Thread 17809722

How was this even possible?

Power vacuum. It's how every rapid expansion happened in history.

>>17809722 (OP)
Rome and Iran had spent centuries alternating between peace and war, using Arabs as auxiliary soldiers.

>>17809731
that doesn't explain how did they organise or supply their armies or that how did they cement their power.

>>17809750
Syrians, but not really, they were considered too servile and effeminate. All the civilized servile Syrians killed themselves off though and migrated leaving only the incestuous knuckle-draggers behind though.

>>17809722 (OP)
The Romans and Iranians spent centuries fighting each other and exhausted themselves. Any power could have easily conquered them by that point

>>17809751
Snowballing. The Islamic conquests started as a single band of people in Medina, then it was Mecca and Medina, then the entire Hedjaz, then all of Arabia, same way the Mongols grew from nothing.

>>17809770
I'm still confused why Theophanes says the "saracens" conquered Mesopotamia 160 years before the Rashidun caliphate did. Was there a proto-Islamic conquest and collapses? Was it Muslims all along?

>>17809776
Saracen just meant generic barbarian before it came to apply solely to Muslims after the rise of Islam.

>>17809731
- byzantines and persians waged long war and exhausted each other, financially and in terms of manpower, and population still didn't fully recover from justinian plague 100 years ago, that struck mainly large cities due to dense population (compared to desert tribes)
- middle east was a wreck, byzantines hadn't fully (re)consolidated the area after the war. picrel is PERSIAN largest extend
- autistic byzantine religious policy alienated levant and egyptian population that practiced "heresies"
- heavy taxation in both empires put a high strain on all population, when arabs came, they demanded LOWER taxes, gaining favor of locals
- less autistic religious policy, if you payed the jizya, nobody cared if your are monophysitist, miaphysitist, etc.
- use of roman and persian infracture
- arabian camels were highly mobile to counter heavy cavalry
- knowing their opponents and their tactics since arabs were always used in the region as mercenaries or allied tribes
- religious fanatism (motivation) and high morale, similar to the first crusade later

>>17809783
Where did you get this idea? Ptolemy in his maps from the 2nd century puts the Saraceni as an ethnicity in northern Arabia. His map is too big for me to share here but you can find samples on search engines.

>>17809722 (OP)
>look up map pre-conquest
>most of it is just two other empires
they literally just kicked down the door and got the local elites to switch sides after seeing which way the wind was blowing

>>17809722 (OP)
Rabid explosion of centuries of repressed and subterranean culture-feeeling articulated in a single multi-decade crusade of liberation.

>>17809805
The map says Saraceni to mean barbarians. Same as "here be dragons."

>>17809722 (OP)
They served under roman and persian armies and knew how they fought
>>17809757
Not syrians
Arabs
>>17809776
Arabs existed in levant and mesopotamia way before muslim conquests

>>17809722 (OP)
Allahallahallah sand ape mentality. Muslims ruin everything. Retards thrive in numbers.

>>17809776
Different time flows, aka mixed chronology.
T. Gunnar Heinsohn

>>17809722 (OP)
Damascus steel

>>17809722 (OP)
The Byzantine and Sassanid empires only existed on paper, all the Arabs had to do was walk in and prove it.
Islam was also very different back then before the Turds and Crusadetards ruined everything.

>>17809722 (OP)
It all came down just as quickly after two centuries. The first decline after 90 years and the second permanent decline after another 120 years.

>>17809999
They were in numerical inferiority

Incel power. Basically a chud revolution.

>>17809722 (OP)
This is how much you can do when weather gets better just a few degrees.
>The Late Antique Little Ice Age (LALIA) was a long-lasting Northern Hemispheric cooling period in the 6th and 7th centuries AD, during the period known as Late Antiquity. The period coincides with three large volcanic eruptions in 535/536, 539/540 and 547. The volcanic winter of 536 was the early phenomenon of the century-long global temperature decline. One study suggested a global cooling of 2 °C (3.6 °F).

>>17809783
Saracen just referred to Arabs, especially Bedouin Arabs

>>17809722 (OP)
Superior tactics, a succession/constellation of great men, a revolutionary worldview, the aid of Allah

>>17810450
This anons is correct. Saracen is just what you call an Arab before Mohammad

>>17810510
Islam as an identity was inclusive rather than exclusive, meaning someone can become a muslim, while someone can't just decide to become persian or roman. Basing an empire on such an identity rather than a racial/cultural identity is what caused the Islamic empire to spread so rapidly.

