Are you ready to start your new online adventure or creative endeavor?

Make it happen with Squarespace, the all in one platform to build an online presence and follow your dream.

But more on that at the borders of China.

This astonishingly managed all the way from France to the borders of China.

This astonishingly massive landmass had been conquered in the span of just three generations

by an elite core of heavily militarised and driven people, skilled at war, though motivated by a revolutionary world view,

a new and unique monotheistic religion.

Yet, just 45 years later, the descendants of those Muslim conquerors

found their lands very nearly torn apart by tribal quarrels,

religious tensions within the faith, and regional revolts from the Atlantic to the Red Sea.

Astonishingly, just five years later, the old regime, with its heartlands in Syria, dominated

by the Umayyad family, was no more, replaced by a new and revitalized dynasty, descended from

a member of the house of the prophet himself, the Abbasids. From then on, until their own

demise some 200 years later, the Abbasids would dominate much of the known world. Remarkably,

this transition from imperialist Umayad Caliphs to cosmopolitan Abbasids was relatively smooth,

resulting in much of the empire simply changing hands rather than breaking away into independent states.

Such has happened after the decline of the Abbasids in the 9th and early 10th centuries.

For historian Hugh Kennedy, the Abbasid Caliphate in the 8th and 9th centuries was as central and pivotal to world history as the Roman Empire was in the

first and second. Like the Roman Empire, its legacy was to influence politics and the

development of society for generations to come. Yet it wouldn't have been possible

without the dynasty that came before.

The Umayad state had been an authoritarian empire based on the ethnic division between Arabs and everyone else.

...