Archives Islamic History
Islamic history is one of the most important stories in the world, and most people have never heard it properly. Archives is here to change that. Each episode breaks down a key era, event, or figure from Islamic history, from the rise of the first caliphate to the Golden Age of Baghdad to the fall of great empires. Whether you're learning for the first time or filling in the gaps, this is the podcast for you.
Episodes
The Timurid Golden Age (part 4): The Uzbeks Arrive
Sultan Husayn Bayqara, the last great Timurid ruler of Herat, died in 1506 while setting out on a military campaign to hold his kingdom together. The next year, an Uzbek army led by Muhammad Shaybani took the city, and a hundred years of rule by Timur's own descendants came to an end. Herat changed hands again in 1510, when Shah Ismail, the first Safavid ruler of Iran, took it from the Uzbeks
The Timurid Golden Age (part 3): The Poet and the Adviser
Ali-Shir Nava'i was a senior official and adviser at the court of Sultan Husayn Bayqara, ruler of Herat from 1469, and head of the sultan's supreme council from 1472. Over his lifetime he founded, restored, or supported some 370 institutions, including, in Herat alone, forty inns for travelers, nine bathhouses, and nine bridges: infrastructure that reached ordinary people far beyond the
The Timurid Golden Age (part 2): The Book Workshop
Baysunghur and Ulugh Beg were sons of Shah Rukh and Gawhar Shad, grandsons of the conqueror Timur, and two of the central figures of the Timurid Golden Age in fifteenth-century Herat and Samarkand. Baysunghur governed Herat and was himself a trained calligrapher. Ulugh Beg governed Samarkand and was a working astronomer, not just a patron of one.This episode follows both men's signature proje
The Timurid Golden Age (part 1): Shah Rukh Rules from Herat
Shah Rukh was a son of Timur, the fourteenth-century conqueror whose armies had carved out an empire stretching from the Mediterranean toward India. When Timur died in 1405 without a settled succession, that empire became something to fight over. Shah Rukh's nephew Khalil Sultan seized the capital, Samarkand, along with its treasury, and held it for four years before Shah Rukh finally took th
Timur - Amir of Samarkand (part 4): What He Left Behind
Timur, the fourteenth century Central Asian conqueror known in the West as Tamerlane, spent nearly his entire adult life at war, building an empire that ran from the edges of China to the Mediterranean coast. In the winter of 1405, in his late sixties and still leading his army in person, he set out to conquer Ming China. He never got close. A fever caught up with him at a camp near Otrar, and the
Timur - Amir of Samarkand (part 3): The Field at Ankara
Timur, the Central Asian conqueror who ruled as amir rather than khan, spent 1402 to 1404 doing two things that seem to contradict each other and turn out to be the same story. At Ankara, his army broke the strongest military power in Anatolia and captured the Ottoman sultan Bayezid, known as the Thunderbolt, the only Ottoman sultan taken alive in battle across six hundred years of that empire&apo
Timur - Amir of Samarkand (part 2): The Road to Delhi
Timur, the fourteenth century Central Asian conqueror who ruled as amir rather than khan, spent the years around 1400 destroying three of the great cities of the Islamic world: Delhi, Aleppo, and Damascus, with Baghdad still to come. This episode follows his army south across the Indus into the Sultanate of Delhi, where a hundred and twenty armored war elephants met a line of burning camels, and f
Fatimids - Cairo Begins (part 4): Saladin Closes the Door
Saladin, the Kurdish general who would later retake Jerusalem, arrives in Egypt in 1164 as a young officer serving his uncle Shirkuh, in the service of Nur al-Din, the ruler of Syria. Within five years, and after a vizier named Shawar burns his own capital's trading city, Fustat, rather than surrender it to the Crusader king Amalric I of Jerusalem, Saladin finds himself vizier to the Fatimid
Timur - Amir of Samarkand (part 1): The Amir Who Could Not Be Khan
Timur, the fourteenth-century Central Asian commander English readers usually know as Tamerlane, is the subject of this episode's opening chapter. Born near Kesh to the Barlas, a Turkic clan of Mongol origin, he rose through the wreckage of the Chagatai Khanate, the Central Asian successor state to Genghis Khan's empire, at a time when it had splintered into rival commands fighting over
Fatimids - Cairo Begins (part 3): The House of Knowledge
