Empire: World History - 138. The Graceful Reed: Ruling the Islamic Empire

Episode Date: April 8, 2024

Sold as a slave to the great Abbasid Caliph, al-Khayzuran quickly rose to the very top of the pyramid. Through marriage and motherhood, she became wife of the caliph and then Queen Mother and in both instances she wielded extraordinary power. In the court at Baghdad - the very heart of the civilised world - al-Khayzuran had major influence and it is possible that during her lifetime, she was the most powerful woman in the world, determining politics from Morocco to Afghanistan. Some even say she assassinated one of her sons, and put a second on the throne. Listen as William and Anita are joined by Hugh Kennedy to discuss the extraordinary life of al-Khayzuran. **Empire Live** Tickets for our live show go on sale on THIS Thursday, but for members of the Empire Club tickets are available in the pre-sale as of 9am GMT TODAY! If you want to sign up to the Empire Club, simply go to https://empirepod.supportingcast.fm/ Twitter: @Empirepoduk Email: [e-mail] Goalhangerpodcasts.com Assistant Producer: Anouska Lewis Producer: Callum Hill Exec Producer: Neil Fearn Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want access to bonus episodes reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community. Discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast, add free listening and a weekly newsletter, sign up to Empire Club at www.mpower.com. Hello, and welcome to Empire with me, Anita Arnan. And me, William Durunpool. I'm very excited about today because we are joined by the great Hugh Kennedy, the author of so many books on the Islamic Caliphate, including the court of the caliphs,

the rise and fall of Islam's greatest dynasty. And we just heard from William, just while we were sort of rigging up, you have an entire Kennedy corner of books, is that right? I have a shelf, not a corner, a shelf, an entire groaning shelf of the collected works of Hugh Kennedy on Mayas, Abbasids, caliphates, early Islamic eras. And I've been trying to get Hugh to come to various festivals

and give various lectures for years. and we finally cornered him here at the pod, which is a very exciting moment. He's a bit of a fan boy, Hugh. So, you know, control yourself, Darren Paul. But look, we've got Hugh on to discuss another great empress. So we have, I may have known if you've been following us, and if you haven't, where have you been?

We've missed you. Cleopatra, St. Helena, the discoverer of the one true cross. Theodora, who rules the Roman Empire. We are talking, Hugh, about somebody now who is as significant you think in history. Al-Kaisur-Anne. Can you tell us why we should care about her and why she was important? And did I say it right? That would help. She is Kaysuran, yes. And she was the, in the end, the wife and, if you like, queen, or at least consort, of the third of the Abbasid Caliphs, Mohamed al-Machti. We'll just call him Al-Mhqdi to keep it simple now. And so, as a woman, she was the partner of the most powerful man in Western Eurasia, certainly.

certainly the most powerful person in the Islamic world. So by that very connection, she just is an important and significant figure. But she's also important, significant, because of her life and what her life and her progress of her life from the most obscure origins up to being this really important figure in the whole politics of the Middle East. The whole story of her life is interesting. Hugh, give us a picture of the Abbasid Empire. the 700s. I mean, we should say, we'll anchor this in dates. We start off, of course, with the death of Prophet Muhammad in 632, and that leads almost immediately after his death. You get this great expansion of Arab armies, which by the 700 have come to

rule the whole area from Central Asia and Sindh in modern Pakistan, right through to the Atlantic coast of Morocco and right through to Spain. It's an enormous land empire. And it's ruled at first by a dynasty called the Umayyads, who in the year 750 were replaced in a revolution by a rival dynasty called the Abbasids. And the Abbasids were called Abbasids because they were the direct descendants of Prophet Muhammad's uncle al-Abas. And so they took their name from him. And that gave them a certain sort of status because while not being descendants of the Prophet, they were actually part of the wider family of the prophet. And that gave them a religious cachet, if you like, that the Umayyads had lacked. And Hugh, this is the period described in the Arabian Knights. Baghdad, the city, which is the capital

