$Unique_ID{how04825}
$Pretitle{}
$Title{World Civilizations: The Postclassical Era
The Islamic Heartlands In The Mid- And Late Abbasid Era}
$Subtitle{}
$Author{Stearns, Peter N.;Adas, Michael;Schwartz, Stuart B.}
$Affiliation{}
$Subject{abbasid
empire
women
muslim
caliphs
power
slave
christian
centuries
concubines}
$Date{1992}
$Log{}
Title:       World Civilizations: The Postclassical Era
Book:        Chapter 13: Abbasid Decline And The Spread Of Islamic Civilization To Asia
Author:      Stearns, Peter N.;Adas, Michael;Schwartz, Stuart B.
Date:        1992

The Islamic Heartlands In The Mid- And Late Abbasid Era

     As early as the reign of the third Abbasid caliph, al-Mahdi (775-785),
the courtly excesses and political divisions that would eventually contribute
significantly to the decline of the empire were quite apparent. Al-Mahdi's
eaforts to reconcile the moderates among the Shi'a opposition to Abbasid rule
ended in failure, and Shi'a revolts and assassination attempts against Abbasid
officials would plague the dynasty to the end of its days. Al-Mahdi abandoned
the frugal ways of his predecessor and, in the brief span of his reign,
established the taste for luxury and monumental building and the habit of
surrounding himself with a multitude of dependent wives, concubines, and
courtiers that would prove an ever greater financial drain in the reigns of
succeeding caliphs.

     Perhaps most critically, al-Mahdi failed to find a solution to the vexing
problem of succession. He not only wavered between which of his older sons
ought to succeed him, he allowed his wives and concubines, the mothers of
different candidates, to become involved in the palace intrigues that
henceforth became a standard feature of the transfer of power from one caliph
to the next. Though a full-scale civil war was avoided after al-Mahdi's death,
within a year his eldest son and successor was poisoned. That perfidious act
cleared the way for one of the most famous and enduring of the Abbasid
caliphs, al-Rashid (786-809), to ascend the throne.

Imperial Extravagance And Succession Disputes

     Emissaries sent in the early years of the 9th century to Baghdad from
Charlemagne, then the most powerful monarch in Christian Europe, provide ample
evidence that al-Rashid continued and enhanced his father's precedents fort
sumptuous and costly living among the courtly elite. Al-Rashid dazzled the
Christians with the splendor of Baghdad's mosques, palaces, and treasure
troves, and he also sent them back to Charlemagne with presents, including an
intricate water clock and an elephant, that were quite literally worth a
king's ransom. The luxury and intriMue of al-Rashid's court have also been
immortalized by the tales of The Thousand and One Nights, which are set in the
Baghdad of his day. The plots and maneuvers of courtesans, eunuchs, and royal
ministers related in the tales suggest yet another source of dynastic
weakness. Partly because he was only 23 at the time of his accession to the
throne, al-Rashid became heavily dependent, particularly in the early years of
his reign, on a family of Persian advisors. Though al-Rashid eventually put a
halt to their usurpation of his powers and had these ambitious ministers
enecuted or imprisoned, the growth of the power of royal advisors at the
expense of the caliphs became a clear trend in succeeding reigns. In fact,
from the mid-9th century onward, most of the caliphs were pawns in the power
struggles between different factions at the court.

     Al-Rashid's death was the signal for the first of a number of full-scale
civil wars over succession. In itself the precedent set by the struggle for
the throne was deeply damaging to the dynasty, but it had an additional
consequence that would all but put an end to the real power of the caliphs.
The first civil war convinced the sons of al-Ma'mun (813-33), the winner, that
they needed to build personal armies in anticipation of the fight for the
throne that would break out on the death of their father. One of the sons,
significantly the victor in the next round of succession struggles, recruited
a "bodyguard" of some 4000 slaves, mostly Turkic-speaking nomads from central
Asia. On becoming caliph, he increased this mercenary force to over 70,000.
Not surprisingly, this impressive force soon became a power center in its own
right, much like the Praetorian Guard had in the later centuries of the Roman
Empire. In 846, slave mercenaries murdered the reigning caliph and placed one
of the caliph's sons on the throne. In the next decade, four more caliphs were
assassinated or poisoned by the mercenary forces. From this time onward, the
leaders of the slave mercenary armies were often the real power behind the
Abbasid throne and consistently a major player in the factional contests for
control of the capital and empire.

