The Rest Is History - 377. Baghdad: Crossroads of the Universe

Episode Date: October 11, 2023

“No city in the world will ever rival it for prosperity...“ Baghdad, originally a Christian village in Iraq, was chosen by the Abbasid Caliph Al-Mansur as the site for the new capital of his empire, and it would become a cosmopolis to rival Rome or Babylon. Its foundations were built in a perfect circle, with walls 90 feet tall, and at its heart, the monumental Palace of the Golden Gate. Rejecting the Umayyad Caliphate's desire to conquer Constantinople, Al-Mansur founded his own “centre of the universe”. In the second part of our series on Baghdad, Tom and Dominic look at how the Abbasids solidified their rule after overthrowing the Umayyads, and the beginnings of Baghdad as their new capital. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Producer: Theo Young-Smith Executive Producers: Jack Davenport + Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. I can't spell it right. So you just give a fake name, your cafe name, Julia. But the more you use it, the more it feels like you're in witness protection. Wait a minute. What kind of espresso drinks does Julia like anyway? Is it too late to change your latte order? But with an espresso machine by KitchenAid, you wouldn't be thinking any of this because you could have just made your espresso at home.

Shop now at KitchenAid.ca. Assuredly, this island of land between the two great rivers, bounded on the east by the Tigris and on the west by the Euphrates, is destined to become the very crossroads of the universe. Ships from the great trading cities of the south, sailing up the Tigris, will land and drop anchor here. Here it is, that merchandise will arrive from Mosul and the lands of the north. Here too will come products transported from Syria, Egypt and beyond. The city will also

lie on the roads taken from the east, from Iran and Khorasan. By God, I will build this city to be my capital, and it shall be my residence for the rest of my life. It shall be the residence too So that was the Caliph al-Mansur declaring his resolve to found a city at Baghdad. And Tom, that was as quoted by the 9th century geographer and historian, Yakubi. Of course it was. And what listeners don't know is that this is the second version of that introduction because your first introduction,

Dominic, your first version achieved the ignominious fate of being the first impression that has been canned for being terrible. No, no, that's absolutely not true at all. It was a very nuanced and sensitive reading

because I did it in what I thought was a 9th century... Yeah, Theo, the producer's writing in the chat. It was too accurate. I did it in an authentic 9th century Baghdadi accent. And when we listened to it back, Tom, I couldn't help noticing that you were... You seemed beside yourself with enjoyment

listening to it. Yes. Well, it was so bad that it's been put in a lead-lined container and buried in the grand cellar beneath Goldhanger Towers, never to be brought out again. The truth of the matter is I've been cancelled by my own woke producers. Well, let's just draw a line under the whole business. Dominic, your second version was wonderful. We should crack on because we've got lots to do. We do. So we ended last time on a bit of a cliffhanger, didn't we?

Because you brilliantly, dare I say, sketched the world of the Umayyad Caliphate. So this great empire, almost unprecedented in world history, all the way from the Straits of Gibraltar, from the Pillars of Hercules, virtually to the borders of China. A colossal Islamic realm ruled by this dynasty who were there in Damascus with kind of their silks and their slave girls and their kind of luxuriating. Sherbet. Their sherbet. I was thinking of sherbet and- Golden goblet. And babbling fountain, Tom.

Yes. So there they are. Meanwhile, there are all kinds of things going on. They've suffered a few defeats. There are sectarian uprisings and kind of developing this alternative code, I suppose, of Islamic laws based on the sayings of the prophets that challenge the supremacy of the Umayyads. And you ended last time by saying, maybe all this would have been manageable were it not for the emergence of a rival dynasty. Now, as far as I remember, the stuff going on in the Far East, which I'm sure you're going to explain, but this is going to lead to a massive transformation in the Islamic world, in medieval world history, and it will of course lead to the foundation of the city of Baghdad. So, take it away please, Tom. Right.

So, I guess the point to emphasise that we were looking at in the previous episode is that this is a world in which it's incredibly diverse. Diversity is the essence of the caliphate, all kinds of different peoples. So you talked about how the Umayyads have their capital in Damascus, but at the end of the last episode, we talked about how the Umayyad caliph Marwan has actually made himself so unpopular in Syria by destroying all his relatives and carving out his rule by means of civil war, that he's actually retreated from Syria to a city to the north called Haran, which enthusiasts for the late Roman Republic will have come across when they read

about the Battle of Carrhae, where Crassus was killed. Carrhae and Haran are the same city. Haran is an absolutely classic example of the way in which this is still very, very far from being a Muslim Near East. Haran is actually still full of pagans. There are people who are worshipping what seem to be Babylonian gods there. They're worshipping Sin, the Lord of the Moon. They're sacrificing bulls. They're inspecting entrails. You may be wondering, how on earth can this be going on in a Muslim empire? Well, the answer is that the Hurranians, the Hurranian pagans, are passing themselves off as Sabaeans. The Sabaeans are a mysterious people mentioned in the Quran as one of the three peoples of the book, along with Jews and Christians.

