Download PDF | From Saladin to the Mongols The Ayyubids of Damascus, 1193-1260 by R. Stephen Humphreys ,State Univ of New York Pr, 1977.
526 Pages
Preface and Acknowledgments
The pages that follow are thickly strewn with names and dates, arranged in a loosely chronological order. Many of my readers may thus suppose that this book is merely a detailed account of the doings of some rather obscure princelings in thirteenthcentury Syria. It is not. It is rather a study of the values and attitudes which underlay political behavior at a crucial period in the history of Egypt and the Fertile Crescent. It is true that I have cast this study in the form of a narrative, though it opens with a long discursus and is interrupted by several others. I have done so because I believe that no other framework is so well suited to the problems entailed by the topic at hand. These problems are basically two.
First, we are dealing with a period in which neither the chief actors nor contemporary witnesses chose to spell out the ideas and assumptions which governed political conduct, so that these things can be inferred only through a close scrutiny of events. As it happens, even the major political events of this period are only poorly known to modern scholarship, and though the sources at our disposal are strikingly rich and varied, they are exasperatingly reticent even in regard to such consciously established and visible institutions as the army or the financial administration. In this situation, where only the external phenomena of politics can be directly derived from the sources, narrative reconstruction provides the most reliable avenue to a level of understanding which comprises not only immediate motives and goals, but also those deeper-lying values and attitudes which shaped policy and action into a meaningful structure of politics.
For if the characteristic vice of narrative is superficiality, at least this approach compels the historian to deal with the purposes, expectations, hopes, and fears of those whom he studies, and it is after all only a step from the thoughts of individuals to the shared ideas of a group. Nor will a carefully made narrative, with its demand that the historian comprehend the totality of known events as they unfolded in time and space, allow him to restrict his attention to a few facts chosen in accordance with the standards of relevance laid down by a perhaps unsuitable or anachronistic model of explanation.
The second problem connected with our topic stems from a major thesis of this book viz. , that the structure of political life in Egypt and Syria suffered a fundamental transformation in the first five decades of the thirteenth century. If that is so, it follows that any valid analysis of the period requires as precise a portrayal of this change as possible. Change can indeed be described by simply asserting its existence and citing a set of facts in illustration. B ut narrative can produce a more adequate characterization in a case like the one at hand, where a major political transformation seems the product not of any vast social and ideological upheaval, but of a clash of interests and ambitions among a restricted and definable group of men. In the case of Ayyubid Syria and Egypt, change is best understood when it is perceived from a narrative perspective as the product (often unconscious and involuntary) of innumerable small acts, done most often to serve some immediate, even trivial end.
In preparing this book I have tried to stick close to my sources. But since these are so taciturn in regard to my real interests values, attitudes, patterns of behavior any statements on such matters are necessarily an extrapolation from the explicit testimony of the texts. But extrapolations of this kind must be made if Ayyubid history is ever to be brought within the mainstream of modern historical enquiry rather than relegated to the marginal status of an "exotic society." Thus even in those areas where my documentation is inadequate or incomplete, I have often decided to venture interpretive hy-potheses, on the grounds that an explicit hypothesis open to empirical testing is more useful than silence. The latter may be more becoming or even more scholarly, but from a scientific point of view it is worthless. I have tried to make a clear distinction between surmise and documented statement; on the whole I think I have succeeded.
Many readers may well feel less offended by an excess of hypotheses than choked by a constant succession of wars and conspiracies in the pages that follow. If I claim that these were by far the most visible forms of political activity in that period, they may protest that to concentrate on them is misleading and superficial, that this approach cannot represent the reality of Ayyubid political life. I must demur. In that age the state was run largely by and for the benefit of a military class a class whose fundamental social function was fighting. Moreover there were no regular institutions (e.g. , parliaments or administrative courts) for resolving conflicts within the ruling group peaceably. The incessant wars and conspiracies of the age merely reflect these realities.
