History thread

Cad said:

Ok so one question I have, so the muslims were stonewalled at Constantinople due to geography. Why didn't they go up through Georgia/Armenia/Ukraine -> Europe? Who was stopping them there? I've never really seen any discussion of that area/front in the 500AD-1000AD time frame.

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Different Khanates, depending on the point in history. At the start it was the Turkic Khanate (Cousins to the Mongols). Pretty nasty bunch, were giving everyone shit, and they didn't have anything anyone else wanted. Given the size of their lands and migratory nature, it meant that you probably couldn't control them all (And like Afghanistan, there was nothing there to make up for the losses even if you could.) So the only thing you could do is take an area so you can travel though, but these people were already attacking their neighbors quite a bit with raids, so a supply line through their territory was probably seen as a very costly.

After a while too, it became less about territory and more about ideology. Muhammad wrote it into his manual that Rome was evil and you went to heaven for killing Rome. While I'm sure he did that because his primary enemy was Rome at the time, after his death that became rather hardwired. So mustering up resources to fight Romans was probably easier than going off and expanding elsewhere.

A couple things to keep in mind about that period.

Dont underestimate the weakness of the Byzantines during the 600s. Justinian was a horrific ruler between the Nika Riots and the draining the treasury on such things as the Hagia Sophia. The empire, not fully recovered from the Hunnic invasions, receded even more, creating a power vacuum that allowed the new Arab power to fill.

Another thing to consider is that Arab armies had a really, really good leader in Umar I. As far as underrated historical figures, this guy is way up there with Caesar or Napoleon.

After the Byzantines got their asses throughly kicked at Yarmouk, they retreated behind their walls and ceded the ground to the Arabs.

Heraclius and the Early Islamic Conquests: An Analysis of Byzantine Military Failure at the Battle of Yarmuk in AD 636 |

Cad said:

Ok so one question I have, so the muslims were stonewalled at Constantinople due to geography. Why didn't they go up through Georgia/Armenia/Ukraine -> Europe? Who was stopping them there? I've never really seen any discussion of that area/front in the 500AD-1000AD time frame.

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The Armenian region and the southern end of the Caucasus mountains had been marches or buffer states for a literal half millennium. Trajan went and ran apeshit over the Mesopotamian region (arguably the apex of the Roman Empire) in the start of the 2nd century and was followed by Hadrian and then others taking defensive approaches and perpetuating the region into buffers, clients, marches, etc. There were actually huge stretches of literal no man's land between Romans and Persians. The no man's land aspect (but not the satellites) even re-emerged bigger than ever once the Islamic vs Christian balance settled down in later centuries.

Going north through the Caucasus was a fool's errand. That region above Georgia (modern Chechnya etc) is geographically terrible. There were Roman settlements at the base of the Crimean Peninsula and at estuaries but they didn't bother to really expand that way either; it wasn't some unique Islamic shortcoming. In fact, Islamic expansion would be even more hindered because Constantinople's location meant the Black sea was a Roman lake, so even if they did manage to get up to Rostov and beyond what's the point? The best analogy I can give, which isn't THAT close, is how the Islamic spread skipped the northwest part of Iberia because it was a bunch of hills and scattered minor villages and not worth the effort it would take to subjugate for no real reward.

Islam was spreading east of the Caspian though. One of my favorite strange instances in history is that the Abbasid Caliphate and the Tang Dynasty ended up fighting in the middle of Asia: Battle of Talas - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Armies tend to move east <---> west and not north <---> south for obvious reasons.

Not until around 1200

Lleauaric said:

Not until around 1200

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THE Mongols weren't until 1200 but there were Mongolians, or more accurately Turkic and central Asian groups, obviously well before then. That entire stretch of the silk road overland is lined with settlement, as are all the river valleys on the many large Russian rivers. You read historical accounts and you have these tribes coming in and crashing down on places, like completely displacing ancient Greece, constantly bombarding the Roman Empire, battering China, etc. They are coming from somewhere - that somewhere is very often the southern portion of these Asian river valleys - modern Russia and the Stans.

Classical civilizations were trading with the base of the Rostov, Greeks founded a couple cities (eg Tanais) in the 6th century BC. There were people there, and enough of them to have a trade economy, and they were most likely dwarfed by the populations along the Volga - one of the most geographically prime rivers in the world.

Yeah, I mean I think it was obviously the trade routes that attracted them. Thats where the money is. There is no incentive to invade or move away from those area. I think those events depend on so many factors. Would Genghis ever have conquered the world if the Plateau didn't have perfect weather at just the right time?

chaos said:

Again, my only source is this podcast, so I could be wrong.

