Before and After Muhammad The First Millennium Refocused

SPACE: AN EASTWARD SHIFT | 123

mia, but could not force the Zagros passes. Because, by contrast, the Moun-
tain Arena’s western side was open to the Mediterranean Sea, Iran enjoyed an
advantage. It was possible for a strong Iranian empire—the Achaemenids or
the Sasanians, but the Arsacids far less effectively—to project itself as far as
the Mediterranean coast. The Sasanians managed this in the 250s, the 540s,
and again in the 610s and 620s. Even the Safavids, who only rarely controlled
parts of Mesopotamia, could still seriously distract the high- noon sixteenth-
century Ottoman Empire if it was forced to fight on two fronts, against the
Habsburgs as well, or the Russians.^116
We may deduce as a rule of thumb, then, that strategic advantage within
the Eurasian Hinge zone could be seized more easily from the East than the
West. Alexander’s conquests were too exceptional to disprove this.

Truth- loving Persians do not dwell upon

The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.^117

And by the same token, the Iranian Empire could not be ruled from Vergina.
The Macedonian conquest had achieved little more than partial replacement
of the Achaemenid elite by a Macedonian one, within very much the same
imperial frontiers and structures.^118 The only two empires that ever gained
simultaneous control of the three wings of our triptych and therefore the
whole Eurasian Hinge zone—Iranian plateau, Mountain Arena, and Eastern
Mediterranean—were the Achaemenids and then, a millennium after their
demise, the early Caliphate. Achaemenid expansion peaked c. 559 to 486
under Cyrus, Cambyses, and Darius I,^119 and then again under Alexander, its
natural continuator.^120 After the Battle of Salamis in 480, Iran no longer en-
joyed natural dominance of the Eastern Mediterranean, but it did maintain
a presence.^121 The Sasanians will have reestablished this only fleetingly, given
the brevity of their three periods of conquest in the Roman East.^122 As for the
Caliphate, the later Umayyads came to control the inland sea’s eastern, south-
ern, and western shores. The Abbasids lost the West but still enjoyed a sub-
stantial presence in the Mediterranean basin seconded by other Muslim

116 W. E. D. Allen, Problems of Turkish power in the sixteenth century (London 1963) 35, 38;
Davutoǧlu, Στρατηγικό βάθος [4:69] 296.
117 Robert Graves, “The Persian version.”
118 P. Briant, Histoire de l’Empire Perse de Cyrus à Alexandre (Paris 1996) 895–96, 1077.
119 Plato [4:17], Menexenus 239d–240a.
120 Iranian tradition saw Alexander as either a demon who brought catastrophe, or a sage and
hero: F. M. Kotwal and P. G. Kreyenbroek, “Alexander the Great ii,” EIr, http://www.iranicaonline.org ; W. L.
Hanaway, “Eskandar-Nāma,” EIr 8.609–12.
121 Briant, Empire Perse [4:118] 843–52; less sanguine, T. Kelly, “The Assyrians, the Persians, and
the sea,” Mediterranean historical review 7 (1992) 28.
122 C. Foss, History and archaeolog y of Byzantine Asia Minor (Aldershot 1990) I.724–25, on at-
tacks on Cyprus and Rhodes in the late 610s and early 620s.