back. “What a rich country is this for the enemy!”115