Not everything was decided on the field of battle or in whispered conversations, and negotiation and compromise were far from alien to the Ayyubid mind. Nevertheless, an adequate history of the Ayyubids must recognize that violence was not incidental, but an integral part of the political process. The preparation of this study has occupied me for many years and I have naturally incurred many debts of gratitude along the way. I should first thank those teachers and colleagues whose advice and criticism have materially improved this work and who have encouraged me to have it published: Prof. Andrew Ehrenkreutz, who supervised it in its first incarnation as a dissertation at the University of Michigan ( 1969) ; Prof. George Scanlon; Prof. Oleg Grabar of Harvard; and Prof. George Makdisi of the University of Pennsylvania. I would also thank Mr. Norman Mangouni, Director of the State University of New York Press, for his willingness to take on a book of the size and complexity of this one; and Margaret Mirabelli, for her astute and sympathetic editing of the manuscript.
Much of the research for this book was made possible through the financial assistance of several organizations. It is a pleasure to cite them here: the Center for Near Eastern and North African Studies, University of Michigan; U.S. Office of Education, for a Fulbright-Hays grant in 1 968-6g; the State University of New York Research Foundation, for faculty research grants in the summer of 1971 and autumn of 1973; the Social Science Research Council , for awards in 1971 and 1972- 73; the National Endowment for the Humanities, for a Younger H umanist Fellowship for the academic year 1972-73; Dean William Kruskal and the Division of Social Sciences, University of Chicago, for underwriting the cost of the maps which appear in this book.
I must also thank the staffs of several libraries whose manuscript holdings are the foundation of this work and where I met with unfailing friendliness and cooperation: the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris; the British Museum; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Nationalbibliothek, Vienna; the Topkapi Saray and the Siileymaniye Kiitiiphanesi, Istanbul. / I am grateful to the Institut Franc;ais d'Etudes Arabes de Damas and to Prof. Nikita Elisseeff of the Universite de Lyon for their permission to reproduce the map of Damascus and its environs. Mr. John Hanner, cartographic assistant in the Dept. of Geography, University of Chicago, ably prepared the other maps. Toni Hoefelmeier gave devoted and skillful assistance in the hateful tasks of proofreading and indexing.
Finally, there is my family. My children have not really understood what their father has been up to all these years; still, they have generally been willing (though with some skepticism) to take my word that it is "important," and have been very good about letting me have enough time to get it finished. To my wife I owe not only a vigorous criticism of many pages in the book, but also an energy and sense of purpose which saw me through many moments of frustration and discouragement. R. Stephen Humphreys .
Introduction
At the time of Saladin's death in s8g/ I 1 9J, the empire which he had founded was but one of many powerful and expanding kingdoms in the Islamic world. In spite of the disproportionate attention which Saladin's wars against the Crusaders have earned him, it would be difficult to prove that Hattin was a more fateful battle than Myriokephalon, that his conquests were vaster or more durable than those of his Almohad, Ghurid, and Khwarizmian counterparts, or even that the issues at stake in his struggles in Egypt and Syria were truly of greater moment for Islam than those which underlay contemporary events in North Africa, Anatolia, and Eastern Iran.
And if such is the case with the achievements and historic role of the great Saladin, what are we to say of his Ayyubid epigoni, even of such considerable figures as al-'Adil, al-Kamil, and al-Salih Ayyub, let alone the dynasties of minor kinglets among whom Syria was divided'! Despite the inevitable impact of Saladin's fame on our thinking, it is nevertheless true that his reign introduced no essentially new element into the political life of his age; rather, it represents the culmination of a process already a half-century old when he first came to power. It is to tl1e obscure quarrels of his successors that we must look to discover a profound transformation in the very structure of Syro-Egyptian politics, one which divides quite abruptly the later Middle Ages from all that preceded it. In this light the Ayyubids occupy a place of highest importance as yet largely unrecognized in the political history of the Nile Valley and the Fertile Crescent.