Actually the Christians are very cross about this and keep saying to Marwan, you're being fooled. They're not the Sabaeans, but Marwan's fine for them to carry on. He's got bigger problems because basically rebellion is brewing in Iraq, but also in Khorasan, this vast kind of region stretching between Iran and up to the Oxus River. So for those people who don't know, this is Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Eastern Iran, Uzbekistan maybe, sort of amorphous, huge region. Yeah. And again, it's a bit like Haran in that this is a region that's so far from the centers of power in the caliphate that again, it's a kind of very, very obvious melting pot because up there, Zoroastrianism is still very vital. There are still fire temples burning. There are still

people who yearn for the return of the Sasanian dynasty. And we talked about this in the first episode that the Persian empire that had been swallowed up by the Arab conquests, that the Persians, the Zoroastrians had been ruled by a dynasty that reached back centuries and was seen by the Zoroastrians as having a kind of holy bloodline, a sacral bloodline that had been ordained by God. And its extinction had been very, very traumatic for Zoroastrians as having a holy bloodline, a sacral bloodline that had been ordained by God, and its extinction had been very, very traumatic for Zoroastrians, for the Persians. What you have in Khorasan is this constant process by which Zoroastrian and Muslim traditions are fusing and blurring. There's a brilliant, brilliant book on this by the late, great Patricia Kroner,

the great historian of early Islam, the nativist prophets of early Islamic Iran, which is such an interesting book. It was her last book before she died. And I commend to anyone interested in this subject. And the implications of this is that it explains why when the rebellion against the Umayyads comes, it does not originate in Iraq, even though that is kind of bubbling with resentment. And Iraq is where the Abbasids are actually waiting, this dynasty that is laying claim to the rule of the world because they are descended from Abbas, the uncle of Muhammad. It actually happens in Khorasan. And both Muslims and Zoroastrians there are seeing the world in rather similar ways. They're seeing the world as being divided into rival spheres of good and evil.

They are convinced that a great monarch is going to emerge who will be a defender of truth, a defender of God's ways, and that the man who lies, he is an oath breaker. He is a person who has trampled on the truth that he must be brought down and humbled. And these doctrines, which are very, very ancient in Zoroastrianism, are also being increasingly applied by devout Muslims towards the Umayyads. I think that this explains the slightly mysterious quality of the outbreak of the Abbasid revolution. In 745, a figure appears in Khorasan by the name of Behatharid. Behatharid dresses in green, which is the color of a Zoroastrian deity called Mir. He brandishes a book written in Persian. He claims to be an agent of light. He's clearly a very, very Zoroastrian figure, but he is also

claiming to be the messenger of God, which is the title of Muhammad. So you can see there the fusion of Zoroastrian and Islamic traditions happening. And Iranian peasants flock to him. It seems that the whole of Khorasan is going to be consumed by a revolution led by this mysterious figure clad in green. But he gets captured in 749. He gets hanged outside a mosque. But here's the thing, Dominic. The people, the Muslims who have captured Behafarid and and put him to death are themselves the followers of a figure who is very, very like Bahá'u'lláh. And this is a very, very enigmatic figure called Abu to be the agent of God. His identity is unknown. It's unclear whether he's an Arab or a Persian, whether he's an aristocrat or what is much likely a reformer slave. And when people ask him, well, who are you? Where do you come from? He replies in enigmatic terms, the knowledge of my deeds is better for you than the knowledge

of my pedigree. That's the kind of thing David Cameron used to say. I know it's not. When people say to him, how can a former, you know, old Etonian run the country? He'd say, it doesn't matter where I'm from. It's where I'm going. I was thinking, I was thinking more about Batman. Oh, Batman. Yeah. He's a kind of a mysterious superhero who's emerged and, you know, cloaked and masked. We have very different images of Abu Muslim. I think, I think that the listeners want to put David Cameron from their minds. Abu Muslim is nothing like David Cameron. He is much more like Batman. Okay, continue.

He's a mysterious, enigmatic figure. And he is an agent of the Abbasids. This is the key. That's the thing. He's not working for himself, right? Has he been suborned? Has he been put up to this by this emerging rival dynasty?

