Download PDF | R.J.C. Broadhurst, A History of the Ayyūbid Sultans of Egypt, translated from the Arabic of al-Maqrīzī, Library of Classical Arabic Literature, vol. 5, G.K. Hall & Co., 1980.
382 Pages
Editor's Preface
Classical Arabic Literature is still almost inaccessible to most scholars, and is even less read and enjoyed by the general educated public. Neither the range of its subjects—from poetry and folklore to historiography, religious speculations and philosophy, not to mention scientific works of all kinds—nor the skill and artistry of the writers are generally recognized outside the small circle of specialists. The non-specialist does not always realize that Arab literature flourished far earlier than did most European literatures and that it reached iis zenith (and, one might say, began to stagnate) at a time when the latter were just beginning their ascent. Not all of the authors, nor even a majority, were Arabs; they used Arabic as the lingua franca of the medieval Muslim empire.
The Library of Classical Arabic Literature aims at making the work of the Arabic-writing thinkers and literati available to those scholars and lovers of literary works unable to read them in the original. Translations of some works into various European languages, including English, have appeared. Most of these, however, lacked grace by adhering slavishly to peculiarities of the Arabic style; they failed to express the idiom used in the original by its equivalent in the language of translation. Others, by paraphrasing, deviated so far from the original text that the scholar could not always be sure of the correct rendering of the author’s thought. Memorable modern exceptions to this statement are Enno Littmann’s German translation of the Arabian Nights, Sir Hamilton Gibb’s translation of Ibn Batttta’s Travels, and the most recent version of the Koran by A. J. Arberry.
This series plans to present readable and enjoyable versions which, though cast into idiomatic English, will remain true to the author’s own thoughts. They will be introduced by an essay on the work and its author, his life and oeuvre, his rank and role in medieval Arab literature and scholarship.
Full scholarly and interpretative notes will give added help and information. Thus, the historian, the sociologist, the literary critic or the humanist, as well as the philosopher may find valuable research material for his own field.
But these works should—and can—be read for their own sake. This series differs from previously offered translations in that it will, whenever applicable, emphasize the relevance of the thought contained in these ancient writings for our own culture and times. It is hoped that this approach will enrich its value and provide an added dimension for our generation in the understanding of the ideas of a brilliant civilization of the past.
In reading Magrizi’s Chronicle of the history of the Near and Middle East during the Crusades, written from the Arab/ Muslim point of view, the reader will be struck by the parallel it offers to contemporary events in the same region. The Western observer is disturbed by them, watching the ever-changing alliances and hostilities among the peoples of the area, who call themselves brethren by ethnic and/or religious bonds and yet constantly shift their allegiance, according to their separate interests, while still paying lip service to their kinship. Thus it was in the Ayyubid era, when they were engaged in the common struggle against the “Franks”; thus it is in the twentieth century, when the unifying factors—even the fight against Israel or the struggle for an “Arab Nation’—do not suffice to overcome the divisive aspirations of the individual Arab groups. Another weighty similarity between these two eras, separated though they are by many centuries, is the threat from powers not indigenous to the region (apart from the Crusaders, then, and “the West,” now), that was and is aggravating the situation and thereby influencing decisions as well as their outcome.
IusE LICHTENSTADTER
Harvard University
Introduction
Before the advent of Islam, the literature of the Arabs was confined mainly to poetry. The poet, seen as the oracle, seer, and guide of his tribe, told of its battles and pasture land and other disputes, preserved its genealogy, described its folklore and spiritual life, and extolled the courage, generosity, loves, and deeds of its heroes. Thus he was the historian of his tribe. The poems were passed on by man’s lips until they began to be recorded in writing in the early seventh century.
The first Muslim historical works were the records of the actions and sayings (hadith) of the Prophet Muhammad. These necessarily included a good deal of incidental historical matter, especially Muhammad’s military campaigns. The first historical work to show some independence of theology was a biography of the Prophet composed by Ibn-Ishag in the eighth century. Biographies and monographs followed, and in the ninth century the Arabic-speaking Persian al-Baladhuri integrated them into two comprehensive works, Futuh al-Buldan, or “The History of the Conquests,” and Ansab al-Ashraf, or “The Lineage of the Nobles.”
As Muslim scholars commenced to study and absorb the various fields of Greek knowledge, they took over the Greek systematic classification of the various branches of science and learning, which gave to history no special place. The early Muslims continued to see history as a secondary discipline, albeit an important one, since it was classed as a supplementary discipline in the field of Muslim religious law. In the eleventh century it was placed by one scholar, Ibn-Abi al-Rabi‘, intermediate between theology and religious law at the top and medicine and the natural sciences at the bottom. It was absent from the course of studies in the madrasat or “colleges” of higher learning.
While Muslim theologians did provide the scholarly techniques which gradually promoted historiography into a science, the fact that they viewed historiography as a mere auxiliary of theology had an inhibiting effect. The early medieval Muslim historian saw his function as mainly one of collecting facts. Philosophic consideration of causes and effects, and speculation upon contingent probabilities, did not come within his consideration.
Ibn-Khaldiin (a.p. 1332-1406) brought a new approach to the writing of history, introducing a philosophic concept to it and applying principles of moral, political, and social science. To an awareness of the physical phenomena of the world he joined a perception of the ways, beliefs, and activities of men. The development and decay of nations, as of individuals, he believed to be the result of universal laws. Certain results inevitably flow from certain causes. The acid test of the truth or falseness of evidence is its innate possibility or impossibility. Evidence must be assessed against the prevailing conditions of the times.
The principles and forces influencing history Ibn-Khaldin displayed in his famed Mugaddimah, or “Introduction” to his universal history. He believed that “nations go through natural periods of life like individuals.” Certain ideas, tendencies, and desires are met with in men’s minds in every clime and age, just as are the laws of matter. Ambition, love, vanity, and greed inhere alike in nations as in individuals and impel them to similar patterns of development. Youth everywhere consists in enthusiasm and great actions, good or bad. Middle age declines to material, often base, objectives. So it is with nations. The early Arabs performed high deeds when they burst from their austere desert confines, where hazards and hardship had induced in them fortitude and a sense of devotion to the common interest of the community, and then, with the prosperity, selfishness, and luxury of empire and city life, sank into degeneracy and decay, to fall before a simpler people.
