88 DESTINY DISRUPTED
It took five years to build the Round City. Some one hundred thousand
designers, craftspeople, and laborers worked on it. These workers lived all
around the city they were building, so their homes formed another, less or-
derly ring of city around the splendid core. And of course shopkeepers and
service workers flocked in to make a living selling goods and services to the
people working on the Round City, which added yet another urban
penumbra around the disorderly ring that surrounded that perfect circular
core.
Within twenty years, Baghdad was the biggest city in the world and
possibly the biggest city that had ever been: it was the first city whose pop-
ulation topped a million.^2 Baghdad spread beyond the rivers, so that the
Tigris and Euphrates actually flowed through Baghdad, rather than beside
it. The waters were diverted through a network of canals that let boats
serve as the city's buses, making it a bit like Venice, except that bridges and
lanes let people navigate the city on foot or on horseback too.
Baghdad might well have been the world's busiest city as well as its
biggest. Two great rivers opening onto the Indian Ocean gave it tremendous
port facilities, plus it was easily accessible to land traffic from every side, so
ships and caravans flowed in and out every day, bringing goods and traders
from every part of the known world-China, India, Africa, Spain ....
Commerce was regulated by the state. Every nationality had its own
neighborhood, and so did every kind of business. On one street you might
find doth merchants, on another soap dealers, on another the flower mar-
ket, on yet another the fruit shops. The Street of Stationers featured over a
hundred shops selling paper, a new invention recently acquired from
China (whom the Abbasids met and defeated in 751 CE, in the area that
is now Kazakhstan). Goldsmiths, tinsmiths, and blacksmiths; armorers
and stables; money changers, straw merchants, bridge builders, and cob-
blers, all could be found hawking their wares in their designated quarters
of mighty Baghdad. There was even a neighborhood for open-air stalls and
shops selling miscellaneous goods. Ya'qubi, an Arab geographer of the
time, claimed that this city had six thousand streets and alleys, thirty thou-
sand mosques, and ten thousand bathhouses.
This was the city of turrets and tiles glamorized in the Arabian Nights,
a collection of folk stories transformed into literature during the later days
of the Abbasid dynasty. Stories such as the one about Aladdin and his