Reading about this caliphs reign in our sources is a bewildering experience: everything is simultaneously great and on the brink of destruction. Later histories pick apart developments in the adminis

Before you even hit play it should already be clear to you that the caliphate is only going to get stronger over the course of our discussion today. Al Mutadid seems to have been incapable of doing a

Get ready for a blast from the past! Perhaps I should have prepared you for a weak pun instead. Hearing about this caliphs reign will transport us back to his great-grandfather al Mutasims days. Mu

Al Mutamids reign lasted from 870 to 892. The Abbasid Caliphate was reborn during these decades, midwifed by the caliphs brother Talha, better known in history by his title al Muwaffaq. The new Abb

Having covered the caliphates East last time, we must now do the same for its west. The anarchy left such a deep impact on the caliphate that we really need to take our time discovering its aftermath

We have been focused exclusively on the capital province of Iraq ever since the outbreak of anarchy. While we had good reasons to keep a close eye on developments there, Khurasan can no longer be igno

Now that the anarchy was over, a reduced but reunited Abbasid military could finally face up to the multitude of threats facing the caliphate. A slave insurrection in the south of Iraq was one of the

The death of Salih ibn Waseef left Musa ibn Bugha in charge of the caliphates armies. This newfound unity effectively ended the Anarchy in Samarra which had plagued the Abbasid state for almost a dec

Dilapidated by years of internal conflict and ruinous mismanagement, the caliphate was a mere shadow of its former self. The void left by its collapse had led to the rise of adversaries which now surr

Instead of bringing about a measure of peace, the end of the civil war signaled a return to the anarchy that had preceded it. The new caliph was restricted by the same men whose influence had checked