Empire: World History - 106. The Rise of Islam

Episode Date: December 14, 2023

With the Sassanian Empire defeated and the Byzantine Empire exhausted, there is a power vacuum in the centre of the world. Both of these superpowers have drained their resources fighting each other over the past 30 years, consuming many of the great cities of antiquity. To the south, on the Arabian peninsula, a new power was rising that would come to take advantage of their weakness. A power that would change the course of history. Islam. Listen as William and Anita discuss the Rise of Islam. For bonus episodes, ad-free listening, reading lists, book discounts, a weekly newsletter, and a chat community. Sign up at https://empirepod.supportingcast.fm/ Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Jack Davenport + Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcasts, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mparpoduk.com. Welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arland. Come on, say it. Hello from me, William Drupal, with my mouth full. Welcome, dear friends. Look, we are here to pick up the... baton from the last episode where we were talking about the great clash of civilizations,

the superpowers of antiquity who go up against each other. And we're talking about Byzantium and Persia. And we're talking about this war that involves some things which are so very important, even to this day, sort of icons of religion. So I mean, we mentioned William that in this fight between the Byzantans. Heraclius burns some of the temples of the Zoroastrians, the Persians, which contain the holy fires. There are actual holy fires which are in here, really very important to the Zoroastrian faith. The eternal flames are destroyed in these. But also, you know, this story that we told last time, also involved as a starring role, the true cross, the one true cross, the cross that crucified Jesus. The cross makes it back to Persia as a gift to Shereen,

from her loving husband, who is the King of Kings, and then is taken back to Jerusalem by Heraclius as a muscle flex that, you know, Byzantine really truly is the new Rome, the protectors of the Christian faith. But you left us at the end of the last episode, William, by saying that actually things worse is so exhausted in chaos, in flux. And you described it after 30 years of warfare that so much of this territory of both sides had been reduced to the kind of scenes that we see in Gaza today. Correct. And many of the great cities, Antioch, Damascus, Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Alexandria, O'Kiro

have been burnt to the ground. Constantinople has been besieged. And on the Persian side, Satisiphan itself has been attacked and partly destroyed. So the whole of this region, after 30 years of war, is exhaustive. and what this means for the future is that the neighbours on several sides are eyeing these previously unbreakable, invincible superpowers and watching to see how weak they are now. And the most important of these lies to the south and the Hajjahs. And when, William, you're talking about the Hejahs. I mean, you're talking about 7th century Arabia, which is, it's a landmass with a number of

unruly, independent tribes, many of them nomadic, some agricultural, a few living in merchant cities along caravan routes. Exactly. The caravan routes is the important thing, because one of the world's most prosperous trades routes at this point runs up the Red Sea. You've got to remember that at this period of history, it's often the maritime roads, which are the easiest and quickest way to travel anywhere. From the mouth of the Red Sea, from the Byzantine port of Berneke, you can travel to India in three months or less if you catch the monsoon at the right time. And along the Red Sea are a number of very, very prosperous, and along the Gulf, along the Persian Gulf, there are a number of very prosperous independent kingdoms.

As well as Sasanian Persia itself, which is one of the richest kingdoms on earth, you've got the different kingdoms of Ethiopia under the monarchs of Axum, who are trading with the increasingly prosperous kingdoms of South and West India. You have rich kings in Gujarat, the area in Sindh, around Karachi, and particularly on the Tamil coast, you've got a whole bunch of traders. And in the new excavations at Beronique on the Red Sea coast, they found whole swathes of early remains of Tamil traders, leaving graffiti in Tamil on the Red Sea coast.

You have remains of the rice and the coriander and the d'Ot and the. dial that they've been eating and bringing with them from India. I remember the first time you told me this. We were on a walk by a river in London and you said, guess what? There's actual tangible evidence of this trade route. And recently they found images of early Hindu deities, the sort of ancestor of the Krishna cult, have been found along with the bilingual Sanskrit and Greek inscription and the first image of the Buddha found in Egypt. Now that same trade route also feeds the frankincense routes leading to the Nabatian kingdoms and the different caravan cities of Arabia. So Medina, Mecca, a rich city, full of merchants trading.

