The world in AD 800

Africa

Ifriqiya, the Arab province whose chief cities were Kairouan and Tunis, had fallen back into near-chaos in 795, when the garrison troops known as the jund ended the rule of the Muhallabid family, governors since 771. In 800 the caliph Harun al-Rashid named as governor Ibrahim ibn al-Aghlab, a general who had restored Abbasid power there after another jund revolt, and when Ibrahim died in 812 his son succeeded him; the family kept Ifriqiya until the Fatimid conquest of 909. Antonia Bosanquet, in a 2025 chapter on rebellion in the province, writes that Ibrahim’s army of slaves brought from south of the Sahara freed the dynasty from dependence on the jund. The fourteenth-century historian al-Nuwayri called the Aghlabid state the first in Ifriqiya to be a dawla in its own right, one that was “almost independent.”

West Asia

Harun al-Rashid, caliph since 786, ruled from Baghdad, founded in 762 by the second Abbasid caliph, al-Mansur, under the official name Madinat al-Salam, the City of Peace. Hugh Kennedy, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, calls it almost certainly the biggest city in the Muslim world until the end of the tenth century, and notes that polo became a favorite pastime at court from Harun’s time. The government was largely in the hands of one family from Balkh, the Barmakids: Yahya ibn Khalid had been vizier since 786, and his sons Fadl and Jafar held the East and the West as governors from 792, although Fadl lost all his offices in 799. Ihsan Abbas writes that it is not clear what turned Harun against them between 799 and 802; he ordered Jafar killed in 803, and Abbas finds the chroniclers’ explanations suggestive but not convincing.

• What was the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, and what did it translate?AD 830

Europe

Einhard, Charlemagne’s biographer, records that Charles went to Rome after Pope Leo called on him for help, spent the winter of 800 there, and received the titles of Emperor and Augustus at an imperial coronation on December 25. Einhard later claimed that Charles disliked the titles so much at first that he “would not have set foot in the Church the day that they were conferred” had he known the pope’s plan. In Constantinople, Irene had ruled alone since 797 after deposing her son Constantine VI, the first woman to govern Byzantium as sole ruler. Dumbarton Oaks, whose online exhibit of imperial seals includes hers, notes that her seals and coins repeat her portrait on both faces and calls Charlemagne’s coronation the most lasting consequence of her sole rule, since until then there had been one empire and one Christian emperor; Charlemagne sent envoys to Constantinople to propose marriage, and while they negotiated, an official named Nikephoros deposed and exiled her in 802.

• Was Charlemagne surprised by his coronation in 800?AD 800
• The Oseberg ship: buried in 834, dug out in 1904AD 834

East Asia

Dezong, Tang emperor from 779 to 804, ruled a China in which, since the An Lushan rebellion, many provinces were governed almost independently by military commissioners. Ulrich Theobald’s history of the dynasty records that Dezong’s chief counselor Yang Yan replaced the old levy of grain, cloth and labor service with a tax collected twice a year on each household’s land and output, the liangshuifa. The court’s attempt to curb the military governors failed, and at one point Dezong had to leave Chang’an; under Dezong and his predecessor Daizong, eunuchs took command of the imperial guards. In Japan the court had moved in 794 to a new capital, Heian-kyō, modern Kyoto, and on the Korean peninsula Silla was in the middle of the period that Columbia University’s Asia for Educators timeline calls United Silla, 668 to 936.

South Asia

Dharmapala, king of Bengal from about 781 to 821, was locked in a three-sided contest with the Gurjara-Pratiharas and the Rashtrakutas of the Deccan for the old north Indian seat of power at Kanauj. A. M. Chowdhury, in the Asiatic Society of Bangladesh’s Banglapedia, places Dharmapala’s campaigns between about 790 and 800, when he put his protégé Chakrayudha on the Kanauj throne, and describes the Pratihara king Nagabhata II then defeating both men before the Rashtrakuta king Govinda III defeated Nagabhata and went back to the Deccan in 801. Chowdhury reads the Pala inscriptions that make Dharmapala overlord of the whole north as the work of court poets, not a record of fact. In central Java the Sailendra dynasty was building Borobudur, which Masanori Nagaoka, in a 2016 study of the site, dates to the eighth and ninth centuries.

