The Fourth Fitna: a Family Feud that Crippled a Caliphate

"When the siege began, Baghdad was exactly 50 years old. It had been founded in 762 by Mansur, the second caliph of the Abbasid dynasty, who gave it the name Madinat as-Salam, or City of Peace. Mansur’s original foundation, the Round City, stood west of the Tigris, a giant pearl resting among branching canals that linked the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. The heavily fortified Round City was protected by a water moat, a raised berm, and three concentric sets of walls made of sun-dried bricks. The outer wall stood 60 feet tall, with circular bastions every 60 yards. The even more massive second wall was 90 feet in height and nearly 40 feet wide across the top. The caliph’s soldiers, officials, and servants occupied houses between the second wall and a third wall that marked off the innermost precinct of the Round City. The area inside the third wall was reserved for government offices and the palaces of the reigning caliph’s sons, with the mosque of Mansur and the Palace of the Golden Gate at the center.

In contrast with the massive defenses girdling the Round City, Baghdad’s remaining residential districts were completely unfortified. The siege did not involve assaults upon a fortified circuit wall but rather upon improvised barricades and fortifications linking house and garden walls that Amin’s troops and civilian supporters constructed around the city’s outer perimeter. The siege was characterized by street-by-street, and sometimes house-by-house, urban warfare of the most destructive kind."