So are we talking about a more influential trade route than the silk routes even? Dare we say that? This is a controversial matter. There are advocates such as our good friend Peter Frankenstein who... He will hit you over the head of the frying pan. Who will hit over the frying pan, if I say it's free silk rate is a myth. But I think it is a bit of a myth at this period because there's very little trade traveling between Rome and Persia. They're at war with each other.

And it's much quicker. It's like three times as quick to travel by boat. And so, yes, the different ports on the Persian Gulf and the different ports along the Red Sea, Socotra is the big refueling island where all the boats stop. And this world, which is incredibly prosperous, has not been affected by the wars or many of the ports have not. And so you're suddenly finding that the Hajas, the Arabian Peninsula, which was much poorer and much weaker and much more divided than either of the superpowers, Rome or Persia, suddenly they are fine. You know, they're trading. Nothing's happened to them. Nothing's happened to them while, you know, there's smoking ruins where Satisophon used to be.

So there's a change in the balance, a subtle change in the balance of power. But also, I mean, when we talk about Arabia, this is pre-Islamic Arabia as well. So, you know, we're talking about a time when each village in the Hajas might have had its own idol. You have the Kabah in Mecca, but it is not the Kabar as we know it now today, right? Sure. And because of the iconoclasm in the period which follows, none of these idols survive. We have very little idea of what they look like. But there are, we know, substantial Christian communities in Arabia. There are substantial Zoroastrian communities.

And perhaps most important of all, there are substantial Jewish communities. who are very big again in the trade routes. A lot of the shipping between India and Alexandria is thought to be known by Alexandria and Jewish families, for example. And they're also in the Hajaz. So the world of 7th century Arabia is quite cosmopolitan and it's quite prosperous. And suddenly these guys find that they are intact while everyone around them is in ruins. Right. Okay. And enter center stage, Muhammad, the Prophet Muhammad, if you are Muslim, who is a successful tradesman. So this trade route is important

because he is a man who is in this slipstream and he's benefiting from this rich commerce that has gone on uninterrupted by whatever nonsense is going on between the Byzantines and the Persians. It's not affected him. The money is flowing. And he's married to a very rich widow, Khadija,

who is actually his boss? That's right, isn't it? She's the boss in this. And in the middle of this, while all these wars are kicking off, Muhammad hears a voice. And this is one of the great moments of religious revelation in world history, and it will change the course of global history in every continent. So according to his love tradition, in 610, Muhammad begins to receive a series of revelations from God, a voice that commands him to recite verses in the name of your lord. And he's obviously panicked and

confused by this, and he leaves the cave, but it saw a man feet astride on the horizon. And a voice, that boomed at him, O Muhammad, thou art the prophet of God, and I am Gibral. And this is the angel that Christians call Gabriel. So he begins to preach his new revelations. And in the conservative town that he lives, Mecca, this doesn't go down well because other people have different religious ideas. And very strongly how beliefs. But in Mecca, what's interesting is because it is part of this sort of trading diaspora, he has been exposed to all these different beliefs and different religions, people passing through. And while most of the traditional tribes in Arabia are polytheistic and believe in a variety of gods, there are enough Jewish and Christian communities and different rival Christian communities.

We talked in the last episode about the Church of the East, which some people call the Nestorians or the monophysites, which are people called the Jacobites, and their tension between them and the Orthodox Byzantine faith run out of Constantinople. In the same way, all these different religious groups are preaching their different method. messages. Muhammad is an intelligent, curious trader moving from town to town who's exposed to all these different currents. And he's about 40 years old. So this is a man who's, you know, sort of a has a maturity as well at this time when he receives his revelations. It's always said that a prophet is never appreciated in his own home. So he has to leave for Trib, which is the city that we now know as Medina in 622 to escape persecution. And this flight, which is known as the

