Baghdad During the Abbasid Caliphate

From Contemporary Arabic and Persian Sources

G. Le Strange

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351625340
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Regional Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The history of Baghdad as a metropolis coincides with the history of the rise and fall of the Abbasid Caliphs. In this volume, first published in 1900 and written by a recognized authority in the field, the history of the city and of the Abbasid dynasty are closely interwoven so that, from a scholarly blending of contemporary records and discursive narrative, an accurate picture emerges of the state and society within the capital of the Muslim world during the period from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries.

BAGHDAD DURING THE CALIPHATE

CHAPTER I

THE FOUNDATION OF BAGHDAD

Previous capitals of Islam. Medina and Kûfah. Damascus. The fall of the Omayyads. Need of a new capital for the Abbasid dynasty. The two Hâshimîyahs. The Râwandî insurrection. Courses followed by the Euphrates and Tigris during the Middle Ages. Manṣûr chooses the site of Baghdad. An Assyrian Baghdad; Etymology of the name. Az-Ḳaṣrâ and Ar-Rawḥâ. The legend of the name Miḳlâs; Sûḳ Baghdâd. The advantages of the situation of Baghdad.

THE history of Baghdad, as a metropolis, coincides with the history of the rise and fall of the Abbasid Caliphs, for in the East it would appear to be almost a necessity of the case that every new dynasty should found a new capital. In the earlier annals of Islam the Era of the Flight (or Hijrah) commemorates the date when the Prophet Muḥammad, being forced to leave Mecca, went to take up his abode in the little hamlet of Yathrib. This change shifted the political centre of Arabia from the older commercial city to Yathrib, now to be named Medina, ‘the City of the Prophet,’ and which, from a small provincial town, suddenly rose to be the capital of Islam, becoming in a few years’ time the seat of the theocratic government that had imposed new laws on the desert tribes and transformed all Arabia into one nation. The first three successors (the Khalîfahs or Caliphs) of the Prophet, namely his companions Abu Ḳaṣr, ‘Omar, and ‘Othmân, continued to govern Islam from Medina; and among the secondary causes that brought about the fall of ʿAlî, the next Caliph, is certainly to be counted his ill-advised abandonment of Medina and the Ḥijâz. In going to reside at Kûfah in Mesopotamia, ʿAlî overset the balance of power among the Arab tribes, as established by his predecessors; also he was unable to found a strong administration in his new capital, discovering when too late that at Kûfah the majority of the population was unreliable, ever rebellious and inimical to his theocratic claims. Mu’âwiyah, who now became the rival of ʿAlî in the Caliphate, had more than a score of years before this period been named governor of Syria by the Caliph ‘Omar; and, foreseeing the struggle from the beginning, had made it his work to colonize Syria with relatives and dependants. The knife ofḲaṣreligious fanatic settled the question of who should be Caliph. ʿAlî perished at Kûfah, inaugurating by his death the long line of Shî‘ah martyrs, and Muʿâwiyah, first Caliph of the house of Omayyah, ruled Islam unquestioned, residing at Damascus, which thus from the capital of a province suddenly became the metropolis of the Commander of the Faithful.

Damascus was well situated to be the seat of government of the purely Arab Caliphate of the Omayyads. It lay in a most fruitful land; well within striking distance of the Ḥijâz, where Medina and Mecca still remained the double centre of Ḳaṣreligious power in Islam; further it was backed by the Arabian Desert, from whence the Caliphs drew their soldiers, and where such of their kinsmen as still clung to the nomad life roamed at pleasure, but close at hand in case of need. Damascus was also conveniently near the Byzantine frontier, and during the ninety years of the Omayyad Caliphate the Arab armies ever and again poured from the north of Syria into Eastern Asia Minor, making almost continuous raids against the unfortunate Christian subjects of the Greek Emperor. Finally, that Damascus did not stand on a navigable river was of little disadvantage during the infancy of Moslem commerce, when all the Ḳaṣrying trade followed the old caravan-routes over the desert, and was of such small amount as could still be borne on the backs of camels.