He may well be. I mean, the likeliest theory is actually he was a slave, probably a Persian in Iraq, and he gets sent to Khorasan precisely because he is able to appeal to the Iranians there and because he will be a kind of neutral figure. And that's why he kind of preserves his mysterious identity. But it enables him basically to cast himself again as an agent of God. And he is able to preach to the Iranians out there that the Abbasids are a family appointed to world rule by God, exactly as the Sasanians have been. So they're kind of tapping into that. Right. So they're picking up on the Persian tradition, but Tom, just remind us from last time, who are the Abbasids again? The Abbasids are the descendants of Abbas, who is the uncle of Muhammad.

Right. And they have been doing what in the interim since those days? Are they like minor dignitaries? Are they governors? They've been kind of hanging out, you know, being Arab warlords. Right. They haven't been persecuted or anything. But because you have this, it's articulated by the Shias who think that it's the bloodline of Ali. It's still very much present in Persian popular imagination. The idea of a family with a sacred bloodline who can be appointed by God to bring about an age of equality and justice is very, very potent, particularly in the eastern reaches of what had been the Persian Empire. And this is what the Abbasids are tapping into.

And that's why they send their agent basically to the old Zoroastrian heartlands. And it's why it's so successful there, I think. I think that what Abu Muslim, even though he suppressed the Zoroastrian prophet, and he himself, there's no question, is a very devout Muslim. Nevertheless, he is making play with Zoroastrian traditions and telling the mass of the Iranian peasantry, look, the Abbasids are the embodiment of what you want. These are the people who have been appointed by God. They share the blood of the prophet in their veins. They have been appointed by God to bring about this new age of justice. And he does this in this incredibly dramatic moment, doesn't he? The 9th of June, 747. He unfurls this flag.

And both the colour of the flag and the place that he does it are significant. Is that right? So it's a black flag. Like a pirate. The black flags of the Abbasids. But he does it in a village outside the great city of Merv, where the last Sasanian king had perished while he was fleeing from the Arabs. So that would kindle Persian memories, would it?

Right. So again, it doesn't imply that Abu Muslim has any sympathy whatsoever with the Sasanians. He's not interested in them, as I say, he's a Muslim, but it does tap into kind of buried loyalties. And he's trying to transfer those loyalties to the Abbasids. This is a tradition that is commemorated for many centuries. Long, long later in the Seljuk era, you have a tradition that, I'll quote, whenever he was alone with Zoroastrians, he would say, according to one of the books of the Sasanians which I have found, the Arab empire is finished. Now, this isn't true. There's no way that he's trying to bring about a return of the Sasanian Empire, but it does suggest that it's recognized by people in these lands that it's going with the grain of Zoroastrian traditions. And it's kind of offering Iranians a chance to redeem their dignity that had been lost

for so long. And it's a very, very potent strategy, and it proves highly successful. So the fires of rebellion, Dominic, we love a fire of rebellion, don't we? It spreads very, very fast. Absolute tinderbox. So by 748, actually on Valentine's Day, so the 14th of February, Abu Muslim has captured Merv. The following year in March, he has marched into Iran. He defeats an Umayyad force at Isfahan in Western Iran. And that effectively secures him the whole of the Iranian plateau. By August, he has gone down into Iraq, into Mesopotamia. He's gone across the Euphrates. And by September, he has captured

Kufa, which is this great city founded by the Arab armies, great kind of sectarian breeding ground for Karajites and Shiites and Sunni lawyers and all kinds of people. And it's there on the 28th of November that Abu al-Abbas, who is the great grandson of Muhammad's uncle, is proclaimed as caliph. And he is one of many brothers. He's not by any means the eldest brother, so he has older brothers. He's in his late twenties. He had arrived in Kufa prior to the arrival of Abu Islam's forces, but had been kept in a safe house. But this doesn't imply in any way that he's a kind of, you know, he's a wuss or coward or whatever. He's not at all. He's a very forceful, very driven, and as events will prove, very brutal figure. And this will be exemplified by his throne name.

So when a caliph extends, he takes a throne name. And his, Dominic, is Asafa, the Shedder of Blood. Good title. Very good title. Meanwhile, this has all been going on in the East, but the Umayyad caliph Marwan, who you described last time, curly-haired fellow, grizzled, and experienced and accomplished soldier, by the way, not a wimp or a waste of space. What's he up to while all this is going on? Well, he's got a problem because the basis

for a man of power are the Syrians and the Syrian soldiers are the elite, but they're scattered thousands of miles across the caliphate. And so it's going to take him time to gather them, but he doesn't have time. So essentially what he does is he gathers what forces he can. It still massively outnumbers the Abbasid army. He heads out from Haran, heads down towards the Euphrates. On the 25th of January, 750, he sees, Dominic, on the horizon, the black banners of the Abbasids. Marwan leads his troops across a river called the Great Zab. Good name. Which is a brilliant name and a tributary of the Tigris.

