Download PDF | (Oxford Studies in Byzantium) Fanny Bessard - Caliphs and Merchants_ Cities and Economies of Power in the Near East (700-950)-Oxford University Press, USA (2020).
389 Pages
Acknowledgements
I discovered early Islamic history in 2004, while attending a seminar on the Umayyad desert castles at the University of Lyon II. Since then, my fascination for the Near East, its incredible Roman and medieval heritage, its religious and cultural diversity has developed, nurtured by my PhD supervisor Jean-Michel Mouton. I received unwavering inspiration, guidance, support, from Hugh Kennedy, Chris Wickham, Alan Walmsley, Andrew Wilson, Olivier Callot. They each showed an incredible willingness to nurture new researchers. It is from these that I have inherited a passion for scholarship, collaboration, and for introducing students to the richness of the period.
I have been fortunate to receive academic and financial support from institutions in France (University Lyon II and Lyon III, EPHE Sorbonne), in the Near East (Institut Francais du Proche-Orient Ifpo, Department of Antiquities in Damascus, Palmyra, and ‘Amman) and Britain (SOAS, University of St Andrews, University of Bristol, University of Oxford). The Near Eastern institutions (Ifpo and DoA) played a vital role in this study; they provided support for my fieldwork, and gave me access to their unique and invaluable archives, without which the project would not have been possible.
The British Academy and the Leverhulme Trust, who awarded me respectively a post-doctoral Newton grant and a Leverhulme Early Career fellowship were also instrumental in this project, offering security, time and funding to carry on my exploration of early Islamic cities and economies and publish the final results with OUP.
Thanks to the editors of Oxford Studies in Byzantium, and to James Howard-Johnston for his time and guidance.
My thanks also to colleagues and friends for kind and helpful readings, suggestions, and productive discussion during the course of this project: Khaled al-Asad, Sophie Berthier, Pascal Buresi, Fernando Cervantes, Paul Churchill, Kristoffer Damgaard, Fred Donner, Jean-Charles Ducéne, Tim Greenwood, John Hudson, Richard Payne, Jean-Francois Salles, Mark Whittow, Donald Whitcomb. This list is not exhaustive, and my sincere thanks go to the many unnamed others for degrees of assistance during the journey. Thanks also to all the colleagues who shared with me their research and photographic material: Thilo Ulbert, Thomas Lepaon, Jacques Seigne, Jacques Thiriot, Eliezer Oren, Gérard Charpentier, Olivier Callot, Denis Genequand, Jean-Charles Balty, Frédéric Alpi, Julian Henderson, Oren Tal, Yael Gorin-Rosen, George Haggarty, Alan Walmsley, Daniéle Foy.
This has been a long project, beginning with my MA over a decade ago. The resilience to continue and to complete this project has been provided by the constant encouragement and faith of my family. It is to them that Caliphs and Merchants is dedicated.
Notes on Transcription and Dates
If not otherwise specified, dates given in this volume are CE dates. However, if a double date is given (e.g. 99/717), the first is the Muslim hijri date (aH) and the second is cz. Arabic personal names and names of towns are transliterated according to the rules of classical Arabic (e.g. Gazira), except if there is a wellknown English equivalent (e.g. Damascus or Palmyra). The transliteration system follows that of the International Journal of Middle East Studies .