The study of European history leaves the Western reader unaware of this crucial lesson of the East, since the existence of the nations of the North is yet incomplete. In the towns and regions of the Middle East, to the contrary, where the periods of life are shorter and faster, dynasties of Babylonians, Hittites, Persians, Parthians, Arabs, Mongols, and Turks rose and fell upon the ruins of each other in rapid succession. Only a study of their histories and their connection will enable the Western reader to form a picture of the laws that govern the succession of nations.
The fact that Muslim historians were rarely able to make a living from writing history meant that they were necessarily men of wide culture and knowledge. The work of al-Tabari (A.D. 838-932), for example, is replete with all the theological, historical, and philosophical learning of his age, and was a huge store of information for succeeding historians. The vast erudition of al-Mas‘idi (A.p. 895?-956), dubbed ‘“‘the Herodotus of the Arabs,”’ was enriched by his extensive travels extending to China and Ceylon. Besides history, his interest and imagination were excited by the geography, natural history, religion, and ethnology not only of Muslim nations but of others as well. His enlarged mind could penetrate the ideas of other peoples, and his narrative is enlivened by many charming anecdotes and vignettes. He set a pattern for Arab historiographers in searching for information without prejudice against what is foreign, in relating a fact without changing it although it may conflict with his own view, and in seeking truth without preconceived viewpoints.
Although historiography occupied but a modest place in the Muslim academic world, nonetheless it held respect in society at large. For young princes, as future rulers, the study of history was deemed a proper subject. Anyone aspiring to a senior government post had to have some knowledge of the histories of other lands, such as Persia and Byzantium. Parents encouraged their children to study noble actions of the past that they might emulate them and learn that virtue is rewarded and evildoing punished. Thus the Muslim historian, if not in the front rank of scholars, yet enjoyed the prestige of influencing the powerful and the young.
Muslim history can be divided into several classes:
1. General histories of which Ibn-al-Athir’s was the great classic, and including such works as those of Sibt ibn-al-Jawzi and Ibn-al-Furat. 2. Chronicles of regions and cities, like those of Ibn-al-Qalanisi on Damas-
cus, and Kamal-al-Din on Aleppo.
3. Histories of regions and their dynasties, such as those of Ibn-Wa4sil and al-Maqrizi.
4, Histories of dynasties, like that of Abu-Shamah. 5. Biographies, like those of Saladin by Ibn-Shaddad and by ‘Imad-al-Din.
6. Autobiographies, like the invaluable and delightful memoirs of Usimah ibn-Mungidh.
The racial and religious emotions evoked by the Crusades produced important historical works. Of these the most important is that of Ibn-al-Athir (a.v. 1160-1234). His Kamil flTa’rikh, or “Complete Book of Chronicles,” is a universal history of the Muslim world up to a.p. 1231. It reproduces much of al-Tabari together with abridgments of other writers, some of whose work would otherwise have been lost, but his contribution on the Crusades, of which he was an eyewitness, is original. He set a standard in Muslim historiography for critical handling of his material and breadth of perception, and his work is distinguished for his lucidity and for his observance of cause and result. Unfortunately, like some other Muslim historians in the service of rulers, he displays antipathy toward Saladin because of his attachment to the Zangid dynasty, which Saladin supplanted.
The name and fame of Saladin encouraged a number of writers. Baha’-al-Din ibn-Shaddad (a.p. 1145-1234) and ‘Imadal-Din al-Isfahani (A.D. 1125-1201), as members of Saladin’s staff, bring personal testimony to their biographies of the Sultan, and their admiration for their master is not greatly biased in his favor. Their works are essentially dependable and very informative of the times. They pay little attention, however, to the social and economic life and military and political aims of the Franks, their adversaries in the Crusades. Moreover, they reveal a grievous ignorance, even indifference, to the other’s faith. Indeed, writers of both sides give the grossest caricatures of the other’s beliefs. Either complete misconception or thoroughgoing prejudice prevented any possibility of seeing the other side’s point of view. Its whole culture and style of life, its most cherished ideals, were objects of derision and scorn. To the Christians the Muslims were ‘Saracen dogs” and “followers of wicked error,” while reverse epithets made the Christians “Christian pigs” and “Polytheists” (worshiping many gods, i.e., the Trinity). The Western historian William, Bishop of Tyre, who knew Arabic, and the Arab memoir writer Usimah ibn-Mungidh, were notable exceptions on either side in their understanding of the other side.
The restriction of the attention of Muslim historians to their own side, although indeed a serious defect, nonetheless leaves the Western reader a large field of information and interest. But such was the continuing indifference of Western scholars to Muslim historiography that even the celebrated Ibn-alAthir was inaccessible to Edward Gibbon, who had to be content with abridgments of his work by later Muslim historians. This inattention of Western scholars has accordingly vitiated all Western histories of the Middle East, and that part of Europe touched by Muslim thought and deeds.
The German E. Wilken’s Geschichte der Kreuzziige (Leipsig, 1817-1832) and J. F. Michaud’s Histoire des Croisades (Paris, 1841) could find few translations of Muslim sources at their disposal, but the use they made of them brought about an awareness of the importance of Muslim historians. Access to the other side’s point of view must have encouraged the sympathetic understanding these writers brought to their work on the crusades, in contrast to earlier writers.
Serious work on the editing of Arabic original sources from previously unpublished manuscripts began in the early seventeenth century. But it was not until over a century later that the Benedictines of Saint-Maur, having collected many Western chronicles, essayed the formidable task of editing Oriental texts. Their work was taken up by the Academie des Inscriptions et des Belles-Lettres, which produced the massive Recueil des Historiens des Croisades, with its four tomes of translations from the Arabic into French.
These translations, however, fall beneath the level of modern scientific research. They are largely a free, not a literal, translation, giving the general meaning of the original rather than a correct translation. Moreover, they are but extracts and are not referred to their place in the original text.
Regrettably, a century later, the position had but little improved. The manuscripts of Ibn-Wasil, Ibn-Taghri Birdi, Ibnal-Athir, al-Furat, and al-Maqrizi and many others have been edited and printed in the Middle East, and await translation.
