Chapter 3 will look into the sociocultural and intellectual conditions of Baghdad before and after the Mongol conquest of the city in 656/1258 as the locus of the production of al-Urmawi’s treatises on music. While not dismissing the damage that the city suffered during the conquest, this chapter will focus on the impact of the arrival of the newcomers on Baghdad’s intellectual environment. In particular, I will focus on the role of the Juwayni family, the rulers of the city in lieu of the Mongols as well as al-Urmawi’s patrons, in reviving the scientific spirit of the Baghdadi society.

A short epilogue brings together the themes of the book, inviting us to look at the period not as a ‘Dark’ or ‘Golden Age’ but as a period of great complexity and transformation. As Gregory of Tours himself wrote: many things happened, both good and bad.

This chapter follows the first three centuries of Abbasid rule. Over the first century, the Bedouin declined in prosperity and power in the army, as the Abbasids changed trade routes and brought in a new army from Khorasan. The dynasty also imported Turkic soldiers from the steppe as mounted archers; these were known as mamluks and became a major force in the caliphate. As Abbasid power declined, independent Bedouin dynasties arose. Two major factors contributed: First, the rise of the Fatimid caliphate made the desert a boundary region, allowing tribes to play off rival powers. Second, several dynasties attempted to use nomadic tribes for their own purposes, controlling them by alternating punishment and reward. By involving them in their politics and causing strife in the steppe, they strengthened tribal leadership and military power. As a result, in the eleventh century independent Bedouin dynasties controlled significant areas. The chapter also follows cultural production – the development of a literature of ethnic rivalry and characterization of three separate populations with the Arab image modeled on the Bedouin and differentiated from Persians and Turks.

Much evidence – textual, material and documentary – points to slavery in the early and medieval Islamic Middle East (c. 600-1000 CE) as a social fact, persistent and multivalent. This is especially true for the urban landscape: the presence of enslaved and freed persons would have been impossible to miss. More difficult is the reconstruction of Middle Eastern agrarian slavery. This is a survey essay with particular reference to the early Abbasid Caliphate (c. 750-950) and select questions around which debate in modern scholarship has grown. One must comb medieval Arabic texts (literary and documentary) to reconstruct patterns of early Islamic-era enslavement; the organization and dynamics of slave commerce; the demands on slave and freed labor; and the (relative) social integration of the enslaved. The Arabic/Islamic library illuminates all manner of topics, religious and secular alike. Literary references to slavery and/or enslaved persons therein are plentiful and of a great variety. One has references in works of poetry and adab, an elastic term used for a variety of Arabic prose writings. Equally numerous are references in chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and works of geography and political thought. Medieval Arabic legal and religious writings provide a considerable number of references as well.

The inhabitants of seventh-century Arabia mobilized for warfare in a manner new to that region of the Near East: the effort fell, albeit gradually, under central authority.1 Arabia had long been a highly variegated cultural zone, encompassing the Syrian Desert, southern Mesopotamia, and the Arabian Peninsula. Acting in tandem, largely nomadic tribal forces accepted the leadership of sedentary townsmen, the great number of whom belonged to the Quraysh, an influential tribe of two towns of the Hejaz region, Mecca and Medina. If Yemen and south Arabia had long known the rule of kings, and, hence, more formal military organization, only now did the central and northern stretches of the Peninsula and southern Syria experience what can thereby be considered as early state formation. The effort was driven by an equally untested set of ethical and spiritual teachings. A charismatic figure, Muḥammad ibn ʿAbdallāh (570–632), preached a strict monotheism; these teachings served as the seedbed of what would soon be known as Islam.

Examination of the art of war among the nomad peoples of the steppe could easily lead to archetypes. Indeed, the sustained similarities between the different descriptions that have survived, from the Xiongnu to the Mongols, are certainly very strong: the type of weapon, the tactic of the ‘Parthian shot’, the small horses, the decimal organisation of the army – over a long period these various elements have contributed to a unified pattern of nomadic warfare. Yet despite these undoubtedly important points of resemblance, the analysis should not be limited to them by ignoring developmental variations and interaction with different contexts and societies. One way to resolve this impasse is to identify the historically coherent periods individually within this continuum, and to restrict sources to this specific group of periods. The Turkish period is one such historical era: the expanses of the steppe were indeed unified during the second half of the sixth century, part of the framework of the trans-Asiatic Turkish empire and its tremendous prestige. At its heart, and then at the heart of the political organisations which it inspired and which succeeded it, we can imagine the existence of political and social lines of transmission which influenced military practices in this geographical zone as a whole. Sooner or later, all the later nomad empires were its descendants; the accent here will therefore fall on military life, in order to tease out the specific characteristics of the Turkish period from the archetype, without recourse to Xiongnu or Mongol sources. But elements of comparison with the Uighur empire which followed it in Mongolia, the Khazar empire which followed it in the western steppes, and finally the Khitan empire which dominated the extreme east from the tenth century, are identified.

The empires of the first centuries of Islam depended on kinship as a principle of legitimacy. Descent from the extended family of the Prophet Muhammad was necessary in order to become Caliph, the political and spiritual leader of the faithful. Consequently, both the Umayyad and the Abbasid dynasties legitimated their rule by reference to blood relations to the Prophet's family. There were also numerous aristocratic families similar to the European nobility but with the important difference that the former were never formalized. Nevertheless, the Arab empires had an ambivalent attitude to hereditary power. Imperial rulers often tried to break the power of the hereditary elites instead of embedding them in a stable system. The result was that few elites trusted the political system and opted for ‘exit’ rather than ‘loyalty’ in times of crisis and war. This also destroyed the Arab empires as rulers had to import foreign mercenaries.