Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

The Abbasids made sweeping changes to the Islamic empire they had wrested from the Umayyads. They moved the capital eight hundred kilometers east from Damascus to a new city in Iraq called Baghdad, and devolved sweeping political and legal powers to local rulers known as emirs throughout the caliphate. The Abbasids also worked hard to integrate non-Arab Muslims into the umma on roughly equal terms. As a result theirs was a time of political fracture within the Islamic world, when emirs gained steadily greater independence from the caliphs, and schismatic Sunni and Shia blocs emerged, as well as rival dynasties such as the Fatimids in Egypt and the Almoravids and Almohads in modern Morocco. Never again would caliphs wield as much political and spiritual power over such a massive swath of territory as they had during the heyday of the Rightly Guided caliphs and the Umayyads. Nevertheless, the Abbasid age (which lasted until 1258, when the caliphate was destroyed by the Mongols [see chapter 9]), would come to be known as the golden age of Islam, during which art, architecture, poetry, philosophy, medicine, and scientific inquiry flourished. In the eighth century the Abbasids stole the secrets of paper-manufacturing technology from the Tang Chinese, and in the thirteenth they learned the secrets of making gunpowder from the Song. They assembled massive libraries such as the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, where millions of pages of books were translated, copied, and studied for th...