Al-Hakim bi-Amr Allah became the sixth Fatimid caliph of Egypt in 996, at the age of eleven, and ruled in his own right for twenty-five years. In March of 1005 he opened a section of his own palace to the public as Dar al-Ilm, the House of Knowledge, a library and academy that taught Quran and hadith alongside logic, medicine, astronomy, and mathematics under one roof. The historian al-Maqrizi put
Fatimids - Cairo Begins (part 2): A City on New Ground
In 969, the Fatimid general Jawhar al-Siqilli, once enslaved and risen to command an entire army, conquered Egypt without sacking its capital, Fustat. Instead of moving into the existing city, he marked out a new walled enclosure beside it with cord, stakes, and a rope hung with bells, meant to signal the single astrologically correct instant to break ground. A bird landed on the rope early. The d
Fatimids - Cairo Begins (part 1): The Missionary and the Berbers
Abu Abdallah al-Shi'i was an Isma'ili Shi'i missionary from Kufa who spent nearly two decades, starting in 893, living among the Kutama Berbers of North Africa's Kabylie highlands, earning their trust before ever asking them to fight. Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi was the man that mission was built around, the claimant descended from the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) through his
The House of Osman - The First Hundred Years (part 4): Eleven Years
Bayezid I, known as Yildirim, "the Thunderbolt," was the fourth ruler of the House of Osman and the most powerful the family had produced: he crushed a European crusade at Nicopolis in 1396, blockaded Constantinople for years, and annexed most of the independent Turkish beyliks of Anatolia. In July 1402, on a plain outside Ankara, that empire collapsed in an afternoon.This episode closes
The House of Osman - The First Hundred Years (part 3): The Field of Kosovo
In June of 1389, Sultan Murad of the Ottomans leads his army against a coalition of Serbian and Bosnian lords under Prince Lazar on a plain in Kosovo. By nightfall both commanders are dead, killed in different ways and for different reasons, and Murad's son Bayezid has been acclaimed sultan on the same field where his father fell. Within hours, Bayezid has his own brother, Yakub Celebi, stran
The House of Osman - The First Hundred Years (part 2): The Crossing
This episode follows the Ottoman dynasty's first sustained foothold in Europe, from the moment Orhan's son Süleyman Pasha crossed into Thrace as a mercenary fighting someone else's civil war, to the Ottoman victory over a Serbian coalition at the Battle of the Maritsa in 1371.The story turns on a single night in March 1354, when an earthquake tore down the walls of Gallipoli and emp
The House of Osman - The First Hundred Years (part 1): Osman of Sogut
Osman was one of a dozen or more minor Turkish frontier chiefs operating along Byzantium's crumbling Anatolian border around the year 1300, and almost nothing about his own lifetime survives in writing. The only contemporary source, the Byzantine chronicler George Pachymeres, gives him a few lines: a defeated relief army at the battle of Bapheus in 1302, and a note that men came to join Osman
Devsirme - The Collecting (part 3): The Auspicious Incident
This is the third and final episode in a series on the devsirme, the Ottoman practice of levying Christian boys from the Balkans and Anatolia and raising them into the sultan's own household and army. It follows the institution from its founding logic through Sokollu Mehmed Pasha, the devsirme boy who became grand vizier for three sultans, to its violent end.On 15 June 1826, the janissary cor
Al-Andalus - Muslim Iberia (part 4): Convert or Leave
This is the final episode of a four-part series on Al-Andalus, Muslim Iberia. It covers the century after Granada surrendered to the Catholic Monarchs on 2 January 1492, tracing how a negotiated treaty protecting Muslim religion, property, and law unraveled into forced conversion, clandestine religious practice, and the mass expulsion of 1609 to 1614.The episode follows Cardinal Cisneros's fo
Al-Andalus - Muslim Rule in Spain and Portugal (part 4): Convert or Leave
When Granada surrendered to Ferdinand and Isabella on 2 January 1492, the terms were negotiated, not imposed. The Capitulations of Granada guaranteed the kingdom's Muslims their religion, their property, their own law, and their language. This episode is the fourth and final installment in the Al Andalus series, and it covers the century that almost never makes the popular retelling: the slow
Al-Andalus - Muslim Iberia (part 3): Thirty Kingdoms