of the Abbasids, is the setting for these fabulous stories. Yes. Baghdad was the creation of the Second Abbasid Caliph al-Muhti's father, a man called Al-Mansur, who founded it as a new town in 762. And it expanded enormously. Immigrants came from all over the people. The United States, he's a the Middle East. The core of them were the army and the bureaucrats who were paid by the states. But lots of people came from every direction to offer goods and services and to be craftsmen and merchants and everything. So certainly by the year 800, that's shortly after case around Steth, we reckon that the population of Baghdad was about half a million. It might have been more, it might have been less. So smaller than Rome in the height of its population, but

a very significant city, more popularly so constant label. There's a wonderful Chinese visitor at this point. He turns up and writes, he says, everything produced from the earth is here. Carts carry countless goods to market, where everything is available and cheap. Bracade, embroidered silk, pearls and other gems are displayed all over the markets, the streets and the shops. But it's also a major intellectual centre, isn't it, Hugh? It's a place where you get the learning, of ancient India, the learning of ancient Persia, the learning of the Arab world and the Byzantine world, all coming together. And you get this atmosphere of terrific intellectual excitement. From the

salons of Baghdad, you get the elite hungrily absorbing all these different ideas, diverse ideas from East and West, all the ancient civilizations, Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, Persian, Persian, and Chinese, all this entire intellectual traditions are coming together in Baghdad for the first time. Yes, because it was such a big city, there was a market for, if you like, intellectual products. It was a market for books. We know that there was a street of booksellers, a souk of booksellers, that had 100 different separate shops in the 9th century, where you could go and browse through the manuscripts and read away to your heart's content. In comparison to which, in the whole of Western Europe, Europe probably, there are a handful of monasteries with decent libraries, nothing at all to compare

with this. Of course, this is helped by the new technology of paper. As paper comes in probably from China originally, certainly from the East, and paper democratizes writing. It means that writing is much cheaper because the basic materials are much cheaper. And that encourages the copying and selling of books on a large scale in a way which is impossible if you just use parchment or something like that, which are the older supports of writing. So it's this new technology that helps the intellectual atmosphere in Baghdad. But as you rightly say, it's people coming from all over the world. A lot of Iranian influence. One of the things the Abbasids did was shift the capital from Damascus and Syria to their new town of Baghdad in Iraq. And this opens the

floodgates, if you like, for Iranian influence on political style, Iranian influence on architecture, intellectual achievements and the introduction of Arabic numerals and so on, but also a keen interest in ancient Greek intellectual life. And despite the fact that the Greeks and or the Byzantines, as we'd like to call them, and the Abbasids were enemies along the frontier, in fact, the Abbasid elite was keenly interested in ancient Greek intellectual life. There's one wonderful story you tell in one of your books about a truce with the Byzantines, and the price of the truce is some of the Greek classic, is it Aristotle or Plato or whatever? They won't grant a truce unless they send some of these scientific books from

the libraries in Constantinople. That's it. But they were interested in science. They were interested in mathematics. They were interested in medicine. They were interested in astronomy and everything like that. They didn't read any of the books that we read from the Greek tradition. They didn't translate history. They didn't translate poetry. They didn't translate plays or anything like that, but they wanted the stem subjects, so to speak, the hard science of what they were after. They sound like my husband. Now, I mean, I'm very, very keen to bring in our woman, Al-Qaizor. Tell us, what do we actually know for sure about where she was born and the circumstances of her birth? Because Baghdad wasn't her origin story, was it? No. Her origins are pretty obscure. And some of

the stories about her youth are certainly made up by either her friends or her enemies. is at a later date. She was almost certainly of Arab stock, but she seems to have been captured as a young girl in one of the sort of raids between Arab tribes and it was effectively a slave. And she was brought from probably South Arabia where she lived to Mecca. And Mecca and Medina were the great cultural centres in the early Islamic period. The slave girls of Medina were the best taught singers. And if you really wanted to get talented young women to come work for you, then Mecca and Medina is where he went to find them. Jawari, is that the phrase?