And he burns the bridges to ensure that his troops won't run away, that they'll have to stand and fight. As I say, hugely outnumber the Abbasids. They have a great force of cavalry, but the Abbasids have brought pikemen. And pikemen are always very effective against cavalry. So when the Umayyads charge the Abbasid lines, they form a shield wall, pikes bristle out like porcupines. And an Abbasid who fought in the battle, he remembered how the Syrians attacked us like mountains of iron. But when we knelt down

and prepared our spears, they turned from us like a cloud. And Marwan's army tries to flee, but they can't. They can't get across the bridge. Because he'd burn the bridges. He'd burn the bridges. So kind of classic error. So it's a kind of comprehensive defeat for the Umayyads. Marwan himself seems to have received a head injury, but he's not going to give up. He manages to get across the river. He flees to Haran. He then goes down to Damascus. No one in Damascus really wants to help him. No one in Jerusalem wants to help him. He flees to Egypt, being pursued the whole way by Abbasid agents. So very like Dominic,

Alexander pursuing Darius, if you remember. Same kind of dynamic. And then Bessus after that into Afghanistan. But Marwan actually gets cornered by his pursuers at a village in Egypt. His head is chopped off, his tongue is removed and fed to a cat, which is a splendid detail. And Marwan's head is then brought to Safa, the bloodshedder, the caliph. And Marwan's death is announced on the steps of the great mosque in Kufa by al-Safa's brother, Dawud. Praise be to God with gratitude, gratitude, and yet more gratitude. Praise be to him who has caused our enemies to perish and brought us to our inheritance from Muhammad our prophet. God's blessing and peace be upon him." Safa merits his name by absolutely, obsessively hunting down every last Umayyad that he can. The shedder of blood. He sheds

a lot of blood. I think we actually talked about this in our episode on the worst parties. The last living Umayyads are brought into Safa's presence and he orders them to be completely butchered, you know, all wiped out. And then the bodies are kind of laid out. A carpet is laid over the bodies and tables are laid kind of on the carpet. And it is said those who were present at the scene ate while the death rattle still sounded in the throats of the expiring victims. Crikey. That's a dinner party. So the living are extirpated, but so too, Dominic, are the dead.

So Sapphire orders the tombs of the Umayyad caliphs to be dug up. Corpses were scourged with whips. Some of them were crucified. Archers used the skulls for target practice and then smashed into little pieces. And then all the remains of the Umayyad caliphs were gathered up and burnt to ashes. So very, very comprehensive extirpation of the ruling dynasty. And the only one who escapes, you may remember Abd al-Rahman, who makes all the way to Spain, where in the long run, his dynasty, the Umayyads will survive and set up a new caliphate.

And we did that in the World Cup, didn't we, for Spain? We did. But Spain is so far away that this doesn't really impinge on the glory of the Abbasid triumph. And Safa basically spends the four years that he's granted of ruling as caliph, killing as many of his enemies as he possibly can. And then in 753, he dies of smallpox. And he is succeeded by his elder brother, Abu Jafar, who takes the throne named Dominic of the victorious one, Al-Mansur. And people remember the brilliant rendering of exactly how he spoke at

the start of this episode. So that is Al-Mansur. And I think we should take a break at this point. And when we come back, we will get to the founding of Baghdad, which is the great achievement of Almanzor. Brilliant. So come back after the break and Almanzor will be founding Baghdad. See you then. Woo. Chiara, it means smart in Italian.

Too bad your barista can't spell it right. So you just give a fake name, your cafe name, Giulia. But the more you use it, the more it feels like you're in witness protection. Wait a minute, what kind of espresso drinks does Julia like anyway? Is it too late to change your latte order? But with an espresso machine by KitchenAid, you wouldn't be thinking any of this because you could have just made your espresso at home. Shop now at KitchenAid.ca. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman.

