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History & Empires

The Islamic Golden Age and the Silk Road

The centuries between the rise of the Abbasid Caliphate in the mid-eighth century and the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth are sometimes called the…

The centuries between the rise of the Abbasid Caliphate in the mid-eighth century and the Mongol conquests of the thirteenth are sometimes called the Islamic Golden Age, and the phrase is apt. In the great cities of the Islamic world — Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Cordoba, Samarkand, Bukhara — scholars produced work of lasting importance in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, optics, chemistry, geography, and philosophy. Merchants and bankers built the most sophisticated commercial system the world had yet seen. Craftsmen developed new materials, new techniques, and new aesthetic vocabularies. The Silk Road was the principal infrastructure of all of this, and the Islamic world was its principal artery. I think the standard textbook framing undersells the Iranian half of the story; the Persian-language scholarship is the spine of the period, and Baghdad is, in a real sense, a Persianate capital.

This article describes the relationship between the Islamic Golden Age and the Silk Road, with attention to the political framework that enabled the trade, the cities that profited from it, the technologies that spread along it, and the intellectual traditions that grew up around it. For the broader context of long-distance commerce, see the article on Silk Road trade, goods, and economy. The central city of the period is treated in the article on Baghdad and the Silk Road, and the spread of the religion that gave the period its name in the article on the spread of Islam along the Silk Road. The most consequential single technology transfer of the period is described in the article on paper-making on the Silk Road, and the broader cultural exchange in the article on cultural exchange along the Silk Road.

The Abbasid revolution

750 CE. The Abbasid revolution ends the Umayyad caliphate, and the centre of the Islamic world moves east. Within a generation, the consequences will be visible from the Atlantic to the Indus.

The Abbasid Caliphate, which overthrew the Umayyads in 750 CE, transformed the political and economic geography of the Islamic world. The Umayyad caliphs had ruled from Damascus, and their attention had been focused on the Mediterranean and the Byzantine frontier. The Abbasids moved the capital east, founding the new city of Baghdad in 762 CE on the Tigris, near the old Sasanian capital of Ctesiphon. The move brought the centre of Islamic power directly onto the overland Silk Road, and the political and economic effects were immediate. (The round-city plan of Baghdad, attributed to al-Mansur’s architects, is reconstructed in several museum models; the British Museum has a particularly good one in the Joseph Hotung galleries, last time I looked.)

The new Abbasid empire stretched from the Indus to the Atlantic, and it included the two most important commercial hubs of the medieval world: the Persian Gulf, which connected the Islamic world with India and the spice trade, and the North African and Levantine coast, which connected it with the Mediterranean and the gold of West Africa. The caliphate’s control of this enormous territory produced a single, integrated market that was, in many respects, larger and more efficient than the Roman Empire had been.

The Golden Age was, in significant part, an effect of the trade.

The early Abbasid caliphs, particularly al-Mansur, Harun al-Rashid, and al-Ma’mun, used the wealth generated by this trade to patronise a remarkable cultural and intellectual programme. The most famous institution of that programme was the Bayt al-Hikma, or House of Wisdom, established in Baghdad in the early ninth century under al-Ma’mun. The House of Wisdom was a library, a translation office, and a research institute. It commissioned and produced Arabic translations of the major works of Greek, Persian, Indian, and Syriac scholarship, and its scholars made original contributions of the first rank in algebra, geometry, astronomy, medicine, and optics. The standard Western textbook tends to treat the Bayt al-Hikma as the centre of the universe; in my view that is too neat. There were similar translation movements in Toledo, in Cordoba, and in the Samanid east, and the Bayt al-Hikma is the one that survived best in the modern imagination.

Baghdad as a commercial hub

The city of Baghdad itself, in the eighth and ninth centuries, may have been the largest city in the world. Estimates of its population in the early Abbasid period range from half a million to a million inhabitants, drawn from every province of the caliphate and from beyond. The city’s merchants traded in Chinese silk, Indian pepper, African gold, Persian carpets, Frankish swords, Yemeni frankincense, and the products of every province of the empire. The wealth of Baghdad was proverbial, and the riches described in the Thousand and One Nights, although set in a later period, capture something of the cosmopolitanism of the early Abbasid commercial economy. What strikes me, rereading the chronicles, is how un-modern the commercial practices look at first glance — and then you notice that the cheques cleared.

Baghdad’s commercial infrastructure was, in its own way, as advanced as that of the great Mediterranean cities. The city had a sophisticated system of money-changing, banking, and credit. Letters of credit and bills of exchange, in forms recognisable to modern economists, were in regular use among the merchants of Baghdad. The institution of the hawala, an informal system of value transfer that allowed a merchant to deposit money with a broker in Baghdad and have an equivalent sum paid out in Damascus or Cairo, was already old in al-Ma’mun’s time and may have origins in pre-Islamic Persia. The conventional narrative, in my view, oversells the hawala as a uniquely Islamic invention. The same instruments are visible in Sasanian business practice, and the lawyers of the Sasanian chancery are the more likely ancestors.

The wealth of Baghdad did not survive intact. The city was sacked by the Buyids in 945 CE, besieged by the Seljuks in the late eleventh century, and finally destroyed by the Mongols under Hulagu Khan in 1258 CE, in one of the great catastrophes of medieval history. The Mongol destruction killed perhaps half a million people and ended the Abbasid caliphate, but it did not end the Islamic Golden Age, which simply moved to other cities. Popular accounts tend to treat 1258 as the end of the story; I think that misses what came after. The Ilkhanid and Timurid courts kept the scholarship going for another two centuries, and the books Baghdad produced in the eighth and ninth centuries were still being copied in Isfahan in 1400.

A personal note

A note on names. The period I have called the “Islamic Golden Age” is variously dated in modern scholarship, with some authors placing it from the eighth to the eleventh century, others from the eighth to the thirteenth, and a few (more controversially) into the fourteenth. I have used the broader dating because the cultural achievements of the Ilkhanid and Timurid periods are continuous with those of the Abbasid. The reader should know that this is contested ground.

Further reading

If you only have time for one thing, read Hansen (2012) — the rest is detail.

  • Hansen, The Silk Road: A New History (Oxford, 2012).
  • Peter Frankopan, The Silk Roads (Bloomsbury, 2015), if you want the more sweeping argument.
  • Whitfield, Life Along the Silk Road, 2nd ed. (2015).
  • The relevant chapter of the Oxford Handbook or Cambridge History of the region or period.
  • One article from a recent issue of Central Asiatic Journal or Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient (JESHO) for current scholarship.

If you came to this article first, start with the main Silk Road guide (Baghdad and the Silk Road). For the rest of the network, see: