Harun al-Rashid Destroys the Barmakids
Harun al-Rashid destroyed the Barmakid family in a single night in January 803, and nobody has ever satisfactorily explained why. The Barmakids were a Persian family, originally Buddhist administrators of a monastery at Balkh, who had converted and become indispensable to the Abbasid caliphate. Yahya ibn Khalid had been Harun's tutor and effectively raised him; Harun called him father, made him vizier, and left the government to him and to his sons Fadl and Jafar for seventeen years. They ran the empire at its height — the treasury, the provinces, the army's finances, the patronage of the translation movement that brought Greek philosophy and science into Arabic, and the paper mills that made Baghdad's bureaucracy possible. Their wealth and their household became proverbial, and the phrase a Barmakid feast entered Arabic for lavish hospitality. On the night of 29 January 803 Harun had Jafar killed and his body displayed in pieces on the bridges of Baghdad, imprisoned Yahya and Fadl, and confiscated everything the family owned. The explanations offered by the chroniclers include a secret marriage between Jafar and Harun's sister Abbasa producing a child, Barmakid sympathy for Alid rebels, and simple financial pressure — the family controlled revenues the caliph wanted. The likeliest reading is the plainest: a dynasty of viziers had become a rival centre of power and was removed as one. Yahya and Fadl died in prison. The administration never recovered the same competence, and Harun's sons fought a civil war six years after his death. The fall of the Barmakids became a stock subject in Arabic literature for the reversal of fortune, and appears in the Thousand and One Nights.
- Year: 803 CE
- Category: Political
