Al-Masaq - Islam and the Medieval Mediterranean (Volume 21 Issue 3 2009)

Al-Masa¯q, Vol. 21, No. 3, December 2009 Communities of the Dead in Umayyad Cordoba ANN CHRISTYS There are frequent r...

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Al-Masa¯q, Vol. 21, No. 3, December 2009

Communities of the Dead in Umayyad Cordoba

ANN CHRISTYS

There are frequent references to Cordoba’s cemeteries in Arabic, Latin and Romance sources, and archaeologists have uncovered several of them. This provides some evidence for the social aspects of burial. This paper considers two factors that seem to have determined where a citizen of Cordoba might be buried – the individual’s social status and religious affiliation – and evaluates their significance.

ABSTRACT

Keywords: Cordoba; Umayyads; Christian; Muslim; Burial; Cemeteries in al-Andalus; Ibn al-Qu¯tiya; al-Ghaza¯li; al-Andalus – archaeology _

On a September day in 972, the caliph al-Hakam II left his palace inside the old _ walled city of Cordoba to inspect a factory making t ira¯z—silk woven for the ruler _ 1 and embroidered with his name. He went out by the Ba¯b al-Yahu¯d (the gate of the Jews), and passed by the cemetery of Umm Sala¯ma, which lay just outside the walls. There are many casual references like this to the cemeteries of medieval Cordoba in a range of written sources, in Arabic, Latin and Romance. Putting them together, scholars have identified more than 20 cemeteries and three royal burial grounds and they are fairly sure where some of them were.2 In addition, since the brief biographies of the eminent men of al-Andalus in the collections now known as biographical dictionaries often end with the subject’s interment, we are almost able to say where individual bodies were buried, although in practice, one cannot dig at the spot marked ‘‘X’’. Excavation is contingent upon modern redevelopment. To make matters more difficult, until the early 1990s, archaeologists tended to rush through Cordoba’s Islamic layers in search of the Roman city beneath and vital evidence has been destroyed. Recently, however, more than a dozen burial sites have been uncovered: a huge expansion in the material remains which corroborates

Correspondence: Ann Christys, 2 Moseley Wood Farm, Smithy Lane, Leeds, LS16 7NG, UK. E-mail: [email protected] 1

Ibn Hayya¯n, Muqtabas, ed. A.R.A. al-Hajji (Beirut: Da¯r al-Thaqa¯fa, 1983), p. 92. _ _ Rafael Pinilla Melguizo, ‘‘Aportaciones al estudio de la topografıá de Co´rdoba isla´mica: almacabras’’, Qurtuba, 2 (1997): 175–214.

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ISSN 0950–3110 print/ISSN 1473–348X online/09/030289-11 ß 2009 Society for the Medieval Mediterranean DOI: 10.1080/09503110903343291

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some of the written evidence.3 We can say as much about the cemeteries of Umayyad Cordoba as about anywhere in the medieval Islamic world. This in turn contributes to our knowledge of social aspects of Islamic burial, which have been little studied.4 Indeed, it is strange that scholars who continue to debate the topography of ‘‘the Islamic city’’ rarely consider the ultimate fate of its citizens.5 This paper uses two case studies to investigate what determined where Cordoba’s citizens were buried. The first deals with ‘‘elite’’ burial, the second with ‘‘convivencia’’—or its post-mortem equivalent—the disposal of the dead of the three religions of al-Andalus. My first case study is the death and burial in 367/977 of the scholar Ibn al-Qu¯tiya, author of a History of the Conquest of al-Andalus.6 Ibn al-Qu¯tiya’s _ _ biography was written before 1013 by one of his pupils, Ibn al-Faradi.7 _ Unfortunately, as is so often the case, only one late manuscript of Ibn al-Faradi’s _ collection as a whole has survived, and the versions of the biography of Ibn al-Qu¯tiya that were copied into a number of later biographical dictionaries show _ a number of more or less important variants on what is presumed to be the original account.8 Ibn Khallika¯n, for example, introduced an anecdote about his subject’s facility for improvising verse, which none of the earlier compilers included.9 This inconsistency introduces a note of uncertainty to Ibn al-Faradi’s description _ of Ibn al-Qu¯tiya’s funeral, which reads: _

He died, may Alla¯h have mercy on him, before we had finished with him, on a Monday, seven days before the end of [the month of] Rabi’al-Awwal in the year 367. He was buried on Wednesday at the hour of afternoon prayers in the burial ground of the Quraysh and Abu¯ Ja‘far ibn ‘Awn Alla¯h was entrusted with leading the prayers for him. According to the Arabic sources, the cemetery of the Quraysh lay on the left bank of the Guadalquivir, across the much-restored Roman bridge from the Great Mosque. One of the early restorers of the bridge was al-Samh, who governed _ al-Andalus from 718 to 721. Al-Samh was also said to have established a cemetery _ near the south end of the bridge, in the suburb of Cordoba known in Arabic as 3

