abstract
| - After his crushing victory over Yazdegird and his Persian host at Qadisiya, Khalid ibn al Walid rested in wake of his victory. He was confident of his victory over Persia; it showed that his soldiers were easily capable of getting to grips with the Persians in close quarter combat. However, he was still wary of his other adversaries, the Byzantine Empire - and consequently did not move from his position in the Jezira until peace has been made with Byzantium by the Rashidun Caliph Abu Bakr in 640. Accordingly, therefore, Khalid mustered his forces and drove them deep into the heart of Mesopotamia arriving at Nineveh late in the year and taking it bloodlessly. The Persian Emperor, meanwhile, had fled from his base in Nineveh to his capital at Ctesiphon, where he watched operations from between the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Khalid, after his leisurely pillage and conquest of Western Mesopotamia, converged on Ctesiphon, which Yazdegird and his army of levies, now 20,000 strong, departed from promptly. In the midsummer of 641, the wealthiest city in the East, second only to Constantinople in the world, fell to the Arab hordes. It was despoiled and plundered by the the ferocious Khalid, who was swift in his pursuit of the Persians. He caught up with Yazdegird in the early spring of 642, near the town of Nehavend on the Iranian Plateau.
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