As to the period of time during which the Ayyubids held sway, few would c-ontest its immense intrinsic interest. The sixty-seven years from 589/ I 193 to 658/ I 260 saw the great crusades against Damietta, not to mention the fascinating expedition of Frederick II or the lesser ventures of the Emperor Henry VI and Theobald of Champagne; they witnessed the apogee of the Georgian and Rum Selj ukid kingdoms and the inevitable repercussions on Syria of their expansion into the upper Jazira; finally, they beheld the terrible impact of the Mongols, at first as reflected in the incursions of Jalal al-Oin Mingburnu, and then directly, with the expedition of Hiilegi.i, which simultaneously completed the ruin of the Ayyubids and sanctioned the authority of the new Mamluk regime. This same era, for all its violence, was one of a great cultural efflorescence in Ayyubid lands, the continuation and zenith of the Syrian renaissan.ce inaugurated under Zangid auspices.
Though the Abbasid caliphate was still alive, Damascus (and to a lesser extent Cairo and Aleppo) were more and more supplanting Baghdad as the chief centers of Sunni thought in the Arab world. But if, in these terms, the importance of the period has never been in dispute, the internal history and structure of the Ayyubid polity have attracted much less interest. Perhaps we have been too seduced by the martial splendor of the reigns of Saladin and Baybars to think of the Ayyubid domination as anything more than a sort of disorderly interregnum, a period of political regression which reintroduced the territorial fragmentation and petty rivalries surmounted by Nur al-Din and Saladin only at the cost of forty years of unremitting labor.
Or perhaps our occidental disposition to regard the crusades as the central fact of Syro-Egyptian political life in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries makes the Ayyubid period seem essentially an unexpected and unearned respite for a Latin regime tottering on the edge of extinction. When one studies the Arabic chroniclers of that era, however, it soon becomes clear that the Ayyubids were seldom attracted by the prospect of large-scale territorial expansion beyond the sphere of interest defined by Saladin's wars, nor were they any more involved with the crusaders than immediate circumstances compelled them to be. Rather, their primary policy concern was to regulate their internal relations. And in their perpetually renewed struggles to achieve a stable and mutually satisfactory division of territory and sovereignty, they wound up creating, perhaps unconsciously, both a decisive change in the ages-old relationship of Syria to Egypt and a remarkable shift in the goals of political ambition. If one is permitted any generalization about the mutual history of Egypt and Syria, it would be that the profound differences in their geography and ethnic composition have kept them in quite distinct and self-contained spheres, both socially and politically, despite a tradition of cultural interpenetration which reaches back at least five thousand years.
In periods of great vigor, indeed, the rulers of the Nile have often been able to impose their suzerainty (and at rare intervals even a direct administration) on inland Syria as far north as the Litani River and the Ghuta of Damascus, as well as on the ports of Palestine and .Phoenicia. But such Egyptian hegemony has lasted only until the rise of some local power in Syria or internal weakness in Egypt herself compels the latter's withdrawal at least to the eastern edge of Sinai. In this light the Mamluk period seems very much an anomaly, for it saw an Egyptian monarchy retain, without effective internal challenge, direct administrative control over all Syria up to the Taurus and the Euphrates for 250 years.1 It may well seem obvious, even trivial, to say that in this regard the Mamluks must have been acting in some way as heirs of the Ayyubids.
More striking is that this Egyptian domination, almost unparalleled both in degree and duration, represents a complete reversal of the conditions obtaining a century before the Mamluk seizure of power. U ntil the rise of Saladin in s6J/II68, Egypt had been progressively slipping into near-helplessness for a half century. Saladin's reign perhaps represents the starting point of the new order, for under him Egypt again supported a powerful military machine capable of undertaking an expansionist policy.
But one must not exaggerate: Saladin did not reside in Egypt for the last decade of his life and, like Nur al-Oin before him, he regarded Egypt as essentially a source of revenue for his wars in Syria and the Jazira. 2 Certainly there is no question of Egypt's ever having been the administrative center of all his dominions. Only in the decades following his death did Egypt become more and more the center of gravity of the Ayyubid world. As a part of this great change in Egypt's role, there occurred a crucial alteration in the goals of the quest for power. Between the rise of Nur al-Oin and the beginning of the Mamluk regime, one sees a transition from an age of many states, in which the dominant hope was to ensconce oneself in a local principality, there to play an independent if restricted role, to an age of one state, in which the sole locus of political power and the goal of all ambition was the sultanate in Cairo. One might easily suppose that this is no more than the victory of the ancient centralizing tradition of Egypt over the equally hoary Syrian tendency to localism and fragmentation. Such a statement is not without truth, of course, but it ignores important evidence of increasing centralization within Syria itself during the Ayyubid domination.
