Routes & Cities
Baghdad and the Silk Road
Baghdad, the round city founded by the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur in 762 CE on the Tigris, was for a century the largest city in the world, and for several…
Baghdad, the round city founded by the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur in 762 CE on the Tigris, was for a century the largest city in the world, and for several centuries the political, economic, and intellectual center of the Islamic world. The city sat astride both the overland route from Central Asia and the maritime route of the Persian Gulf, and was the destination of goods from India, China, and the Mediterranean as well as the source of manufactured goods, books, and paper for the entire Islamic world. Its rise to prominence was, in my view, the single most important development in the Silk Road cities of the central Islamic zone — and the speed of it, from a building site in 762 to a million inhabitants within a century, still astonishes me every time I think about it.
The Abbasid revolution of 750 CE, which overthrew the Umayyad caliphate in Damascus, had been substantially financed by Shi’a partisans, eastern Iranian landowners, and Sogdian and other merchants who had grown rich on the overland trade through Merv and Khorasan. The new dynasty needed a capital closer to its eastern power base, and al-Mansur selected a site on the Tigris near the old Sasanian capital of Ctesiphon. The Round City — a perfectly circular walled enclosure about two kilometers in diameter, with four equidistant gates — was organized around the caliphal palace in the center and the great mosque on the riverside, with the four gates leading out to Khorasan, Kufa, Basra, and Damascus.
Trade and the Abbasid economy
Baghdad’s commercial importance was built on its position at the crossing of two trade systems. To the east, the overland routes from Samarkand and Bukhara brought Chinese silks, Central Asian furs, and Indian goods through Merv and Khorasan. To the south, the maritime route through the Persian Gulf brought Indian pepper, cinnamon, and gems, and East African ivory, gold, and slaves. The city’s merchants acted as brokers between the two systems, and its markets became the largest in the medieval world.
The Abbasid caliphate also developed a sophisticated system of state-sponsored industry. The imperial workshops in Baghdad — the tiraz factories, run from the caliphal palace — produced silks, glass, metalwork, and paper for both domestic consumption and export. Baghdad’s brokers developed early forms of commercial credit, including letters of credit and bills of exchange (suftaja), that allowed merchants to settle accounts across long distances without moving metal. These financial instruments, described in detail in the Islamic Golden Age context, are the ancestors of the modern banking system — a point, I think, that most general histories skip past too quickly.
Baghdad was, in the ninth century, the largest city in the world.
The House of Wisdom and the translation movement
Baghdad’s most lasting contribution to world history was intellectual. Under the caliphs al-Mansur, Harun al-Rashid, and al-Ma’mun, the city became the center of a great translation movement in which the scientific, medical, philosophical, and mathematical works of Greece, India, and Persia were translated into Arabic. The institution most associated with this effort is the Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom, founded under al-Ma’mun in the early ninth century, though the translation movement involved many libraries and individual scholars across the Islamic world and the Bayt al-Hikma was only one node in a wider network.
The works translated at Baghdad included the mathematical texts of Euclid, Archimedes, and Diophantus; the astronomical works of Ptolemy (the Almagest came across in several versions, none of them simple); the medical writings of Galen and Hippocrates; the philosophical works of Aristotle and Plato; and the mathematical and astronomical treatises of Indian scholars, including Brahmagupta and the unknown author of the Siddhantas. The Arabic translations preserved many Greek works that had been lost in the original Greek, and they formed the basis from which the same works were later translated into Latin — by Gerard of Cremona in Toledo, by Adelard of Bath in Sicily — and transmitted to medieval Europe.
The paper that made this translation movement physically possible came largely from the technology captured by Arab forces at the Battle of Talas in 751 CE, in modern Kyrgyzstan. Paper factories were established in Baghdad in the late eighth century, and the city quickly became the principal paper-producing center of the early medieval world. The paper-making revolution that followed transformed the economics of scholarship, government, and commerce throughout the Islamic world and, eventually, in Europe.
The Iraq Museum in Baghdad — the building on its own, opened in 1966 and badly damaged in the 2003 war and only partially restored — still holds the principal collection of Abbasid material culture. The British Museum (Room 34, the Islamic gallery) and the Louvre (Department of Islamic Art, the lower mezzanine) have substantial collections of Abbasid ceramics and metalwork acquired before the 1990s, and the smaller but very good Ashmolean collection in Oxford is worth a special trip if you are already in the city.
A personal note
A note on the modern city. The round city of al-Mansur has been completely rebuilt and rebuilt again, and the modern city of Baghdad, with ten million inhabitants, preserves almost no trace of the medieval Abbasid capital. A reader visiting modern Baghdad for the Silk Road will be disappointed. The Abbasid monuments are mostly gone. What survives is the site, the surrounding Iraqi landscape, and the manuscript collections in the Iraq Museum.
Further reading
- Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford, 2012).
- Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road, 2nd ed. (2015).
- The relevant Oxford Handbook or Cambridge History chapter for the region or period.