Chapter 2
THE GREAT CONQUESTS
In 622, at about the time that Muhammad was beginning to construct his
power base at Medina, the two great powers of the Mediterranean world
were in the final phases of a great war. This war, fought between the
ancient Persian Empire and the organized power of the Byzantine Empire,
had six more years to run. The two huge warring empires forgot about
the seemingly ephemeral events in the Arabian Peninsula. Neither of them
could have foreseen the mistake in this.
Of the two, the Persians had been familiar to the western powers since
the days of Xerxes and the Greek city-states in the fourth centuryB.C. The
great empire, now ruled by the Sassanid dynasty, had its power base in
what is now Iran and Iraq, but it stretched as far as India, and traded
beyond. The English-speaking world knows little of the Persian Empire,
but it was probably the mightiest imperial construct of all time. Made rich
by its position astride Oriental trade routes, and strong by the number and
valor of its warriors, the fire-worshipping Zoroastrian Persians were both
vigorous and competent. They had been troubled by Greeks, and then by
Alexander, and even by the Romans, but at the end of the day the Persian
Empire stood as it had always—the greatest power in the Middle East. Or
so it was in 622.
The Byzantine, or Eastern Roman Empire, had grown up around the
city of Constantinople in the fourth centuryA.D. Although this Eastern
Empire considered itself Roman in all except geography, it had been suf-
ficiently distant and powerful to survive the destruction of the old Western