Conquered peoples canassimilate easily without much immediate cultural changes by just converting. Slaves are more often than not automatically freed if they decide to become muslim, with some of them eventually becoming religious scholars or administrators.

The egalitarian and scholarly nature of Islam too contributed to the often meritocratic style of government, eventually leading to non-Arabs dominating the political and intellectual spheres of muslim society. Muslim intellectualism was characterized by the lack of central authority/institutions

>>17809750
>>17809767
Then why did the Arabs also defeat the Turks, Armenians, khazars, Indians, Berbers and the Visigoths?

>>17811795
This. The midwit take is that Romans and Persians were exhausted. But the Arab tribes didn’t just defeat some armies and take some land they managed to create a new civilization in richest and most populous regions of Earth and all that within a few decades.

>>17809722 (OP)
Inhabitants of the Arabian desert have always been some form of nomadic warriors up until that point. Islam unified them in a way they had never had before and they simply took advantage of the Persians exhausted state right after their war with the Romans. The Egyptian governor was grossly incompetent and didn’t care that hoards of arabs were kicking down the door. After taking Egypt, taking the rest of north africa was an extremely simple task.

>>17810525
It feels crazy that an ideology like this rose up and thrived in the exact correct conditions to go off on a tear and consume neighboring stagnant civilizations.

I imagine things like this happened in the classic world every so often where suitable, dynamic religious ideologies cropped up and revolted, but local rulers put it down. Kind of like the Taiping rebellion in China and the countless peasant revolts they've had. Anyone know of similar movements that failed or were crushed in the classic world?

>>17811795
Power vacuum still applies to Spain. Visigoths were embroiled in a civil war at the time.

>>17809893
Saraceni in Greek is Sarakenoi, the -oi ending is nominative plural, which refers to people. If it were singular it would be a place. The -i ending in Latin is used which is also a genitive singular and can imply "of the ___", which implies ethnicity explicitly.

>>17809995
>Arabs existed in levant and mesopotamia way before muslim conquests
Sure, but does that mean Arabs conquered Mesopotamia before Islam then again after Islam?

If that's the case, it looks like there was already an Arab empire and the Rashiduns had to reunite it.

>>17810037
It could be !

>>17811795
>Turks
gets Ack'd by a small turkish khanate and only returns to central asia after the collapse of the khanate
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Thirst
>Khazars
conquers the southern caucasus and stops at derbent
>Indians
Conquers Sindh (modern southwestern pakistan) and is defeated when attempting to go further
>Berbers
gets btfo to Libya by berbers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berber_Revolt

>>17809722 (OP)
They had F35s

>>17809751
They just replaced the elites. Decapitation.

>>17809722 (OP)
Notice how they can only conquer brown countries.
The moment they step foot on white land they got btfo and never expanded again

>>17809722 (OP)
Cancer spreads fast.

>>17813415
Notice how retarded you are.

>>17812628
>gets Ack'd by a small turkish khanate and only returns to central asia after the collapse of the khanate
The Arabs caused the collapse of the khanate. Not to mention that it wasn’t small.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Kharistan
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Talas
>As a result, the Battle of Kharistan is considered a turning point for Muslim fortunes in Central Asia.[32][33][34]
>Under Asad's successor, Nasr ibn Sayyar, the Umayyad armies recovered most of Transoxiana by c.743

>conquers the southern caucasus and stops at derbent
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab%E2%80%93Khazar_wars
>Marwan then advanced, according to some Arab sources, to the Khazar capital of al-Bayda on the Volga. The khagan withdrew towards the Ural Mountains
>the Khazar khagan soon requested peace. Marwan reportedly offered "Islam or the sword", and the khagan agreed to convert to Islam.

>gets btfo to Libya by berbers
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_al-Asnam

I don’t like using Wikipedia but this board is too unserious for me to have a civil discussion.

>>17809789
>alienated levant and egyptian population that practiced "heresies"
Blame it on post-Justinian’s autistic dream on retaking the west.

>>17814361
>>17812628
Funny how Turkic slaves one day ruled Islamic world.

>>17814408
There’s only 8 Turkic mamluk dynasties and they were nothing close to ruling all of the Islamic world. only 4 of them exited for more than 100 years.