And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to TheRestIsEntertainment.com. That's TheRestIs the rest is entertainment.com that's the rest is entertainment.com hello welcome back to the rest is history so we ended last time with the arrival on the scene of al mansoor he is a very impressive man isn't he he's in his late 20s people say he's a very impressive man, isn't he? He's in his late 20s. People say he's a very tall, lean, regal-looking figure. But he's not a great party animal of what makes them so unpopular with pious Muslims and has contributed to the Abbasid revolution. Al-Mansur is a very, very pious Muslim,

so he doesn't drink. He very much disapproves of music. And people may be wondering, are there going to be any eunuchs in this story? Well, there are. So one day he hears the sound of a mandolin being played in his palace, absolutely shocked, and tracks it down, discovers that it's a eunuch playing the mandolin. So he orders the instrument to be broken over the eunuch's head and the miscreant to be hauled out of the palace and sold in the slave market. So that is how he treated musicians, Dominic. Right. Okay. That's a warning there for, yeah. Yes. For anybody making music. Yeah. He's also like Sapphire, the shedder of blood. He's also pretty brutal. So Justin

Marozzi, whose book Baghdad, City of Peace, City of Blood is a wonderful history of the entire city. He says of Al-Mansur, the caliph's executions were so numerous that there were times when the historian wonders how he found the time to attend to other affairs of state. And you've read that, haven't you? There's a brilliant story about what happens after Al-Mansur has died. And he's given a key to his daughter-in-law and said that, you know, this is the key to the storeroom. You must on no account open it until I'm dead. And then he actually dies on pilgrimage to Mecca. And the news comes back to Baghdad, which is built by this point. And the daughter-in-law and her husband, the new caliph think,

oh, brilliant, let's go and find out what daddy has left in the storeroom. And do you want to take up the story? Yeah. So they go in and they think it's all going to be treasured, don't they? And they go in and they actually find

it's piles and piles and racks and racks of the dead bodies of the descendants of the Caliph Ali. That's right, isn't it, Tom? Yes. So the Shia. Yeah. Then lovely details.

They've all been labeled and tagged to say who, because they must be rotting by this point. So it's like, oh, this is great uncle Ibrahim. This is so-and-so. This is so-and-so. Yeah. I love the fact that he's been so diligent, Tom, about collating and identifying all the bodies. Well, it's the collating and identifying all the bodies.

Well, it's the fusion of brutality and bureaucracy. Yes. But sadly, it probably didn't happen. No, it almost certainly didn't happen. But it's the kind of story that his reign generates, because he very rapidly becomes the archetype of a great ruler, which of course is exactly what the Abbasid revolution was supposed to stop. The Abbasid revolution was supposed to be all about introducing a reign of justice and equity and making the teachings of the Quran manifest on the earth. But actually Al-Mansur is having none of that. So one of the reasons why he is persecuting the family of Ali is that he wants to enshrine the rule of his own family, the Abbasids. And it becomes clear very quickly

to disillusion supporters of the Abbasid revolution that basically, here's the new boss, same as the old boss. They had appealed to the Shia. Yeah, they had. Wasn't that part of the thing? And now they're basically- Suckers. Yeah, right. Oh dear. But I mean, you know what I'm saying? He's brutal. He's faintly hypocritical. He doesn't like music,

but he is a hugely impressive ruler. He's probably the most impressive ruler since Abdul Malik, the greatest of the Umayyad caliphs. And he marshals the economy very effectively. So the extravagance that had been the hallmark of the Umayyads, he stops that. He's nicknamed Abu Dawanik, which one translation is daddy's small change, because he counts every last dirham, every last dinar. You need that in a rule of thumb. You do. There's a kind of famous maxim of his that is quite kind of mafiosi. He who has no money has no men and he who has no men watches as his foes wax great. So he's aware of what the

basis of his power is, that it's money and it's men. But he does also have an absolutely authentically global sense of his mission, which is an Islamic one. As I say, he's a very pious Muslim. And he feels that to set his own dynasties and the caliphate's power on a firm footing, he needs a capital. And so that then begs the question of where should the capital be? So there were various options. It could have Damascus. The Umayyad capital, basically. The Umayyad capital, beautiful mosque there, which still stands, famous Muslim city, but very associated with the Umayyads. And there's a further problem with that, that the Abbasid

power base basically is Iranian. They came to power by means of the revolution in Khorasan. So really, Damascus is too far to the west. The need to keep Iran and Khorasan on side explains why Abu Muslim, for instance, is very rapidly dispatched. Yeah, I was wondering what happened to him. So he comes on pilgrimage from Khorasan and he gets invited to Al-Mansur's party and that's the end of him. And even though there's a revolt in Khorasan, Al-Mansur is able to suppress it. So he's good at taking calculated risks, I think. But that just emphasises for him the fact that he needs a capital that's going to look eastwards rather than westwards as the American capital at Damascus had done. So he could found it in Kufa, but the problem with Kufa has always been

that it's absolutely rife with sectarian tensions. There are so many Shiites there, so many Karajites there. It's a real problem. And basically, Al-Mansur comes to the conclusion that Kufa breeds heresy. So he establishes a camp on the outskirts of Kufa and his Persian guards end up reclaiming Al-Mansur a god. And when he objects to this, they try to kill him. And so he has them all killed, but he decides this is no good either. Haran, the capital of Marwan, again, rife with pagans. And so he decides that he's going to build a new capital from scratch. And he decides it's got to be in Mesopotamia. Mesopotamia is the richest possession in the entire caliphate. It's very conveniently connected

to the east. He goes sailing up and down the River Tigris looking for the perfect spot. He settles on a tiny village called Baghdad. Baghdad is not an Arab word, it's a Persian word meaning a gift from God. It's one of a number of very Christian villages, lots of monasteries. Almansoor buys up the whole lot and decides that this is where he is going to found his capital. Aside from the fact that it has very, very convenient links to Khorasan, it's also on the trade links between the Persian Gulf, so Basra, and the Mediterranean. Yeah. This is why in the passage that you so beautifully read at the start, he says, this city is going to be the crossroads of the universe. And basically that's

what Baghdad becomes. Al-Mansur's aim is that Baghdad will be the centre of the world. And that's basically what it does indeed become. Because it becomes the most populous city, the richest city on earth, doesn't it for a time? It does. But before we get to that, Tom, tell us how it's built. So Almanzor arrives in the spring of 762, and his engineers outline the new city's walls in cinders. And then the day that is chosen for the foundation, it's chosen by two royal astrologers, and the date is variously given as the 30th of July or 2nd of August.

It's sometime around then. And it's Mansur, of course, who lays the first brick. And it takes four years to complete the initial stage of the capital. And then 768, he starts building an extension on the far side of the Tigris. And these are linked by pontoon bridges. Lots of land around the city are given to soldiers from Khorasan. So basically, you basically, it's kind of free land. This solves the problem of how do you keep your soldiers on board and give them

land. And very rapidly, you're starting to get slums develop as well, because it's obvious that this is going to be the place to be. And Baghdad is given the official name of Madinat As-Salam, the city of peace. Now, what does it look like? The problem we have is that the foundation established by Al-Mansur, nothing has survived at all. So we're dependent on written sources. And a lot of these, there's a reason why Baghdad becomes the fabled city of the Arabian Nights. Some clearly very tall stories are told about it. But having said that, there is a kind of consensus in the sources that you can kind of arrive at. And the most striking thing about it is that the city that is initially built by Mansur is a circle, an absolutely perfect circle. So Al-Jahiz, who is a famous essayist,

who actually ends up being crushed to death when a great pile of books fall on him. That's a warning to us all, Tom. Warning to us all. He says of Baghdad that it's such a perfect circle that it is as if it was poured into a mould and cast. So you have a moat, you have two massive walls. These walls are estimated to have been anything from one to four miles in circumference. The outer wall is 60 feet high. The inner wall is 90 feet high. So these are massive, massive walls. There are only four gates. These gates are located midway between the four cardinal directions, so north, east, south, and west. And the gateways are spectacular. So you have cupolas. These are over the gatehouse. These are supported by columns

of teak. The coloring of these gatehouses, green on the outside, gold ceilings. So to go into Baghdad, you know that you are entering the most spectacular, the most beautiful city on the face of the planet. Each of these gates, straight roads leading to the very center of the city lined with vaulted arcades. And beyond these arcades, there are various bazaars, which are, of course, incredibly rich because Baghdad attracts merchandise from across the world. And these are there for the first years of Baghdad's existence. But then a Byzantine emissary comes and points out to Mansur that bazaars breed mobs and that mobs are capable of turning on emperors. And this, of course, is something that the Byzantines are well aware of. And so Mansur, you know, he says, whatever, no one would attack me.

And then a few months later, he orders all the bazaars out and they are moved to a place called Kark, which becomes the kind of the great commercial industrial hub of the city, and that's outside the circular walls. And actually, the west part of Baghdad is still nicknamed Kark to this day, isn't it? To this day, from that, yeah. And then you have this kind of third innermost wall, and beyond this innermost wall, you have a great central enclosure, and inside it, you have a mosque and a palace. And this is a pious recreation of how Muhammad had lived at Medina, where he had a mosque and there were living quarters for his various wives. So even though the buildings here are massive, there is a sense in which Al-Mansur is paying tribute to the prophet because both these buildings are on a massive scale.