What is certain is that this transformation cannot be dated earlier than the thirteenth century and that it did not come about under Nur al-Oin and Saladin. If they succeeded, by combining skillful diplomacy with a judicious application of force, in creating unified kingdoms out of the chaos which they had inherited, they signally failed to stop the centrifugal tendencies which they had spent their lives combatting. Indeed, one can hardly avoid the conclusion that they implicitly accepted the old tradition and tended to work within it. Certainly it was tenacious, as is at once apparent from the fate of the successive empires of Tutush, Zangi, Nur al-Din, Saladin, al-'Adil, and al-Kamil. In addition to these changes in the territorial character of sovereignty and very much bound up with them both as cause and consequence are certain important trends in the nature of the governing elite trends which end by divorcing the Mamluk regime from its twelfth-century origins. First, within the membership of the ruling elite, one can detect a growing (if uneven) tendency to exclude civilian and religious elements from the higher levels of decision-making.
Second, the key institution within the ruling class, the army, begins to change from a mixed corps containing a large and influential body of free-born men into a corps whose elite units and highest commands were reserved for men of slave origin. Finally, the army becomes aware that its monopoly of force makes it the final arbiter of politics, and it ceases to be bound by loyalty to a hereditary dynasty. It must be emphasized that this threefold evolution was far from complete when the Ayyubid domination collapsed. While the Ayyubid empire was flourishing, it certainly seemed to contemporaries to be conserving without substantial alteration the institutions and political roles which had been established during the twelfth century. And in fact the concrete changes (rather few and elusive) which one can discern in the first half of the thirteenth century do no more than imply a trend, a possible line of development, if taken in themselves.
But the brutal and unexpected coup d'etat of 648/1250 proved that these changes had been decisive and irreversible ; slight in appearance, they still enabled the new Mamluk regime, with little delay or opposition, to reorder the structure of politics. In the first half of the twelfth century, both in Syria and Egypt, the presence of urban notables and members of the religious elite within the ruling group guaranteed a considerable degree of political participation to the indigenous, Arabicspeaking elements of the population. That is, the leaders of local society were included among the small group of men whose standing and influence with the prince gave them an effective voice in state policy. In Syria these local leaders were high administrative and religious officials or chiefs of the local militias; in Egypt, where there was no militia as such, there were many Arabs in the provincial governorships and the high command of the regular army. In Syria, such local participation is to be connected with the multiplicity of small city-states ; these could furnish their Turkish princes with only limited financial and military resources, even while the system as a whole ensured a local ruler a host of rivals.
Active indigenous support was essential to survival; the political power of local groups could not have been suppressed had the rulers so wished. 3 In late Fa timid Egypt, where the political participation of the various ethnic groups has received less study, we must be content for the moment to notice the ruling dynasty's Arab descent, its reliance on a multi-national army, and its origins as a religious as well as a political movement whose success depended on engaging the commitment of local leaders. Beginning with the reign of Zangi, these circumstances began to alter drastically; nevertheless, even at the height of Nur al-Din's and Saladin's power the political influence of the indigenous notables did not disappear, although it was transmuted into quite a different form. Their power now flowed from their vital role as the agents and propagandists for a policy which sought to combine religious and political ends into a common program: revivification of the Sunna in order to consolidate and unify Syro-Egyptian society for the war against Frank and Isma'ili. 4 After Saladin's death, however, their position must have begun to erode, for by the early Maml uk period the indigenous notables no longer played an active political role.
