Introduction

Caucasia is something of an in-between zone, with the Anatolian plateau and Black Sea to the west and the Caspian Sea to the east, and the western Central Asian steppe to the north and the ancient Mesopotamia- Zagros region to the south (see Map 1). In the millennium before the rise of Islam, it found itself between the Roman and Persian empires, each vying to pull the Caucasian powers over to their side. This tug-of-war intensified in the third–sixth centuries ce, as the Sasanian dynasty that assumed control of the Persian Empire in 224 pursued a more centralising and expansionist policy than its Parthian predecessor. The success of the Muslim conquests in the seventh century meant that the Caliphate (Islamic Empire) replaced the Persian Empire as the principal adversary of the Roman Empire (or Byzantine Empire, as I will henceforth call the Roman Empire of the seventh–fifteenth centuries ce, following usual practice). Although the Caliphate was the dominant actor in this region, it is the contention of this paper that the Byzantine Empire, and to a lesser extent the Khazar Empire, which had emerged in the eighth century in the northern part of Caucasia, were still major players in this struggle for influence over Caucasia. It is also argued that this struggle hampered the integration of Caucasia into the Caliphate and constrained the processes of Islamicisation and Arabicisation.

The modern Caucasian nations of Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan are sometimes assumed to correspond loosely to the polities of Armīniyya, Jurzān and Arrān that are known to medieval Muslim authors. However, these three geographical entities should not in any way be thought of as states or nations. They certainly possessed a degree of distinctiveness, which had been given greater substance by the emergence of an ecclesiastical hierarchy upon their conversion to Christianity in Late Antiquity and by the use of a distinctive language for church literature – Armenian, Georgian and Albanian. However, their borders were very fluid and subject to change over time, and this is reflected in the frequent disagreement in our sources over which settlements belonged to which region. Thus Tiflīs (modern Tblisi) is accounted by some medieval Muslim geographers as belonging to Jurzān and by others as part of Arrān.