Jira becomes one of the, you know, the great moment of Islamic history. Islamic history is dated from this date. And this is the message that changes everything. And he comes back to Mecca. He succeeds in taking over the city. He cleans the Kaaba of all the idols. And he unites the different tribes. And this means something now because the kind of massive superpower armies that were sitting to the north in Byzantium and in the Persian world are no longer there. And there are some papyri that have been discovered in recent years, William, which also link into this, the Hidra, the flight, this seminal moment in Islamic history, is the time when this preaching from Mohammed is giving birth to a new religion and a new

identity. That's exactly right. And what's interesting is that the conflict, this great war between the Byzantines and the Persians that we described in the last episode, has created discontent also in cities like Mecca and Medina that the Romans are not fulfilling their obligations. When one of them asks where the subsidies have gone, he gets to reply, the emperor can barely pay his soldiers their wages, much less you dogs. And when another envoy tells the tribesman that the future prospects of trade now look rather limited, he's killed and sewn up in a camel. Well, I mean, that suggests that there

There is discontent verging on, well, I mean, it's the ingredients of rebellion, isn't it? You have two superpowers who have been looking down their noses at people they feel are less than themselves and now have withdrawn the subsidies which they have relied on. That is a powder keg about to go off, isn't it? Absolutely right. And so by the time that Muhammad dies, which is thought to be 632 AD, 10 years after the Hidra, he has become the Lord of Arabia. He has united these warring tribes and his armies are crossing the frontiers and heading north. And there's some lovely passage in Stephen Rundsenman, my great hero, he says that the message of Mahbid was simple enough to be accepted by his Iranian contemporaries, but universal enough to suit the needs of the great

dominion that his successors were going to build. There was one God and one law by which to rule the Quran. And this avoids all the debates, which is splitting the Christian world. We had that with this description last time. Oh yes, the Nestorians don't agree with the Byzantans. Don't agree with it. Yeah, to Jacobites and all of that. What is the nature of Christ? What is the nature of his mother?

What is the how many angels dance on the head of a pin? And so on. And so you have now this army realizing the vulnerabilities of the two empires to their north, the empires which have kept them down, which have paid them subsidies. They're now too poor to pay the subsidies and they're too weak to defend themselves. But they're not a standing army as such. They are just tribes which are united that if a call goes out, they can fight. It's not like they're regimented and training and drilling because they're going to go and lay waste to what was Byzantium.

Well, it's very clear that whatever the message of Muhammad was, it united the tribes and gave them an extraordinary confidence and a kind of religious zeal, which drove them in spectacular fashion around the world in both directions over the decades to come. Okay, so tell us about the successes of Muhammad, particularly Abu Bakr I'm interested in. Tell us about him. So there's a whole range of conflicts within the early Islamic community, too, that we let's not deal with at this time, but between the early, what will become the Sunnis and the Shias. But Abu Bakr is, again, another extraordinary military leader. And he decides to invade first Sasanian Persian territory. and he moves into what's now Iraq, fights the Battle of the Chains, and captures the great cities of Hira and Najaf. And after that, after he dies of an illness, he's succeeded by this very ascetic but incredibly powerful figure of the Caliph Omar. Omar is a great general and incredibly pious Muslim. He'd been an advisor to Muhammad.

He wears threadbare robes, his diet, his salt, bread and water. and I love this detail. He would jump from the saddle and throw stones at any of his generals if he saw them wearing silks or brocades, like the Byzantines or the Persians. Oh, because they're too fancy. Yes, you're being too much of a dandy, so no fancy pants, right. No, he's a man in the desert. And so all these Byzantines in their purple and their gorgeous robes,

like you see, you know, Count Belasarius and his wife wearing in the mosaics at Ravenna. All that is out. It's now threadbare clothes, ascetic Puritanism. But what I'm really interested in Omar is that he is the sort of like Janus-headed, he's looking to take Sasanian land and Byzantium as well. That's what's extraordinary, I think, is just the confidence of these guys. You know, it's only been 20 years that they were effectively disorganized traders moving between relatively small caravan cities. And now they are taking on not one, but the two great superpowers of their day. The success continues.

