Download PDF | Jo Van Steenbergen - Order Out of Chaos_ Patronage, Conflict and Mamluk Socio-Political Culture, 1341-1382 (The Medieval Mediterranean)-Brill Academic Publishers (2006).
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express my strong appreciation for the inspiration, guidance and support I received from Urbain Vermeulen, who supervised the thesis that preceded this study and to whom I owe my entrance into academic life, my interest in the Mamluk regime and my enthusiasm for the history of the Islamic Middle East. Likewise, I am grateful to former colleagues at the Oriental Studies Department of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium), where most of the research for this study was conducted.
I must also thank the School of History of the University of St Andrews (UK), where this book was actually written and where it benefited a lot from a unique and challenging scholarly environment. I am especially indebted to my colleagues and fellow-historians from the Middle Eastern Studies Department: Angus Stewart, Ali Ansari, Hugh Kennedy and Robert Hoyland. Without their valuable comments, suggestions, guidance, support and assistance this project would have been so much harder to bring to an end.
Angus Stewart in particular deserves to be mentioned, for he read through the bulk of the manuscript and prevented me from making too serious errors. Other colleagues and friends who should be mentioned and thanked for their assistance, feedback and suggestions at the various stages of the research and writing process are my external examiners Dionisius Agius and Heinrich Biesterfeldt, as well as Robert Irwin, Anne Broadbridge and Maaike van Berkel, and Yves Van den Broek. It goes without saying that I am solely responsible for any mistakes and shortcomings contained in this study.
A number of institutions and organisations need to be thanked for their support: the Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders (Belgium) for its financial support in the period 1998-2003, the NetherlandsFlemish Institute in Cairo (Egypt) for its hospitality and institutional assistance (“madam’ Shahdan, ‘madam’ ‘Azza, Mushir, Ghali, Khalid and Fathi in particular), and the Dar al-Kutub in Cairo, Cambridge University Library, the Bodleian, the British Library and the Forschungsund Landesbibliothek Gotha.
And last but not least, my family needs to be mentioned. I owe them immense gratitude for their support and understanding, and for enduring a long sequence of deadlines. In particular my beloved Maya deserves special thanks, for her assistance, encouragement and criticism, for her many sacrifices, and for not giving up when she had to compete with the Mamluks so often. Thank you, Maya.
TRANSLITERATION
Transliteration follows the practice of Mamlik Studies Review. In principle, Arabic words are italicised. Names not commonly known in English take diacritics, but are not italicised. Words used throughout the book and therefore not requiring diacritical marks, or italicisation, include sultan, amir, mamluk, Mamluk and Qalawunid, except when they are used in official titles. The term mamluk refers to a social category, to an individual who is a manumitted military slave, whereas, if capitalised, Mamluk refers to the regime that dominated Egypt and Syria from the mid-thirteenth to the early sixteenth centuries.
In general, Mamluk amirs are identified by their personal names and any further commonly used part of their name (e.g. Qawsin, but Yalbugha al-Khassaki) and sultans are referred to by their honorific, but without the honorific’s first element (al-malik), followed by their personal names (e.g. al-Nasir Muhammad, al-Mansur Abia Bakr). Full names of the sultans and of most of the amirs that are mentioned in this book can be found in Appendices | and 2.
INTRODUCTION
I could not say much of the Mamalucs, of whom I knew no auther [sic] that has written in particular: neither did they deserve that any should. For they were a base sort of people, a Colluvies of slaves, the scum of all the East, who, having treacherously destroyed the Jobidae, their Masters, reigned in their stead; and bating that they finished the expulsion of the Western Christians out of the East (where they barbarously destroyed Tripoli and Antioch, and several other Cities) they scarce did anything worthy to be recorded in History.'
Ever since the extreme negativism of this early eighteenth-century approach to the Syro-Egyptian Mamluk regime (ca. 1260—-1516/17 CE),? Mamluk studies have progressed steadily, and important steps have been taken to start acknowledging the intrinsic value of this regime’s long and crucial contribution to Middle Eastern history.’ Nevertheless, the pace of scholarship in general, and Mamluk scholarship in particular, is slow, and several periods in Mamluk history remain unexplored, especially from the perspective of their social and political development. This is particularly true for the years between the death of the Mamluk regime’s most successful sultan al-Malik al-Nasir Muhammad (r. 1293-1294; 1299-1309; 1310-1341) in June 1341 and the accession to the throne of the amir Barqtq (d. 1399) towards the end of November 1382.
