Harun al-Rashid sent Charlemagne a clock so clever it seemed like sorcery
When Frankish envoys visited Baghdad in 799, Caliph Harun al-Rashid sent them home with gifts, including a clock whose hourly sounds and mechanical tricks struck Charlemagne's court as a conjuring act. Harun presided over the start of the Islamic Golden Age and later walked straight into the One Thousand and One Nights.
Harun was born in Rey, in present-day Iran, sometime between 763 and 766, son of the third Abbasid caliph al-Mahdi and of al-Khayzuran, a forceful woman who shaped state affairs under her husband and sons. His education combined history, geography, rhetoric, music, poetry and economics with intensive study of the Quran and hadith, plus archery, swordsmanship and the art of war.
As a young prince he nominally led campaigns in 780 and 782 against the Byzantine Empire of Empress Irene, the second reaching the Asian outskirts of Constantinople. The chronicler al-Tabari claims the booty needed 20,000 mules and that afterwards a sword sold for one dirham. The success earned him the title al-Rashid, the rightly guided, and made him crown prince over the western provinces from Syria to Azerbaijan.
His brother al-Hadi became caliph in 785 and tried to replace Harun as heir with his own son. Their mother, whose door was besieged by princes and petitioners seeking her influence, backed Harun, and al-Hadi resented both her interference and her favouritism. He ruled only fourteen months, and in September 786 Harun became the fifth Abbasid caliph.
Under him the Abbasid Empire reached its height. He founded the famous library known as the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, which grew into a world hub of learning, culture and commerce. He freed many Umayyads and Alids his brother had jailed, offered an amnesty to all Quraysh political factions, and continued his father's domestic policies, while the Barmakid family, crucial to the dynasty's founding, gradually lost ground. In 796 he shifted his court to Raqqa, in present-day Syria, and waged major wars with Byzantium. He died on 24 March 809, leaving a court that storytellers have mined for tales ever since.
Source: Harun al-Rashid
