Thanks, that was very interesting. It's not much information, but one finds so little about that comparatively neglected piece of the Mediterranean. The book you meant is "Muslim Expansion and Byzantine Collapse in North Africa"? Too bad I'm unlikely to find it in libraries here. I guessed that Africa must have remained important until the 7th century given that it had just supported Heraclius' rebellion, but that it wasn't a good recruitment base comes as a surprise. Perhaps that helps explain why the empire also failed to hold the south of the Iberian Peninsula, which seemed well worth holding (the Arabs, after all, managed it for a long time): they lacked manpower form their nearest main in Africa, and elsewhere it was tied up in different conflicts?
That is indeed the book.
The loss of Byzantine Spania isn't really a subject with which I am well acquainted, but it seems that the establishment of imperial control there was chiefly reliant on the fact that no major political agglomerations existed in southern Iberia at that point. The Suebi were stuck up in Gallaecia and Gothic power probably didn't extend south of the Tagos at the time of the Ioustinianic conquest. It was always a far outpost that never received much in terms of reinforcements, and when, under Liuvigild, the Goths finally established control over most of the peninsula, a decline in Byzantine control was practically foreordained. The fact that the final Gothic conquest took place during the greatest threat to the Empire's existence in its long history - the Last Persian War - merely made an already-unlikely reinforcement expedition impossible.
innonimatu said:
It still seems amazing how fast the arabs seized the provinces of the empire piece by piece, especially as the arabs themselves must not have been that numerous. Can the explanation be as simple as that old "nomad advantage" of using a large proportion of their male population as warriors?
It doesn't really matter how many of the Muslims' overall population were warriors. Even a united Arabia could never have defeated the Empire under any other circumstances. But after a thirty-year war in which most of the Empire's army was destroyed, either by the Sasanians or in civil conflict, the Byzantines really only had one sizable field army to stop the Muslims. That field army was badly battered at Yarmouk. After that, a Levantine defense was untenable.
Remember, when Herakleios won the Last Persian War, he didn't actually
reconquer the Levant and Egypt from the Sasanians. Shahrvaraz was induced to leave because of the Sasanians' own internal problems (admittedly, these were partially created and definitely exacerbated by Herakleios himself). The Empire was barely capable of holding those territories with the troops that it had at the time. Hell, the numbers that the Muslims could muster may have even exceeded those available to the Byzantines, as ridiculous as that appear on the face of it. Later recruitment partially made up these numbers, but these recruits were, of course, poorly trained and their performance showed it. Only the forces that were left on the defensive in Armenia and Anatolia really came close to covering themselves in glory; the Egyptian expeditions were the most that they could muster for much of an offensive campaign, and those, already hamstrung by the political squabbles of Martina and Valentinos, didn't really work out all that well.
None of this is to deny the Muslims agency in their own conquests. It's just that there was a very huge and unlikely precondition that had to be met for them to get anywhere, and they lucked into it at precisely the right time.
You mentioned that it wasn't met with universal approval. What did the opposition say?
Kaegi places a great deal of emphasis on the fractures between imperial central authority and the African military government, and on the fracture between the Romano-African population and the Greek-officered and -led army. By other interpretations, those are correspondingly less relevant; the place was simply not that well defended, regardless of its internal problems (which may or may not have been important).
The central, very basic narrative I typed up is more or less agreed upon, though.