Al-Mu'tamid ibn Abbad was the poet-king of Seville, ruler of one of the richest courts in the Muslim world and one of the finest Arabic poets of his generation. This episode traces how he ended his life a captive in a small Moroccan town, and why the century that ruined him is one of the strangest in the history of Muslim Spain.After the death of the hajib al-Mansur in 1002, the caliphate of
Al-Andalus - Muslim Rule in Spain and Portugal (part 3): Thirty Kingdoms
This episode covers the collapse of the Umayyad Caliphate of Cordoba and the century and a half that followed, when al-Andalus, Muslim-ruled Spain and Portugal, fractured into roughly thirty rival kingdoms known as the taifas, and then watched two North African dynasties, the Almoravids and the Almohads, arrive as rescuers and stay as rulers.It opens with al-Mansur ibn Abi Aamir's 997 raid on
Al-Andalus - Muslim Iberia (part 2): Madinat al-Zahra
In 929 CE, Abd al-Rahman III, ruler of Cordoba, took the title of caliph, rejecting the lesser title his family had held for five generations and setting himself against two rival claimants to leadership of the Muslim world, in Baghdad and in North Africa. This episode follows what he built to back that claim up: Madinat al-Zahra, a purpose-built palace city on three stepped terraces outside Cordo
Al-Andalus - Muslim Rule in Spain and Portugal (part 2): Madinat al-Zahra
In 929, Abd al-Rahman III, emir of Cordoba, took the title his ancestors had refused for a hundred and seventy three years: caliph. Seven years later he began building Madinat al-Zahra, a palace city outside Cordoba with a reported four thousand marble columns and fifteen thousand doors, designed to make foreign ambassadors feel the size of his claim before a word of diplomacy was spoken.This epis
Al-Andalus - Muslim Iberia (part 1): The Crossing of 711
In 711, Tariq ibn Ziyad, a Berber general serving the Umayyad governor Musa ibn Nusayr, crossed the strait separating North Africa from Iberia and defeated the Visigothic king Roderic, opening a peninsula already fractured by a royal succession crisis. Within seven years, most of Iberia was under Muslim rule, won through a mix of battlefield conquest and negotiated treaties like the one signed wit
Al-Andalus - Muslim Rule in Spain and Portugal (part 1): The Crossing of 711
In the year 711, a Berber commander named Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the narrow strait separating North Africa from Iberia and defeated Roderic, the last Visigothic king, in a battle whose exact location history still cannot confirm. Within seven years, most of the peninsula had changed hands, not only by conquest but by negotiation, as the Treaty of Theodemir shows: a Visigothic lord who kept his la
The Mamluks (part 3)
This is the third and final episode in a series on the Mamluks, the purchased slave-soldiers who ruled Egypt and Syria from 1250 to 1517. It covers the sultanate's final year: the Ottoman-Mamluk war of 1516 to 1517, the betrayal at the Battle of Marj Dabiq, and the execution of the last Mamluk sultan, Tuman Bay II, at Cairo's Bab Zuwayla gate.By the early 1500s, Egypt had absorbed roughl
The Mamluks (part 2)
This episode covers the second stretch of the Mamluk Sultanate's story: the 1260 Battle of Ain Jalut, where the Mamluk army under Sultan Qutuz, with the commander Baybars leading the decisive maneuver, handed the Mongol army its first major defeat anywhere. It also covers what happened fifty-one days later, when Qutuz was killed by his own commanders on the road home, and Baybars became sulta
The Mamluks (part 1)
A Mamluk was, by definition, "one who is owned." From 1250 to 1517, the sultanate of Egypt and Syria was ruled from Cairo by men who began their lives that way: boys of ten to fifteen, bought from slave traders on the Kipchak steppe and later in Circassia, shipped through Black Sea ports, and sold into a seven-year military education in the barracks of Cairo. At the end of it, they were
Timbuktu - The City That Traded in Books (part 3)
In 2012, the militant group Ansar Dine, backed by al-Qaeda's regional branch, occupied the historic city of Timbuktu in Mali and began enforcing its own version of religious law at gunpoint, banning music, carrying out public punishments, and demolishing the city's centuries-old Sufi shrines and the sealed door of the Sidi Yahya mosque.This is the third and final episode in our three-par
Timbuktu - The City That Traded in Books (part 2)
