Al-Mansur, the Abbasid caliph who built Baghdad’s Round City

Today Baghdad ranks among the world’s major cities. Before 762, however, there was only a small village on the western bank of the Tigris. The Abbasid caliph who turned it into a grand capital was Abu Jafar al-Mansur, who ruled from 754 to 775. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, he was the second caliph of the Abbasid dynasty and is generally regarded as the real founder of the Abbasid caliphate. His most lasting monument is Baghdad.

Early life

According to Britannica, Mansur was born in al-Humaymah between 709 and 714. The town was then part of Syria and is now in Jordan. It had been the home of the Abbasid family since 687-688. His father, Muhammad, was a great-grandson of Hazrat Abbas. His mother was of Berber descent.

Accession and Hashimiyah

The first Abbasid caliph, Abu al-Abbas al-Saffah, was Mansur’s brother. According to Britannica, he died in 754 after a reign of only five years, and the caliphate passed to Mansur.

According to the British geographer Guy Le Strange, Saffah lived in a palace called “Hashimiyah” on the Euphrates near Anbar. It was named after Hashim, the ancestor of the family. After becoming caliph, Mansur had another residence of the same name built near Kufa. He soon abandoned it, judging it unsuitable for a capital. Its exact location is still unknown.

Search for a new capital

According to Le Strange, Mansur made several journeys in search of a site for the new capital. He inspected places along the Tigris from Jarjaraya to Mosul. In the end, a Persian village called “Baghdad” on the western bank of the Tigris was chosen. It lay a little above the point where the Sarat canal falls into the Tigris.

According to Encyclopaedia Iranica, the site was close to Ctesiphon, the Sasanian capital. According to Britannica, Mansur also considered bringing building material from the ruins of Ctesiphon. According to Iranica, the city was officially named “Madinat al-Salam”, the City of Peace.

Building the Round City

According to Le Strange, Mansur laid the foundation of the new city in 145 AH, or 762. By 763 the work had advanced far enough for the treasury and government offices (diwans), which had been temporarily in Kufa, to be moved to Baghdad. After that, 100,000 workmen kept working without a break. In 766 “Mansur’s Round City” was complete. According to Le Strange, the workmen were brought from Syria, Mosul, Iran and the Babylon region, together with skilled architects and land surveyors.

The plan of the city was first drawn on the ground in lines of ashes. To make the lines stand out, balls of cotton soaked in oil were placed along them and set alight.

Plan and gates

According to Le Strange, the city was built in concentric circles. There were two outer walls, a deep water-filled moat outside them, and a third wall inside around the central open space. Each circle had four gates at equal distances. The Kufa Gate in the south-west and the Basra Gate in the south-east opened towards the Sarat canal. The Khurasan Gate in the north-east led to the great bridge of boats over the Tigris. The Syria Gate in the north-west joined the Anbar highway. From each gate a road ran to the central space like the spokes of a wheel.

The figures given by ancient writers for the size of the city differ. According to the historian Yaqubi, the distance from one outer gate to the opposite one was about two and a quarter kilometres. Le Strange writes that the circular plan was new among Muslim cities of the time and was probably borrowed from Iran. According to Iranica, Darabgird and Firuzabad in Sasanian Iran were also round cities, and like Baghdad they had four great gates.

According to Le Strange, the walls were built of very large unbaked bricks dried in the sun. The great inner wall was about 90 feet high.

The palace of the green dome

At the very centre of the city stood the caliph’s palace, known as “Bab al-Dhahab” (the Golden Gate) or “al-Qubba al-Khadra” (the Green Dome). Beside it was the congregational mosque. According to Le Strange, Mansur held that a ruler should live in the middle of everyone and at an equal distance from all. The palace measured about 200 yards square. Its green dome rose about 120 feet above the ground, and on top stood the figure of a horseman, about which many legends later spread. The dome fell during a storm in 941.

According to Iranica, the palace had an Iranian-style iwan with a domed chamber behind it. The mosque was a building with a flat roof resting on brick walls and wooden pillars.

Administration, markets and new quarters

According to Britannica, one reason for building the new capital was to house the rapidly growing government machinery, which Mansur developed under the influence of Iranian administrative ideas. According to the German historian Julius Wellhausen, Mansur admired the well-ordered treasury and diwan of the Umayyad caliph Hisham as a model. According to Le Strange, offices for the armoury, official correspondence, land tax, the royal seal, the army, buildings and salaries were set up around the central space.

According to Britannica, Baghdad stands on the Tigris at the point where the river comes closest to the Euphrates, about 40 kilometres away. The two rivers were linked by canals. According to Le Strange, the markets were at first in the arcades of the four roads running from the city gates. A few years later, however, Mansur moved all the shops outside the city and founded the suburb of Karkh for the merchants.

In 157 AH (773-774) Mansur built a new palace called “al-Khuld” on the Tigris outside the Khurasan Gate. According to Iranica, in 768 his son and heir al-Mahdi founded a new settlement on the eastern bank of the Tigris. Baghdad thus began to spread on both banks.

Death

According to Britannica, Mansur was tall and thin, with a wheat-coloured complexion and a thin beard. Many stories about him show his simple life, thrift and love of poetry. He died on 7 October 775 on the road while travelling to Mecca, and was buried near Mecca. He was succeeded by his son al-Mahdi, and all later Abbasid caliphs were his descendants.

Legacy

According to Iranica, Baghdad was the home of the Abbasid caliphs from 762 to 1258, apart from a short interval. Until the end of the tenth century it was the most important centre of Arabic learning and literature and probably the largest city in the Muslim world. According to Le Strange, no traces of the Round City, built of unbaked bricks, survive today. Its plan, however, is preserved in the writings of Arab geographers, and the city Mansur founded still stands on both banks of the Tigris.