over into
Spanish, Italian, French and finally into English in the form of "tabby,"
as the designation of a rich-coloured watered silk. Depending on coloured
tiles and gorgeous fabrics for their rich effects, nothing of the buildings
of the times of Harun al-Rashid or Mamun, once counted so magnificent, have
come down to us. All have perished in the numerous sieges and inundations
which have devastated the city.

With the rise of the Turkish body-guard under Mamun's successor, Mo'tassim,
began the downfall of the Abbasid dynasty, and with it of the Abbasid
capital, Bagdad. Mo'tassim founded Samarra, and for fifty-eight years
caliph and court deserted Bagdad (see CALIPHATE, sect. C). Then, in A.D.
865, Mosta'in, attempting to escape from the tyranny of the Turkish guard,
fled back again to Bagdad. The attempt was futile, Bagdad was besieged and
taken, and from that time until their final downfall the Abbasid caliphs
were mere puppets, while the real rulers were successively the Turkish
guard, the Buyids and the Seljuks. But during all this period the caliphs
continued to be the religious heads of Islam and their residence its
capital. Bagdad, accordingly, although fallen from its first eminence,
continued to be a city of the first rank, and during most of that period
still the richest and most splendid city in the world. Its religious
importance is attested by the number of its great shrines dating from those
times; as for its wealth and size, while, as stated above, few remains of
the actual buildings of that period survive, we still have abundant records
describing their character, their size and their position. With the last
century of the caliphates began a more rapid decline. From the records of
that period it seems that the present city is identical in the position of
its walls and the space occupied by the town proper with Bagdad at the
close of the 12th century, the period when this rapid decline had already
advanced so far that the western city is described by travellers as almost
in ruins, and the eastern half as containing large uninhabited spaces. With
the capture of the city by the Mongols, under Hulagu (Hulaku), the grandson
of Jenghiz Khan, in 1258, and the extinction of the Abbasid caliphate of
Bagdad, its importance as the religious centre of Islam passed away, and it
ceased to be a city of the first rank, although the glamour of its former
grandeur still clung to it, so that even to-day in Turkish offici