Introduction
Under the hegemony of the early Islamic caliphates—the Umayyads (661-750) and ‘Abbasids (750-1258) —the Near East experienced remarkable prosperity, evolving into one of the wealthiest economies of Eurasia, which, perhaps equally remarkably, has yet to receive concerted scholarly attention.’ This contrasted with the situation in western Europe, where the collapse of the Roman Empire led to political fragmentation, a breakdown of broader networks of exchange, and a related decline in the standard of living from the fifth to the ninth centuries.” This view is very much at odds with early-twentiethcentury scholarship. Scholarly interest in the economy of the early medieval Near East developed from the 1930s onwards. During this period, Jean Sauvaget
argued that the Arab-Muslim conquests led to a shift from ‘order to disorder’, with the late antique city, its monumental architecture and organized layout, evolving into the Arab madina. Disorganized marketplaces developed to the detriment of the well-organized classical models of the agora and forum. In another approach, Henri Pirenne* formulated the famous but controversial theory that the Muslim conquests instigated the break-up of the commercial and cultural unity of the Mediterranean. In this interpretation, the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages in western Europe would not have been a slow process, but a rupture after the coming of Islam. Pirenne argued that this rupture led to a remarkable impoverishment of Roman cities and villages in the Levant, evidence for which was discovered by the archaeologist Georges Tchalenko in the Limestone Massif of North Syria in the 1950s.”
After the Second World War, there was a reaction. The theory of an inevitable decline of the Near Eastern economy and cities after the ArabMuslim conquests was first opposed by the publication of Maurice Lombard’s L’or musulman du VII’ au IX® siécle in 1947.° In contrast to Henri Pirenne, Lombard hypothesized that the Arab-Islamic conquests were a significant event in European history not because it created a rupture in the Mediterranean but because it introduced new economic stimuli. Lombard’s model can be reduced to a system of mechanical causalities: in the fifth century, the Franks ran a trade deficit through their extensive purchasing of goods from the Levant, the Levantines ran a surplus for which a portion of this wealth was transferred, through trade, to Byzantium but also to the Persian and IndoChinese worlds.
The impoverishment of western Europe caused by this trade imbalance led to a net movement of gold wealth from West to East. However, Lombard argued that in the seventh century the Muslim world managed to rebalance this disequilibrium by introducing a series of reforms that involved putting back into circulation the gold held by Christian churches and producing new coinage used for trade with Carolingian Europe. While Lombard emphasized the benefits of the coming of Islam for the wider Mediterranean world, Albert Hourani in The Islamic City’ (1970) and later Hugh Kennedy in From Polis to Madina (1985) defended the idea of a slow evolution of the Near Eastern city from the sixth to the eighth century relying on endogenous causes such the expansion of Christianity.
the decline of civic institutions,’ and the evolution of the fiscal system.’® In parallel, excavations in the 1990s, in the villages of Dehes, Sergilla, and al-Bara in the Limestone Massif yielded evidence disproving Tchalenko’s hypothesis and contradicting the tenets of Sauvaget and Pirenne’s theses."”
Over the last two decades, scholarship has continued to challenge the preconceived myths of an early medieval decline in the Eastern world, highlighting the economic continuity between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages’” as well as the increasing monetization of the economy. Much attention has also been paid to the evolution of late Roman and Sasanian road and fluvial networks and the ports, han, or ribat associated with them after the rise of Islam in greater Syria, Iraq, and Iran.’* While most publications offered a regional perspective’* or documented the history of one specific network from late antiquity to early Islam, such as the Hag¢ routes,'* Adam Silverstein’s volume on the postal systems, barid,’® in the pre-modern Islamic world has provided a wider picture of the way peoples travelled and cities were connected across the Near East from the Achaemenids to the Mongols.
Since the 1990s, agriculture has been one of the dominant themes of the historiography of the early Islamic economy because it is clearly related to the status of lands after the Islamic conquests and the evolution of the fiscal system. Pioneering research was conducted in 1957-8 by Robert McC. Adams’” who looked at the evolution of settlement patterns and agricultural systems over a period of six millennia in the Diyala plains of Iraq. This field of study has in the last two decades increasingly benefited from the multiplication of surveys in Greater Syria,‘* Gazira,’® Iraq,”° and Iran,”? as well as of researches using old maps, aerial photographs and landscape archaeology techniques.”* Historians and archaeologists have demonstrated a continuous agricultural dynamism” from the sixth to the ninth century in the Near East, except in Cilicia and Lycia in Anatolia, where the economy dramatically declined,” in the context of the Byzantine and Sasanian conflicts that forced the populations to flee the areas.
