Early Middle Ages

The Umayyad Caliphate

Explore the Umayyad Caliphate (661-750): the first hereditary Muslim dynasty, the expansion into Iberia and Central Asia, and the Abbasid revolution.

In-depth article

The Umayyad caliphate (661-750) was the first hereditary dynasty of the Islamic world and one of the largest states the world had ever seen. Founded by Muawiyah ibn Abi Sufyan, a member of the Umayyad clan of the Quraysh, after the assassination of the caliph Ali and the suppression of the second civil war of Islam, the dynasty presided over a vast Arab-Muslim empire that stretched from al-Andalus in the west to the Indus Valley in the east. From their new capital at Damascus, the Umayyad caliphs directed the final phase of the Arab conquests, completed the Islamization of the former Sasanian and Byzantine provinces, and developed the institutional apparatus of an Islamic state. Their overthrow in 750 by the Abbasid revolution was a turning point, not only in the political history of the caliphate, but in the social and cultural development of Islam as a world religion.

The Umayyad period is often treated as a transitional era between the conquests of the seventh century and the flowering of the Abbasid age in the ninth. In some respects, this is fair: the Umayyads completed the territorial expansion of the caliphate, set the basic institutions of governance, and presided over a period in which the Arab-Muslim ruling elite consolidated its position. In other respects, it was a period of major transformation in its own right. The Muslim community of the seventh century had been a largely Arab movement of tribal soldiers and Bedouin auxiliaries. By the time of the Umayyad collapse, it had become a multiethnic ruling class presiding over a vast, multilingual, and religiously plural empire. The caliphs had been, in effect, tribal chiefs of a conquering army; by the eighth century, they had become oriental monarchs, surrounded by elaborate court ceremony, ruling an increasingly sophisticated bureaucratic state.

The Coming of the Umayyads

The Umayyad caliphate arose from the ashes of the first civil war of Islam, the First Fitna (656-661), which had pitted the caliph Ali against his rivals. The war had its roots in the assassination of the third caliph, Uthman ibn Affan, in 656, an act of mutiny by soldiers who had grievances against his administration. Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, was chosen as the fourth caliph, but his rule was contested from the start by the Umayyad governor of Syria, Muawiyah, who held Ali responsible for failing to bring Uthman’s murderers to justice. The war was complicated by the secession of the Kharijites, an egalitarian movement that had broken with Ali after he agreed to submit his dispute with Muawiyah to arbitration.

The pivotal event of the war was the Battle of Siffin (657), fought on the Euphrates in northern Syria, in which the forces of Ali and Muawiyah clashed. The battle was inconclusive, and the decision to submit the dispute to arbitration was a setback for Ali. The arbitration, in 658, ruled in favor of Muawiyah in some respects, but the result did not satisfy either side. Ali was assassinated in 661 by a Kharijite, and his elder son Hasan briefly succeeded him before abdicating in favor of Muawiyah in exchange for a pension. Muawiyah thus became caliph, founding the Umayyad dynasty.

A second civil war, the Second Fitna (680-692), broke out after the accession of Muawiyah’s son Yazid, when the Prophet’s grandson Husayn rose in revolt at Karbala in 680 and was killed with a small band of supporters. The deaths of Hasan (in 669) and Husayn (in 680) at the hands of the Umayyads were, and remain, the foundational events of the Shia sense of grievance against the Umayyads and the seed of the Sunni-Shia division. The Second Fitna also included the revolt of the Medinan Muslims against the Umayyads, the sack of the city, and the eruption of a Kharijite revolt in Iraq. The war was finally ended in 692 by the Umayyad general al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf, who defeated a combined Shia-Kharijite force and reestablished Umayyad authority.

The Caliphs of Damascus

The Umayyad caliphs ruled from Damascus, in Syria, the heart of the Umayyad power base. The list of caliphs includes Muawiyah I (r. 661-680), Yazid I (r. 680-683), Muawiyah II (r. 683-684), Marwan I (r. 684-685), Abd al-Malik (r. 685-705), al-Walid I (r. 705-715), Sulayman (r. 715-717), Umar II (r. 717-720), Yazid II (r. 720-724), Hisham (r. 724-743), al-Walid II (r. 743-744), Yazid III (r. 744), Ibrahim (r. 744), and Marwan II (r. 744-750), the last Umayyad caliph.

The longest-reigning and most important of these was Abd al-Malik (r. 685-705), who consolidated the empire after the Second Fitna, introduced Arabic as the language of administration in place of Greek and Pahlavi, and built the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem (completed 691/2) as a statement of Muslim religious authority over the holy city. His son al-Walid I (r. 705-715) presided over the apogee of the dynasty, with the conquest of North Africa, the invasion of Spain, and the construction of the Great Mosque of Damascus. Umar II (r. 717-720), the only pious ascetic among the Umayyad caliphs, attempted reforms of the fiscal and administrative system, but died before they could be fully implemented. Hisham (r. 724-743) presided over a long and competent reign, including major campaigns in Central Asia and the failure of the second Arab siege of Constantinople in 717-718, but his later years were marked by the loss of North Africa to the Kharijites and the Berbers, the Berber revolt in Morocco, and the beginnings of Shia and Abbasid agitation in the eastern provinces.

