Baghdad | Research & Encyclopedia Articles

(2002 est. pop. 5.6 million). Baghdad, on the Tigris River 150 kilometers from the ancient city of Babylon, was founded by the second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur, in 762 CE on a site inhabited since the mid-third millennium BCE. The city, which is the capital of modern Iraq, achieved its greatest prominence in the medieval period; it became the capital of the Abbasid empire (749/750–1258) after its foundation and remained the capital until its sack by the Mongols in 1258. In its heyday in the ninth and tenth centuries, Baghdad was probably the largest city in the world, with a population estimated at 1.5 million, covering an area roughly the size of modern Paris inside the outer boulevards.

Named Madinat al-Salam (City of Peace) by its founder, the original eighth-to-tenth-century city was constructed on an immense scale: 100,000 laborers were employed to build a circular inner city some five kilometers in diameter, surrounded by a rampart with 360 towers. Only a few years after its foundation, Baghdad had expanded outside the walls, to the south (Karkh) and to the east bank of the Tigris. The location of the new Abbasid capital reflected the new Eastern orientation of the Islamic dawla (state); as was clearly indicated by the rebellion that brought the Abbasids to power, their power base lay in Iraq and western Iran.

Medieval Arab geographers left detailed descriptions of the city, stressing its magnificence, its huge domed palace (Bab al-Dhahab), and its numerous mosques and extensive markets. Under the Abbasids an elaborate court ritual developed, in which the rulers (descended from the family of the Prophet Muhammad) were segregated from their subjects. They made only ceremonial appearances, in a manner similar to that of the Sasanid monarchs (whose great ruined palace at Ctesiphon lies some forty kilometers south of the medieval city) who had ruled the area from the third to the seventh centuries, and of the Achaemenid rulers who flourished from 559 to 330 BCE.

The city went through many vicissitudes as a result of struggles both between members of the Abbasid family and between the Abbasids and various dynasties that attempted to seize, sometimes successfully, political power during the tenth and eleventh centuries. Despite these conflicts the medieval city was almost unparalleled in its day as a center of law, learning, culture, and commerce. It was the home of the Hanafi and Hanbali schools of Islamic law and of numerous poets, historians, and scholars and had a diverse and international population. Even the Abbasids' rivals (such as the Shiʿite Buyids in the tenth and eleventh centuries and their Sunni successors, the Seljuks) continued the architectural traditions of the past, with such buildings as the Adudi hospital (982) and the Nizamiyya madrasah (Islamic theological college; 1066). Baghdad was also the center of an elaborate and far-reaching banking system, which was crucial in ensuring the city's continuing commercial preeminence. The seventh and ninth Shiʿite imams, Musa al-Kadhim (745–799) and his grandson Muhammad al-Taqi (c. 810–835), are buried at al-Kadhimiya (Kadhimain) just outside Baghdad, and this site remains an important Shiʿite pilgrimage center.

Baghdad was already in decline in the twelfth century, but major and almost mortal blows were struck by the invasions of the two Mongol conquerors Hulegu (1258) and Timur (Tamerlane; 1393, 1401). Large numbers of the city's inhabitants were killed, and many of its great public buildings destroyed. A period of stagnation and decay followed until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the city was fought over by the Safavids and the Ottomans, finally passing to the Ottomans in 1638. The Ottoman Evliya Chelebi and other travelers of this period described the city as a prosperous trading center, the main intersection of commerce between Arabia, Anatolia, and Persia. However, little of the splendid medieval architecture survived the Mongol attacks.

The city remained a provincial capital (although under Mamluk governors between 1749 and 1831) for the rest of the Ottoman period, undergoing a brief period of reform and modernization under the energetic Midhat Pasa (1822–1883), governor between 1869 and 1872. Midhat established several modern (secular) schools and introduced a tramway and a printing press, as well as a river steamboat line between Baghdad and Basra. He was also responsible for introducing the body of Ottoman administrative and legal reforms known collectively as the Tanzimat, which had been promulgated elsewhere in the Ottoman empire since the 1830s. The Ottoman salnamehs (provincial yearbooks) for 1900–1901 give the male population of the city as 70,000 (57,000 Muslim males, 12,000 Jewish males, and 1,000 Christian males), from which a total population of 120,000–130,000 can be extrapolated.

Southern Iraq was invaded by British troops in 1914, and Baghdad was eventually captured in March 1917. After the war and the collapse of the Ottoman empire, Baghdad became the capital of the new state of Iraq, which remained under British mandate until 1932. The British introduced a monarchy headed by Faisal, son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who reigned from 1921 until his death in 1933. In 1958, the monarchy was overthrown in the course of a military coup, and a republic was installed. Baghdad and the rest of Iraq has been ruled by a military-civilian group nominally associated with the Baʿth Party since 1968; in fact, the form of government since 1979 has been a totalitarian dictatorship under the presidency of Saddam Hussein.

The city has grown immensely in recent years. The aggregate of urban communities is mostly populated by Sunni and Shiʿite Muslims, although the Shiʿites are probably more numerous. The Jewish community, a lively presence in the city until mass migration to Israel in the late 1940s and early 1950s, has almost entirely vanished; its commercial role was largely taken over by Shiʿite businesspeople. There are a number of (rather small) communities of Orthodox and Catholic Christians. Baghdad has several universities, as well as the Iraqi Museum, established in the 1920s, which houses unique collections of pre-Islamic antiquities, many marking the beginnings of civilization in the ancient Near East.

Baghdad suffered extensive destruction by aerial bombardment in January–February 1990 during the U.S.-led attack following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, and the economic sanctions imposed since that time have gravely affected the city's infrastructure. The economy and the urban fabric are unlikely to recover substantially while the present regime remains in power.

Batatu, Hanna. (1978) The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq's Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, Baʿthists, and Free Officers. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Ibn Hawqal, Abu'l-Qasim Muhammad. (1800) The Oriental Geography of Ebn Kaukal, an Arabian Traveller of the Tenth Century. Trans. by William Ouseley. London: Wilson.

Issawi, Charles. (1988) The Fertile Crescent 1800–1914: A Documentary Economic History. New York: Oxford University Press.

Lassner, Jacob. (1970) The Topography of Baghdad in the Early Middle Ages. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press.

Longrigg, Stephen H. (1925) Four Centuries of Modern Iraq. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Wiet, Gaston. (1971) Baghdad: Metropolis of the Abbasid Caliphate. Trans. by Seymour Feiler. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

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