ABSTRACT
The continuous decline in the power of the caliphate was shown to be irrevocable when al-Muqtadir (908-932) was killed during his struggle with the generalissimo Mu‘nis. The petty princeling of central Iraq, which was all that remained of the glory of the ‘Abbāsid ruler, was now driven to a perpetual search for a military protector. This role fell to various Turkish mercenary leaders, and then for three years (March 942 to January 945) to the last Arab majordomo, the Shī‘ite-inclined Ḥamdānid Ḥasan. (He is better known under his honorary title of Nāṣir ad-Daula, defensor imperii, representative of a type of title which arose at this period and of which he was the first holder of any note.) A few months after his return to the centre of his power in his family estates in Northern Mesopotamia he was replaced by the Dailamite Büyids, whereby a dynasty of ‘barbarians’ based on Central and Southern Persia, only scantily arabized and of the Twelver Shī‘ite confession, took over power in Iraq at the invitation of the Caliph. The Būyids were condottieri who had risen high in the service of the Sāmānids and later of Mardāvīj ibn Ziyar, a Gīlān prince who had built himself an influential position in Central Persia and apparently dreamt of the restitution of a Zarathustrian Iranian empire. However, he was assassinated in 935 in the typical dissensions of those days between ancestral Dailamite troops and mercenaries of mixed origin. The Būyids entrenched themselves in Persia south of the Sāmānid territory and succeeded in incorporating the often attacked but never conquered Baluchi of Kirmān into the dār al-islām for the first time.
