Middle East, Africa and Iberia · Animated schematic fronts

Early Islamic conquests

Expansion under the Rashidun and Umayyad caliphates; there was no single continuous front.

This war had no continuous front. The line is a schematic limit of advance and operations: it summarises campaigns and is not a trench line or an administrative border. The coloured areas are operational sides, not evidence of contiguous occupation; in-between frames are interpolated and closing edges are graphic. Three lines follow the expansion: to the north and east, through North Africa and across the Iberian Peninsula. The territory behind them was not everywhere governed or converted.