Marozzi's history starts with Baghdad's founding during the years 762-767 and ends with an average of 25 Iraqis killed by violence every day during 2013. The 12th-century saga is, as Marozzi concludes, "relentlessly tempestuous". Baghdad's is perhaps the greatest urban story ever told, with more beauty and more evil — more sheer humanity, for this is what beguiles and inspires Marozzi — than any other.
This is the city that was the capital of the world when, fewer than 50 years after its birth, it underwent its first civil war, siege, mass fire, starvation, and physical destruction as Mamoun besieged his Arab brother Amin; where the Mongols slaughtered 200,000 people in a single sacking four and a half centuries later; and where Saddam Hussein ruled while killing three or four times that many of his own people in relentless wars abroad and repression at home.
Along the way were Buyids, Seljuks, Mongols, Persians, Turks, Mamlukes, Britons, Americans and others. All came and went in violence. At a time of plague in 1831, with "bodies piled up in the streets" because the rulers would not allow prophylactic medicine to interfere with God's will, the city was a "Dantean vision of hell", in Marozzi's words.
The amazing thing about Baghdad is that such a description could turn up on any page of this story. There simply is no place on earth where more people have been slaughtered, raped, tortured, burned to death, starved, or killed by flood, drought, pestilence or famine.
And yet Marozzi loves the place, and succeeds magnificently at making us love it with him. Blood-soaked navel of Islam's violence it may be, but it is also the place where caliphs dream of Aristotle while perfumed Circassian slave girls sing in meadows of gold. It is hard to imagine anyone else being able to write a book that does the subject such justice. Marozzi's sources range from the medieval Arab chroniclers such as Al Tabari to unpublished papers written by Iraqi intellectuals of the last decade, from the accounts of European travellers, beginning with Benjamin of Tudela in 1170, to many private conversations with old-fashioned Baghdadis living today, who embody the author's vision of the profound, painful worldliness of the city. Such prodigious research — 17 pages of bibliography, 25 pages of notes, all of it credible and relevant — is rarely pulled together so elegantly.
Marozzi has spent a great deal of time in Baghdad. It is in the thick of yet another of the city's endless, peculiarly vicious wars that he visits the Mustansiriya University, founded in 1233, Baghdad's only major physical legacy from the heyday represented by Mamoun. "Defiance and nostalgia are set in every stone" of the ancient university, writes Marozzi. This is the spirit — adventurous, sophisticated, respectful — that typifies a truly splendid work of erudition, storytelling and humanity.
This is the city that was the capital of the world when, fewer than 50 years after its birth, it underwent its first civil war, siege, mass fire, starvation, and physical destruction as Mamoun besieged his Arab brother Amin; where the Mongols slaughtered 200,000 people in a single sacking four and a half centuries later; and where Saddam Hussein ruled while killing three or four times that many of his own people in relentless wars abroad and repression at home.
Along the way were Buyids, Seljuks, Mongols, Persians, Turks, Mamlukes, Britons, Americans and others. All came and went in violence. At a time of plague in 1831, with "bodies piled up in the streets" because the rulers would not allow prophylactic medicine to interfere with God's will, the city was a "Dantean vision of hell", in Marozzi's words.
The amazing thing about Baghdad is that such a description could turn up on any page of this story. There simply is no place on earth where more people have been slaughtered, raped, tortured, burned to death, starved, or killed by flood, drought, pestilence or famine.
And yet Marozzi loves the place, and succeeds magnificently at making us love it with him. Blood-soaked navel of Islam's violence it may be, but it is also the place where caliphs dream of Aristotle while perfumed Circassian slave girls sing in meadows of gold. It is hard to imagine anyone else being able to write a book that does the subject such justice. Marozzi's sources range from the medieval Arab chroniclers such as Al Tabari to unpublished papers written by Iraqi intellectuals of the last decade, from the accounts of European travellers, beginning with Benjamin of Tudela in 1170, to many private conversations with old-fashioned Baghdadis living today, who embody the author's vision of the profound, painful worldliness of the city. Such prodigious research — 17 pages of bibliography, 25 pages of notes, all of it credible and relevant — is rarely pulled together so elegantly.
Marozzi has spent a great deal of time in Baghdad. It is in the thick of yet another of the city's endless, peculiarly vicious wars that he visits the Mustansiriya University, founded in 1233, Baghdad's only major physical legacy from the heyday represented by Mamoun. "Defiance and nostalgia are set in every stone" of the ancient university, writes Marozzi. This is the spirit — adventurous, sophisticated, respectful — that typifies a truly splendid work of erudition, storytelling and humanity.
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