A History of Islamic Societies

Baghdad

The first venture of the new regime was the creation of a new capital. From ancient times, Middle Eastern rulers had built new cities as headquarters for their armies and administrative staffs and as symbols of the advent of a new order. The rulers of the Assyrian Empire created the famous cities of Nineveh and Nimrud; the Sasanians founded Ctesiphon. In a strategic location on the main routes between Iraq, Iran, and Syria – in one of the most fertile parts of Iraq with ready access to the Tigris-Euphrates water system – the ʿAbbasids built Baghdad to be their palace and administrative base. (See Map 3.)

Like its predecessors, Baghdad rapidly transcended the intentions of its founders and grew from a military and administrative center into a major city. The very decision to build the administrative center – called the City of Peace (Madinat al-Salam) – generated two large settlements in the vicinity. One was the extensive camp of the ʿAbbasid army in the districts to the north of the palace complex (al-Harbiya), and the other, to the south (al-Karkh), was inhabited by thousands of construction workers brought from Iraq, Syria, Egypt, and Iran. Here were markets to provision the workers and their families and workshops to produce their clothes, as well as utensils, tools, and factories to supply the building materials for the construction project. The original Baghdad, then, was a three-part complex – the troop settlement in al-Harbiya, the working populations in al-Karkh, and the administrative city itself, Madinat al-Salam. No sooner was the City of Peace completed than the decisions of the caliphs to build additional palace residences and administrative complexes in the immediate vicinity stimulated the growth of additional quarters. Across the Tigris, the new palace district of al-Rusafa also promoted urban development.