The Mystery of Medieval Baghdad

There's a picture I can't get out of my head. This image of a perfectly round city. Three walls shelter a green-domed palace. This picture is supposed to be of Baghdad in Iraq. A city you might only know from negative news. A suicide car bomb attack that's killed more than 20 people in Baghdad's Sadr city. But Baghdad was once called the city of peace. It was the center of vast trade networks, the birthplace of early science and mathematics. The capital of an Islamic world stretching from the Atlantic Ocean all the way to the gates of China. But if you look at a satellite image of Baghdad now, you can't find anything of this circle city. The walls, the palace, nothing remains. What happened to Baghdad's circle city? It seems strange to me that this story of a circle city is so well known, that you can find images, Minecraft reconstructions, that there's even an Assassin's Creed game set in Baghdad. But we don't have any archaeological evidence that it ever existed. Many modern cities with ancient origins still have physical remains. In Rome, you stumble over Roman heritage. But even a place like London has its Roman walls. So where did it all go? But where the evidence is missing, the stories told about Baghdad are so wild, you wonder what is myth and what is reality? To answer these questions, I read dozens of literary sources. I modeled the city in 3D and I worked with an Iraqi filmmaker living in Baghdad today. But for the start of the story, we have to go back almost 1300 years. It's time to sleep, Arwa. But daddy, can you tell me the story of the city again? Of course, habibti. Will you start from the beginning, please? Well, our ancestors have lived in this area for a very long time. Here between the two rivers where all the crops grew so well, the first cities were born. But Baghdad was just a small village. Until 762, when the great Abbasid Caliph Mansur came here. He wanted to build a new capital. Who are the Abbasids again? The Abbasids are the rulers who founded our third caliphate, our empire of Islam. They are descendants of the uncle of Prophet Muhammad. And Mansur's name means the victorious. He came to power shortly after a bloody revolution. The capital of the old rulers was Damascus, far to the west at the edge of the caliphate, and Mansur wanted his new city to sit at the heart of the empire. He wasn't just building a normal city, he was founding a new dynasty. And Mansur traveled all over Iraq to search for the best spot. He sailed up and down the Tigris until he saw our village of Baghdad. Then he said, this is a good place for an army camp. Here is Dijre, with nothing between us and China, and on it arrives all that the sea can bring, as well as provisions from the Jazira, Armenia, and surrounding areas. Further, there is Al-Farat, on which can arrive everything from Syria, Al-Raqqa, and surrounding areas. Do the fire part now? So, after choosing the site, Mansur drew the city's outline in ash. Two circles with four gates. Satisfied with his design, he ordered cotton, salt, and flammable liquid to be placed along it before setting them on fire. Flames rose high from the ground, and a city of fire. Al-Mansur finished Medina al-Salam, the city of peace, in 766. This started a golden age for the Abbasids and Islam. The city grew to a million people. Spices came all the way from modern-day Indonesia. Oranges were introduced in Spain. Muslim scholars started a translation project unlike the world had ever seen. Translating and updating classic texts from Greek and Sanskrit, advancing our knowledge of medicine, mathematics, and the natural world. As the great poet Mukandasi described, in it are to be found the best of everything, and all that is beautiful. All hearts belong to it, all wars are against it. And every hand is raised to defend it. Thank you, daddy. There's an issue with the image I showed you before. It's more of an artist's imagination than based on fact. Historians have looked at all the sources and pieced together information, and they've come to an idea of how this city looked like. So I printed two models. One model that is the artist's imagination, and the other, how it really looked. And if we can compare, we can see where the differences are. In this version, there's five walls. But in reality, there were double circular walls with an empty space inside it. They are surrounded by a moat. There are four gates that are evenly distributed around the circle, like points on a compass. These mark the entrances of the four main roads in and out of the city. The Kufa and Basra gates opened into the Zerat Canal. The Sham Gate pointed towards the road to Syria. And the Khorasan Gate led to a bridge of boats across the Tigris. Inside the city, there were market stalls along the main corridors and residential areas behind it. Inside the round city, you would find the palace of the caliph. And the caliph's palace had a 36 meter high dome. Around the palace in the grounds, you would find administrative buildings and also barracks. And it was said that the only person that would be able to go or allowed to go on horseback was the caliph himself. It's often said there was a weather vane shaped like a horseman atop the dome. A horseman that pointed to the direction of the empire's