and venerable culture was acknowledged even by the Arabians. The soil of Khurasan in the north-east proved especially fertile for the germination of Shiite doctrine, but decisive leadership was furnished by the Abbasid claimant, abu-al-Abbas Abdullah, a master of propaganda.
Actual revolt began in Khurasan in 747 under the Abbasid agent abu-Muslim, a freedman of obscure origin. At the head of an army of South Arabians he seized Merv and other Persian cities while Marwan was kept busy by a rebellion in Syria and a Kharijite revolt in Iraq. Kufah fell in 749, and abu-al-Abbas was proclaimed caliph. A final decisive battle in January 750 was won by the Abbasids, and Marwan fled to Egypt. Of the towns of Syria, only Damascus put up the semblance of a fight. A few days of siege were enough to reduce the proud capital. Marwan was captured and killed, as were almost all survivors of the Umayyad house except a grandson of Hisham named Abd-al-Rahman.
After an odyssey of some five years, fraught with danger, Abd-al-Rahman reached Spain and established himself in 756 as the undisputed master of the peninsula. For capital he chose Cordova, which blossomed into the seat of a new kingdom and a brilliant culture. Abd-al-Rahman endeavoured to fashion his state after that of Damascus. He inaugurated an enlightened, beneficent regime, which on the whole conducted itself in the best tradition of its Damascene predecessors. Fourteen years before his arrival a Syrian army of twenty-seven thousand sent by Hisham had established itself in military fiefs throughout the principal districts of south-eastern Spain. Climatic and other physical similarities helped to make the newcomers feel at home. As the Syrians conquered the land, Syrian songs, poetry and art conquered the people of the land. From Spain and Portugal several of these cultural elements were later introduced into the New World. Arab geographers began to refer to Spain as a Syrian province, but meanwhile Syria itself had been reduced to an Abbasid province.
