what caused the Arabs to blow out of Arabia (that's what it is called at this time right?) anyway?
what caused the Arabs to blow out of Arabia (that's what it is called at this time right?) anyway?
Their biggest advantage in this era wasn't disease resistance. As far as I know that wasn't the case or anything they had that made them special. Their biggest advantage was that they had one of the greatest Persian emperors ever. Probably second only to Cyrus the Great in terms of how well remembered he was (I really like the guy). They didn't have much advantage beyond much more effective leadership.
Justinian and Belisarius might have re-established Mare Nostrum. But the Sassanids eventually would have fought Rome to a bloody draw as OTL. Maybe even beaten them altogether if not damaged by the Plague.
The truly interesting question is: If no plague, might someone (the Sassanids? Axum? have conquered Mecca and butterflied Islam? And if so, what might have replaced or not replaced Islam if Persia and Byzantium had fought each other to a draw in the 7th Century Crisis. Turks converted to Buddhism a century or two later perhaps?
IIRC, population pressures, combined with the devastation in the Byzantine-Sassanid War (and hence easy pickings) of both Persian Mesopotamia and the Roman Levant combined with the organisation brought about by Muhammad's creation of what would coalesce as Islam.
That comes around a century after Justinian, though.
I think Muhammad deserves a hell of a lot of credit, the guy was clearly a visionary politico-religious leader even if he was not, as you suggest, really a "Muslim" as we understand the term. The Arabs enjoyed a happy combination of an excellent leader at a time when the superpowers that had dominated their world for centuries were busily engaged in destroying one another. No Muhammad probably means no Arab breakout.
This is true, but would they have become assimilated into the regions of the lands they conquered if they had maintained their pre-Islamic religion? IIRC the Muslim military camps in the early days were set up outside the cities to keep cohesion and reduce mixing in part for this reason. What if this doesn't happen?I don't know about no breakout, though- Rome and the House of Sassan were both pretty punch drunk at the time. I suspect the Levant and Mesopotamia looked like obviously easy pickings to the Arabs. I agree that proto/Islam probably gave them more organisation and staying power than normal raiders/nomad conquerors.
I didn't mean anything Islamophobic by suggesting that he wasn't a Muslim as we understand the term- I just feel that Islam only really concretised as a religion in the generations after Muhammad's death, just as Christianity only did generations after Jesus' death.
Although possibly not to the Anglo-Saxons, who at that date seem to have had little if any trade with mainstream European civilisation. Allegedly the Romano-British didn't want much contact with them, and the plague therefore hitting the Roman-British rather harder than it did the Anglo-Saxons was what allowed the Anglo-Saxons to start expanding rapidly after being limited to just a few areas for a couple of generations.That said, we know the plague spread throughout Europe and Iran,
@Athelstan: I agree with you that Treadgold's book is useful, and the statistics he uses I reproduced for my dissertation and find to be broadly reasonable estimates for the hammer blow of the plague.
That said, we know the plague spread throughout Europe and Iran, so I think that all settled peoples would have really been hurt more or less equally by it. I don't therefore find it particularly convincing to argue that Rome was weakened by the plague, thus allowing the Iranians and Goths to do better.
For sixth century fans, I'm doing a mini "Timeline In A Day" about a successful Nika revolt here.
The Arabs seem to have been less affected by it, thanks to desert isolation; for that matter, the plague spread more quickly in urban agglomerations, which means that it likely had less effect on, say, Slavs, Lombards, Franks, etc.