     The mercenary troops also became a disruptive force in the life of
Baghdad and other cities of the empire. Between stints of military service,
which the mercenaries became more and more adept at keeping to a minimum or
avoiding altogether, they became a rowdy and volatile element in the capital
and garrison towns into which they crowded. They bullied the local populace
and quarreled, often violently, among themselves. When their salaries and
provisions were meager or late in coming (a situation that became increasingly
frequent as the central government's share of the revenues fell to a small
fraction of the taxes actually collected), they sacked and pillaged or became
a leading element in the food riots that broke out periodically in the urban
centers.

     As defenders of the caliphate the slave soldiers were at first essential
replacements for the Arab warriors who gradually drifted back to their
homelands in Arabia or settled down on rural lands purchased with their share
of the booty. But within decades the mercenaries had become a major source of
instability within the empire and a constant threat to the very dynasty they
had been recruited to protect.

Imperial Breakdown And Agrarian Disorder

     In the last decades of the 9th century, the dynasty brought the slave
armies under control for a time, but at a great cost. Incessant civil violence
drained the treasury and alienated the subjects of the Abbasids. A further
strain was placed on the empire's dwindling revenues by some caliphs' attempts
to escape the perils and turmoil of Baghdad by establishing new capitals in
the vicinity of the original capital. The construction of palaces, mosques,
and public works for each of these new imperial centers added to the already
exorbitant costs of maintaining the court and imperial administration. The
burden of footing the bill, of course, fell heavily on the already
hard-pressed peasantry of the central provinces of the empire, where some
semblance of imperial control still remained.

     The need to support growing numbers of mercenary troops also increased
the revenue demands on the peasantry. Lacking the bureaucratic means to pay a
regular salary to the commanders of the mercenary forces and stipends for
their troops, the Abbasid regime farmed out the revenues from various parts of
the empire to these military chiefs and their retainers. Some of the
commanders were concerned for the welfare of the village populations under
their control and sought to make improvements in irrigation and cropping
patterns that would enhance the revenues they received over the long term.
Unfortunately, the majority of the mercenary leaders tried to exact as much as
possible from the hapless peasants.

     Spiraling taxation and outright pillaging led to the destruction or
abandonment of many villages in the richest provinces of the empire. The great
irrigation works that had for centuries been essential to agricultural
production in the fertile Tigris-Euphrates basin fell into disrepair and in
some areas collapsed entirely. Some peasants perished through flood, famine,
or violent assault; others fled to wilderness areas beyond the reach of the
Abbasid tax farmers or to neighboring kingdoms. Some formed bandit gangs that
grew in size and audacity or joined the crowds of vagabonds that trudged the
highways and camped in the towns of the imperial heartland. At times, bandits
and vagabonds were involved in the food riots in the towns or the local
peasant rebellions that broke out periodically in the later Abbasid period. In
many cases dissident religious groups, such as the various Shi'a sects,
instigated these uprisings, thereby making them movements that not only
challenged the legitimacy of the Abbasid regime but were dedicated to its
utter destruction.

