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Contributors
John A. Ferejohn is a political economist and democratic theorist who has written widely in the areas of political institutions and behavior, judicial politics, and the philosophy of social science. He was the Carolyn S. G. Munro Professor of Po liti cal Science at Stanford University before becoming Professor of Law and Po liti cal Science at New York University in 2009.
Ferejohn is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and has held fellowships with the Brookings Institution, the Guggenheim Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois, and the Center for the Advanced Study of the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford. He received an Honorary Degree from Yale University in 2007 for his contribution to the development of positive po liti cal theory. He sits on the editorial boards of Social Choice and Welfare, Democratization, Supreme Court Economic Review, and the Cambridge Press series Philosophy and Law and Economics and Philosophy.
Frances McCall Rosenbluth is a po liti cal economist with a special interest in Japan. She is the Damon Wells Professor of International Politics at Yale University. She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has received fellowships from the Fulbright Commission, the Social Science Research Council, the Abe Fellowship Program of the Japan Foundation, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Her books include Financial Politics in Contemporary Japan (Cornell 1989), Japan’s Po liti cal Marketplace (Harvard 1994, with Mark Ramseyer), Th e Politics of Oligarchy: Institutional Choice in Imperial Japan (Cambridge 1996, with Mark Ramseyer), an edited book on Th e Po liti calEconomy of Japan’s Low Fertility (Stanford 2007), Women, Work, and Power (Yale University Press 2010, with Torben Iversen), and Japan Transformed: Politi cal Change and Economic Reform (Prince ton University Press 2010, with Michael Th ies). Thomas Conlan is a historian of Japan at Bowdoin College. Professor Conlan studied Japa nese history at the University of Michigan (B.A., 1986), Kyoto University, and Stanford University (Ph.D., 1998). Conlan’s scholarship focuses on medieval Japa nese history and in par tic u lar on the nature of warfare and the po liti cal role of esoteric (Shingon) Buddhism. His books include In Little Need of Divine Intervention (Cornell 2001); and State of War: Th e Violent Order of Fourteenth Century Japan (Michigan 2003). Karl Friday teaches at the University of Georgia, where he focuses on Japa nese military institutions and traditions. His Ph.D. is from Stanford in history in 1989. His books include Hired Swords: Th e Rise of Private Warrior Power in Early Japan (Stanford 1992), Legacies of the Sword: the Kashima Shinryu and Samurai Martial Culture (Hawaii 1997), and Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan (Routledge 2004). Professor Friday’s most recent book is called The First Samurai: Taira Masakado and His World (John Wiley & Sons). Susumu Ike is a professor of medieval and early modern history at Hitotsubashi University in Japan.
He is widely known in Japan for his economic history of Japan and for his research on Hideyoshi Toyotomi’s invasion of Korea. Tsuguharu Inaba is well known in Japan as a proponent of “new cultural history,” which examines po liti cal economy from “the bottom up.” Eschewing older models of history that focused on elite behavior or economic determinism, Inaba’s research entails painstaking archival work to understand the lives of common villagers. Pierre Souyri is a historian of medieval Japan at the University of Geneva. Professor Souyri received his Ph.D. in history at Paris- Nanterre University in 1984 and taught at the Paris Institute of Oriental languages and civilizations (Inalco) for fi ft een years before taking his current position in Geneva in 2003. Although most of his scholarly work is in French, English- speaking readers are familiar with his highly accessible book on Japa nese history, Th e World Upside Down: Medieval Japa nese Society (Columbia 2001).
Carol Richmond Tsang is a specialist in the religious movements in medieval Japan that successfully resisted Japa nese territorial consolidation for many de cades. She received her Ph.D. in history from Harvard in 2005 and is the author of War and Faith: Ikko Ikki in Late Muromachi Japan (Harvard East Asia Center 2007).
Introduction Th e Ninja— the lightly armed warrior who operates by stealth and amazing physical prowess to attack powerfully equipped enemies— is a familiar comic book image and heroic action fi gure. It is generally known that the ninja existed sometime in the mists of Japa nese history. Less well understood is that the ninja was but one manifestation of fi erce and extensive re sis tance to encroaching armies in the dying years of medieval Japan. Local farming communities, particularly those in mountain valleys, armed themselves with simple weapons and guerrilla techniques to forestall the trend toward territorial consolidation and centralized taxation. Th e transformation of “ninja” (the “forbearing ones” or shinobi mono) into warriors with virtually supernatural powers is a recent invention that glorifi es the struggle of humble mountain villages for local autonomy in the late sixteenth century. Th e world is more familiar with similar events in Eu rope. Th e legend of William Tell is of a simple mountain man who inspired Swiss alpine farmers in 1307 to resist domination by the Habsburg Empire. Tell, it is said, was forced to shoot an apple on his son’s head in exchange for freedom aft er he failed to bow to the Austrian governor’s hat placed in the village square.
In the Battle of Morgarten in 1315, Swiss farmers armed with rocks, logs, and pikes are said to have crushed the magnifi cent cavalry of Duke Leopold I of Austria in an ambush at Morgarten Pass, pushing countless horses and their riders off a steep mountainside, spearing other unfortunates through with pikes, and causing the rest to fl ee in terror. Swiss pikers from mountain villages managed to protect their land from foreign invaders, thereby assuring Swiss autonomy. Feared and admired the world over for their ferocity in battle, Swiss fi ghters were recruited into mercenary armies throughout Eu rope.
The Roman Catholic pope chose them for his own guards, a role they continue to serve, at least symbolically, to this day. Unlike the Re nais sance Italians or the seventeenth- century En glish, the Swiss did not elaborate an indigenous theory of limited government, though their practices of cantonal government with local referenda have endured. Th e Swiss mountain warriors were uneducated farmers and woodsmen scrabbling out a living in alpine valleys and were unfamiliar with the classical Greek and Roman texts that inspired Italian and En glish antimonarchical theorizing. What distinguishes the Swiss in the forest cantons from farmers elsewhere— as well as from Swiss farmers in the rolling hills in the north— was not so much a belief in the right to their land, but the formidable terrain that made it possible for them to think they had a chance to preserve their in dependence.