Jariya. Yes, the institution of the Jaria. The Jaria was a female, a young woman who was renowned in popular literature and so on for her musical abilities, for her beauty, of course, because all young women in all these stories are always beautiful, and her sexual availability, but also her talents. And we know, for example, that Chaisal Ran, besides having all the poetry and so on at her fingertips was also the sort of person who could commentate learnedly on Quran and on the Hadith of Prophet Muhammad and so on. So it wasn't all completely frivolous stuff. And it was

the ideal of the roundage area who could both sing and introduce all sorts of learned discourse, but also remembered the old songs, remembered the poetry that was the ultimate achievement of Abbasid culture. The great poets were famous, they were rich. They were in effect, the rock stars of their day, I guess you could say. Exactly, exactly. Unlike rock stars, they were allowed to behave badly. Oh, good. Good, good. Really interesting. I mean, you say we don't know much about her. I mean, I was doing a search for imagery of her. There's not much at all, sort of visuals of what she looked like and how do you explain that? It's not a visual culture. This makes it very different from the Greek, somebody like Theodora that you've been discussing and so on. This isn't a culture that records images of people, and particularly of women. It would have been considered indelical. or even outrageous to attempt a portrait of a woman like her. In early Umiad culture, you do get images of women and of dancing girls

and all sorts of things in the bathhouses of the Umiads and so on and in those wonderful desert palaces. But the Abbasids almost nothing. It disappears. Now, this may be simply that we've lost a whole culture, but even in the case of the Umiyid ones, the images are generic. They're not of a particularly named individual. that would make the difference and accounts for it.

So her name, Kaysoran, means a read. So we assume that she was slender and delicate and so on in appearance. But nobody would comment on that because, as I say, it's a private matter. And it's a nickname rather than an actual name? I mean, Al-Kayseran is like a stage name. I think it was her name she was given when she was being trained up to make her attractive and interesting and to prospective buyers, basically. Right. I mean, when you say attractive and interesting, it's kind of courtisan level, attractive and interesting, or attractive and interesting with sort of marriage prospects?

Certainly at a courtesan level. Right. And we know that she was brought to Mecca. She was trained up in all the skills that these women were supposed to have. She was sold to the Caliph al-Mansur when he came on pilgrimage. She came on the Hajd to Mecca. And she was given by Al-Mansur to his son, Al-Mati. And that's her route to success. Can I just pause for an e'er. I know this happens, but e'erl. Just sort of, you know, women being passed on as commodity, it always makes me feel a bit ew. Let me ask you this. I mean, they're often parallels drawn between her and Scheherazade of 1001 nights, you know, sort of suggesting that she was this bright, clever, beautiful creature. I mean, how much of that? And why has that happened? Because I often see the two conflated. They can be conflated, but Scheherazade, we were told in the frame story was the daughter of the vizier. Sheffersard comes from up. class background, at least in the stories that we have about her. Kaysaeran doesn't. And Kayseran's whole career shows that being a slave gave you opportunities of social mobility that ordinary, as it were, Muslims digging in the fields didn't have.

Because it brought you into close proximity with power. And the fact that you are given to the caliph means that she had an opportunity to shine and display her talents. It's so counterintuitive to think of it that way. I do want to know, though, when we know, she's passed from father to son as a gift. So she would have lived in the harem at that point. What was life like for women in the harem? It's very difficult to tell.

Most of what we know about or we think we know about harems are necessarily fantasy. We don't have any memoirs of anybody who was brought up in a harem at this stage. A harem simply means the women's quarters. We know that in palaces that the women are lived in different parts. of the palace, as they did in Byzantine Court at the same time. There was a women's domain, as it were. And within that, there was a good deal of freedom, I think, for women to live their own lives, as it were. And a very important thing is that women were allowed their own property and kept and managed their own property. Of course, lots of women didn't have any property, they were poorer

and so on. But somebody like Hezoran or the other queens we know of from the Abbasid period, Some of them were immensely rich. Kaysoran certainly died a very rich woman. And she kept her own household. She had her own stewards and business managers. And this is mostly recorded in terms of her charity, giving of good causes. She was one of the people, along with her successor, Zubeda, who was her Rina Rashid's wife, who set in motion the building of a long roadway, really, called the Dab Zubeda nowadays,

the path of Zubeda, but Kayseran started it, so that pilgrims could pass from, Iraq across the Arabian desert, even at the height of summer, to the holy cities, to the haramane of Mecca and Medina. And this was the biggest civil engineering project in 8th century Western Eurasia and probably in the entire world. It involved a north setting up of systems, fortresses, clearing the road of stones and all this sort of thing. And it was above all women's pious generosity that created this network. So there's a lot of disposable income. There's a lot of control over what they did with their income. But of course, these were the lucky 1%. Hugh, we know not only Al-Khazerun herself as a powerful figure. We also know Zubeda, her successor.

