Yahya ibn Khalid
Yahya ibn Khalid was the head of the Barmakid family, the Persian house from Balkh whose ancestors had kept the Buddhist monastery there, and for seventeen years the vizier of Harun al-Rashid, whom he had brought up and who called him father; he and his sons Fadl and Jafar ran the Abbasid empire at its height, from the provinces to the treasury to the patronage of the poets and translators, until the night in January 803 when Harun had Jafar beheaded and Yahya and Fadl imprisoned, an act the chroniclers could not explain and have not stopped explaining. His father Khalid had been the first Abbasid caliphs' chief of revenue and a governor of provinces, and Yahya governed Azerbaijan for al-Mansur before al-Mahdi made him the tutor and secretary of his younger son Harun. When Harun's brother al-Hadi became caliph in 785 and tried to set Harun aside, Yahya stood by his pupil and was imprisoned for it, and on the night al-Hadi died, in circumstances the sources leave to Harun's mother, he was released and made vizier with, the tradition says, the caliph's seal and the words that he had given him the government. He ran it. Fadl was governor of the east and then of Egypt and Syria and put down the Alid rising in Daylam by negotiation. Jafar held the seal and the caliph's evenings. Yahya settled the succession between Harun's sons at Mecca in 802, in the document hung in the Kaaba that divided the empire between al-Amin and al-Mamun and led to the civil war. The family's court at Baghdad paid the translators who brought Greek and Indian science into Arabic and the poets who made the age; Yahya himself was, the historians agree, upright and generous and too powerful. The fall was on 29 January 803, at Anbar on the way home from the pilgrimage. Yahya and Fadl were taken to Raqqa and kept in prison, where Fadl died in 808 and Yahya in November 806, aged about seventy, having written on a slip of paper found with his body that the accused would go before the judge and the accuser would follow. The reasons proposed range from Jafar's secret marriage to the caliph's sister to the family's control of revenues Harun wanted; Ibn Khaldun thought it was simply that they had become the state.
- Lived: 738 CE – 806 CE
- Nationality: Persian
- Roles: vizier, statesman