Th ere is little wonder that the great plains of Eu rope, which sometimes doubled as highways for marauding armies, were populated with seemingly weak- kneed farmers who chose instead to exchange their labor for military protection. Japa nese mountain dwellers and Swiss alpine farmers took naturally to fi ghting for their freedom, not because they were braver than their lowland counterparts, but because their craggy fortresses gave them the possibility of resisting domination. Th ree other groups in Japan successfully resisted po liti cal incorporation for centuries. For seafaring pirates (wako), water provided the functional equivalent of mountain defense. Th eir ships navigated deft ly through the coastal waters, which they knew better than those who commanded the commercial ships on which they preyed or the government’s ships that pursued them. As Japan’s earliest historical rec ords testify, pirates plagued coastal commerce around the Japa nese archipelago from time immemorial. Th e po liti cal arm of Buddhism constituted a second group in medieval Japa nese society that managed for centuries to repel the government’s encroaching territorial and jurisdictional authority. Buddhist temples, monasteries, and farming communities, oft en heavily armed but also oft en allied with members of the imperial family, avoided government taxation and regulation until Oda Nobunag, one of the unifi ers of Japan, fi nally brought them to heel in the 1580s. Priests protected the tax- free status of temple lands by promising blessings to their patrons, but they would resort to armed defense when necessary. In the case of the spectacularly expansive Ishiyama Honganji branch of Jodo shinshu (Pure Land) Buddhism (discussed in detail in Carol Tsang’s chapter in this book), thousands of believers were members of a vast Buddhist movement in the province of Kaga. Th ey enjoyed de facto autonomy from Kyoto or local warlords until they were vanquished in 1584. Less romantic but more successful was the opposition to centralized rule by the territorial domains in the far- fl ung islands of Kyushu and Shikoku or the outer reaches of eastern Honshu, which had consolidated locally around a powerful warlord (daimyō).
It was not until the Battle of Sekigahara in 1600 that these great outlying domains were vanquished. Th is battle occurred some 15 years aft er the defeat of mountain villages and religious communities, and only when one of the lords switched sides in the end game to gain spoils from the others. Th e secret to the local domains’ longevity was their attainment of considerable economies of territorial scale through the exchange of security for taxation with which to fund large armies. Th is early set of successful Hobbesian bargains at the local level would infl uence Japan’s constitutional structure for centuries to come, in the form of Tokugawa’s de facto federal system, which was built on semiautonomous domains.
All of Japan, some parts of which were more aff ected than others, succumbed to Tokugawa rule for three centuries before a new government would take tentative steps toward constitutional monarchy in 1868. Although the Meiji oligarchs only cracked open the door to electoral competition, the energetic expressions of free speech and support for democracy by incipient political parties were testament to a latent yearning for self- governance. Th is is not to say that Japan’s freedom- fi ghting past was a continuing legacy that kept alive the potential for re sis tance. Re sis tance or acquiescence in Japan’s early history followed a pattern of opportunity or necessity. The Japa nese accommodation to military rule in the 1930s and 1940s, which was followed by an enthusiastic embrace of democracy from 1945 onward, is better explained by changes in constraints than by long- standing mental frames.
This book relates the tumultuous events of Japan’s medieval and early modern history— roughly 1185 to 1600— to theorizing about war and politics elsewhere. Japa nese resisters and Swiss alpine warriors are exceptions to the general rule that people tend to populate fertile plains where livelihood is the easiest to secure. Th e plains areas were also the favored pathways of invading armies and were used to destroy the food supplies of enemy troops as well as to amass large armies on a battlefi eld. While Japa nese and Swiss holdouts provide a fascinating sideshow, the main story of the emergence of the modern territorial state is a Hobbesian one of distraught peasants exchanging fi nancial and labor resources for military protection. We do not intend to paint a picture of happy peasants bargaining and contracting for a better life. Rather, we seek to underscore the severe circumstances in which the Japa nese, along with many of the earth’s population, found themselves. As the weak have always known, when life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” subservience to a protective power may be a lesser evil, even if it is a deeply resented one. Japanese and Swiss fi ghters off er a romantic picture of rustic self- governance of the sort that Rousseau contemplated in his discourse on equality. But Rousseau’s world was out of reach for most people. In the embattled lowlands of France, for example, the protection that comes with strong centralized government gave Bodin’s work widespread credibility. Opposition to absolutism was stiff er, and theorizing about limited government was more prolifi c in Italy and En gland, whose indeterminate topography left open a range of political outcomes.
War, though miserable for those who fi ght and for those whose homes and fi elds are destroyed in the path of battle, can sometimes function as a po liti cal leveler. History provides some dramatic examples of po liti cal rights that have issued from war mobilization, starting with classical Athens and republican Rome. Mobilizing for war can shift the balance of bargaining power away from rulers in favor of those whose resources are required for battle. But much depends on several factors that affect how much and to whom rulers need to make concessions in exchange for resources, including whether the people supplying resources for war value the protection of a powerful ruler. If communities are confident of their ability to protect themselves, they will be willing to fight for others only in exchange for something of value such as po liti cal freedoms or, if they are already free, for pay.
Japanese mountain villagers needed relatively little protection from overlords because their topography made it possible for them to protect themselves. By contrast, agricultural communities that were located in the crossroads of competing territorial claims were more likely to supply increasingly large revenues in exchange for protection. Their fear of violence and instability was greater even than their desire for freedom from domination. Their willingness to supply resources for large armies lies at the root of Japan’s political unification in the sixteenth century. Th e same logic accounts for the rise of Eu rope’s large territorial monarchies.
The Rise and Fall of Decentralized Military Rule in Medieval Japan Th e debates among social and economic historians over the repressive nature of Japa nese feudalism have largely played themselves out as accumulating evidence suggests that farmers retained some leverage in dealing with overlords. We will therefore avoid using the term feudalism altogether. Moreover, farmers’ leverage varied considerably over time and place. Still underdeveloped, however, is theoretical analysis explaining this variation in leverage both within Japan and between Japan and elsewhere. Th e contributors to this volume establish that, holding all else constant, farmers’ bargaining leverage was inversely related to their vulnerability to military attack and hence to their willingness to pay for protection. All else is not constant, of course, because there were also more purely economic sources of farmers’ bargaining power, such as labor scarcity during the early period of land abundance. Japan was settled in the Paleolithic period, tens of thousands of years ago, by hunter- gatherers from the Asian mainland (to which Japan was physically attached by land bridges during the ice age) and fisher folk from Polynesia who enjoyed land abundance and relatively egalitarian social structures. Then, in about 300 b.c., waves of immigrants from Korea invaded Japan and pushed the earlier inhabitants into the mountains and outlying islands. Th e new ruling elite organized in to political units (uji) that jostled among themselves for preeminence. By the eighth century, the ujihad imported ideas along with material culture from China and took to calling their leader an “emperor” on the Chinese model.
Imperial succession, though sometimes spectacularly contested, was usually managed peacefully through negotiations among a co ali tion of leading clans. Unlike many powerful monarchical dynasties in China or Europe, imperial succession rules were loose, allowing for a large number of potential heirs. A signifi cant part of the ruling class derived benefi t from the imperial institution, giving it the structure of an oligarchy rather than an autocracy. Th e scions of some court families emigrated to the provinces beginning in the late ninth century. Th ey did well for themselves by exploiting their connections to powerful court fi gures and institutions, and by obtaining sinecures as government offi cials or managers of private estates. Th e court, in turn, cultivated its connection to these emerging military families to help extend the reach of the court into the hinterlands and to protect the court from both internal and external threats.
Access to abundant frontier land, followed by the scramble to clear new arable land out of forests and swamps, aff orded a modicum of bargaining leverage to farmers who were willing to do this work. Noble families, whose land was exempt from some kinds of taxation, bid up the price of agricultural labor in their eff orts to claim new land for themselves. Farmers oft en chose to work as tenants on this tax- privileged land rather than to till taxable lands allotted to them by the central government. Meanwhile, provincial nobles and other elites increasingly commended their lands to military leaders, who could defend the land from predation by bandits and opportunistic neighbors. In the centuries that followed until the sixteenth century, the imperial court became overshadowed by military order provided by one group of warriors or another. Periods of stability were punctuated dramatically by violent rivalries, until all of Japan— save a few mountain redoubts— became engaged in civil war from 1467. Th e romantic image of the valiant and honorable medieval samurai keeping the peace is a myth. Among warriors, loyalty to their lord was least common when it was the most valued. Warriors fought alongside their lords when they thought they could win, but they oft en switched sides to join the victors rather than have their land confi scated and reallocated among the winners. Among the farmers whose land was ravaged and lives were destroyed, war was hell.Territorial Consolidation Farmers were inevitably drawn into wars among provincial warriors in one way or another. But by the mid- fi ft eenth century, when territorial control of Japan was divided into scores of local domains, two of the most innovative warlords, Oda Nobunaga (1534– 1582) and his general Toyotomi Hideyoshi (1536– 1598) who succeeded him, sharpened the division of labor between farmers and warriors (heino bunri) that had already begun to emerge under domainal rule. Farmers were to remain on their land to produce food and pay taxes, while only warriors (many who had previously been farmers, jizamurai) would fi ght in battles. Although taxes increased, so did agricultural productivity and economic growth.
Making good on the promise to protect farmers gave these leaders an enormous advantage over their opponents. Leaving farmers on the farm, Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi created disciplined and skilled armies. Histories of modern warfare herald Maurice of Nassau (1567– 1625) and Gustav Adolf of Sweden (1594– 1632) for building regimented and skilled armies, but Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi were achieving similar success on the other side of the globe. Hideyoshi also carried out extensive land surveys to clarify available assets for taxation, and he dealt gently with former enemies to win their compliance. In the space of less than two de cades, Hideyoshi and Nobunaga reversed the centrifugal movement toward smaller po liti cal units and created signifi cant economies of scale. By the 1580s, they had managed to consolidate about half of Japan’s land mass under unitary rule. Although it remained for Tokugawa to build a co ali tion big enough to fi nish the job, Nobunaga and Hideyoshi had broken the back of re sis tance to central military control. Warrior- farmers in mountain hideaways and armed monks in monasteries in Kyoto, Kanagawa, and elsewhere held out with remarkable tenacity. For these fortress communities, some by virtue of geography and others by virtue of religiously motivated militarism, the protection that Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi aff orded came at a dear price: their autonomy. Th e result was a series of ferocious, village- razing battles in which the trained armies of samurai won. It was not a technologically foregone conclusion, however, for guns were available to both sides. Th e or gan i za tion al and numerical superiority of the conquering army was made possible by the taxes of millions of war- weary farmers.
War and State Building in Japan and Eu rope Following the fall of the imperial court in the late twelft h century, Japan came to be dotted with castles of noble warriors in much the same way as was then happening in Eu rope. Farmers in the surrounding countryside provided labor, crops, or both in exchange for protection from invaders provided by the nobility’s cavalry. Common to both Japan and Eu rope was the rather small territorial size of feudal domains aft er the breakup of empires, given the diffi culty of protecting large tracts of open terrain with small bands of warriors on horse back. It was not until war once again became endemic, and farmers were willing to pay larger sums for their protection, that military leaders raised armies large enough to command expansive territorial control. Changes in economies of territorial scale are, of course, also aff ected by factors such as modes of economic production and military technology. But economics and technology, whether alone or together, leave unexplained substantial parts of the variation in scale economies. Economic theory might suggest, for example, that Eastern Eu rope was dominated by larger fi efs and more per sis tent serfdom because economies of scale in grain production there are greater than for the crops cultivated in the hillier terrain of Western Eu rope. Th e fi xed costs of maintaining teams of oxen and other farm equipment would be too great for small landholders, making large manors more eco nom ical ly productive. Th ere is no obvious reason, however, why farmers might not have worked out some cooperative arrangement to share expensive livestock and tools. Another infl uential economic model of serfdom (and slavery) turns standard bargaining logic on its head. Precisely because abundant land- to- labor ratios favored peasants in Eastern Eu rope compared to Western Eu rope, po liti cal regimes had to be more oppressive in order to extract economic surplus from peasants. Regimes that mustered coercive power displaced their more timid counterparts because they were able to extract greater eff ort and productivity from peasants. But this model does not explain the origins of coercive power. Military technology is another possible explanation for changes in economies to territorial size. Th e introduction of stirrups to Eu rope from somewhere in Asia in the late seventh century gave the cavalry an edge over amassed foot soldiers, ushering in an era of feudalism in which only nobles could aff ord the required horses and armor. Castles were easy to defend and hard to destroy, creating diseconomies of scale until the invention of heavy artillery in the midfi ft eenth century. With the development of cannon in 1449– 1450, Charles VII of France regained much of Normandy by knocking down 60 fortifi cations— each of which took the En glish a year to build— at a clip of more than one a week. Th e Turks destroyed Constantinople in 1453 with comparable dispatch. Well- regimented armies, equipped with heavy artillery, were now a match for the castles and cavalry of the nobility. Changes in technology may indeed have shift ed the relative productivity between capital- and labor- intensive modes of warfare, with potential consequences for the bargaining leverage of those with capital or labor. While rich nobles thrived in the age of the cavalry, farmers stood to gain from the military value of foot soldiers before the stirrup and aft er the cannon. But the exposure of farmland to plundering armies meant that farmers were always exploited, even when they were mobilizationally useful. Th ey were too vulnerable to make use of their relative scarcity as bargaining leverage. Early modern Poland is instructive here because the inability of Polish peasants to assert their natural bargaining advantage conferred by the abundance of labor relative to land has always been something of a mystery to economists. Th e dominance of the Polish landed nobility makes more sense when one re- members the serial invasions by Magyar and other horse back invaders, against whom the Polish cavalry was quite successful.
The Polish cavalry’s battle record was so glorious that Poland neglected military innovation and was destroyed by Rus sian and Prus sian armies of foot soldiers in 1794 and 1797. For farmers the emergence of larger territorial units was a double- edged sword. Although the larger government unit was able to raise more powerful armies and provide greater security, it also meant that farmers lost the benefit of exit options among multiple political units. Th is was particularly true in Eastern Eu rope where there were fewer cities to provide absconding peasants with anonymity and alternative employment. Consolidating territorial size is a function of raising enough revenue to pay for the inputs of war, a problem the economic and technology accounts fail to address. Th e remaining puzzle is identifying the source of this money. Th e medieval Japa nese experience, like the Eu ro pe an one, revolved around an implicit peasant demand for protection. Lords competed for the loyalty of lesser lords, but ultimately the whole edifi ce rested on resources, which were wrested from the land in some fashion. Lords had an incentive to extract from their own base and compete for the loyalty of neighboring farmers.
Only where warfare was infrequent or where locals were confi dent of their ability to defend themselves did peasants resist taxes and territorial consolidation. Territorial consolidation began in those fl at areas that were most vulnerable to military invasion and spread as the armies of those areas gained preeminence. In France, monarchical control began in the Ile de France and Normandy but was resisted longer in Langue d’Oc and Brittany, and only gained widespread ac cep tance in the wake of harrowing religious violence in the sixteenth century. Elsewhere in Eu rope, taxes were higher and armies were larger in the great fl atlands of Prus sia and Rus sia, in the pathway of steppeland hordes. Big armies can oft en conduct an eff ective defense, but there is the question of paying to feed, train, and equip them. Widespread fear of violence and the demand for protection gave birth to the modern nationstate with territorial control, fi rst in the form of the absolutist state.
This recognition of the importance of peasant demand for protection differs from the Marxist suggestion that the landed nobility needed an absolutist state to fi x their status against the onslaught of the proto- industrial bourgeoisie. Nor were undefended “church lands” available for confi scation in Japan because monasteries tended to be armed to the hilt. In Japan, the unifi ers robbed their competitors of their lands militarily, whereupon they divided the lands among their men. In any case, the practice of rewarding loyal warriors with land taken from the vanquished had occurred so many times during Japan’s medieval period that by the mid- fi ft eenth century most of the elite were of shallow vintage. Not that this situation was unique to Japan; the Romans did the same thing following Sulla’s reforms and aft er Octavius’s victories. Th e “proscriptions” are remembered mostly for legal murders, but note that they also served to take lands away from rich opponents and confer them on allies. In overwhelmingly rural Eastern Eu rope, Rus sian and Prus sian “absolutism” seems hardly to have been a response to a threatening rise of the middle class. Peasant fear of violence from marauders is a more consistent theme that runs through all of these cases. Th is is not to deny that peasants were oft en miserable, on the verge of starvation, and hardly able to pay heavier taxes for larger armies. But in their desperation, they chose among the available poisons.
Their choices had significant consequences for the kinds of states that would subsequently emerge. Conclusions Widespread territorial vulnerability and fear of violence created the territorial state. Th is book tells that story as it unfolded in medieval and early modern Japan, but it follows a general logic that holds in Eu rope and elsewhere. Th ere is some irony to the way vulnerability paved the way for strong, hierarchical governments with extensive coercive powers over the subject population. At least in the short run, mobilization for war could have increased the bargaining leverage of the populace whose resources were needed for war. When foot soldiers are militarily valuable, peasants may profi tably refuse to fi ght unless the leader is willing to off er better terms of exchange. History gives us a number of examples of po liti cal concessions to peasant fi ghters, including fi ft h century b.c. Athens when Cleisthenes granted the masses full participatory rights in exchange for their help in ousting the Spartan- installed oligarchy. In Republican Rome, fi ghting wars for Rome was the ticket to citizenship, fi rst for local residents and then for men of conquered lands as well. During the protracted Dutch Revolt against the Habsburg Empire (1568– 1648), ordinary citizens gained the right to participate in politics, even if the rights were substantially retracted aft er the war was won. In modern times, World War I ushered in female suff rage in most rich democracies, World War II launched the civil rights movement, and 18- year- olds gained the right to vote during the Vietnam War. Why does war bring po liti cal rights in one setting and an abdication to absolutist government in another?
Japa nese history provides a number of clues. As the example of the ninja shows, mountain villagers had little use for an absolutist ruler when they could live out their lives without a strong protector. In the lowlands, the bidding among nobles for peasant support did in fact raise many farmers through the ranks of warrior status to become lords in their own right. But armies consisted of small bands of cavalry, and competing nobles typically could not aff ord to put entire villages in arms. Compared to classical Greece, which was invaded by the ferocious Persian army, violence in Japan escalated only slowly. We can only speculate whether, had the Mongols landed in full force, the Japa nese people might also have won po liti cal concessions in exchange for emergency mobilization. Th e piecemeal intensifi cation of violence in Japan worked against broader mobilizational concessions. Once widespread destruction reached an intolerable threshold, ordinary people were willing to pay for large armies and a leader strong enough to lead them.
Territorial consolidation ended competition among aspiring generals, without which peasant bargaining was attenuated. In the chapters that follow, historical experts sift through archival materials to provide a close look at the choices made by lords and peasants throughout the medieval period and across diff erent parts of Japan. In Chapter 2, Karl Friday reminds us that the samurai came into being from within the imperial system and served the system obediently for over 300 years. Although warriors possessed a monopoly over the instruments of armed force, and indeed functioned as the court’s protectors and administrators in the provinces, the warrior families were too divided among themselves, even under the Kamakura shogunate, to be a viable alternative to court- based rule and legitimacy. When the court collapsed into civil war between the Northern and Southern Courts in 1333– 1335, the Ashikaga shogunate stepped into the breech. But the power of the Ashikaga shogunate rested on the acquiescence of local military lords who claimed growing powers for themselves at the expense of centralized rule, setting the stage for eventual civil war. Chapter 3 by Susumu Ike describes the range of relationships between lord and retainer during the decentralized years of medieval Japan, aft er the decline of the imperial authority and before unifi cation under Oda Nobunaga. Competition among military leaders may have increased the bargaining leverage of peasants who were needed to feed the soldiers or to join armies as soldiers. But navigating relationships among competing nobles was treacherous business because backing a loser could mean the loss of land and death. Th e civil war that broke out in 1437 among lords competing for territory forced local villagers to make painful choices, sometimes in favor of retainers against their masters (gekokujo), when the retainer was thought to be better able to lead armies to victory.
In Chapter 4, Tsuguharu Inaba describes the misery of peasant life in wartime and explains the relief with which peasants greeted Oda Nobunaga’s policy of dividing labor between farmers and warriors. Rather than being distressed to have their swords confi scated, many farmers greeted with relief the new leader’s ambition to curb the fi ghting clans. Th roughout these years, Inaba emphasizes, farmers retained their local village councils in which they made their collective decisions to support the emerging centralized regime. Chapter 5 by Carol Tsang recounts the tenacity with which some religious organizations, such as the Honganji Temple in Osaka, resisted Oda Nobunaga’s pell- mell push toward territorial consolidation. Th e Honganji Temple’s thousands of followers in villages across a sizable area in today’s Ishikawa prefecture created a structure of local self- rule and po liti cal order to match that provided by local military leaders. Th e villagers who joined in this religious league had little need for the protection off ered by secular lords because they were well armed and well disciplined. Th eir belief that fi delity to their cause would be awarded in the aft erlife empowered them to fi ght fearlessly. But in the end, this league and others like it throughout central Japan were steamrolled by Nobunaga’s and Hideyoshi’s even more powerful military machines. Lacking the economies of scale that the centralizers had developed, the most passionately in de pen dent local re sis tance movements were swept aside. In Chapter 6, Pierre Souyri writes of the farmer- warriors from the mountain valleys of Iga and Koga near Kyoto who tenaciously resisted Oda Nobunaga’s ambition for territorial consolidation. Had these valleys been clustered more closely together rather than spread out along the spine of Honshu, one wonders whether a ninja league might not have prevailed as their counterparts did in Switzerland, with vastly diff erent consequences for Japa nese po liti cal history.
