Battle of the Yarmuk

The Battle of the Yarmuk was fought in August 636 near the Yarmuk River, east of the Sea of Galilee, between the armies of the Rashidun Caliphate and the Byzantine Empire. After six days of fighting, the Muslim Arab forces won a decisive victory that ended Byzantine rule in Syria and opened the region to the early Muslim conquests.

Byzantium and the Sasanian Empire had fought a long and ruinous war that ended only in 628 with a Byzantine victory, after which the emperor Heraclius recovered Syria, Palestine and Egypt from Persian occupation. Both empires were drained of money and men. Meanwhile, after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in 632, the first caliph, Abu Bakr, united Arabia and sent armies north into Byzantine territory.

From 634 Muslim forces, joined by the experienced general Khalid ibn al-Walid, defeated Byzantine armies in Palestine and Syria and took Damascus. Heraclius, based at Antioch, gathered a large army of Byzantine troops, Armenians and Christian Arab allies of the Ghassanid dynasty to recover the region. Faced with this force, the Muslim commanders withdrew from the cities they had taken and concentrated their army on the plains near the Yarmuk, a tributary of the Jordan, close to where the borders of modern Syria, Jordan and Israel now meet.

The size of both armies is uncertain. Early Arab chronicles give the Byzantines very large numbers, but modern historians suggest much smaller forces, with estimates for each side ranging from about 15,000 to 40,000. The Arab sources say the Byzantines outnumbered the Muslims by about two to one, but some modern estimates make the armies closer in size. The Byzantine field army was led by Vahan, an Armenian general, while on the Muslim side Abu Ubayda held overall command but, according to the traditional accounts, handed tactical control to Khalid.

The battle was fought over six days, with the main engagements placed in mid-to-late August 636. In the first days the Byzantines attacked repeatedly and at times pushed back the Muslim lines; traditional accounts describe women in the Muslim camp driving fleeing men back into the fight. Khalid kept a mobile cavalry reserve which he used to shore up threatened parts of the line. On the final day he launched a combined attack that separated the Byzantine cavalry from the infantry and drove the Byzantine army against the steep ravines to the west, where many were killed in the retreat or as they tried to escape. Byzantine losses were heavy, though the figures in the sources cannot be trusted.

The defeat left Byzantium with no field army able to defend Syria. Heraclius withdrew to Constantinople, and later tradition records his farewell to the province. Muslim forces retook Damascus and went on to capture the other cities of Syria. Jerusalem surrendered to the caliph Umar in 637 or 638, and Egypt was conquered within a few years. In the same period Arab armies defeated the Sasanians at al-Qadisiyyah. The Levant remained under Muslim rule for centuries afterwards, and Yarmuk is counted among the most consequential battles of the early Middle Ages.

Our 600 map shows Syria and Palestine under the Byzantine Empire, before the conquests, and the 700 map shows the region within the Umayyad Caliphate.