Haroun

Haroun, surnamed AL-RASCHID (more properly Harún er Rashid, 'the orthodox'), the most renowned of the Abbaside califs, was born in 763, and succeeded his elder brother, El Hádi, in the califate, in the year 786. He owed his peaceful accession to the sagacity of the Barmecide Yahya, whom he at once made his grand-vizier. To him and his four sons he left the entire administration of his extensive kingdom; and the energy of their administration, the enforcement of order, and the general prosperity of the country proved that his confidence was not misplaced. Meantime Haroun gave himself up to the pleasures of life, and his own taste and hospitality quickly made his court at Bagdad a brilliant centre of all the wit, learning, and art of the Moslem world. Himself an accomplished scholar and poet, he gathered round him the best scholars, poets, and musicians of his age, and heaped rewards upon them with lavish prodigality. Towards the end of his reign a strange and deeply-rooted hatred towards the Barmecides (q.v.) filled his mind, and in 803 he caused the vizier, his four sons, and all their descendants save one, to be executed, not even excepting his favourite Jaafar (Giafar), who had been his constant companion in his famous but apocryphal nocturnal rambles through the streets of Bagdad. But the retribution of heaven quickly followed; his affairs fell into irretrievable confusion; treason and rebellion, no longer dreading the far-reaching arm of the able vizier, showed themselves in every corner of the empire; and, when it was too late, Haroun repented bitterly his ferocious cruelty. To quell a formidable rising in Khorassan, in the north-east of the empire, Haroun marched in person against the rebels, but an attack of apoplexy obliged him to remain behind in Tús, where he soon afterwards died, in the month of March 809. Haroun the Magnificent is the hero of many of the stories in the Arabian Nights, which have thrown a false halo round his memory; for with all his enlightenment, there was room in his heart for the most merciless and blood-thirsty ferocity. See Gibbon's History, Weil's Gesch. der Chalifen, and Professor E. H. Palmer's sketch in the 'New Plutarch' series (1880).