West Asian legacy

By Justin Marozzi

To begin at the beginning is to explore Baghdad’s greatest half-millennium, when it was the richest, most sophisticated and advanced city on earth under the rule of the Abbasid dynasty of caliphs. Perhaps nowhere else has world civilisation flourished so extraordinarily, in such a short period, as in Baghdad during the earliest years of the Abbasid caliphate, during 750-1258 AD.

Basking in prodigious royal patronage, the City of Peace — as Baghdad was known after a sura in the Quran about Paradise — was fabulously rich from its very foundation in 762. The astronomical sum left in his treasury on his death in 775 by the caliph Al Mansur, the founder of Baghdad — 14 million dinars and 600 million dirhams, or around 2,640 metric tonnes of silver — demonstrates how quickly his city had prospered and how rapidly the Abbasid dynasty had consolidated its position at the heart of the Islamic Empire after the defeat in 750 of the Damascus-based Umayyads.

Swishing through their ornate palaces in embroidered silks, the royal family sat at the top of the social and political hierarchy, luxuriating in the trappings of power. Abbasid courtiers and favourites… also grew rich on the vast pickings available from the caliph’s court, where life-changing fortunes could be made or lost at the ruler’s whim. Beyond this glittering and unpredictable world of imperial largesse, trade also fuelled the rise of Baghdad.

From “Baghdad: City of Peace, City of Blood”