But he mentions that the Khanates were fierce as fuck, your typical steppe warrior tribes, in addition to them not having much of value. But he also talks about internal divisions within the Caliphate around the time following the siege of 717. Not civil war necessarily, but division. Muslama got annihilated between the siege and the travel home, and by the time he got home there was internal division/Caliphate politics to work out, then there were Eastern threats (probably more steppe tribes, can't remember) that pulled the Caliphate focus away from conquering Rome. At the point I'm at in the story, roughly 800, the Arabs are raiding Roman settlements, but the Romans have basically rolled up into fortified cities/areas making the spoils of raids less fruitful. And the Caliphate as a whole seems to be declining.

he also mentions that Muslama was not seen as a failure or dishonored, as he might have been if he were Roman. He went on to govern Iraq, which is a huge post in the Caliphate.

For reasons that are not clear, be it technology or lack of willpower or whatever, the Arabs do not seem to really engage in siege warfare.

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Just unexamined, ancient, cultural assumptions maybe?

When you're a bedouin tribe moving from water to water, is there ever any point in a siege? Whoever has the water wins. Thinking otherwise isn't a way to fight, it's just suicide. It's also a particularly slow and wasteful (if effective) method of warfare, so there may be some philosophical reservations. Yeah... we could sit out here for six months and shoot arrows at them or throw rocks at them, and kill some stragglers. Oooooor... we could not do that.

My latest history was a biography of Muhammad. But that marks about my 10th book on Arabia and Islam alone this year. I think I'm done with Arabia for now. I've done America, Western Europe, Rome, and have dabbled in Ancient Greece and Communist China, and now I guess I've done Arabia. Maybe it's time for me to do what chaos and apparently a bunch of you are doing, Byzantium and the Eastern empire. But having just come off Muhammad, maybe I'll keep with the Skulls for the Skull Throne theme and study the Golden Horde. Did they write?

chaos said:

Again, my only source is this podcast, so I could be wrong.

But he mentions that the Khanates were fierce as fuck, your typical steppe warrior tribes, in addition to them not having much of value. But he also talks about internal divisions within the Caliphate around the time following the siege of 717. Not civil war necessarily, but division. Muslama got annihilated between the siege and the travel home, and by the time he got home there was internal division/Caliphate politics to work out, then there were Eastern threats (probably more steppe tribes, can't remember) that pulled the Caliphate focus away from conquering Rome. At the point I'm at in the story, roughly 800, the Arabs are raiding Roman settlements, but the Romans have basically rolled up into fortified cities/areas making the spoils of raids less fruitful. And the Caliphate as a whole seems to be declining.

he also mentions that Muslama was not seen as a failure or dishonored, as he might have been if he were Roman. He went on to govern Iraq, which is a huge post in the Caliphate.

For reasons that are not clear, be it technology or lack of willpower or whatever, the Arabs do not seem to really engage in siege warfare.

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Yeah, the Stepped people were in general just nasty, vicious fuckers. As others pointed out, most urban based civilizations had a lot of difficulty dealing with them because most tactics/logistics were developed around civilizations who had, well, urban centers. So taking territory against nomads for them was just extremely difficult. And whenever these nomadic groups swept out of plains, as Yerb said, they gave urban civilizations a lot of grief. Obviously the most famous being the Huns or the Mongols (The huns were Tukric like the group currently ruling in this time period, the mongols were distinct but they both lived in the same latitude band, and developed nomadic life styles because of the environment)

Is this thread only for Middle -East history?

Cad said:

I know we abstractly hear about how the Muslims were at the gates of Vienna after 1453. I had no idea about these battles and war though.

Here's what I've been reading this morning:

Siege of Vienna - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Austro-Turkish War (1663–64) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Great Turkish War - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

God damn it I had no idea Muslims had been this aggressive towards Europe even in the Rennaissance. Like we're learning about Michelangelo and Shakespeare and shit and the Muslim hordes were literally at the gates.

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Oh yes, the Ottomans were the worlds superpower at the time. They had colonies in Europe, and were aggressively looking for more territory, they even took over a million European slaves--literally ripped them right from the coast lines. There were numerous times throughout the Renaissance that the only reason the Ottomans didn't gain large footholds in Europe was due to the Holy League, and other alliances that overcame active wars between European states. It was constant, century after century. We're talking 300+ years of outright aggression. Followed by a century of a kind of cold war during the early colonial period (Age of sail) by the European powers. Centuries of this shit was visited on Europe by the Islamic world, and all of you ever hear about is the one counter attack period known as the Crusades.