The fifty-six years during which the Abbasid capital was moved from Baghdad to the new city of Samarra (835/836 to 892) constitute the central institutional crisis of the dynasty. The new city was built to house the Turkish slave-soldier (ghulam) army that the caliph al-Mu'tasim had begun to recruit in the 820s as a personal corps, and that progressively replaced the Khurasani regiments as the principal military establishment. The Turkish guard, once installed at Samarra alongside the caliph, became the principal political force of the empire and progressively reduced the caliph to a ceremonial figurehead whom they raised, deposed and murdered at their convenience. Four caliphs were killed by their Turkish guard between 861 and 869. The institutional damage to the dynasty was permanent: when the caliph al-Mu'tadid returned the capital to Baghdad in 892, he did so as the head of a much-reduced state, with the eastern provinces functionally independent and the religious legitimacy of the office substantially compromised.
The Turkish guard
The recruitment of Turkish slave soldiers from the Central Asian steppe frontier began under al-Ma'mun in the 820s, principally to provide a personal military force loyal to the caliph rather than to the Khurasani provincial establishment. The system — by which young boys were purchased on the steppe frontier, brought to the empire, converted to Islam, trained in Arabic and in military skills, and formed into a professionally salaried corps of household troops — was a substantial military innovation. The Turkish ghulams were technically slaves but in practice were a privileged military caste with their own internal hierarchy and their own substantial political weight.
Al-Mu'tasim (833–842) substantially expanded the system from a personal guard into the principal military establishment of the empire. By the end of his reign the Turkish corps was approximately seventy thousand men — substantially exceeding the Khurasani regular regiments — and the principal military commanders of the empire were Turkish ghulams (Ashinas, Itakh, Wasif and Bugha al-Kabir among the most prominent of the period). The Khurasani regiments were progressively reduced to second-line status; the Arab tribal forces had already been substantially marginalised under al-Ma'mun.
The foundation of Samarra
The Turkish guard at Baghdad produced substantial political problems with the existing population — the regiments quartered in the city were involved in repeated public disorder, the Turkish military and aristocratic establishment was politically distinct from the existing Iraqi establishment, and the caliph found himself in the awkward position of mediating between his guard and his capital. Al-Mu'tasim's solution was the construction of a new capital, sixty miles up the Tigris from Baghdad on a previously empty site, specifically to house the Turkish guard and the caliphal court separated from the existing capital.
Samarra (a colloquial name; the official name was Surra Man Ra'a, "He who sees it is pleased") was founded in 836. The construction was on a substantially larger physical scale than the Round City had been — the inhabited area extended for approximately twenty miles along the east bank of the Tigris — with vast palace complexes, the Great Mosque (whose distinctive spiral minaret, the Malwiya, survives as a UNESCO World Heritage Site), barracks for the Turkish regiments, and residential quarters for the court and the supporting populations. The city was substantially larger in built area than any other city of the world of its period — though much of the built area was thinly populated and was more a series of palace cities than a coherent urban centre.
The capital remained at Samarra under al-Mu'tasim (833–842), al-Wathiq (842–847), al-Mutawakkil (847–861), al-Muntasir (861–862), al-Musta'in (862–866), al-Mu'tazz (866–869), al-Muhtadi (869–870), and al-Mu'tamid (870–892). Eight caliphs in fifty-six years — an average reign of seven years, which is substantially shorter than the dynasty's earlier average.
Al-Mutawakkil
The reign of al-Mutawakkil (847–861) was the longest of the Samarra period and produced the substantial doctrinal-religious reversal of the post-mihna policy. Al-Mutawakkil formally rescinded the mihna in 851, restored the Sunni traditionalist doctrinal position to official favour, persecuted the Shia community (including the substantial destruction of the Shia shrine at Karbala in 850 — an act that left a substantial bitter memory in Shia historiography), restricted the non-Muslim populations through the renewed enforcement of the Pact of Umar (which imposed substantial sumptuary restrictions on Christians and Jews), and conducted substantial construction at Samarra (including the Great Mosque and the substantial palace complex at Balkuwara).
Al-Mutawakkil's relations with his Turkish guard substantially deteriorated through the late reign. The principal Turkish generals had become a substantial political establishment in their own right; al-Mutawakkil's attempts to reduce their power and to favour an alternative Iraqi establishment provoked their substantial reaction. On the 11th of December 861, while at dinner in his palace, al-Mutawakkil was murdered by Turkish officers acting in collusion with his eldest son al-Muntasir. The new caliph al-Muntasir lasted six months before dying suspiciously in June 862; his successor al-Musta'in was forced from the throne by the Turkish guard in 866 and shortly afterwards strangled; al-Mu'tazz was deposed and murdered by the Turkish guard in 869.
The anarchy at Samarra
The decade from 861 to 870 was the principal institutional anarchy of the dynasty. The Turkish guard at Samarra installed and deposed caliphs at will; the empire's military forces in the provinces increasingly took their political cues from the dominant Turkish factions rather than from the formal caliphal authority; the central treasury collapsed under the substantial military payroll and the substantial difficulty of revenue collection in increasingly autonomous provinces. The substantial peripheral provinces of the empire — Khurasan under the Tahirids, Egypt under the Tulunids from 868, the Aghlabids of Ifriqiya — were substantially independent in practice, though they continued to acknowledge the caliphate in the Friday sermon.
The recovery began with al-Mu'tamid (870–892), whose effective government was conducted by his brother al-Muwaffaq (regent in all but name) and by al-Muwaffaq's son al-Mu'tadid. The Zanj revolt — a substantial rebellion of black slaves working on salt-flat plantations in southern Iraq, prosecuted from 869 to 883 — was finally suppressed by al-Muwaffaq's campaigns in 881-883. The Saffarids of Khurasan, who had displaced the Tahirids and threatened to march on Baghdad in the 870s, were defeated at the battle of Dair al-'Aqul in 876. By the end of al-Mu'tamid's reign the institutional centre had been substantially restored.
The return to Baghdad
Al-Mu'tadid (892–902) — al-Mu'tamid's nephew and successor — formally restored the capital to Baghdad in 892. The substantial Samarra palace complex was abandoned, the Turkish guard establishment was substantially restructured under closer caliphal control, and the dynasty resumed the substantially older institutional pattern of an Iraqi-administered caliphate at Baghdad. The recovery was real but partial: the dynasty would never again exercise the substantially direct authority over the provinces that it had possessed before the Samarra crisis, and the substantial succession of dynastic crises in the tenth century would substantially complete the institutional collapse that the Samarra period had begun. The Buyid entry into Baghdad in 945 and the substantial reduction of the caliph to a religious figurehead is the subject of chapter VI.
End of Chapter V