Look who used the term ' Men in Black' first!.
In 756, the Abbasid Caliph Al-Mansur sent over 4,000 Arab mercenaries to assist the Chinese Tang dynasty in the An Shi Rebellion against An Lushan. The Abbasids or "Black Flags," as they were commonly called, were known in Tang dynasty chronicles as the hēiyī Dàshí, "The Black-robed Tazi", (黑衣大食) ("Tazi" being a borrowing from Persian Tāzī, the word for "Arab").[nb 1][nb 2][nb 3][nb 4][nb 5] Al-Rashid sent embassies to the Chinese Tang dynasty and established good relations with them.[21][nb 6][nb 7][24][25][26][27][28] After the war, these embassies remained in China[29][30][31][32][33] with Caliph Harun al-Rashid establishing an alliance with China.[21]
Several embassies from the Abbasid Caliphs to the Chinese court have
been recorded in the T'ang Annals, the most important of these being
those of Abul Abbas al-Saffah, the first Abbasid caliph, his successor Abu Jafar, and Harun al-Rashid.
There were recurrences of the plague in Syria–Palestine about every decade between 688/89 and 744/45. [35] "The Umaiyad [sic] dynasty was literally plagued by this disease ", in the words of Dols. [36] The deaths of the Umayyad caliphs Mu'awiya II ( r . 683–684 ), Marwan I ( r . 684–685 ), Abd al-Malik ( r . 685–705 ), Sulayman ( r . 715–717 ) and the Umayyad governors in Iraq al-Mughira ibn Shu'ba ( r . 661–671 ) and Ziyad ibn Abihi ( r . 685–673 ) may all possibly have been caused by the plague epidemics in Syria and Iraq. [37] [21] The caliphs routinely withdrew from the cities to their desert palaces when the plague emerged during the summer months. [36] Notable among them was Caliph Hisham ( r . 724–743 ), who preferred his palace at Rusafa over Damascus because he viewed the latter to be unhealthy. [38]
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