Abbasid Caliphate I

  General Description   In 750 CE, following a revolt, Abbasid rulers took power from the Umayyad Dynasty under Abu al-’Abbas al-Saffah. To secure his rule, Abu al-’Abbass al-Saffah sought to destroy the male line descending from Fatima and Ali, ^[1] and had about 300 members of the Umayyad family killed. ^[2] The last 80 Umayyads were tricked into attending a banquet with their hosts in Damascus and massacred there. ^[3] (One twenty-year-old prince, Abd al-Rahman, famously managed to escape this fate: he dodged assassins all the way to Spain, where he founded an Umayyad Emirate). The First Abbasid Caliphate Period ended in 946 CE when the Daylamite Buyids from northwestern Iran reduced the caliph to a nominal figurehead. Ironically, given the bloody manner in which the dynasty began, the final Abbasid caliph was rolled up in his own carpet and trampled to death by Mongol horsemen in 1258 CE. ^[4] The zenith of the Abbasid period is considered to be the reign of Harun al Rashid (763-809 CE), whose rule is described in The Thousand and One Nights. ^[5]
Population and political organization
The capital of the Abbasid Caliphate eventually settled at Baghdad, but in the earlier years the central administration was run from Kufa (750-762 CE), Al-Raqqah (796-809 CE), Merv (810-819 CE), ^[6] and Samarra (836-870 CE). ^{[7] [8]} The Abbasid caliph, spiritual leader of the Sunni Muslim world and commander-in-chief of its army, left the day-to-day administration to his vizier and heads of the diwans in the complex bureaucracy.
The departments were divided into three main areas of responsibility: the chancery (diwan-al-rasa’il); tax collection (diwan al-kharif); and army administration (diwan al-jaysh). ^[9] Professional officials and soldiers were paid both in cash and in kind. ^[10] The task of organizing the ’collection and payment of revenues’ fell to the Abbasid military. ^[11] However, while it was a professional institution, it lacked a rigid hierarchy or a well-defined officer class. ^[11] Below the caliph himself, the top military rulers were the provincial governors in Iraq, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Syria, Western Iran and Khuzistan. In Iraq and Egypt, local government was divided into a hierarchy of districts, with subdivisions (kura, tassuj and rustaq) used for assessing taxation, which was passed to the governor. ^[12] Within the Abbasid Caliphate there were also relatively independent vassals, who were required to pay tribute to the central government at Baghdad. ^[12] The law code was based largely on sharia law and the ijma’ (legal opinions of religious scholars). ^[13]
The Abbasid state provided centres of medical care, built ornate public markets, often with drinking fountains, and furnished welfare for the poor. ^[14] As paper technology diffused from China, libraries became a common fixture in the cities of the caliphate. In Baghdad, the Khizanat al-Hikma, or ’treasury of wisdom’, became a refuge for scholars, providing access to a large collection as well as free lodgings and board. ^[15] Each important city included an official called the saheb al-sorta, who was responsible for maintaining public order, and the amir al-suq, in charge of regulating the bazaar. ^[16]
The territory possessed by the caliphate was lost in dramatic fashion, shrinking from 11.1 million square kilometres in 750 CE, to 4.6 million around 850 CE, to just 1 million square kilometres half a century later as Egypt, Afghanistan and Central Asia were all lost. ^[17] Nevertheless, in 900 CE the core region of Abbasid control in the Middle East still had a substantial population of about 10 million people. ^[18] Over 300,000 (or maybe 900,000) of these lived in Baghdad, ^[17] which by this date had probably outgrown Byzantine Constantinople.

[1]: (Zayzafoon 2005, 139) Lamia Ben Youssef Zayzafoon. 2005. The Production of the Muslim Woman: Negotiating Text, History, and Ideology. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.

[2]: (Uttridge and Spilling, eds. 2014, 186) S. Uttridge and M. Spilling, eds. 2014. The Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare. London: Amber Books.

[3]: (Schwartzwald 2015, 24) Jack L. Schwartzwald. 2016. The Collapse and Recovery of Europe, AD 476-1648. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.

[4]: (Kennedy 2001, 164) Hugh N. Kennedy. 2001. The Armies of the Caliphs: Military and Society in the Early Islamic State. London: Routledge.

[5]: (Esposito, ed. 2003, 699) John L. Esposito, ed. 2003. The Oxford Dictionary of Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[6]: (Starr 2013, xxxii) S. Frederick Starr. 2013. Lost Enlightenment: Central Asia’s Golden Age from the Arab Conquest to Tamerlane. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

[7]: (Lapidus 2002, 53-54) Ira M. Lapidus. 2002. A History of Islamic Societies. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[8]: (Lapidus 2012, 106) Ira M. Lapidus. 2012. Islamic Societies to the Nineteenth Century: A Global History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[9]: (Kennedy 2001, 60-66) Hugh N. Kennedy. 2001. The Armies of the Caliphs: Military and Society in the Early Islamic State. London: Routledge.

[10]: (Lapidus 2012, 250) Ira M. Lapidus. 2012. Islamic Societies to the Nineteenth Century: A Global History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[11]: (Kennedy 2001, 21) Hugh N. Kennedy. 2001. The Armies of the Caliphs: Military and Society in the Early Islamic State. London: Routledge.

[12]: (Lapidus 2002, 61) Ira M. Lapidus. 2002. A History of Islamic Societies. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[13]: (Zubaida 2005, 74-84) Sami Zubaida. 2005. Law and Power in the Islamic World. London: I. B. Tauris.

[14]: (Pickard 2013, 431) John Pickard. 2013. Behind the Myths: The Foundations of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse.

[15]: (Bennison 2009, 180) Amira K. Bennison. 2009. The Great Caliphs: The Golden Age of the Abbasid Empire. London: I. B. Tauris.

[16]: (Lambton 2011) Ann K. S. Lambton. 2011. ’Cities iii: Administration and Social Organization’, in Encyclopedia Iranica V/6, 607-23; an updated version is available online at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/cities-iii (accessed 2 April 2017).

[17]: Christopher Chase-Dunn 2001, personal communication.

[18]: (Blankinship 1994, 37-38) Khalid Y. Blankinship. 1994. The End of the Jihad State: The Reign of Hisham Ibn ’Abd Al-Malik and the Collapse of the Umayyads. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.