al-Fadl ibn Yahya

al-Fadl ibn Yahya was Harun al-Rashid's foster-brother and governed half the empire before the family was destroyed in a night. The Barmakids were a Buddhist priestly family from Balkh who had converted and become indispensable to the Abbasid state; his father Yahya had been Harun's tutor and effectively raised him. The foster relationship was literal: Harun's mother nursed al-Fadl and al-Fadl's mother nursed Harun, which in Islamic law made them milk-brothers and kin. He governed Khurasan and the eastern provinces from 793, and the administration is what he should be remembered for - he suppressed a long revolt, recruited a large provincial army, and built mosques, hospitals and caravanserais at his own expense. He was described as the more serious of the two brothers and the less favoured; Harun preferred Jafar's company. The family ran the treasury, the provinces and the patronage of the translation movement for seventeen years, and a Barmakid feast became a proverb in 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, and imprisoned Yahya and al-Fadl and confiscated everything. The chroniclers offer a secret marriage, Persian sympathies, or simply that a caliph in his forties was tired of being managed. He was flogged and held at Raqqa and died in prison in 808, a few months before the caliph who had ordered it. The fall of the Barmakids became a standing subject in Arabic literature for the reversal itself - the most powerful family in the world destroyed overnight by the man they had raised - and their name reached the Thousand and One Nights, where Jafar attends Harun through the streets of Baghdad as though nothing had happened.

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