Sea of Faith

by Stephen O'Shea

  Outnumbered and perhaps a little overawed, the Muslims beat a tactical retreat. They withdrew from the cities so recently captured and regrouped near the southern Syrian centers of Bosra and Dara. In the latter, interestingly, one of the Arab Jewish clans of Madina had settled after being chased from their homes by the Prophet some ten years earlier. In the sources, there is no mention of hard feelings between these Jews, the Banu Nadhir, and their former persecutors—this clan of armorers and blacksmiths may even have helped equip the Muslim army, so disgusted were they by the intolerant bloodlust of Heraclius. Just as likely, however, the Banu Nadhir Jews of Dara had no choice in the matter—fifteen thousand Muslim warriors, at the very least, were squatting their new homeland by the Yarmuk. They were soon to be joined, in the summer of 636, by a huge Byzantine force.

  Maddeningly, the horizon of history as it bears on this world-altering event is clouded with uncertainty. Sources for the battle range from blame-dodging Christian chronicles to triumphalist Muslim traditions, and the resulting thicket of self-serving tale-telling has left Yarmuk in a narrative limbo. Until recently western scholarship routinely discounted many of the Muslim accounts; credence was given instead to claims that a sudden sandstorm blinded the Byzantines—in the stony terrain of the Golan, no less—and to the customary Greek accusation of Armenian perfidy. One of the commanders at Yarmuk, a hitherto loyal Armenian warrior called Vahan, was supposed to have been proclaimed basileus by his mutinous followers on the eve of battle, thereby sowing confusion in the Byzantine ranks. While not unprecedented for the time (both Phocas and Heraclius had started as usurpers, after all), the tale of revolt seems too tidy a manner of explaining away the Byzantine defeat. What can be asserted with certainty is that Byzantine Syria and Palestine in the fourth decade of the seventh century were divided, weakened, captious provinces—and that the advancing Arabians had overcome tribal animosities to form a disciplined fighting force.

  The Byzantines had assembled in southern Syria by July 636. Their main fortified camp was established by a wadi in the western Golan, near Yaqusah—what is now the no less armed-to-the-teeth Kibbutz Meizar. Though hardly the quarter-million-man force described in one Arab chronicle, the Christian soldiery may have outnumbered the Muslim two, perhaps three, to one. Heraclius, from his headquarters in far-off Antioch, instructed his generals to set about Byzantine business as usual: they were to attempt to buy off, suborn, or corrupt their counterparts on the opposing side. As a stratagem it was a shabby but humane way of achieving victory without bloodshed. Indeed, one of the Byzantine leaders at Yarmuk, Niketas, was the epitome of an enemy-turned-collaborator: his father had been Shahrbaraz, the formidable Persian general who had laid waste to Jerusalem two decades earlier.

  The Muslims did not bite. Bribes were rejected, blandishments ignored. If anything, some Ghassanid and other Christian Arab auxiliaries of the Byzantines may have found the reasoning behind the refusals compelling. Although Khalid had been deprived of overall command—on the order of Umar, the successor as caliph to the recently deceased Abu Bekr—his prestige remained undiminished. His aura of invincibility, coupled with rumors of a new brotherhood of faith animating the invaders, could not have failed to intrigue. Whatever the dynamic of desertion and side-switching, as the summer of 636 progressed the incorruptible Arabians clearly did not melt away into the desert as expected; instead they gained in strength. And the Byzantines, even if this corner of Syria had long been theirs, began feeling like an army in hostile territory. Their supply line to Damascus became unreliable; the Christian Arab governor of that city complained long and loud about pouring provisions down the maw of a vast imperial host. He is even thought to have organized a night raid on a Byzantine camp outside Damascus, an incident said to have shaken morale. As July turned to August, the Byzantine generals realized that time, perhaps even God, was not on their side.

  In mid-August 636 Vahan is said to have made one last overture to Khalid: if the Muslims decamped and quit the province, a king's ransom would be theirs. The Sword of God demurred. Just after daybreak the next morning—in all likelihood August 15—the signals were given. Various champions from the two sides approached each other over the boulder fields and fought duels to the death as their comrades slipped on surcoats of mail and hardened leather. As custom demanded, the light Muslim archers took a running leap and mounted their steeds. The Byzantine infantryman strapped on his simple conical helmet, with a long strip of metal to protect the nose. Round shields were raised; javelins and spears bristled. At last the battle standards were hoisted, the cross of Byzantium on one, the colors of Arabia on the other. The armies that had skirmished with each other all summer readied themselves for the carnage to come. By noon battle was joined. The epochal engagement at Yarmuk would last six days.

