The Baghdad Brothers and the Book of Devices

The City of Peace

Baghdad, in the year 830, was not merely a city; it was the world’s center of gravity. Founded less than a century before by the Caliph al-Mansur, it was officially named Madinat al-Salam, the City of Peace. And it was round. A perfect circle of mud brick and sun-hardened clay, double-walled and moated, with four great gates aimed at the cardinal points of the compass, as if to draw in all the world’s knowledge. Inside those walls, the city hummed with a revolutionary idea: that the accumulated wisdom of humanity—from the Greeks, the Persians, the Indians—was not a foreign contaminate, but a treasure to be hunted down, translated, and built upon. Ivory, soap, and diamonds moved through its markets, but so did manuscripts. Paper technology, a secret captured from Chinese prisoners of war, had turned the city’s bookshops into hives of activity, where a scholar might find the works of Euclid or Aristotle rendered into elegant Arabic. The air smelled of river water from the Tigris, of spices from the East, and of the ink drying on new pages. This was the project of the Abbasid Caliphs, and its most fervent champion was Caliph al-Ma'mun. A ruler who, it was said, once dreamed of meeting Aristotle, al-Ma'mun did not just fund scholarship; he drove it. He dispatched agents to the far reaches of the Byzantine Empire with treasure, not to conquer land, but to purchase books. He established observatories to map the heavens and, in a grand project, sent teams of surveyors into the desert to measure the very circumference of the Earth. At the heart of this intellectual ferment was a library and academy known as the Bayt al-Hikma, the House of Wisdom. And at the heart of the House of Wisdom were three brothers.