Yazid II

By dint of his descent, Yazid was a natural candidate for the succession to the caliphate.[1] A noble Arab maternal lineage held political weight during this period in the Caliphate's history,[14] and Yazid took pride in his maternal Sufyanid descent, viewing himself superior to his paternal half-brothers.[7] He was chosen by his half-brother Caliph Sulayman (r. 715–717) as the second-in-line in the caliphal succession after their first cousin, Umar II, who ruled from 717 to 720.[1] Yazid acceded at the age of 29 after the death of Umar II on 9 February 720.[1][15] For most of his reign, he resided in Damascus or his estates in Jund al-Urdunn (the military district of Jordan),[1] which was centered in Tiberias and roughly corresponded with the Byzantine province of Palaestina Secunda.[16]

Silver dirham of Yazid II, minted in 721/22

Shortly before or immediately after Yazid's accession, the veteran commander and disgraced governor of Iraq and the vast eastern province of Khurasan, Yazid ibn al-Muhallab, escaped from the fortress of Aleppo where Umar II had him imprisoned.[17][18] During Sulayman's reign, Ibn al-Muhallab, an enemy of al-Hajjaj, had been responsible for the torture and deaths of members of al-Hajjaj's family, Yazid's in-laws, and feared retaliatory maltreatment when Yazid's accession became apparent.[17] Yazid had long held suspicions, nurtured by al-Hajjaj, of Ibn al-Muhallab's and the Muhallabid family's influence and ambitions in Iraq and the eastern Caliphate.[19]

Evading the pursuit of Umar's or Yazid's commanders, Ibn al-Muhallab made his way to Basra, one of the main garrison towns of Iraq and the center of his family and Azd Uman tribe.[17] On Yazid's orders, Basra's governor Adi ibn Artat al-Fazari arrested many of Ibn al-Muhallab's brothers and cousins before his arrival to the city.[17][20] Ibn Artat was unable to stop Ibn al-Muhallab's entry and the latter, with support from his Yamani tribal allies in the Basra garrison, besieged Ibn Artat in the city's citadel.[17] The Qays–Mudar factions of the garrison, though traditional rivals of the Yaman and unsympathetic to Ibn al-Muhallab, did not actively or effectively oppose him.[21] Ibn al-Muhallab seized the citadel, captured the governor and established control over Basra.[21] Yazid pardoned him, but Ibn al-Muhallab continued his opposition, declaring jihad (holy war) against the caliph and the Syrian troops who enforced Umayyad authority in Iraq.[21] Umar II had likely withdrawn most of the Syrians from Wasit, their main garrison in Iraq, and Ibn al-Muhallab captured the city with ease.[22] Most of the qurra (pious Qur'an readers) and the mawali (non-Arab Muslim converts) of Basra supported Ibn al-Muhallab's cause, with the exception of the prominent theologian al-Hasan al-Basri.[23] The Iranian dependencies of Basra, namely Ahwaz, Fars and Kerman, joined the revolt, though not Khurasan, where Qays–Mudar troops counterbalanced the pro-Muhallabid Yamani faction in the province's garrisons.[24]

Map of Iraq in the early 9th century

Ibn al-Muhallab advanced toward Kufa, the other main garrison center of Iraq, where he attracted support across the tribal spectrum and among many of its noble Arab households.[25] In the meantime, Yazid dispatched his kinsmen, the veteran commanders Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik and al-Abbas ibn al-Walid, to suppress the revolt.[26] They killed Ibn al-Muhallab and routed his army near Kufa on 24 August 720.[27] Yazid ordered the executions of the roughly two hundred prisoners-of-war captured from Ibn al-Muhallab's camp, while Ibn al-Muhallab's son Mu'awiya ordered the execution of Ibn Artat and his thirty supporters incarcerated in Wasit.[28] Afterward, the Umayyad authorities pursued and killed many of the Muhallabids, including nine to fourteen boys who were sent to Yazid and executed by his order.[29][30] The Muhallabid revolt's suppression marked the last of the great anti-Umayyad uprisings in Iraq.[31]

The defeat of the Yamani Muhallabids and Yazid's successive appointments to Iraq of the pro-Qaysi Maslama—who was shortly dismissed for not forwarding the provincial tax surplus to the caliph's treasury—and Maslama's Qaysi lieutenant, Umar ibn Hubayra al-Fazari, signaled a triumph for the Qays–Mudar faction in the province and its eastern dependencies.[32] According to the historian Julius Wellhausen, "the proscription of the whole of the prominent and powerful [Muhallabid] family, a measure hitherto unheard of in the history of the Umaiyids [sic], came like a declaration of war against the Yemen [faction] in general, and the corollary was that the government was degenerating into a Qaisite party-rule".[19] Wellhausen blames the caliph for the escalation of factionalism and attributed the appointment of Ibn Hubayra to his own desire for revenge against the Muhallabids' Yamani backers.[19] The Yamani-affiliated tribes of Khurasan viewed the events as a humiliation and during the Abbasid Revolution which toppled the Umayyads in 750 they adopted as one of their slogans "revenge for the Banu Muhallab [Muhallabids]".[33]

Orientalist Henri Lammens considers Yazid's portrayal as "a pro-Mudar and anti-Yaman extremist" as "unfair, as he actually tried to balance the conflicting groups, just as other Umayyad rulers did".[1] Yazid did not champion the Qays over the Quda'a, the major component of the Yaman in Syria.[19] Indeed, members of the Quda'a's principal tribe, the Banu Kalb, had formed the core of the caliph's army during the suppression, pursuit and elimination of the Muhallabids.[19] He appointed Yamani governors to the large provinces of Ifriqiya (central North Africa) and the Jazira (Upper Mesopotamia) and its dependent districts of Adharbayjan and Armenia.[1]

