Reign of Harun al-Rashid

Harun, son of the caliph al-Mahdi and al-Khayzuran, had led campaigns against Byzantium as a prince — in 782 his army reached the Asian suburbs of Constantinople — and became caliph when his brother al-Hadi died suddenly in September 786. For seventeen years the government was run by his mentor Yahya ibn Khalid, of the Barmakid family from Balkh, and Yahya’s sons al-Fadl and Ja'far; in 803 Harun had Ja'far executed and the rest of the family imprisoned, for reasons that remain unclear. In 796 he moved his court to Raqqa, near the Byzantine frontier, and lived there for about twelve years while the main administration remained in Baghdad.

Raids into Byzantine Asia Minor were frequent. When Emperor Nikephoros I stopped paying the tribute agreed by his predecessors, Harun led in person the great campaign of 806, the largest Abbasid expedition against Byzantium, which took Herakleia and forced the emperor to agree to pay again. In the west the caliphate lost ground: Idris I set up an Alid state in Morocco in 788–789, and in 800 Harun recognised Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab as hereditary emir of Ifriqiya in return for a yearly payment of 40,000 dinars. Harun exchanged embassies with Charlemagne, whose envoy Isaac brought back an elephant, Abul-Abbas, which reached Aachen in 802, and the Tang annals record embassies from him.

Baghdad flourished as a centre of trade and learning; Harun’s palace library was the direct forerunner of the House of Wisdom that grew under his son al-Ma'mun, and in these years paper began to replace papyrus and parchment in the offices of government. In 802, on a pilgrimage to Mecca, he fixed the succession: al-Amin was to reign in Baghdad, and al-Ma'mun, as his heir, to govern an almost autonomous Khorasan. Harun died at Tus on 24 March 809 on his way to put down a revolt in the east, and the rivalry of his sons soon turned into civil war. The splendour of his court made him the hero of many tales of the Thousand and One Nights, which obscure his historical personality.