So news reaches Cesaria on the coast of Palestine. the ruins which are still there are on the coast of Israel north of Gaza, that there's been an incursion into Palestine by the Arabs. So, Cesarere is the naval base where the galleys are. It's the link with Constantinople. And a force is sent down to meet them, led by a man named Sergius, who's a personal favourite of Heraclius and has fought with Heraclius in his campaigns against the Persians. Okay.

You mentioned Palestine. What was Palestine like in that era? So Palestine in this era is recovering from the successive waves of the Persian armies, the burning of the monasteries and the towns, then the recapture by Byzantian, but there's no money particularly around to help rebuild all these cities. So I think one can imagine broken walls, the remains of looted and burnt out monasteries. And it's through this sort of landscape that's barely had time to recover. It's less than a decade since the defeat of the Persians. So Sergius is going down to meet the Arabami. And of course, it's a calamitous defeat.

Can I just say, is he crap on a horse? Because he falls off his horse three times, Sergius, doesn't he? I mean, why is he on a horse? He falls off his horse three times, and is then allegedly sewn inside a freshly flayed camel hide. Which then seems to be a popular end to sewing inside cabals. Boyle in the bag, monks in the last episode. But this, I mean, trying to make sense of this, and forgive me, because maybe it's me being slow. But if he first sewed a great deal in South London.

If he's sewed into the height of a freshly, freshly flayed camel hide, is it so that he can be carried, almost like a pannier because he can't sit on his horse and he's falling off? No, I just suffocate him. You just sort of desperately want to kill him. It's just a slow, horrible death inside a camel. Right, okay. Thank you for clarifying that. Okay. So Sergius is no more.

So then are we talking about the sort of the dismantling now of Rome happening before our very eyes? Exactly. So there's only been the one garrison town, which is on the coast, Caesarea, and it's now everyone for themselves. So the defence of Jerusalem is taken up by my friend Sophronius. Do you remember me mentioning in the last episode about my Holy Mountain book and how I'd followed? Yes, I do. And I had it whose name you could not remember. I could remember.

I was teasing you. I remember Simon Mayer's favorite book, Hello, Simon. There we go. Anyway, so the last time we met him, Sophronius was the young pupil of John Moskis, who's been going around interviewing the hermits and stylites of the East. Now, 20 years later, he is the Patriarch of Jerusalem. He's the top dog in the Orthodox. He's done well.

He's done well, exactly. John Moskis has retired to a monastery in Constance. Santa Nopal, and I think by now he's dead, while Sophronius is now the patriarch. And it's left to Sophronius, a monk, this former backpacker who'd been around all the different monasteries and traveled through Syria, through Iraq, taking down the stories of all these hermits, not knowing that this world was on the verge of dissolution, not realizing that he was recording the last days of a Christian Middle East. And it's up to him in 638 to defend the city of Jerusalem. But there's no hope of relief, because the Imperial Army has already been ambushed.

Sergis, as you say, is fallen off his horse three times. Three times. And this is where we come to one of my favourite passages in Runciman. May I read it for you? And you can just enjoy and revel in Runciman's words. On a February day in the year, AD 6.38, the Caliph Omar entered Jerusalem riding upon a white camel. He was dressed in worn, filthy robes. And the army that followed him was rough and unkempt.

But its discipline was perfect. At his side was the patriarch, Sophronius, as chief magistrate of the surrendered city. Omer rode straight to the site of the Temple of Solomon, whence his friend Muhammad had descended into heaven. Watching him stand there, the patriarch remembered the words of Christ and murmured through his tears. Behold the abomination of desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet. Oh, I love that. That's one of the great sort of ransom.

His opening paragraphs are a lesson to any historical. on how to do this sort of thing. And I just remember reading that age, I don't know, 18, 19, and thinking, that's what I want to do. And then I went and followed Sophronius as a result of the – he mentions the spiritual meadow in the next paragraph of this book, and so I ordered it up. Okay, look, so you could say they've dealt with Rome. Do they then look to Persia, what was Persia? Join us after the break and find out if their ambition extends that way to.

Welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about how now this united brotherhood in a new religion called Islam has managed to mop up what is left of the exhausted Roman-stroke Byzantine Empire, once one of the greatest superpowers in the world. And they have exhausted themselves fighting Persia. Now, what about Persia, William? I mean, are these United Arab tribes now going to look towards Persia and think, actually, if we can, we take on the Romans, stroke by Zantans, we can take the Persians on too. Well, they've already inflicted one defeat in Iraq on the Persians, so they know that the Persians are vulnerable. But the big battle happens in 637. In other words, the year before Jerusalem finally surrenders, Jerusalem is under siege at this point, and the Arabs are already sufficiently confident to take on both. They're besieging Jerusalem and they're attacking Persia. And the Persians, the Sussanians pull themselves together and they produce the cream of their army, which, as we described last time, involves these wonderful knights in all their heavy armour, war elephants from Bactria,

which is still part of the Sassanian Empire, but nothing can stop the momentum of these Arabs on their racing camels and on their light horses and with their bows and they run rings around the Persians. Is it the case that both sides, you know, Byzantium and and the Persians have just completely underestimated the threat of the Arabs, or was there no way they could have predicted how quickly you could have people come together and fight you? I think this would be like a situation. Like, imagine that, I don't know, Iceland had remained neutral in World War II. And all the other powers were completely exhausted.

And suddenly, Iceland, out of the blue, has the momentum to take over France and Germany and Britain. It's an incredibly improbable attack. there'd never been an army emerging before from Arabia. It had always been armies heading southwards. If you think of the history, it's Egypt, it's Persia, it's Assyria, those are the powerful regions. And it's areas like Judea and Arabia, which are always being conquered by incoming armies from the north. But for once in history, its forces coming from the south from Arabia that sweep up. And the great battle is Cadizia in 637. And it's a catastrophic defeat for Sassanian Persia with all these great war elephants and heavy cavalry.

And the Persians, I think, are particularly shocked by the Arab women who stalk the battlefields afterwards, slitting the throats of the enemies who are still alive. This is considered to be something extraordinary. Yeah, well, it is a bit, to be fair. It's not lovely. But can I just say, as we found with other parts of our Empire podcast, you know, it is one thing. You know, when we talked about the steps and when we talked about early Russia, we talked about the early Ottomans, there's one thing to conquer great swathes of the world. But it's quite another to hold on to them.

But this is what the Arab lands are doing. Are they just going in and defeating? I just don't think there's any sort of spare armies left after this cataclysmic Armageddon, this last great war event. antiquity. And then there's one final defeat for the Byzantines at the River Yarmuk, which is south of the Sea of Galilee. And again, the Byzantines seriously underestimate both the size and the capability and the determination of these Arab forces. And so by 639, 640, they have won the Levant, the richest area of the world. The Levant and the Persian interior is now in the hands of these improbable army of nomadic Bedouin from Arabia.

No, and you know, relatively speaking, it hasn't taken much time at all. It's been like a lightning strike. And this will continue. We won't go into it because we're focusing in this series on Persia. But of course, the Arab armies then take Egypt.

They go across North Africa. And within a few years, within a century, they're at Tur in the south of France. And the first check that happens to them is the Carolingians. It's Charles Martel at the Battle of Tour. And that's only a century later.

I mean, one thing we've learned, William, in the course of doing this podcast, is that when you are going after a superpower, it's one thing to take their satellite interests and to cut off their trade and money streams. And it is another then to follow them back and to chase them back into their very heartlands. You know, that's real defeat when you go into the very heart of the empire. So in Persia, first of all, where is its beating heart? And does that start to happen at around this time? So the beating heart is where it was for the whole of the Sasanian period is Satisiphan. It is this great capital close to Baghdad today. And that is in the heart of Mesopotamia. And after the Battle of Kadasia, there's another terrible Sasanian defeat at Nakhavand near Hamadan in western Iran. And at this point, Yazdegad does exactly what Darius III did. When pursued by Alexander, he heads for Bactria and the hills of Afghanistan. done. History doesn't repeat it. It's about 800 years between, but there's the same echo, isn't it?

