For ten years (not including an interval of seven) from the time of Al-Rashid’s accession (A.D. 786) to the date of their fall, (A.D. 803), Yahya and his sons, Al-Fazl and Ja’afar, were virtually rulers of the great heterogeneous empire, which extended from Mauritania to Tartary, and they did notable service in arresting its disruption.  Their downfall came sudden and terrible like “a thunderbolt from the blue.”  As the Caliph and Ja’afar were halting in Al-’Umr (the convent) near Anbar-town on the Euphrates, after a convivial evening spent in different pavilions, Harun during the dead of the night called up his page Yasir al-Rikhlah[FN#268] and bade him bring Ja’afar’s head.  The messenger found Ja’afar still carousing with the blind poet Abu Zakkar and the Christian physician Gabriel ibn Bakhtiashu, and was persuaded to return to the Caliph and report his death; the Wazir adding, “An he express regret I shall owe thee my life; and, if not, whatso Allah will be done.”  Ja’afar followed to listen and heard only the Caliph exclaim “O sucker of thy mother’s clitoris, if thou answer me another word, I will send thee before him!” whereupon he at once bandaged his own eyes and received the fatal blow.  Al-Asma’i, who was summoned to the presence shortly after, recounts that when the head was brought to Harun he gazed at it, and summoning two witnesses commanded them to decapitate Yasir, crying, “I cannot bear to look upon the slayer of Ja’afar!” His vengeance did not cease with the death:  he ordered the head to be gibbetted at one end and the trunk at the other abutment of the Tigris bridge where the corpses of the vilest malefactors used to be exposed; and, some months afterwards, he insulted the remains by having them burned—­the last and worst indignity which can be offered to a Moslem.  There are indeed pity and terror in the difference between two such items in the Treasury-accounts as these:  “Four hundred thousand dinars (L200,000) to a robe of honour for the Wazir Ja’afar bin Yahya;” and, “Ten kirat, (5 shill.) to naphtha and reeds for burning the body of Ja’afar the Barmecide.”

Meanwhile Yahya and Al-Fazl, seized by the Caliph Harun’s command at Baghdad, were significantly cast into the prison “Habs al-Zanadikah”—­of the Guebres—­and their immense wealth which, some opine, hastened their downfall, was confiscated.  According to the historian, Al-Tabari, who, however, is not supported by all the annalists, the whole Barmecide family, men, women, and children, numbering over a thousand, were slaughtered with only three exceptions; Yahya, his brother Mohammed, and his son Al-Fazl.  The Caliph’s foster-father, who lived to the age of seventy-four, was allowed to die in jail (A.H. 805) after two years’ imprisonment at Rukkah.  Al-Fazl, after having been tortured with two hundred blows in order to make him produce concealed property, survived his father three years and died in Nov.  A.H. 808, some four months before his terrible foster-brother.  A pathetic tale is told of the son warming water for the old man’s use by pressing the copper ewer to his stomach.