Ahmad Baba al-Timbukti was the most eminent jurist and teacher in Timbuktu, a member of the scholarly Aqit family, at the moment his city stopped belonging to itself. This episode opens with the popular myth of the "University of Sankore" and replaces it with the real system: mosque courtyards and private houses, a teacher and a student reading one book together until it was finished, an
Timbuktu - The City That Traded in Books (part 1)
Timbuktu has no founder, no charter, and no founding date. Tradition holds that Tuareg nomads left an older woman, Buktu, in charge of a well around 1100 CE, and a city grew outward from the water she guarded. This episode traces how that accident of geography, a well eight miles from the point where the Niger River bends deepest into the Sahara, turned into the meeting point of two trade systems:
The Abbasid Revolution (part 4): The Faceless Man Must Die
This is the fourth and final part of the story of the Abbasid Revolution, and it begins where a triumph is supposed to end. In January of 750, the Abbasid armies broke the last Umayyad field force at the Great Zab, and the most powerful dynasty on earth began to fall. What happened next was not a victory parade. It was a reckoning, and it fell on enemies and friends alike.The episode follows the w
The Abbasid Revolution (part 3): The Blood-Shedder and the Falcon
In January of 750, the last Umayyad army broke on the banks of the Great Zab, and ninety years of Umayyad rule began to come apart in a matter of months. Part 3 of The Abbasid Revolution follows what victory actually looked like once the fighting stopped.The revolution had made its move early, proclaiming Abu al-Abbas as the first Abbasid khalifa in the mosque at Kufa before the decisive battle ha
The Abbasid Revolution (part 2): The Umayyad Blind Spot
By the 740s the Umayyad dynasty ruled the largest empire on earth from Damascus, stretching from Spain to the edge of Central Asia. From the outside it looked unbeatable. Underneath, it was tearing itself apart. A reigning khalifa had been murdered by his own kin, the ruling family had fallen into civil war over the throne, and the Arab tribes that manned its armies had split into the old feuding
The Abbasid Revolution (part 1): The Abbasid Revolution
In the year 747 the Umayyad Caliphate was the largest empire on earth, ruled from Damascus, and the province that would bring it down sat two thousand miles away on its eastern edge. That province was Khurasan, and this first episode of a four part series is the story of how a revolution was built there in plain sight, one careful conversation at a time, while the capital looked the other way.The
Ibn Khaldun (part 5): The Historian and the Conqueror
Ibn Khaldun was a fourteenth-century North African judge, diplomat, and scholar, and he is widely regarded today as the founder of the science of society, a thinker who anticipated sociology, the philosophy of history, and parts of modern economics centuries before anyone in Europe. Born in Tunis in 1332 into a family that had already lost its ancestral home in Muslim Spain, he spent his life aski
Ibn Khaldun (part 4): The Book and the Shipwreck
Ibn Khaldun was a fourteenth-century scholar, judge, and diplomat from North Africa, born into a family that had once been nobility in Muslim Seville and lost everything when al-Andalus contracted. By his forties he had burned through twenty years in the unstable courts of the Maghreb and Granada, serving sultans, running secret correspondence, sitting in prison, and watching clever men fail to un
Ibn Khaldun (part 3): The Castle and the Book
Ibn Khaldun was a fourteenth century North African scholar and statesman, born in Tunis in 1332 into an exiled noble family that had once helped lead Seville in Muslim Spain. He spent more than two decades inside the courts of the Hafsids, the Marinids, and the Nasrids of Granada, rising to become keeper of the seal, switching sides to survive, and spending nearly two years in a prison in Fez. He
Ibn Khaldun (part 2): The Road Back to Seville
Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun is remembered as the founder of the science of history, the man whose Muqaddimah laid the groundwork for sociology, economics, and the philosophy of history centuries before those fields had names. But before he wrote the book that made him immortal, he lived the material. This episode follows the years he spent inside the machinery of power in the fourteenth-century Musl
Ibn Khaldun (part 1): Ibn Khaldun
Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun, born in Tunis in 1332, is often called the founder of the scientific study of history and society. Centuries before the words sociology, economics, or the philosophy of history existed, he set out to explain something no scholar of his age treated as a science at all: why civilizations rise, and why they fall. This first episode is the origin story of that question, told
Suleiman the Magnificent (part 5): The Price of the Throne
Suleiman the Magnificent ruled the Ottoman Empire for forty-six years, the longest reign in its history and, by common agreement among historians, its highest point. This final episode of our five-part series is not about his conquests. It is about what they cost him.The story turns on a single brutal law. Generations earlier, Mehmed the Conqueror had written into the Ottoman code that a new sulta
Suleiman the Magnificent (part 4): The Friend He Raised and Killed
Ibrahim of Parga was the son of a Christian fisherman on the Greek coast, taken as a boy into the Ottoman system that turned captured children into the servants who ran the empire. He grew up beside the young prince Suleiman, reading and making music with him, and when Suleiman took the throne he raised Ibrahim faster than the court had ever seen a man rise, all the way to grand vizier, the second
Suleiman the Magnificent (part 3): Kanuni, the Lawgiver
Suleiman the First ruled the Ottoman Empire at the height of its power, from 1520 to 1566. To the kings of Europe, dazzled by his court and his conquests, he was Suleiman the Magnificent. But to the millions who actually lived under him, he carried a different name, and it was the one that lasted: Kanuni, the Lawgiver. This episode is about the two things he built in the years after his armies rea
Suleiman the Magnificent (part 2): Two Hours at Mohacs
Suleiman the Magnificent inherited the richest and best organized state of the sixteenth century, and in his first campaigns he took the fortresses that had defied even Mehmed the Conqueror. This episode, the second in our series, follows him to the two battles that defined the peak of Ottoman power in Europe.On the twenty-ninth of August, fifteen twenty-six, on the marshy plain of Mohacs, the you
Suleiman the Magnificent (part 1): Suleiman the Magnificent
In 1520, a twenty-five-year-old named Suleiman became the tenth sultan of the Ottoman Empire. He was the only surviving son of Selim the Grim, the most feared conqueror of the age, so the crown passed to him without the usual war between brothers and without the strangling of rivals that so often opened an Ottoman reign. He inherited a state that spanned three continents, the richest and most powe
Avicenna - Master Healer (part 5): Avicenna
Abu Ali al-Husayn ibn Sina, known to Europe as Avicenna, was the finest physician of his age and one of the most influential minds in human history. In this fifth and final part of our series on the Prince of Physicians, we leave the philosopher behind and meet the healer, then follow him to the end of his road.The episode opens with the famous case of the lovesick prince: a young man wasting away
Avicenna - Master Healer (part 4): Avicenna
Ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna, was the greatest physician and one of the boldest philosophers of the Islamic Golden Age. This fourth part of our series follows him into the city of Hamadan around the year 1015, where curing a Buyid emir of a brutal illness won him the highest office in the land. He became vizier, the chief minister of the state, and for a few years he lived an almost impos
Avicenna - Master Healer (part 3): Avicenna
Ibn Sina, known in Europe as Avicenna, was the most brilliant mind of his century: a physician, philosopher, and scientist whose work would shape both the Islamic world and Christian Europe for centuries. By his early thirties he was also a refugee, a homeless wanderer carrying the largest education on the planet from one court to the next after the fall of Bukhara.This episode follows the most da
Avicenna - Master Healer (part 2): Avicenna
Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna, was the most important physician and one of the most important philosophers of the medieval world. This is the second part of his story, and it covers the years when a teenage prodigy in Bukhara became famous enough to be summoned to the bedside of a dying king, and then lived to watch the entire civilization that made him collapse around him.The episode op
Avicenna - Master Healer (part 1): Avicenna
