The Islamic and Byzantine City

Although fewer in number and developed later, these served significant symbolic purposes, since the "royal cities" established in the emerging Islamic world were often accompanied by regime changes: the movement of the caliphate or shifts between Sunni and Shiite sects. Two notable examples were the planned princely cities of Baghdad (properly Madinat al-Salam, the "City of Peace," or Madinat al-Mansur, the "City of the [Caliph] Mansur") founded during the second half of the eighth century by the Abbasids who displaced the Umayyad caliphate, formerly located in Damascus, and Cairo (Al-Qahirah, "the Victorious"), founded in 969 by the Fatimids, a Shiite dynasty coming from Tunisia that displaced the former Sunni rulers. Both were new cities, located on level and well-irrigated land some distance from existing settlements; they were carefully designed as walled protected enclaves for new rulers. But they differed radically in terms of conceptions and plans.

The royal city of Baghdad was a circular city on the opposite bank of the Tigris from the village of Baghdad, intended to house the newly victorious Abbasid caliphate. Surrounded by a pair of formidable walls and a moat, with entry restricted to four gateways and commoners forbidden admittance, the round city held at its center the palace of the caliph with its attached cathedral mosque. Around this most protected focus were the palaces for the princes and their armed defenders. Inside the peripheral walls were arranged governmental offices to administer the empire. Gradually, population gathered on the outskirts of this city, of which only archaeological traces remain. Within a short time Baghdad had grown into a large capital in which Islamic learning and scientific and intellectual development reached a medieval peak—at least until it was sacked by the Mongols in 1258.

Cairo, in contrast, would eventually grow from imperial enclave into the greatest capital in the Islamic world until Ottoman times, filled with architectural and artistic treasures, many of which are preserved to this day. Laid out in the form of a walled rectangle with a regular street pattern of two major streets intersecting at right angles and leading to four impressive gateways, it contained the palaces of Mu izz al-Din, the newly installed Fatimid caliph, the major mosque, and quarters assigned to various ethnic groups that made up his army. The ordinary citizens of Fustat, by then grown into a prosperous commercial city to its south, were at first enjoined from entering. Only after Fustat was burned (in 1169) to protect the princely city from invading Crusaders, were the gates to Al-Qahirah opened to the "masses." But this marked the rise of Salah al-Din Yusuf al-Ayyub (Saladin; 1137/8–1193), the demise of the Fatimids, and the establishment of the Ayyubid dynasty. Thereafter, the history of the city's development approximated that of the third category.