This still rather obscure period of forty years has gained a reputation primarily as an episode of social, economic and political chaos and upheaval, in which the twelve scions that succeeded al-Nasir Muhammad to the throne never managed to equal the unparalleled welfare and grandeur his reign came to stand for. On the contrary, abundant accounts of failed harvests, famines, pestilence and plague on the one hand, and of seemingly endless conflicts in the cities and in the countryside on the other, were considered a significant indication of the dire straits the regime and especially its subjects were in.
As a result, several economic and socio-political phenomena that left their marks on the second half of Mamluk history are clarmed—and often undoubtedly correctly so—to have their origins somewhere during these forty years. Scholarship, however, has remarkably enough never focused on this crucial episode. ‘This was largely due to the fact that, for a long time, source material from unstable and confusing times such as these was not deemed useful for any historiographical narrative.
Already in 1896, William Muir doomed the study of the period for many decades, when he—as did many after him—concluded that, indeed, this was nothing but an unattractive era of transition that lacked any order worthy of a historian’s attention: 1341-1382 AD. For the next forty years the Sultanate was held by the house of Nasir; in the first score by eight of his sons successively, and in the second by his grandsons; from first to last a miserable tale. They rose and fell at the will of the Mameluke leaders of the day, some mere children; the younger, indeed, the better, for so soon as the puppet Prince began to show a will of his own he was summarily deposed, or he was made away with, few of such as reached maturity dying a natural death. The Emirs rose and fell: each had his short day of power; then deposed and plundered, exiled or strangled, others succeeded but to share their fate.
There were short intervals of able rule; but for the most part, murders, torture, execution, crime, and rebellion were throughout the period rife. The tale is sad and unattractive, and will be disposed of as briefly as the history admits of.
It was only in 1980, therefore, in an unpublished PhD-dissertation, that a detailed chronological narrative of the period was attempted. But even its author, Werner Krebs, felt obliged to admit that his subject was of minor importance only and had so far been justly neglected.
It actually took another few years before the publication of more concise and slightly more positive reconstructions of the period’s history, as smaller chronological units, though, incorporated within the larger surveys of pre-modern Middle Eastern history, by Peter Holt and Robert Irwin respectively.° Yet again, Irwin felt obliged to admit that a proper reconstruction of the period’s socio-political history in particular still remained confusing and troublesome:
Study of this confused epoch is complicated by the difficulty in determining who really exercised the power in the Sultanate. Not all of alNasir Muhammad’s descendants were degenerates or minors—putty in the hands of powerful emirs—but plainly in cases where that was so, it would be necessary to identify the background and intentions of emirs and, since abrupt switches in policy resulted from the frequent coups and murders at the top, it is difficult to find a narrative thread that will make sense of it all.’
Individual aspects of the period’s socio-political history fared somewhat better in attracting scholarly attention. Haya Nasir al-Hajji made detailed reconstructions of the lives of two major characters from the period’s political scene, the amir Qawsin (d. 1341) and the sultan al-Ashraf Sha‘ban (d. 1377); David Ayalon, Jean-Claude Garcin, Amalia Levanoni, Peter Holt and Ulrich Haarmann focused on specific areas of social and political activity, mostly, however, in a larger conceptual or historical framework (eunuchs, the region of Upper Egypt, mamluks, the sultanate, and mamluks’ scions respectively); William Brinner identified the nominal character of the caliph’s and sultan’s reigns between the years 1363 and 1412; and, most recently, Amalia Levanoni, again, questioned the source material’s ethnocentric judgement of the 1382 transition to the reign of Barqiq.®
Though all of undeniably crucial importance and often of outstanding scholarship, finding ‘a narrative thread that will make sense of it all’, as Irwin put it, has remained problematic until today. ‘This is largely due to the fact that narrative historiography is not the most suitable approach to generate historical insight into the multitude of socio-political events and individuals that coloured the period. When the available source material provides information on much more than a thousand individuals that were all more or less politically involved, and on seventy-four socio-political conflicts in just four decades, it becomes evident that a mere narrative listing of facts and figures can only result in a situation in which one can no longer see the forest for the trees, and chaos appears prevalent.’ So far, unfortunately, the results of this deficient approach have only been rather extreme generalisations, like the following quite remarkable summary of the period’s political history by the pioneer of Mamluk studies, David Ayalon:
Coalitions and combinations of forces [...] were generally of a most temporary nature, and the stability of each sultan’s rule was to a large extent dependent on his ability to take full advantage of the rivalry among the various units. A detailed presentation of the vast material supplied on this topic by Mamluk sources is of no special interest No period in history deserves such a blanket rejection of its own historical dynamism. In fact, Stephen Humphreys, in a recent review article on Mamluk politics, made a case for giving priority to the study of this period’s political dynamics in particular."