Of the many causes that led to the overthrow of the Omayyads, the two most potent factors would appear to have been the decay of the Arab tribal system on which the military power of the Damascus Caliphs depended, and the disaffection towards the government caused by the continued misrule of the New-Moslems, who were not Arabs—being mainly the subjects of the old Persian kingdom of the Chosroes—and who, both in numbers and in intellectual gifts, far surpassed their Bedawin conquerors. The Persians had accepted Islam cordially, but distinctly after a fashion of their own, which the Arab party regarded as heterodox; and the Abbasid claims to the Caliphate were made good, to no inconsiderable extent, by trading on the inborn Ḳaṣred which the Persians,Ḳaṣready Shîʿahs, nourished against the Sunnî Caliphs at Damascus, who, though lax in morals and given to wine-bibbing, were orthodox in faith, and, before all things, Arab in sympathy¹.

The last Omayyad Caliph, Marwân II, was routed and slain in the year 132 (A.D. 750), and the first Abbasid Caliph well merited his name of Saffâḥ —the ‘Shedder of Blood’—he having been constantly occupied, during the four years of his reign, in hunting down and putting to death every male descendant of the house of Omayyah, save one youth only who, escaping to Spain, ultimately obtained rule there, and founded the dynasty which afterwards came to be known as the Caliphate of Cordova. In 136 (A.D. 754) Manṣûr succeeded his brother Saffâḥ on the throne, and during the twenty-two years of his reign built Baghdad, and there organized the government of the Abbasids, which first established in power, and then suffering a long decay, was destined to last for five centuries seated on the banks of the Tigris.

A new capital for the new dynasty was indeed an imperative need. Damascus, peopled by the dependants of the Omayyads, was out of the question; on the one hand it was too far from Persia, whence the power of the Abbasids was chiefly derived; on the other hand it was dangerously near the Greek frontier, and from here, during the troublous reigns of the last Omayyads, hostile incursions on the part of the Christians had begun to avenge former defeats. It was also beginning to be evident that the conquests of Islam would, in the future, lie to the eastward towards Central Asia, rather than to the westward at the further expense of the Byzantines. Damascus, on the highland of Syria, lay, so to speak, dominating the Mediterranean and looking westward, but the new capital that was to supplant it must face east, be near Persia, and for the needs of commerce have water communication with the sea. Hence everything pointed to a site on either the Euphrates or the Tigris, and the Abbasids were not slow to make their choice.

During the first Moslem conquest of Mesopotamia, two Arab cities had been founded there for the Ḳaṣrisoning of the troops—Baṣrah near the mouth of the twin rivers, and Kûfah on the Euphrates, where the desert caravan-road, from the Ḥijâz to Persia, entered the cultivated plain of Mesopotamia. The Caliph Saffâḥ, when not occupied in fighting and butchering, had lived at the Palace called Hâshimîyah (after the ancestor of his race), which he had built beside the old Persian city of Anbâr on the eastern side of the Euphrates, near to where the great canal, afterwards known as the Ḳaṣr ʿÎsâ, branched off towards the Tigris. At this Hâshimîyah (of Anbâr) the first Abbasid Caliph died in 136 (A.D. 754); and his brother Manṣûr, shortly after succeeding to the throne, began to build for himself another residence called by the same name. This second Hâshimîyah, according to one account, was a town standing between the Arab Ḳaṣrison-city of Kûfah and the old Persian town of Ḥîrah; that is to say, on the Arabian side of the Euphrates, not far above the place where that river, in the tenth century A.D., spread out and became lost in the Great Swamp. Another account places the later Hâshimîyah of Manṣûr near the town (Madînah) of Ibn HuḲaṣrah, which last lay close by Kûfah, and therefore must not be confounded with the Castle (Ḳaṣr) of Ibn HuḲaṣrah, a town of some importance lying higher up the Euphrates than Kûfah, and on its left or eastern bank¹.

The exact position, however, of this town of Hâshimîyah is of little importance, since Manṣûr very soon abandoned the site as most inconvenient for a capital. It was too near Kûfah, with its population of fanatical Shîʿahs, and its Ḳaṣrison of Arab tribesmen, who constantly rioted and otherwise gave trouble. Lastly, Manṣûr took a permanent dislike to Hâshimîyah after the insurrection of the Râwandîs, when a multitude of these Persian fanatics surging round his palace had insisted on worshipping him as the Deity. The indignant Caliph had repudiated their idoḲaṣrous homage, whereupon they beganḲaṣriot, attacking the guards, and Manṣûr at last found himself in some danger of losing his life at the hands of those who had pretended to revere him as their God.

