r whilst they were in
prison, he used to warm the water by placing a pot of it on his own
stomach.

Jaafar (the brother of Fadhl and a son of Yahya), who was slain A.D.
802, is to be mentioned here, not for his tragic fate, which is well
known, but rather for his literary attainments, especially his oratory
and his style, in both of which he excelled. From his long biography,
written by Ibn Khallikan, there will be given here only some extracts
relating to science and literature. He was a great master of speech,
and expressed his thoughts with much elegance. In one night he
endorsed more than a thousand petitions addressed to the Khalif with
his decisions, all of which were in perfect concordance with the law.
His instructor in jurisprudence had been Abu Yusuf the Hanifite, whom
his father Yahya had appointed to teach him. The favour enjoyed by
Jaafar with Harun-ar-Rashid was so great that this Khalif caused one
robe to be made with two separate collars, which they both wore at the
same time. Ibn Khallikan narrates the traditions relating to the fall
of Jaafar and his family; the one refers to his amours with Abbasa,
the sister of Harun, and to the birth of a child; the other to the
escape of a member of Ali's family entrusted to Jaafar's guardianship
by Harun. The true cause was probably the Khalifs envy of the power,
wealth, and generosity of the Barmekides, along with the backbitings
of their enemies. Jaafar was slain at Al-Omr in the district of
Al-Anbar, his head and the trunk of his body were set up opposite to
each other on the two sides of the bridge of Baghdad, and his death
was lamented by various poets.

After Mamun (A.D. 812-833) the most intellectual Khalif appears to
have been Radhi-billah (A.D. 934-940). His poems were collected in a
Diwan. He was the last Khalif who presided not only over the
Government as a sovereign, but also over the pulpit as Imam; indeed,
he may be said to be the terminal point of the power, brilliancy and
independence of the house of Abbas, which henceforth gradually
declined till its final extinction with the conquest of Baghdad by the
Mughals in A.D. 1258.

The great chess-player, Abu-bakr as Sauli, bears witness, in Masudi's
'Meadows of Gold,' to the great accomplishments of Radhi-billah, and
to his love of the sciences. Of games, chess and nerd[4] flourished
during his reign, and although the perfection of song and of
lute-playing had already passed away, singers and musici