The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages, 400-1000

by Chris Wickham

  The years 861-70 were not so very long, but, like the civil war of the 810s, they opened up fault-lines in the ‘Abbasid polity which were hard to close. The revived ‘Abbasid protagonism of 870-908 (it extended to al-Mu‘tadid’s son al-Muktafi, 902-8) faced widespread difficulties. Iranian rebels, the Saffarids (they did not have aristocratic roots, and they were close to fringe Muslim sects), had defeated the Tahirids in Khurasan between 867 and 873, and marched on Iraq; they were defeated there in 876, but they continued to control much of Iran, paying taxes only intermittently. The Turkish governor of Egypt, Ahmad ibn Tulun (868-84) was not directly opposed to the ‘Abbasids, but he too did not pay much tax to Iraq, and he extended his power into Syria and Palestine, which thus did not pay much either; only after his son Khumarawayh (884-96) succeeded him did an ‘Abbasid army manage to re-establish a greater measure of tax-paying from the Tulunid provinces, and not until 905 did the ‘Abbasids regain direct rule in Egypt. Only in Iraq did the ‘Abbasids exercise fiscal control in the 870s and 880s, and here, around Basra in the south, they faced a huge slave revolt, of the Zanj, African slaves used to maintain the irrigation system: this revolt, lasting from 869 to 883, was the most successful slave uprising in history before the Haitian revolt of 1791, resulting in an independent Shi‘ite state which was only destroyed by four years of war under al-Muwaffaq in 879-83. The ‘Abbasids were seriously short of money until the mid-880s, and even after that had to fight without a break, with their still-Turkish armies, to keep on top of events. They succeeded in their core lands, with the exception of Iran, which increasingly slid away under local dynasties. But they could not afford to relax their pressure. After 908, al-Muqtadir was a very inattentive ruler, and his mother Shaghab did not have control of the army. By the 920s, with infighting inside the bureaucracy, rival generals in Iraq, bedouin raids from the Arabian desert, and Syrian and Egyptian governors who had begun to stop paying taxes again, the gains of recent decades were all lost; in the 930s caliphs began to be deposed once more, and after 936 the caliph lost all power to a military governor, the amr al-umar’, ‘amir of amirs’. In 945 Ahmad ibn Buya (d. 967), from the most successful of the rising dynasties of Iran, the Buyids, took Baghdad, and became amr al-umar’ with the ruling name of Mu’izz al-Dawla, ‘fortifier of the [still nominally ‘Abbasid] state’. Iraq was controlled from western Iran from then on for a century.

  The break-up of the ‘Abbasid caliphate, for a hundred years the strongest state in the world (Tang China had run into trouble in and after the 750s), would ideally need as detailed an account and set of explanations as did that of the Roman empire. If I dispose of the sequence of events in a couple of pages, it is only because by now, after the 860s, its history hardly extended beyond Iraq except for brief periods, and is too far from the history of Europe. The tenth century in the Islamic world was, as already observed, even more fragmented, with the Samanids and then the Ghaznavids in eastern Iran, two or three Buyid polities in western Iran and Iraq, two Hamdanid polities in Aleppo and (more briefly) Mosul, a set of Kurdish dynasties in the mountains to their north and east, the Qaramita in the Arabian desert, the Ikhshidids and then the Fatimids in Egypt, and other smaller polities too - as well as those of the Maghreb, which had not been under ‘Abbasid control since the early ninth century or even before, the Aghlabids and then the Fatimids in what is now Tunisia and Sicily, the Idrisids in what is now Morocco, and the Umayyads in Spain. We cannot follow all their histories here. But before we look at two of them, we do need to take stock of the century of ‘Abbasid unity and of its failure.

  One simple reason why the ‘Abbasid caliphate broke up was that it was too large. Local societies were too different; communications were always slow; the caliphate was larger than the Roman empire, and did not have a sea, with its relatively easy bulk transport, at its heart. Conquests and reconquests, with new ruling armies and a clean slate, helped periodic reunifications: in 636-51, 747-50, 811-13, as subsequently with the Buyids, and the Seljuk Turks in the 1040s and later, but tensions would always rise again. This was particularly the case in Khurasan and in Iran as a whole, whose pre-Islamic ruling class, with some military protagonism, survived better than elsewhere (and whose pre-Islamic past was still celebrated by Muslims in oral and written literature, unlike anywhere further west except Spain); and which, being mountainous, was much harder to control in depth; significantly, the most successful and long-lasting later Islamic empire, the Ottomans, never held Iran. Trouble for the ‘Abbasids generally began in Iran; Iraq and Egypt were much easier to rule, and Syria was not any sort of power-centre for two centuries after the fall of the Umayyads.

