The Buyids Seize Baghdad
Ahmad ibn Buya entered Baghdad in December 945, and the Abbasid caliph never governed anything again. The Buyids were a family of Daylamite mountaineers from the south Caspian — mercenary soldiers of Iranian rather than Arab or Turkish origin — who had taken western Iran in the 930s as the Abbasid state disintegrated. That disintegration had been running for a century. The caliphs had been controlled by their own Turkish guards since the 860s, provinces had stopped remitting revenue, and the central authority extended barely beyond Iraq. Ahmad took the city without a serious fight, was given the title Mu'izz al-Dawla, and had the caliph al-Mustakfi blinded and deposed within weeks for negotiating with his rivals. He then did the thing that defines the period: he kept the caliphate. The Buyids were Twelver Shia and had no use for a Sunni caliph's religious claims, and could have abolished the office or replaced its holder with a Shia — and did neither, because the caliph's name on the coinage and in the Friday prayer legitimised their own rule over a Sunni population. The caliph became a ceremonial figure with a stipend, and stayed one for the next three centuries. The Buyids patronised Shia scholarship, instituted the public commemoration of Ashura and of Ghadir Khumm, and presided over a considerable flowering of Persian and Arabic learning. The Seljuk Turks took Baghdad in 1055 and replaced them, keeping the same arrangement. The office survived until the Mongols killed the last Abbasid caliph in 1258, having governed nothing for over three hundred years.
- Year: 945 CE
- Category: Political
