Where the Umayyads fit
The Umayyad caliphate is usually described as the first Islamic empire in the sense of a dynastic state: one family held the caliphate for roughly ninety years, from 661 to 750. It was not the first Muslim-ruled state. Between the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632 and 661, the first four caliphs, known as the Rashidun, had already led the conquest of Syria, Egypt and the Sasanian lands of Iraq and Iran. The Umayyads inherited those conquests and turned them into a lasting empire. This article gives the broad picture; the details of how the empire was governed are a separate subject.
From civil war to Damascus
The dynasty took its name from Umayya, an ancestor of a leading clan of Mecca. Its first caliph, Muawiya, had been governor of Syria for many years under earlier caliphs. When the third caliph, Uthman, a member of the Umayyad clan, was killed in 656, the community split. Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, became caliph, and Muawiya challenged him, demanding justice for Uthman’s death. The two sides fought at Siffin in 657 without a decisive result. After Ali was assassinated in 661, Muawiya was accepted as caliph, and Ali’s son Hasan did not contest the matter.
Muawiya ruled from Damascus, where he could rely on a large Syrian army that was loyal to him. The choice of Syria, not Arabia or Iraq, shaped the character of the state. It put the capital among Greek-speaking and Aramaic-speaking populations with a long tradition of administration, and it bound the ruling house to a regional military base.
Succession was a recurring problem. Muawiya named his son Yazid as heir, a step that many regarded as a break with earlier practice. After Muawiya died in 680, Husayn, the son of Ali, was killed with a small band of followers at Karbala by Yazid’s forces. The event is commemorated by Shia Muslims and remains a powerful memory in Islamic history. A prolonged civil war, often called the Second Fitna, followed, with rival claimants in Mecca and Iraq. The Umayyad branch descended from Marwan eventually prevailed, and the caliph Abd al-Malik (reigned 685 to 705) secured the dynasty by about 692.
Expansion across three continents
Under Abd al-Malik and his successors, Muslim armies made some of their most extensive advances. In North Africa, a military base at Kairouan was established around 670, and Carthage, the former Roman and Byzantine centre, was taken in 698. By around 709 Arab forces had reached the Atlantic coast. Berber peoples of the Maghreb, who had long histories of resisting outside rule, were drawn into the armies and, increasingly, into Islam. Their role in the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula was significant: in 711 an army under Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the strait that later took his name and defeated the Visigothic king Roderic. Within a few years most of the peninsula was under Muslim rule, known as al-Andalus. A raid across the Pyrenees was checked in the Frankish lands around 732, a battle often called Tours or Poitiers, though historians debate how much strategic weight it carried.
In the east, Arab forces had already overthrown the Sasanian state, whose old capital and its great arch, Taq Kasra, still stood at Ctesiphon. The Umayyad period saw them push through Khurasan into Transoxiana, taking cities such as Bukhara and Samarkand in the early eighth century under commanders such as Qutayba ibn Muslim. Here they met Sogdian merchants and local rulers whose towns lay on the Silk Road trade routes. In 711 a force led by Muhammad ibn Qasim entered Sindh in the Indus region. The result was a state that stretched, at its largest, from Iberia and North Africa to Central Asia and the Indus, covering parts of Europe, Africa and Asia.
Against the Byzantine Empire, results were more mixed. Arab fleets and armies besieged Constantinople in the 670s, though the dating of that campaign is uncertain in the sources, and again in 717 to 718, when the attempt failed and Byzantine control of Anatolia held. That long frontier continued to shape politics for centuries, as the Byzantines carried on what had been the eastern half of the Roman state long after the fall of Rome in the west.
Monuments and the look of power
Umayyad rulers used architecture to announce a new religion and a new order. The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, completed in 691 to 692 under Abd al-Malik, is the oldest major surviving Islamic monument, and its inscriptions are among the earliest long Qur’anic texts displayed in public. The caliph al-Walid I (705 to 715) oversaw the Great Mosque of Damascus, built on a site that had been occupied by a church of St John the Baptist, with mosaics that drew on the artistic traditions of the Byzantine world. Rulers also built desert residences and bathhouses in Syria and Jordan, such as Qasr Amra, decorated with wall paintings.
These buildings were created by local craftsmen who worked in earlier Roman, Byzantine and Persian traditions. The early Islamic style was therefore a synthesis, which blended inherited techniques with new purposes, rather than a clean break from the past. The same is true of the economy, which relied on trade routes and agricultural systems that predated the conquests; the old incense trade of Arabia, for example, had long connected the peninsula to the wider Mediterranean.
Strains within the empire
The empire’s rapid growth created problems. Arab Muslim soldiers formed a ruling class, settled largely in garrison cities such as Basra, Kufa and Fustat, while most inhabitants of the conquered lands were not Muslim. As conversion spread, non-Arab converts, known as mawali, sought equal treatment, and tax and status disputes became a source of resentment. Tribal rivalries among the Arab groups, notably between northern and southern factions, divided the army. Frontier wars became costlier as expansion slowed, and a major Berber revolt broke out in North Africa in the early 740s. Religious movements, including Kharijites and Shia supporters, challenged the legitimacy of Umayyad rule, and many pious Muslims criticised the court as worldly.
The fall in 750
The Umayyads were overthrown by a revolution that began in Khurasan, in the far east of the empire, where discontent was greatest. The movement, organised in the name of the family of the Prophet and led on the ground by Abu Muslim, raised black banners from 747. The last Umayyad caliph, Marwan II, was defeated by the revolutionaries at the battle of the Greater Zab in January or February 750, and he was pursued to Egypt and killed. The new Abbasid dynasty then hunted down many members of the Umayyad family.
One young prince, Abd al-Rahman, escaped and eventually reached al-Andalus, where he established an Umayyad emirate at Cordoba in 756. That branch survived in Iberia for much longer than the Damascus caliphate did, and the Abbasids moved the centre of the Islamic world to Iraq. The Umayyad age thus left both a model of imperial rule, in which Persian imperial culture and Roman-Byzantine practice were adapted to Arab rule, and an enduring political legacy in Spain.