Between 757 and 768, the second ʿAbbāsid caliph, al-Manṣūr, engaged in an unprecedented set of foreign relations which stretched across Afro-Eurasia, from Tang China to Carolingian Francia. The unique scale of this activity has previously gone unnoticed because much of the evidence comes from the caliph’s diplomatic partners. Al-Manṣūr’s dealings with these polities tend to be taken on a case-by-case basis, resulting in often-unconvincing explanations of his motives. By instead taking all of this activity together as a whole, we can see a deliberate policy of “prestige diplomacy”, in which the caliph sought to legitimize his regime to a domestic audience by bringing envoys and gifts to his court, following Sasanian models of universal kingship.

Literary sources from the Abbasid period record few descriptions of courtly masquerades and plays called samāǧa, which closely resemble sumozhe plays from eighth-century China. On the basis of these samāǧa descriptions, the present paper argues that it is possible to understand how samāǧa plays were carried out. Moreover, I argue that samāǧa performances were a Central Asian custom imported to the Abbasid court with the establishment of the Turkish corps, and that its disappearance after the caliphate of al-Muʿtaḍid signals a substantial shift in the nature of the Turkish presence in the Abbasid heartland, marked by the establishment of the mamlūk system.