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"I have no concern with the world save through it I make provision for the hereafter."

The second of the 'Rightly Guided' caliphs and the commander of the faithful during the greatest years of the conquest, Umar transformed a movement into an empire. A companion of the Prophet Muhammad renowned for his stern justice and simplicity of life, he directed from Medina the astonishing campaigns that overran Syria, Egypt, and Persia, appointing and controlling generals like Khalid, Amr, and Sa'd across a front thousands of miles wide. He was also the architect of the state that governed the conquests — establishing the diwan register of pensions, the Muslim calendar, garrison cities, and the framework of taxation and protected 'People of the Book' status for conquered Christians and Jews that let a tiny Arab elite rule vast populations. Famous for entering Jerusalem humbly on foot and guaranteeing its Christians' safety, he was assassinated in Medina by a Persian captive in 644, at the height of the empire's expansion.

"I have fought in so many battles that there is no spot on my body but bears a scar of a sword or an arrow."

The greatest general of the early conquests, Khalid ibn al-Walid was never defeated in a major battle. Once the pagan commander who had beaten the Muslims at Uhud, he converted and became the sword of Islam — crushing the rebel tribes in the Ridda wars, then unleashing a career of astonishing victories. His legendary forced march across the waterless desert from Iraq to Syria, guided by camels used as water-stores, brought his army into the Byzantine rear like a bolt from nowhere. At Yarmouk in 636 his masterly handling of mobile cavalry destroyed a Byzantine army several times his size and severed Syria from the empire forever. Feared and loved by his men, he was so overshadowing that the caliph Umar dismissed him from command — reportedly lest the people credit victory to Khalid rather than to God. He died, to his own frustration, not on the battlefield but in his bed, 'like a camel.'

"Egypt is a land of dust turned to gold by a single river."

A shrewd Meccan aristocrat, diplomat, and soldier, Amr ibn al-As conquered Egypt for Islam with a tiny army through boldness and political skill. He won permission from the caliph Umar to invade, beat the Byzantines at Heliopolis, and after a long siege took the great city of Alexandria, exploiting the resentment of Egypt's Coptic Christians toward their Byzantine overlords. He founded the garrison city of Fustat — the seed of modern Cairo — and governed Egypt with a light and pragmatic hand, reopening the ancient canal to the Red Sea. A supremely able politician, he later played a decisive role in the civil wars of Islam, helping Mu'awiya win the caliphate. He died as governor of the rich province he had conquered, one of the most consequential and cunning figures of the age of conquest.

"Patience and prayer are the two wings of victory."

One of the earliest converts to Islam and a companion of the Prophet, Sa'd ibn Abi Waqqas commanded the army that destroyed the Sasanian Empire. Appointed by Umar to lead the invasion of Iraq, he faced the main Persian host — with its war elephants and elite savaran cavalry — under the great general Rostam at al-Qadisiyyah in 636. Though ill and directing the battle from a litter, he won a crushing victory after days of ferocious fighting. He went on to take the Sasanian capital of Ctesiphon with its fabulous treasures, and he founded the garrison city of Kufa, which became a great centre of the new Islamic civilisation in Iraq. Renowned for his piety and as one of the ten companions promised paradise, he was later, by tradition, credited with carrying Islam as far as China. He died at his estate near Medina, one of the last surviving companions of the Prophet.

"The sea is behind you, and the enemy before you."

A Berber commander and freedman in Umayyad service, Tariq ibn Ziyad led the invasion of Visigothic Spain in 711, crossing the strait from Africa and landing at the great rock that ever after bore his name — Jabal Tariq, Gibraltar. With a mostly Berber army he met and destroyed the army of the Visigothic king Roderic at the Guadalete, exploiting the treachery of Roderic's rivals. Legend has him burning his own ships on landing and telling his men that the sea was behind them and the enemy before — there could be no retreat, only victory. He drove north with astonishing speed, taking Toledo, the Visigothic capital, and within a few years almost all of Iberia had fallen. His conquest founded al-Andalus, one of the most brilliant civilisations of the medieval world. His later fate is obscure — recalled to Damascus, he passed out of the record.

"Peace be with thee, O Syria — and what a beautiful land thou wilt be for the enemy."

The emperor who had just achieved one of history's great comebacks — defeating Persia and recovering Jerusalem and the True Cross — lived to see it all swept away. Within a few years of his triumph, the armies of Islam erupted from Arabia and struck the exhausted Byzantine East. Heraclius gathered a great army to crush them, but it was annihilated at Yarmouk in 636. Aged, ill, and heartbroken, he could only watch as Syria, Palestine, and Egypt — the provinces he had bled to reconquer from Persia — fell one after another to the Arabs. He is said to have bidden a bitter farewell to Syria as he withdrew. He died in 641, a disillusioned man, the frontier of his empire pulled back to the mountains of Anatolia, having witnessed both the summit of Roman revival and the beginning of its greatest catastrophe.

"The empire of a thousand years cannot end in my lifetime."

The last emperor of Sasanian Persia, Yazdegerd III came to the throne as a boy of eight, in the chaos that followed the ruinous war with Byzantium and the murder of his grandfather Khosrow II. He inherited a shattered, divided empire just as the Arab storm broke, and he spent his short reign in flight and futile resistance. His armies were destroyed at Qadisiyyah and then, decisively, at Nahavand in 642 — the 'Victory of Victories' that ended organised Persian resistance. Yazdegerd fled ever eastward across his crumbling empire, seeking help from local lords and even from Tang China, but found none. In 651 he was murdered near Merv, by tradition by a miller who coveted his jewels. With him ended the Sasanian dynasty and over a thousand years of Persian imperial independence, and Iran began its long transformation into a land of Islam.

"The city of the Virgin shall be the grave of the invader."

A soldier of humble origins from the eastern frontier, Leo III seized the imperial throne in 717 at the very moment the Umayyad Caliphate launched its greatest assault on Constantinople. In the year-long siege of 717–718 he masterminded one of the most important defensive victories in history — using the great walls, the terrifying Greek Fire that destroyed the Arab fleets, a Bulgar alliance that fell on the besiegers, and the miseries of a brutal winter to annihilate the vast Umayyad army and navy. The destruction of the invaders in 718 broke the momentum of the Islamic advance in the east and secured the survival of the Byzantine Empire — and, many historians argue, of Christian Europe. Leo went on to found a new dynasty and to launch the fierce controversy over icons known as Iconoclasm, but his enduring achievement was the salvation of Constantinople.

"Let us stand firm as a wall of ice, and the charge shall break upon us."

The effective ruler of the Frankish kingdom and grandfather of Charlemagne, Charles Martel — 'the Hammer' — was the man who, in later tradition, halted the Islamic advance into Western Europe. When an Umayyad army raided north out of Spain deep into Gaul in 732, Charles met it between Tours and Poitiers with his seasoned Frankish infantry, drawn up in a dense, disciplined square that stood immovable against the Muslim cavalry charges through a long day of battle. The Umayyad commander was killed and the raiders withdrew. Whatever its true strategic weight — it was one of many raids — Tours entered legend as the salvation of Christian Europe, and it cemented the power of Charles's family. He reorganised the Frankish military around heavy cavalry, ruled in all but name, and founded the Carolingian dynasty that his grandson Charlemagne would raise to imperial glory.