Abbasid caliphs expressed, in a sustained manner, the charismatic quality of their authority and claimed divine mandate for their rule through announcing a personal link between themselves and the divinity guaranteeing their power. On the one hand, they projected their power through a set of familiar and culture-specific embodied practices and discourses such as theatrical displays (processions, ceremonies, royal entries, coronations, congregational prayers, pilgrimages, funerals, public hearings), literary and artistic work (art, literature, scholarship, architecture), charitable acts (pardons, patronage, donations, monetary or in kind bestowals), and theologies constructed and maintained by a range of specialists among the literate elite (ritual officiants, artists, poets, literati, religious scholars, etc.). They imagined themselves as rulers who inherited the right to world-rule (translatio imperii) as the final representatives of the royal lineage of Noah’s sons and the most recent followers and banner holders of the monotheistic tradition of Abraham. Based on historiographical as well as oft neglected “fitan” and “hadith” literature, this paper examines the messianic aspects of Abbasid imperial ideology from a new angle. I attempt to show how the Abbasids sought to consolidate the monotheistic messianic promise not in the person of a particular caliph as Mahdi who is promised to come in the imminent or distant future, but in the collective dynastic body of the Abbasid family as it acted in history. My suggestion requires a reconsideration of the Abbasid claims to divine mandate, of having a purified lineage, of lawfully inheriting rule, and of being the dynasty of the end times in a theoretical framework that allows an analysis of the concepts of rule and of messiah as authorized knowledge and practice embodied in the family. Acting in such a way that enabled the collective body of the “dynasty” to emerge as messiah, I argue, the Abbasids marked a remarkable shift in the ways empires related to messianic monotheism in late antique/early medieval Mediterranean.