Samarra

Samarra is a city on the Tigris in Iraq, founded by the Abbasid caliph al-Mu'tasim as a new capital in the ninth century. It housed the caliph's Turkic slave-soldier army away from Baghdad. Accounts of the Abbasid Caliphate describe the Anarchy at Samarra (861–870), when four caliphs were murdered by their own troops, as the point at which military domination of the caliphate became irreversible.