Therefore, the study presented here aims to heed this call and to contribute to the filling of a vacuum in academic research that has existed for far too long. To this end, it proposes to search for the dynamics of action and reaction that shaped the period’s politics and moulded their social background, and that will enable, eventually, a reconstruction of its political development that will claim to make more ‘sense of it all’.
Ultimately, it may even be postulated that, rather than being of no special interest, this episode and the information it reveals on the Mamluk political process in general should be considered of more interest than any other episode in Mamluk history. This is due to the fact that, for the majority of years between 1341 and 1382, the dynamics of that process were not ‘cloaked’ under any institutional disguise and therefore were more significant and revealing than ever.
This study will maintain that in the political process—as especially Ira Lapidus and Michael Chamberlain have previously argued in more general terms—Mamluk institutions, including the sultanate, came second only to the individuals that populated them, and to the social and political interaction they generated among themselves in particular.'* This is why detailed prosopographical analysis of this socio-political interaction in the years between 1341 and 1382 lies at the basis of this study.'* The results of that analysis, enabling the first solid interpretation of the period’s political culture and development, are presented here via a reconstruction of that interaction from three perspectives: institutions, individuals, and conflicts.
In keeping with a long tradition of Middle Eastern military government, mamluks gained their momentum of political power and dominance on the thirteenth-century battlefields of Egypt and Syria, a military momentum that would remain an essential characteristic of the regime they initiated. Being rooted in the military corps of the last Ayyubid sultan, al-Salih Ayytib, this regime continued to derive its authority and legitimacy primarily from its coercive force. However, at the same time, the generally defensive nature of that momentum eventually—as will be detailed below—turned the men of that regime from a military force, who were equally involved in politics and government, into a body politic, whose background and authority continued to be militarily defined, but whose concerns were social and political rather than military.
In particular, the long first half of the fourteenth century and the internal and external status quo that pertained to most of the third reign of al-Nasir Muhammad b. Qalawin (r. 1293-1294; 1299-1309; 1310-1341) should be deemed largely responsible for this ‘politicisation’—or perhaps rather “demilitarisation’— of the Mamluk military regime.'* As a result, despite the fact that the thirteenth-century military institutional framework, from which this body politic continued to stem, remained an essential element in the nature of the political process, it came to be superseded by socio-political modi operandi that went far beyond the military.
As noted above, this growing divergence between the institutional framework and socio-political practice is one of the main parameters of this study. Especially in the period immediately after Muhammad’s reign, this split became a major characteristic of the socio-political process, occasionally even defined as “the breakdown of the established political system”.'? At the same time, despite this divergence, it will equally be maintained that both remained two sides of the same coin. While institutions came second to practice only, neither can be properly analysed without the other, for only together did they engender interaction, power, and political development.
Therefore, this study’s first chapter will focus on that subordinate, yet indispensable institutional framework of Mamluk politics and on the part it still played in Mamluk society between 1341 and 1382. Consisting of mostly military institutions whose authority and prerogatives were largely derived from the sultanate and its unremitting caliphal legitimisation, the exercise of political power as described in this chapter will be conveniently captured under the heading of ‘Legitimate Power’.
The use of this terminology actually helps to picture both the association with and the distinction from this study’s second chapter, on the period’s socio-political practice, similarly captured under such a heading: ‘Effective Power’, as it were Legitimate Power’s superior alter ego.'° This chapter will focus on individuals and the nature of their socio-political relationships. It will analyse how the institutional framework was used to enhance and create power via the set-up of comprehensive households and supplementary networks of supporters, and it will establish what variants of this Effective Power there were in the period between 1341 and 1382."
And finally, the third chapter will continue in this vein and analyse how these households and networks competed for power during those four decades. It will, therefore, focus on the motives and strategies behind the period’s seventy-four socio-political conflicts and situate them again within the balancing processes of Effective Power.'* Hence, it will become possible to use insights thus gained to conclude with a reconstruction of the period’s political history, demonstrating how an alternative predominant order of Effective Power relapsed repeatedly into the period’s five moments of socio-political chaos, a cycle only the amir Barqiq managed to break in 1382.