It is undeniable that the Mamluks ostentatiously supported orthodox religion and that the highly placed members of the religious establishment were much honored. Nevertheless even the religious chiefs had no real access to the sources of power, while the executive positions in the civil bureaucracy increasingly fell to military men, with the indigenous officeholders becoming mere functionaries. 5 The steps which led to this loss of power remain obscure, but a few aspects of the problem are clear. On the one hand, the indigenous notables continued to influence the throne to the end of the Ayyubid dynasty, and they could obtain the highest positions in the state, even (occasionally) military command. On the other hand, the partial return to a system of city-states in Syria did not bring with it revival of the old militia organizations and the Ayyubids were much less energetic prosecutors of the .iihad than their two immediate predecessors. As a consequence fewer diplomatic and propaganda positions were available to local religious leaders.
These changes in the overall membership of the ruling elite were by themselves tantamount to a militarization of the government. But their effect was reinforced by a parallel process within the structure of the army. If one compares the armies of twelfth-century Syria (to which those of Nur al-Din and Saladin clearly belong) with the Mamluk forces of the late thirteenth century, it is obvious that the latter were a distinctly heavier burden on society and that they formed a more tightly knit and self-conscious body, one better able to act in its own interests, yet more alien to the society which it dominated. Again the change from the older system to the new cannot be thought of as a simple linear progression; it is more a building up of inner tensions under the Ayyubid regime which suddenly burst forth with the Mamluk seizure of power. 6 One must not exaggerate : similarities between the armies of the Zangids and early Ayyubids and those of the Mamluks are quite as evident as differences. Both institutions were formed around a corps of mamluks (usually Turkish), but both permitted., and sometimes encouraged, the recruitment of freeborn soldiers, either individual adventurers or tribal groups. Such free troopers were sometimes used in ad hoc auxiliary units (the usual status of the Ti.irkmen and Arab Bedouin tribes), sometimes in the army's standing regiments.
Moreover both armies were largely financed through some form of the iqta' system; in both cases, its use implied a degree of administrative decentralization and meant that a significant part of the state's troops were supplied by and owed their primary (albeit unofficial) allegiance to its own high-ranking officers. Nevertheless, it is the differences which really define the nature of the two forces.
The Mamluk army was constructed on an altogether vaster scale than its twelfth-century predecessors. Two examples will serve to make the point: Saladin's reformed army in Egypt numbered about I O,ooo regular cavalry, while the Egyptian army of Baybars eventually reached 4o,ooo; the standing garrison of Damascus under Nur al-Oin was probably about 1 000 cavalry, but in the early Circassian period, the garrison attained a nominal figure of 3000 mamluk cavalry and 1 2,ooo free troopers drawn from the halqa. 7 Second, the Mamluk army at its best had a meticulously organized system of training and hierarchy of ranks, while the Zangid and even early Ayyubid armies had no clear system of ranks and command and seem to have been assembled and organized according to ad hoc considerations.
By far the most fundamental difference, however, is that the officer corps from Seljukid well into Ayyubid times had a distinctly hereditary character: sons routinely inherited their fathers' iqta's, and even when they did not, they could almost take for granted promotion to the very small body of amirs. This is precisely the opposite of the Mamluk system, which rigorously reserved the highest ranks and honors for men of slave origin, while systematically relegating the sons of amirs (let alone free troopers and tribal leaders) to inferior positions with no real hope of advancement. 8 It was the Mamluk coup d'etat of 648/1 250 which showed how far both the evolution of the army and the exclusion of civilian and religious elements from effective power had gone by the late Ayyubid period. But this coup was also the final stage in the creation of a new political role for the army.
Military intervention in politics was hardly foreign to twelfthcentury Syria and Egypt, to be sure. Nevertheless even in the most troubled periods of that century the army tended to act within a framework of support for the established dynasty. The struggles which revolved around the last Fatimids were seldom aimed at the occupant of the throne, but rather represented factional conflicts over control of the vizierate; in the rare instances where they resulted in the deposition or assassination of a caliph, he was replaced by another member of the Fatimid house, not by his assassin. In Syria an army commander would not try to take power in his own name unless the throne fell vacant at a time when the established dynasty could provide no clear or competent heir.