The transition between the death of Justinian in 565 and the end of the Umayyad caliphate in 750 has so far been central to the historiography of the early Islamic economy in the Near East, for which tracing the continuities with late antiquity has remained its main focus. By contrast, to move the discussion forward, this study explores the early medieval economy in the Near East from the early eighth to the tenth century. It replaces dynastic periodization with an original understanding based on economic development, which can progress without dependence on politics. It begins with the monetary reform of Caliph “Abd al-Malik around 700. The production of aniconic coins and the creation of a vast single market within a unified political space, without fiscal impediments to trade in the form of customs dues, favoured consumption and investment.””
This reform constituted a fertile ground for trade and production, up to the tenth century, when competing sultanates disputed ‘Abbasid supremacy. The caliphate began then to suffer from a sharp economic decline from the rule of al-Qahir in 932. The ‘Abbasid Empire lost the revenue of Egypt, Gazira in northern Iraq, and Iran, all of which became independent. In an attempt to maintain the cohesion of the caliphate and the allegiance of the army, the ‘Abbasid rulers adopted the ‘iqta system,”° in which state lands were allocated, as an income, to military and administrative officers. However, this policy reinforced territorial division of the Empire into privately administered areas that were not governed by central authority. In the context of the weakening of central authority, the economic prosperity of Ifriqiya and Egypt under the Fatimids (909-1171) attracted many merchants, who left Baghdad to settle in North Africa.
This book, divided into four parts, explores the transformations undergone by craft and retail institutions in the Near East between 700 and 950, as well as their impacts on the individual, the community, and social hierarchy in the wider context of shifting power relations and changing economic dynamics. How did the changing sociopolitical, ideological, and economic dynamics after the rise of Islam affect retailing and crafts? What were the Roman, Sasanian, and late antique economic legacies kept in the eighth and ninth centuries? What was the influence of a conscious Islamification of daily life on the functioning of local exchange and production within Near Eastern cities? What can the specificities of craft and retail institutions between 700 and 950 tell us about changing labour patterns and social behaviours?
Part I examines the development of urban retail and craft in the highly favourable economic and demographic context of early Islam. It explores how and why patronage became an imperial officium from the early eighth century and the extent to which this evolution affected the status of craft and retail in the urban environment. While caliphal involvement in urban retailing is well attested in ninth- and tenth-century literary sources, I contend that rulers involved themselves already in this to establish their power and legitimacy from the first decades of the eighth century.
Part II examines the nature and functioning of craft and retail spaces in the early medieval world and whether Arab-Muslim practices were radically innovative, or a readoption of phenomena that had disappeared in the fifth and sixth centuries, or a continuation of past Roman and Sasanian norms.”’ Part III investigates the institutional and religious generators of trade and production in early Islam, while Part IV studies how this would, in turn, change the social status, labour patterns, and religious involvement of craftworkers and traders between 700 and 950.
This book offers unique insights into the formative period of Islamic society and the determinants of the economic success of the medieval Near East. In the background are questions to do with continuity and historical lineage, that is to say, whether the development of urban retailing, craft, and labour patterns under early Islam represented a continuation of Byzantine (and ultimately Roman) and Sasanian practices, a standardization of these, or a radical break from them. Although the Near Eastern material is central, comparisons in the paths of trade and economic life between the Near East and western Europe provide ways to identify the divergences between East and West after the fall of Rome. In this way, the path taken by the Near East after the rise of Islam can be set in a broader context.
Additionally, this book marks an advance in expanding the debate by comparing and contrasting the Levantine and Iraqi evidence with original data from the eastern half of the Islamic caliphate, Iran and Central Asia. Did urban economic practices in the Levant, Iraq, Iran, and Transoxiana evolve towards a similar pattern, despite their different pre-Islamic heritage, or did they develop differently? Was the chronology of their transformation similar or substantially different according to their historical context?
