Organizational Power III: Imperial Administrative Elites

The metropolitan administration quickly came to depend heavily upon Roman and Sasanian personnel. Although the settlement of the armies in new garrison camps and their payment according to common principles indicate a degree of central ad­ministration from the outset,^[1050] it was the relocation of the caliphal capital to Syria that created courts in the Middle Eastern imperial tradition.

The Abbasids appropriated most of the Umayyad administrative apparatus (al­though some senior figures, such as Abd al-Hamid, were killed),^[1053] while drawing new groups from post-Sasanian Khurasan into a much larger ruling elite. Abbasid patronage created powerful dynasties of scribes, the most famous of whom are the Barmakid descendants of a Buddhist priesthood from Balkh, in Khurasan, who served the first three generations of Abbasid caliphs, and presided over the expan­sion of the imperial bureaucracy and the creation of the post of vizier (senior impe­rial administrator).^[1054]

The same patterns of patronage occurred at lower levels in the bureaucracy, and at the courts of members of the ruling elite, creating a competitive milieu which was the crucible for rapid advances in the skills and technology demanded by the Abbasids and their supporters: mathematics, medicine, metallurgy, astrology, phi­losophy, theology, geography, history, and other sciences and disciplines. Specialist knowledge of Sasanian administrative traditions, the Arabic language, and Islamic law and religion created a class of bureaucrats (the kuttab), who sustained a dis­tinctively Islamic statecraft, and who could transfer their services between courts within the Abbasid Caliphate, or in the Muslim successor states beyond it.⁶⁰