  This straightforward geopolitical argument is largely backed up by one basic point about the tenth-century Muslim successor states: they were almost all tax-raising states with a central paid army and bureaucracy, just as the caliphate had been. Only some of the Kurdish states of southern Anatolia and the Iranian mountains, followed by bedouin dynasties in Syria and the Jazira in the eleventh century, had a simpler structure, based on block gifts of tribute to armed transhumant groups. Unlike at the end of the western Roman empire, there was no structural breakdown inside the majority of these smaller polities. Unlike in the Romano-Germanic kingdoms, the new ruling groups were not concerned to make themselves into a landowning aristocracy. Land indeed did not bring political power in most medieval Muslim societies, only state position did that: or so it seemed to medieval political actors. Wealth, too, was most reliably obtained through positions in the state; and old families, whose longevity was ensured by private wealth - inevitably in land, in the Muslim as in the Christian world - were not especially privileged in any Islamic state structure, even in Iran. The political model established by ‘Umar I and two centuries of Umayyad and ‘Abbasid caliphs thus continued to hold. Indeed, it intensified, as the idea of ex-slaves holding military power, with no links to local communities and no family background, first experimented with al-Mu‘tasim’s Turks, became an increasingly common model in later centuries. Independence from the caliphate just meant that taxation stayed in the province concerned and paid a local army: a basic aim of provincial élites from the Umayyad period onwards, and only fully overridden by the strongest ‘Abbasid rulers, with reversions whenever ‘Abbasid control slipped, as in the 810s and 860s. From this standpoint, the break-up of the caliphate could even be seen as unproblematic, as simply consisting of the reversion of politics to its optimum size, the province.

  Broadly, I think this interpretation is a fair one. But it does concentrate attention too much on the state; provincial societies get left out of the equation. Local social leaders were hugely diverse, extending from the old families of parts of Iran to the rapidly changing Iraqi élites, who tended simply to be the heirs of the most recent wave of administrators, who had made money from taxation and settled down; all the same, they existed everywhere. They certainly did have land by now, and also sometimes commercial wealth, which they turned into land as well. The great local political centres, almost all urban - major cities like Aleppo, Mosul, Rayy (modern Teheran), Merv and Nishapur in Khurasan - were full of local elite families, of ‘ulam’ and others, who sought the post of qa, an important focus of local power, and who squabbled over local and provincial position, rather than seeking it from the state; here, land, private wealth and birth did matter (being an ‘Alid was increasingly chic, especially in Iran), just as it did in the West. ‘Abbasid governors always had to come to terms with local power-broking families, or else they would fail: they would be unable to collect tax (a process itself controlled by local figures), or face revolt, or both. So did the smaller-scale rulers of the tenth century. And indeed this in itself shows that there was a relationship between local societies and the ‘state class’. Even the most deracinated army family could put down local roots, at least as rulers, as the Tulunids did in Egypt; and all rulers, bureaucrats and local military men had to negotiate with their subjects, or at least the richest of them. Some sections of
the ‘state class’, particularly the civil administration, had origins in local societies, too; they, at least, had tight local obligations.

  All the same, a separation between the ‘state class’ and local and provincial societies did exist, and was a problem. By and large, making a career in the local city and making a career in the state were different, not only in the geographically large-scale ‘Abbasid caliphate but in the provincial polities of the tenth century as well. This meant that local societies could view the changing fates of their rulers with a certain equanimity: the latter were largely external figures, whether benevolent or violent, generous or fiscally harsh, cultured or martial, without a structural connection to the strata of the governed. As government became more secular, now that the fate of Islam had devolved to the ‘ulam’, the salvationist imagery of right rule so effectively invoked by Abu Muslim and the early ‘Abbasids was also no longer part of most political programmes. Only the Fatimids tried it in the tenth century, as we shall see in a moment. When a local ruler faced military failure, then, because a blockage in the tax supply made it hard to pay troops, or simply because of defeat in battle, he could be replaced without local society really being involved, as long as the new ruler did not take over too violently. There were certainly some examples of a loyalist protagonism by local élites, as when the citizens of Mosul in 989 expelled the Buyids and temporarily restored their earlier rulers, the Hamdanids, but they were not so very many. On one level, indeed, the very ease with which the ‘Abbasids lost control in the 910s to 940s, to be replaced by regimes which for the most part resembled them, was a real structural failure: however dismal the period was, it ought to have been possible for someone to make more of a stand, a heroic loser committed to an older legitimacy. The ‘Abbasids did not leave stories of that kind, and nor did the Buyids later. The stories that continued to hold attention were still Sassanian - or else of the timeless fantasy Baghdad of Harun al-Rashid and the Thousand and One Nights.

