The world in AD 850

Africa

Kairouan’s Great Mosque had reached its present size in 836, when the Aghlabid prince Ziyadat Allah I rebuilt it completely. Mohamed Béji Ben Mami, writing for the Discover Islamic Art database of the Museum With No Frontiers, gives its plan as 125 meters by 75 meters and dates its mihrab to Abu Ibrahim Ahmad in 862, with a surround of luster tiles from the ninth century that are probably of Iraqi origin. In Egypt the same caliph who ruled from Samarra ordered a Nilometer built on Roda Island at Cairo in 861: a stone-lined well fed from the river by three tunnels, with an octagonal marble column marked in cubits to measure the flood. Tarek Torky’s entry for the database calls its kufic inscriptions the oldest dated Arabic inscription recorded in Egypt, and notes that some scholars trace the foundation back to the caliph al-Ma’mun.

West Asia

The caliph al-Mu’tasim founded Samarra in 836, about 100 kilometers northwest of Baghdad, and it replaced Baghdad as the caliphal capital for almost 60 years. Peter J. Brown, in a 2025 study of the city’s water supply, writes that its most extensive building campaigns came under al-Mutawakkil, caliph from 847 to 861, who added the northern district of al-Mutawakkiliyya and the al-Ja’fari palace and had a canal of some 62 kilometers dug from the Tigris in 859 and 860. According to the textual sources, that system never worked as intended. Brown suggests that by siting his palace beside a Sasanian-era canal, al-Mutawakkil “may have consciously linked himself to the Sasanian kings”; after al-Mu’tadid moved the capital back to Baghdad in 892, Samarra was gradually abandoned.

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

Europe

Michael III was two years old when his father died in 842, and for 14 years his mother, Theodora, and the logothete Theoktistos managed the Byzantine government. Dumbarton Oaks, in its online exhibit of imperial seals, credits Theodora with taking “the definitive step of ending Iconoclasm” in 843, and records that when power changed hands in the spring of 856 it went not to Michael but to his uncle Bardas. In England, the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle enters under 851 that “the heathens now for the first time remained over winter in the Isle of Thanet,” and that 350 ships came into the mouth of the Thames the same year. Its entry for 854 records the first winter they spent on the Isle of Sheppey.

• The Oseberg ship: buried in 834, dug out in 1904AD 834
• Was Charlemagne surprised by his coronation in 800?AD 800
• Alcuin's letters on Lindisfarne, 793, and a cemetery dug since 2016AD 793

East Asia

Xuanzong took the Tang throne in 846, a year after the proscription of Buddhism that Ulrich Theobald’s history of the dynasty dates to 845 and names after the Huichang reign period. The edict of his predecessor Wuzong, in the translation that Columbia University’s Asia for Educators reproduces from Sources of Chinese Tradition, claims that more than 4,600 temples had been demolished and more than 40,000 privately established temples destroyed, and orders more than 2,000 Nestorian and Mazdean men back to lay life. Theobald traces the campaign to the tax-exempt wealth of the monasteries at a time of fiscal austerity, and to a rise of Daoism and revived Confucianism. Under Xuanzong, who reigned until 859, officials at the capital were divided into two rival parties, the Niu and Li factions.

South Asia

Amoghavarsha I, also called Nripatunga, had ruled the Rashtrakuta kingdom of the Deccan since 814 and would reign until 880. K. A. Nilakanta Sastri, in the 1958 edition of A History of South India, writes that war with the Eastern Chalukyas broke out again about 850, when Gunaga Vijayaditya III tried to free the kingdom of Vengi, and that after a Rashtrakuta victory at Vingavalli, in what is now Kurnool district, Gunaga stayed loyal for the rest of the reign. Sastri calls the king a religious man who “loved literature more than fighting,” credits him with building the city of Manyakheta, and names him as the ostensible author of the Kannada Kavirajamarga. Farther south, Vijayalaya had taken Tanjore some time before 850, the first step, in Sastri’s account, in the rise of Chola power.

Central Asia

Dunhuang had been under Tibetan rule until the campaign that Zhang Yichao began in 848, and in 851 the Tang conferred on him the title of Military Governor of the Return to Righteousness Army, Guiyijun Jiedushi. Hiroshi Kumamoto, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica, writes that the unified military rule of the Tibetan empire seems to have disintegrated quickly after the assassination of its king Glang Darma in 842, and that for the second half of the ninth century there is virtually no information on Khotan. The Uighur steppe empire had fallen to the Qirqiz in 840, according to Theobald, and Kumamoto notes that one group of Uighurs driven from Mongolia around that year had settled to the south in Ganzhou by 880.

• Did one battle in 751 carry papermaking to the West?AD 751
• A sealed room at Mogao, opened in 1900: the Dunhuang Library Cave1000

The Americas

Chaco Canyon’s great houses begin in this century. The National Park Service dates the Chacoan flowering to the mid-800s and lists Pueblo Bonito, Una Vida and Peñasco Blanco as great houses built in the middle and late 800s: multistory stone buildings with hundreds of rooms, planned from the start and often oriented to solar, lunar and cardinal directions. By 1050, the Park Service writes, Chaco had become the ceremonial, administrative and economic center of the San Juan Basin, tied by roads to more than 150 great houses in the region. It adds that the great houses may have been public architecture used at times of ceremony and trade, not farming villages with large permanent populations.

• How the Maya counted Venus, and the book that kept the countAD 900
• Three painted rooms at Bonampak, c. 790, entered by outsiders in 1946AD 790

Oceania

Samoa’s people, by Ethan Cochrane and his colleagues’ account in 2024, descended from settlers who arrived from the islands around New Guinea between 2,900 and 2,700 years ago. The team cites genetic work concluding that the population stayed extremely small, with repeated bottlenecks, until about 1,000 years ago, and notes that larger settlements, land boundaries and ceremonial mounds appear only after that date. East of Samoa, Janet Wilmshurst and her colleagues, in a 2011 radiocarbon study, placed the first settlement of the Society Islands between about 1025 and 1120, so in their reckoning those islands were still empty in 850. For Australia and New Guinea in 850, none of the works listed here gives an account.

Sources

• Museum With No Frontiers, Discover Islamic Art, Mohamed Béji Ben Mami: "Great Mosque of Kairouan"
• Museum With No Frontiers, Discover Islamic Art, Tarek Torky: "Nilometer"
• Peter J. Brown: "Water in an Abbasid City: The Sources, Distribution, and Significance of Water at Samarra", Journal of Abbasid Studies 12, no. 1 (2025)
• Dumbarton Oaks, God's Regents on Earth: A Thousand Years of Byzantine Imperial Seals: "Michael III (856–867)"
• Yale Law School, Avalon Project: "The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle: Ninth Century"
• Columbia University, Asia for Educators: "Selection from Emperor Wuzong's Edict on the Suppression of Buddhism: The Edict of the Eighth Month" (from Sources of Chinese Tradition, compiled by Wm. Theodore de Bary and Irene Bloom, 1999)
• ChinaKnowledge.de, Ulrich Theobald: "Tang Dynasty: Political History"
• K. A. Nilakanta Sastri: A History of South India (Oxford University Press, 1958; Internet Archive text)
• Encyclopaedia Iranica, Hiroshi Kumamoto: "Khotan ii. History in the Pre-Islamic Period" (2009)
• National Park Service, Chaco Culture National Historical Park: "History & Culture"
• PLoS One via PubMed Central, Cochrane and colleagues: "Collective action problems led to the cultural transformation of Sāmoa 800 years ago" (2024)
• PNAS via PubMed Central, Wilmshurst and colleagues: "High-precision radiocarbon dating shows recent and rapid initial human colonization of East Polynesia" (2011)