Baghdad’s caliphs ruled an Islamic golden age for centuries
In 750 a revolution from Khurasan toppled the Umayyads and installed the Abbasids, kin of the Prophet’s uncle Abbas. From Iraq—and especially from Baghdad, founded in 762—they presided over a famous flowering of science and arts, even as real power later slipped to Buyid and Seljuq warlords.
The dynasty traced itself to Abbas ibn Abd al-Muttalib, who died in 653, and advertised Hashimite kinship the Umayyad house could not match. That pedigree, plus outreach to non-Arab mawali Muslims treated as second-class under Umayyad kinship politics, built a revolutionary coalition in distant Khurasan. Abu Muslim raised the Black Standard at Merv on 9 June 747 with close to ten thousand soldiers. After the Abbasid imam Ibrahim died in Marwan II’s prison, rebel armies finished the Umayyads beside the Great Zab in early 750; Marwan fled into Egypt and was killed there.
Early administration sat at Kufa until the second caliph, al-Mansur, laid out Baghdad in 762 and made the new city his capital. It became a magnet for scholars, artists, and inventors—the milieu later nicknamed the Golden Age of Islam. Conventional memory pins peak prestige to Harun al-Rashid’s reign from 786 to 809. After his death, civil war remade the state: a professional army drawn largely from Turkic slaves, a fresh capital at Samarra from 836, and provinces that increasingly ignored the centre.
By the tenth century the caliphs had become figureheads. Iranian Buyids took Baghdad in 945 and Seljuq Turks followed in 1055. A revival came under al-Muqtafi, who won back Iraq during his reign of 1136 to 1160, and al-Nasir, who extended rule into Iran before his death in 1225. It collapsed in 1258, when Hulagu Khan's Mongols sacked Baghdad and put al-Musta'sim to death, although Mamluk sultans installed a surviving branch of the family in 1261.
The dynasty's reach ran surprisingly far east. In 751 an army under Ziyad ibn Salih beat the Tang general Gao Xianzhi at Talas, near modern Tashkent, ending Chinese influence in Transoxiana. Five years later al-Mansur sent more than 4,000 Arab mercenaries to help the Tang against the rebel An Lushan, and Chinese chronicles remembered the Abbasids as the black-robed Arabs. In the far west, meanwhile, a lone Umayyad survivor named Abd al-Rahman set up an independent emirate at Córdoba in 756.
Source: Abbasid Caliphate