An alternative route to domestic tranquility, apart from the militarily imposed peace of an absolutist ruler, might have entailed the sorts of treaties that the Swiss Alpine regions concluded with the lowland cantons. In Chapter 7, Th omas Conlan addresses the question of how the more successful military lords managed to consolidate territory. Conlan documents the or gan i za tion al prowess of military leaders of regional domains. Among the many military governors or shugo, the most successful became domain lords or daimyō. For their spectacular success in achieving territorial consolidation, Conlon credits these generals’ methodical approach to gaining public ac cep tance, raising revenues, and building armies, rather than the guns with which they equipped their men.
In Japan, as in modern Eu rope, state building emerged out of the mayhem of warfare. But societal need for order is, by itself, no explanation for how a state capable of providing security materialized in either place. Th e variation within Japan over time and place suggests a mechanism for its emergence that was at work in Eu rope as well. Farmers in the pathway of armies became desperate for protection, even at the cost of their money and freedom. Although less vulnerable populations in hills or islands resisted territorial incorporation that would burden them with taxes to pay for the security of others, farmers on the fertile plains generated enough money and military might to break the re sis tance of these natural fortresses. In Japan, the entire archipelago became as one.
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444 Pages
Professor Amalia Levanoni’s Contribution to the Field of Mamluk Studies
Michael Winter
For over thirty years, Amalia Levanoni, Professor (Emerita) of Middle Eastern History at the University of Haifa, has contributed, through her vast expertise, devotion, and tireless efforts to the preservation and expansion of studies on the political, social and cultural history of the Mamluk state (1250–1517). She is one of the outstanding scholars in this fascinating and growing academic chapter of the Middle East in the later Middle-Ages. While drawing on the solid foundations of Israeli and international Mamluk scholarship, she continually finds new and pioneering themes and approaches. Amalia Levanoni has organized multiple international conferences in Haifa and other universities in Israel. She has also cultivated collegial ties with Mamlukists abroad and has been a very active participant in international conferences on the Mamluks. She has visited and lectured in many universities and centers where Mamluk and related subjects are researched, notably Oxford, Bonn and other German universities, as well as in Belgium, France and North America. Amalia Levanoni has numerous publications on the Mamluk regime and the military which examine the Mamluk concepts of the sultanate, Shajar al-Durr, the only woman sultan in medieval Islam, the Battle of ʿAyn Jālūt that presents a paradigmatic historical event in Mamluk historical narratives, and many others.
Her book, A Turning Point in the Mamluk History: The Third Reign of al-Nāṣir Muḥammad Ibn Qalāwūn (1310–1341) is a thoughtful analysis of his sultanate. Al-Nāṣir Muḥammad was one of the greatest Mamluk sultans, probably second only to Baybars, the actual founder of the state. Al-Nāṣir Muḥammad was a strong and energetic ruler and peace prevailed during his reign. He was an avid builder and spendthrift, and as Levanoni writes “he pawned the future” by his recklessness. His economic and financial policy led directly to the social, monetary, and moral decline of the state after his death. Amalia Levanoni has also published countless articles on cultural and social subjects and about daily life during the Mamluk period, such as the cooking and cuisine of the elite, relationships between the rulers and the ʿulamāʾ, women in the Mamluk elite, religion and theology, Mamluk travels and pilgrimages, and the water supply in medieval Cairo. The list of Levanoni’s articles is impressive in terms of their number, the originality of the subjects, and the journals in which they were published.
These include the International Journal of Middle East Studies, Studia Islamica, Der Islam, and Arabica. She has also written several articles for the Mamluk Studies Review, the leading journal in the field, which is published by the University of Chicago. In addition, Levanoni has contributed many items on Mamluk history to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition (EI2), and to the Encyclopaedia of Islam, Third Edition (EI3). Amalia Levanoni’s many book reviews of scholarly works about Mamluks and related issues testify to her authority in the field. Last but not least, Amalia Levanoni is an active and involved educator and colleague at the University Haifa, beyond Mamluk and Middle Eastern studies. Between 2013 and 2016 she served as President of the Middle East and Islamic Studies Association of Israel, the first woman to hold this prestigious position.
Preface
This collective volume incorporates 17 papers in the field of Mamluk studies written by a set of leading historians of this period, both from the younger generation of scholars as well as more established ones, in honor of Prof. Amalia Levanoni, one of the most influential scholars of Mamluk society and culture, who recently retired from the Department of Middle Eastern History at the University of Haifa. The articles in this volume are divided into five thematic categories covering social and cultural issues, women in Mamluk society, literary and poetic genres, the politics of material culture, and finally regional and local politics. Obviously in a project of this nature there is a certain element of eclecticism which has to do with the interests of the scholars participating, and some of the papers could very well fit into more than one category.
I have nonetheless tried to group them in categories which best suit the main themes discussed and allow different perspectives and comparisons on given subjects. For the most part the articles deal with topics their authors have already dealt with in the last decade or two, in previous projects and publications. Their current work can thus be seen as a statement about the field of Mamluk studies today and a review of its recent developments. This field has been changing very rapidly in recent decades and today includes hundreds of active researchers worldwide who write in numerous languages and constitute a lively, strong community. Amalia Levanoni has been a prominent member of this community since the 1980s and many of the contributions in this volume in fact correspond with her research and reflect her wide range of interests and research projects as well as her vast influence on the field of Mamluk studies.
Among Amalia’s varied research topics one can find the importance of the Battle of ʿAyn Jālūt, the role of the ʿulamāʾ in the Mamluk state, Mamluk food and its meaning, women in the elite of the Mamluk state, the water system in Mamluk Cairo, the writing of historians, travelers, and pilgrims during the Mamluk period, research about specific Mamluk sultans such as al-Nāṣir Muḥammad, everyday practices in Mamluk Cairo, governance, rulership, religion, and theology during the Mamluk period, and more. All of these issues are widely discussed in the 17 articles presented in this volume.
In the first section, Social and Cultural Issues, Carl Petry, in his article “Already Rich? Yet ‘Greed Deranged Him’: Elite Status and Criminal Complicity in the Mamluk Sultanate,” explores elite complicity in criminal activity as reported by contemporary observers. Students of crime in several medieval cultures have noted the ties between profitable criminal activity and individuals or groups socially situated at the apex of their societies to wield military force, police regulation, political influence and financial coercion. Why were these individuals or groups so motivated, when they already exercised hegemonic levels of control and oversaw assets in excess of what the great majority of the populace could hope to acquire?
