The Umayyad Period

The Umayyad Period, 661 to 750, was the era of the Umayyad Caliphate, the first hereditary dynasty of the Islamic world, founded by Mu'awiya I after the First Fitna and ruling from Damascus over an empire that, at its height, stretched from the Iberian Peninsula and Morocco in the west to the Indus Valley and Central Asia in the east, among the largest empires in history to that point. Umayyad conquests carried Islam across North Africa and into Spain, where the dynasty's forces were finally stopped by the Franks at the Battle of Tours in 732, while the caliphate also built the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem and standardized Arabic as the empire's administrative language. Resentment among non-Arab Muslim converts and rival factions culminated in the Abbasid Revolution of 750, which overthrew the Umayyads in the east, though a surviving branch of the dynasty went on to found a long-lived independent emirate, later caliphate, in Cordoba, Spain.