What was happening around the world in 750 CE?

Around 750 CE the Abbasids toppled the Umayyads, the Tang faced rebellion, and post-Roman Europe redrew its map — all at once.

Open the world in 750 CE →

The mid-eighth century is a useful place to test a simple question: what was happening elsewhere at the same time? In the Islamic world, the answer was upheaval. The Abbasid Revolution, which Annalium dates to 746, culminated in 750 at the Battle of the Zab, where Abbasid forces defeated the last Umayyad caliph. Power shifted east, away from Damascus, and within a generation the new dynasty would build a capital at Baghdad. The map around the eastern Mediterranean in these years is dense with campaigns and revolts tied to that transition.

Look further east and a second crisis was building. Tang China had spent decades as one of the era's great powers, but in 751 its westward expansion met the Abbasids and their allies at the Battle of Talas, in Central Asia. Four years later the An Lushan Rebellion erupted, a civil war that began in 755 and shook the dynasty for years. Two of the period's largest states were straining at almost the same moment — visible side by side once you stop reading one region's history in isolation.

Europe in these decades looks different but no less active. Earlier, in 732, the Frankish victory at the Battle of Tours had checked an Umayyad advance north of the Pyrenees. By 756 the Donation of Pepin handed conquered Italian territory to the papacy, an arrangement that shaped medieval politics for centuries. In Byzantium, the Council of Hieria in 754 endorsed the official rejection of religious images, deepening the iconoclast controversy. Pan out across the map for 750 and these threads — Baghdad's rise, China's rebellion, Europe's realignment — sit on one screen, unfolding together.

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Events from Wikipedia/Wikidata (CC-BY-SA); boundaries from OpenHistoricalMap (ODbL). Spotted a mistake? Email [email protected].