In 747 Abu Muslim raised the black banners in Khorasan, drawing on non-Arab converts, the mawali, who paid higher taxes and were shut out of power under the Umayyads. In 750 the Abbasids, who claimed descent from the Prophet Muhammad’s uncle Abbas, crushed Marwan II at the Great Zab River and wiped out the Umayyad line except for one prince who escaped to Spain. Al-Mansur had Abu Muslim executed in 755 and in 762 founded Baghdad on the Tigris, turning the empire east toward Persia and the trade routes to India and China. Under Harun al-Rashid and al-Mamun, with the Barmakid viziers running the administration, state money poured into the House of Wisdom and the translation of Greek, Persian and Indian texts.
The golden age carried its own fault lines. Al-Mamun’s Mihna of 833 tried to force scholars to accept Mutazilite theology, and the resistance of Ahmad ibn Hanbal helped turn the ulema into an independent class. After civil war between Harun’s sons, al-Mutasim built an army of Turkic slave soldiers and moved the capital to Samarra in 836. The guards murdered al-Mutawakkil in 861, and in the anarchy that followed four caliphs were installed, deposed or killed in nine years. Provinces broke away, iqta land grants starved the treasury, and the Buyids took Baghdad in 945, leaving the caliphs as religious figureheads until the Mongols sacked the city in 1258.
- Translators could reportedly be paid the weight of a finished book in gold.
- Avicenna’s Canon of Medicine distinguished measles from smallpox for the first time.
- Sailors used the kamal, a knotted string and wooden block sighted on the North Star, to read their latitude.
- Papermaking reached the caliphate from Chinese prisoners taken at the Battle of Talas in 751.
- A surviving Abbasid line served as ceremonial caliphs for the Mamluks in Cairo from 1261 until the Ottoman conquest of 1517.
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