"العراق والخليج الفارسي" [ظ‎‎٣‎٢‎٠] (٨٦٢/٦٤٣)

PORTS AND INLAND TOWNS
5 00
capital on the right bank of the Tigris between modern Karkh and
Kadhimain (a.d. 762-766). This ‘Round City’, known as Dar as
Salam, ‘Abode of Peace’, consisted of three concentric zones separ
ated by walls and crossed by four roads which radiated from the
Caliph’s palace at the centre. But it soon spread far beyond its outer
most walls with prosperous market suburbs, including Adhamiya on
the east bank. The secession of the caliphal court to Samarra
(836-892) was a temporary check, and the full growth of the city on
the east bank dates from the return of the Caliphs, when Mutamid
moved his court there. As the Round City decayed the main
town grew up on its present site, and at its greatest extent in late
Abbasid times must have covered the same area as the core of the
present city, because the walls built by Caliph Mustadhir (a.d. 1095)
followed the same line on the east as the later Ottoman fortifications.
Baghdad suffered greatly in the Mongol invasions which eclipsed the
Caliphate (p. 254), particularly from the sack by Hulagu Khan (1258)
and by Tamerlane (1401). Very few Abbasid buildings survived
this destruction, and later rebuilding removed most of these. The
fortifications were first restored in 1405 and later greatly amplified.
The Englishman Ralph Fitch found Baghdad in 1583 ‘a town not very
great but populous and of great traffic of strangers, for that is the way
to Persia, Turkey, and Arabia’. East Baghdad and Karkh were already
connected by a bridge of boats ‘tyed to a great chain of iron’. Thus
trade maintained the city when it was not a great political capital.
From 1508 to 1534 Baghdad was under Persian control and many
of the surviving Sunni mosques and colleges were destroyed. When
Sultan Suleiman I drove the Persians out in 1534 (p. 256) he restored
many shrines. Thenceforth Baghdad was the capital of the senior
pashalik or ayalat of Ottoman Iraq. It suffered from later sieges in
the continual warfare between Turkey and Persia, and particularly
from the Persian occupation of 1623-1638. This occupation popular
ized the Persian architectural style in Baghdad and Iraq. Sultan
Murad IV recovered the city in 1638 and was the last Ottoman Sultan
to visit it. The Gate of the Talisman, bricked up behind him,
remained unused for three centuries. A succession of Turkish Pashas
enriched and improved the shrines of Baghdad, which became again
the virtual capital of northern and southern Iraq under the Mamluk
Pashas (1704-1831, p. 259) (photo 129). The last of these, Daud
Pasha, built several new mosques and also the triple-arched bazaar
still in use. Many of the finest old houses date from this epoch, but
in April 1831 the city suffered from a flood which destroyed 7,000