17=ells (about 19 metres) in height...

17=ells (about 19 metres) in height, with a gangway (to ascend it, that went up) outside, and no Minaret after this fashion was ever built by anyone before his time.”[^4] This Minaret, was so large that a man on horseback is said to be able to ascend its so-called gangway.

The same thing is claimed for the similar minaret in the Mosque of Tulun, which may have been modeled after it.[^5] But the Turkish mercenaries, on whom Mu'tasim and his sons and grandsons relied, soon became the true masters of the situation.

While they cherished their position as guardians of the caliphs, whom they permitted to live in luxury and security, nevertheless they so exploited their own opportunities - for gain, through cruelty and oppression, that in matters of internal administration the authority of the Muslim Empire sank to a low ebb.

This was at a time, however, according to Dinawari, when there were more victories, for the troops than during any preceding caliphate.[^6] In Samarra the caliphs busied themselves building palace after palace, on both sides of the river, and at a cost that Yakut estimated as 204 million Dinars, which would not be less than eight million sterling.[^7] A great cypress tree is celebrated in the Shah Nameh as having sprung from a branch brought by Zoroaster from Paradise.

It is said to have stood at the village of Kishmar, near Turshiz, and to have been planted by Zoroaster in memory of the conversion of King Gushtasp to the Magian religion. Such too was its power that earthquakes, which frequently devastated all the neighbouring districts, never did any harm in Kishmar. According to Kazvini, the caliph Mutawakkil in 247 A.H.

(861 A.D.) caused this mighty cypress to be felled, and then transported it across all Persia, in places carried on camels, to be used for beams in his new palace at Samarra.

This was done inspite of the grief and the protests of all the Guebres, but when the cypress arrived on the banks of the Tigris, Mutawakkil was dead, having been murdered by his son.[^8] Mustawfi who wrote in the fourteenth century, takes pain to mention with sympathy how the Caliph Mutawakkil enlarged Samarra, and in particular, how “he built a magnificent Kiosk, greater than which never existed in the lands of Iran, and gave it the title of the Ja'fariyyah (his name being Ja'far).