  As far as can be determined, the battle front stretched about fifteen kilometers from Nawa south to the Yarmuk River. The Byzantines held the west; the Muslims, cognizant of the local terrain, chose to make their stand in the east, leaving the enemy to take the fight to them. The Byzantine camp at Yaqusah was more than twenty kilometers in the rear, established there because of its superb natural defenses and its position athwart the route that led to northern Palestine. It was the back door to the Promised Land. This eminently sensible strategic setup had one flaw: between the camp and the field of battle—a site of Khalid's choosing—lay the Wadi Ruqqad, which in its southern reaches carves a topographical gash in the plateau rivaling that of the Yarmuk's canyon. To reach the safety of their camp then, in the unlikely event of a retreat, the Byzantines would either have to take a circuitous detour to the north, where the Ruqqad was easily forded, or cross a Roman bridge spanning the wadi at a place called Ayn Dhakar. The bridge at Ayn Dhakar stood a few kilometers north of the Ruqqad's dramatic confluence with the Yarmuk and provided the most direct route back to the camp at Yaqusah. It was a sturdy and reliable old structure but a potential bottleneck if things went awry.

  Not that the Byzantines anticipated a military reversal. They had a considerable numerical superiority and, even with ominous dissensions between rival commanders, a long and glorious history of victory in the field. These Greeks were Romans {Rumi or Rum to their enemies), the rightful proprietors of the mare nostrum. The Arabians, so they still thought, were a rabble.

  The Armenian Vahan seems to have coordinated the initial massive attack from his position at the midpoint of the front, near the present-day village of Tsil. Hardwood shields locked and aloft, spears bristling, a cloud of arrows preceding it, the Byzantine infantry would have marched forward in the same hedgehog formation that its Roman forebear had used to subdue a world. The Arabs, nimble in the saddle and lightly armed, fell back before the onslaught, their Yemeni bowmen loosing volleys of armor-piercing bolts as the Muslim lines re-formed. Throughout this first day of battle, scores of engagements raged across the plateau, with many of the dozen or so commanders on both sides joining in the vicious hand-to-hand fighting. By nightfall a sanguinary stalemate obtained, with no ground gained or lost.

  The Byzantines attacked the next morning while the Muslims were at prayer—that much they knew about this unfamiliar enemy. The encampments of Khalid and the other generals, especially in the northern section of the battlefield, near Nawa, seem at one point to have been overrun. In some Arab chronicles, the women in the camps made their important appearance at this moment, a peculiarity of the battle that would amplify in the ensuing days. As the Byzantines, in a calculated encircling strategy, drove back first the Muslim left, then the right, time and again the wives and daughters of the retreating warriors came out to menace their fleeing menfolk with sharpened tentpoles, cursing them for giving ground. The redoubtable and by now inevitable Hind is celebrated in these traditions for stemming a rout in the southern section of the battlefield, near the cliffs of the Yarmuk, by leading her sisters in a suggestive song containing the oldest threat of all:

  We are the daughters of the night;

  We move am
ong the cushions

  With a gentle feline grace

  And our bracelets on our elbows.

  If you advance we shall embrace you;

  And if you retreat we shall forsake you

  With a loveless separation.

  Her husband, the seventy-three-year-old Abu Sufyan, promptly turned around and counterattacked, only to lose an eye to a Byzantine arrow. Another story has a retreating Muslim leader in the northern sector making the same impulsive return to the fray, exhorting his men, "It is easier to face the Rumi than our wives!"

  Whatever the truth of these tales, every able-bodied person on the Muslim side must have pitched in to withstand the assaults of the Byzantine foot and horse. They had to hold their ground, having nowhere to retreat but the desert. In all probability Khalid's strategy, risky in the extreme, called for a Muslim attack only when the Byzantines showed signs of exhaustion or disorganization, neither of which the outnumbered Arabians had the luxury of allowing themselves. Despite the inexactness of the source material, consensus holds that Khalid at last saw his chance on the fourth or fifth day of the bloody stalemate.

