Maslama ibn Abd al-Malik
705 – 24 December 738) was an Umayyad prince and one of the most prominent Arab generals of the early decades of the 8th century, leading several campaigns against the Byzantine Empire and the Khazar Khaganate.
Maslama was granted extensive estates by his brothers, investing considerable sums to reclaim and develop agricultural lands in Balis, the Balikh valley, and the marshlands of southern Iraq.
Nonetheless, out of respect for Maslama's battlefield reputation, his descendants were largely spared from the Abbasids' wide-scale persecutions of the Umayyad family.
[5] His first major expedition was the 707–708 campaign against the Byzantine city of Tyana in southeastern Asia Minor, which was launched in retaliation for the defeat and death of the distinguished general Maimun the Mardaite the year before.
[4][6][8] A few months later, in the summer, Maslama led another expedition into Asia Minor and defeated a Byzantine army near Amorium, while in 709 he raided into the region of Isauria.
[8] In the same year, Maslama was appointed military governor of the Jazira, Armenia and Adharbayjan, succeeding his uncle Muhammad ibn Marwan.
The Khazar khagan confronted the Arabs at the city of Tarku but, apart from a series of single combats by champions, the two armies did not engage for several days.
The imminent arrival of Khazar reinforcements under the general Alp' forced Maslama to quickly abandon his campaign and retreat to Iberia, leaving his camp with all its equipment as a ruse.
[15] The early Muslim sources generally credit Maslama with leading the Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca in 713, though his nephew Abd al-Aziz ibn al-Walid is also cited as the leader that year.
The Arabs' plans were aided by the recurrence of civil strife, which had plagued the Byzantines since 695; Emperor Anastasius II was overthrown by Theodosius III in 715, who was in turn opposed by the strategos of the Anatolic Theme, Leo the Isaurian.
His navy, however, was soon neutralized by the use of Greek fire, and as his army was unable to overcome the city's land defences, the siege continued into the winter, which was especially severe that year, with snow covering the ground for three months.
[5][4][6] As governor of Iraq, a major provincial office whose authority extended over the eastern half of the Caliphate, Maslama championed the Qays in their factional conflict with the Yaman, whose interests Ibn al-Muhallab had represented.
Arab sources report that the Umayyad troops fought for thirty or forty days in the mud, with continuous rain, before defeating the khagan on 17 September 728.
The impact of their victory is questionable, however; Maslama was ambushed by the Khazars upon his return, and the Arabs abandoned their baggage train and fled through the Darial Pass to safety.
Despite his energy, Maslama's campaigns failed to produce the desired results; by 729, the Arabs had lost control of northeastern Transcaucasia and were again on the defensive, with al-Jarrah having to defend Adharbayjan against a Khazar invasion.
[36][38][39] He is then recorded by the Byzantine chronicler Theophanes the Confessor as having been responsible for the sack of the fortress of Charsianon in late 730, but Arab sources credit Mu'awiya ibn Hisham for this act.
Sa'id was relieved of his command in early 731 by Maslama and imprisoned at Qabala and Bardha'a, charged with endangering the army by disobeying orders, and was released only after the caliph intervened on his behalf.
He restored the provinces of Albania to Muslim allegiance (after punishing the inhabitants of Khaydhan who resisted him) and reached Derbent, where he found a Khazar garrison of 1,000 men and their families.
He re-established the city as an Arab military colony (misr), restoring its fortifications and garrisoning it with 24,000 troops, mostly from Syria, divided into quarters by their district (jund) of origin.
[54][55][56] Leaving his relative Marwan ibn Muhammad (later the last Umayyad caliph, from 744 to 750) in command at Derbent, Maslama returned with the rest of his army south of the Caucasus for the winter.
[10] As the commander of the great assault on Constantinople and the "founder of Islamic Derbent",[5] for over twenty years in the early 8th century, Maslama was "one of the principal props of Umayyad power and a foremost actor on the stage of the East", according to the historian Douglas M.
[61] Maslama's attempt to capture Constantinople in particular became celebrated in later Muslim literature, with several surviving accounts, mostly semi-fictional, in which the historical defeat was transformed into a sort of victory: Maslama was said to have departed only after symbolically entering the Byzantine capital on his horse accompanied by thirty riders; Leo received him with honour and led him to the Hagia Sophia, where the emperor paid homage to the Arab general.
[64][65] His campaign against Constantinople continued to provide inspiration to later Muslim authors, from the Muhadarat al-Abrar ascribed to the 13th-century Andalusian mystic Ibn Arabi, to the khamsa of the 17th-century Ottoman poet Nargisi.
[69][70] The previous inhabitants of Balis had fled the town during the early 7th-century Muslim conquest and it was re-settled by Syrian Arab tribal warriors who converted to Islam.
The canal ran parallel to the Euphrates river, corresponding with medieval accounts tracing Nahr Maslama's route from Balis through Qasirin to the site of Siffin (Tell Abu Hureyra).
There, he built a fortified compound and dug a canal, also known as Nahr Maslama, to transport water from the Balikh to a large cistern which supplied the new town, whose inhabitants were Muslim landed settlers.
[72][b] The historian Jere L. Bacharach speculates that Maslama was the most likely founder of the Umayyad Mosque of Aleppo, whose original construction is otherwise attributed to al-Walid I or Sulayman.
[11] The Umayyad-era qasr (castle) in Balis, a fortified residence with a canal and a wool production center, was possibly a construction by Maslama or Sa'id al-Khayr.
The incident provoked the Qaysi allies of Maslama's family, led by Zufar ibn al-Harith's grandson Abu al-Ward, to revolt against the Abbasids.
[84] His grandson, Muhammad ibn Yazid al-Hisni, a poet, was spared by Caliph al-Mahdi when the latter visited Hisn Maslama in 780, despite making a slight toward the Abbasids in verse.