  The Fatimids were the most successful, richest and most stable of the tenth-century Muslim states. They outlived their major rivals, the Buyids, by over a century, and indeed ruled over all, first in Kairouan in Ifriqiya, modern Tunisia, and then (after 973) in newly conquered Egypt, for more than two hundred and fifty years, 909-1171. They also represent, as just observed, the only serious attempt at a salvationist revival after the early ‘Abbasids, and are thus a special case in the tenth-century Islamic world. Their salvationism was, however, Shi‘ite, not Sunni. The first Fatimid, ‘Ubayd Allah al-Mahdi, was an Isma‘ili Shi‘a living in Syria, who belonged to one of the sects of Shi‘ism which held that a hidden imm or supreme spiritual leader, descended from the caliph ‘Ali, would return to redeem the world. In around 899 he declared - controversially inside the Isma‘ili movement, which he split in two - that he was himself the imam. He had to flee Syria, and ended up among the Kutama Berbers of modern Algeria, a sensible move, for the Berbers often had ‘Alid sympathies - an earlier ‘Alid exile, Idris ibn ‘Abd Allah (d. 795), had founded the Idrisid kingdom in central Morocco in 789. The Berbers were also good fighters, and were the core of the Fatimid army until well after our period ends. The Kutama adopted al-Mahdi as a charismatic leader, and keenly took to the role he offered them as the equivalent to the Khurasanis in the ‘Abbasid ‘revolution’. Their general, an Iraqi named Abu ‘Abd Allah, the Fatimid version of Abu Muslim, took Ifriqiya from the faltering Aghlabid dynasty in 909, and al-Mahdi proclaimed himself caliph (910-34) outside Kairouan a year later. Like Abu Muslim, Abu ‘Abd Allah was also killed by his patron-protégé inside a year, and al-Mahdi was not troubled by rivals thereafter.

  Like both the ‘Abbasids and the Aghlabids, al-Mahdi set up his own capital in 920, at Mahdiyya on the Tunisian coast. He used the same governmental structures as the Aghlabids, although his Isma‘ili messianism set himself, and his Kutama army, apart from his Sunni subjects. That messianism, however, meant that al-Mahdi would not be content with Ifriqiya; from the start, the Fatimids looked eastwards, with raids on Egypt. This strategy was deflected by another salvationist Berber revolt, by Kharijites this time, in 944-7, but it was defeated, and by 960 al-Mahdi’s great-grandson al-Mu‘izz (953-75) ruled all North Africa, unified for the first time since the 730s. This stability allowed a renewed attack on Egypt, which was rudderless after the recent death of Abu’l Misk Kafur, a black ex-slave, a eunuch of fabled ugliness, who had ruled Egypt with skill and vision for twenty-two years (946-68). The Fatimid general Jawhar (d. 976), another ex-slave, a Slav this time, took the country with little violence in 969, and al-Mu‘izz moved there four years later. Jawhar and later generals pursued Fatimid ambitions on into Palestine and Syria, but they ran aground around Damascus, and when the frontier stabilized in the 990s it did so between Damascus and Aleppo. Fatimid expansionism stopped, and a modus vivendi emerged in Syria between the main regional powers, the Fatimids, the Buyids, and, since the 950s, the Byzantines, as we saw in the last chapter. Perhaps surprisingly, by the 990s the caliphs, now situated stably in wealthy Egypt, were prepared to let control over Ifriqiya slip, to a family of hereditary governors; from now on the Fatimids would be an Egyptian and Levantine power, which they remained for nearly two centuries more.

