The Central Problem: the world of Late Antiquity from its Persian centre (2021)
historytoday.com
historytoday.com
Not really. There were a lot of people that "almost" captured Constantinople. Persians, Arabs, Bulgars, various other Steppe nomads.
Constantinople due to its geography was pretty close to as impregnable as could be given ancient technology (especially when they had naval superiority).
It was only the Crusaders of the 4th crusade in the 1200's and the Ottoman Turks in 1453 that successfully conquered Constantinople. The former had naval superiority thanks to the Venetians, and the latter had gunpowder.
In fact, because of the strength of its defenses, one of the main strategies of the the Byzantine Empire was the tie down the bulk of the enemy's armies before the wall of Constantinople, and then attack their rear, which is exactly what the Emperor Heraclius did to the Persians leading to their defeat.
In addition, the outcome of the war didn't matter so much, because it exhausted both Empires and made them ripe for being conquered by the Arab Muslim armies (the Byzantine Empire pretty much lost all their Middle Eastern provinces, and the Persian Empire was completely conquered).
"When I have a little money, I buy books; and if I have any left, I buy food and clothes." - Erasmus
"Roman historians claim that the Sasanians were aiming to recreate the first Persian empire of Cyrus the Great. This meant pushing the Iranian border with Rome further and further west. Unsurprisingly, Rome and Iran were nearly constantly at war. The two powers competed for even the smallest advantage along an ill-defined and porous frontier running south from the Caucasus into Arabia. Each war was worse than the last, and conflict spread southward as far as Ethiopia, with Iran and Rome eventually contesting control of the India trade through the Red Sea. The 6th-century Roman emperor Justinian could not break the Persian monopoly there, so he and his successors tried to dominate the overland silk trade from China.
This evolved into a world war when the Turks got involved. In the 6th century the Turkish nomads of Inner Asia were the foremost military power of the age. They had overthrown the Huns who menaced Iran from the east, and had built an empire stretching from the borders of China to the Caspian Sea. With Roman backing, the Turks aimed to disrupt the Persian monopoly on the India trade by flooding Iranian markets with cheap Chinese silk which they had received as tribute from rival Chinese dynasties. Iran retaliated, and the armies of the Persian king Hormizd IV fought Roman and Turkish troops on multiple fronts and emerged victorious – further proof that the Iranian war machine was more than match for its rivals."
[https://www.asor.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Bonner-Febru...]
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Lessons from the Last Empire of Iran goes a bit deeper and concludes:
I wrote The Last Empire of Iran to tell the story of the Sasanian dynasty from beginning to end. It is a narrative that covers some of the most important events of human history. And over the past 1,400 years, the story has lost none of its power.
https://quillette.com/2020/07/31/lessons-from-the-last-empir...
EDIT: And I'm not actually sure you can say central Asia didn't have a big philosophical impact. I seem to recall that ibn Sina's argument for the existence of God came to be pretty popular among Christians and Jews as well.
Mongol raids destroyed a lot of Islamic cities, including Baghdad, a centre of learning. [0]
Fundamentalist ideas and sects rose to the fore, such as the Hanbalis [1], who were suspicious or hostile towards secularism and secular science.
The current geopolitical conflict is about preventing the shifting of trade routes back to land from Western controlled waterways. It is amazing to me to consider for example Armenia's history and see the constant back and forth between a west and east aligned contenders and see its echo it contemporary events. Ditto for the overall high level connectivity between east and west, and how its shifts mirror civilization balance between East and West.
The "One Belt One Road" initiative is literally being marketed as an attempt to re-establish those same land-based trade routes. Though it's also criticized by some since it's perceived as coming with too many strings attached.
Before too long the Mongols came. Plan A for China was originally to kill everyone, burn the fields, and raise the biggest herds ever on the resulting grassland. Thankfully this was quickly abandoned for Plan B, conquer and tax the people. But Plan B needed larger armies than Plan A and when Khwarezmia offered an unforgivable insult while the bulk of the Mongol army was needed pacifying China they got the Plan A treatment and why it seems so weird to us that a contender for largest city in the world could have ever been in Turkmenistan.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Incoherence_of_the_Philoso...
Another reason the Islamic world didn't reach industrialization first is because of a lack of capital concentration and resulting lack of a large merchant class. Christian Europe practiced primogeniture so large estates passed to a single, next heir. Islamic laws resulted in accumulated wealth being dispersed among more inheritors each successive generation. Furthermore, the Muslim world did not indigenously develop a legal corporate form that lasted beyond the life of any of the partners further limiting the ability to form large companies.
If you have access, check out some of Timur Kuran's papers on Google Scholar.
Of course, it is a very decidedly modern and political framing, but inaccurate and bizarre nonetheless. As much as calling the Renaissance in Europe the ‘Christian Golden Age’.
It is also worth noting the interplay and knowledge transfer from China, India, Japan, and various South East Asian countries into Persia too: in an attempt to hold up this narrative, we forget to see some of the things that we give ‘Islam’ exclusive credit for that were actually merely translated from the Eastern original.