Ibn Sina, known in the Latin West as Avicenna and in the Islamic East as al-Shaykh al-Ra'is, the Preeminent Master, was one of the greatest physicians and philosophers in human history. This first episode of our deep dive into his life follows the child before the legend: a boy born around 980 near Bukhara, the dazzling capital of the Samanid dynasty and one of the brightest cities of the Isl
The Great Mosque Builders (part 4): The Shah Mosque of Isfahan
Shah Abbas the Great was the ruler who pulled the Safavid empire back from collapse, reorganized its armies, and around 1598 moved his capital to Isfahan, where he laid out Naqsh-e Jahan, the Image of the World, one of the largest public squares ever built. In 1611 he began the mosque meant to crown it. This is the story of how it was made, and of the price of building in a hurry.This is the seven
The Great Mosque Builders (part 3): The Sultan Hassan Mosque
This is the third episode of The Great Mosque Builders, a series on seven monuments and seven builders across roughly a thousand years, each one an answer to the one before. This episode takes the two that sit at the heart of the story, and they make a strange matched pair: two men, two centuries and a continent apart, each trying to outbuild death.The first is Sultan Hasan of Cairo, a Mamluk rule
The Great Mosque Builders (part 2): Mosque of Ibn Tulun
In the year 868, a soldier's son named Ahmad ibn Tulun was sent to govern Egypt as a deputy and quietly turned himself into a king. This episode of The Great Mosque Builders follows the mosque he raised on a rocky hill in Cairo, the building tradition says he made from fired brick and carved stucco because he would not strip columns from the churches and temples of others. Its arches were poi
The Great Mosque Builders (part 1): The Umayyad Mosque
In the year 705, the Umayyad khalifa al-Walid ruled an empire that reached from Spain to the edge of India, and at the heart of Damascus he raised the first great monument of Islam. On a walled site where a Roman temple, then a great church, had stood for a thousand years, his craftsmen covered nearly four thousand square meters of wall in gold glass mosaic, rivers and trees and palaces that early
The Mongol Storm (part 5): What the Storm Left
This is the fifth and final episode of a five part series on the Mongol invasions and the astonishing reversal that followed. It begins outside the walls of Damascus in 1401, with one of the medieval world's greatest minds being lowered on a rope to meet one of its most destructive men face to face.The episode tells the story of Timur, the man the West called Tamerlane. A Turco-Mongol amir bo
The Mongol Storm (part 4): The Khan Who Knelt
This is the fourth episode of a five part series on the Mongol invasions and the astonishing reversal that followed. After the destruction of Baghdad and the turning of the tide at Ain Jalut, this episode tells the strangest part of the whole story: how the storm that came to erase Islam ended up praying toward Mecca, and how the empire built to destroy the faith became the machine that spread it
The Mongol Storm (part 3): The Day the Storm Broke
This is the third episode of a five part series on the Mongol invasions and the astonishing reversal that followed. It tells the story of the day the unstoppable were finally stopped: the Battle of Ain Jalut, fought on the twenty fifth of Ramadan, the third of September 1260, in the Jezreel Valley of Galilee.The episode begins with the men who marched out of Egypt, the Mamluks, slave soldiers boug
The Mongol Storm (part 2): The Fall of Baghdad
This is the second episode of a five part series on the Mongol invasions and the astonishing reversal that followed. It tells the story of the single most catastrophic day in the political history of the medieval Muslim world: the fall of Baghdad in 1258.The episode follows Hulagu, a grandson of Genghis Khan, as he leads an enormous army west to finish what his grandfather began. We watch him swit
The Mongol Storm (part 1): The Khan of the Steppe
This is the first episode of a five part series on the Mongol invasions of the Muslim world, and the astonishing reversal that followed. It opens with a survivor of the sack of Bukhara, who summed up the fate of his city in nine words, and then pulls back to show the world as it stood before the catastrophe: Baghdad, capital of the Abbasid khilafa for nearly five hundred years, a metropolis of clo
Saladin (part 4): The Lion and the Empty Treasury
After Jerusalem, the Third Crusade arrived. After two years of war with Richard the Lionheart, Saladin signed a peace and went home to Damascus to die.Full Description:This is the closing episode of the four-part Saladin series. After the fall of Jerusalem in October 1187, Saladin made one strategic mistake that the chronicler Ibn al-Athir said was the worst of his career: he could not take the fo
