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The Sibling Rivalry That Wrecked an Empire, and Other Self-Destructive Royal Family Episodes

Khalid Elhassan January 5, 2020 33 min

Wars of the Roses - Battle of Bosworth Field — The Wars of the Roses, during which the Plantagenet Dynasty destroyed itself. Encyclopedia Britannica

38. The Abbasid Brothers’ Civil War

In 811, Abbasid Caliph al Amin gathered an army of about 50,000 men, mostly infantry, and sent it to put down his elder brother in Khurasan. They ran into a much smaller army of al Ma’mun, of about 5000, but they were all cavalry – mostly mounted steppe archers.

Al Amin’s army was routed, and al Ma’mun then went on the counter-offensive, invading his brother’s heartland, and besieging him in Baghdad. After a siege that lasted a year, Baghdad fell, and al Amin was captured and executed in 813. Al Ma’mun succeeded him as Caliph, and ruled until his death in 833.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.