The Declining Position Of Women In The Family And Society

     The harem and the veil became the twin emblems of women's increasing
subjugation to men and confinement to the home in the Abbasid era. Though the
seclusion of women had been practiced by some Middle Eastern peoples since
ancient times, the harem was a creation of the Abbasid court. Both the wives
and concubines of the Abbasid caliphs were restricted to the forbidden
quarters of the imperial palace. Many of the concubines were slaves, who could
win their freedom and amass considerable power by bearing healthy sons for the
rulers. The growing wealth of the Abbasid elite generated a large demand for
female and male slaves, who were found in the tens of thousands in Baghdad and
other large cities. Most of these urban slaves continued to perform domestic
services in the homes of the wealthy. One of the 10th-century caliphs is
reputed to have had 11,000 eunuchs among his slave corps, another is said to
have kept 4,000 slave concubines. Most of the slaves had been captured or
purchased in the non-Muslim regions surrounding the empire, including the
Balkans, central Asia, and Sudanic Africa. They were purchased, with the
highest prices going for the most physically appealing, in the slave markets
found in all of the larger towns of the empire. Female and male slaves were
prized both for their beauty and intelligence. Some of the best educated men
and women in the Abbasid Empire were slaves, and caliphs and high officials
frequently spent a good deal moreatime with their clever and talented slave
concubines than with their less well-educated wives. Slave concubines and
servants often also had a good deal more personal liberty than freeborn wives.
Slave women could go to the market and were not required to wear the veils and
robes that free women wore in public.

     Over the centuries the practice of veiling spread from women of the urban
elite to all classes in town and country. As the stories in The Thousand and
One Nights make clear, seclusion and veiling were seen as essential ways of
curbing the insatiable lust that many writers argued possessed all women from
puberty. Because men were considered incapable of resisting the lures and
temptations of women, men needed to be segregated from all but those women in
their families.

     Though women from poor households farmed, wove clothing and rugs, or
raised silkworms to help support their families, rich women were allowed
virtually no career outlets beyond the home. Often married at puberty (which
was legally set at the age of nine) women were raised to devote their lives to
running a household and serving their husbands. Their main purpose in life was
to make a good marriage and have lots of children, preferably sons. For
ordinary women bearing children secured a place in the household and provided
insurance for their old age. For the women of the caliphal palace and the
great houses of the elite, children provided an entree into political life.
Wives and concubines cajoled their husbands and plotted with eunuchs and royal
advisors to advance the interests of their sons and win for them the ruler's
backing for succession to the throne. Despite these brief incursions into
power politics, by the end of the Abbasid era the considerable freedom and
influence both within the family and in the wider world that women had enjoyed
had been severely constricted.

Nomadic Incursions And The Eclipse Of Caliphal Power

     Preoccupied by struggles in the capitel and central provinces, the
caliphs and their advisors were powerless to prevent further losses of
territory in the outer reaches of the empire in addition to areas as close to
the capital as Egypt and Syria. More alarmingly, by the mid-10th century,
kingdoms that had formed in areas once part of the empire had begun to aspire
to supplant the Abbasids as paramount lords of the Islamic world. In 945, the
armies of one of these regional splinter dynasties, the Buyids of Persia,
invaded the heartlands of the Abbasid Empire and captured Baghdad. From this
point onward, the caliphs were little more than puppets controlled by families
such as the Buyids, whose heads took the title of sultan and became the real
rulers of what was left of the Abbasid Empire.

     The Buyids controlled the caliph and court, but they could not prevent
the further disintegration of the empire. In just over a century the Buyids'
control over the caliphate was broken, and they were supplanted in 1055 by
another group of nomadic invaders from central Asia via Persia, the Seljuk
Turks. For the next two centuries, Turkic military leaders ruled the remaining
portions of the Abbasid Empire in the name of caliphs, who were usually of
Arab or Persian extraction. The Seljuks were staunch Sunnis, and they moved
quickly to purge the Shi'a officials who had risen to power under the Buyids
and to rid the caliph's domains of the Shi'ite influences the Buyids had
sought to promote. For a time, the Seljuk military machine was also able to
restore political initiative to the much reduced caliphate. Seljuk victories
ended the threat of conquest by a rival Shi'a dynasty centered in Egypt and
humbled the Byzantines, who had hoped to take advantage of Muslim divisions to
regain some of their long-lost lands. The Byzantines' crushing defeat was
particularly important because it opened the way to the settlement of Asia
Minor, or Anatolia, by nomadic peoples of Turkic origins. The region later
formed the nucleus for the powerful Ottoman Empire, and it comprises today the
greater part of Turkey, the national home of the Turkic peoples.