  It is easy to see 909-10 as a rerun of 749-50, and at one level one whose religious fervour had greater staying power, for the Fatimids began a long way from the old power-centres of the Islamic world, which they would have to fight for longer to reach - indeed, they never reached Baghdad. As Shi‘ite imams, too, the Fatimid caliphs did not have to pay attention to the ‘ulam’ in any of their domains, for that was by definition Sunni, and anyway an imam drew his authority direct from God. But, even more than in Ifriqiya, Fatimid rule in Egypt was simply a continuation of the - already effective - rule of their predecessors. The Kutama in Egypt and Syria were another paid army, far from home, like the abn’ and the Turks. Al-Mu‘izz and his successors recentralized the fiscal administration of Egypt, as had the early ‘Abbasids, but in Egypt it had never been very decentralized. A strong state aided commercial development, but in any case Egypt had by now outstripped Iraq again as a productive region. In large part, the Fatimids allowed it to develop simply by creating stability; Egypt remained one of the major Islamic powers until the very end of the Middle Ages as a result, with a political protagonism unmatched since Cleopatra. Their administrative capital, al-Qahira, that is, Cairo, was founded in 969 just outside the previous provincial capital Fustat, which remained the commercial focus of Egypt; Fustat-Cairo was for a long time the major economic powerhouse of the whole eastern Mediterranean, surpassing even Baghdad, as we shall see in more detail in the next chapter.

  So the Fatimids can be construed simply as normal rulers of the tenth century and onwards, just successful at it, and lucky with the region they ruled. All the same, this did not make the Fatimids exactly the same as their peers elsewhere in the Islamic world. Isma‘ilism, a secretive sect with esoteric and abstract Neoplatonist elements, including a complex letter and number symbolism, continued to mark out the court and the army, isolated among an ocean of Sunnis, Coptic Christians and Jews, and caliphs could continue to have messianic dreams: not least al-Hakim (996-1021), who erected anti-Sunni slogans on Sunni mosques, who demolished the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and who was, and still is, venerated as divine by the Druzes of Lebanon. Al-Hakim was also a capricious and violent autocrat in a rather more familiar mould, but his religious imagery marks out the originality of the Fatimids nonetheless.

  Tariq ibn Ziyad, the Berber leader of a largely Berber army, invaded Visigothic Spain for the Umayyad caliphs of Damascus and defeated and killed King Roderic in 711. The Berbers and Arabs had taken nearly all the peninsula by around 718. Muslim armies raided into Francia for another decade and a half, but without much commitment to conquest; Spain - al-Andalus in Arabic - was already on the very edge of their world, and it is likely that, if it had not fallen so easily, they would have stopped at the Straits
of Gibraltar. Be that as it may, the occupation of the peninsula was quick. With the Visigothic army defeated, the Muslims made separate treaties with several local lords, in particular Theodemir in south-east Spain in 713. They did not base themselves in the old Visigothic capital of Toledo, but in Córdoba, in the rich south; Toledo was rather more of a frontier area, with an extensive uncontrolled land further north in the Duero valley between Muslim al-Andalus and the Christian polities of the northern fringe of the peninsula. At Córdoba, a succession of governors ruled, chosen by the caliphs. Al-Andalus looked like a normal, if outlying, province of the caliphate. It was as affected as was North Africa by the great Berber revolt of 740, but Caliph Hisham sent Syrian armies into Spain in 742, who won back the peninsula in 742-3 and settled there, thus increasing the Arab element of the Muslim settlement. The Syrians in Spain replicated the Qays- Yaman faction-fighting of the fertile crescent, however, and for a decade from 745 there was civil war between them. When the Umayyads were overthrown in Syria in 750 and largely wiped out as a family, one of Hisham’s grandsons, ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn Mu‘awiya, fled to the Berber kin of his mother, first in Africa and then, in 755, in Spain. Here he found support, both from Berber lineages and from the Yamani Arab opponents of the Qaysi governor, Yusuf al-Fihri. (The Yamanis in Spain were thus pro-Umayyad, not anti, as they had come to be by 749 in the East.) Inside a year he had defeated Yusuf and had taken Córdoba. ‘Abd al-Rahman I then ruled as amr for more than thirty years, 756-88, wholly independent of his ‘Abbasid enemies in Baghdad. So did his descendants, until 1031.