This question raises issues as complex and diverse as the social contexts in which they pursued their activities. In late medieval Egypt and Syria, writes Petry, on-site observers who commented in detail on the behavior of local elites they regarded as illicit did not offer a uniform or consistent set of explanations for their complicity in crime for profit. But the frequency with which these observers reported what they regarded as elite complicity in crime reveals the significance they attributed to it. The article considers the range of explanations these observers put forward and tries to find continuities and contrasts in their assessments of elite complicity in profitable crime.
The article presents illustrative cases from criminal categories predictably associated with profitable gain such as larceny, theft, fraud, corruption, and counterfeiting. Other categories less associated with fiscal gain, such as religious deviance, but which also led to criminal incidents involving elite complicity for profit are also discussed. Koby Yosef, in his article “Usages of Kinship Terminology during the Mamluk Sultanate and the Notion of the ‘Mamlūk Family’,” challenges the standard perception of the family during the Mamluk period as primarily based on mamlūk connections. Most students of the Mamluk Sultanate, writes Yosef, tend to underestimate the importance of relationships based on blood ties and marital ties.
Instead, they emphasize the importance of mamlūk connections such as the relationship between a master and his mamlūks, or the connections among mamlūks of the same household serving the same master (khushdāshiyya), generally referred to as “pseudo-familial ties.” According to Ayalon, for example, the mamlūk’s period of enslavement determined his affiliations for life and, therefore, the structure of Mamluk society was based on what he called the “mamlūk family.” The patron and his freedmen developed relationships very similar to those of a biological family, and the terminology characterizing their relations was identical to terms used for the biological family. The patron was the ‘father’ (wālid) of his mamlūks, and they his ‘sons’ (awlād, sing. walad), and the freedmen regarded each other as ‘brothers’ (ikhwa, sing. akh). The khushdāsh of a master was considered an ‘uncle’ by the master’s mamlūks, and the master of the master was considered the ‘grandfather.’
According to Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Rāziq, the mamlūks did not understand “the true meaning of family” since their social relationships were based on mamlūk ties. Like Ayalon, he also emphasizes the fact that the terminology for these relationships was identical to that of the biological family. Yosef argues instead that the terminology of the biological family was used to express hierarchy at least as much as it was used to express affinity. Such metaphorical usages of biological familial terms are also attested for non-mamlūks and for periods other than the Mamluk Sultanate. Moreover, in many cases during the Mamluk Sultanate, when biological family terminology is employed with respect to mamlūks, the usage does not fit the structure of the “mamlūk family” as envisioned by Ayalon. In addition, many times the terminology of the biological family is used to express relationships between mamlūks who were in-laws or even blood relatives.
Yosef concludes that scholars’ emphasis on usages of biological family terminology with respect to mamlūks thus reflects their tendency to emphasize the importance of mamlūk connections during the Mamluk Sultanate to a greater extent than it reflects social reality. Limor Yungman, in her article “Medieval Middle Eastern Court Taste: The Mamluk Case,” examines the formation of the “Mamluk taste” as a culinary, cultural, and political choice constituting one unique example of medieval Middle Eastern court proclivities. Class formation and social status are shaped and determined, among other things, by food preferences.
This article explores the idea of the taste of medieval “haute cuisine” literally and symbolically in terms of what factors shaped it, and how it was regarded and practiced. Yungman reconstructs the tastes of the Mamluk court by investigating various sources, mainly cookbooks, chronicles, and reports on imports of food articles and ingredients that could not be found locally in Egypt such as rare and exotic spices. The “Mamluk taste” was based on two factors.
The first is external and has to do with the Mamluks’ background going back to the Golden Horde; i.e., the “taste” with which they came to Egypt. Remnants of Central-Asian cuisine can be found, such as the qūmiz (mare’s milk) and horsemeat frequently gracing the sultan’s table. The second was the internal influence of earlier court cuisines, such as the Abbasid-Baghdadi and the Fatimid, which in turn were influenced by pre-Islamic cuisines; for instance, the Persian-Sassanid. These two axes define the unique combination of Mamluk cuisine associating “nomad” cuisine and urban Caliphal “haute cuisine.”
In addition, the “Mamluk flavor” was also defined as “sweet” (Amalia Levanoni) and “seasoned and unrefined” (Paulina Lewicka), two features which are also investigated in the article. Yungman’s examination and analysis of historical recipes and other sources, especially in comparison to the nutrition of the rest of the population, leads to a better understanding of Mamluk taste even beyond the “culinary,” beyond the “eaten,” and beyond the Mamluk context. Bernadette Martel-Thoumian, in the only French article in this volume, “Du sang et des larmes: Le destin tragique d’Aṣalbāy al-Jarkasiyya (m. en 915/1509),” [Blood and Tears: The Tragic Fate of Aṣalbāy al-Jarkasiyya (died 1509], discusses the story of a Circassian concubine, whose tragic and fascinating life story reflects the fate of Mamluk elite women.
Aṣalbāy al-Jarkasiyya was a concubine of the Mamluk Sultan al-Ashraf Qāytbāy (r. 1468–96) and gave birth to his son and successor al-Nāṣir Muḥammad (1496–98). She witnessed the rise to power of his murderer al-Ẓāhir Qānṣūh min Qānṣūh (1498–1500), who was his maternal uncle. In 1500 she married atābak al-ʿasākir Jānbalāṭ who in the same year revolted against Qānṣūh min Qānṣūh and dethroned him, making the former concubine the sultaness for a short period of a few months. She then witnessed his emprisonment in Alexandria where he was executed and the vindication of his two successors Ṭūmānbāy and Qānṣūh al-Ghawrī.
She made the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1508, which gave the sultan an opportunity to exile her, where she died and was buried about a year later. Finally in this section, Daisuke Igarashi, in his article “The Office of the Ustādār al-ʿĀliya in the Circassian Mamluk Era,” discusses the role of chief of the al-Dīwān al-Mufrad, a special financial bureau entrusted with providing monthly wages (jāmakiyya), clothing allowances (kiswa), fodder (ʿalīq) for horses, and other provisions to the sultanic mamlūks (al-mamālīk al-sulṭāniyya). Al-Ẓāhir Barqūq, the first sultan of the Circassian Mamluk dynasty, founded the dīwān to increase and maintain his mamlūk corps.
The bureau was meant to fortify the sultan’s position in the throes of political instability and financial difficulties. Consequently, the newly established dīwān rapidly expanded its role, and the Mamluk state structure was reorganized. In principle, the ustādār al-ʿāliya was held by a high-ranking military man, usually an amīr of a hundred (amīr miʾah muqaddam alf), although the duties were not military.
Rather, they comprised financial management, which was usually the responsibility of the civil services. However, sources show that the actual careers and backgrounds of appointees varied as a function of the transition of the status and importance of the dīwān in the governmental system, which changed throughout the Circassian Mamluk period. The article lists all appointees to the office of ustādār al-ʿāliya and investigates the reasons for their appointment and dismissal. It systematically examines their careers and backgrounds as well as the political and financial situations of the Mamluk state in which each appointment was made.
