What Were the Great Islamic Empires?

For roughly a thousand years, from the seventh century to the eighteenth, a succession of Muslim empires ranked among the largest and most powerful states on earth. They were not one continuous thing. They rose, fell and replaced one another, and they differed in language, dynasty and temperament. But together they governed a vast stretch of the world, from the Atlantic coast of Spain to the frontiers of China, for longer than most empires manage to last at all.

The first century

The earliest expansion, under the first caliphs and then the Umayyad dynasty based in Damascus, was astonishingly fast. Within a hundred years of the Prophet's death, Muslim rule reached from the Iberian Peninsula, taken in 711 by Tariq ibn Ziyad, to the edge of India. Few powers in history have grown so far so quickly.

Baghdad and Cordoba

In 750 the Abbasids overthrew the Umayyads and moved the centre of gravity east, founding Baghdad, which under Harun al-Rashid became the richest city of the age. A surviving Umayyad prince, Abd al-Rahman I, escaped west and built a rival state in Spain whose capital, Cordoba, would outshine every city in Europe. For a time two brilliant Muslim centres stood at opposite ends of the Mediterranean.

The age of Saladin and the slave kings

As Abbasid power faded, new powers rose to meet new threats. Saladin united Egypt and Syria and took Jerusalem back from the Crusaders in 1187. When the Mongols destroyed Baghdad in 1258 and looked unstoppable, it was the Mamluks, a dynasty of former military slaves, who broke them. Baybars, a man once sold in a slave market who rose to the throne of Egypt, was the hardest of them.

The gunpowder empires

The last great age belonged to three large states sometimes grouped together as the gunpowder empires: the Ottomans, the Safavids of Persia and the Mughals of India. The Ottomans took Constantinople in 1453, and under Suleiman the Lawgiver reached the walls of Vienna and codified a body of law for an empire spanning three continents. The Mughals ruled most of the Indian subcontinent and raised some of the most famous architecture in the world. These were among the most powerful states on earth well into the early modern period, while Europe was still finding its feet as a global power.

The Empires of the Islamic World collection takes its subjects from across this long history, from the conquest of Spain to the courts of the Ottomans and Mughals.