Al-Mu’tadid, the Reviver of the Caliphate | 892CE - 902CE | Abbasid Caliphate #09

By the 870s, the Abbasid Caliphate had come out of the anarchy at Samarra. However, it hadn't come out as strong as it had been just ten years earlier. The chaos of the anarchy had torn the Caliphate apart. Much of its former territory had fallen to local powers. There were revolts everywhere. Much of Persia had walked away. Egypt was lost. Arabia too had fallen to tribal warriors. Even Iraq, the heartland of the Abbasid Caliphate, wasn't fully under their control. While most members of the Abbasid royal family were weak and used as puppets by various generals and bureaucrats, there were two men who were capable and had the ability to battle their vassals for control. The first was al-Mu'affaq who had led the military and had actually been the power behind the throne during the reign of Caliph al-Mu'tamid. Al-Mu'affaq was replaced by his son al-Mu'tamid who, like his father, was a very capable man. He began repairing the damage that had been done to the Caliphate. He would turn out to be the last great Abbasid Caliph. This video is brought to you by, well, you guys. Thanks to my Patrons for supporting the channel and making these videos possible. Al-Muqaddimah is funded only by Patreon and as you can see, the videos take a long time to research, edit and produce. And it's only because of my Patrons that I am able to put this kind of time into these videos and keep them free from any kind of paywall. So, if you want to pledge a dollar or more to support the channel, you can head over to my Patreon. Link is in the description. You can also become a member right here on YouTube. There's some cool stuff that comes with it. Back to the video. Al-Mu'tadid was born around the 860s during the anarchy at Samarra. His father knew exactly where the Abbasids had gone wrong and so, he prepared his son to be better than most others in the family. Al-Mu'tadid had led armies at various points in his youth and was even considered a hero of the Zunj Revolt. With his father's death, Al-Mu'tadid brushed his cousin, Jafar ibn al-Mu'tamid aside and forced Al-Mu'tamid to declare him heir to the throne. When Al-Mu'tamid died, Al-Mu'tadid ascended to the Caliphate in 892. While he was technically the caliph of everything between India and Tunisia, he was, in practice, only the ruler of central Iraq. His first step was ending the Zunj Revolt where his father had set him up for success. He achieved that in 893. Around the same time, he moved his capital back to Baghdad. Al-Mu'affaq had already used Baghdad primarily for his campaigns against the Zunj and Al-Mu'tadid was quite popular there. Additionally, it wasn't in the hands of the Turkic commanders, so the caliph was less likely to become a puppet if he resided there. This jump-started the decline of Samarra and left it in ruins that we see today. To the west, most of Syria and Egypt were under the control of Tolunid ruler Khumrave ibn Ahmad. While he wasn't as brilliant a commander as his father had been, Khumrave was still able to secure his position by defeating Al-Mu'affaq, forcing the Abbasids to sign a treaty that gave the Tolunids the right to rule Egypt for 30 years. While Al-Mu'tadid didn't try to change this outright, he did want to get something more favourable for the Abbasids. With a show of power thanks to his relatively better position, he intimidated the Tolunids to accept a new treaty where they'd pay tribute to the caliph and recognise his overlordship. To seal the deal, the caliph married Khumrave's daughter. Unfortunately, neither the young bride nor her father lived for long. Khumrave was assassinated by his own court eunuchs in 896. He was succeeded by two young sons, neither of whom could secure power. Syria, Egypt and Northern Iraq slipped out of their grasp. They fell back to Damascus where they were defeated by the Carmatians. Most of their former territory and commanders opted to join Al-Mu'tadid. With Syria under his control, Al-Mu'tadid restarted the long-dormant tradition of yearly campaigns against the Byzantine Empire. In this way, he was trying to emulate his great-great-grandfather Harun al-Rashid who led a raiding campaign against the Byzantine Empire almost every year. To the east, there was trouble brewing. The family of Yaqub ibn al-Layth al-Saffar, known as the Safarids, were ruling most of the Persian-speaking world. Al-Mu'tadid, like he had done with the Talanids, recognized the cost of trying to conquer them and so, he struck a deal. He recognized ibn al-Layth's brother Amr as the governor of Fars and Khorasan, which he already controlled. Additionally, he put him in charge of Transoxiana. This was a brilliant move on his part because he had already recognized another man named Ismail ibn Ahmed as its governor. While Amr had no desires of conquering Transoxiana before, now he wanted to extend his power there. Amr, a man al-Mu'tadid was too weak to defeat, was defeated by Ismail and sent to Baghdad as a prisoner where he was executed. With a single investiture, al-Mu'tadid had ended the power of the great Safarids. Ismail ibn Ahmed, while not the founder, was the man who turned his dynasty, the Samanids, from a small power to a major force which would rule most of the Persian-speaking world in a few decades. Since the days of the Anarchy at Samarra, Shi'ism had seen an increase in influence in some parts of the Caliphate. Since local rulers needed a reason to challenge the Sunni Caliph at Baghdad or Samarra, they often supported the Shias. The main point of Shi'ism, for those who don't know, is that only the descendants of the Prophet have the right to rule the Caliphate and since the Abbasids were cousins of the Prophet and not his descendants, they didn't have that right. However, the Shias themselves were split over who, among the descendants of the Prophet, was the most senior Imam. Imam simply means leader. This resulted in various branches emerging within the Shias. I will briefly go over the three primary ones at the time of al-Mu'tadid's ascension. First, we have the Zaydis who believed in the Imamate of Zayd ibn Ali, a great-great-grandson of the Prophet through his daughter Fatima. This far, they had represented the primary force among the Shias and