The more normal pattern was for the military chiefs to assume the role of an electoral college in disputed or problematic successions when the heir was a minor, for example, or when there was more than one claimant to the throne. Moreover when the previous sovereign had expressed his will explicitly in the matter, these military conclaves almost always acted accordingly. To all appearances this same procedure continued in the Ayyubid period, and at least twice the decisions of the generals were crucial for the dynasty's future: once after the death of al-'Aziz 'Uthman (595/1 198) , when his designated successor was a young boy and a regent was needed, and a second time after al-Kamil's passing in Damascus in 635/ I 238, when the provincial government in central Syria stood vacant.
Given this tradition, it is striking that after the assassination of Turanshah (itself an unparalleled event in Ayyubid history), the military chiefs should have made so little serious effort to designate a legitimate successor to the throne. Just as important, not only the exclusively mamluk Bahriyya regiment, but also some of the dynasty's oldest and most respected supporters, had been involved in this event. By 648/1250 the army no longer felt compelled to secure its interests within the context of dynastic loyalty. Its electoral role now differed from that of the preceding period in a crucial respect: the amirs could not only confirm or arbitrate the succession, they might even name candidates for the throne from among their own number.
It is clear that all three lines of evolution within the governing institutions of Syria and Egypt between the early twelfth and late thirteenth centuries led insensibly but steadily to a single result: the militarization of the body politic. Civilian and religious elements were effectively excluded from the formation of state policy in favor of an army ever more narrowly recruited and more isolated from the society which it dominated. Not only did the military thus become the chief arbiter of public policy, it also made of itself the sole source of political authority. In each case it seems clear that the critical stages of transition must have occurred during the seven decades of Ayyubid rule. Both the transformation in the nature of territorial sovereignty and the militarization of politics represent a fundamental change in the political organization of medieval Egypt and Syria. Thus it seems ironic that they should have arisen within a framework which ought to have enshrined and fostered the old order of things.
For insofar as so vital and changing an organism is subject to static definition, the Ayyubid empire was never a unitary monarchy, save during the first decade of Saladin's regime or the last ten years of al-N asir Yusuf II. Rather it was a confederation of local principalities, each ruled by a prince of the Ayyubid house9 and each with its own political and strategic interests as well as its own autonomous administrative system. Although the various local princes had to be invested by the senior member of the dynasty (the sultan, as we shall call him) 10 and owed him the formal allegiance expressed in the institutions of the khutba and sikka, their petty states were otherwise quite autonomous, and they resented bitterly any attempt by the sultans to meddle in their internal affairs.
Each of the local principalities tended to develop its own dynastic succession, and if the sultan tried to install his own candidate, he did so at the conscious risk of civil war. The Ayyubid sultans, then, for all the prestige which they enjoyed, were properly suzerains rather than autocrats. To understand the true sources of their authority, one must examine their role within the Ayyubid family rather than their formal constitutional status. Paralleling the looseness of the empire's constitutional structure was the lack of a stable territorial identity within its constituent principalities. Any given principality was not necessarily a contiguous mass ; it was indeed quite likely to be divided into a number of scattered parts. Moreover, towns and even entire regions were exchanged wholesale among the princes, usually for transient diplomatic or strategic purposes and with little concern for geographic stability or some "natural" equilibrium.
In this light an Ayyubid principality is best defined as a group of towns and districts whose inhabitants, at a given time, owed allegiance to one prince and were subject to his officials. A principality, in short, was identified not by the regions which it comprised but by the man who ruled it.11 The only places (except for Egypt) which enjoyed an on-going political identity independent of their rulers were the major cities of S)lria and the Jazira, whose size, location, and prestige ensured their becoming the capitals of the more powerful princes. These urban centers did lend a certain geographical continuity to the Ayyubid principalities, for each great prince would be certain to hold one as the core of his domains.
But the fact that a man was lord of Damascus or Mayyafariqin does not in itself define the other territories he ruled. Such a political system would seem inescapably destined to ever greater fragmentation , for its only cohesive aspects were the administrative structure of the Nile Valley and the traditions of the Syro-J aziran cities. The question confronting the modern historian is why, despite all apparent probabilities, the general political evolution was toward centralization and militarization . Unfortunately the very structure of the empire ensures that this process should appear impossibly tangled and complex. One must devise some approach which permits the presentation of all directly relevant data without obscuring the evolutionary pattern which is our chief concern. What seems altogether the most feasible approach emerges from a recognition that the Ayyubid empire was fundamentally a confederation of principalities.
