Western historical memory remains endlessly captivated by classical antiquity, fascinated by how Greeks and Romans projected their power and philosophy across the Mediterranean Sea and beyond. Renowned for the marble bastions of Athens and Rome, they reinvented how urban civilisation worked and how the idea of the city was viewed. Yet this European triumph leaves another great success in the shadows. After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century AD, Western Europe entered a period of political fragmentation, although its cultural and intellectual traditions endured. However, far away from Europe’s crumbling temples and arches, the Middle East was witnessing the metamorphosis of the Islamic world. At the epicentre of it was Baghdad, a metropolis that did not merely rival imperial Rome, but surpassed it in several remarkable respects. At its zenith, ‘The City of Peace’ rivalled Rome in population and distinguished itself through master-planned urban design, scientific breakthroughs and global connectivity, establishing Baghdad as an epicentre of the pre-modern world.
On 30 July 762 AD, Caliph al-Mansur, the second ruler of the newly established Abbasid Caliphate, commissioned a new imperial capital, choosing a site on the fertile Mesopotamian plain along the Tigris River and connected by canals to its sister river, the Euphrates, effectively controlling vital trade and agricultural routes in the Middle East. From the start, Baghdad was destined to be a monumental city: according to medieval accounts, it was built by around 100,000 construction workers, and within a century, it had transformed into one of the world’s largest metropolises. Unlike other great cities of antiquity that grew in an organic, yet chaotic manner, Baghdad was master-planned as a geometric ideal: a central Round City with four principal gates and expanding market suburbs. Located at the crossroads between Europe and the Near East, and Central Asia and beyond, Baghdad was home to a multi-ethnic population, which some estimates suggest reached upwards of 1,200,000, although its precise size remains disputed. Its inhabitants ranged from Arab elites to Silk Road merchants and Persian bureaucrats to Jewish scholars. Arab historian al-Khatib al-Baghdadi described the city’s vast size and its sprawling suburbs and market areas, which made it a major centre of commerce and learning. Although it was officially named ‘Madinat al-Salam’ – ‘City of Peace’ – locals retained the older name of ‘Baghdad’, whose precise etymology remains debated, that still stands today.
The construction of Baghdad presented new innovations and enhancements to how a city could optimally be run and operated. However, it was not the only city to have forged the path of modernisation. Centuries earlier, Rome had pioneered monumental engineering, with achievements such as the Colosseum, the Pantheon and the great aqueducts. Yet Rome’s urban development was not without its flaws. The centuries of urban sprawl that Rome underwent were marred by fires, narrow streets and overcrowded tenement blocks known as insulae. As a result, the city faced repeated destruction and had to keep adapting to survive. The original centre of Baghdad, on the other hand, was much more deliberately organised. Under the direction of al-Mansur, architects designed the prestigious centrepiece of the metropolis, known as the Round City. Designed as an urban circle approximately two kilometres in diameter, it served as the city centre and the administrative bastion of the capital, where the great mosque and imperial palace were located. The famous library known as the House of Wisdom later became associated with Baghdad’s intellectual achievements. Furthermore, residential quarters and markets developed around the central complex, with the city’s gates providing a degree of control over movement. It was ringed by substantial brick walls and a deep moat, offering formidable urban protection for that time. However, parts of its strong walls were left open to accommodate four principal gates which pointed along trade routes, allowing the city’s bustling trade and commerce to flourish in the form of new markets and both cultural and intellectual exchange.
Another great flaw of Imperial Rome was its sanitation. Its many tight and crowded alleys could become littered with waste and street runoff, despite the extensive aqueducts and sewage systems in place. Baghdad’s innovative water infrastructure, however, helped support the needs of its growing population. An extensive network of canals connected the city to the Tigris and Euphrates river systems, supplying water for irrigation, transport and urban use, although sanitation and disease remained challenges. Furthermore, the bimaristan system, an important development in organised public healthcare, expanded across the Islamic world, with Baghdad becoming a major centre of medical practice. This represented a significant development beyond the Roman institutions of military valetudinaria and other medical facilities, as many Islamic hospitals offered publicly funded or charitable treatment. These hospitals provided treatment across specialised fields, including surgery and ophthalmology, and some offered care for patients with mental illnesses. To ensure that doctors were competent, medical training involved study and practical experience, while systems of examination and licensing developed in certain periods and places. These developments greatly benefited Baghdad, improving access to medical treatment and contributing to the city’s reputation as a centre of healthcare and scientific advancement.
Rome was famed for the legacy it built, resting heavily on military conquest and legal governance. However, Baghdad built its pre-eminence through an intellectual engine that transformed global science as we know it. Rome was the undeniable master of administrative law, rhetoric and military conquest in much of the ancient Mediterranean world. Its people excelled at legal systems, and its all-powerful legions had spread Roman rule across three continents. The Romans were also important preservers of knowledge. Elite Romans, such as Seneca and Cicero, valued Greek literature and philosophy, drawing heavily on the ideas of their Greek predecessors. However, Baghdad developed a particularly extensive tradition of bringing knowledge from different cultures together. In the Islamic city, the pursuit of knowledge and intelligence was held in the highest esteem, so much so that the Abbasid administration and wealthy patrons took it into their own hands, turning scholarship into an imperially financed endeavour rather than leaving it solely as a private vocation. A principal symbol of this thirst for knowledge was the House of Wisdom (Bayt al-Hikma) of Baghdad. A great repository of manuscripts and books associated with the Abbasid court, it became emblematic of the city’s wider translation movement, although its precise role remains debated. Scholars and translators, such as the revered Hunayn ibn Ishaq, translated and interpreted many works. They would look at texts from across the known world and cross-reference them with other copies rather than copying them word for word, before translating them into Arabic and other languages. Through this great movement of interpretation, discoveries in science, medicine and philosophy that were previously difficult to access due to language barriers were united and shared through Arabic, which became a major language of scholarship. It allowed Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Zoroastrian scholars from Spain to Central Asia to study, question and add to the very same scientific pool of knowledge, revolutionising progress in science for centuries to come. Furthermore, the city developed papermaking after the technology spread westwards from China through Central Asia during the eighth century. This provided a cheaper alternative to expensive animal-skin parchment and papyrus. It led to a boom in manuscript production and the book trade, with numerous booksellers operating in the city, making scientific works more widely available rather than leaving them exclusively in elite private collections.
Whilst Rome’s commercial sphere of influence was centred on the Mediterranean Sea region, Baghdad during the ninth century emerged as a geographic crossroads, linking vast parts of Afro-Eurasia together. Imperial Rome’s trade network was well-organised and extensive, reaching beyond the Mediterranean into Africa, Arabia, India and parts of Asia. However, Baghdad occupied a particularly dynamic position within the river, land and maritime trade routes of the Abbasid world. Baghdad was a trading hub – like the import-export ports that we have today, only connected by both land and water. Its function as an entrepôt meant that it participated in the process of transporting goods and merchandise from areas as far as Tang dynasty China to the Iberian Peninsula, even though many goods did not stay for long within it, often being dispatched soon after. Baghdad’s strategic position along the Tigris River allowed goods, people and ideas to enter the city via ships which arrived from the Persian Gulf and beyond, giving the Caliphate a leading position in international trade. Thanks to this dynamic movement, many innovative technologies from distant areas entered the gates of Baghdad and were shared across the wider Islamic world. For instance, in the eighth century AD, Baghdad received knowledge concerning papermaking technology originating in China, yet instead of shrouding it in secrecy, its craftsmen expanded its production and usage, thus reducing reliance on expensive parchment and papyrus and democratising access to books and literature. As a result of increased trade and connectivity, the Abbasids continued the use of gold coinage in the form of the dinar and employed the suftaja – a written credit instrument which enabled merchants to transfer funds across long distances without needing to carry gold coins physically. Although Rome had a well-organised trading complex, Baghdad helped establish a highway of trade and commerce extending across much of Afro-Eurasia. It ultimately acted as a catalyst for innovation, fostering a remarkable surge in technological advancements, scientific understanding and intellectual collaboration.
Ultimately, popular memory favours stone over paper. We remember Rome and its empire more vividly due to its everlasting footprint in the many ruins across Europe today that have survived centuries of slow decay. In contrast to this, Baghdad suffered catastrophic destruction in 1258 AD when the Mongol army sacked the city, destroying buildings and libraries. Later accounts famously describe the river Tigris turning black with ink from manuscripts that had been thrown into it, although the literal truth of this story is uncertain. Yet, whereas the ruins of classical Rome stand testament to its past architectural glories, Abbasid Baghdad has left us the invisible architecture of intellectual exchange that helped shape the modern world. By advancing algebra and medicine, supporting scientific scholarship and connecting distant regions through trade, ideas and technology, Abbasid Baghdad created an intellectual engine whose advancements were profoundly transformative and whose influence endured long after the city’s destruction.
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