Saladin (part 3): Hattin and the Fall of Jerusalem
This is the climax episode of the Saladin series. On the fourth of July, 1187, on a twin-peaked hill in Galilee called the Horns of Hattin, the army of the kingdom of Jerusalem was destroyed in a single afternoon by exhaustion, smoke, thirst, and the patient battlefield management of Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub. Twelve thousand Crusader knights and infantry were dead or prisoners by sundown. The
Saladin (part 2): The Patient Sultan
In the spring of 1175, the Abbasid khalifa in Baghdad recognized Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub as Sultan of Egypt, Syria, and the Maghrib. He was thirty-seven years old. The Crusader kingdom of Jerusalem sat just over the river, watching him, waiting for him to come. He did not come for another twelve years.This second episode of the Saladin series covers the long middle years, 1175 through 1186, t
Saladin (part 1): The Boy from Tikrit
Salah al-Din Yusuf ibn Ayyub, known to Europeans as Saladin, became the most famous Muslim ruler of the medieval Mediterranean. He took Jerusalem back from the Crusaders in 1187, fought Richard the Lionheart to a standstill in the Third Crusade, and died in Damascus in 1193 with forty-seven dirhams in the treasury. But before all of that he was a Kurdish boy born in flight from a citadel called Ti
Mansa Musa (part 4): A City of Books
This is the final episode of the Mansa Musa series. It is the legacy story. Not the gold in Cairo. The books in Timbuktu.Mansa Musa returned to Mali in 1325 with an Andalusian scholar named al-Sahili, possibly four Hashimite Sharifs, and an unrecorded number of Egyptian and Maghrebi jurists, calligraphers, and copyists. The chronicle tradition says al-Sahili built the great mosque of Timbuktu, the
Mansa Musa (part 3): Half a Continent to Stand Here
In the autumn of 1324, after eight months on the road, Mansa Musa I of Mali reached the Hijaz. This episode covers what he did there, who he found, and what it cost him to come home.The plain at Arafat, the central rite of the Hajj, is the place where Muslim pilgrims ask, in white ihram cloth, for whatever it is they came to ask for. The Tarikh al-Fattash preserves a tradition that what Mansa Musa
Mansa Musa (part 2): Four Months in the Sand
Mansa Musa I was the ninth ruler of the Mali Empire. In late winter 1324 he led the largest pilgrim caravan in recorded history out of his capital at Niani and pointed it northeast, toward Mecca. Four months and roughly twenty-seven hundred miles later, the column came over a rise west of Giza and saw the Pyramids.This episode covers the road. The Massufa Berber caravan-masters who took over from
Mansa Musa (part 1): The Richest Man on Earth
Mansa Musa I was the ninth ruler of the Mali Empire, an African Muslim kingdom that in 1324 covered more land than the Mamluk Sultanate and the Ilkhanate combined and produced somewhere between half and two-thirds of all the gold in the medieval Mediterranean basin. By the standards of disposable wealth, he was the richest human being on the surface of the planet. The Mediterranean had barely hear
The Silk Road's Muslim Merchants (part 3): The Trust Network
In a moneychanger's office in Basra around 950 CE, a merchant could hand over 100 gold dinars and whisper a password. Two months of desert travel away, in Samarkand, the moneychanger's counterparty would pay 100 dinars to whoever produced the password. No gold crossed the desert. The ledger would balance later against a reverse flow. This was a hawala, and it predated modern wire transfe
The Silk Road's Muslim Merchants (part 2): Sufis, Gold, and Shahada
In July 1324, Mansa Musa of Mali crossed the Nile into Egypt at the head of a caravan of 60,000 people, with 500 enslaved attendants in silk, each carrying a six-pound gold staff. He stayed in Cairo for three months, giving away gold. By the time he left, the Egyptian dinar had lost roughly 12% of its value, and the market would take twelve years to recover. Al-Umari, the Mamluk bureaucrat who rec
The Silk Road's Muslim Merchants (part 1): Dhow Sailors and the Muslim Quarter
On a hill above the Chinese port city of Quanzhou in the spring of 1417, a Ming admiral named Zheng He burned incense at the tombs of two men whom tradition identified as Companions of the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him). His father and grandfather had made the Hajj. His ancestors had come from Bukhara. In a few days he would raise a Chinese-language stele and take 28,000 men and 317 ships so
