Ibn al-Zubayr initiates the rebuilding of the…

Yazid had been succeeded by his son, Muawiya II, but he dies in early 684 later without ever having enjoyed any real authority outside the Sufyan family's traditional stronghold of Syria.

His death provokes a crisis, since his other brothers are too young to succeed.

As a result, Umayyad authority collapses across the Caliphate and Ibn al-Zubayr is accepted by most of the Muslims as their new leader: the Umayyad governor of Iraq, Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad, is evicted from the province, coins in Ibn al-Zubayr's name are minted in Persia, and the Banu Qays of northern Syria and the Jazira go over to his cause.

Even some members of the Umayyad family consider going to Mecca and declaring their allegiance to him; in contrast, the local tribes of central and southern Syria, led by the Banu Kalb under Ibn Bahdal and Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyan, uphold the Umayyad cause.

At their initiative, a shura of the loyal tribes is held at Jabiya, where Marwan ibn al-Hakam, a cousin of Mu'awiya I who had served under the Caliph Uthman ibn Affan (r. 644–656) but had played no role in Mu'awiya's Umayyad regime, is elected as the Umayyads' caliphal candidate.

Marwan's election provokes the reaction of the Qays, who rally around the governor of Damascus, al-Dahhak ibn Qays al-Fihri.

After vacillating between the two candidates, al-Dahhak is persuaded to recognize Ibn al-Zubayr, and begins assembling his forces on the field of Marj al-Suffar near Damascus.

In response, the Umayyad coalition marches on Damascus, which is surrendered to the Umayyads by a member of the Ghassanid tribe.

The two armies first clash in mid-July 684 at the plain of Marj al-Suffar, and the Qays are pushed towards Marj Rahit.

Twenty days of skirmishing between the two camps follow, until the final battle takes place on August 18.

The numbers of the two opponents are uncertain: al-Tabari puts Marwan's forces at six thousand, another tradition at thirteen thousand and thirty thousand for Marwan and al-Dahhak respectively, while Ibn Khayyat inflates the numbers to thirty thousand and sixty thousand respectively.

The traditions agree, however, that the Umayyad forces are considerably outnumbered.

Marwan's commanders are Abbas ibn Ziyad, Amr ibn Sa'id al-As and Ubayd Allah ibn Ziyad (another tradition has Ubayd Allah commanding the cavalry and Malik ibn Hubayra al-Skauni the infantry), while only one of al-Dahhak's commanders, Ziyad ibn Amr ibn Mu'awiya al-Uqayli, is known.

A plethora of anecdotes, individual accounts and poems on the battle survives, but the details of the battle itself are not clear, except that the day resulted in a crushing Umayyad victory: the main leaders of the Qays, including al-Dahhak, fell in the field.

N. Elisséeff explains the Umayyad success by the possible defection of Qays-aligned tribes during the preceding weeks, eager to uphold the Syrian hegemony over the Caliphate.

In addition, Elisséeff points out that the Umayyads still controlled the state treasury in Damascus, allowing them to bribe tribes to join them.

The remnants of the Qays army flee to Qarqisiya under Zufar ibn Harith al-Kilabi, and Marwan is officially proclaimed as Caliph at Damascus.

The victory at Marj Rahit secures the Umayyads' position in Syria, and allows them to go into the offensive against Ibn al-Zubayr's supporters.

Egypt is recovered later in the year.

Ecgfrith of Northumbria sends an expedition to Ireland under his ealdorman Berht, laying waste to the territory of Fínsnechta Fledach, King of Brega, a petty kingdom north of Dublin.

Early Khazar history is intimately tied with that of the Göktürk empire, founded when the Ashina clan had overthrew the Juan Juan in 552.

With the collapse of the Göktürk empire due to internal conflict in the seventh century, the western half of the Turk empire had split into a number of tribal confederations, among whom were the Bulgars, led by the Dulo clan, and the Khazars, led by the Ashina clan, the traditional rulers of the Göktürk empire.

By 670, the Khazars had broken the Bulgar confederation, causing various tribal groups to migrate and leaving two remnants of Bulgar rule—Volga Bulgaria, and the Bulgarian khanate on the Danube River.

The first significant appearance of the Khazars in history had been their aid to the campaign of the Roman emperor Heraclius against the Sassanid Persians.

The Khazar ruler Ziebel (sometimes identified, inconclusively, as Tong Yabghu Khagan of the West Turks) had aided the Romans in overrunning Georgia.

A marriage had even been contemplated between Ziebel's son and Heraclius' daughter, but never took place.

During these campaigns, the Khazars may have been ruled by Mo-ho-sahd and their forces may have been under the command of his son Buri-sad.

The Umayyad Caliphate has been attempting simultaneously to expand its influence into Transoxiana and the Caucasus.

The first war between Khazaria and the Caliphate had been fought in the early 650s and ended with the defeat of an Arab force led by Abd ar-Rahman ibn Rabiah outside the Khazar town of Balanjar, after a battle in which both sides used siege engines on the others' troops.

Several further conflicts would erupt in the in following the decades, with Arab attacks and Khazar raids into Kurdistan and Iran.

The Khazars counterattack around 685, penetrating southward of the Caucasus into present-day Georgia, and Azerbaijan.

The situation in the Eastern provinces of the Empire is stable due to the victoroes of Constantine, whose sixteen-year-old son succeeds him in September 685 as Emperor Justinian II.

After a preliminary strike against the Arabs in Armenia, Justinian manages to augment the sum paid by the Umayyad Caliphs as an annual tribute, and to regain control of part of Cyprus.

The incomes of the provinces of Armenia and Iberia are divided among the two empires.