  In the Strategikon, a contemporaneous Byzantine military manual, mention is made of a combined cavalry and infantry maneuver to be used to create surprise and deliver a sudden hammer blow to the enemy. Calling for a complex ballet of foot soldiers thinning ranks to allow columns of galloping horsemen passage to and from a point of impact, the maneuver required the sophistication of a long martial tradition even to be considered as a tactic in the heat of battle. The foremost historian of Yarmuk thinks that—in place of the unlikely sandstorm theory—the Byzantines tried this maneuver and botched it. Somehow the cavalry became separated from the infantry, leaving the latter bereft of protection. Khalid had been holding his horsemen in reserve, behind the Muslim lines, waiting for just such a moment. Cymbals crashing and war cries sounding, he raced into the gap. The surprised Byzantine horse, most of them Ghassanids, fled northward, to Tal al Jabila and the lava fields beyond. The Armenian infantrymen, their left flank completely exposed, bore the full brunt of the charge, falling back as wave after wave of sword- and spear-bearing cavalry barreled into them. In these days before gunpowder, it was the mismatch dreamed of by every rider of camel or horse. The left and part of the center of the Byzantine lines were comprehensively massacred.

  But that would not necessarily have spelled doom for the Byzantine Middle East had the day not held a second surprise. According to one account, somewhere in the sector, hiding behind a hillock or in a hollow, a small mounted detachment awaited its orders. Its commander may have been Zarrar Ibn al Azwar, the killer of pale faces at Ajnadayn. When word finally came, the horsemen left their place of concealment and rode westward like the wind. They galloped through the shouts and confusion and broke out into the clear beyond enemy lines. Their destination was the bridge at Ayn Dhakar.

  It is, of course, impossible to locate with any precision where the cavalry commando unit, if indeed there was a contingent of handpicked men, had been hiding: perhaps behind a long-vanished stand of trees; or behind Dar Ayyub, the Hill of Job; or near the more imposing Tal al Jumu'a, the Hill of the Gathering (where a Syrian army observation post now keeps the western horizon forever in its sights). The road, after making a right-angle turn in front of Job's shrine, heads straight westward through empty fields, where the mounted warriors would have certainly begun their ride, toward the distant village of Tsil. Today olive groves eventually flash past on this road, peopled by veiled women beating the tree branches so that the fruit drops into sacks spread open on the rock-hard ground. The men, most of them sporting a red or black kaffiyeh, tie the bags and hoist them up onto the backs of uncomplaining donkeys. Aside from the occasional army jeep trundling into view, the scene would be familiar to the combatants at Yarmuk.

  Tsil itself breaks the spell. Half-finished concrete structures hem in a series of starburst road junctions; schoolgirls scramble out of the way of mechanized contraptions that look and sound like great malevolent insects. A helpful shopkeeper first points the way to Wadi Allan before realizing that the Wadi Ruqqad and Ayn Dhakar are being sought. A sly smile greets this information, and a you-can't-get-there-from-here shake of the head follows. And he seems to be right. On each attempt to reach the Muslim cavalry's goal of fifteen hundred years ago, a roadblock materializes, usually manned by a baby-faced Syrian conscript, waving away the anachronistically curious no matter how many official papers are produced. The critical bridge of Ayn Dhakar lies only a few more kilometers to the west, yet the complications of the present conspire to thwart a glimpse of the past. At last an impossibly ancient farmer, his great- or great-great-grandson smiling beside him from atop his perch on an ass, indicates a dirt track leading down a grassy ridge.

  The barely passable route descends an unexpectedly steep slope until it meets a paved road to which access had been denied earlier in the afternoon. This T-junction is invisible from the crest of the ridge, where the army checkpoint stands guard. Farther down the slope a plantation of tall trees offers precious shade and further concealment from the conscripts. Less than a half-kilometer on, the road levels off to cross a broad culvert—and there it is, the Roman bridge, unused but unmistakable, standing off to the left. Its friable red-brick rational arches, sturdy stone piers, and humped-back cobbled roadbed—all betray the enduring work of the engineers of the mare nostrum. It, despite the absence of any signpost, will serve as the monument to the Battle of Yarmuk.

