Mediterranean & Near East · 632–656

The Rise of Islam: The History Behind the Game

In under a generation, a newly unified Arabia overran two of the greatest empires of late antiquity. Era of Warlords covers the astonishing speed of the Rashidun conquests, from the death of the Prophet to the first civil war that nearly undid them.

Two exhausted empires

By 632 AD, the Byzantine (Eastern Roman) and Sassanid Persian empires had just finished nearly three decades of brutal, mutually ruinous warfare against each other, leaving both treasuries drained and both frontier defenses hollowed out. That same year, the Prophet Muhammad died having united the previously fractious tribes of Arabia under Islam for the first time — and his successors, the Rashidun ("Rightly Guided") Caliphs, inherited a newly cohesive, battle-tested Arabian confederation right as its two great neighbors were at their weakest.

A generation of conquest

The results were staggering. At the Battle of Yarmouk in 636, Rashidun forces broke Byzantine power in the Levant for good; the same year, victory at al-Qadisiyyah opened the Sassanid heartland to invasion. By 642, the crushing Rashidun victory at Nihavand — remembered in Muslim tradition as the "Victory of Victories" — effectively ended organized Sassanid resistance, and within a few more years the once-mighty Persian Empire had ceased to exist as a state.

The conquests' pace only slowed when unity at home broke down. The assassination of the third caliph, Uthman, in 656 triggered the First Fitna — the first Islamic civil war, fought between Ali and rival claimants — a reminder that the empire built in a generation could just as quickly turn on itself.

87 territories, playable from any of the scenarios above, against AI rivals with their own diplomacy and ambitions.