It was on this day 762 that the city of Baghdad was founded. It's nickname is The City of Peace. Like all old things, it's had its ups and downs. During the Abbasid Era (750-1258), the "Golden Age of Islam," Baghdad was the largest city in the world.
People had been living on the site of Baghdad on the Tigris River for thousands of years when the Abbasids decided to build their capital there. The caliph chose this spot because of an old prophecy by a Christian monk that a fabulous city would be built here by a ruler named Miklas. That was the calpiph's nickname as a child. The caliph named his capital City of Peace, but one of the original villages on the spot was called Baghdad or Gift of God, and the common people kept calling their home Baghdad and that's the name that persisted.
Baghdad is located in a dry area but the Tigris provided plenty of water for everyone. The river also provided a route for trade in all directions. It took 100,000 laborers four years the build the new city which was in the form of a circle. The city was surrounded by four thick walls for defense with a moat around the outermost wall. The city had two designers, one an astrologer, the other a Jew.
Baghdad became a center of learning and preserved Greek and Roman texts in its academies that would otherwise have been lost. But the great city began to decline in the mid-11th century due to internal squabbling. In 1258 the ultimate disaster occurred when the city was conquered by the Mongols. The Mongols massacred most of the inhabitants and destroyed large parts of city. It was the end of the Golden Age, which Islam even now is hoping to reestablish.
The Ottoman Turks took over the city in 1534. As a pawn between the Turks and the Iranians to the east, Baghdad could had no chance to recover. A series of plagues and cholera reduced the population from close to two million at the time of the Mongol invasion, to a low of 185,000.
The Ottoman Empire collapsed after WWI and Iraq became a British Protectorate and was made an independent kingdom in 1932. A series of coups brought Saddam Hussein to power in 1979. A series of wars since then have prevented Baghdad from attaining its former glory.
Since the defeat of Isis in 2017, Baghdad has become much safer, though suicide bombings continue every couple of months. The city locked down during the pandemic, but now tourists are welcome. Few are coming.
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| Baghdad gets snow once every ten years. You can leave your sandals on. |
Thanks for this bit of history from the general geography of my ancestors. Reminds me of sitting at my Syrian grandfather's knee, listening to his stories about life in "the old country," playing on the defunct battlefields that were still littered with live ordnance, and the stories of emigrating to America - "the land of milk and honey where the streets were paved with gold." Yes. But the "poor and tired" never stopped coming.
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