  The bridge of Ayn Dhakar still spans Wadi Ruqqad, which is now a scree of jagged granite blocks and scrubby bushes. South of this point the river bottom descends deeper and deeper into the plateau until reaching the Yarmuk; north, the wadi's waters now lap up against an earthen berm; east, the old Roman road leads from Tsil and the battlefield; west are the heights of the Golan; and suddenly three white jeeps emblazoned with the UN logo approach at great speed. They are obviously not interested in archaeology—far too much water, apparently, has passed under this bridge.

  The Muslim raiders were led directly to the spot by a traitor to Byzantium. Surprise and demoralization did the rest. In no time they had commandeered the vital structure and put themselves in control of the best escape route for the beleaguered Christian troops wishing to regain their camp. The bridge was no longer a bottleneck; it was securely stoppered.

  The Roman bridge spanning the Wadi Ruqqad at Ayn Dhakar, a site of crucial importance in the Battle of Yarmuk.

  To worsen the Byzantine prospects, Khalid had moved infantry behind his outflanking cavalry, so that the northern part of the battle front, beyond Ayn Dhakar, became inaccessible to the imperial forces. The circuitous line of retreat to where the wadi could be forded was now blocked by thousands of Muslim warriors—and presumably their wives. The great mass of the Byzantine army was thus stranded on the southwestern reaches of the plateau, between Wadi Allan and Wadi Ruqqad. Getting back to camp at Yaqusah would entail scrambling down and up the gorges, perhaps even trying one's luck in scaling the steep slopes of the Yarmuk.

  Disaster turned to debacle. Even the safe haven of camp was gone: the raiders of Ayn Dhakar had ridden under cover of night to Yaqusah and destroyed the Byzantine position in the rear. That they could have done this so thoroughly must be put down to a collapsing will to fight on one side and their own insane bravery on the other. The news filtered back to the front lines. By the final day of the battle, the armies of the Byzantines were nothing more than mobs of terrified men, tripping through the dawn light, hoping to find a way out. Some just sat down where they were and awaited their fate. Some fell to their deaths in the mad jostle to escape. Others made desperate last stands. The Muslims pressed them from the north and the east, ever closer to the chasm of the Yarmuk. Prisoners were not taken; he who was found was slain. Thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, perished.

  Yet the Byzantine nightmare was not over. The men who had escaped the bloody denouement, either by deserting early or by fighting their
way out as a group, were making their way north toward home, certain that the victorious Muslims would tarry on the killing fields to divide up the spoils of war. This too was a fatal miscalculation, another failure to appreciate just how disciplined a force they faced. The Muslims wheeled away from the battlefield to give chase, making much of Syria and what is now Lebanon into the scene of a wide-open manhunt. Vahan and his remaining troops were overtaken and slain well south of Damascus; retreating soldiers were killed in the Bekaa Valley; Khalid stormed up to Horns, several hundred kilometers north of Yarmuk, where Niketas pleaded with him to accept his sudden conversion to the cause of Islam. The Muslims pressed the hunt even farther north, going into the Orontes Valley, the cradle of Syrian civilization, and then on to the approaches of Anatolia beyond Aleppo. The surrenders of towns and cities came as fast and furious as the victorious horsemen rode. No second battle over Byzantine Syria would be fought. Yarmuk had decided that.

  In the countryside northwest of Aleppo, glimpses can still be had of the world that was to vanish. A series of limestone ridges rises on the horizon once the ancient city has been left behind, the folds in the earth creating hidden valleys and defiles, as if the forces of geology are playing hide-and-seek with the visitor. The human landscape is even more deceptive, the few villages punctuating the windswept hills seeming like sentinels stationed in a wilderness. Yet here and there, and soon everywhere, odd combinations of hewn, honey-colored blocks can be detected against the backdrop of gray rock and purple soil. The weather-beaten stones eventually coalesce as tympanum, lintel, colonnade, atrium—the remains of church, villa, warehouse, and market. More than seven hundred deserted Byzantine villages and towns are here, a grand gallery of ruins, testament to the time when these barren downs were blanketed by olive groves and pomegranate orchards, crisscrossed by Roman roads alive with merchant and scribe, matron and actress, monk and pilgrim.