Thus it is that even the latest of Western Crusades historians, such as Runciman and Smail, have been afforded only limited access to Muslim sources. For the later Crusades only the smallest fraction of the Arabic sources have been translated.
So it was that Muslim historical writing, for centuries far more copious than and unquestionably superior to contemporary Western historiography, yet had no influence upon it. As modern times approached, the picture changed, and Western historiography rapidly took the lead. It fell to modern European and American scholarship to come to a complete understanding of the idea of history.
Nevertheless modern Egyptian and Lebanese scholars have united Western methodology to their own traditional techniques to produce histories of the highest order. Their skillful editings of hitherto unpublished but valuable texts have left the Western translator with many outstanding tasks. These modern Arab scholars repine that the restriction of access to Arabic sources has resulted in an equal restriction in appreciation of the Arab point of view and of Arab culture and achievement.
A period when the standard of Muslim historians was very high, was that of the Mameluke dynasty of Egypt. In the relatively stable regime of these slave-sultans, whose martial energy had cleared Syria of the crusaders and repelled the innumerable hordes of the Mongol Hulagu, there emerged historians of the highest class. Among these were Ibn-Khaldin, Abw’l-Fida’, al-Suyiti, Ibn-Taghri Birdi, al-Sakhawi, and alMagrizi. Such scholars pondered the definitions and objects of history, the methods and techniques to be followed, the manner in which the validity of evidence can be tested, and the general utility of history.
Among these Mameluke historians Taqi-al-Din Ahmad alMaqrizi is outstanding. Professor P. K. Hitti, Professor of Semitic Literature at Princeton University, has declared that Maqrizi was “beyond doubt the most eminent of the Mamluk historians.”! Professor R. A. Nicholson, onetime Professor of Arabic at Cambridge University, descanting upon the number and talent of the historians of the Mameluke period, says: “Perhaps the most famous of them is Taqi’l-Din al-Maqrizi.”? Professor H. A. R. Gibb, onetime Professor of Ara-bic at Oxford University, and Jewett Professor of Arabic at Harvard, considers that “as a compiler of historical works alMaqrizi holds a very high place.”? Professor Mustapha Ziyadah, onetime Professor of Medieval History at Fuad al-Awwal University, Cairo, believes Maqrizi to be the best of the Muslim historians of the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries, and the Suluk to be the leading production of the period.* Professor Francesco Gabrieli, Professor of Arabic Language and Literature at Rome University, deems the Sulik to be “‘indispensable in our present state of knowledge.’’®
Describing Magqrizi’s Khitat,® A. R. Guest records that Magqrizi “has accumulated and reduced to a certain amount of order a large quantity of information that would, but for him, have passed into oblivion. He is generally painstaking and accurate, and always resorts to contemporary evidence if it is available. Also he has a pleasant and lucid style, and writes without bias and apparently with distinguished impartiality.”’ The words can equally be applied to the Suluk.
In his Khitat® Magqrizi indicates that he draws on three kinds of sources, namely written works, teachers and contemporaries, and observations and experience. For the Suluik Magqrizi drew greatly on Jamal-al-Din ibn-Wasil’s Mufarriy al-Kurib fi Akhbar Bani-Ayyib, or “The Dissipator of Anxieties Concerning the History of the Ayyabids”; on Ibn-al-Athir’s al-Kamil fl Ta’rikh, or “The Complete Book of Chronicles’; on Ibn-Abi-Tayyi’ ’s Ta’rikh Misr, or “History of Egypt’; on Abu-Shamah’s Kitab al-Rawdatayn, or “The Book of the Two Gardens’; on Sibt ibn-al-Jawzi’s Mirdat al-Zaman, or “Mirror of Time’; as well as others like Ibn-‘Abd-al-Zahir and the Hafiz ‘Abd-al-‘Aziz al-Mundhiri. Unfortunately, he all too rarely indicated his sources or his debt to earlier writers. Indeed, his contemporary al-Sakhawi accused him of wholesale plagiarism. Some mitigation may be allowed by reason of the practice of the day of assuming that, once a source had been given, no acknowledgment had to be given of further quotations, the style of the earlier passage being recognizable. It must be understood, too, that since original documents, such as government papers, family records, legal documents, ambassadors’ reports, treaties, official letters and speeches, administrative reports, and the like were rarely filed for archive purposes, historians like Maqrizi, writing of events before their time, were fain to draw wholesale on chroniclers contemporary to the events described, to whom alone these original sources were available and who, indeed, made wide use of them.
Maqgqrizi is a generally impartial historian. Allowing for the formal strictures which, by the convention of his time, he leveled against the Christian enemy, he is free from religious bias and pietism. He does, though, habitually overestimate the strength of the Christian forces.
Whatever his defects, Maqrizi remains preeminent for the industry and judgment with which he collected, selected, and arranged the immense and varied mass of material that he reviewed. In truth, Maqrizi’s literary output was very considerable, although not the greater part remains to us. Apart from his Khitat and his Sulwk, there exist only a few volumes of his biographical dictionary of Egypt,!° an unfinished work that projected eighty-four volumes, together with some _ historical and other monographs. His other compositions included a history of the prophet Muhammad and his family in six volumes, a description of the Arab tribes in four volumes, a biographical history in three volumes of distinguished men who had died since Magqrizi’s birth, a collection in nearly sixty volumes of assorted histories, a history of the city of Fustat (old Cairo), and a history of the Fatimid Caliphs of Egypt.
Magrizi followed the annalistic system whereby events are described chronologically as they occurred in successive yearly compartments. Each year begins: “In this year...,’ and the events thereafter chronicled in that particular year are connected by the words: “And in it [ie., in the same year].” This specialized form of chronological historiography was developed by al-Tabari (d. A.p. 923), whose monumental history begins with the creation of the world and continues to A.p. 915, Succeeding historians like Ibn-al-Athir (d. 1234) and Abt-’l-Fida’ (d. 1231) continued the successive years by describing the events occurring in their own time. The great drawback of this time system is its inhibition of the development and critical analysis of selected episodes and themes.
