The Long Brief: Holiday From History [Part 2]
Maps are masks. Tribes, sects, and memory wait underneath.
February Long Briefs = a four-part serialization of Holiday From History. This week is Part 2: the imperial afterlife—why borders hold on paper while peoples keep score in blood.
Full book: Holiday From History on Amazon
Shalom, friends.
Part 2 is structural history with direct operational implications: conquest patterns, post-empire fractures, and the durable loyalties Western policy keeps ignoring.
This installment explains why “nation-state” is often a veneer—why governance collapses into kinship, militia, and sect when pressure hits—and why that reality keeps defeating diplomatic language.
Holiday From History:
The West’s Delusion of Peace and the Return of War
Part Two: Empires and Their Ruins
Chapter 6: The First Conquests
By 600 CE, the Near East was a battlefield of two exhausted giants: Byzantium in the west and Persia in the east. They had just bled each other dry in a final war that ended in 628. Emperor Heraclius clawed out a victory, but the decades of fighting left both empires hollow. Bubonic plague had already torn through their populations. Economies were wrecked, armies thin, treasuries bare.
Byzantium looked mighty on a map, stretching from the Balkans to Egypt. Persia ruled from Mesopotamia to Central Asia. In truth, both were brittle. Byzantine Christians weren’t even united: Egyptian and Syrian believers resented Constantinople’s orthodoxy and taxation. Many saw imperial officials as occupiers. Persia had its own fractures—Zoroastrian in theory, but also home to large Christian and Jewish communities. Jews fared better there than under Byzantine rule, where persecution and forced conversion flared.
Both empires leaned on Arab allies to guard their frontiers. Byzantium had the Ghassanids in Syria. Persia had the Lakhmids in Iraq—until it foolishly dismantled that buffer in 602, just as new forces stirred beyond the desert.
Heraclius’s crowning moment came in 630, when he paraded the restored True Cross into Jerusalem. Yet only eight years later, that same city yielded to Arab Muslim armies. The reversal was shocking but not miraculous. Local populations, weary of Byzantine tax collectors and theological enforcers, often welcomed the new rulers. Arabs demanded less gold and, at first, showed little interest in dictating Christian doctrine. In Alexandria and Jerusalem, gates opened with barely a fight. A change of masters seemed better than more imperial fatigue.
The late antique order was not toppled by a blank-slate revolution. It was already fractured, waiting to be replaced. Arab conquerors did not build from nothing; they absorbed the machinery of Byzantium and Persia, retooled their hierarchies, and draped them in the language of revelation. Into a weary, divided world came a movement that claimed both divine sanction and political destiny.
The Arab conquests began at home. When Muhammad died in 632, Arabia was anything but united. Tribes that had pledged to him quickly bolted, some rallying to rival prophets. The first caliph, Abu Bakr, called it what it was—apostasy—and crushed the Ridda revolts without mercy. By 634, his armies had broken the back of tribal separatism. The Arabs, once fractured clans, were now welded into a single war machine bound by faith, plunder, and discipline.
