20 A Short History of the Middle East
the seat of Mu'awiya's power before his elevation to the caliphate,
now became the centre of gravity of the Empire, and Damascus its
capital.
Under the Umayyads the military extension of the Arab Empire
continued, until by 732, the centenary of the Prophet's death, it
had reached its geographical limits, Transoxiana and Northern
India in the east, Spain in the west. The Muslims had indeed in-
vaded France, but in the centenary year itself were decisively
checked half-way to the English Channel, at a battle fought be-
tween Tours and Poitiers, by the Frank Charles Martel. Though
the Muslims had conquered Crete, they had twice failed to take
Constantinople, which remained the capital of a substantial
Byzantine Empire comprising the Balkans and Asia Minor.1 In
the south the Sahara remained a barrier, and it was some centuries
before Islam effectively penetrated up the Nile beyond Aswan.
The Umayyads maintained the broad lines of internal ad-
ministration laid down by 'Umar, those of an Arab military
aristocracy. The Arab military governors of the provinces through-
out the vast Empire enjoyed a freedom from central control
amounting almost to independence. Civil administration remained
in the same non-Arab and mainly non-Muslim hands as before.
For a whole century, from the Arab conquest in 636 down to 743,
the financial administration of the city of Damascus itself remained
in the hands of a Syrian Christian family, one of whose members
has been canonized by the Church as St. John of Damascus.
Already at this stage however, the great social defect of the Arab
character, its unreadiness to subordinate its overmastering self-will
and self-interest, whether of individual, of family, or of tribe, to
the good of a larger group, was manifesting itself in incidents that
boded ill for the future of the Arab Empire.! 'The Arabs arc in-
capable of founding an empire*, wrote the fourteenth-century
Muslim historian Ibn Khaldun, 'unless they are imbued with
religious enthusiasm by,a prophet or a saint'| and the social
cohesive force of Mohammed's teaching was alreldy largely spent
on the generation which personally knew him. The most im-
1 Their recognition of the de facto independence of the Byzantine Empire
conflicted with their theoretical duty to bring about the conversion of the whole
world to Islam. The orthodox explanation was that a respite had been granted
to the Byzantine Empire because Heraclius, unlike the Persian King who had
torn to pieces the Prophet's fictitious letter bidding him adopt Islam, had
preserved his letter in musk! (D. S. Margoliouth, The Early Development of
Mohammedanism, 103.)