And so he flees east, begging local rulers to help him against the Arabs. And he gets further than Darias got. He gets as far as the great caravan city of Merv in Central Asia. And in 651, just like Darias III, he's actually given up by one of his own people. And he's killed, not by the Arabs, but by one of his own nobleman. Isn't it extraordinary? It really is a repeat template of defeat and dissent into oblivion. It's your own that get you. Yeah, there are different versions. In some versions of the story he's killed by one of his nobleman.

In another, it's just a humble miller who takes him in. He's a total fugitive by this point, according to one version of the story. He's on his own and the miller takes him in and kills him in his sleep. I mean, it's that desperate. Yeah. So by this time, can we just have a little pause and just think about it? how much land has now been conquered by, you know, the Arabs now. So soon, Egypt as well, what are we talking about landmass here? You know, we're talking about something that is

bigger than the Sasanian Empire was at its peak, because that was huge. Yes, this is not just the Sasanian Empire, but the full Akamunid Empire. Because remember, Cyrus conquered Egypt, but it has Arabia too. There's never been an empire which has had the whole of this. Yes, that's massive. But it isn't static. There's no sense that this has ended. And it takes a century for the Arab armies to get through North Africa, to cross to Gibraltar. The conflict goes on right up into Khorasan.

And this is important because in Khorasan, you have some of the most educated and most brilliant minds. Yeah, scholars in the Persianate world. And there's one family who we've got to bear in mind because they're going to come back very shortly. which is in Balkh in Afghanistan, which falls shortly afterwards, there is a family of hereditary Buddhist abbots. And this is a family that is suspended between the Persian world and the Indic world. Wow. As Buddhists, they are Sanskrit literate,

and I think they've intermarried with Kashmiri families, and the children are sent often to Kashmir for higher education. But now Baha, which is the monastery that they run as hereditary abbots, of which they are Pramuk's, the Sanskrit word for headman, they convert to Islam at this point. And their name is rabbiised to Barmakid, from Pramuk to Barmak. How interesting. So with the defeat of Persian leaders and this amassing of land, are they also these newly minted Muslims, if we can put it that way? because it's still a fairly young religion. Are they tolerant of the other religious beliefs that existed in these lands?

I'm thinking about, we've been talking about Zoroastrianism so much lately, and we've given so much time and interest to it. What happens to those who believe in Zoroastrianism? So they are relatively tolerant to Christians and Jews, who they see as Al-Liketab, people of the book. But it's unclear what the attitude to Zoroastrians should be. Initially, they were treated as people of the book, But after the conquest, as they begin to get more and more dismissive of these defeated fire worshippers, as always in defeat, people have come to be regarded as subhuman.

This is what happens terribly throughout history. So you get this warrior Arab aristocracy beginning to look down on the Persians. And you find that the initial tolerance granted to the fire temples begins to diminish pretty quick. and you begin to get emigration of fire worshippers to India, which is the next stop. So this is where the Parsis begin. Can I tell the story about the Parsis? I'm sure I've told it on this podcast before, but there is a, I'm sure it's just an apocryphal story, but a ship loaded fleeing Zoroastrian's Parsis come to Bombay and the reigning king there.

They can't speak the same language. So the Persian captain of the ship is trying to communicate and the monarch at Bombay says, look, we can't take you in. We're full. Basically, we're full. No small or big boats here. We're full. So what the Bombay ruler does is he sends back a glass of milk, which is full to the brim. To try and tell these people his language, he doesn't speak, we are full. And what the Zoroastrians do, they take the glass of milk and they add sugar and then they give it back. And that is how they're allowed into India. That's so the story goes. Nice story, cute story. Probably no historic basis to it, but it's cute. This, we should say, happens, you know, several centuries later. It's really the kind of 9th, 10th century that you begin to get mass emigration of Zoroastrians to initially Gujarat. But nonetheless, this begins at this time. You get increasing intolerance of Zoroastrians and fire worship and Buddhism, all of which are present in Persian lands.