The expenses of enforcing Umayyad rule in Iraq and the expansionist war efforts along multiple fronts, including the enormous cost of the failed sieges of Constantinople in 717–718, had erased much of the monetary gains from the conquests of Transoxiana, Sind and the Iberian Peninsula under al-Walid I, causing a financial crisis in the Caliphate.[34] Among the solutions of Yazid's predecessor to the fiscal burden were the withdrawal of the Syrians from Iraq, a halt on conquests and near elimination of grants to Umayyad princes, as well as an unrealized goal to withdraw Arab troops altogether from Transoxiana, the Iberian Peninsula and Cilicia.[34] The most significant reforms of Umar II granted equality to the mawali in Khurasan, Sind, Ifriqiya and the Iberian Peninsula by abolishing the jizya, the poll tax traditionally exacted on non-Muslim subjects but in practice extended to non-Arab Muslim converts, and instituting equal pay for mawali in the ranks of the Caliphate's Arab-dominated armies.[1][35] According to Blankinship, the reforms favoring the mawali may have been guided by Umar II's piety but also a fiscal consideration: if equal treatment with the Arabs made the government popular with the mawali it could translate into delegating an increased security role for the mawali in their native provinces and their enthusiastic defense of the Caliphate's frontiers, thereby reducing the expense of deploying and garrisoning Arab troops.[34]

Yazid attempted to reverse, with limited success, the reforms of Umar II, which were opposed by the Arab militarist camp in the Caliphate and the Umayyad ruling family.[1] During Umar II's rule the militarist camp led by Maslama may have accepted a temporary pause in activity to recover from the Constantinople debacle.[36] Under Yazid, Maslama and his proteges, including Ibn Hubayra, were restored or appointed to senior commands, Syrian garrisons were reintroduced to Iraq, the traditional annual raids against the Byzantines and the war with the Khazars were restarted, and the grants of estates or generous sums to Umayyad princes resumed.[37] Although Yazid's policies were presumably meant to gain the backing of the ruling elite and restore the flow of war spoils, they proved insufficient to finance the Caliphate's troops, particularly as booty had become increasingly difficult to obtain by the Arab expeditionary forces.[37]

To fill the depleted coffers of the caliphal treasury Yazid turned to the fifth of provincial tax revenues officially owed to the caliph. Historically, the provinces neglected to forward the revenues if political conditions allowed, and governors often pilfered such funds. To ensure the flow of revenues to the treasury, Yazid appointed governors based on the example set by al-Hajjaj, i.e. upright, meticulously loyal, and ruthless in the collection of taxes.[37] Unlike the era of al-Hajjaj, however, Yazid applied this principle for the first time to Ifriqiya, Khurasan, Sind and the Iberian Peninsula.[37] A major aspect of his policy was the reinstatement of the jizya on the mawali,[37] which alienated the mawali in the aforementioned provinces.[1]

In Ifriqiya, the caliph's governor Yazid ibn Abi Muslim, himself a mawla from Iraq and a protégé of al-Hajjaj, was assassinated by his Berber guard in 720, shortly after his appointment, for attempting to reinstate the jizya.[1] Many, if not most, Berbers had embraced Islam and commanded a strong position in the army, unlike mawali in other parts of the Caliphate.[38] The Berbers reinstalled Ibn Abi Muslim's predecessor Ismail ibn Abd Allah ibn Abi al-Muhajir and notified Yazid, who approved the change.[39] The incident in Ifriqiya was a blow to the Caliphate's prestige in North Africa and served as a harbinger for the Berber Revolt in 740–743.[1] The reinstatement of the jizya in Khurasan in 721/22 by Ibn Hubayra's deputy Sa'id ibn Amr al-Harashi led to revolts and wars in the province that continued for twenty years and partly contributed to the Abbasid Revolution.[1] In Egypt pay increases to the indigenous mawali sailors of the Muslim fleet were reversed.[37]

In March 722 the Syrian army of Yazid's governor in Armenia and Adharbayjan, Mi'laq ibn Saffar al-Bahrani, was routed by the Khazars in Armenia, south of the Caucasus. The defeat marked the culmination of the Caliphate's winter campaign against the Khazars and resulted in considerable Syrian losses.[40] To avenge this defeat, Yazid II sent al-Jarrah ibn Abdallah at the head of a 25,000-strong army of Syrians, who pushed into the Caucasus homeland of the Khazars and took their capital of Balanjar on 22 August.[41] The main body of the highly mobile Khazars avoided the Muslims' pursuit and their presence compelled al-Jarrah to withdraw to Warthan south of the Caucasus and request reinforcements from Yazid.[41] In 723 he led another raid north of Balanjar but made no substantive gains.[41]

According to Greek sources, including Patriarch John V of Jerusalem (d. 735), Theophanes the Confessor (d. 818) and Patriarch Nikephoros I of Constantinople (d. 828), Yazid issued an edict ordering the destruction of all icons in Christian churches across the Caliphate under the influence of a Jewish magician from Tiberias, called Beser or Tessarakontapechys, who promised Yazid a long life of fortune in return.[42] Syriac sources further note that Yazid entrusted Maslama to execute the order and that the edict influenced the Byzantine emperor Leo III (r. 717–741) to enact his own iconoclastic policy in the Byzantine Empire.[43] The Egypt-based Arabic historians al-Kindi (d. 961), Bishop Severus ibn al-Muqaffa (d. 987) and al-Maqrizi (d. 1442) also make note of the edict and describe its execution in Egypt.[44] Medieval historians cite different years for Yazid's edict, but modern historian Alexander Vasiliev holds that July 721, the date cited by Patriarch John V, is the most reliable.[45] The order was reversed by Caliph Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik (r. 724–743).[44]