Moreover, the annalistic, more or less simple quotation system was not adequate to correct the bias and flattery of contemporary biographies, often written by courtiers on the demand of their ruler for his own glorification. Muslim biography nonetheless contains invaluable material and was much esteemed by Muslim historians. Believing in the beneficial effect of studying the lives of famous men of the past, Maqrizi would perhaps have agreed with H. St. John Bolingbroke’s famous line: “I think that history is philosophy teaching by examples’ (Letters in the Study and Use of History).
Magqrizi himself defined the object of history as being “rendering information about what once took place in the world,” al-Khabar ‘an al-Bashar. Although this does not strive, as Emerson exhorted, “to attain that lofty sight where facts yield their secret sense and poetry and annals are alike,” an ideal perhaps beyond attainment, it nevertheless represents a worthy concept that has presented us with a wealth of facts and information that otherwise would have been irretrievably lost.
The author was born in Cairo in A.D. 1364 of Baalbekan ancestry, his surname owing its origin to Makriz, a suburb of Baalbek. His grandfather, Muhyi-al-Din Abt-Muhammad ‘Abd-alQadir ibn-Muhammad ibn-Ibrahim al-Maqrizi, was a celebrated jurisconsult of the Hanbalite rite. His father, ‘Ala’-al-Din ‘Ali, married a woman of parts and sensibility, Azma, a daughter of the Shaykh Shams-al-Din Muhammad ibn-‘Abd-al-Rahman, for whom he wrote a biographical piece. He revealed precocious talent and received early employment in the Sultan’s diplomatic chancellery. He performed the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1385 and again in 1430 and 1435. In 1398 he was appointed Muhtasib (see n. 8, Chapter 2) of Cairo and of the northern part of Egypt. He was made inspector of the al-Qalanisi Wagqf, or pious foundation, in Damascus in 1408, and later was offered but declined the qadiship of that city. His contemporary standing is marked by the fact that among his pupils were Ibn-Taghri Birdi, al-Sakhawi, Ibn-Hajar al-‘Asqalani, and al-‘Ayni.
Magrizi was a man of piety, of agreeable address, and a zealous student of Muslim traditions. Brought up in the strict Hanafite rite, he changed to the Shafi‘ite on the death of his father, he being then twenty years of age. He died in the year 1442 at the ripe age of seventy-eight.
An understanding of the events that occurred in the Middle East, in times ancient and medieval, is a sine qua non for an appreciation of the problems—political, social, and economic— that beset it and affect Europe today. The relationship between the Middle East and Europe, although reaching back to ancient times, began seriously to develop with the Crusades, and continues to this day. The ever-moving frontiers between Europe and Asia, often described as the Eastern Question, were first contended between the realms of Greece and Persia. The Crusades and the Muslim Counter-Crusades were medieval manifestations of the problem.
When Pope Urban II preached the First Crusade in 1095, he called on Western Christendom to deliver Eastern Christendom and the Holy Places from the yoke of the infidel Muslims. The reverse was the result. When the last Crusade was over, the Eastern Christians, who hitherto had dwelt under the liberal dispensation of their tolerant Muslim rulers, now found themselves exposed to the indignant wrath of those finally triumphant masters. The ferocious fanaticism of the Crusaders had been matched by an increasing intolerance on the part of the Muslims—although indeed their warrings were not so cruel as those between the Christians themselves in Europe, as, for example, in the Thirty Years War. The relationship between the Byzantine and Arab empires, previously reasonably stable, had now become rancid. Weakened by the malicious diversion of the Fourth Crusade against Constantinople, that capital of Byzantium fell to the advancing Turks, who then moved deeply into Europe and crossed the Danube.
Although in the Crusades the ideological motive, in this case religion, was advanced by its promoters in order to gain popular support, in reality economic and secular factors comprised, as in most wars, the most important war aims.
A population explosion and pestilence and famine in Europe drove men of meager resources to seek new opportunities in fresh regions. Pope Urban II, in his call, titillated their appetites by describing Palestine as a land where rivers of milk and honey flowed freely. The Italian city states early set up emporia in the East, whither came porcelain and silk from China, carpets and tapestries from Persia and Samarqand, jewels and spices from India, and ivory and ebony from Africa. To this were added the enormous products of local factories. Sidon and Tyre produced glass of unthought-of clearness and fineness, the foundation of the stained glass of Europe’s cathedrals and abbeys. Egypt gave grain and textiles. Damascus contributed glass, steel, scent, and perfumes. From Arabia came incense and gums.
Brocades, embroideries, curtains, soap, copper and pewter ware, knives, needles, scissors, lamps, vases, chandeliers, bows and swords and much more were sold to these emporia, whose fleets brought them back to Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, whence they were carried over the Brenner and up the Rhine to Cologne, bifurcating there to Liibeck on the Baltic or Bruges on the North Sea. Along these routes famous cities of the Middle Ages came into being, with some, like Arras, with its tapestry and lace factories set up in imitation of those in the East.
Returning Crusaders, accustomed to the comforts and luxuries of the East, introduced their countrymen to the delightful taste of sugar, grown on the shores of Syria, and pepper, ginger, cloves, aloes, olives, lemons, melons, apricots, maize, sesame, carob, and rice. They embellished themselves and their ladies with fine new fabrics of fur, velvet, satin, silk, muslin from Mosul, baldachins from Baghdad, and damask from Damascus. Into their bare castles they brought curtains, rugs, hangings, and sofas. Their fine clothes and furniture were colored by brilliant new dyes like crimson, lilac, and purple.
In painting, book-illustration, church architecture and decoration, and other artistic fields the Crusaders learned more from Byzantium than from Islam.
In the early twelfth century, the Arabs introduced paper, first made in China, into Sicily, and there, too, at Palermo, was set up a factory to copy the Eastern tiréz workshops for making embroideries, brocades, and robes of honor. These latter, encrusted with gems and precious stones, were marvels of workmanship. The use of the compass, also invented in China, was learned by Italian sailors from Arab sailors, the first to use the instrument for navigation. The secrets and techniques for the production of glass in Syria were sold by the Crusader Prince Bohemund IV of Antioch to Venice in 1277, and the early production was under the supervision of Muslim artisans. Rock crystal, like the beautiful ewer in the treasury of St. Mark’s in Venice, was also brought to Europe by Crusaders, and Muslim potters introduced the ceramic industry to France and Italy.