Crossing the traditional boundaries that circumscribe fields, archaeological and written evidence are combined. Most of the Arabic written material dates from the late ninth century to the end of the ‘Abbasid rule in 1258, which poses an important methodological issue for the study of early Islam. There is a significant time lag between the events they describe and the time they were recorded. Therefore, this work marks an advance in bringing together historical sources with contemporaneous material data. Archaeological sources, largely ignored by economic historians of the Near East,”* are used to enrich, to add texture and life, as well as to provide quantitative data, to the simple narratives of early Islamic economy.
Physical traces include the remains of workshops and shops, from elementary to complex sites, excavated in the Near East, across the Levant and Iraq, as well as in Central Asia. Small artefacts, such as coins and tools from commercial and artisanal contexts, are also essential for a richly textured and nuanced interpretation of urban economy. This volume gathers drawings, axonometric renderings, plans, cuts, sketches, and photographs of early Islamic shops and workshops from twenty-two archaeological sites in the Near East. Part of this iconographic material comes from widely available publications, but most of it was gathered from across Europe and the Near East with varying levels of difficulty.
Many of the sites mentioned here were excavated between the 1930s and 1980s, at a time when the primary focus of archaeological research was the biblical and Roman heritage. In many instances, medieval remains from the first centuries of Islam were not considered important primary material and consequently were rarely photographed. They were hastily sketched before the excavation proceeded to more ancient occupational levels. More often than not, these discoveries were either not published or merely mentioned in reports.
The iconographic material collected includes representations for the most part unpublished until now. First and foremost, it comes from archaeological research in Jarash carried out personally and under the direction of A. Walmsley. Photographs of ancient digs, never published, were retrieved from archives in ‘Amman, Damascus, and Jerusalem, at the Ifpo (French Institute of the Near East), as well as at the State Departments of Antiquities and Museums in Jarash and Palmyra, which are no longer accessible. I was also able to access some photographic archives and logbooks from ancient digs stored in several academic institutions, principally the Belgian Royal Academy of Brussels (Apamea archives).
Lastly, several images or still unpublished plans were provided by archaeologists Oren Tal (Tiberias project), Daniéle Foy (Beirut project), Pierre-Marie Blanc (South Syria project, Bosra), Denis Genequand (Qasr al-Sarqi project), Olivier Callot (Dehes project), Gérard Charpentier (Sergilla project), Jacques Thiriot (Balis project), Kristoffer Damgaard and Donald Whitcomb (Aqaba project). This material documents sites which have been damaged or destroyed because of warfare, agricultural and urban growth, or where archaeological studies are no longer possible owing to political or security difficulties. The purpose of including this visual material is not only to illustrate the points made in this book but also to provide additional data, through detailed legends, views presented from various perspectives—from close-ups to wide-angle—and aerial views that allow one to see remains in their urban context. It enables a more comprehensive representation of each of the sites, aiming to provide a foundation that can be used for future research.
In addition, epigraphic sources,” which provide significant information on trade and the identity, life, and rank of producers in early Islam, enable us to paint a more complex picture than that which can be derived from historical sources alone. They include shopkeepers’ accounts, papyri, and craftworkers’ signatures in Arabic and Aramaic produced in the Near East and Central Asia between 700 and 950. These signatures, listed in a database, often written in an informal style, were added to the finished objects, usually in inconspicuous places. These marks were not an indication of an elevation of status from artisan to artist but rather as a sign of pride in workmanship. They tell us about the conditions under which craftspeople laboured. These sources also provide information about women’s and juveniles’ involvement in the production; women and children rarely feature in narrative sources.