Now, is this a newly developed power that Abbasid queens have, or do you see it earlier in the Umayyad period too? It seems to be something that's coming in in the Abbasid period. I think we know the names of the partners of the Umayyad caliphs, who were almost all Arabs of high standards. but we don't get the same sort of stories about them that we do about Chazoran and Zubeda. And these are the two most important queens. Interestingly, in the next century, that changes. Caliph stopped marrying. All the caliphs are sons of slaves who, in many cases, remain slaves.

But the key figure in the women's court in the next century is the queen mother. And it's the queen mother who rules the harin. Whereas in time of Cheseran and Sabeda, it's the partner, the favourite partner of the Caliph. Right. Well, let's talk about being the favourite partner, because being the favourite partner of Almadi, she also has his favourite children, it turns out. I mean, I suppose those two things go hand in hand. But she has two sons and a daughter.

And I'm really interested in the daughter because it seems as if the Caliph is so enamoured with how lovely his little daughter is and how great she is, that he wants to hang out with her quite a lot, so dresses her as a boy, so he can hang out with her. I mean, that's right, isn't it? Yes, exactly so, yes. But within the family, there wouldn't have been a problem about that. But yes, she's dressed as a boy. And people say, look at her and say, that's a girl riding by, you know, dressed as a boy.

And Almaty is one of the more attractive characters amongst the Abasi-Kalas in many ways. I mean, he was a pious man, and he obviously had very close relations with women, not just on a partnership basis, so to speak, not just with Hezoran, but with his cousin Rater and so on. So it does emerge, and he's famous for his generosity and so on. He's famous for his piety. He was one of the fewer Basu Caliphs who didn't drink wine on a regular basis, and he was encouraged things like pilgrimage to make her. Okay, but she's still, I mean, even though she has, you know, produced the favorite children, and she is clearly a favorite of Almadi. She's still a slave. At what point does she become a wife rather than a slave? The year is often given 775 when she is freed because she produces a male son.

Slave girls who produced male offspring were usually given their freedom and they stopped being slaves. So you get a lot of one generation slavery. Is that as a reward or is that in order to raise the status of the sun? Both, I think. So we get this one generation slavery that girls who are favoured by their masters achieve their freedom. And most unusually, of course, Almaty actually marries her, rather than just keeping her as part of the household, and she becomes his wife. And certainly in my period, the idea of a slave girl becoming the wife of a caliph would not have been doable. I didn't stop Caliph sleeping with slave girls, but they're becoming an official wife.

And Qaerran, likes of Beda after her, achieve that status. So what should we assume about Al-Khazeran because of the fact that she was freed and? and then married. What does that imply that it's a love affair, that she's remarkable, that she's socially acceptable? What are the different things we can read into that? Yes, I think, and so far as we can gauge these things, of course, it is a love affair, or at least it's a very companionate relationship, and it must be something to do with her sexual attractiveness, must be one of the factors that's involved with this. But she obviously, it's shrewd and clever. I think, we always think that Kayla says it's being almighty people who do whatever they like and don't care about,

thing. But being a caliph must be a very lonely business. You're always surrounded by people who want something from you and who are making demands on you and sometimes are plotting against you. So if as a caliph you find a partner like Mahdi obviously find with Kayseran, who was loyal and shrewd and clever and stood up and was with him, then that I think was probably more of an attraction than anything else, just that the supportive relationship must have been immensely valuable. about her original status before she was enslaved? You say she was captured in a tribal fight. Do we know whether her family were from the top of the pyramid or the bottom? Well, this is an interesting question because when she was originally trained as a slave girl

and originally met Amansura, and so one of the attractions was that she claimed she had no family. And of course, this was very important because if you marry the caliph and you've got a family, then the family are going to expect a lot of favours, prominent positions. in the government. They are going to feel that they are owed something and they're going to become a faction, basically, in the politics. So Kayseran, a shrewd woman that she was, claims that she has no family. And then she gets her status. She's freed and she married. And she says, oh, by the way, I do have a brother. I actually do. I do have a brother and a number of cousins.

