In the year 744CE,
Marwan II ascended to the throne of the caliphate. Little did he know that he
would be the last Umayyad to do so after ninety years of corruption, the throne
was being pulled from under the Umayyad dynasty, once and for all.
By 746CE, a man named
Abu Muslim had taken control of Merv from the Umayyad governor and was now in
full revolt. By 747CE, he had secured Khorasan and Persia. The Abbasids and
their black standard were now moving towards Mesopotamia. They used a black
flag in opposition to the Umayyads’ white flag.
In 749CE, the Abbasid
army crossed the Euphrates and entered Kufa. By this point, the Abbasids were
confident of their victory. So much so that Abul Abbas as-Saffah, the
great-great-grandson of Muhammad’s uncle, al-Abbas, was declared caliph in
Kufa. Marwan II tried to mobilize an army to defeat the Abbasids. The armies
met at the Battle of the Zab on the 25th of January, 750CE. Marwan’s army was
defeated by the Abbasids.
This was the final nail
in the Umayyad coffin. The revolution was more or less over. Marwan escaped to
Egypt but was caught and killed. By April of that year, Damascus was secured by
the Abbasids. The Umayyads were no more. During the revolution, the Abbasids
painted themselves as the exact opposite of the Umayyads. Where the Umayyad
bureaucracy was made up mostly of Arabs, the Abbasids recruited soldiers of all
ethnicities and ranked them by merit.
Abu Muslim went up and
down the Silk Road to find soldiers who would join them. He did all of this in
secrecy before his attack on Marv. The revolution grew for more than forty years
inside the Umayyad Caliphate. The name of that member wasn’t revealed until the
Umayyads were overthrown. That’s how secretive they were. Anyways, As-Saffah,
whose name literally means “The Blood-shedder” took the title of the Caliph and
established the Abbasid Dynasty, which would hold the title of Caliph till
after Columbus sailed the ocean blue.
Umayyad princes were
massacred in large numbers. They were chased and killed wherever they were
found. The graves of Umayyad rulers were desecrated except for Umar II. The
Abbasids even promised amnesty for Umayyad princes, gathered some eighty of
them, and massacred them. One prince, however, the great-grandson of Abd
al-Malik named Abd al-Rahman escaped through Egypt and Africa. He was around
twenty years of age at the time.
He made his way to
Al-Andalus or Hispania. After the Muslim conquest of Spain, the Muslim
population there was mostly Syrians and Berbers. Syrians loved the Umayyads and
Abd al-Rahman’s mother was Berber so he was able to secure enough support there
to overthrow the governor there and establish an independent emirate. He
created a safe haven for the supporters of the Umayyads and his own family, including
his sisters, wife, and children, whom he had left in Mesopotamia.
On the other side,
As-Saffah spent the next four years consolidating his control over the empire. In
751CE, the Abbasids met their Chinese neighbors in the Battle of the Talas River.
The Tang Empire had been a powerful rival to the Umayyads in Central Asia. In
As-Saffah’s attempt to consolidate his rule in Khorasan, his armies met the
Chinese Army. The battle resulted in a victory for the Abbasids who moved to
take almost all of Central Asia.
As-Saffah died of
Smallpox in 754CE, leaving the empire to his brother, Al-Mansur. Al-Mansur is
often regarded as the real founder of the Abbasid Dynasty because of all the
contributions he made to the empire. The first thing he did as caliph was had, Abu
Muslim killed because that’s what you get for helping douchebags overthrow an
empire. Abu Muslim had solid support throughout the empire due to his role in
the rebellion.
Al-Mansur took him out
for a walk and had some of his guards kill him. After dispatching Abu Muslim,
he dispatched an army to take back Al-Andalus. The Abbasid army surrounded Abd
al-Rahman in a fortress in Carmona, in modern-day Spain. Abd al-Rahman knew
that there was no way out so he handpicked some 700 of his men and lit up a
fire and ordered his men to throw their scabbards into the fire. He told his
men that he would rather die fighting than die of hunger so, he opens the gates
and attacked the unsuspecting Abbasid army.
The Abbasid army was
taken by surprise and Abd al-Rahman actually managed to defeat them. He cut off
the heads of all the leaders of the army, preserved them in salt, and sent them
to al-Mansur, who was on a pilgrimage to Mecca at the time when he received
those heads. There were even tags attached to the ears of each head to identify
it. On the 30th of July, 762CE, Al-Mansur commissioned the construction of a new
city.
He chose a site north
of Ctesiphon, which had been the Persian capital before the Muslims overthrew
the Sassanid Empire. It took around four years to finish the construction.
Baghdad was founded. At the core of Baghdad was around the city called The City of The peace which housed the Golden Gate Palace, which housed the Caliph. Eventually,
this city would become the biggest city in the world, the center of learning
and culture with more than a million inhabitants at its peak.
The empire was starting
to shift from an Arab empire to a more Persian one. The Abbasids were Arabs but
it was the Persians who had helped bring them to power so they made sure not to
alienate them. Arab bureaucracy was replaced by a Persian one. A new position
of Vizier was established and more power was delegated to local Emirs and away
from the caliph. Al-Mansur died in 775CE, his son Al-Mahdi took over the
empire.
During his reign,
Baghdad became a metropolitan city. It attracted immigrants from all over the
world. These immigrants brought with them, their cultures, religions, and ideas.
One of the most important ideas was Paper. Chinese actually invented paper but
it wasn’t used anywhere else till the Muslims met the Chinese in the battle of
the Talas River. Muslims conquered some previously Chinese areas and took the paper
from them.
Eventually, paper
became so important that Baghdad had a whole street dedicated to nothing but
paper. All these factors combined made the perfect breeding ground for an
intellectual revolution. This was the birth of the Islamic Golden Age.
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