Caliph Mamoun died pretty suddenly after a pleasant summer day of sitting on a river bank with his brother, chatting and eating some dates. All of a sudden, he had a fever. Other got sick too, but the Caliph died the next day. He had not made a clear provision for an heir, and his son Abbas was out on military campaign. As it happened, the brother who was sitting with him was a masterful man who really wanted to become Caliph. It may have been the last time that the Arab tradition of brother inheritance worked out peacefully; Abbas came home to find his uncle already ruling. He decided to just deal with it.
Caliph Mu’tasim had always been a hardy, active man who preferred sports and campaigns to study. While he was still a very young man, he started picking up cheap Turks on the slave market to create a personal guard. His brother encouraged him because it was very useful to have a growing personal army on hand, and when Mu’tasim became Caliph, he gathered even more Turkish guards.
Turks had already been coming to Baghdad, but this was the largest influx yet, and they walked right into officer positions in the army, displacing former generals. They were unreconstructed Turks; many did not speak Farsi or Arabic, and their Islam was worn lightly. Their arrival in Baghdad caused an unpleasant culture shock; the citizens claimed that the Turks were callous, knocking people down with their horses and trampling children. Those who had held power under his brother protested and tried to push back. Mu’tasim’s tie with his Turks was so strong that he decided to build a new capital a bit to the north, abandoning Baghdad to a governor and its booming commerce.
The new capital was called Samarra. He chose a plateau near the river, purchased from a Christian monastery, but the climate was too dry for any city to flourish. Within two years, the basic city was built, and dry plots of land around it handed out to his leading supporters, as his family had done in Baghdad. There were mosques, palaces, houses, parks, and even race courses. But commerce did not move north with his court. He now had a place where Turks could live in a more Turkish way, but he was also sidelined.
In 838, to nobody’s surprise, the old power based in Baghdad attempted a coup in favor of Abbas. But Mu’tasim’s power was already too strong, and he carried out a ferocious purge of his brother’s old supporters. (During his reign, purge execution methods favored originality. His vizier is credited with inventing the Iron Maiden, a box with spikes sticking inward.) Nephew Abbas was killed by dehydration (too much salt, wrapped him up in felt in the hot desert). Seventy plotters were killed in other creative ways, a few buried alive.
Mu’tasim’s method for regaining popularity was to start three wars. Two of the Turkish generals conquered small principalities in Azerbaijan, while Mu’tasim himself led an army into Byzantine territory. He achieved two significant goals: the capture of the city the Greeks called Ancyra, which became Ankara, and the thorough destruction of the Roman Emperor’s hometown, Amorion. A weakness in the wall–the governor just didn’t get around to fixing it when the Emperor had ordered it–permitted it to be broken in. High ranking citizens were held for ransom, women and children were auctioned off as slaves, and 6000 low-ranking citizens were later mass-murdered on a forced march that went wrong.
Forty-two of the high-ranking hostages later became martyrs of their faith. Those who held them refused ransom, demanding that they convert to Islam, and they died instead. Their Orthodox feast day is March 6, commemorating their execution.
Mu’tasim died in 842, and his son inherited rule as al-Wathiq (or, in some Western transliterations, Vathek, as in a lurid Orientalist novel of that name). He was a timid man who stayed in Samarra and allowed his father’s inner circle advisers to run things. Things began to go wrong for him quickly. In 846, there was an uprising in Baghdad because the common people were still feeling oppressed by the Caliph’s theological position. Mamoun, you recall, had taken the position that the Quran must be declared to be created, but most of the citizenry had been believing that it was eternal. This could be just a disagreement among friends, only it wasn’t. The governments of Mamoun, Mu’tasim and Wathiq harshly punished those who gave the wrong answer to this question, saying they were heretics and apostates.
Caliph al-Wathiq survived the uprising, but he died of natural causes in 847. The same inner circle was still in control, and they had to choose among the various sons, brothers and cousins: who could they promote now? Who looked pliable enough to let them have their way? They chose a non-entity named Jafar, and soon they were sorry…
- Caliphate: the History of an Idea. Hugh Kennedy.
- When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World. Hugh Kennedy.