A contrasting society: Baghdad around 900 CE
History · Key Stage 2 · The School
The round city
Baghdad was founded in 762 CE. It was built as a planned circular city. Within a hundred years it may have been the largest city on earth, with several hundred thousand people. It had paved streets and public baths. It had hospitals with trained physicians. It had paper mills, using a technique that had travelled from China.
Britain at the same moment
Compare that with London in 900 CE. London was a modest town. Most people in Britain lived in villages of timber and thatch. Alfred was defending Wessex against Viking armies. Setting the two side by side is the point of this unit. The past was not the same everywhere, and Europe was not its centre.
How knowledge moved
Scholars in Baghdad translated Greek, Persian and Indian works into Arabic. They argued with those works and extended them. Al-Khwarizmi worked on algebra. Ibn al-Haytham worked on optics. Ibn Sina wrote a medical Canon. All of it travelled onward into Europe, through Muslim Spain and Sicily. Ideas move along trade routes, and they rarely move in only one direction.
BAGHDAD: several hundred thousand people. A paper industry. Public hospitals with separate wards. A translation movement turning Greek and Indian science into Arabic. Mathematicians developing algebra. LONDON: perhaps ten thousand people. Recently sacked by Vikings. Largely built of wood. Learning kept alive in a handful of monasteries. The same decade. Any account that calls this period dark is describing one corner of one continent.