Literary evidence remains essential to exploring the changing status of economic patronage after the rise of Islam, the key issue of ownership, legal and administrative status of shops and workshops, as well as the relationship between merchants, craftsmen and -women, and the caliphal authority in the eighth, ninth and early tenth centuries. Non-Arab chronicles have the benefit of being contemporary to the eighth and ninth centuries, which is not always the case with Arab sources,*® and some of them, such as the Byzantine-Arab chronicle of 741, the chronicle of Thomas of Marga, pseudo Sebeos, Zuqnin, and Michael the Syrian, include relevant accounts on urban economy in early Islam. The fourth part of the Syriac chronicle of Zuqnin,** which evidence suggests may have been produced by a monk from the monastery of Zuqnin near Amida, is one of the most detailed sources on the economic and fiscal history of Gazira in the second half of the eighth century.
Beyond a simple narrative on the local ecclesiastical life, the chronicler also introduces polemical reports on the status of lands, the agricultural land-use, and the rapacious economic policy of the early ‘Abbasids. He illustrates the increasing impoverishment of the Gaziran peasantry in the context of the overtaxation of lands and emigration of peasants towards Mosul. In comparison, Mosul prospered from the eighth century with the development of cotton and wool industries,” and this generated a shift in the local elite with the empowerment of local merchants to the detriment of the landowning aristocracy. This document has been used in parallel with the history of Mosul of al-Azdi** (d. 945) and two brief Syriac chronicles written by local monks, the Ris Mellé of Jean Bar Penkayé** (d. 700), a Chalcedonian monk of Penek, and the chronicle of Jacob of Edessa** (d. 708). Among Syriac chronicles, the account of Michael the Syrian has also been used.
This chronicle derives its information from earlier chronicles, notably the lost chronicle of Dionysius of Tell Mahré and the anonymous Chronicle of 846,*° and provides a broad overview of the history of the Near East from antiquity to the twelfth century, bringing to the historian essential data shedding light on the evolution of urban economy. Literary testimonies also include a large corpus of Arabic sources, notably local chronicles from the ninth to the eleventh centuries. Urban histories include those of Wasit by Ibn Bahéal’’ (d. 905), Buhara by al-NarSahi (d. 959), Mosul by Abt Zakariyya’ al-Azdi (d. 945), and Isfahan by Hamza al-Isfahani (d. 961). In conjunction with this are the introductory chapters of the Ta’rih Bagdad by al-Hatib al-Bagdadi (d. 1085), that offer a detailed description of the historical topography of Baghdad from information collected in the ninth century by the linguist Ibn Abi Tahir Tayfur.
The book by Hamza al-Isfahani on Isfahan is lost, but pieces have survived in the thirteenth-century geographical encyclopedia Mu‘gam al-buldan of Yaqut. This corpus includes the chapter on the topography of cities and geography of Fars written by ‘Istahri in the tenth century, which was transmitted by his contemporary Ibn Hawgal. Also falling into this orbit are the chapters of al-Ya‘qubi on Baghdad and Samarra, which are not merely descriptions of the geographical features, but also integrate historical commentaries. Urban chronicles provide evidence on the foundation of new settlements after the rise of Islam as well as the Islamization of late antique urban centres. They elucidate the characteristics of urban topography and the increasing prominence of trade and production in Near Eastern cities from the early eighth century.
The evolving processes of integration into the urban framework of marketplaces and workshops, their division into specialized sectors, their operational relationships with mosques and progressive ghettoization beyond the fortifications from the reign of “Abbasid caliph al-Mansur in the late eighth century are central themes covered by urban chronicles. Relevant comparisons can be drawn between the chronicles and the archaeological evidence to challenge the classical model of a transition from urban order to disorder after the Islamic Conquest. Urban chronicles additionally reveal key points about the administration of urban economy, in particular the public-private status of shops and workshops, the issue of the hereditary transmission of economic property, as well as questions relating to taxation and rent.