Although all these fine products of the East attested the skill and flair of its artists and technicians, and the general opulence that supported it, on the intellectual and scientific side the Muslim Orient was in decline at the time of the Crusades. Moreover, the Crusaders themselves, as soldiers and colonists, had their main contacts with peasants and artisans rather than with intellectuals. Nonetheless, there were some instances of scientific transmsision, as for example the treatise written in the twelfth century by Leonardo Fibonacci of Pisa in which, after a visit to Syria and Egypt, he introduced Arabic numerals to the West, which hitherto had used the old cumbersome Roman numerals, so revolutionizing its mathematics. The building of hospitals and public baths in Europe was greatly stimulated by Crusader contacts.
In the field of literature at this time the stimulus was not inconsiderable. The great events of the time inspired the writing of history, including the greatest piece of medieval historiography, the Historia Transmarina of William of Tyre. The stirring deeds excited poetic imagination and provided heroic themes. Duke Godfrey of Bouillon, a leader of the First Crusade and first ruler of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem, was the hero of two French chansons de geste, the Chanson d’Antioche and the Chanson de Jérusalem, and his deeds were further enshrined in the cycle of the Chevalier au Cygne, a tale almost identical with the legend of Lohengrin. Chaucer’s Tales, the Decameron, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels, and the works of Milton and Sir Walter Scott all received impetus from the Arabian Nights, although what proportion was transmitted in the times of the Crusades and how much through Spain is still uncertain. The legends of the Holy Grail have unmistakable Syrian elements.
The failure of the military enterprise against the “unbelievers” induced in Europe an interest in Arabic and Oriental studies generally as a means of substituting persuasion instead of violence. In 1311 the Council of Vienne resolved upon the creation of chairs of Arabic at the Universities of Paris, Louvain, and Salamanca.
The knights learned much in the art of war. Sapping and mining, the uses of the crossbow, mangonels, and battering rams, of quilt coats under armor, and of combustibles used as missiles were learned from the Muslims. Although already possessed of sound techniques in military architecture, the Crusaders learned to replace their old keep and bailey castle, with its single wall, by the concentric castle, with its successive rings of walls. They added the lute and the kettledrum to their military bands, hitherto composed of horns and _ trumpets only. They discovered the practice of the tournament. They adopted, too, from the Muslims the science of heraldry. Azure derives from Arabic. The two-headed eagle and the fleur de lys were charges in Muslim heraldry, and lions, leopards, eagles, and other creatures were emblazoned on the shields and banners of Muslim warriors. The use of carrier pigeons to convey military information was also learned from the Arabs.
Windmills were introduced into Normandy by returning Crusaders in the late twelfth century. Waterwheels had existed in Europe before the Crusades, but an improved model was brought back from Hamah during the Crusades.
All this commercial activity demanded new financial arrangements and a system of credit notes, and banking firms started in Genoa and Pisa with offices in Syria. Consular offices were opened, the first ever appointed being that of Genoa to Acre in 1180. Fleets of mercantile shipping came into being in the Mediterranean.
A very important result of the Crusades was that the preoccupation of the turbulent Western lords and knights in the conquest of Outremer allowed the monarchs of Europe to assert their central authority and promote order in their realms.
Not least of the contributions of the Crusades was the shaking of the Western colonists from their ancient roots and their being confronted with new ideas and ways. Contact with an entirely different race and religion necessarily provoked comparisons, sometimes favorable and sometimes not, and engendered an inevitable spirit of understanding and a quickening of the imagination that must have been a steppingstone toward the Renaisssance. Intermarriage, social intercourse, commerce, and the daily routine of life tended to blur the distinctions of East and West. The Franks insensibly adopted much of the clothing and customs of the Orient, and the Muslims perforce admired the valor and discipline of the Franks. Although Crusaders newly arrived from Europe were filled with religious ferocity, the native-born Franks learned to respect and get along with their outnumbering Muslim neighbors, as was the case in reverse. The leaders of both sides often put aside religious motives and approached their problems in a wholly secular and pragmatic manner. With impartial vigor the Eastern kings and sultans turned their arms against whichever adjacent state, be it Muslim Arab, Turk, Egyptian, or Christian Frank, seemed ripe for the picking. The Frankish princes were equally opportunistic, and entered with indiscriminate expediency into treaties and martial alliances with Muslim rulers. In the opening pages of Maqrizi we see how the Franks under King Amalric I besieged Saladin in Damietta in tacit alliance with the Fatimid Caliph of Egypt. Many similar examples of Frankish-Muslim alliances follow.
We observe similar tendencies in the Middle East today, as in the case of Israel and the Lebanese Christians, where the practicalities of the situation outweigh ideologies. Familiarity and common interests overcome religious and political animosities, and a man like the native-born, Arabic-speaking Count Raymond III of Tripoli has his counterpart today in General Moshe Dayan of Israel.
Maqrizi’s Sulik is replete with details concerning conditions, administrative, military, and social, at the time of the Crusades. There is much information regarding the government and administrative system in Egypt, including the revenues accruing from the taxable sources such as date palms and acacia bark. The Egyptian navy and the revenues alloted to it are discussed, as is the military system, with the ranks, pay, privileges, and appanages of the emirs and the lower officers and the revenues deriving from their fiefs, the strengths of the various types of troops, and their annual budgets.
Many interesting apercus of historical personalities and comments on singular circumstances are given. Wine, for example, we notice, was prohibited only in the fasting months of Ramadan, and the tax on it accrued to the Sultan and his officers. At one time all provisions for the Sultan’s household were defrayed from the farmed tax on wine and beer, a monopoly bringing an annual receipt of 7,000 dindrs. Many murders were committed in Cairo by men in drink.
