The collapse of Umayyad power happened within a decade. The North African revolts of 740 had begun the process, breaking away the western part of the empire from central control, while the failures in Sicily and Anatolia in 740 had also damaged the Syrian armies and weakened Hisham's prestige. When Hisham died, less than three years later, the extent of the rifts within the wider Marwanid clan and their armies were exposed. These fractures were widened by competition between other powerful groups close to the ruling family, among them the Thaqafi relatives of al-Hajjaj, the Makhzumi maternal relatives of Hisham, and the family of Khalid al-Qasri, the deposed governor of Iraq. Because of these conflicts, Hisham's death triggered a succession crisis and civil war in Syria. This breakdown at the imperial centre gave well-established networks of opponents of the Umayyads in Iraq and the East an opening. In the East, as with the ‘Berber Revolt’ in the West, it was the mass participation of non-Arab forces that gave the rebels an advantage on the battlefield against divided and demoralised Syrian armies.

The End of Marwanid Unity and the Killing of al-Walid II

Towards the end of his life, Hisham had made unsuccessful attempts to nominate his son, Abu Shakir, as his heir. Abu Shakir was to succeed in place of his cousin, al-Walid b. Yazid, who had been named as Hisham's successor by his father, Yazid II, in the early 720s. The tussle over the succession had pitted members of the Marwanid family against one another and had involved other members of the wider ruling elite whose interests were aligned with the succession of one or other candidate. Hisham's sons, his maternal relatives from the Banu Makhzum, his commanders in northern Syria from the Banu ‘Abs, and the senior religious scholar at the Marwanid court, Ibn Shihab al-Zuhri, are all said to have been in favour of changing the succession in favour of Hisham's son. In contrast, al-Walid b. Yazid's place in the succession represented the opposing interests of his maternal uncle, Yusuf b. ‘Umar al-Thaqafi, whose appointment to Iraq in 738 presumably marked the end of any ambition to alter the existing arrangements.