Introduction

At its height, the Caliphate was among the largest empires in pre-modern history. It was more than twice the size of the Roman Empire and probably about as populous.¹ Spanning a wide band of territory from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, the Caliphate united the Mediterranean world with the Iranian Plateau, via the bridge of the “Fertile Crescent” of Syria and Iraq.

However, as an empire founded upon nomadic conquest, its unity was both porous and relatively short-lived: tribes from the Arabian Peninsula created it in one century of conquests, between the 630s and the 720s; internal conflict was rife, and as soon as expansion slowed, peripheral regions began to break away. Then, after a phase of consolidation between ca. 750 and ca. 800, fragmentation accelerated in the mid-ninth century, culminating in the empire's collapse in the 930s.

Nonetheless, a long eighth century of imperial unity transformed the Mediterranean and the Middle East. The conquests had overwhelmed the 400-year-old Sasanian Empire of Iran and had wrested North Africa and the Levant from more than six centuries of Roman control. They established a new elite, who benefited from the taxation systems of the two main silver- and gold-based economies of late antiquity, and whose migration and settlement patterns led to the creation and rapid expansion of new cities and the transformation of existing ones, as well as an agrarian revolution in the cities' hinterlands.

The new imperial elite were themselves transformed both by the processes that had led to the conquests and by the consequences of their success. A distinctive monotheist identity was crucial in uniting the leadership of the nascent empire, and although these “believers” did not initially usually refer to themselves as “Muslims,” the latter term was already in circulation in the seventh century, and became much more salient in the eighth and ninth centuries.² The Arabian tribal identities and

¹ For comparative sizes of empires, see Taagapera 1978; Myrdal 2012.

Pre-modern populations are extremely difficult to estimate—attempts include McEvedy and Jones 1978 and Biraben 1979. See also the comments in Myrdal 2012. I would like to express my thanks to the editors for the invitation to contribute to this volume, and for subsequent helpful advice. Farrhat Arshad, Matthew Gordon, and Chase Robinson kindly agreed to read drafts of this chapter and offered comments and criticisms, for which I am very grateful. I would also like to record my thanks to the editors, as well as to Mehdy Shaddel, who read the text at a later stage. All remaining shortcomings are entirely my own. I would also like to acknowledge the support of an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant for much of my work on this chapter [grant number AH/1026731/1].

² On the labels used by the seventh-century Arabian conquerors, see Lindstedt 2015. For the case for seeing seventh-century Islam as an ecumenical and millenarian believers' movement, see Donner 1998, 2010. Cf. Elad 2002.

Andrew Marsham, The Caliphate In: The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0012. affiliations of the conquerors were also reshaped by the dislocations of conquest and migration, and “Arab” gained in importance as an ethnic label, so that it seems reasonable to refer in what follows to “Arabians” or “Arabian tribes” in the first three or four generations after the initial conquests, and to “Arabs” thereafter.^{^[998]}

The Arabians' hegemony established Islam (and its scriptural language, Arabic) across the empire, so that the majority non-Arab population increasingly looked to Islam as the idiom for the articulation of their own economic and political ambitions—in turn shaping the religion itself. The result of widespread conversion among the conquered populations was that as the Caliphate collapsed, it left behind Muslim successor states.

Hence, like the papacy and the Holy Roman emperorship, the office of caliph remained potent long after end of empire: the Abbasid dynasty, who had reigned in Iraq since 750, retained the Caliphate down to 1258; it then persisted in new guises down to the twentieth century, and in certain very etiolated forms into the twenty-first.

In what follows, the structures of power within the Caliphate as a territorial empire (ca. 640-ca. 940) are analyzed, beginning with an outline of political history, before turning to the economic context and the organizational structures of the empire, provincial administration, taxation, and the imperial administrative elites. These are followed by discussions of coercive and ideological power. In each section, following the model set out by Michael Mann, the various social formations in which aspects of economic, political, military, and ideological power resided are distinguished, and explanations of how tensions within and between these groups generated change are proposed.^[999]

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Source: Bang Peter F., Bayly C.A., Scheidel Walter (eds.). The Oxford World History of Empire. Volume Two: The History of Empires. Oxford University Press,2020. — 1352 p.. 2020

Introduction

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