In the mid-eighth century the technology of papermaking passed from China into the Islamic world, with Samarkand emerging as the first great Muslim centre of production. According to the eleventh-century historian al-Thaalibi, Chinese prisoners taken at the Battle of Talas in 751 introduced the craft there, though paper was probably already spreading westward by other routes. A paper mill was established in Baghdad around 794, and the cheap, durable material rapidly displaced costly papyrus and parchment across the Abbasid realm. Its abundance fuelled an explosion of books, libraries, archives and a vast bureaucratic record.
Cheap paper supplied the medium for the registers, deeds, contracts and treatises through which Islamic states administered land, taxed populations and governed cities. Carried onward through Islamic Spain, papermaking reached Europe and underpinned the later expansion of record-keeping and print.
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