Oh, I like her. And they happen to be on their way to Baghdad now as we speak. Yeah, exactly. See that. What a coinkidink. What a coingitink. That's what do something for them. That's hilarious. And that what happens.

A newly discovered brother becomes an important person in politics. He becomes a governor of Yemen, doesn't he? He actually rises to a very senior position. So we think that she probably came from Yemen. There's no evidence that she came, that these were a very important family before this moment. Around the time of 775, something monumental happens, which really accelerates that.

Or I suppose magnifies that position of power and makes it even more important. Yes, well, Al-Mafdi becomes Caleb. He succeeds his father that they're rather grim, severe, but immensely able Al-Mansur. And he's a breath of fresh air in the court and so on. She's quite a mover and shaker, though, because not only does she manage to suddenly, ta-da, produce a family that she said she didn't have, but she manages in this whirlpool of different wives and different children to make her children rise up to the point where it is her.

son who becomes the crown prince. And when does that happen? And how does that happen? It certainly happens after her marriage. But the intriguing things that we really don't know how it happens, because Raito had two sons as well. And why they weren't selected, we simply don't know. And it may be that they were sickly children who didn't thrive and so on, so and all sorts of reasons that we really can't know about. Or it may be because Hezoran was very effective and say, look, I've got these two young lads, and they're definitely going to be the airs, and Amati accepts that. It's a very important decision, but we've no idea how it was made. They just do emerge, as the air, the first heir and the second air, so to speak. And her eldest son,

who is called Musa al-Hadi, we'll call him Al-Hadi, but his Musa, which is Moses, Al-Hadi, is the first heir and is the eldest. Now, he comes across in the sources as a very macho young man. very close relations with the military. He loves going on campaign. He loves doing hunting and all these things. He's quite headstrong. He leads a campaign against the Byzantines quite early on after his succession. Yes, against the Byzantines, but also in northern Iran and so on. So he has the military contacts. He is the favourite of the army, shall we say. And the younger son, Harun, is portrayed as a very different sort of young man. His close contacts are. with the court officials.

It's a good point to take a break because now we've got a woman who has, this is a familiar template for many of the women we've done in this series, who has risen from nothing, who has been passed around as chattel, who has risen through the ranks and managed to get herself to the very top of the court, and not only herself, but her children as well. So we've got crown princes, we've got the caliph's ear. This is a source of enormous power. Let's take a break and find out after the break what she does with it.

Welcome back. So just before the break, we were talking about this girl from a lowly background who has risen to the heights. She now has the Caliph's ear. She is a favourite. Her children are favourites. But something happens in around we think 7, 8, 5 where this is now a stratospheric rise to power. Tell us about that. So can I do a reading here? Because I've got here the wonderful chronicle of the amazing Abbasid historian Masudi. It's called the Meadows of Gold. Now, Masudi gives a very full account, the best account we have, of the fallout between the young Caliph Hardy and his mother, Al-Hezarun. And we are presented with this picture of a young Caliph who's threatened by the popularity, the industry and the sheer power of his mother. And I think the best I could do is probably just read Hardy was extremely deferential towards his mother, Chisarun, and gave her everything she asked for for her protégés. Inumerable cues of petitioners stood before the gates, which led one courtier

to say, gently now Chazerun, stop and let your sons govern their subjects. One day, however, she asked him for a favour, which was impossible to grant. And as he was searching for excuses, she cried, you absolutely must agree. I cannot, said Hardy. His mother then retorted, But I have guaranteed Abad al-Ala and Ibn Malik that you would do this for him. These words angered the caliph. Curse that son of a whore, he said. I knew that request came from him.

By God, I'm not going to grant it to you. God knows then, said Khazirun, that I shall never ask you for anything again. God knows, replied Hardy, that I shan't be sorry for that. He flew into a rage and his mother, no less angry, rose to leave. Stay, he said to her, and hear what I have to say. If I break the oath that follows, let me deny my descent from the prophet. May the prayers and peace of God be upon him. If any one of my generals or my court or my servants goes to ask you for favors, he will have his head cut off and his goods confiscated.

Let he who wants to see it, try it. What are all these crowds that besiege your gates every day from early morning. Have you no spindle to amuse you? No Quran for your prayers. No room in which you can stay. Take care and may God help you if you open your mouth to plead for anyone, Muslim or tributary. Kaiser Rune arose, unable to believe her years and scarcely knowing where she was going. From that day, she no longer said a word to her son, sweet or bitter. So after this fallout, his mother very much pushed the cause of her second son, Harun al-Rashid, who had the support of the Barma kids, who were this key family, who had made Baghdad, who had come from Central Asia, who were masters of mathematics, who had grown up in the Sanskritic Buddhist tradition,

which their family was originally from, and understood Indian mathematics and brought it to Baghdad, which is why today we all use Indian numbers, though we call them Arabic numbers. Yes. The Barma kids are very important, and they're in charge of the civil administration, the writing offices, and above all, they're in charge of the collection of the taxes, and that gives them a real power. Useful chaps to have on your back. Exactly, because the army needs to be paid by taxes, and it's the Barma kids who control that. So you can see very easily how these two factions are brought into conflict or brought into rivalry.

Harun means Aaron, incidentally. So we've got Moses, the first brother, Musa, and Harun, Aaron. And we know the relationship between Moses and Aaron is paralleled by this. But Harun is his mother's favourite. And they said fatal consequences for Al-Hadi. Because Al-Hadi becomes a caliph. He's only caliph for about a year. And he tries to keep his mum in the kitchen, doesn't he? He tries to stop her interfering in politics. Yeah. Exactly, she's told to behave herself and go back to her spinning wheel and things like that. So there is a story and tell me Hugh if this is true or not and where this comes from. Whether Musa is such a chavness, piglet, because he is the son, then he turns around to his mother and says, it is not in the power of women to intervene in matters of sovereignty.

Look at your prayers and your prayer beads, which sounds a lot to me like get thee to a kitchen lady. Oh yes, this story is precisely making that point, whether these are the words that were spoken or not. We can't be certain. Where does it come from? It comes from Tabare's History of the Prophets and Kings, which is the great, enormous, wonderful history of the early Islamic world. This wonderfully gossipy and full of details like this that may or may not be true,

but which paid to wonderfully vivid picture of the intrigues of the court. Yes, they may not be true, but they have meaning, if you see what I mean. They reflect not necessarily the actual words, but they reflect attitudes and so on. That's how these historians present. Rather than making a general argument, as modern historians would, they seize on a person and put words into, usually his mouth,

sometimes her mouth. And that's the way you present an argument. That's the way you build up a picture. There's a suggestion that he's even more of a little shit than just being a sexist pig, that he actually tries to poison his mother. He's sort of so wants to curtail his mother's movement that he sends her a delicious dish of something that is poisoned. And she, she instead of eating it gives a little bit to her doggy, a little doggy to try, and the dog kills over and dies, just like, so she's, she's, she's, say from that? Where does that come from? From the same imagination that produces the stories of the Arabian Nights.

Ah, really? Because the world of the intimate household of the Caliphs is so private, then any number of stories can be made up. Now, that doesn't mean that it isn't true, but we've got no reason to assume that it is either. Something like this. Al-Hairdi dies dramatically and suddenly. So, of course, we don't really know what happened to. Hardy, but he, according to one account, he falls gravely ill, perhaps with a stomach ulcer, which was a malady to which the family, over many generations, but seems to be susceptible. But it seems more likely that he'd consumed a poison his mother had managed to mix with his drink.

And the suggestion in some of the chronicles, not Masudi, but other versions, has Al-Qaizroon actually poisoned her son, Hardy, in revenge for excluding her from the business of the the empire. And no sooner had Hardy been killed or expired, then the Barmakids rally, and they find Harun al-Rashid, who's out wandering around the Euphrates Valley, and they wake him up. He's naked in bed, is the story we're told. And Yaya Barmakid, who's the guy who is his old tutor, his old teacher, says, awake, O commander of the believers. What are you saying? cried Harun. Don't you know that what will become of me if Hardy learns that I've been so addressed?