had revolted against the Abbasids in their early days as well as against the Umayyads who were predecessors of the Abbasids. Then we have the Ismaili Shias. This split happened over the succession to Zayd ibn Ali's nephew, Imam Jafar al-Sadiq who passed away in 765. Jafar al-Sadiq had appointed his son Ismail to be his heir but Ismail predeceased his father and so a split occurred between these Shias. One group believed that Ismail's son, Muhammad ibn Ismail was the next Imam while the other believed that the Imamate now went to Jafar al-Sadiq's second son, Musa al-Khadim. The believers of Ismail and his son Muhammad's Imamate are known as the Ismailis while the followers of Musa al-Khadim are called the Twelvers The great-great-grandson of Musa al-Khadim was named al-Hasan al-Asqari who died in 874. He had a son named Muhammad al-Mahdi who was said to be in hiding or occultation. He would reappear when the time was right for him to claim the Caliphate. To reiterate, there were three main Shia groups. The Twelvers, the Ismailis and the Zaydis. A Zaydi state had appeared near the southern edge of the Caspian Sea around 864. Another had appeared in Yemen in 897. Both of these areas were tough for the Abbasids to control and so these states were fairly successful. Around the same time, in the 870s, we see preachers for the Ismailis increasing their activities and finding supporters among people who were unhappy with the Abbasids. These preachers were known as the Da'is or callers because they called people to Muhammad ibn Ismail's imamate who, by the way, would have been at least 130 years old by the 870s. The Da'is created a fairly impressive network to win recruits throughout the Abbasid Caliphate. One of these recruits was a man named Hamdan Qarmat. Qarmat was a villager and started to win supporters in the south Iraqi countryside. On the other side of the Caliphate, in Algeria, a man named Abu Abdullah was successful in winning supporters among the Amazigh tribes. These tribes were unhappy with the ruling Akhlabid dynasty. While the Akhlabids swore fealty to the Abbasids, they were independent in all but name. In their final years, they focused too much on conquering Sicily and had ignored the increasingly discontent among the locals in North Africa. This allowed the Ismaili Da'is to expand there. In 899, an Ismaili leader named Sayyid ibn al-Husayn declared that he was the new imam of the Ismailis. He claimed descent from Muhammad ibn Ismail and believed that his ancestry allowed him to claim the imamate. He chose the title of al-Mahdi. Abu Abdullah, over in Algeria, recognised his claim and swore allegiance to him as the imam while Hamdan Qarmat and most in Iraq didn't recognise his claim and chose to split from this branch of the Ismailis. His branch came to be known as the Qarmatians, although for the Abbasids, all Ismailis other than the later Fatimids were considered Qarmatians. Meanwhile, in Algeria, Abu Ahmad was able to win over many Amazigh tribes and create a major force to fight the Akhlabids. He defeated the Akhlabids as well as the neighbouring Rustamids and took over most of Algeria and Tunisia. At that point, al-Mahdi joined him as the imam and the new caliph. This new political entity came to be known as the Fatimid Caliphate. Toward the heartland of the Abbasid Caliphate, there were even more Shia threats. Various Bedouin forces with a Shia Qarmatian at the head began raiding Abbasid cities. In the last years of al-Mu'tadid's reign, there was even a Qarmatian state in al-Bahrain. Al-Bahrain at the time referred to what is today the eastern part of Saudi Arabia near the modern country of Bahrain. This Qarmatian state was headed by a man named Abu Sa'id al-Janabi. In Syria, Hamdan Qarmat's original group had fallen in the hands of a man named Yahya ibn Zakrawi. He was such a mysterious figure that he wore a veil from which only his eyes were visible. It was he who defeated the Talanids in Syria in 902. With these Qarmatians and various Fatimid groups appearing all over the Abbasid territory, the threats to the Caliphate only seemed to grow. While external threats were mounting, there were also internal threats. While al-Mu'tadid had the respect of the military and was able to keep them occupied with annual raids into Byzantine territory, he didn't have control over his bureaucracy. By the start of his reign, the Abbasid bureaucracy was a complex and well-oiled machine but with the decline in the Caliph's power, it had gotten out of hand. Without a bureaucracy, it was tough to pay the military and so al-Mu'tadid decided to restructure it. He began by bringing the entire bureaucracy to Baghdad. Before, it had been divided by region and was mostly under the control of regional governors. There was a lot of money to be made in the bureaucracy business, mainly due to corruption. There was so much corruption that al-Mamun had even established a department called the Divan of Mu'tadid Properties which primarily dealt with confiscating the properties of retired or fired bureaucrats. This was usually done by interrogation and torture. By the end of al-Mu'tadid's reign, however, despite his best efforts, the bureaucracy came under the influence of two factions, the Furatids and the Jarahids. Both of them fought each other, mostly indirectly, over control. The bureaucracy became so powerful that after al-Mu'tadid's death, they even led armies instead of the older Turkic commanders. Caliph Abu Labbas Ahmad ibn Talha al-Mu'tadid passed away in 902 after 10 years as Caliph. If he had reigned longer, it's likely that history would've been different now. He could've fought off the Shia threat as well as the internal factionalism of the bureaucracy. While he had improved the position of the Caliphate greatly, it also faced more threats now. To keep it going, the next few Caliphs would have to be at least as good as, if not better than al-Mu'tadid. Unfortunately, that wouldn't be the case. His son, Abu Muhammad Ali ibn Ahmad ascended to the throne with the title of al-Muqtafi. See you next time. Don't forget to subscribe and press the bell icon. On the screen right now, you can see the names and tiers of the patrons. You can join them by pledging a dollar or more to support the channel. Thank you for watching.