enemies. To make these models, I used BambooLab's A1C printer. I've never used a 3D printer before, but this was actually really easy. These models are very intricate, but I was surprised at the speed and precision with which they print. The printer has full auto calibration, bed leveling and vibration calibration. So when it starts, you can just watch it print. The active flow rate compensation makes the border smooth at every corner. And with the automatic material system, you can print with multiple materials and colors at the same time. For this model, I combined white and green to shape the domes of the city. But the PLA also comes in matte and translucent. If you don't have any 3D experience, don't worry. There's this huge community called Makerworld. And here you can find tons of models ready to be printed. Here I found a model of the Yugoslav memorial I made a video about. But there are tons of other options. If you also want to get into 3D printing, you can check the link below to see what bamboo printer best suits your needs. For now, let's get back to the video. So why was this city round? With the move of the capital of the caliphate to the east, Islam fused with traditions of empires that had come before. Adopting building traditions that had existed for centuries. The city itself was a crossroad of cultures. Three ethnic groups dominated. Arabs, Persians, and Turks. But not everyone was Muslim. There were neighborhoods where groups of different faiths lived. There were Christian churches and Jewish synagogues among the hundreds of mosques. For its time, it was a truly cosmopolitan city. A city at the center of the world. But with undaunted riches also came inequality. Vast slums surrounded the city. And slavers took people from the icy north and from the deep south. So what happened? How did such a city just disappear? If you go through modern-day Baghdad, the old round city Mansur built is completely gone. But there are some remains from that era. Ask a filmmaker from Baghdad to find these locations. There's the Abbasid palace, built in the late 1100s. The Musnashira madrasa, a place for studying Islamic law. The Sharawari mosque, from the same time. And there's even an old gate. Not from when it was founded, but from the early 1200s. A gate that could not protect the city. In 1258, Baghdad is invaded by the Mongols. They pillage the city. Some accounts say a million people were put to the sword. This is surely an exaggeration, but it must have been a plot path. A Mongol invasion to end the city of peace. Was this really the reason for the end of Baghdad? This picture of a walled city standing alone in the desert, it tells a good story. But the city would have only existed like this for a very short time. In al-Mansur's own lifetime, it began expanding beyond the walls. Markets and bazaars were moved to the Kharq district in the south. The city grew organically, spreading out across the Tigris from the moment it was founded. But urban sprawl did not end the circular city. Al-Mansur's city was built using sun-baked mud bricks. I've seen similar technology before, in Shibam and other towns in Yemen. These can be great to live in, but the buildings need constant upkeep. If you don't take care of them, they crumble. When the empire prospered, so did the city. But when wealth and power declined, it faced crisis after crisis. In the end, the round city itself only served as the home of the caliph for about 60 years. New palaces were built in different districts, and between 836 and 892, the capital was even moved to another city entirely. By some accounts, the inner circles of al-Mansur's round city were abandoned in the 940s. There's a line between history and myth that can sometimes get blurred. I thought about this a lot while researching this video. Many of the sources that describe the design of the city are like folklore legends. Of a great leader at the start of a new dynasty, who builds the most impressive and beautiful city on earth. Without archaeological evidence, all that we know about the round city of Baghdad comes from a number of written sources. And what these tell us, that they were written centuries after the city itself was founded. They are all speaking about events that happened long before the author's lifetime. So if we look at the time that many of these sources were written, we find out that the Abbasid empire was already in decline. So these authors, they are writing official histories, but they want to invoke a sense of pride in the history of the empire. In a way that it sometimes almost reads as fan fiction. That said, it's hard to overstate the impact the city had on our time. The legacy of al-Mansur's city is very much alive in the present. In Baghdad, the move of the markets outside of the city is still there. Although the markets have evolved with time. The work of the scholars and translators in medieval Baghdad, it laid the foundation for the western renaissance, for our modern world. Al-Mansur's dream came true, not just in his city he built, but in its image being perpetuated across time. The memory of its original shape and the ideas behind it lasted for centuries, in a way that has no equivalent in the history of other cities in the region. The round city was realized, remembered, and revered.