As was and is often the case in the East, there were great extremes of poverty and wealth, the former mitigated somewhat by the giving of zakah, or alms, a duty incumbent on all Muslims possessing property, including money, merchandise, and produce. When the inundation of the Nile, an annual event, was very low or totally absent, with a consequent poor irrigation and fertilization of the surrounding countryside, a great scarcity of food would result. A plague of locusts would exacerbate the crisis, and Magqrizi described a fearful famine in Egypt when a quarter of a million died in a short time. Men ate earth and manure and devoured corpses, and fathers even roasted and ate their dead children, this being most prevalent in the better houses. Many slaughtered others for food, and a number of physicians were lost, since they were often called to a house only to be killed and eaten. Commodities became so rare that even the rich could not buy them. There were not enough gravediggers to bury the piles of corpses, and in the stress of work they did not dig deep enough, so that soon the cemeteries could not be approached because of the stench of the corpses. From villages of five hundred souls only two or three remained. There was a general evacuation of Egypt for Syria, but many died on the way.
We read how in times of siege vast numbers perished of hunger, as when the Khwarizmians besieged Damascus in 1245 and cut off supplies, so that one man sold his house for a sack of wheat.
With all this went great opulence, the Middle East being, as already mentioned, the emporium of the known world. Maqrizi relates that when the Sultan al-‘Adil’s daughter, Dayfah, married the Prince of Aleppo, fifty mules and five hundred camels were required to carry her trousseau to her new home, together with a dowry of 50,000 dindrs and attendant maidens on a hundred camel litters. Her groom gave her five costly strings of pearls, a diadem of precious gems, five amber necklaces ornamented with gold, 150 gold and silver objects, many vestments, and numerous handmaidens and slaves. For her first-born ten cradles of gold and silver were made, and others of ebony and sandalwood, and dresses interwoven with pearls, rubies, and sapphires, as well as other rich articles of dress.
The salient theme of Magqrizi in these pages is the course of the Ayyibid dynasty of Egyptian sultans which, rising with the refulgent glory of Saladin (Salah-al-Din), declined and sank with his successors in a welter of internecine intrigue and war. It relates how the genius of one man united the turbulent Muslim world to turn the tide of Crusader conquest, and recounts the quarrels, jealousies, and treacheries which not only rendered the later Ayyibids unequal to the task of finally destroying the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem but encompassed their own destruction at the hands of their guards and slaves, the Mamelukes.
The eponym of this cultivated house, Ayyab, was a Kurd, a member of the hardy Indo-European race, proud and independent, who dwell in the mountains of Asia Minor and who are famed equally as brigands and as men of piety. His father had migrated to Baghdad, and in time Ayyub had come to receive the appointment of governor of Takrit, a citadel on the left bank of the Tigris. But a deed of blood by his brother Shirkuh exacerbated, in the eyes of the Caliph of Baghdad and the Saljtq Sultan who directed temporal affairs, the earlier offense of Ayyub in promoting the escape across the river of their retreating enemy ‘Imad-al-Din (Pillar of Faith) Zangi. To this rising potentate the brothers fled in the night with Ayyub’s new-born son, Saladin, and became his supporters in his founding of the Atabeg dynasty of Mosul and Aleppo. Formally entitled Atabeg (Turkish ata, “father,” and beg, “prince’) or guardian to young Saljiiq princes, Zangi, like other atabegs, soon substituted his own rule for those of his protégés. Zang was the first of the great Counter-Crusade warriors.
The two brothers assisted Zangi’s still greater son Nur-al-Din (“Light of the Faith’) Mahmud, who succeeded to Zangi’s Syrian possessions, with Aleppo as his capital. In 1154 he seized Damascus and thus made his territories contiguous with the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. When Niar-al-Din, as an ortho- dox Sunnite and upholder of the Caliph of Baghdad, sent an army to Egypt to deracinate the Shi‘ite heresy and caliphate of Cairo, as well as to deny that land to the Latin King Almaric I of Jerusalem, Shirkth was its commander, and with him went his nephew Saladin.
In 1169 Shirkth became governor of Egypt in the name of Nur-al-Din, and vizier to the effete caliph, the Fatimid al‘Adid; but on the death of Shirkth two months later he was succeeded by Saladin. On the death of al-‘Adid himself in 1171, Saladin became sole ruler of Egypt, although Nur-al-Din remained a watchful and suspicious suzerain until his death in 1174, leaving a minor in his place. Saladin was now ready to address himself to the two burning ambitions of his life: the establishment of the supremacy of the orthodox Sunnite faith and the destruction of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem.
The first object was obtained when, on the death of the Shi‘ite al-‘Adid, Saladin could ordain that in the prayers at the Mosque in Cairo the name of the Sunnite Caliph of Baghdad should be substituted for that of the heretic caliph. The extinction of the Shi‘ite caliphate and following in Egypt produced an incalculable effect on the destiny of the Muslim world, for North Africa and the Sudan would otherwise assuredly have followed it; and indeed the whole Muslim world might today await the coming of the Mahdi, the Shi‘ite Messiah.
The command of Egypt, with its strategic position and great resources, was also invaluable to the recovery of Palestine, the second objective of Saladin. For the nine years following the death of Nur-al-Din, Saladin was engaged in gaining the Syrian possessions of his late suzerain, acquiring Damascus in 1174 and Aleppo in 1183. With Syria and Egypt joined, and with the true faith of the Sunnite supreme between the Tigris and the Nile, Saladin was ready for the Counter-Crusade, the ;7had, or holy war.
In the opposing Christian camp all the portents were propitious to the new sultan’s design. Much of the wonder and magic that had attended the creation of the Christian states under Syrian skies had departed. The king, Baldwin IV, was a dying leper. The ignominious failure of the second crusade (1147-48), with its disgraceful discords and diversions, besides encouraging the Muslims, had brought, in Western eyes, discredit upon the whole endeavor. Many of the native Franks had been ¢educed, within a generation, by the insidious influences of the East and, taking to themselves Syrian women, clothes, food, and modes of life, had become reconciled to view the Muslims as joint occupants of Syria. Their cousins, the recruits from the West, lustful for gain and filled with ferocity toward the infidel foe, they resented and thwarted. The Italian city republics of Genoa, Venice, and Pisa, whose powerful navies had been largely responsible for the conquest of the Syrian coastal cities, were interested only in their trade with the East and were indifferent to the condition of the interior. There remained one grave flaw in the strategic design to prove the ruin of the Latin kingdom. It had been cardinal to its safety that its eastern frontier should be extended to its natural and defensible boundary of the Syrian desert. For the Muslim possession of the cities of Hamah, Hims, Baalbek, and Damascus gave them the bases from which, reinforced from the east, they could mount and deliver swift and surprising attacks on the exposed Christians. It was the slender numbers of their fighting men which no doubt precluded this obvious consummation. The losses from battle, disease, and fatigue under an eastern sun, combined with a dire mortality among their children, could not be supplied from the sparing reinforcements from the west.