The sources
There are, of course, some drawbacks and limits inherent in this study’s approach to the political history of the period between 1341 and 1382 that need to be acknowledged and taken into consideration. Though individuals, groups, and their socio-political behaviour are this study’s subject, the deeper emotional and behavioural grounds for actions performed and decisions taken mostly cannot and will not be incorporated in the analysis. As a work of history, and an ‘exploratory essay’,'’ far more emphasis will be put on the how and what of socio-political processes than on their why, and if this has resulted in an occasional overemphasis on the less emotional, material character of these processes, then this can only be acknowledged. An important reason for such an emphasis, 1s, of course, the nature of the source material that allows for such insights to be gained. Since the majority of them are chronicles, and they all provide narratives, which are of an unremittingly personal character, one generally needs to be wary of putting too much confidence in the factual accuracy of their accounts.*” And when an analysis of political processes and, very often covert, behaviour has to be based on such material, one needs to be even more careful. As suggestive as the abundance of their illustrations of those processes may be, they can never be considered exhaustive, nor, strictly speaking, representative of an obscure political process that remains largely shrouded in the clouds of premodern history. At the same time, however, the sources’ involvement also means that whatever their meddling with the stories they narrate, in order to present them convincingly, they always had to embed them within those social and political processes that were familiar to themselves, their audience, and the social environment this study hopes to revive. Whatever those stories’ historical accuracy, therefore, they instinctively or subconsciously reflected the processes this study is actually looking for. Moreover, as will be detailed below, the coherent, plagiaristic nature of Mamluk historiography even suggests that such involvement translated rather into omitting certain facts than in totally transforming or making up historical accounts.”’ It may therefore be safely assumed that the period’s source material allows not just for—though inherently conjectural—quite convincing interpretations, but also for the reconstruction of a general line of political developments that is derived from information on events and main characters that were ubiquitous in the period’s source material and therefore as close as one can get to Mamluk historical reality.”
One drawback which follows from this, and which seriously affected this study and the rendering of its analysis in this book, is the overwhelming wealth of material which is available and which so far largely prohibited any narrative attempt to present a coherent picture of the period’s history. This material spans many years, it reflects an eventful and unstable history, and it is very diverse in nature, in particular with respect to the processes of socio-political conduct that defined that fragmented history. It has, therefore, been considered inescapable to represent this wealth and variety through the reproduction of an often wide range of examples that may, occasionally, interfere with, or even interrupt the general flow of the argument. This has been deemed unfortunate, but at the same time equally necessary to render the analysis as comprehensive as possible and to give full credit to the riches of the period’s political history.
The abundant narrative historiographical material that, despite some lack of historical accuracy, remains extremely illustrative and informative of the Mamluk political processes and developments in the period between 1341 and 1382, was transmitted chiefly in two distinct formats: biographical dictionaries and chronicles.” Of major importance for this study in the first category were two dictionaries written by the Syrian contemporary scholar and administrator Khalil b. Aybak al-Safadi (1297-1363): the multi-volume comprehensive continuation of a predecessor’s work, the Aztab al-Waft bi-al-Wafayat, and the condensed and more focused Aan al-Asr wa Awan al-Nasr. Both contain an unmatched wealth of information on the individuals al-Safadt often had received direct information on or was personally involved with, until shortly before his death in 1363. His Sitz-am-Leben as a mamluk’s son, as an important Syrian administrator and as an acquaintance to many a Syrian political character turned him into a privileged and involved witness, and a very useful source for this study.** On the basis of the Aan, but with the addition of a lot of new information for the period after 1363, the Egyptian scholar Ibn Hajar al-‘Asqalani (1372-1448) wrote his own well-known dictionary, al-Durar al-Kamina fi Aan al-mi’a al-thimina.*?> And similarly, the later historian Ibn ‘Taghri Birdi (1411-1469) wrote his own valuable continuation of al-Safadi’s work, al-Manhal al-Safi wa al-Mustawft bada l-Wafi, and often exceptionally facilitated the historian’s job by referring to the sources he had copied from.?°
As mentioned above, copying from predecessors’ accounts, generally without acknowledgements, is also what made up considerable parts of many contemporary or near-contemporary chronicles. And actually, from that perspective, quite insightful observations can be made on the narrative traditions that determined the historiography of the period between 1341 and 1382, as it may be found in Mamluk chronicles written roughly in the century after 1341.
Generally, a major geographical distinction can be discerned between chronicles compiled in Syria and those written down in Egypt.”’ The Syrian side of this specific period’s historiographical tradition is mainly represented by a number of Damascene chronicles, which are all continuations of the works of the Damascene scholar al-Dhahabr (d. 1347). Especially the works of Muhammad Ibn Shakir al-Kutubr (d. 1362), the ‘Uyiin al-Tawartkh, and of his contemporary Ibn Kathir (c. 1300— 1373), the al-Bidaya wa al-Nihaya, are of interest for the local and more general social and political insights they offer, up to the year 1359 and 1366 respectively. Although each of the latter two works occasionally contains reports and stories that are not to be found in the other, they do offer many identical accounts of the events of these years, often almost matching word for word and indicative of their deep interdependence.”
