In a rustic hamlet named Humayma (Jordan) lived a well-connected but obscure squire with his sons. Muhammad ibn Ali was unexceptional, except that he was a great-grandson of Muhammad’s uncle Abbas, and he was disgusted by the effeminate caliphs ‘whose only ambition’, remarked his son Mansur, ‘was the satisfaction of pleasures forbidden by God’. As the Umayya faltered, a perfume seller arrived at the farm on a secret mission from Iraq, where support was growing for a furious revolution far to the east in Khorasan. In June 747, a sacred warrior, a manumitted slave who called himself Ibn Muslim, emerged from nowhere to launch a rebellion of Khorasanis, excluded by the Arab Umayyas, that quickly gathered a militant alliance of black-bannered warriors – Persians and Afghans, dissidents and adventurers, followers of the Ali lineage of Muhammad’s family and sectarians named Kharijites – who took an oath of allegiance to ‘An Acceptable Member of the House of the Prophet’. Knowing that the Ali family offended many in Syria, Ibn Muslim backed Abbas’s descendants and sent the trusted cosmetics salesman with an invitation to destiny.
Muhammad ibn Ali agreed to support the revolution, a cause inherited by his sons, only for the Umayya to hear the rumours and kill the eldest. A younger son, Abbas, went underground as Ibn Muslim galloped out of Khorasan into Iraq. There the two met, united in disgust and outrage at the decline of the House of Islam. Proclaiming himself caliph of House Abbasiya of the Muhammad dynasty, Abbas warned, ‘Hold yourselves ready for I am the pitiless bloodshedder and destroying avenger.’ His regal name was al-Saffah – the Bloodshedder.
At the River Zab in February 750, Ibn Muslim and al-Saffah defeated the army of Marwan II, who was hunted down in Egypt and killed – the last Umayya caliph.* In April, al-Saffah, his brother al-Mansur and his troops took Damascus. Bloodshedder personally beheaded Umayya princes, dead caliphs were disinterred, ‘scourged with whips then crucified’, skulls smashed. Bloodshedder announced an amnesty for the Umayya family, who were invited to a reconciliatory dinner near Jaffa. But it was a trick: as Bloodshedder watched gleefully, the guests were slaughtered. ‘Never have I eaten a meal’, he said, ‘that did me such good or tasted so delicious.’
Only one prince escaped, but he would eventually found a new paradise kingdom in the west. Prince Abd al-Rahman, grandson of the poetry-lover Hisham and son of his heir Muawiya who had died young, fled from Damascus with his brother and Badr, a Greek slave. Hunted by Bloodshedder’s henchmen, they were trapped at the Euphrates, where the brother was beheaded. But Abd al-Rahman swam for his life, the start of a five-year adventure across Syria and Africa, towards the last place where his family still had friends: Spain.
Bloodshedder moved the capital to Kufa, closer to the Persian homelands of the revolutionaries, Damascus being tainted with Umayya filthiness, and his success was capped by advances towards the borders of China’s Western Region. Arabs, Chinese, Tibetans and Turks fought in ever-changing alliances. The Chinese, backed by Turkic allies, repelled Bloodshedder’s armies until a clash at Talas where the Turks switched sides. The Arabs won, but this was a minor encounter compared with the catastrophe that was enveloping the Tang.
Emperor Xuanzong had ruled conscientiously for decades, but now, beguiled by Taoist alchemy and depressed by traitorous sons, he lost focus. He liquidated three of his sons, leaving power to a minister named Li Linfu who recruited a professional army that included Sogdians from central Asia. Among them was an ostentatious, illiterate and Brobdingnagian soldier, An Lushan. As a boy An Lushan had been arrested for stealing, as a general almost executed for insubordination, yet he proved a master manipulator of his patronizing Tang masters, who fatally underestimated him as he played the fat, coarse, devoted bumpkin. When Emperor Xuanzong asked what was in his belly, he replied, ‘Other than a faithful heart, there is nothing else,’ and at other times he pretended not to know what a crown prince was, insisting, ‘I’m a barbarian! I don’t understand formal ceremony.’ But he had a nose for weakness and understood that the essential person was not the emperor but a certain concubine.
At fourteen Yang Guifei was married to one of the emperor’s sons but spotting her beauty as she bathed at Huaqing springs – ‘the hot water running down her glistening jade-like body’, as a poet put it – the sixty-nine-year-old emperor ordered her enrolment as a Taoist nun so that she could remain in the palace; meanwhile he foisted another wife on his son. Yang had a porcelain complexion and a curvaceous figure which she displayed in a bodice she had designed herself.