The Institutions of the Caliphate

The Umayyads presided over a state that, by the standards of the early eighth century, was remarkably well organized. The caliphate was divided into a series of provinces (wilayas), each governed by an appointed governor (wali). The major provinces included Syria, Egypt, North Africa, al-Andalus, the Yemen, Iraq, Khurasan, and Transoxiana. The army was organized by tribal regiments, with the major garrison towns of Kufa, Basra, Fustat, and Kairouan serving as the headquarters of the various provincial forces. The fiscal system was based on a combination of land tax, poll tax, and alms, with the revenues collected in the various provinces remitted to the central treasury at Damascus. Arabic coinage, modeled on the Sasanian and Byzantine prototypes, was standardized under Abd al-Malik, who replaced the Byzantine and Sasanian coins in circulation in the caliphate with a unified gold dinar and silver dirham.

A distinctive feature of the Umayyad state was the systematic use of Arab tribal soldiers as the principal military force. The Arab tribesmen who had participated in the conquests were settled in the garrison towns, where they received a share of the revenues of the provinces in which they served. The non-Arab Muslim converts, the mawali, were a much larger group, but they were, in theory, second-class subjects, paying the poll tax that the Arab Muslims did not. The grievances of the mawali would be one of the principal sources of support for the Abbasid revolution.

The Expansion of the Caliphate

The Umayyad period saw the final phase of the Arab conquests. North Africa, including the former Vandal kingdom, was conquered between 665 and 711, and the conquest of the Iberian Peninsula began in 711. The Arab advance into Gaul was checked at the Battle of Tours in 732, and the second Arab siege of Constantinople in 717-718 was beaten off by the Byzantine emperor Leo III with the use of Greek fire. In the east, the Arab armies had reached the Oxus by 705, and by the 730s had begun to push into Transoxiana and the Indus Valley. The Berber revolt of the 740s, in which the Kharijite Berbers of Morocco established independent rule, was a major reversal, and the loss of much of North Africa to the Kharijites and Berbers would prove one of the dynastic weaknesses of the later Umayyads.

The Abbasid Revolution

The Abbasid revolution of 750 was the culmination of a long period of political, religious, and social discontent. The Abbasid movement, claiming descent from the Prophet’s uncle Abbas, drew on the Shia sense of grievance against the Umayyads, the resentment of the mawali against their second-class status, and the support of the Iranian and Central Asian populations who had been incorporated into the caliphate. The Abbasid agents organized a long underground campaign in Khurasan, in eastern Iran, and in 749-750, as the Umayyad caliph Marwan II was distracted by conflicts elsewhere, raised a revolt. The decisive battle was the Battle of the Zab in 750, in which the Abbasid forces defeated Marwan II. The last Umayyad caliph fled to Egypt, where he was killed. A surviving Umayyad prince, Abd al-Rahman ibn Muawiyah, fled westward and eventually to al-Andalus, where he founded an independent Umayyad emirate that would last, in some form, until 1492.

The Abbasid revolution was more than a change of dynasty. It was a revolution in the social, cultural, and political basis of the caliphate. The Arab tribal aristocracy of the caliphate was displaced, in favor of a more cosmopolitan ruling class that drew on the Persian administrative tradition. The new caliphs, basing themselves in Baghdad, presided over a court that was, in many ways, a continuation of the Sasanian monarchy. The Islamic civilization that flourished under the Abbasids was, in this sense, a new departure: more urban, more cosmopolitan, more intellectually ambitious, and less restricted to the Arab ruling class. The story of this new order is told in the The Abbasid Caliphate.

Legacy of the Umayyads

The Umayyad period was formative for the institutional shape of the Islamic world. The Arabic language of administration, the unified coinage, the system of provincial governors and garrison towns, the practice of regular taxation, and the political vocabulary of the caliphate all date, in their mature form, from the Umayyad period. The Umayyads were also the dynasty under which the great monuments of early Islamic architecture were built: the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, the Great Mosque of Damascus, the Great Mosque of Cordoba. Their patronage of the arts included the great desert palaces of the Syrian steppe, the Qusayr Amra and the Hisham’s Palace at Khirbat al-Mafjar, with their famous figurative wall paintings that preserve a vivid picture of early Umayyad court life.

The overthrow of the Umayyads in 750 was not, however, a clean break. The surviving Umayyads of al-Andalus continued to rule, and the Umayyad administrative and cultural inheritance was incorporated into the Abbasid caliphate. The Umayyad period remains, in modern scholarship, a subject of considerable interest, not least because the dynasty left behind a vivid and well-documented body of poetry, official correspondence, and historical tradition that has been preserved in the Abbasid and later sources.

Further reading

  • Hugh Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates, 3rd ed. (Routledge, 2015).
  • G. R. Hawting, The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate A.D. 661–750, 2nd ed. (Routledge, 2000).
  • J. H. Johns, Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily: The Royal Dīwān (Cambridge University Press, 2002) for the comparative Mediterranean context.