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Lesser Known Byzantine Empire Facts

Khalid Elhassan September 11, 2020 35 min

Byzantine Empire - Constantinople — Procession of Emperor Manuel I Komenos in Constantinople. Imgur

19. The Byzantine Empire’s Disastrous Battle

Medieval illustration of the Battle of Yarmouk. Wikimedia

In 634, Arab tribal armies fired up by Islamic zeal erupted from the sparsely populated Arabian Peninsula to simultaneously attack the day’s two superpowers, the Sassanid Persian Empire to the east, and the Byzantine Empire to the west and north. Within two years, the outnumbered Arabs had won a series of brilliant victories that permanently reshaped the Middle East.

The Sassanid Empire fell, while the Byzantine Empire lost its possessions in Syria, Egypt, and North Africa, and got pushed back to today’s Turkey. Of the Arab victories over the Byzantine forces between 634 – 636, the most decisive occurred in August, 636. It was fought along the Yarmouk River, southeast of the Golan Heights, near the intersection of the borders of today’s Syria, Jordan, and Israel.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.