The nature of the conflict and the contacts which developed between the Muslim Caliphate and the Christian Byzantine empire after the middle of the seventh century has been the subject of many studies. The hellenistic and Roman city had never been a centre of production. Commerical and industrial centres certainly existed, but they were comparatively few in number and were even then entirely dependent upon their hinterlands for their basic needs. Significant also is the role of the gold coinage in the machinery of the state. Coin was issued entirely to serve the purposes of this administrative state structure, to oil its own internal activities. For the moment, then, it will be sufficient to stress the original role of the city or town in the east Roman world. Cities existed before the Roman state, which came, however, to depend upon them as administrative centres.

The Armies of the Caliphs is the first major study of the relationship between army and society in the early Islamic period, and reveals the pivotal role of the military in politics.
Through a thorough examination of recruitment, payment, weaponry and fortifications in the armies, The Armies of the Caliphs offers the most comprehensive view to date of how the early Muslim Empire grew to control so many people. Using Arabic chronicles, surviving documents, and archaeological evidence, this book analyzes the military and the face of battle, and offers a timely reassessment of the early Islamic State.

Arab sources say that mosaic workers and materials were sent by the Byzantine emperors to help in the decoration of mosques in Medina and Damascus, where the surviving eighth-century mosaics may be the tangible proof of this cultural interchange. Support is lent by the much better documented despatch of Byzantine mosaicists to help in the decoration of the great mosque at Cordova during a time of diplomatic rapprochement and, once again, the results of this ancient diplomacy are still visible today. Byzantine diplomatic strategy was essentially defensive. The main purpose was to keep Aleppo, ruled by the Hamdanids and from the early eleventh century, the Mirdasids, an Arab dynasty of Bedouin origin, as an independent, tribute-paying, buffer state. The Byzantines arrived by sea: 'the Byzantine warships came looking magnificent bringing with them the Moslem prisoners'. Any prisoners who refused to do so were returned to the Byzantines.

The ‘Islamic city’ has been an important focus of historical discussion for at least a century; scholars have drawn attention to the importance of cities in Islamic society, the vast size of certain cities in the medieval Muslim world and the importance of merchants, not only as generators of wealth but as religious leaders, intellectuals and exemplars of good and worthy citizens. All this is in implied contrast with the societies of north-west Europe, in which, it is argued, elite power was based in the countryside and the rural estate and where cities were comparatively small and merchants regarded with suspicion and contempt by the upper reaches of both secular and religious hierarchies.

The built environment of the Islamic city also appears to have certain definable characteristics. The most obvious of these was the apparent absence of formal planning, the narrow winding streets, the closed-off residential quarters. The main arteries of such a Muslim city were narrow and sometimes stepped because they were not designed for wheeled vehicles. Medieval Muslim society almost disinvented the wheel: it was the pack animal and the human porter that shifted goods, not the cart. This meant that there was no need for wide, well-engineered streets of the sort that Roman towns had required. The closed residential quarters were a result of the Muslim concern with the privacy and sanctity of domestic family life, which had to be protected from prying eyes.

The Muslim invasions of Turkistan and Iran in the seventeenth century have been discussed several times in the modern literature. This chapter focuses instead on the implication of Muslim invasion on the topography and demography of Bukhara. It considers the geography of Muslim occupation and settlement, the reactions of the local people to the invaders and the impact of the coming of Islam on the topography and environment of the city. Basing itself on Arabic and Persian accounts of the conquest and on the subsequent history of the city, the chapter paints a picture of changing fortunes, including the several political and social accommodations that the inhabitants of the city and the neighbouring areas had to make in order to be incorporated into the new Muslim order. It also illustrates the rivalries between several indigenous sources of power, and the relationship of the city and its surrounding areas given Bukhara’s complex situation.

The reign of al-Muqtadir (295-320/908-32) is a crucial and controversial epoch in the history of the Abbasid empire. Al-Muqtadir’s regime has traditionally been depicted as one of decline, when the political power of the caliphate and the lustre of its capital began to crumble. This book not only offers a substantial investigation of the idea and reality of decline, but also provides new interpretations of the inner workings of the court and the empire. The authors, four specialists of Abbasid history, explore the formal and informal power relationships that shaped politics at the court, involving bureaucrats, military, harem, courtiers and of course al-Muqtadir himself. A study of the topography of Baghdad completes this vivid picture of the court and its capital.

This is a general account of the history and architecture of Crusader castles in the Kingdom of Jerusalem, County of Tripoli and Principality of Antioch between 1099 and 1291, the years during which the Crusaders had a permanent presence on the Levantine coast. Extensive use is made of contemporary chronicles to show the reasons why castles were built and how they were used in peace and war. The book is fully illustrated by photographs, drawings and plans, and contains a comprehensive bibliography.

The decline and fall of the Abbasid caliphate in the first half of the fourth/tenth century led to the emergence of a new political order. Many of the post-Abbasid regimes attempted to continue the old system and employ ghilman, with their salaries being paid out of the receipts of taxation. The Ghaznavids rulers followed the middle Abbasid practice of recruiting an army of Turkish ghilman and collecting taxes to pay them. Kurds had inhabited much of the area of the Zagros mountains and the uplands to the north of Mosul for many centuries before the coming of Islam. The Muslim world had come into being because lands from Central Asia to North Africa had been conquered by armies largely made up of Arab Bedouin tribesmen. The newly emerging Shiism was not formally the state religion of the Buyids. The new Sunnism was based on the ideas of the muhaddithun, first developed in the third/ninth centuries.

The "golden age of Islam" in the eighth and ninth centuries was as significant to world history as the Roman Empire was in the first and second centuries. The rule of Baghdad's Abbasid Dynasty stretched from Tunisia to India, and its legacy influenced politics and society for years to come. In this deftly woven narrative, Hugh Kennedy introduces us to the rich history and flourishing culture of the period, and the men and women of the palaces at Baghdad and Samarra-the caliphs, viziers, eunuchs, and women of the harem that produced the glorious days of the Arabian Nights.