The Battle of Talas — and paper
751 CE · The Abbasid Caliphate & Golden Age
On the Talas river, Abbasid and Qarluq forces defeat the Tang Chinese army — the only major battle ever fought between the caliphate and imperial China. It fixed Transoxiana inside the Islamic world, and tradition holds that captured Chinese artisans brought papermaking to Samarkand. Within decades Baghdad had paper mills; cheap paper is part of why the Islamic golden age could run on books.