926 little finance was reaching the city from the outlying regions of Egypt, Syria, Mosul, Iran, and much of Iraq itself. It has been aptly remarked that it was bankruptcy not military defeat which brought the Abbasid caliphate to an end and the disorders of the tenth century were caused to a great extent by the inability of the caliphs to finance the great armies which were the basis of their rule. The kharaj, the land-tax collected annually by the officials of the central government, was being progressively replaced either by the appointment of tax-farmers whose reliability could not be assured, or by the increased grant of iqtas--the assigning of the revenues from a given area to an individual who, whilst often providing a certain number of troops or money, also became the accepted local leader. These centrifugal tendencies were aggravated by the factionalism which pervaded the capital. This had two distinct though connected strands: political and religious.
Since the caliphs were the only form of legitimate power in Islam, many forces attempted to control them. The Abbasid court was a byword for intrigue. In order to secure their own positions, the powerful men in the Abbasid state recruited military followings, often made up of mercenary chiefs and their paid warriors (ghilman) from Turkish or mountain peoples and these chiefs began to play an important part in the government of the state. In the early tenth century, three Persian soldier brothers, the founders of the Buyid dynasty, gained power in Iran and Baghdad. Whilst in theory they governed on behalf of the Abbasids, in reality they ruled the caliphate until it fell under Turkish control in 1055. The caliph, a virtual prisoner in his great palace, could be controlled by those with the military strength to back their demands and it was within the ranks of the army that some of the most important changes of the period were taking place. From the ninth century onwards, Turks provided the basis of the army and their nomadic culture brought to the fore the skills of cavalry manœuvre and mounted archery. But where they were employed, their tribes had to be rewarded with grazing lands previously held by other longer-established groups. The changes in the structures of the armies, which in any case did
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