But on hearing that his brother was dead, Harun lost no time in setting out to take possession of the seals of state. As he left, he received another message, one announcing the birth of a son to his Persian concubine, Marajil. The boy who had been named Abdullah became the Caliphamun in time. Thus, on one night of destiny, predicted by Kezerun, says the chronicler, saw the death of one caliph, the accession of a second, and the birth of a third. Can we also say, you know, whereas, you know, Al-Han is the one who says, get into the kitchen mother, that her and our Rashid is more of a mummy's boy. I mean, is that true to say? That's what the sources tell us. And it may well be true.

No need to argue with them, exactly. There's a small group of people who knew each other very well. And so, you know, that seems to be the implication. So you gave us the nod about the Arabian Nights and the imaginative world that that enters in. Now, the Arabian Nights centers very heavily on the young Harun in disguise, visiting the flesh pots of Baghdad in the streets, in the company with the youngest generation of the Barma kids, this guy called Jaffar. And those of us who watched our kids looking at Aladdin were no Jaffar. that very handsome Indian-looking guy with a high collar, and he's a bad boy. And he has a parrot, who's also a bad parrot. Yes, he's a bad parrot. Tell us a little bit

about these two young men that certainly has portrayed in the Arabian Knights Hugh. The Arabian Knights reflects what the historians are telling us that Harona Rashid and Jaffa the Barmakid, who is the Barmakid who is of his generation, or one of them anyway, were very close friends. And more than that, they shared wet nurses, don't they? Yes. boys are nursed by the Abbasid women and the Arbisid boys are nursed by the barmacid women. So you swap babies. It's the most intimate thing you can do in this world. Yes. So, yes, they make some virtually family. And so these two young men are running loose, creating havoc in the streets, in disguise, pretending to be ordinary boys in the streets, but in fact they're

from these two super rich, super powerful families. Yes, yes. Whether they really create havoc or not, it's more difficult. But they certainly have adventures. And it's a way the storytellers, use of opening doors into other people's lives and so on. They go there and they find whoever it is, who tells them a story about how he was once in India. And, you know, the whole thing goes on and on from there. But there are three of them. One is Harun.

The other is Jaffa, who is the young man of his own age, and doesn't seem to have any of the sinister reputation that comes in later night's stories that you're talking about. And the third is Masra, who is both the servant-factual. Totum and executioner, and these three go around and have these adventures. He's sort of Jeeves, but with an assassin's dagger. Yeah. One of the things that young Jafar and young Harun do together is play chess, isn't it?

They're one of the very first chess players we know about in history. Yes. And chess is introduced from the Indian world by the Barma kids again. By that sort of coming in of Persian influences and so on. You're absolutely right. chess seems to come from India, it comes through Iran, and then it becomes something that the elite do. They also play Nard, they play backgammon, and I don't know what the history of backgammon is, but that's very much around at the time. Can I just bring us back to the Queen Mother, though,

sort of now the floor is cleared for her son to rule, the one that she likes more, who doesn't want to remove her from the scene. Do we know how her stature grows and how much her influence remains in the kingdom? What do we know of what happens to her in all of this? Well, we know that Kayserun flourished under the rule of her son Harun. We know that he paid enormous some public respect to her at the time of her funeral, which was unusual, perhaps. Well, we haven't killed her off yet. What year is this? She dies and how does she die? She dies just three years after her son Harun exceeds to the throne. So she only has three years, as it were, in power until 789, she dies.

Apparently natural causes. I mean, there's no reason to assume anything else. So she's achieved all she wants to achieve, but she doesn't get much time to enjoy it. And during those three years, it seems that she and her Barma Kid allies and one or two people in the military are running the state for this young and inexperienced youth. So how young is he? Within his 20s, almost all these people, almost all the Caliphs died very young.