So 360,000 feet is Justin Marozzi's estimate in his book, The Mosque, so vast. And the palace, it's called the Palace of the Golden Gate. It has an enormous 120 foot high green dome above the main audience chamber. This is an emulation of what the Emead's done. So Emead Palace has had green domes, but again, absolutely nothing on this scale. And again, you get a sense of the way in which the stupendous quality of this very rapidly starts to shade into myth because there are stories that on the top of the dome, there is a statue of a horseman with a lance and that this horseman will turn and point the lance in whatever direction the next enemy to confront the caliph is expected to come from.

And within this great central enclosure, no one except for Mansur himself is allowed to ride a horse. So even his relatives, if they're ill, they're not allowed to get on a horse. And Tom, the people who moved to Baghdad, so the caliph moves in, his bodyguards, his nobles, whatever, his advisors, but all the people who are piling in, are they, what, economic migrants from other parts of the empire? Are they largely from Iran or from Mesopotamia? Do we have any sense of that? You have his courtiers and you have the soldiers from Khorasan who've been given lands, rather like Octavian gives lands to his legions after he's defeated Antony, same kind of idea. But inevitably, you have people who are flocking to where the caliph is. I mean, this is where the action is. So yeah, you have people from

across the entire world coming to Baghdad. And that means that the city is endlessly growing. So Mansur himself, I mean, amazingly, he decides he's a bit fed up with his palace in the middle of the round city. So he builds another one called the Palace of Eternity down by the banks of the Tigris, I guess, because it's cooler there. You're getting the, you know, the airs from the river. And he also builds another extension, another palace on the far side of the banks. So on the Western banks of the Tigris. And it's just enormous. And even Byzantine ambassadors coming from Constantinople are kind of stupefied by it, stupefied by the wealth, by the beauty, and by the absolute perfection of the round qualities of these great central walls in the heart of Baghdad.

And this becomes a great source of pride to Baghdadis later in centuries on. So one of them, who writes a history of Baghdad in the 11th century, he says of Baghdad, there is no other round city that is known of in all the regions of the world. So he sees it as being completely unique, but Dominic, here's the thing. It's not at all unique. Oh, Tom, what a twist. Because actually various cities in the Sasanian empire had been circular. Right. So even Iran had been kind of oval, but the Sasanians had actually been very keen on circular cities. And that's a reflection of the fact that although we think Baghdad is an Arab

city, the designers and the architects seem almost certainly to have been Persian. So the design of the mosque, the mosque does not have a dome in the center of the round city. It's actually modeled on Persian examples of architecture that goes ultimately all the way back to Persepolis. There's a little touch of the court of the King of Kings in the mosque in the center of Baghdad. And if the association of palace and mosque in the middle of Baghdad echoes the example of Muhammad, it also echoes the example of the Sasanian kings who had fused fire temples with palaces in their own cities. Even one of the astrologers who fixes the date for the founding of Baghdad, he's a Zoroastrian convert. The weird thing about Baghdad is that almost everything about it suggests a culture that is ultimately Persian and therefore actually much older than Mansur himself.

So even though Baghdad is a new city, its roots are actually surprisingly deep and it reflects a seismic development in the history of Islam and therefore of the world, which is that the orientation of Islam from this point on will definitely be Persian rather than Roman. So Tom, just to focus in on that. So when Islam emerged, it emerged in a world heavily influenced by the Romans on a frontier, I guess. So at first, the Romans themselves thought it was a kind of, you know, those first fragmentary sources say, well, is it a kind of Jewish heresy? Is it an offshoot to Christianity? Who knows what it is? So the Arabs have taken over a lot of the old of Baghdad, there is a massive fracture point, which is that now what we think of as the Middle East is looking away from the West, from the Mediterranean, and looking more towards Persia, basically. I think so. The Umayyads were notorious for impersonating Caesars. This was one of the

many accusations that were levelled against them. If you think of the Dome of the Rock, it's like a Byzantine church. Yeah, it's like the great church in Constantinople, right? Yeah. The great mosque that the Umayyads built in Damascus, that had originally been a cathedral, but before a cathedral, it had been a temple to Zeus. So it's literally built within the shell of a Roman pagan temple. And there is a sense that the endless attempts to try and capture Constantinople are because the Umayyads feel that they can only properly be world emperors if they're ruling it from the capital of Caesar. But with the Abbasids and with the founding of

