From Berlin to Bagdad and Babylon

by J. A. Zahm

Bagdad was founded A. D. 762, by Al-Mansur, the second of the Abbasside Caliphs. Before deciding on a site for his capital Al-Mansur made many journeys and carefully examined all the available locations along the Tigris from Jarjaraya to Mosul. Moslem historians inform us that the Caliph was finally induced to select the spot on which Bagdad now stands by the advice of those who had lived there both in winter and in summer and who assured him that “among all the Tigris lands this district especially was celebrated for its freedom from the plague of mosquitoes and that the nights, even in the height of summer, were cool and pleasant.” “We are, furthermore, of the opinion,” they continued, “that thou shouldst found the city here because thou shalt thereby live amongst palms and near water, so that if one district fail thee in its crops, or be late in its harvest, in another will the remedy be found. Also thy city being on the Sarat Canal, provisions will be brought thither by the boats of the Euphrates and by the caravans through the plains, even from Egypt and Syria. Hither, up from the sea will come the wares of China, while down the Tigris from Mosul will be brought goods from the Byzantine lands. Thus shall thy city be safe standing between all these streams, and thine enemy shall not reach thee, except it be by a boat or by a bridge, and across the Tigris or the Euphrates.”

“The practical foresight shown by the Caliph,” in the selection of the site of his capital, “has been amply confirmed by the subsequent history of Bagdad. The city called into existence as by an enchanter’s wand was, during the Middle Ages, second in size only to Constantinople, and throughout Western Asia was long unrivalled for splendor. It at once became and remained for all subsequent centuries the capital of Mesopotamia. Wars, sieges, the removal for a time by the Caliphs of the seat of government to Samara, higher up the Tigris, even the almost entire destruction of the city by the Mongols in A. D. 1258, none of these have permanently affected the supremacy of Bagdad as the capital of the Tigris and the Euphrates country, and now, after the lapse of over twelve centuries, the new Arabic King of Mesopotamia still resides in the city founded by the Caliph Al-Mansur.”[425]

Many etymologies, most of them fanciful, have been given of the name Bagdad. It is said that when Al-Mansur finally selected the site for his capital he found it occupied by several monasteries, most of them Nestorian, and that the capital derived its appellation from the Arabic word bagh—garden,—and Dad—the name of a certain monk who had a garden there. Others aver that the name is derived from two Persian words, Bagh—God,—and Dadh—founded—signifying a city founded by God. The official name, however, given, we are told by the Caliph Al-Mansur himself, was Medina-as-Salam, which signifies the “City of Peace.” But among the Saracens it was more generally known as Dar-as-Salam, which also signifies City or Home of Peace. The Greeks gave it a name—Eirenopolis—which is a literal translation of the Arabic Dar-as-Salam. But it is by the older and more common name—Bagdad—which is variously spelt—that the city of Al-Mansur has generally been known from its foundation to the present day.

It was long thought that the capital of the Caliphs had been founded on ground which had not previously been occupied by a dense population. But a discovery made in 1848 by Sir Henry Rawlinson, when the waters of the Tigris were exceptionally low, disclosed the surprising fact that Al-Mansur had founded his capital on the site of a city that antedated the Christian era by at least seven centuries. An extensive facing of brickwork, which still exists, was then found to line the western bank of the river, and each brick of this facing bore the name and titles of Nebuchadnezzar. No less remarkable, in this connection, is a later discovery in the Assyrian geographical catalogues, belonging to the reign of Asurbanipal, of a name very similar to Bagdad “which probably refers to the town then standing on the site afterwards occupied by the capital of the Caliphs.”

Al-Mansur founded his capital, known from its peculiar form as “The Round City,” on the right bank of the Tigris, but it was not long until the palaces of the Caliphs and the government offices were transferred to the eastern side of the river, where the capital has since remained, while the part of the city on the western bank, especially the quarter called Karkh, was given over to markets and merchants, where “every merchant and each merchandise had an appointed street: and there were rows of shops, and of booths and of courts in each of the streets; but men of one business were not mixed up with those of another, nor one merchandise with merchandise of another sort. Goods of a kind were only sold with their kind, and men of one trade were not to be found except with their fellows of the same craft. Thus each market was kept single and the merchants were divided according to their merchandise, each craftsman being separated from others not of his own class.”[426]

What greatly contributed towards the rapid development of Bagdad and towards making it the great emporium of the East, was the admirable system of canals which intersected the rich alluvial plains of lower Babylonia and which enabled the inhabitants of this region to utilize the surplus waters of the Euphrates for irrigating the fertile lands which lay between this river and the Tigris. Contrary to what is so often thought, the Arabs, under the Caliphs, gave as much attention to the canalization of Mesopotamia as had their predecessors, the Persians and the Babylonians.

But these canals, besides being used for purposes of irrigation, likewise served for the transportation of merchandise from distant regions. Thus, to give a single instance of their use for this purpose, we are informed that “great boats and barges were loaded at Rakkah, ‘the port,’ as it was called, of the Syrian desert on the Upper Euphrates, there taking over from the land-caravans the corn of Egypt and the merchandise from Damascus; and these boats, coming down the great river, and then along the Isa Canal, discharged their cargoes at the wharves on the Tigris banks at the lower harbor in Karkh.”[427]

To give some idea of the fertility of the irrigated region of Mesopotamia during the reign of the Caliphs it suffices to quote the words of an Arabic writer regarding certain cornlands in the vicinity of Bagdad, where, we are told, “the crops never failed, neither in winter nor in summer,” and of the report given of a certain mill in which there were no fewer than a hundred millstones which produced the extraordinary annual rental of a hundred million dirhams, a sum that was equivalent to several million dollars of our money.

Marco Polo, that king of mediæval travelers, who, by the vast compass of his journeys, was better qualified than any man of his time to express an opinion on the relative importance of the cities of Asia, declares that Bagdad—which he calls Baudas—is “the noblest and greatest city of these regions” and that it “used to be the seat of the Caliph of all the Saracens in the world, just as Rome is the seat of the Pope of all the Christians.”[428] But the illustrious Venetian voyager did not visit Bagdad until several decades after the destruction of the city by the Mongol hordes under Hulagu Khan.

The question now arises, if Bagdad was so great a metropolis only a half century after it was ravaged by the Mongols, what must it have been when at the zenith of its power and magnificence? Some authors estimate that the city counted no fewer than two million souls. D’Herbelot, the celebrated Orientalist, says that one can conjecture the number of the inhabitants of Bagdad from a statement made by Arab historians, who declare that the funeral of Eben Hanbal, a famous Moslem doctor who died with a great reputation for sanctity, was attended by eight hundred thousand men and sixty thousand women.[429] Then again, Marco Polo tells us that the number of Christians in Bagdad, shortly before it was sacked by Hulagu, was more than a hundred thousand.[430] This would indicate that the population of this Saracen city, of which a very great majority was Mohammedan, must then, in the days of its decline, have exceeded a million. This seems clear from what historians tell us about the “horrible butchery of men, women and children,” which lasted forty days, when the city was sacked by the Mongols under Hulagu.