122 DESTINY DISRUPTED
dog. In Rome, this group was called the Praetorian Guard, and it was
(ironically) well staffed with Germans recruited from the territories of the
barbarians north of the frontiers, those same barbarians with whom Rome
had been at war for centuries and whose excursions posed a constant threat
to civilized order.
The same pattern emerged in the Abbasid khalifate. Here, the imperial
guards were called mamluks, which means "slaves," although these were
not ordinary slaves but elite slave soldiers. Like Rome, the Abbasid khali-
fate was plagued by nomadic barbarians north of its borders. In the west,
the barbarians of the north were Germans; here they were Turks. (There
were no Turks in what is now called Turkey; they migrated to this area
much later. The ancestral home of the Turkish tribes was the central Asian
steppes north oflran and Afghanistan.) As the Romans had done with the
Germans, the Abbasids imported some of these Turks-purchasing them
from the slave markets along the frontier-and used them as bodyguards.
The khalifas did this because they didn't trust the Arabs and Persians
whom they ruled and among whom they lived, folks with too many local
roots, too many relatives, and interests of their own to push. The khalifas
wanted guards with no links to anyone but the khalifas themselves, no
home but their court, no loyalties except to their owners. Therefore, the
slaves they brought in were children. They had these kids raised as Mus-
lims in special schools where they were taught martial skills. When they
grew up they entered an elite corps that formed something like an exten-
sion of the khalifa's own identity. In fact, since the public never saw the
khalifa anymore, these Turkish bodyguards became, for most folks, the
face of the khalifate.
Of course they were arrogant, violent, and rapacious-they were raised
to be. Even while keeping the khalifa safe, they alienated him from his
people, their depredations making him ever more unpopular and therefore
unsafe and therefore ever more in need of bodyguards. Eventually, the
khalifa had to build the separate soldier's city of Samarra just to house his
troublesome mamluks, and he himself moved there to live among them.
Meanwhile, a Persian family, the Buyids, insinuated themselves into the
court as the khalifa's advisers, clerks, helpers. Soon, they took control of the
bureaucracy and thus of the empire's day-to-day affairs. Boldly, they passed
the office of vizier (chief administrator) down from father to son as a hered-