98
The Third Civil War
power from getting off the ground. Marwan’s hopes of a peaceful
and secure start to his rule should then have been strengthened when
Sulayman b. Hisham and Ibrahim, apparently seeing no future in
continuing opposition, came to his court and sought reconciliation
with him.
The new caliph did not stay in Damascus
but moved his court to
the Qaysi centre of Harran. This was a significant departure. It is
true that earlier caliphs like Hisham and al-Walid II had sometimes
preferred not to live in Damascus, possibly because, at a time when
the plague was a frequent and deadly visitor, they thought it wiser to
establish residences in the desert, possibly because of sentimental or
aesthetic preferences for life away from the large town. But even in
these cases the danger of absence from Damascus could be seen in
the ease with which Yazid III had seized
the town in his rebellion
against al-Walid II. Marwan’s move, which is probably to be
explained by a clear-sighted understanding of where the real centre
of his military power lay, however, went much further. For the first
time a caliph seemed to have abandoned Syria altogether. Harran
was not just the site of the court, but a real centre of administration
and government, and although it could be argued that the move was
a logical one given the changed conditions in Syria (see pp. 102–3),
the Kalb of central and southern Syria,
already suspicious of and
hostile to Marwan, would hardly see it that way.
8
At any rate, there
soon began a major rebellion against Marwan in Syria and, since
Iraq had not yet submitted to him, his caliphate was for a time very
precarious.
The rebellion in Syria lasted from 745 to 746 and may be divided
into two stages. First, in the summer of 745, a revolt which seems to
have begun among the Kalb in the south and to have been instigated
by the
wali
of Palestine, Thabit b. Nu‘aym, spread to engulf most of
Syria,
including even Hims, which had been one of the centres most
loyal to Marwan. This necessitated Marwan’s coming to Syria and
gradually reducing the dissident towns one by one, beginning with
Hims which submitted after a siege, the Himsis apparently betraying
the thousand or so Kalbis from Palmyra who had come there to
strengthen the resistance of the town. From Hims, Marwan then
relieved Damascus which was under siege from Yazid b. Khalid al-
Qasri. Yazid’s forces were scattered,
he himself killed, and the Kalbi
centre of al-Mizza put to fire. Thence Marwan relieved Tiberias,
centre of the Jordanian
jund,
which was being besieged by Thabit b.
Nu‘aym. Thabit was subsequently again defeated in Palestine, taken
The Third Civil War
99
prisoner and executed with his sons. Finally an attack on Palmyra
led to a negotiated settlement with the Kalbi leader Abrash al-Kalbi.
At this point Marwan seemed to have reestablished his position in
Syria, and he took the opportunity to gather the Umayyad family
together and appoint his two sons as his successors. Then, turning
his attention to Iraq, he raised an army
in Syria to go in support of
the army of Mesopotamia which, under the command of Yazid Ibn
Hubayra, was on its way south to enforce Marwan’s authority there.
However, as the Syrian army passed Rusafa in 745 it revolted and
Sulayman b. Hisham, with its support, made an attempt to seize the
caliphate for himself. The rebels were able to take Qinnasrin, whose
troops were on their way to Iraq under Yazid Ibn Hubayra, and were
augmented by more Syrians eager to join the revolt. This forced
Marwan to bring back most of the army from Iraq,
leaving only a
small force under Ibn Hubayra to continue the expedition. The
caliph himself led the attack on the rebels and, near Qinnasrin, he
was able to inflict a defeat on them, forcing Sulayman b. Hisham to
flee via Hims and Palmyra to Kufa. Most of that part of Sulayman’s
army which had survived the defeat, however, remained in Hims
under the command of Sulayman’s brother Sa‘id, and this
necessitated Marwan’s second siege of Hims, this one lasting for
several months during the winter of 745–6 before the town finally
fell. Marwan’s anger at the continuing hostility of Syria following
his fairly lenient treatment after the suppression
of the first stage of
the revolt now led him to raze the walls not only of Hims but also of
other important Syrian towns including Damascus and, reportedly,
Jerusalem. As Wellhausen expressed it, ‘in the summer of 128 (746)
he had finished with Syria; it lay in fragments at his feet’.
9
In Iraq ‘Abd Allah b. ‘Umar, the governor appointed by Yazid III,
had been confronted by a Shi‘ite revolt in Kufa at the time of
Marwan’s takeover of power in Syria. This was led by ‘Abd Allah b.
Mu‘awiya, not himself a descendant of ‘Ali but only of ‘Ali’s
brother Ja‘far. Ibn ‘Umar had been able to deal with the revolt in
Iraq, using the garrison of Syrian troops now established in al-Hira,
but Ibn Mu‘awiya had fled to Istakhr in south-west Persia, from
where he was able to control
large areas of western Persia, attracting
assorted discontented elements to his cause. Marwan, meanwhile,
could only attempt to weaken Ibn ‘Umar’s position in Iraq by
appointing a Qaysi in the Syrian army there, Nadr b. Sa‘id al-
Harashi, as his governor and hoping that he would be able to gain
the support of the ‘northerners’ (Mudar) in the Syrian army. Nadr b.
