636 Yarmouk & al-Qadisiyyah—Islam Triumphs ..............................

Lecture 8

A

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began to feel that something was terribly wrong. Throughout the
day, individual soldiers, most of them wounded, had come seeking aid for
their injuries from the battle taking place a few hundred yards away. But
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humiliated, the men turned and reengaged the Byzantines, pushing them
back and reestablishing their lines.

Competing Empires
x Pressure from nomadic Germanic tribes, combined with a number
of other factors, resulted in the political collapse of the western
Roman Empire and its fragmentation into a host of barbarian
kingdoms, many of which still continued to emulate the culture and
model left by Rome.

x Meanwhile, the eastern half of the Roman Empire—the Byzantine

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emperors and controlled territory from Constantinople across

all of modern Turkey and along the eastern coastline of the

Mediterranean, even including Egypt.

x Further east, the Sassanid Empire encompassed eastern Syria and

Mesopotamia and extended through the Caucasus into south central

Asia, reaching all the way to the borders of India. Culturally and

geographically, the Sassanians, a version of the old Persian Empire,

created a golden age for Persian culture, and the empire was

wealthy, vast, and powerful.