Only one Abbasid Kaleh, had up 28 or something, reached the age of 60. And Harun Arashid, you see these portraits of him with a long beard, a gracious old, grey-bearded ancient, died at the age of 43. Wow. They were all quite young men. Yeah. But back to his mother, when you say she was running the state, I mean, what does that mean, in essence? What does that look like?

Well, this really happened in the next century. But the Abbasid women became very influential through their sons and advising them, their sons, but also because they were very wealthy. And in the next century, when the caliphate was in financial crisis, caliphs could and did appeal to their mothers to try and bail out the government, which is a testimony to the enormous wealth that some of these women had. And of course, because they were very wealthy. Everyone wanted to come and see them. Everyone wanted to do business with them and so on. And if you want the caliph to do something, then you try in one way or another to approach him through his mother. Do we know any of the acts of patronage of Al-Qaeda?

Zarun? Any great buildings in Baghdad associated with there, any of the great mosques? Like in late years, you get Ottoman and Mughal women and Safavid women. No, sadly not. And the reason for this is because Abbasid Baghdad lives on in our imagination. It lives on in literary descriptions. It lives on in the Arabian nights. But the fabric of the city has completely disappeared. There was no standing monument because it was mud brick and it dissolves in the rain and because it's beside the Tigris. And Tigris is a fickle friend. It provides lots of water. But it changes its course and the great round city that Almansoa built finds itself in the middle of the riverbed at one stage and it's simply washed away by repeated floods. So we don't have a single

thing that we can touch and see that belongs to Abbas in Baghdad. And yet we have this huge wealth of historical literature, geographical literature, imaginative literature, poems about the city and so on. Hugh, just finally, I sort of leapt in when you were starting to talk about the funeral, but the funeral was a very good story. So this exemplifies how important she was to the Caliph, what does he do when his mother dies? How does he show his grief to the people and the importance of her? Muslim funerals happen very quickly, day off, preferably. The funeral is just a gathering together of those people around. What's striking is that Harun attends the funeral as one of the leading mourners, and it would be most unusual for the Caliph to attend a funeral publicly.

And it would be most unusual for a Caliph to honour a woman in that sort of way. And in fact, for a long time after Hezoran's death, the government that she had put together, if you like, continue to run the state effectively in their own interests and the interests of the administration and so on and so forth. So they are, in a sense, the government of Harunists made in her image. The coalition she put together continues. One of the legacies that one could perhaps trace to Al-Qa-Zirun is that while she dies, the institution of the queen remains central. And the next phase of the story of the Abbasids is dominated by Zubeda, who is the wife of Harrod or Rattin.

It's Zubeda that brings down the Barma Kids in a kind of scene that resembles the Godfather, isn't it? In one night, all six of the Barma Kid palaces are raided, heads are put on stakes, they're thrown into prison, all this sort of thing. Yes, Zubeda isn't certainly the only actor in this. She ends up with a lot of their wealth, though, doesn't she? She's certainly, whether or not she's brought about this Godfather, Knight of Knives, a lot of their palaces end up in her personal disposal. People at the time speculated about what happens to the Barma Kids,

Basically, nobody knew why Harun turned against them so dramatically. Suddenly turns on them. Exactly, as you say, it's all over in the night. And his bosom friend Jaffa, his body parts are displayed on the bridges in Baghdad for the populace to Gorpat. And having been two days before, the powerful and cherished companion of the caliph. And it goes down through Islamic history as the archetype of pride comes before a fall, if you like, of how even the most powerful people can be completely destroyed in

and reduced to nothing by the will of the ruler. So if we look back at Al-Ka-Zerun, Hugh, do we remember her as one of the most powerful women in early Islamic history, the most powerful woman in early Islamic history? She's certainly one of the most powerful women, I mean, just in her influence on politics and her wealth. We can certainly say that.

And the whole story of her life is an illustration of how talent and imagination can get you right up the social scale in this society. And it's a society where social mobility for the lucky few is very much a reality. So yes, she is definitely one of the most powerful. It's a really interesting story. Thank you so much for sharing it with us. Hugh Kennedy, it's been a pleasure. That's it from this episode of Empire. Goodbye from me, Anita Arnhann. And goodbye for me, William Duremple.