The voluminous histories of al-Tabari (d. 923) and the Ansab al-asraf of al-Baladuri (d. 892) remain fundamental to our understanding of the Near Eastern history of the eighth and ninth centuries. The regional chronicle of Abt al-Fat al-Samiri al-Danafi provides an additional interesting perspective on the political, economic, and fiscal history of Palestine up to the reign of “Abbasid caliph al-Radi (d. 934). Although the chronicler does not mention his sources, chronologies of natural events (earthquakes, floods, famine, and drought) are meticulously recorded and lead us to suppose that the author relied on contemporary sources.
Evidence has also been gleaned from treatises of political and fiscal theory, which illuminate the institutional foundation of urban economic changes in the eighth and ninth centuries. This includes manuals of hisba (works of Islamic law) written in the ninth to eleventh centuries by Zaydi and Mawardi, epistles, and fiscal treatises, such as the Kitab al-Harag of the Qadi Abu Yusuf** (d. 798), written by administrative secretaries in the early ‘Abbasid rule. Among the epistles, the Risdla of Secretary Ibn al-Muqaffa‘ (d. 757) is a detailed memorandum addressed to Caliph al-Mansur (d. 775). It constitutes a detailed testimony on the early ‘Abbasid Empire, the status of its army, economy, and taxation system.
The ninth- and tenth-century Arab geographers—al-Hamadani” (d. 903), al-Ya‘qubi*® (d. 905), Ibn Hurradadbih*’ (d. 911), al-Muqaddasi*” (d. 946), and Ibn Hawgqal*? (d. 977)—in their Kitab al-buldén(s) expound random tales of their voyages illuminating life in Near Eastern cities and their hinterland, as well as local trade and production across the dar al-Islam in the context of the rise of Baghdad as the core capital of an increasingly globalized exchange system. Their accounts provide valuable quantitative and descriptive details of shops and workshops city by city. In addition, the revenues collected as taxation or rent from these facilities and their redistribution are also recorded—for instance, between the Daylem and the Hurasan the revenue of the urban marketplaces was used for the maintenance of the ribat(s).*
In parallel to the treatises of descriptive geography, the eighth- and ninthcentury books of medicine, largely ignored by economic historians, gathered additional and relevant information on organic and inorganic resources used in the production of pharmaceutical drugs and urban industries operating in the early Islamic Near East. Outlining the local, regional, or foreign origin of these resources, medical treatises shed light on the evolution of trading patterns and the contribution of agriculture and exchange in the early Islamic economy. Among these treatises are those of Masih al-Dimagqi (d. 809),*° Yuhanna b. Masawayh (d. 857),*° Qusta b. Liga (d. 912),*” Sahlan b. Kaysan (d. 990),** and Ibn Butlan (d. 1066).*?
This book also makes use of the medical treatises of the Egyptian physician Ibn Baytar (d. 1248). Although this is a later source, his work remains nevertheless useful as the author relies on earlier material from Galen, Aristotle, and Dioscorides to Yuhanna b. Masawayh (d. 857), ‘Ali al-Tabari (d. 861), Hunayn b. Ishaq (d. 873), and Abt Hanifa al-Dinawari.
Lastly, as part of the textual material, the ‘yin al-ahbar are a fundamental source to examine the evolving status of merchants and craftspeople. These books compile anecdotal narratives about the everyday life of the general populace and the elites in the Near Eastern cities of the caliphate, illuminating the rise of trading classes. Among them are the books of al-Gahiz, Kitab al-buhala’ (the Book of Misers)°° and Kitab al-bigal,*’ as well as the Kitab(s) of al-Tanthi and Dinawari on Baghdad, the Kitab al-isdra of Ibn ‘Ali alDima§gqi,” and the Kitab al-Kasb of al-Shaybani.*?
Combining archaeological and literary material, this monograph engages with the social and economic history of the early medieval Near East and moves beyond the simple description of retail and production in early Islam to provide an original analysis of urban economic and social transformations precipitated by new power dynamics from 700 to 950.
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