The Crusading Interlude

     Soon after seizing power, the Seljuks were confronted by another and very
different challenge to Islamic civilization. It came from Christian Crusaders,
knights from western Europe who were determined to capture the portions of the
Islamic world that made up the Holy Land of biblical times. Muslim divisions
and the element of surprise made the first of the Crusaders' assaults between
1096-1099 by far the most successful. Much of the Holy Land was captured and
divided into Christian kingdoms. In June of 1099, the main objective of the
Crusade, Jerusalem, was taken while its Muslim and Jewish inhabitants were
massacred by the rampaging Christian knights.

     For nearly two centuries the Europeans, who eventually mounted eight
Crusades that varied widely in strength and success, were able to maintain
their precarious beachhead in the eastern Mediterranean. But they posed little
threat to the more powerful Muslim princes, whose disregard for the Christians
was demonstrated by the fact that they continued to quarrel among themselves
despite the intruders' aggressions. When united under a strong leader, as they
were under Saladin in the last decades of the 12th century, the Muslims
rapidly reconquered most of the crusader outposts. Saladin's death in 1193 and
the subsequent breakup of his kingdom gave the remaining Christian citadels
some respite, but the last of the crusader kingdoms was lost with the fall of
Acre in 1291.

     Undoubtedly, the impact of the Crusades was much greater on the
Christians who launched them than on the Muslim peoples who had to fend them
off. Because there had long been so much contact between western Europe and
the Islamic world through trade and the Muslim kingdoms in Spain and southern
Italy, it is difficult to be sure which influences to attribute specifically
to the Crusades. But the Crusaders' firsthand experiences in the eastern
Mediterranean certainly intensified European borrowing from the Muslim world
that had been going on for centuries. Muslim weapons, such as the famous
damascene swords (named after the city of Damascus), were highly prized and
sometimes copied by the Europeans who were always eager to improve on their
methods of making war. Muslim techniques of building fortifications were
adopted by many Christian rulers, as can be seen in the castles built in
Normandy and coastal England by William the Conqueror and his successors in
the 11th and 12th centuries. Richard the Lionhearted's legendary preference
for Muslim over Christian physicians was but one manifestation of the
Europeans' avid and centuries-old interest in the superior scientific learning
of Muslim peoples.

     From Muslims and Jews in Spain, Sicily, Egypt, and the Middle East, the
Europeans recovered much of the Greek learning that had been lost to northern
Europe during the waves of nomadic invasions after the fall of Rome. They also
mastered Arabic numerals and the decimal system, and benefited from the great
advances Arab and Persian thinkers had made in mathematics and many of the
sciences. The European demand for Middle Eastern rugs and textiles is amply
demonstrated by the Oriental rugs and tapestries that adorned the homes of the
upper classes in Renaissance and early modern paintings as well as by names
for cloth such as fustian, taffeta, muslin, and damask, which are derived from
Persian terms or the names of Muslim cities where the cloth was produced and
sold.

     Muslim influences, from Persian and Arabic words and games such as chess
(passed on from India) to chivalric ideals, troubadour ballads, and foods such
as dates, coffee, and yogurt, permeated both the elite and popular cultures of
much of western Europe in this period. Some of these imports - namely the
songs of the troubadours - can be traced quite directly to the contacts the
Crusaders made in the Holy Land. But most were part of a process of exchange
that extended over centuries. In fact, the Italian merchant communities that
remained after the political and military power of the Crusaders had been
extinguished in the Middle East probably contributed a good deal more to this
exchange than all the forays of Christian knighthood.

     Of perhaps even greater significance, the "exchange" was largely a
one-way process. Though they imported items such as fine glassware, weapons,
and horses from Christian Italy and Byzantium and beeswax, slaves, and timber
from Russia and the Balkans, Muslim peoples displayed little interest in the
learning and products of the West in this era. The Crusades reflected this
imbalance. They had only a marginal effect on political and military
developments in the Middle East, and, if anything, their cultural impact on
Islamic civilization was even less. There were, for example, few counterparts
in the Islamic world to the songs and great heroic epics the Crusaders' feats
in Spain and the Holy Land inspired in the West.