The forty-five-year reign of al-Nasir li-Din Allah (1180–1225) was the last attempt by an Abbasid caliph to exercise actual political authority over the central Islamic lands. The reign succeeded — within the constrained territorial limits of central and southern Iraq — in restoring a caliphal political and administrative apparatus, in producing a diplomatic position toward the surrounding regional powers, and in developing the futuwwa orders (Sufi-influenced young-men's brotherhoods) as a social-religious infrastructure of caliphal authority. The restoration was undone, however, by the proximity of the Mongol expansion that would arrive at Baghdad within thirty-three years of al-Nasir's death.
The political conditions
The political situation that al-Nasir inherited at his accession in March 1180 was favourable for caliphal political recovery. The Seljuk grand sultanate had declined to regional-power status; the Zengid dynasty that had dominated Syria and the Jazira was broken up after the death of Nur al-Din in 1174; the Ayyubid Saladin was focused on the Crusader war and on consolidating his control over Egypt and Syria; the Khwarazmians had not yet emerged as the central Asian power they would become; the territory immediately around Baghdad was without any rival military authority. The caliph could, for the first time in two and a half centuries, conduct an independent political and administrative programme.
The administrative restoration
Al-Nasir's administrative achievement was the restoration of an effective caliphal apparatus across central and southern Iraq. The revenue collection was reorganised; the army was expanded from a ceremonial guard to a fighting force of approximately twenty thousand men; the administrative records were restored; the relationships with the regional powers (the Ayyubids, the Khwarazmians, the Anatolian Seljuks of Rum, the Almohads of the western Mediterranean) were conducted as diplomatic exchanges between sovereign powers rather than as the formal submissions that had previously characterised them.
The achievement was real but the territorial extent of the restoration was limited. The caliph governed effectively in central and southern Iraq — the territory of the modern Iraqi state south of the Mosul plain — but did not extend his authority beyond that. The provinces of Khuzestan, Fars, Jibal, the Jazira and Khurasan were under other authorities and were diplomatically engaged rather than subordinated. The reach of the restored caliphate was therefore narrower than the Abbasid empire of the eighth and ninth centuries, but it was substantively a state rather than a ceremonial fiction.
The futuwwa orders
The social-religious innovation of the reign was the development of the futuwwa orders. The futuwwa tradition — originating in the artisan-guild and youth-brotherhood traditions of the eastern Islamic lands, with influences from the Sufi orders and from the urban militia traditions — comprised fraternal organisations of young men, organised around shared ethical commitments (the duties of generosity, courage and protection), shared religious practices (substantially Sufi-influenced but within the Sunni mainstream), and shared social-political loyalties.
Al-Nasir's achievement was the integration of the futuwwa orders into a caliphal social structure. The caliph himself was initiated into the order in 1207 and became the head of a restructured order with international reach. The diplomatic correspondence with the Anatolian Seljuk sultan Kaykhusraw I and other regional rulers involved their initiation into the same order — producing a form of caliphal religious-personal authority over rulers who would not have accepted political subordination. The form of the futuwwa order was the medieval Islamic analogue of the European chivalric orders of the same period, with the difference that the caliphal sponsorship produced a centralised institutional structure that the European orders lacked.
The Khwarazmian crisis
The regional power that the late reign produced was the Khwarazmian Sultanate under Ala al-Din Muhammad II (1200–1220). The Khwarazmian state, based in central Asia (the modern Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and northern Iran), expanded through Iran in the early thirteenth century and threatened the Abbasid territorial position. The confrontation between the caliph and the Khwarazmian sultan in the 1210s — including the Khwarazmian sponsorship of an alternative Alid caliphal claim in 1217 — produced the diplomatic crisis of the late reign.
The resolution of the crisis was effected by an unexpected external party: the Mongol invasion of the Khwarazmian state in 1219–1221, which destroyed the Khwarazmian military apparatus and eliminated the regional threat to the caliphate. The irony was that the Mongol intervention that saved the late reign would also produce the destruction of the caliphate itself one generation later. The Mongol forces of Hülegü that would sack Baghdad in 1258 were the direct institutional descendants of the Mongol forces of Chingiz Khan and his son Tolui that had eliminated the Khwarazmian threat to al-Nasir.
The death and the succession
Al-Nasir died at Baghdad on the 5th of October 1225, aged about sixty-seven, after a reign of forty-five years and seven months — the longest of any Abbasid caliph. His son al-Zahir (1225–1226) reigned briefly before his own death; his grandson al-Mustansir (1226–1242) and great-grandson al-Musta'sim (1242–1258) completed the dynastic line. The difficulty of the post-al-Nasir reigns was the inability to sustain the administrative restoration that al-Nasir had achieved — the successor caliphs lacked the personal political abilities that the reign had required — combined with the accelerating geopolitical threat posed by the Mongol advance into western Iran.
The Mongol invasion of the Abbasid heartland and the sack of Baghdad in February 1258 are the subject of the next chapter.
End of Chapter VIII