This detailed investigation reveals the development of the function of the office of ustādār al-ʿāliya and helps contextualize the transition of the status of al-Dīwān al-Mufrad in the fiscal administration of the Mamluk state as a whole. In the second section of this volume, Women in Mamluk Society, Yaacov Lev, in his article “Women in the Urban Space of Medieval Muslim Cities,” addresses the issue of women in the socio-economic life of medieval Muslim urban society and how to read sources about them. The examination of literary sources, especially from Mamluk Egypt, has led scholars to the conclusion that there was a considerable disparity between concepts of the ideal position of women in society and the actual reality of their everyday lives.
The methodology adopted by some scholars can be described as a “reverse reading” of the sources. Among other things, the article examines the wider ramifications of this methodology and its potential pitfalls. Yehoshua Frenkel, in his article “Slave Girls and Learned Teachers: Women in Mamluk Sources,” concentrates on two groups of women during the Mamluk period, slave girls (concubines) and educated women. He highlights the dualism in writing about women as reflected in male dominated sources and the multifaceted conditions existing in urban centers of the Mamluk Sultanate. Chronicles, biographies, legal texts, and inscriptions, writes Frenkel, shed light on both the ideal social position of women and their image, as well as on historical reality throughout the long Mamluk dominion.
These sources describe free or slave women who were engaged in a variety of domestic and non-domestic forms of labor. The prevailing social attitudes, which are reflected in legal writings, indeed reinforce their image as a marginal component of Mamluk society. As they were prevented from holding leading legal, political or military positions they were forced into the background. This articulated, common arrangement is visible in accounts of social gatherings (majālis) in which the wives did not participate, but professional female performers took an active part. However, although women are underrepresented in Mamluk chronicles and biographical dictionaries, it should be emphasized that these sources offer rich accounts that highlight their lives and conditions. Hence, readers of Mamluk documentation should not accept any overstated popular generalization and should reject a-historical statements about “Muslim women, Islam and the woman, etc.” The information on the social position of Mamluk women and their textual image reflects, in contrast to a simplified and idealistic picture of past societies, a complex reality.
This stems from varying conditions, including their status and roles. The sources depict polar opposites from the pious ascetic woman to the shameless adulteress. Mamluk ʿajāʾib accounts (mirabilia), for example, transport their readers, as accepted in this literary genre, into realms of fantasy. Women in these stories often have irresistible seductive power and play the role of the destructive temptress. Boaz Shoshan, in his article “On Marriage in Damascus, 1480–1500,” the last article in this section, discusses the practices of marriage in Mamluk Syria.
While the basic customs associated with the act of marriage in Islam are well known, marriage customs in the pre-modern Middle East are less well explored. Among the hundreds of notarial documents included in Shihāb al-Dīn Aḥmad Ibn Ṭawq’s Taʿlīq, a sort of “diary” (yawmiyyāt) recorded between 1480 and 1503 CE containing detailed and variegated information about the social fabric of Damascus at the end of the Mamluk era, there are reports of about 150 marriage contracts, 65 of which contain relatively rich information.
This is undoubtedly the best set of data on this subject one could hope to find for a pre-Ottoman Islamic society anywhere. The article analyzes the marriage data and comments on the pattern of marriages among the Damascene population at the end of the Mamluk era. In the third section, Literary and Poetic Genres, Li Guo’s “Songs, Poetry, and Storytelling: Ibn Taghrī Birdī on the Yalbughā Affair” discusses two ballīq-songs originally composed as a muʿāraḍa-duet between a court poet, Ibn al-Kharrāṭ, and a street entertainer, Ibn Mawlāhum. Medieval Arabic vernacular poetry developed alongside the classical crown jewel, the shiʿr. The staples of the “popular” kind—muwashshaḥ, mawāliyā, dū-bayt, zajal, and kān wa-kān—further developed into several sub-genres which display discernable timely features and regional flavors. The ballīq-ballad, a spin-off of the zajal, is one example: it was Mamluk and Cairene. Medieval and modern sources tend to juxtapose the term balālīq (pl.) with azjāl (pl.) as a general reference to “songs and ballads”; often the two terms are used interchangeably—a testimony to the popularity of this particular zajal form throughout Ottoman times, and extending to modern day Egypt. However, while Mamluk poetry production, including the zajal in general, has attracted steady interest in recent years, little has been written about the ballīq.
The topic of the poetic debate discussed in Guo’s article was the status and state of a soldier versus that of a scholar. What makes this even more interesting is that these ballads were performed for Sultan Ḥasan ibn Muḥammad (r. 1347–51, 1354–61) in a song-and-dance format. After a close reading of the texts (the songs and the accompanying materials), this article examines the artistic features of the Egyptian Mamluk ballīq (continuity and discontinuity versus earlier Iraqi samples provided by Ṣafī al-Dīn al-Ḥillī), and aspects of Mamluk courtly performance (the tension between the vernacular verses and “low-brow” entertainment and the high madḥ-panegyric courtly ritual). Frédéric Bauden, in his article “Maqriziana XIII: An Exchange of Correspondence between al-Maqrīzī and al-Qalqashandī,” examines correspondence between two prominent Mamluk authors at the beginning of the fifteenth century: al-Maqrīzī and al-Qalqashandī. Correspondence between scholars in the Mamluk Sultanate has not yet received the attention it deserves although several collections of letters are available to researchers.
In the case discussed here both scholars worked together at the chancery in Cairo, before their ways parted when al-Maqrīzī opted for a different career. However, an exchange of two letters between them shows that they kept in touch. These two letters (an inceptive letter and its answer) were quoted by al-Qalqashandī’s son, Ibn Abī Ghudda (d. 1471) in his own chancery manual which is still unpublished. This text indicates that a few years before al-Qalqashandī’s death, al-Maqrīzī sent him a letter in which he consulted him about the use of the verb rasama in the meaning of amara (to order, to decree), a connotation which was not found in dictionaries. Beside the significance of al-Qalqashandī’s answer for the field of Mamluk diplomacy, the two letters, writes Bauden, also provide crucial information about the works of these two authors.
The article describes the letters, analyzes their content, and determines their significance for Mamluk diplomacy, epistolography, lexicography, and the authors’ bibliographies. In the third article in this section, Michael Winter, in his article “Sultan Selīm’s Obsession with Mamluk Egypt according to Evliyā Çelebi’s Seyāḥatnāme,” discusses the writings of this famous Ottoman 17th-century traveler who produced a ten-volume travelogue (Seyāḥatnāme) describing the countries he visited.
The tenth volume of his work, the topic of this article, is a depiction of Egypt and Habesh (Ethiopia). Most of this volume is devoted to Egypt as Evliyā Çelebi saw it, but there is also a section on the history of Egypt, including the events leading to the war between the Mamluk sultans and Sultan Selīm I, who led his army against the last two Mamluk sultans, Qānṣūh al-Ghawrī and Ṭūmān Bāy. Evliyā Çelebi’s writing is problematic historically, but is nevertheless fascinating because it raises numerous social and cultural issues. His narrative presents several key figures and events of the early sixteenth century in a different light than what we know from various Arab and Ottoman chroniclers.