By focusing on the history of a single principality its internal political structure and evolution and its changing role within the empire as a whole one can achieve an otherwise very elusive sense of unity and continuity. But for this method to work, one must focus on a principality so in the thick of affairs that its history faithfully reflects the whole. From this point of view, the principality of Damascus is indisputably the most useful choice. Its vital political role in the empire is clearly revealed by two facts. It was under siege no less than twelve times between 589/ I 193 and 658/ I 260; and in six of the seven periods of serious internal conflict which the empire suffered after Saladin's death, the prince of Damascus led one of the primary factions. Moreover, Damascus was the only one of the four major Syrian principalities which never succeeded in establishing a stable, uncontested hereditary succession ; on six occasions an established prince was driven from the city by his Ayyubid brethren, even when he had an unassailable right to the throne.
In contrast the succession in Aleppo was never disputed, although the succession twice fell to very young minors, while Egypt witnessed a successful coup d'etat only twice, in 596/ I 200 and 637 I 1240. Clearly control of Damascus was a crucial issue throughout the incessant struggles in which the Ayyubids tried and ultimately failed to resolve the internal tensions and contradictions of their constitutional structure. 1 2 Damascus would have been an important town in any event, for among its natural dependencies were three agricultural areas of great fertility its own superb Ghuta, the Biqa' , and the plateau region east of Lake Tiberias and the upper Jordan (the Balqa', the J a ulan, and the Hauran). But Damascus owed its sometimes unenviable importance in Ayyubid affairs chiefly to its location. The major overland trade routes of southwest Asia terminated there the roads from Anatolia, north Syria and the Jazira, and the northern end of the Persian Gulf-Euphrates River route to India making the city the chief entrepot for three of the leading Frankish ports (Acre, Tyre, and Beirut) , although it does not seem to have played a major direct role in the Mediterranean commerce. Damascus also picked up such commerce as entered Syria by way of Aden and Mecca.
Its position on the trade routes inevitably gave it a tremendous importance in the pilgrimage traffic to Mecca and Medina ; it was the gathering-place for one of the three principal hajjcaravans. 13 These facts are all well known. What has received less attention is that Damascus commanded a vital node on the military road between north Syria and the Jazira on the one hand and Egypt and Palestine on the other. At a time when the Franks controlled both the sea lanes and the coastal route, there was really no other way to get from one region to the other. Damascus was thus condemned to play a crucial part in any struggle involving the ruler of Egypt and the Syrian princes.
Such a struggle was inevitable, for the Ayyubid sultans were not content to be primus inter pares. Having inherited the unifying and dominating role of Saladin, their fundamental concern was to reduce the princes' autonomy sufficiently to retain some degree of cohesion and coordination among them. The princes of course tended to see any such initiatives as a threat to be resisted. The Ayyubid civil wars, then, arose essentially out of the sultan's attempts to assert his authority over princes who felt little obligation to obey him. And because the sultan's residence was ordinarily in Cairo, these civil wars took on the secondary character of a struggle between Egypt and Syria.
To control the other princes of the dynasty the sultan had to dominate the Syrian cities which were their capitals, and this in turn required him to control Damascus, either directly or through a docile client prince. From the point of view of the Syrian princes, on the other hand, Damascus was not only their last bulwark against the sultan's ambitions, but also the necessary keystone of any coalition they might assemble. It is not surprising, then, that the incessant conflicts between the sultan and the princes almost always took the form of a war between Damascus and Cairo or that when the sultan did succeed in exerting authority over the prince of Damascus, the empire was at peace.
The political life of the Ayyubids of Damascus, therefore, accurately reflects the constitutional evolution of the empire as a whole. Obviously not every crucial event or fateful change in institutions took place within the walls of this city, but every such event and change did impinge on its history and compelled an appropriate response from its princes. Their political behavior is our best single key to understanding the slow decay and abrupt collapse of those twelfth-century attitudes and institutions which seemed to the last so integral a part of the Ayyubid empire.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق