Islamic Golden Age

In 762 CE, the Abbasid caliph al-Mansur broke ground on a new capital. He chose a site on the Tigris River in central Iraq, had astronomers consult the stars to pick an auspicious date, and hired one hundred thousand workers to build it. The city was circular, an enormous planned metropolis unlike anything in the Mediterranean world, with the caliph's palace and mosque at its center and four great gates facing the cardinal points. Within decades, it had probably become the largest city on earth. Baghdad.

What made Baghdad remarkable was not just its size or its canals or the blue tile on the palace dome. It was the hunger that drove it. The Abbasid caliphs were, by the standards of their era, unusual rulers: they wanted to know things. Al-Mansur acquired Greek scientific manuscripts and had them translated. His grandson Harun al-Rashid, the caliph of the Thousand and One Nights, sent ambassadors to collect books from the Byzantines. His great-grandson al-Ma'mun turned collecting into institution. Around 830 CE, he formalized what had been a royal library into something genuinely unprecedented.

The Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom, was a scholarly institution established in Baghdad under the Abbasid caliphs in the early ninth century. It functioned primarily as a royal library and translation bureau. The broader research effort was spread across many patrons and cities throughout the caliphate. Under Caliph al-Ma'mun, it became the symbolic center of a vast intellectual movement that sponsored translations of virtually all available Greek science and philosophy. employed translators, copyists, astronomers, mathematicians, and physicians. It paid well. It housed the finest collection of books in the known world. And it drew scholars from every corner of the Islamic empire: Arabs, Persians, Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, converts of every origin. What qualified you for entry was not your religion or your ethnicity but your competence.