Saladin Saladin started the Ayyubids When the First Crusade defeated the Fatimid Caliphs and captured Jerusalem in 1099 AD, people were very upset. People in Egypt and Syria gradually decided that the Fatimids were too weak to [...]
Rabat gate, Morocco, about 1200 AD Who were the Almohads? During the 1100s AD, while the Ayyubids were taking over Egypt, the Almohad dynasty managed to conquer and rule the rest of North Africa (modern [...]
Minaret at Samarra, 847 AD The first Abbasid caliphs In 750 AD, the Abbasid caliphs murdered all of the surviving Umayyad men but one. Who were the Umayyads? All our medieval Islam articles [...]
Islamic government: The Umayyad caliph Muawiyah Caliphs and viziers From the beginning, the Islamic Empire was a monarchy like the Roman Empire or the Sassanian Empire before it. One man ruled the Islamic Empire. [...]
Medieval Islamic games: Muslims playing chess in Spain Chess from India The big new game of the Islamic Empire was chess. The Arabs learned to play chess from the Sassanians when [...]
Orange tree: medieval Islamic food included new sweet oranges What did medieval people eat? Around the Mediterranean, people continued in the Islamic period to rely on the three main foods from [...]
Bedouin tents today in the Arabian peninsula: Islamic environment Early medieval environment We can divide the environmental history of the medieval Islamic Empire into three different phases. The early phase, [...]
Turkomen on the Silk Road with camels Just like under Persian or Sassanian rule, the economy of West Asia during the Islamic period depended very heavily on trade. The Silk Road ran right across the Islamic Empire. It [...]
Medieval Islamic clothing: women covered their heads with veils, and men wore hats or turbans. Why did people cover up their bodies? It was hot in the Islamic Empire. So people [...]
A tin-glazed plate Just about the time of the Arab conquests (about 600-700 AD), potters started to use metal-based glazes on their pots. So Islamic pottery looks very different from the Roman pottery that came [...]