There remained the Greeks, strong in their navy, their improved army, and their gold, of whom aid might be sought. The inveterate hostility between the Latin and Byzantine worlds had been suspended by the mutual helps of the First Crusade. But the breaking of oaths and treaties, as when Bohemund seized Antioch for his own, and a pogrom against the French and Italian colonies in Constantinople, had vitiated the uneasy alliance. The Greek emperor, aware that the Normans were persuaded that only with the Latins in control of the coast could the Muslims be held, was not averse from the Muslims keeping them engaged. No Greeks, therefore, fought beneath the banner of the Cross against Saladin at the Battle of Hittin (1187), which smashed the kingdom of Jerusalem and left to the Latins only the city of Tyre and, to the north of the kingdom, the principalities of Antioch and Tripoli. Even the Holy Cross itself, which possessed a special power of regeneration to compensate for wear and tear, passed into hands all too ready to test its powers.
Against the grand and heroic Third Crusade which these disasters provoked Saladin still prevailed; and it may reasonably be supposed that the first of the Ayyubids alone prevented a long, and perhaps perpetual, dominion over Egypt and Syria by the Christian West. For, during the three preceding centuries, under the Tulinid, Ikshidite, and Fatimid dynasties, Egypt had fallen into increasing anarchy and impoverishment, and if the Franks had had to meet only the debauched and feeble Fatimid caliphs, in a land debilitated and depopulated by the economic crisis of 1062-73, torn by intrigue and dissension, tyrannized by rival Negro and Turkish viziers and military officers, and wracked by a futile administration, the golden oriflamme of St. Denis must surely have waved triumphant above the Cairene walls. The victories of Saladin were supported by the erection in Egypt of an order and cohesion long unknown; and the institution, with his successors, of the political organization and administrative machine that was continued and developed by the succeeding dynasty of the Mamelukes must be counted for achievement to the Ayyubids.
Had the successor of Saladin been of his father’s mettle, the Christian occupation of the Holy Land might have ended in his time. But even had he possessed the capacity, his opportunities, from the outset, were greatly constricted. For Saladin, who had seventeen sons and one daughter, divided his empire among the elders of them; and the story of their jealousies and quarrels—in which the command of Egypt was the main prize for contention—and those of their cousins, the sons of Saladin’s brother al-‘Adil (Saphadin), who ousted them, largely compose the chronicle of the pages which follow. The dissolution of Saladin, it will be seen, ensured the dissolution of the hard-won unity of Islam.
During the fifty-seven years in which his successors reigned, their incessant quarrels prevented their combined attack upon their Christian foes. Indeed, at times they even sought them as allies in their internecine feuds, and it was well for them that the Fourth Crusade was diverted against the Byzantine empire.
Yet they produced sultans of distinction and achievement, and have been described by Runciman as “the kindly and cultured Ayyubites.”"! Al-‘Adil effected, for a time, something of the unity of Saladin; and his son al-Kamil, despite treachery, repulsed the Fifth Crusade and secured the evacuation of Damietta, for which the Crusaders were fain to accept, as consolation, the Holy Cross. Both these sultans displayed tolerance and honor in their dealings with the Crusaders. It was basic to al-‘Adil’s policy to avoid the provoking of another crusade, and Maaqrizi reveals the active kindness of al-Kamil toward his Christian subjects. It was al-Kamil’s religious tolerance, when in fear of his brother al-Mu‘azzam, which allowed him to seek the aid of the Emperor Frederick, whose religious laxity matched alKamil’s. The Hohenstaufen, excommunicated by the Pope and frustrated by the Lombard League, was well disposed for a politic crusade, and we meet this dazzling and perfidious prince, at once attractive and repellent, the Wonder of the World, linguist, soldier, philosopher, statesman, and scientist, on his celebrated visit to Jerusalem in 1229. His treaty with al-Kamil (1229), the result of skillful manipulation of Ayyubid jealousy, gained Christendom its last fifteen years of possession of Jerusalem (1229-44), a triomphe sans lendemaine.
Renewed dissension among the heirs of al-Kamil encouraged the Franks to the act of fatal folly which forever ruined their field army, kept them defensive within their fortified cities, and lost them Jerusalem in finality. Allying themselves to the Ayyubid rulers of Hims, Damascus, and Aleppo, they were deserted by those princes on the field of battle at Gaza in 1244 and overwhelmed by Baybars, the Mameluke general of the sultan of Egypt, al-Kamil’s son al-Salih Ayyab, and his allies the Khwarizmians.
Pressed by the Mongols behind them, these savage shepherds of the Caspian, who had won dominion between the Ganges and the Tigris, had swept like a fire through Mesopotamia and Syria, burning, pillaging, and slaying. In turn offering their flaying swords to the contending Ayyibids, they were finally annihilated by the confederate and disgusted princes at Hims in 1246.
But a still more ferocious scourge menaced Frank and Muslim alike. At the death of Jenghis Khan, his hosts of horsemen, bursting like a cyclone from their steppeland wastes, had carved an empire that stretched from the Pacific Ocean to the Dnieper. The successors of the Great Khan continued the expansion. Trampling on the necks of a crowd of kings and princes, they drove away the Khwarizmians to become the mercenaries of the rival Ayyubids. At the gallop they ravaged Kiev and Poland, annihilated the Germans at Liegnitz in Lower Silesia, and destroyed the Saljiiq power of Rum. The Saljiiq Turks of Ghuzz had emerged in the eleventh century from Transoxiana to become the protectors and tyrants of the puppet caliphs of Baghdad. Thence they had come to conquer Asia Minor and found the empire of Rim. Their most illustrious prince, Kayqubad, won fame by his victory, with the Ayyubid al-Ashraf, over the Khwarizmian Shah, Jalal-al-Din, in 1230. But by his destruction of the Khwarizmian empire he removed the only buffer between him and the impending Mongol. In 1231 an expedition against him by the Ayyabid princes under al-Kamil miscarried, again through their mistrust of each other. His son and successor Ghiyath-al-Din Kaikhasraw II ensured the ruin of his dynasty by sustaining defeat at Kazadaq in 1243 beneath the swords of the conquering Mongols.
