Abbasid Caliphate

The caliphate that stopped conquering and started thinking, and lasted five centuries as a result. The Abbasids came to power in 750 on a revolutionary movement built in Khurasan among non-Arab Muslims who resented Umayyad Arab privilege, and their victory shifted the centre of the Islamic world east from Syria to Iraq. Baghdad was founded in 762 as a planned round city and grew into the largest city in the world outside China, perhaps a million people. The regime governed through a Persian bureaucratic apparatus and adopted Persian court ceremony, which distanced the caliph from his subjects in a way the early caliphs would not have recognised. Its lasting achievement was intellectual: the House of Wisdom and the wider translation movement rendered Greek, Persian and Sanskrit works into Arabic, preserving much that would otherwise have been lost and providing the base on which al-Khwarizmi, Ibn Sina and others built. Algebra and the algorithm both take their names from this period. Paper-making arrived from China and made the whole thing cheaper. Political control faded early: Spain was lost from the start, Egypt and the east broke away, and from the ninth century the caliphs were controlled by their own Turkish slave soldiers and later by Buyid and Seljuk overlords. By 1200 the caliph was a religious figurehead ruling little more than Iraq. The Mongols sacked Baghdad in 1258 and executed the last caliph. A shadow line continued under the Mamluks in Cairo. The dynasty held the caliphate from 750 to 1258. Baghdad stood on the Tigris and was laid out as a circle around the caliph's palace. Harun al-Rashid exchanged embassies with Charlemagne. Arabic numerals reached Europe through Abbasid mathematics.

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