If the capital of Islam was to be shifted to Mesopotamia, the advantages of a site on the Tigris, rather than on the Euphrates, were conspicuous. The new capital would then stand in the centre of a fruitful country, and not on the desert border, as was the case with Kûfah and the neighbouring towns, for the Ḳaṣren sands of Arabia come right up to the western bank of the Euphrates. By a system of canals the waters of this latter river were used to thoroughly irrigate and fertilize all the country lying in between the two great streams, while the waters of the Tigris were kept in reserve for the lands on its left or Persian bank; and thus the whole breadth of the province, from the Arabian Desert on the one side to the mountains of Kurdistân on the other, was to be brought under cultivation, and converted into a veritable garden of plenty. Lastly, the Lower Tigris before its junction with the Euphrates was more practicable for navigation than this latter river, inasmuch as the great irrigation canals, by effecting the drainage of the surplus waters of the Euphrates into the Tigris, scoured the lower course of this river, and kept the water-way clear through the dangerous shallows of the Great Swamp immediately above the Baṣrah Estuary.

To understand the problem as presented to Manṣûr in his search after a suitable place for the new capital, it must also be borne in mind that during the period of the Abbasids, neither the Euphrates nor the Tigris followed the course marked on our .modern maps. From the account given by lbn Serapion, it is evident that the main stream of the Euphrates, at a short distance above the ruins of Babylon, took the right or western channel, and, very soon after passing Kûfah, discharged its waters into the Great Swamp, which is so important a feature in the political and physical geography of that day. The Tigris, on the other hand, when it reached the latitude of the present Ḳûṭ-al-‘Amârah (about a hundred miles as the crow flies below Baghdad) turned due south, and passing down to Wâsiṭ#x1E6D; by the channel now known as the Shaṭṭ-al-Hayy, shortly below this city, also entered the Great Swamp where, however, unlike the Euphrates, its course continued to be marked by a series of navigable lagoons, called Ḳaṣr. Finally the whole body of water collected in the Swamp, from both the great rivers, drained into a channel leading out immediately to the head of the tidal estuary, which, after passing Baṣrah, flowed into the Persian Gulf at ‘Abbadân¹.

Manṣûr made many journeys in search of a site for his new capital, travelling slowly up the banks of the Tigris from Jarjarâyâ to Mosul. A site near Bârimmâ below Mosul was at first proposed, where the hills called Jabal ḤḲaṣrîn are cut through by the Tigris, but the Caliph finally decided against this, it is said because of the dearness and the scarcity of provisions. The Persian hamlet of Baghdad, on the western bank of the Tigris, and just above where the Ṣarât canal flowed in, was ultimately fixed upon, and in the year 145 (A.D. 762) Manṣûr began to lay the foundations of his new city.

From the discovery made by Sir Henry Rawlinson in 1848, during the low water in an unusually dry season, of an extensive facing in Babylonian brickwork, which still lines the western bank of the Tigris at Baghdad, it would appear certain that this place hadḲaṣready been occupied by a far more ancient city. The bricks are each stamped with the name and titles of Nebuchadnezzar, and it has since been found that in the Assyrian geographical catalogues of the reign of Sardanapalus a name very like Baghdad occurs, which probably refers to the town then standing on the site afterwards occupied by the capital of the Caliphs.

