The complementary histories of the Islamic and Byzantine worlds down to 1050 demonstrate the importance of political organization to military success. Byzantium survived the attacks of a Caliphate that deployed vastly superior forces largely because of the cohesion of its political-military system with its focus on a Constantinople whose walls and naval defenses proved impregnable. But it could resume the offensive only when the political unity of Islam disintegrated, a result of internal forces, not of Byzantine pressure. The Caliphate and its successor states in the Islamic world, on the other hand, found efficient application of their resources to warfare hindered by the problematic relationship of state and society that developed in the wake of the initial Arab conquests.
The central role the state assumed, whether positively or negatively, in the histories of Byzantium and Islam to 1050 contrasts interestingly with western Europe, where military force arose more out of the fabric of social relations and class structures. As a result, the state in western Europe was more a product of a sociomilitary system than the controlling feature of the military landscape that it was for the other heirs of the Roman state. Relations among all three civilizations and the nomadic world of the steppes would develop further in the age of the Crusades, a story taken up in Chapter 11.
Crone, Patricia. Slaves on Horses. The Evolution of the Islamic Polity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980. A fundamental analysis in broad comparative perspective of the rise of slave soldiers in Islam and the shaping of Islamic states.
Donner, F. M. The Early Islamic Conquests. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. The best narrative account of pre-Islamic Arabia and the early campaigns, though perhaps too accepting at times of details in Arab sources.
Frye, R., ed. The Cambridge History of Iran. Vol. 4: From the Arab Invasions to the Saljuqs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. A standard, comprehensive account; useful, if dated in interpretive terms.
Gordon, M. The Breaking of a Thousand Swords: A History of the Turkish Community of Samarra. Albany: SUNY Press, 2001. The best general account of the rise of Turkish military influence in the Islamic world.
Haldon, J. F. Warfare, State and Society in the Byzantine World, 565-1204. London: Routledge, 1999. An excellent synthesis of the interrelationships of social formation, politics, and military power in Byzantium. Both Haldon and Whittow (below) stress the small size and limitations of Byzantine armies. See also his Byzantine Praetorians and Byzantium in the Seventh Century.
Hawting, G. R. The First Dynasty of Islam: The Umayyad Caliphate, ad 661-750, 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2000. A solid analysis of the dynamics of Umayyad rule and the political problems the dynasty faced.
Kaegi, Walter. Byzantium and the Early Islamic Conquests. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. A detailed examination of the early Byzantine-Arab wars, though more from the Byzantine perspective.
Kennedy, Hugh. The Armies of the Caliphs. Military and Society in the Early Islamic State. London: Routledge, 2001. A thorough and balanced survey of the armed forces of the Arab conquests and the Caliphate to the mid-tenth century. Especially strong on the fiscal relationship of state and army.
McGeer, Eric. Sowing the Dragon’s Teeth. Byzantine Warfare in the Tenth Century. Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 1994. Both an edition and a critical study of Byzantine military manuals, with much detail on army composition and tactics in the tenth-century age of Byzantine expansion.
Treadgold, Warren. Byzantium and Its Army 284-1081. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. A survey of the linked development of the Byzantine state and army, with emphasis on institutions and finances as a window on army size, which he sees, unconvincingly, as much larger than Haldon and Whittow do.
Whittow, Mark. The Making of Byzantium, 600-1025. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996. An excellent reinterpretation of Byzantine history, with a revealing focus on political and military strategy in the broad context of Near Eastern geography, economics, and society.