Iraqi History · Chronicle X of XII
The Islamic Golden Age
The founding of Baghdad, the House of Wisdom, and the Mongol catastrophe.
Abbasid CaliphatePolitical
The caliph al-Mansur builds a perfectly round new capital on the Tigris, the 'City of Peace.'
Al-Mansur chose a site where the Tigris and Euphrates run close together, astride the trade of a continent, and laid out the Round City with the caliph's palace and mosque at its centre. Officially Madinat al-Salam, the City of Peace, it grew within a lifetime into the greatest metropolis outside China, perhaps the first city to hold a million people.
Abbasid CaliphateCultural
Under Harun al-Rashid the caliphate reaches its height of wealth and splendour, remembered in the Thousand and One Nights.
Harun's Baghdad was the fabulous city of the Arabian Nights, its court a byword for luxury and learning. He exchanged embassies and gifts with the Tang emperors of China and, legend says, sent an elephant and a water-clock to Charlemagne. Beneath the glamour, though, the vast empire was already growing too large for one hand to hold.
Abbasid CaliphateCultural
The caliph al-Ma'mun makes Baghdad's House of Wisdom the greatest centre of learning in the world.
Al-Ma'mun poured resources into the Bayt al-Hikma, gathering scholars of every faith and paying, it was said, the weight of a translated book in gold. There the works of Aristotle, Ptolemy, Euclid, and Galen were rendered into Arabic and preserved, while Indian numerals and Persian astronomy were absorbed into a single river of knowledge.
Abbasid CaliphateCultural
The scholar al-Khwarizmi, working in Baghdad, writes the founding book of algebra and popularizes the decimal numerals.
From the title of al-Khwarizmi's treatise, al-jabr, comes our word 'algebra'; from a Latin version of his name comes 'algorithm.' His work, and that of physicians like al-Razi and philosophers like al-Kindi, made ninth-century Baghdad the intellectual capital of the world — the fruit of a civilization confident enough to learn from everyone.
Abbasid CaliphatePolitical
Al-Mu'tasim builds a vast new capital at Samarra to house his Turkish slave-soldiers, crowned by a spiral minaret.
To control his growing corps of Turkish ghilman, the caliph al-Mu'tasim moved the court sixty miles up the Tigris to a new city, Samarra, which sprawled for miles along the river. Its Great Mosque and the extraordinary spiral minaret, the Malwiya, still stand — monuments of a brief, brilliant, and troubled second capital.
Anarchy at SamarraPolitical
The Turkish guard turns on its masters, making and murdering caliphs, and Abbasid power begins to crumble.
In a decade of chaos, the Turkish soldiery enthroned and killed one caliph after another. Central authority never fully recovered: provinces broke away, and real power in Baghdad passed increasingly to soldiers and strongmen. The caliphate would endure for centuries more, but the age of caliphs who truly ruled was ending.
Abbasid CaliphateCultural
The court returns to Baghdad, which remains the beating heart of Islamic scholarship, law, and literature.
Even as its political power waned, Baghdad stayed the intellectual capital of Islam. Here the historian al-Tabari wrote his monumental chronicle of the world, the physician al-Razi practised and taught, and the schools of law, grammar, and theology flourished. The city's paper mills spread a new technology — cheap paper — across the Islamic world.
Buyid DominationPolitical
The Shia Buyid amirs seize Baghdad and reduce the caliph to a figurehead, keeping him only for his prestige.
The Buyids, an Iranian dynasty of Shia soldiers, marched into Baghdad and made themselves masters of Iraq, ruling in the caliph's name while stripping him of real power. For a century Baghdad was the seat of a Sunni caliph controlled by Shia warlords — a strange arrangement that suited everyone but the caliph himself.
Seljuk DominationPolitical
The Sunni Seljuk sultan Tughril takes Baghdad, restoring Sunni power and founding the great Nizamiyya college.
The Seljuks swept away the Buyids and set themselves up as sultans, the military protectors of a caliph who was now purely a spiritual authority. Their great vizier Nizam al-Mulk founded the Nizamiyya, a model madrasa where the theologian al-Ghazali taught — part of a Sunni revival that reshaped Islamic learning.
Mongol ConquestMilitary
Hulagu Khan storms Baghdad, kills the last Abbasid caliph, and ends five centuries of the caliphate.
The Mongols besieged and sacked Baghdad in a slaughter that killed hundreds of thousands and, tradition says, turned the Tigris black with the ink of ruined books. The last caliph, al-Musta'sim, was rolled in a carpet and trampled to death. The fall of Baghdad is often taken to mark the end of the Islamic Golden Age — a wound Iraq took centuries to recover from.
2 more entries, to 1258
