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722-723 AD. al Yazid. Yazid bin Abd al-Malik or Yazid II (687 – 26 January 724) (Arabic: يزيد بن عبد الملك) was an Umayyad Caliph who ruled from 720 until his death in 724. Yazid was the son of the fifth Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik (r. 685–705) (the guy who first started minting these dinars) and his favorite wife Atika, a daughter of the third Umayyad caliph Yazid I.
Numerous civil wars began to break out in different parts of the empire, such as in Al-Andalus (the Iberian Peninsula), North Africa and in the east.
722 is one of the dates assigned to the Battle of Covadonga, where Visigothic nobleman Pelagius (Don Pelayo) defeated the Umayyad forces under Munuza, provincial governor of Asturias, at Picos de Europa (near Covadonga). This marks the beginning of the Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula (or it could have been in 718).
Anti-Umayyad groups began to gain power among the disaffected. Al-Tabari records that Abbasids were promoting their cause in A.H. 102 (720-721 CE). They were already building a power base that they would later use to topple the Umayyads in 750 CE.
An anecdote told of Yazid is that his wife Sudah, upon learning Yazid was pining for an expensive slave girl, purchased this slave girl and presented her to Yazid as a gift. This woman's name was Hababah and she predeceased Yazid. It is said that, while feasting with Hababah, Yazid threw a grape into her mouth, on which she choked and died in his arms. Yazid died the next week.
The Byzantine chronicler Theophanes the Confessor states that a wizard advised Yazid that he would reign for forty years if he opposed Christian icons. Yazid did so. But, he died the same year he issued his iconoclastic edict (724 CE). He didn't even have a chance to leave the wizard a one-star review.