The caliphates, one by one

A caliphate is not a church. It is a state claiming universal sovereignty on religious grounds, and every one of them was built by an army. This page takes them in order: what each took, from whom, and what it did with the people it took it from.

The pattern repeats with variations. Conquest, then a treaty imposing tribute, then a legal caste system for the conquered, then conversion over generations as the fiscal and legal pressure does its work, then a slave supply drawn from beyond the frontier.

Rashidun, 632 to 661

The four “rightly guided” caliphs: Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, Ali.

First war: apostasy. Before a single foreign conquest, Abu Bakr fought the Ridda wars of 632 to 633 against Arabian tribes that considered their allegiance to have ended with Muhammad’s death. The precedent set was that leaving is rebellion, and apostasy remains a capital offence in law in several states today.

What it took. Byzantine Syria and Palestine after Yarmouk in 636, with Jerusalem surrendering in 637. Sassanid Mesopotamia after Qadisiyyah in 636, and the Persian empire itself after Nahavand in 642. Egypt between 639 and 642 under Amr ibn al-As. Cyrenaica in 643.

What it did with it. The Sassanid state was abolished outright. Zoroastrianism, the religion of Iranian kingship for a thousand years, became a taxed minority and is now roughly twenty thousand people inside Iran. The terms imposed on the conquered were tribute and legal subordination, formalised in the arrangement later remembered as the Pact of Umar, whose text is short, explicit, and worth reading once in full.

Umayyad, 661 to 750

Capital at Damascus. The dynasty that turned a conquest movement into an Arab empire.

What it took. The Maghreb in a fifty-year campaign that ended with the destruction of Carthage in 698 and the extinction of the Christian church of North Africa, the church of Tertullian, Cyprian and Augustine. Spain from 711 under Tariq ibn Ziyad, held in part for the next 781 years. Sindh in 711 under Muhammad bin Qasim, the opening of a thousand years of campaigning in India. Transoxiana from 705 under Qutayba ibn Muslim, taking Bukhara and Samarkand from Buddhist and Zoroastrian rulers.

Where it stopped. Outside Constantinople in 718 and in France in 732. Both were sieges and battles, not trade missions.

What it did with it. The Umayyads governed as a conquering Arab aristocracy over a mostly non-Muslim population, and the tax structure assumed that would continue: the jizya on non-Muslims was the fiscal base, which produced the empire’s first constitutional crisis when too many people converted and the revenue fell.

Abbasid, 750 to 1258

Capital at Baghdad. Less new territory, more machinery, and the machinery is what outlived it.

The legal architecture of dhimma was systematised here: the poll tax, the ban on new houses of worship, the disability in court, the dress rules.
The slave trades ran at industrial scale, drawing from East Africa, the Slavic lands (from which the word “slave” descends), the Caucasus and Central Asia. The Zanj rebellion of 869 to 883, a rising of East African slaves in the marshes of southern Iraq that took fourteen years to put down, is the measure of how many were held in one province.
Castration. Male captives crossing the Sahara and the Red Sea were frequently castrated to supply eunuchs, at mortality rates contemporaries put in the majority, which is why no diaspora comparable to the Americas exists along those routes.
The slave-soldier system, the mamluks and the Turkic guard, eventually reduced the caliphs to figureheads of their own bodyguards.

Ended by the Mongols in 1258, when Baghdad was sacked and the last Abbasid caliph killed.

Fatimid, 909 to 1171

An Ismaili Shia caliphate ruling from Tunisia and then Cairo, in open competition with Baghdad, and proof that “the caliphate” was never one thing. Under al-Hakim, from 1004, churches and synagogues were destroyed in Egypt and Palestine, including the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1009, an act that reverberated in Europe for the rest of the century.

Almoravid and Almohad, 1040 to 1269

The North African Berber dynasties, and the correction to anyone who imagines Muslim Spain as a permanent convivencia.

The Almoravids came out of the Sahara in the eleventh century, took Morocco and Mauritania, and crossed into Spain in 1086. The Almohads replaced them in the twelfth century with a harder doctrine and abolished dhimmi status outright: Jews and Christians in their territory converted, died or fled. Maimonides, the greatest Jewish thinker of the medieval world, was driven out of Córdoba by them as a boy and spent his life in Egypt. The Jewish community of Fez was massacred in 1033 and again in 1465.

Our audit caught Wikipedia’s opening on the Almohads dropping the word jihad, which it carried in 2005.

Ottoman, 1299 to 1924

The longest-lived, and the one whose end still shapes the map.

What it took. The Balkans from 1354, Constantinople in 1453, ending the Roman Empire, then Syria, Egypt and the Hejaz from 1516, and the siege of Vienna twice, in 1529 and 1683.

The devshirme. From the late fourteenth century the Ottoman state levied Christian boys from Balkan villages, roughly every three to seven years, aged between about eight and twenty. They were taken to Istanbul, converted to Islam by force, and trained as janissaries or palace administrators. Scholarly estimates run to about three thousand boys a year, and one documented levy in 1603 to 1604 gathered 2,604 in a single season. The Christians who paid it called it the blood tax, and it is the single clearest answer to anyone claiming the dhimma was a partnership: a partner does not surrender his sons.

How it ended. The Armenian genocide of 1915 to 1923 destroyed between one and one and a half million Armenians, alongside the Assyrian and Greek genocides. Christians were roughly a fifth of Anatolia’s population in 1914 and are well under one per cent of Turkey’s today. The caliphate itself was abolished by the Turkish Republic on 3 March 1924, and every jihadist movement since has been trying to restore it.

Sokoto, 1804 to 1903

The one that proves this is not only medieval history.

Usman dan Fodio declared jihad in what is now northern Nigeria in 1804 and founded a caliphate that became, by the nineteenth century, one of the largest slave societies on earth, with estimates of the enslaved population running into the millions. It was raiding its neighbours for captives while the Royal Navy was suppressing the Atlantic trade, and it ended in 1903 when the British took Sokoto.

Boko Haram operates in the same territory today and names the same project.

The through line

Seven states across thirteen centuries, three continents, Sunni and Shia, Arab, Berber, Turkic and Fulani. They fought each other constantly. What they share is not ethnicity or sect but a structure: universal claim, conquest, tribute from the conquered, a legal ceiling on non-Muslims, and a slave supply from outside the frontier.

That structure is the thing the modern movement is trying to rebuild, and it says so in its own publications. Islamic State’s declaration in 2014 was not a metaphor. It was a claim to be the ninth entry on this page.