The article explores several episodes involving Sultan Selīm I’s conquest of Egypt as discussed by Evliyā Çelebi which are often anachronistic, and attempts to determine their origin. These include the discovery by the Ottomans of the tomb of Ibn al-ʿArabī, the great but controversial mystic who died in Damascus in 1240, the circumstances surrounding the death of the Mamluk Sultan Qānṣūh al-Ghawrī, the last days of Ṭūmānbāy, the Mamluk ruler who spoke with Selīm before he was hanged at the Zuwayla Gate in Cairo, administrative changes the Ottoman sultan introduced before his return to his capital, and others. In the fourth section, The Politics of Material Culture, Warren C. Schultz, in his article, “Mamluk Coins, Mamluk Politics and the Limits of the Numismatic Evidence,” examines the surviving corpus of Mamluk coins to identify and analyze the patterns that emerge.
The article focuses on four case studies of Mamluk coins. While coins are primarily economic in nature in that they were minted to facilitate trade and commerce, they are also documents. Their two sides, writes Schultz, provide small billboards for the conveyance of information. Since the right of sikka was a royal prerogative, it is not unusual to find names, claims, and titles on coins that supported a ruler’s claim/right to rule. However, there are no surviving mint manuals or similar documents from the Mamluk era that provide insights as to what sultans or their mint supervisors intended, let alone how the coins were made.
Although Mamluk-era historians frequently mention coins, they rarely shed direct light on why Mamluk coins bear certain legends. The only surviving evidence is the coins themselves. To date, there has been no systematic examination of this large corpus of numismatic evidence on political topics, and the numismatic evidence itself is limited. Coins by themselves seldom prove anything above and beyond their material characteristics.
That said, their legends may support hypotheses arrived at from other evidence. They may also suggest new avenues of inquiry. But they usually serve as additional building blocks of an argument, and seldom as the foundation. Hana Taragan, in her article “Mamluk Patronage, Crusader Spolia: Turbat al-Kubakiyya in the Mamilla Cemetery, Jerusalem (688/1289)” discusses the modes of use of columns, gates, stones and marble sarcophagi taken by the Mamluks from Crusader shrines (generally under violent circumstances) in 13th-century Bilād al-Shām, and recycled or reused in their own buildings such as mosques, madrasas, and mashhads. Spoliation, plunder or the transfer of valuable material including architectural components and treasury pieces from one culture/sphere to another to reuse them was a common practice in Late Antiquity and during the Middle Ages.
They often reflected ideological, political and/or cultural messages. In the case discussed here, these plundered architectural material or spolia were recontextualized in the buildings of the victors, the Mamluks. They reflected a display of dominance, while concomitantly “defacing” the holy buildings (churches, shrines, etc.) of the defeated enemy. Bethany J. Walker, in her article “The Struggle over Water: Evaluating the ‘Water Culture’ of Syrian Peasants under Mamluk Rule,” evaluates the success and failure of the Mamluks’ irrigation projects, as well as their long-term impact on villages. On the village level, conflicts over water created some of the worst tensions between local communities and Mamluk officialdom. Changes in land tenure and imperial agricultural policies, combined with political struggles within the Mamluk elite, exacerbated these troubled relations.
The special conditions of administering rural lands, however, required a flexibility of governance that allowed a give-and-take in enforcing imperial projects related to agriculture. The results were unpredictable. Walker shows that village communities could modify imperial water programs in ways that had political repercussions and could transform land use and settlement. This article investigates the complex relations between state and local society as reflected in struggles over control of local water resources—their harvesting, storage, and use.
It highlights the evolving water politics in villages in two regions of southern Syria: the Jordan River Valley and the Madaba Plains of central Jordan. In both cases, the Mamluk state intervened in local agriculture through an aggressive irrigation program which interfered with local cultures of resource management. In the Jordan River Valley, this ultimately led to armed conflict, and in the Madaba Plains to the revival of traditional water harvesting and the physical restructuring of the village.
The article reviews narratives from contemporary chronicles and revisits the results of archeological fieldwork in these regions, in particular an ongoing interdisciplinary water systems research project at Tall Ḥisbān, where state-sponsored renewal of ancient qanāts has created new agricultural regimes and markets. Élise Franssen, in her article “What was there in a Mamluk Amīr’s Library?
Evidence from a Fifteenth-Century Manuscript,” the last paper in this section, examines a poorly known Arabic manuscript housed in the University of Liège, a religious work entitled Manāfiʿ asmāʾ Allāh al-ḥusnā wa-manāfiʿ al-ism al-aʿẓam wa-kalām aṣ-ṣaḥāba … wa-manāfiʿ al-Qurʾān that was copied upon the request of the Mamluk amīr Taghribarmish. The article addresses the question of the intellectual training of the mamlūks, and more specifically their religious education.
In addition, it touches on the issue of biographical dictionaries and provides the full codicological analysis of the volume, which enhances our knowledge of book production in the Mamluk period. In the last section in this collection, Regional and Local Politics, Reuven Amitai, in his article “Post-Crusader Acre in Light of a Mamluk Inscription and a Fatwā Document from Damascus,” examines the role of Acre after the Mamluk conquest in 1291. In spite of the widespread willful destruction of the coastal area by the Mamluks in the aftermath of their conquests, there is some evidence of economic activity in Acre’s environs and some minimal Mamluk presence in the city.
The topic also serves as a valuable opportunity to revisit David Ayalon’s thesis on the Syrian coast, as well as conclusions drawn by other prominent scholars, such as Aziz Suryal Atiya and Eliyahu Ashtor. In the second article in this section, Joseph Drory in his article “Favored by the Sultan, Disfavored by his Son: Some Glimpses into the Career of Ṭashtamur Ḥummuṣ Akhḍar,” examines the rise of one senior amīr in the Mamluk Sultanate during the fifth decade of the fourteenth century, to better understand the main machineries of power in Egypt during that period. The political history of the Mamluk Sultanate during the period following al-Nāṣir Muḥammad’s reign (died in 741/1341) has been more widely discussed by historians in recent years. The political vicissitudes of the next four decades of the fourteenth century (1340–80), although defined, perhaps rightly, as devoid of outstanding sultans, do not lack interest and sometimes even tension.
The dominant impression of a generation led by potentates who did little more than drain each other’s resources by endless strife and violent struggles may not alter this view, but still provides a better window on Mamluk polity, especially in eras undistinguished by famous names. It is often stated that the overly autocratic Sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad left his inheritors too feeble for a sultanate, or for effective governing. Not only were non-Mamluk political personalities ill-equipped regardless of their formal high credentials because of the unique structure of the Mamluk state, but first-generation Mamluks who usually proved far better capable of guiding the reins of power failed to survive the cruel struggles of leadership. A concise depiction of Ṭashtamur’s activities can thus help understand the main power mechanism in Egypt at that time, and thus corroborate the conventional model where powerful amīrs replaced petty, weakly authoritative rulers. It also provides a glimpse into the political arguments and motives exploited by the ruling classes.
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