Byzantine-Sassanian War (602-628 CE): The Last Great War of Antiquity
14 comments
·January 17, 2025bobosha
antupis
yes and no then you have characters like Genghis Khan who change history even if everything is stacked against them.
machinekob
Not sure if this is true, he got "lucky" with technological advantage of warfare (Mongol bows) compared to other nations close to him as horse archers were literally "meta" to fight vs heavy/peasant infantry same case as Crassus fighting Parthians.
Kamq
Horse archers had been a thing before him, though they were quite powerful.
His great accomplishment was marrying that with the ability to besiege walled cities. Nobody expected barbarian horse archers to be able to do that.
panick21_
Not really true. Horse archers were a thing before him and after him. And many of the people he thought were either horse archers themselves, or allied with horse archers, or had fought horse archers for centuries.
namdnay
“The Mule”
mytailorisrich
The rise of Islam through military conquest perhaps, but as a religion it is difficult to say. It spread in Asia mostly through peacful means all the way to China and South East Asia, for example.
alephnerd
But the spread of Islam into China (in reality Central Asia - there's a reason Xinjiang has historically been called Turkestan, Uyghur is the closest living language to Chagatai, and why a Kashgari family has managed the Jama Masjid in Delhi for centuries) and South East Asia was itself because of Islam's prominence in Central and South Asia.
The early Islamic preachers in what became Indonesia and Malaysia were South Asian or Iranian in origin (major reason why Persianate motifs are prominent in Southeast Asian Islam).
That would have not happened if the Byzantine-Sassanid War did not happen, because what became Yemen and Oman would have remained under Sassanid suzerainity and much of the Levant would have remained Byzantine. And thus, Khorasan, Gujarat, Sindh, and Punjab would have not become Muslim.
That said, I agree with you that the spread of Islam was HEAVILY dependent on trade.
jim_inont
[dead]
machinekob
If someone is interested in Byzantium fall and why this war was so bad for both empires, read some more about Justinian's Plague which killed ~35-50% of population and also halved economical output. It took about 200 years to get to the same place population wise for most of the empire.
Weirdly it didn't hit Persia as much outside of Mesopotamia, most historians estimate "only" ~20-30% of population died and shifted balance of power to Persian side, from almost renewed Roman Empire at 540 which most likely was getting back to ruling mediterranean world once again.
mezod
For anyone enjoying this type of content, I just happen to be reading The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan and damn, I never thought I could be so interested in all its cultural and religious context. So much to learn from history... but this time is different hehe ;)
johngossman
Tom Holland's "Shadow of the Sword" covers this and the broader context. "Justinian's Flea" is set a century earlier, but provides some grimly fascinating background: both these empires were still suffering the economic and demographic consequences of a plague. It's an under appreciated period of history, just as interesting as the Roman civil war imho.
jim_inont
[dead]
The rise of islam was only possible due to the fight to exhaustion by the Byzantines and Sassanids. If not for the timing, Muhamad and his religion would have been but an obscure cult in the sands of Arabia. Just goes to show that timing is everything in history.