And the new masters are from a very different world. They are Arabic speaking. They are Bedouin. So they set up sort of armed camps rather than settling in the old Sasanian caravan cities. And they generally allow existing proprietors of land and the peasants and the merchants to go back their business as usual. And they only expropriate initially state land. So, I mean, with language, I mean, if they're Arabic speaking, do they then make Arabic the lingua franca? of these areas. I mean, did people have to learn Arabic? So again, this is one of the stories which

we're going to be telling because, yes, both the political sense of a country called Iran disappears at this point, as does Persian as an official language. So Arabic very quickly becomes the language of administration. It continues to be written in Greek in some parts, like Damascus for several decades more, but very quickly, Arabic begins to replace it. And you have the Persian language go to ground. And it's a story which will be telling in a while how it returns from the dead. But the Persian language doesn't completely disappear. But I'm presuming language goes, so therefore poetry goes, therefore art goes,

and figurative representation goes, history goes. I mean, it is kind of year zero. for this entire civilization. And you find this particularly, because the Zoroastrian faith had been so tied up with the Sassanians, because they'd been so central to the identity

of the Sassanian monarchs, one of the first things that the Arabs do is they take the state land and the estates of the Zoroastrian temples. And the first to flee to India are the old Magi and the Zoroastrian high priests who either have to convert or flee.

When we talked about the Ottomans going up against the Byzantines. And we talked about the sort of the clashes that also led to these amazing cauldrons of mixed styles that happened. I mean, is there a new style developing or a new aesthetic that's developing, which involves, you know, sort of the Muslim, Arabic ideal of beauty and, say, the old Byzantine idea, mixed with the Persian idea. What do we get? I mean, are there things that are being built at this time? So exactly that the first thing that's built, the first major building project of the new religion is the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem.

And what you see there is a octagonal Byzantine domed shape of which there are similar examples, for example, in Thessalonica. It's one of the models in Ravenna, you also get octagonal churches. And if you look at the mosaics of the Dome of the Rock, they are done by Byzantine craftsmen, but often with Persian designs, the crowns and the tiaras shown in the an iconic mosaics of the Dome of the Rock, have both Persian and Byzantine elements in it. So the Arabs have no high architectural style. They haven't been building massive buildings like Ayasophia or Sottsa because they're a caravan people. So when they want to start building grand monumental structures, it is to Byzantine and to Sasanian models that they look. And in a sense, you can argue, and Ransman makes this argument, that the Arabs at this point take on a lot of the Hellenized culture of the Eastern Roman Empire and a lot of the Sasanian culture.

And they keep both the civilisations alive. So, for example, the culture of bathhouses, the Hamam, which has died out in the West. You don't find, you know, the Anglo-Saxons having bathhouses or the Merivindian kings having baths. Turkish baths, so. But you do have it throughout the Middle East. And you have it in Damascus. You have it in the great cities. And so what survives from the wreck of antiquity, what is salvaged from the wreck of antiquity,

the succession of wars, followed by the conquest of the Arabs, survives in these great cities in the Middle East, in Antioch, in Jerusalem, in Damascus in the former Sasanian cities like Satisophon. And these carry on now in a slightly different form. And what one sees is the beginning of this mixture of Hellenized Greek and Persian civilization coming together, both architecturally and in painting and also in learning, in scholarship. So ideas, for example, of astronomy, ideas of mathematics and mythologies. All these begin to meld. And the next thing that happens after the Umayid caliphate is you get a kind of Persian reconquest. Because when the moment comes for the great Abbasid revolution in 748, which begins in Persian territory in Merv, the same city that Yazdegerd was killed by the Miller.

But I mean, just reminds who are the Abbasids? I mean, just who are the Abbasids and where are they from? So the Abbasids are initially the rebels who. take on the Arab caliphs, the Umayyads. The Umayyads are based in Tabascus. The Abbasids begin their attack on the Umayyads from Merv, from Persian territory. And many of the foot soldiers of the Abbasid army are Persians from Kurosan, from northeast Persia. So although Persia disappears as a political unit, although the Persian language is no longer a state-funded literary language and disappears for a while. We'll see its revival in the next episode with Faddaozy, but that's still to come. And although the Zoroastrian religion is no more and its high priests are either thinking

of converting or fleeing eastwards to India, in the Abbasid revolution, you get the return of ethnic Persian nobleman to power. the leading force in that, and this is where we come back to the Barma Kids. So the Barma Kids are now going to be very important. So the Barma Kids, who had been the hereditary Buddhist abbots of this monastery called Naubahar in Balch, which was visited, for example, by the Chinese traveller, Shwan Zhang on his journey to India. He describes it as one of the great centres of learning. These guys are sent initially as hostages to Rassafan.

