Historic Battles

Few regions have been fought over as often, and a handful of engagements redirected the history of the whole area.

At Yarmouk in 636, Muslim forces defeated a much larger Byzantine army on the plateau above the Jordan valley, ending Byzantine rule in Syria. Qadisiyyah, a year later, had the same effect on Sasanian Persia. Together they opened the era of Islamic expansion.

At Hattin in 1187, Salah al-Din drew the Crusader army away from water in the July heat and destroyed it, recovering Jerusalem within months. At Ain Jalut in 1260, the Mamluks under Qutuz and Baybars defeated a Mongol force in Galilee — the first serious check to a Mongol advance that had already destroyed Baghdad, and the point at which that advance stopped.

Others reshaped the map differently: Marj Dabiq in 1516 brought the Arab lands under Ottoman rule; the long Reconquista campaigns ended Al-Andalus at Granada in 1492; and the twentieth-century campaigns of the two world wars and the independence struggles produced the states that exist today.