The warrings of these Scythian scourges against the Muslims, their religious curiosity, and the marriage of Christian princesses into the family of the Great Khan had disposed Pope Innocent IV to indulge the hope of their conversion to Christianity. Indeed many of them were nominal Christians, and Rome even regarded their eruption upon the Arabs as an intervention inspired by Providence. Further, they might be a mighty ally, the anvil against which the Muslims could be smitten and smashed. Jerusalem had recently been lost. A new crusade seemed necessary and propitious.
The objective, Egypt, was unexpected by the Muslims, but obvious to the attacker. The center of Muslim power had moved to Egypt. It was their richest territory, and controlling the commerce of the Indian Ocean therefore attracted the Italian sea-states. Its denial to the Muslims would rob them of their Mediterranean fleet and expose them to envelopment from Acre and Suez. And St. Louis, King of France, had no doubt learned how deeply the Mamelukes had subverted the power of the dynasty they were so soon to replace. Damietta was the immediate objective, and Cairo was the next.
But the extraordinary and lengthy preparations of the French king failed to secure the success of the maritime enterprise. Maqrizi portrays the energy and valor of the corps of Mamelukes—introduced to his court by the imprudence of al-Salih Najm-al-Din Ayytb, the penultimate Ayyabid—in routing the Christians, conspicuous among them Baybars the Arbalester, within months, as the final pages here recount, to cut down his sultan and with him the Ayyubid house, and to become himself the greatest of the succeeding dynasty of Mamelukes.
The name and merit of Maqrizi have so long been acknowledged that it is a matter of astonishment that there exists no English translation of his works. Of his two major extant productions, the Khitat and the Sulik, the latter only has been rendered into a European language. The earlier part, dealing with the Ayyubid dynasties of Egypt and Syria, has been rendered into French by E. Blochet (Paris, 1908) under the title Histoire d’Egypte de Magqrizi, and the remaining portion of the Suluk, relating to the subsequent Mameluke dynasties, has also been translated into French by M. Quatremére (Paris, 1837) and entitled Histotre des Sultans Mamlouks. Both these translations, in addition to their intrinsic excellence, are accompanied by full and copious notes invaluable to students of the period and drawn on by myself in this translation of the earlier Ayyubid period.
It is fortunate that, since the translations of Quatremére and Blochet, the aforementioned Egyptian scholar, Dr. Mustapha Ziyadah, should have come upon a manuscript unknown to them, a manuscript of excelling value in that it was written in the author’s own hand. This autograph manuscript lies in the Yani Jama‘ Library in Constantinople and is numbered 887. It is the first volume of the original series of four, is written, according to Ziyadah, in a clear medium naskh hand, and ends at the year A.D. 1304. It therefore covers the period translated by Quatremére and Blochet, save that the manuscripts used by them extend to 1309. These manuscripts Nos. 1726-28 in the Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris, Fonds Arabe, Ziyadah used for comparison with the Yani Jama‘ text to resolve obscurities and supply deficiencies caused by the ravages of time. These Paris manuscripts were copied, or at least completed, by the scribe in A.D. 1361, nearly two centuries after the death of Magqrizi. In making their translations from them, neither Quatremére nor Blochet used any other text to check variants, to supply omissions caused by damp, adhesion of pages, and fading, and to correct the errors and slips of the coypist. Ziyadah had that advantage and, more important, could work from the original product of Magqrizi’s own hand, wherein is much that the copyist of the Paris manuscripts had missed. The editor found himself so well served by these resources that he felt he had no occasion to consult the other manuscripts which exist and which he enumerates and locates in his Introduction. It is this edition of the Sulak by Dr. Ziyadah, published by the Egyptian Library Press (Cairo, 1934-36), which I have used to make my translation of that part of it which recounts the history of the Ayytbids. I have not translated the opening pages of Magqrizi, for they present but a brief and general review of the ‘Abbasid caliphate, the Buwayhid supremacy, and the Saljtqid sultanate, periods well anterior to the author and on which he throws little light.
I have striven to make my rendering as true to the original as grammar and syntax will allow and historians will require. Words and phrases added by myself, or adduced from others (with due reference) in order to complete the sense or balance of the passage I have placed within the body of the text between parentheses. Very short explanatory notes I have also placed, for speed of reading, within the text, in this case between brackets. Fuller notes to each chapter I have consigned to the end of the translation, and a bibliography gives the writers and works referred to in them. Here again I am particularly indebted to the recent scholarship in the medieval Egyptian field of Dr. Ziyadah. Italicized Arabic words and phrases are explained in a Glossary, and a row of asterisks indicates a lacuna in the original manuscripts. I have used the standard method of transliterating Arabic words and names into English, save in the case of familiar anglicized forms, e.g., emir, Jerusalem.
Withal, I am conscious of many imperfections and inadequacies and can well understand why Cicero and Quintillian recommended the practice of translation as essential to the forming of an accomplished writer and orator.
The work has received the inestimable advantage of a thorough check by the late Professor Nabih Amin Faris of the Department of History in the American University of Beirut. He consumed two years in comparing my work with the Arabic text, going through it, as he wrote to me, “with a fine comb.”
It is impossible to overestimate the value of the immense scholarship and meticulous diligence which Professor Faris brought to his task. That he did so in the midst of his labors on al-Ghazzali, on scholarly articles, and on multifarious administrative duties, as well as in supervising all Y.M.C.A. work in Lebanon, is testimony at once to his industry and to his goodness of heart. From the deep debt of gratitude I came to feel toward him I can well understand the universal dismay, in the world of scholarship and far beyond, at his untimely death. Any thanks that I can give him must be too small.
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