Now, do you remember in the last episode, we had, Shireen, the wife of Kusrow, endowing a Byzantine church at Sergeopolis at Rassafa. This place becomes one of the main palaces of the Umayyad dynasty. And they send the young princes from across the empire, all these conquered noblemen who are given into the Arabs who have converted to Islam, who have become part of the new system. All the children are sent to be schooled together in Rasafer. And it's there that a man Kahlia Dimmin Barmak, who's one of the Barmak kids, meets the future Caliph al-Mansaw, and the two together become the linchpins behind the Abbasid revolution. The resurgence of Persian identity and power? Not yet Persian identity, because

this is very much an Arab revolution, but the personnel is ethnic Persian. So they're not speaking Persian and the language of administration is Arabic and they are Muslim, but they are the descendants of ethnic Persians. And so when the Umayyads are defeated, they have to build a new capital. And where do they decide to build that? They build it back in the Persian heartlands. And that capital is called Baghdad. And it's Khalid Barmak who builds it. And the Barma kids become for four generations, the Viziers who will run Baghdad. And if ever you've had to bring your children to watch Disney videos, do you remember in Aladdin, there's a character called Jafar. I do, of course. Jafar Bhoush is the fourth generation of Barma Kiddhiz. He's a real historic

character. He's a thing. He's a thing. And he is this ethnic Persian from Balk. Wow. Who is the great grandson of the man who's planned Baghdad, Khalidim Barmak, and he is the great friend of the Caliph Omar, and together the story of these two young men running riot in the streets of Baghdad becomes the Arabian Knights. I love this so much. Does he also have an evil-talking parrot?

I mean, this is important. Is that mentioned anywhere? I don't think the parrot is in there, but I might be wrong. I don't know. At that dramatic point, I think it's a good thing to pause. And you know what? We're going to take a little break in the Persian series over. for Christmas, William, because I personally thought that murder and an epilagin could pause over

the Christmas period. I've always liked a bit of murder and a pillogen. Yeah, I know. You can, you know, no, no, it is not, it is not, it's not tinsely at all. It's not Christmassy. So what we're going to do instead, and this is very much under my insistence, I have to say, I've been right bossy pants over this. But, and I'm really even astonished at how few people know this Christmas Carol. You know it. You know it. Sing it with me. I saw three ships, come sailing in, Oh Christmas Day, on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day in the morning. Okay. Oh, yeah.

I mean, well, you knew, but I mean, the younger members of the Empire team were just looking at me and I could lost my mind. You were thinking of young Callum Hill, our producer. Callum Hill, I mean, you know, ridiculously, you know, who knows so much about everything, had no bloody clue about this at all. And neither did many other people. But look, there is a Christmas song. And I thought, oh, why don't we do three great ships of Empire? See, see, see, see, it's a theme.

and talk about the part they played in history in different empires. So we're doing it, aren't we willing? We are doing it. We are doing it. We are doing it. We're bloody doing it. I would never resist something you want to do, Dita, ever. Good.

That is the right answer. So join us on Tuesday when we discuss our first ship, and this is your nominated ship. Tell us what you wanted to do. We are doing the great ethnic Persian Chinese Admiral Jung Ho, who is this extraordinary. extraordinary figure who led the greatest flotilla of Chinese ships on a voyage of exploration that went from China through Sri Lanka to the east coast of Africa. There we are. And we'll be joined by the fabulous, hopefully fingers crossed if we can get him during this

very Christmassy time. Rana Mitter, who is an absolutely outstanding scholar on these issues. So listen, it's a Christmas Carol from us to you. So join us then. Until then, it's goodbye from me, Anita Arnan. And goodbye from me, William Duremberg.