The City of Baghdad
Nothing remains of al-Mansur’s famous circular city of Baghdad begun in 762 and called the City of Peace but many contemporary descriptions allow us to make a hypothetical reconstruction. The double walled moated enclosure was about 2,515 yards in diameter. The four gates, halfway between the cardinal points and surmounted by four golden-domed audience chambers, looked out on the major directions of the empire: the Khorassan gate toward the northeast, the Kufa gate towards Makkah and the
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Political and Cultural History of Islam
southwest, the Shami gate toward Byzantium and the northwest, and the Basra gate toward India and the southeast. Within a circular inner city surrounded by administrative buildings and residences for alMansur’s relatives stood the 900 square foot Dar al-Khilafah (residential palace) at the qibla wall of the great mosque, also a square of 450 feet. The palace had a so-called Golden Gate, an iwan
45 feet deep and 30 wise, and two 45-square-foot domed chambers one above the other. The uppermost was called the Qubbat alKhadra, like Mu’awiya’s in Damascus and Hisham’s at Rusafa.
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