Harun al-Rashid's Baghdad

Part oneThe caliph and his court

In 802 an elephant arrived at Aachen, in what is now Germany, to the court of Charlemagne, king of the Franks. His name was Abul-Abbas. He had come as a gift from the caliph in Baghdad, Harun al-Rashid, and Frankish records noted his arrival. A few years later, in 807, a brass water clock that sounded the hours came from the same ruler. Envoys had been travelling between the two courts for some time.

Harun had become caliph in 786, while still a young man. He was the fifth Abbasid caliph, and the grandson of al-Mansur, who had founded Baghdad. He ruled for twenty-three years. People remembered him with two names at once, his given name and his title, al-Rashid, the Rightly Guided.

He took religion seriously in public. He went on Hajj several times as caliph, and he sent armies, sometimes led by himself, against the Byzantine frontier in Anatolia. For much of his later reign he lived at Raqqa, on the Euphrates in northern Syria, where he had palaces built. Baghdad stayed the place where the empire's business was done.

The frontier gave him his name as a warrior. In 806 he led a large army into Anatolia and took the fortress of Heraclea, after the Byzantine emperor Nikephoros I stopped paying the tribute that had been agreed earlier with the empress Irene. The war with Byzantium went on for generations, and it was part of the background of daily life in the border towns of Syria and northern Iraq.

Much of the empire's business was run by the Barmakids, a family from Khurasan. Yahya ibn Khalid had been Harun's tutor and became his chief minister, the vizier, and Yahya's sons Fadl and Jafar held high posts too. They gave generously to poets and scholars. In 803 Harun suddenly removed them from power. Jafar was put to death and Yahya was imprisoned. Historians have offered many reasons, and none is certain.

Harun's wife was Zubaydah. She was a wealthy woman of the Abbasid family, and the mother of his heir. A chain of wells, pools and rest stops along the pilgrim road between Iraq and Makkah is remembered by her name, the Darb Zubaydah. Pilgrims made that long desert crossing for generations with its help.

Part twoA city of paper and physicians

Walk into Baghdad in those years and you would meet a city that was learning to write on paper. The craft had come from China across Central Asia, and by Harun's time it was spreading through the offices of the government, where it was cheaper and easier to handle than parchment. Paper was soon sold in shops, and with paper came booksellers, copyists and readers. The copyists were called warraqin, a word that comes from waraq, the Arabic for paper. Accounts differ on who founded the first paper mill in Baghdad.

Doctors were in demand. Christian physicians of the Bukhtishu family, from the old medical centre at Gundishapur in Iran, served at the court. Baghdad's first bimaristan, a hospital, is usually dated to this reign. Medicine in the city was already a mix of Greek, Persian and Indian knowledge, written in several languages and slowly moving into Arabic.

The law had a voice at court too. Harun asked his chief judge, Abu Yusuf, a leading scholar of the Hanafi school, to write a book on the taxes of the state and how a ruler should deal with the people he governed. That book, the Kitab al-Kharaj, set out how revenue should be raised without cruelty or favour, and it was read for centuries.

Baghdad held a mixed crowd. Arabs, Persians, Turks, Syrians and others lived there, and so did Christians, Jews and Muslims. Poets and singers found patrons. Merchants brought goods from India, China, Egypt and Central Asia along roads and rivers that all led to the capital. The Tigris was busy with boats.

Holding such an empire together took messengers. The state kept a postal and information service, the barid, with relay stations along the main roads. Letters, tax reports and news of distant governors reached Baghdad by horse and by river. A caliph who wanted to know what was happening in Khurasan or Egypt depended on it, and so did the merchants who followed the same roads.

Storytellers later made Harun the hero of tales in the Thousand and One Nights, in which he walks the streets in disguise. Those stories are fiction. They show how strongly the city lived in memory, but they are not a record of the real man.

The real Harun was a cautious ruler who tried to plan ahead. In 802 he set out how his sons would share the empire after him. Al-Amin would be caliph, and al-Ma'mun would govern the east. The agreement was placed in the Kaaba for safekeeping. He died in March 809, at Tus in Khurasan, travelling east to deal with unrest.

His plan did not last. Within two years his sons were at war, and in 813 al-Ma'mun won. It was a hard ending for a reign remembered as golden.

The tales made Harun a legend, but the real city was richer than the legend, with its paper, its physicians and its crowded river.

WatchThe lecture for this chapter

Lecture Al MuqaddimahHarun al-Rashid, The Golden Prime (opens on YouTube)

The mapWhere it happened

• Baghdad
• Raqqa
• Makkah
• the Byzantine frontier in Anatolia
• Aachen

This map is a simple sketch to help you picture where events took place. Positions, distances and borders are approximate, so please use it for reference only, not as an accurate map.

SourcesSources for this chapter