Baghdad, that orientation, that sense that it's the Roman example that is there to be emulated, or rather to be drawn on, perhaps I should say, for cultural and ideological sustenance. That fades and increasingly it's the Persian example. But it's not just the Persian because I'm sure people who have heard the episodes that we did on Babylon, when I'm talking about the great walls, the great religious structures and palaces in the heart of the city, will be reminded of Babylon. Now, this is not conscious, but Babylon is only about 40 miles from where Baghdad is. And there are other cities as well. So there's Seleucia, which had been the great Hellenistic capital, Ctesiphon, which had been the Sasanian capital. These are pretty much on the doorsteps of Baghdad. And in fact, Ctesiphon provides raw materials for the building of Baghdad. Even if Mansur himself is not

consciously drawing on these exemplars, scholars in Baghdad do recognize the fact that the placement of Baghdad in what they can recognize as the great birthplace of civilization is significant. There's the court astrologer in the earliest days of Baghdad. He writes that the people of every age and era acquire fresh experiences and have knowledge renewed for them in accordance with the decree of the stars. So there's that idea that Baghdad is the latest iteration of cycles of great cities that have risen and fallen, but that Baghdad is the culmination of it because it can absorb the learning and the experience of all the cities that have gone before it. So it's the climax of world history?

Yes, because just as Jews and Christians and Zoroastrians have been absorbed into the Caliphate, just as the Roman and Iranian provinces have been absorbed into it, so is the past being absorbed into an Islamic future. Baghdad is the summation of all the civilizations that have gone before it. And this is basically why representatives of the superseded faiths are perfectly welcome in Baghdad. So I said one of the astrologers that says the date on which it should be founded is Zoroastrian, the other one is a converted Jew. The court physicians are Christian.

Christians are famous as doctors. And within only a few decades of the founding of Baghdad, the Eastern Patriarch will be enshrined in Baghdad and made very welcome. But there's also a sense in which, symbolically, trophies are being brought to Baghdad that symbolize older civilizations. So the gates on the four great gates that lead into the circular city, the story goes that originally they were made by demons out of iron for Solomon. One is said specifically to have been of pharaonic workmanship. By pharaonic, it doesn't mean it comes from Egypt, but from a pagan temple, probably in Syria. These gates are pre-Islamic, but the point is that they have now been absorbed

into the urban fabric of an Islamic city. You can see economically, in terms of trade policy, in terms of its ability to command the high roads that lead out to the limits of the frontier in terms of psychogeography, in terms of culture, in terms of architecture. Baghdad is a brilliant, brilliant foundation. Everyone immediately recognises that this is a city that, even though it's barely been in existence, Mansur dies, as we said earlier, on pilgrimage to Mecca in 775. By the time of his death, everyone absolutely accepts that Baghdad is the place to be, that it is a beautiful, haunted place. And that's kind of amazing considering it's the Milton Keynes of... I'm glad you said that at the end and not at the beginning, because we wouldn't have any listeners,

apart from people in Milton Keynes, of course. Actually, in Milton Keynes, they were very keen on psychogeography as well. The chief designer was a druid. I've written about Milton Keynes, Tom. I'm actually quite a big fan of Milton Keynes. Anyway, this is an unexpected development. Let's just leave this episode by saying that Baghdad has been founded. The boast of Mansur, that it will become the crossroads of the universe, has been fulfilled.

It's a global crossroads, but it's also a crossroads of the universe has been fulfilled. It's a global crossroads, but it's also a crossroads where past and future, where various traditions, various understandings of the divine all meet, and that this sets it up for what will become an absolutely dazzling golden age. It's the reason why, I guess, Assassin's Creed have decided that Baghdad deserves to rank alongside Alexandria as one of the totemic urban centers of human civilization. So the good news is, Tom, we finally got within 100 years of the period that the introduction to the last episode was set in.

At last, we are approaching what we'll be talking about next week, which is even more exciting than what we've done so far. So we will be talking about the golden age of Baghdad, the Islamic golden age, this extraordinary zenith of arts and philosophy and mathematics and science and all kinds of drama. And of course, the world of the Arabian Nights and Harun al-Rashid and all of this stuff.

So we've got all that to look forward to next week. Of course, if you remember the Rest is History Club, you know the drill. You get all kinds of lovely sherbets and sort of dancing girls dancing sweetmeats and all that kind of stuff don't you and you also get the chance to listen to episodes early which is the real attraction but the rest of you we will well we will join you next week hopefully and tom thank you very much and on that note goodbye goodbye Goodbye. Goodbye. I'm Marina Hyde.

And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com.