Khalid ibn Yazid

He participated in a number of successful military campaigns in 691, but then chose to retire to his Homs estate, where he lived out the rest of his life.

[2] A struggle for succession broke out between the supporters of the young Khalid and those who favored Marwan ibn al-Hakam (623 or 626–685), who was not part of the ruling branch of the Umayyad family (the Sufyanids), but was much older and more experienced.

[7] In the summer of 691, Khalid was made a commander in Abd al-Malik's siege of the Qaysi leader Zufar ibn al-Harith al-Kilabi in al-Qarqisiya in the Jazira.

[8] After this victory, the caliph appointed Khalid commander of his army's left wing at the Battle of Maskin (691) against Mus'ab ibn al-Zubayr, which resulted in the Umayyad conquest of Zubayrid Iraq.

[9] After this short spell as a military commander, Khalid appears to have spent the rest of his life in Homs,[10] which had been appointed to him as an emirate already by Marwan.

[19] In reality, however, these translations only started in the late 8th century (at the very earliest during the reign of the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur, r. 754–775),[20] and the credit given for them to Khalid is generally held to be part of the legend surrounding him.

One of these is the Liber de compositione alchemiae ("Book on the Composition of Alchemy", translation of the Masāʾil Khālid li-Maryānus al-rāhib mentioned above), which contains a dialogue between Khalid and the semi-legendary Byzantine monk Morienus (Arabic: مريانس, Maryānus, perhaps from Greek Μαριανός, Marianos).

[35] It was the first full-length Arabic alchemical work to be translated into Latin, a task which was completed on 11 February 1144 by the English Arabist Robert of Chester.