The Egyptian ‘school’ on the other hand—wealthier in information for this study since the centre of political gravity largely remained in Egypt—clearly consisted of more than only one historiographical tradition, even within some of the individual chronicles that covered it. Until the reports of the year 1354, it is very likely that the origin of many narratives can be traced back to one largely lost contemporary chronicle, the Nuzhat al-Nazir ft Strat al-Malik al-Nasir by the well-connected military man and historian al-Yusufi (1297—1358).” Donald Little has demonstrated how this definitely was the case for reports by others—especially the contemporary al-Shuja‘’s Tarikh as well as the early fifteenth-century annalistic chronicles by al-Maqrizi (1364-1442) and by al-‘Ayni (1361-1451), the Swlak and the ‘qd alJuman—on the end of the reign of al-Nasir Muhammad, claiming at the same time quite convincingly that, even despite today’s loss of al-Yusufi’s text beyond the report on the year 1338, this dependence could safely be extended until the accounts of the year 1345.°° But, as this year was only chosen since it was, by chance, the last to have been preserved from al-Shuja‘’s history, and since those chronicles, in particular the most elaborate and detailed among them, al-Maqrizi’s Suliik, show no significant change from the pre-1345 period in the nature and presentation of its historical material, it seems safe to assume that such interdependence with—if not dependence on—al-Yusufi’s Nuzha continued until the last year reported in it, namely 1354.*! Beyond 1354, however, such interdependence becomes less straightforward to determine. Only from the reports on the year 1363 onwards do some parallels re-appear, especially when remarkably detailed lists of promotions and appointments start to pop up in the narratives of al-Maqrizi and al-‘Ayni, as well as in those of the contemporary author Ibn Duqmaq (ca. 1350-1407)—in his Jawhar alThamin and, as from the year 1367, similarly in his Nuzhat al-Anam and of Ibn Hajar, after 1372, the first year to be recorded in his chronicle, the Inb@ al-Ghumr. As with the earlier tradition, this later Egyptian narrative strand would also certainly need further specialised research. For the time being, however, the road such research is very likely to take is indicated by some explicit remarks to that extent. In his own chronicle, the Egyptian historian Ibn Bahadur al-Muwmint (d. 1473) claims that al-‘Ayni, in his Zgd al-Juman, mentions his extensive borrowing from a great number of histories, among which “the history of al-Yusuff [...], [. ..] of Sarim al-Din Ibrahim b. Duqmaq and [...] of the judge Nasir al-Din Ibn al-Furat [. . .].”** Secondly, Ibn Hajar, in the introduction to his chronicle that includes the period between 1372 and 1382, also refers very explicitly to his methodology and sources:
Most of what is mentioned in [my chronicle], have I either seen with my own eyes, taken over from [people] I consulted, or found in the writings of those I trust among my predecessors and peers, like the great history of the shaykh Nasir al-Din Ibn al-Furat, whom I have studied a lot of Hadith with, and like [the work] of Sarim al-Din Ibn Duqmagq, whom I met a lot. Most of what I transmit is from his writings and from the writings of Ibn al-Furat via [Ibn Duqmaq’s], [as well as from the works of | [...] Ibn Hijj, [...] al-Maqrizi, [...] and others.*!
All the preceding clearly hints at the existence of more than one major historiographical tradition for the period between 1341 and 1382: at least one in Syria, and two subsequent ones in Egypt.* And within the latter, the history of al-Yusufr on the one hand, and allegedly also those of Ibn Duqmaq and, especially, of Ibn al-Furat (1334-1405) on the other were of vital importance. It is therefore extremely unfortunate that the parts of Ibn al-Furat’s Tartkh al-Duwal wa (-Muliik that deal with the period between 1341 and 1382 are not known to have been preserved.*®
Of greater importance for this study than the exact nature of this interdependence, though, remains the fact that the prevalence of such traditions resulted in an occasionally even complementary uniformity in the period’s source material, deeply rooted in the society it evoked. In their own historical process, these contemporary traditions, and especially the way their constituents reconfirm, contradict and complement each other, gave shape to a near-contemporary critical mass of material that enables us to come very close to the historical processes and realities they claim to be narrating.
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