The Alhambra: What They Tried to Erase (Part 4)
In late 1499, Cardinal Francisco Jimenez de Cisneros stood in the Bibarrambla plaza of Granada and watched thousands of Arabic manuscripts burn. The Treaty of Granada, signed seven years earlier, had guaranteed the Muslims of the conquered city that this would not happen. The Treaty was now, in practice, dead. In 1526, Charles V arrived on his honeymoon, stayed in the Alhambra, and commissioned a
The Alhambra: Gardens of Paradise (Part 3)
On January 2, 1492, Muhammad XII, called Boabdil, rode out of the Alhambra and kissed the arm of Ferdinand of Aragon. He handed over two keys to the main gates of the fortress and a gold ring with an Arabic inscription that had, he said, governed Granada since it was ruled by the Moors. "God loves you very much," he said, in his own language. "These, my lord, are the keys to this Pa
The Alhambra: The Court of the Lions (Part 2)
Lisan al-Din Ibn al-Khatib was the vizier, the historian, the plague-treatise writer, and the court polymath of Nasrid Granada in its golden age. Ibn Zamrak was his student, the brilliant young poet whose verses are carved on the Fountain of the Lions, the Hall of the Two Sisters, and the Comares throne. In 1374, Ibn al-Khatib was strangled in his cell in Fez on charges of heresy. His former stude
The Alhambra: The Last Muslims in Spain (Part 1)
Muhammad I ibn al-Ahmar was a plowman when the mosque assembly of Arjona acclaimed him emir in 1232. Four years later, Ferdinand III of Castile took Cordoba, the capital of Muslim Spain, and turned its great mosque into a cathedral. Twelve years after that, the Nasrid emir rode at Ferdinand's side into the surrender of Seville. Returning home, hailed as "victor for God," he replied
Nana Asma'u: A Legacy They Couldn't Erase (Part 3)
The final episode in the Nana Asma'u series follows the Yan Taru network forward in time, from Asma'u's death in 1864 through the British conquest of the Sokoto Caliphate in 1903, the colonial period, Nigerian independence, and into the twenty-first century.This episode examines why the Yan Taru survived when almost every other institution of the Sokoto Caliphate did not. It explore
Nana Asma'u: War Comes Home (Part 2)
Part 2 of the Nana Asma'u series goes deeper into the years that shaped her most enduring achievement. It covers the Battle of Gawakuke in 1836, when Asma'u fled on horseback through a war zone and later turned that experience into poetry. It covers the death of her brother, Caliph Muhammad Bello, in 1837, the succession crisis and civil war that followed, and how that collective trauma
Nana Asma'u: Born in a Revolution (Part 1)
This episode traces the life of one of the most remarkable women in African history - a scholar who wrote in four languages, advised caliphs, documented wars in poetry, and then, in the aftermath of civil war, built an educational network for women that no empire, no colonial power, and no government has ever been able to destroy. The Yan Taru — "those who congregate together" — sent tra
The Ottoman Siege of Vienna: The Largest Cavalry Charge In History (Part 3)
This episode covers the relief of Vienna and the Battle of September 12, 1683. It traces Emperor Leopold I's desperate diplomacy, Pope Innocent XI's role in funding and framing the holy war, and the Treaty of Warsaw that brought Poland into the fight. We profile Jan III Sobieski — his military career, his victory at Khotin, and his march of 435 miles through the Vienna Woods with his tee
The Ottoman Siege of Vienna: The Tunnels Beneath the Walls (Part 2)
This episode covers the two-month siege of Vienna from July to September 1683. It examines Vienna's fortification system, the flight of Emperor Leopold I, and Count Starhemberg's defense with a garrison outnumbered ten to one. Without heavy artillery, Kara Mustafa turned to the lagimcilar — Ottoman military miners — to tunnel beneath the walls and plant gunpowder charges. The episode tra
The Ottoman Siege of Vienna: The Grand Vizier's Gamble (Part 1)
This episode covers the events leading up to the 1683 Siege of Vienna. It explores the Ottoman Empire at its territorial peak, the military system that powered it — Janissaries, Sipahi cavalry, and the Devshirme child levy — and why the empire structurally needed to keep expanding. We trace the first failed siege of Vienna in 1529 under Suleiman the Magnificent, the concept of the Red Apple (Kizil
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