The sons of the Turkish cabal who had held power under Mu’tasim were now back in power and planned to remain so. They needed a frontman to be the Caliph, but the individuals they chose didn’t live long. There were four Caliphs in just a few years.
Muntasir began to realize what he had done, conspiring with the Turks to share his father’s blood on their hands. He openly told his half-brothers that he deposed and sent them away because if he didn’t, Turks would kill them. He died six months after his accession, with poisoning rumors.
Next, the Turks chose a grandson of their old patron and named him al-Musta’in. Immediately there were riots in Samarra and Baghdad on behalf of Muntasir’s brothers. By the following year, when there was bad news from eastern wars, the people rioted again. They burned the houses of a few prominent Christians in Baghdad, and in both Baghdad and Samarra, mobs broke into the jails. To stop the riot in Samarra, one of the leading Turks ordered soldiers to set fire to that quarter of the city.
All this time, the Caliphs had been keeping huge salaried armies. Al-Tabari’s history reports that their annual salaries amounted to two years’ tax income for the Caliph. Obviously, that’s unsustainable, and the situation had been going on, getting worse. Now, with the tax-gathering and payment structure falling apart in anarchy, salaries went unpaid. It was clear that there was no payment forthcoming, so a mob of soldiers killed the vizier and looted his house.
Caliph Musta’in slipped away to Baghdad when the Turks around him began quarreling and plotting against him and each other. A few months later, Baghdad and Samarra were in open war. Both cities blocked any river traffic to the other, and Baghdad called in reinforcements from other parts of Iraq. Within a few months and at great cost, they built up walls, barracks, and catapults, readying for a siege. They even broke irrigation systems north of Baghdad to flood the land so that Turks coming from Samarra would be slowed.
The Turks did march from Samarra, and by then, they had decided to support Muntasir’s brothers, whom before they had rejected. Any port in a storm, anything for revenge. They were seven thousand strong, and they destroyed property as they came. Crops and houses were ruined and farmers fled. Other rebels joined them, so when they besieged Baghdad they may have been 12,000 strong. Many of Baghdad’s defenders were civilians with tar-covered reed-mat “armor” and buckets of rocks. At one point, though, Baghdad’s defenders routed the Turks and chased them into the Tigris River, but the Caliph’s commander did not follow them to finish it off, and the city remained under siege.
One defender in Baghdad, clearly a civilian, got the names of the Caliph Musta’in and would-be Caliph Mu’tazz mixed up. He was executed as a traitor. Nobody pointed out that these names are really very confusing. They will not be on the test.
The city was eventually starved out. By 866, Musta’in abdicated. He was supposed to retire to an estate, but…nope. Mutazz had him executed.
Caliph Mutazz ruled from Samarra over a divided realm, an Iraq destroyed by war, falling income, and mounting debt. He imprisoned, fired, or executed all rivals (some brothers, some Turks, some others). He appeared to be emerging from the Turkish shadow, but without money he just couldn’t do it. In his last year, the governor of Egypt declared independence—and stopped passing on taxes—and African slaves in southern Iraq mounted a large, long-lasting Kharijite rebellion. It was too much. Mutazz was deposed and killed in 869.
The Turkish lord Salih ibn Wasif appointed Mutazz’s cousin al-Muhtadi, who ruled for only six months. He was pious and abstemious so the people accepted him, but the realm was falling apart by now, and he was assassinated in 870 and replaced by his cousin Mu’tamid. Mu’tamid, however, ruled for 22 years, though personally he was sidelined by a more ambitious brother.
- Caliphate: the History of an Idea. Hugh Kennedy.
- When Baghdad Ruled the Muslim World. Hugh Kennedy.