ABSTRACT
The empire and its culture were carried on the shoulders of the peasants, but dominated by the townsmen; the countryside was organized from the town and exploited by princes, burghers and mercenaries. The Islamic East, from the intrusion of the Turks in the ninth century to the fall of Baghdad (1258), is the history of the victory of a predominantly Turkish military landowning aristocracy over the landowning but primarily mercantile Arab or Arabiz-ing aristocracy dominant in civil government. But both classes, like all the ruling classes in the Islamic world, were town dwellers. The Fāṭimids managed to hold back this development in Egypt, but even there the two leading classes succeeded in establishing the same division of power which had now become typical in the East. Only in the West, in North Africa and Spain, was the state able to assert itself without the Turks; there the repression of the mercantile Arabized aristocracy by the politico-military executive took on other forms, certainly more favourable to the native population. Yet there too the town was the real centre of power.