Central Asia

Toward the end of the eighth century the Tibetan empire extended its rule over the Tarim basin, capturing the oasis kingdom of Khotan in 791. Victor Mair and Prods Oktor Skjærvø, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, write that little is known of Khotan under Tibetan occupation, which lasted until about 842. Étienne de la Vaissière describes constant wars among the Chinese, the Uighurs and the Tibetans in the Tarim basin and Gansu that stopped the caravan trade for a long time; it recovered at the beginning of the ninth century inside the Uighur empire, which until 840 stretched across northern Central Asia and received enormous deliveries of silk from the weakened Tang in exchange for horses. Since about 762 the Uighur rulers had followed Manicheism, which Werner Sundermann notes was an often persecuted minority faith everywhere else.

• Did one battle in 751 carry papermaking to the West?AD 751

The Americas

The Classic Maya political order of the southern lowlands was already breaking up. Tobias Braun and his colleagues, writing in 2023, report that warfare and the abandonment of sites were under way between 750 and 830 in the Petén heartland of Guatemala and Belize, and that more than 63% of urban polities with dated monuments had disintegrated by 835; at Uxbenká the last dated stone monument went up in 780, 30 years before the site was abandoned. Scholars date the end of the period differently: the Braun team notes that the Terminal Classic was traditionally set at 850 to 1000, while David Lentz and his colleagues, studying Tikal in 2020, use 830 to 900. The Lentz team found high mercury levels and toxic blue-green algae in Tikal’s central reservoirs in layers from the period just before the city was abandoned in the ninth century.

• Three painted rooms at Bonampak, c. 790, entered by outsiders in 1946AD 790
• How Did the Maya Track the Cycle of Venus — Without a Telescope?AD 900

Oceania

No written record survives from the Pacific islands or Australia for AD 800. A 2014 study of lake sediments on New Zealand’s South Island, led by David McWethy, places the first human arrival in New Zealand about 750 years before its publication, so the islands had no people in 800. Alexander Ioannidis and his colleagues, in a 2020 genetic study, dated contact between Polynesians and a Native American group to between about 1150 and 1230, the century in which some studies place the discovery of the last island groups from Hawaii to New Zealand and Rapa Nui. The sources cited below give no account of Australia in this century.

Sources

• Antonia Bosanquet: "Changing Patterns of Rebellion in Aghlabid Ifrīqiya", in Hannah-Lena Hagemann and Alasdair C. Grant, eds, Between Rebels and Rulers in the Early Islamicate World (Edinburgh University Press, 2025, open access via OAPEN)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Hugh Kennedy: "Baghdad i. The Iranian Connection: Before the Mongol Invasion" (1988)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Ihsan Abbas: "Barmakids" (1988)
• Dumbarton Oaks, God's Regents on Earth: A Thousand Years of Byzantine Imperial Seals: "Eirene (797–802)"
• Fordham University, Internet Medieval Sourcebook: "Einhard: The Life of Charlemagne" (translated by Samuel Epes Turner, 1880)
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "Tang Dynasty: Political History"
• Columbia University, Asia for Educators: "Japan: Timeline of Historical Periods" (prepared by Amy Vladeck Heinrich)
• Columbia University, Asia for Educators: "Korea: Timeline of Historical Periods" (consultant Charles K. Armstrong)
• Banglapedia, Asiatic Society of Bangladesh, A. M. Chowdhury: "Dharmapala" (Internet Archive copy, 2025)
• Masanori Nagaoka: "Historical Setting of Borobudur", in Cultural Landscape Management at Borobudur, Indonesia (SpringerBriefs in Archaeology, 2016)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Victor Mair and Prods Oktor Skjærvø: "Chinese Turkestan ii. In Pre-Islamic Times" (1991)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Étienne de la Vaissière: "Sogdian Trade" (2004)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Werner Sundermann: "Manicheism i. General Survey" (2009)
• Communications Earth & Environment via PubMed Central, Braun and colleagues: "Decline in seasonal predictability potentially destabilized Classic Maya societies" (2023)
• Scientific Reports via PubMed Central, Lentz and colleagues: "Molecular genetic and geochemical assays reveal severe contamination of drinking water reservoirs at the ancient Maya city of Tikal" (2020)
• PLoS One via PubMed Central, McWethy and colleagues: "A high-resolution chronology of rapid forest transitions following Polynesian arrival in New Zealand" (2014)
• Nature 583 via PubMed Central, Ioannidis and colleagues: "Native American gene flow into Polynesia predating Easter Island settlement" (2020)