Harun al-Rashid

No Abbasid ruler looms larger in popular imagination than Harun al-Rashid, the caliph who wanders disguised through the streets of Baghdad in the tales of the Thousand and One Nights. The historical figure, fifth caliph of the dynasty, was born in 763 (some sources say 766) to the caliph al-Mahdi and al-Khayzuran, a former slave who became one of the most influential women of the early Abbasid period. He came to the throne in 786 after the brief reign and sudden death of his brother al-Hadi.

For the first part of his reign, government rested largely with the Barmakids, a family of Iranian origin whose head, Yahya ibn Khalid, had been Harun's tutor. Yahya and his sons al-Fadl and Ja'far directed the administration with great ability and presided over a court of conspicuous patronage. In 803 the caliph abruptly destroyed them: Ja'far was executed and the others imprisoned. The reasons were debated even by medieval historians, and no single explanation is established; the fall of the Barmakids became a byword for the precariousness of power under princes.

Harun's foreign policy centred on war with Byzantium, against which he had campaigned as a prince and which he fought again as caliph, notably against the emperor Nikephoros I. He moved his residence for some years to Raqqa on the Euphrates, closer to the frontier. Frankish sources record exchanges of embassies and gifts with Charlemagne, including an elephant named Abul-Abbas delivered to Aachen; the Arabic sources do not mention these contacts, but the Western accounts are circumstantial and widely accepted.

His reign is conventionally seen as the zenith of Abbasid wealth and culture, though the empire's western provinces were already loosening their ties to Baghdad. His most consequential decision was the succession arrangement dividing authority between his sons al-Amin and al-Ma'mun, formalised at Mecca. Harun died in 809 at Tus, in Khurasan, while suppressing a revolt; within two years his sons were at war, and the great civil war that followed permanently weakened the caliphate his legend remembers as golden.