Be this as it may, the name of Baghdâd in its more modern form is presumably Persian, for which Yâḳût and other Arab authorities give various fanciful etymologies. Bâgh in Persian means ‘garden,’ and the city, they say, had the name of the garden of a certain Dâd or Dâdwayh; or else Bagh was the name of an idol, and dâd, meaning ‘given’ or ‘gift,’ the name of the town would thus have signified ‘the gift of the idol Bagh’—for the which reason, some pious Moslems add, its name was changed by the Caliph Manṣûr to Madînat-as-Salâm, ‘the City of Peace. This last was more especially the official name for the capital of the Caliphate, and as such Madînat-as-Salâm appears as a mint-city on the coins of the Abbasids. In common parlance, however, the older name, Baghdad, maintained its supremacy, and the geographical dictionaries mention several variations in the spelling, doubtless Persian or archaic forms, viz. Baghdâdh and Baghdân, also Maghdâd, Maghdâdh, and Maghdân. From an elegy quoted by Tabarî on the ruin which Baghdad had suffered during the great siege in the reign of the Caliph Amîn, it would seem that the pronunciation Baghdâdh was then held to represent what had been the name of this town in the Persian or infidel days, as against Baghdad of the Moslems. The poem in question closes with these two lines:—

‘And, in this present state of afḲaṣrs, it will be well indeed,

If (Moslem) Baghdâd do not shortly relapse and again become (Infidel) Baghdâdh !’

The true etymology, however, of the name would appear to be from the two ancient Persian words Bagh, ‘God,’ and Dâdh, meaning ‘founded’ or ‘foundation’—whence Baghdad would have signified the city ‘Founded by God.’

The western half of Baghdad in Moslem days was also known by the name of Az-Ḳaṣrâ, meaning ‘the Bent’ or ‘the Crooked,’ in allusion, it is said, to the Ḳiblah-point (or direction towards Mecca) not precisely coinciding here with any one of the cardinal points of the compass. Another explanation given is that Baghdad took the name Az-Ḳaṣrâ from the river Tigris, which was ‘bent’ as it passed by the city: while Eastern Baghdad is said to have received the name of Ar-Rawḥâ, the Widespreading,’ or ‘the Shallow,’ from its position in a curve of the stream; and Mas‘ûdî in mentioning these names adds that both Az-Ḳaṣrâ and Ar-Rawḥâ were in common use among the people in his day. It is to be remarked that the grammatical form of both these names is Arabic, but the explanation given for the use of the terms is in neither case very plausible; it is therefore noteworthy that Ḥamd-Allah the Persian geographer, writing in the eighth century (A.D. the fourteenth), states that while the Arabs always spoke of Baghdad as Madînat-as-Salâm, ‘the City of Peace,’ it was in preference named Ḳaṣrâ by the Persians, which almost looks as though this Arabic word Ḳaṣrâ, ‘Crooked,’ may have stood for some more ancient Iranian name, now long forgotten¹.

During the last period of the Sassanian dynasty, Persian Baghdad, on the western side of the Tigris, had been a thriving place, and at the period of the Moslem Conquest a monthly market was held here. It became famous in the early annals of Islam for the very successful raid of which it was the scene. During the Caliphate of Abu Ḳaṣr, Khâlid the general of the Arab army, after advancing some way into Mesopotamia, suddenly dispatched a body of troops against this Sûḳ Baghdâd, as the ‘Market’ held at the Ṣarât Point was then called; the raiders surprised the town ‘and the Moslems filled their hands with gold and silver, obtaining also the where-withal to Ḳaṣry away their booty,’ for they promptly returned again to Anbâr on the Euphrates, where Khâlid lay encamped.

After this incident of the year 13 (A.D. 634) Baghdad appears no more in history until Manṣûr, seeking out a site for the new capital, encamped here in the year 145 (A.D. 762). We are told that the spot was then occupied by several monasteries (Ḳaṣr), chiefly of Nestorian monks, and from them Manṣûr learned that among all the Tigris lands this district especially was celebrated for its freedom from the plag...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• BIBLIOGRAPHICAL LIST OF AUTHORITIES
• CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE
• CHAPTER I
• CHAPTER II
• CHAPTER III
• CHAPTER IV
• CHAPTER V
• CHAPTER VI
• CHAPTER VII
• CHAPTER VIII
• CHAPTER IX
• CHAPTER X
• CHAPTER XI
• CHAPTER XII
• CHAPTER XIII
• CHAPTER XIV
• CHAPTER XV
• CHAPTER XVI
• CHAPTER XVII
• CHAPTER XVIII
• CHAPTER XIX
• CHAPTER XX
• CHAPTER XXI
• CHAPTER XXII
• CHAPTER XXIII
• CHAPTER XXIV
• INDEX