Using the nearby peninsula of Cyzicus as a base to spend the winter, he returned every spring for five years to launch attacks on the city’s fortifications. Having secured bases along the coast of Asia Minor, he set about installing a blockade around the Great City. In AD674, he mounted a concerted assault on the city of Constantinople. From there, the Muslim conquests continued with remarkable success, swallowing Transoxiana, Sindh, the Maghreb, and in time the Iberian Peninsula, thus making the Ummayyad Caliphate one of the largest empires in history.īut amid that expansion, Mua’wiya’s boldest move was the attempt to decapitate the beleaguered Roman/Byzantine Empire once and for all. Mua’wiya was determined to establish dynastic, hereditary rule within this one clan, seating the capital of their burgeoning empire in the ancient city of Damascus. Perhaps the most powerful of these was Mua’wiya, who had emerged victorious from the First Muslim Civil War in AD661. Meanwhile, Islam’s fervid forces, under the impassioned leadership of warrior-prophets like Umar, had fallen under the control of a single dynasty: the Ummayyads, the first to style themselves Caliphs, which means successors. Everywhere, the Byzantines were on the back foot, ceding Syria and the islands of Rhodes and Crete, and pushed back from their frontiers deep into the Anatolian plateau. The dying Persian Empire fell easily into their hands. By then, the armies of Islam had assumed the glamour of an unstoppable force.

He died in despair, a broken and disappointed man. Image: Ergovius, Wikicommonsīy the time of Heraclius’ death, the restored provinces of the Levant and Egypt had once more fallen into enemy hands. Although that was a tactical victory for the Byzantines, the inexorable rise of Islam had begun. Instead, the first action fought between Muslim and Roman (or Byzantine) forces was the Battle of Mu’tah in September AD629. Animated by the new spiritual force of Islam, this growing army of Muslim warriors would ensure that Heraclius never got his well-earned rest. However, unknown to Heraclius, even as he acknowledged the acclaim of the crowds in the streets of Jerusalem, an obscure prophet named Muhammad had successfully united the many disparate Arab tribes dwelling on the peripheries of the Empire and throughout the Arabian Peninsula. The annexed provinces of Egypt, Palestine and Syria were restored to the Eastern Roman Empire, and the Emperor and his realm could look forward to a period of much needed respite from near constant war. But through a brutal and brilliant campaign, Heraclius had achieved what no other Roman Emperor could: a final and resounding victory over the Persians from which there was no coming back. The relic had been taken from Jerusalem by Khosrow II in AD614 and carried off to distant Ctesiphon, a sign of Persian dominance over wilting Roman power. The high point of the triumphal procession was the restoration of the “True Cross” to its rightful place. Yet only 80 years before that, in AD629, the late Roman Emperor Heraclius had staged a grandiose ceremony in the city of Jerusalem to mark the Empire’s final and emphatic victory over its long-standing rival, the Persian Empire. 400 years before the First Crusade, Christianity was on its knees before an ascendant Muslim Caliphate.

The last bastion