The Penitents are a group of pro-Alid Kufans, led by a certain Sulayman ibn Surad, who wish to atone for their failure to assist Husayn ibn Ali in his uprising against the Umayyads, which had condemned him to death at the Battle of Karbala in 680.

With the outbreak of the Second Islamic Civil War and the collapse of Umayyad authority across Iraq in 683/684, Sulayman ibn Surad had begun in November 684 to call upon his fellow Kufans to avenge their failure.

Although some sixteen thousand had pledged themselves to support him, only some five thousand show up at their mustering place.

Undeterred, they move up the Euphrates towards the Jazira.

At Qarqisiya, the Qaysi refugees from the Battle of Marj Rahit aid them with supplies and advice but refuse to join them, seeing no hope in their endeavor.

The Penitents press on to 'Ayn al-Warda (identified with Ra's al-'Ayn), where they meet an Umayyad army of twenty thousand under Husayn ibn Numayr.

Although the Penitents hold the upper hand in a first skirmish, over the next two days the numerical superiority of the Umayyad army begins to prevail.

Finally, the Penitents are surrounded and almost annihilated, with only a few survivors escaping under the cover of night and making it back to Kufa.

Marwan is able to arrange the succession of his son 'Abd al-Malik by eliminating all other contenders for the caliphate.

His short reign is a period of continuous battle between various factions for the caliphate.

He strengthens the foundations of the Umayyad house and concentrates more power in the hands of the caliph.

An old man in poor health when he ascends the throne, Marwan dies of illness less than a year later.

Abd al-Malik becomes caliph and attempts to unify the fractious Arab tribes, now split between various northern and southern factions.

The forces opposing the Umayyads are still formidable.

There are, first, the northern Arab tribes who, under their leader Zufar, are holding out in northern Syria and Iraq.

The second focus of resistance is in Iraq, where three main groups, opposed to each other but united in their resistance to the Umayyads, hold sway: the Kharijites, the Shi'ah, and the forces of the anticaliph 'Abd Allah ibn az-Zubayr, who is proclaimed caliph in Mecca in 685 and receives at least nominal allegiance from many provinces.

Constantine of Mananalis, a dualistic community near Samosata, had studied the Gospels and Epistles, combined dualistic and Christian doctrines, and, upon the basis of the former, vigorously opposed the formalism of the church.

Regarding himself as called to restore the pure Christianity of Paul, he had adopted the name Silvanus, one of Paul’s disciples, and about the year 660 had established his first congregation at Kibossa, near Colonia in western Armenia thus founding the Paulician sect.

Constantine-Silvanus directs the Paulician movement until his death in 684, which occurs by stoning after his arrest by soldiers sent by the emperor Constantine IV to suppress heresy.

Having insisted that the New Testament (as he interpreted it) should be the only written source of religious guidance, Constantine-Silvanus leaves no known writings.

His duality of names will be imitated by subsequent Paulician leaders.

Simeon, the court official who had executed the order, is himself converted, and, adopting the name Titus, becomes Constantine’s successor.

The dualistic sect, holding Gnostic and Manichaean beliefs and subject to sporadic persecutions, flourishes between 650 and 872 in Anatolia, spreading from Armenia to the Eastern Themes of the Empire.

The Gnostic dualistic sect called Bogomilism, the synthesis of Armenian Paulicianism and the Bulgarian Slavonic Church reform movement, would emerge in Bulgaria between 927 and 970 and spread throughout the Empire into Serbia, Bosnia, Italy and France; Bogomilism will eventually morph into Catharism, a name given to a religious sect with Gnostic elements that will appear in the Languedoc region of France in the eleventh century and flourish in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

The Isle of Wight and the adjacent shore of southern Hampshire had become a Jutish kingdom ruled by King Stuf and his successors until the year 661 when it had been invaded by Wulfhere of Mercia and forcibly converted to Christianity at sword point.

When he left for Mercia, the islanders had reverted to paganism.

An invasion by Caedwalla of Wessex in 685 is by all accounts prolonged and bloody.

The Anglo Saxon Chronicle reports that during Caedwalla's attempts to subdue the population he was gravely wounded—wounds from which he will die within a couple of years.

Most of the Jutish population of the island are slaughtered before final subjugation and the remnant forced to accept Christianity as their religion and the West Saxon dialect as their language.

The island—the last place in the United Kingdom to convert to Christianity—from 685 can therefore be considered to have become part of Wessex and, following the accession of West Saxon kings as kings of all England, then part of England.

The North Welsh in Strathclyde, Scots (Irish) in Dal Riada (Argyllshire) and indigenous Picts fight for supremacy in Scotland, being left free to contest their own fate by rivalries among the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms to the south.

The Northumbrians have been gradually extending their territory to the north, their constituent kingdom of Bernicia having in around 638 captured Edinburgh from the Gododdin.

They had established political dominance during the ensuing thirty years over the Kingdoms of Strathclyde and Dál Riata, as well as Pictish Fortriu.

The Picts, under overking Bridei, have warred since 672 against Stratchclyde.

With the settling of the Anglo-Saxon Heptarchy into a pattern of relative order in 685,  the Northumbrian ruler Ecgfrith marshals a huge army, apparently to stop the Picts from raiding to the south.

Ecgrith’s force against the advice of Cuthbert of Lindisfarne advances through Lothian and reaches a site known as Nechtan’s Mere (present Dunnichen in Angus), where he engages a Pictish force of equal strength, led by Bridei.

The Picts defeat the Northumbrians, killing Ecgfrith, and take from the weakened Northumbrian kingdom all its territory beyond the Firth of Forth.