Marıá Teresa Casal Garcıá, Los cementerios musulmanes de Qurtuba (Cordoba: Universidad de Co´rdoba, 2003); idem, ‘‘Aspectos morfolo´gicos de los cementerios musulmanes de Qurtuba’’, in Andalucıá Medieval tomo I. Actas del III congreso de Historia de Andalucıá, Co´rdoba, 2001 (Cordoba: Publicaciones Obra Social y Cultural Cajasur, 2003), pp. 305–18. 4 Timothy Insoll, The Archaeology of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 166. 5 e.g. Paul Wheatley, The Places where Men Pray Together: Cities in Islamic Lands Seventh through Tenth Centuries (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2001) rarely mentions cemeteries. 6 Ibn al-Qu¯tiya, Ta¯’rikh Iftita¯h al-Andalus, ed. Pascual Gayangos Eduardo Saavedra and Francisco _ _ Codera, Historia de la conquista de Espanã de Abenalcotıá de Co´rdoba (Madrid, 1868), rev. Ibrahim al-Abyari (Cairo: Da¯r al-Kita¯b al-Masri and Beirut: Da¯r al-Kita¯b al-Lubna¯ni, 1410/1989), trans _ J.M. Nichols, ‘‘Ibn al-Qu¯tiya, The History of the Conquest of Al–Andalus’’, PhD Dissertation, _ University of North Carolina, 1975. 7 Ibn al-Faradi, Ta¯’rikh ‘ulama¯’ al-Andalus, ed. Francisco Codera and Juliań Ribera y Tarrago´ (Madrid: _ Bibliotheca Arabico-Hispana, 1891–1892), n.1316. 8 Ann Christys, Christians in al-Andalus 711-1000 (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2002), pp.160–64. 9 Ibn Khallika¯n, Wafaya¯t al-‘aya¯n, ed. Ihsa¯n ‘Abba¯s (Beirut, 1970–1971); trans. MacGuckin de Slane, _ Ibn Khallikan’s Biographical Dictionary, volumes I–IV (Paris: Oriental Translation Fund of Great Britain and Ireland, 1842–1871; repr. Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1970).


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Shaqunda, from its Roman name Secunda, the second milestone on the Via Augusta. Today, this area is the Barrio de Miraflores. The Arabic writers often called it ‘‘the suburb’’ (al-rabad ), and it may have been the only part of Cordoba, _ apart from the Roman walled city, where Muslims settled after the conquest.10 It is prominent in the historiography of al-Andalus as the centre of a revolt against al-Hakam I in 818; once he had put down the revolt, the amir ordered that the _ whole area, with the exception of its cemeteries, should be razed and its people were scattered to Toledo, Fez and Alexandria. Several of the Arabic sources mention al-Samh’s cemetery,11 although most date from the fifth/tenth century or later. _ Some speak of the ‘‘cemetery of the suburb’’ (maqbarat al-rabad ); others refer to _ cemeteries in the plural. They are sometimes called ‘‘the old cemeteries’’ (maqbara¯t al-rabad al-‘atiqa),12 which could mean that the Muslims continued to use Roman _ or Visigothic burial grounds, a practice that is found at the possible site of the Umayyad palace of Rusa¯fa, outside Cordoba,13 and elsewhere in Spain, for example at Sego´briga. Some sources say that there were just two cemeteries in Shaqunda, the second called ‘‘the cemetery of the Quraysh’’ (maqbarat al-Quraysh). The tribe of Quraysh were of the highest nobility, including the Umayyads, who claimed descent from the family of the Prophet Muhammad. _ A cemetery in Baghdad was named after them.14 Among the members of this elite to be buried in the cemetery of the Quraysh in Cordoba was a son of the amir ‘Abd Alla¯h,15 although the amirs and caliphs themselves were buried within the city walls in royal burial gardens called rawd as (which have yet to be uncovered). Several _ topographical markers mentioned in the sources help to localize the cemetery of the Quraysh, such as the fact that it was near the Musallah, an open area by the river _ where Muslims met for prayers. Eulogius, the narrator of the Cordoban martyr movement of the mid third/ninth century, described the execution of two of the martyrs here at the end of Ramadan in 853.16 The family of Ibn al-Qu¯tiya _ seems to have Christian origins; his name may mean ‘‘son of the Gothic woman’’. They had, however, converted to Islam and were important dependants of the Umayyads, from whom they acquired the privileges of noble descent. The historian’s father had served as a judge in Seville.17 It was therefore appropriate that Ibn al-Qu¯tiya should have been buried in the cemetery of the Quraysh. _

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Juan F. Murillo Redondo, Marıá Teresa Casal Garcıá and Elena Castro del Rıó, ‘‘Madinat Qurtuba. Aproximacioń al proceso de formacioń de la ciudad emiral y califal a partir de la informacioń arqueolo´gica’’, Cuadernos de Madinat al-Zahra¯’, 5 (2004): 257–90. 11 Anon., Fath al-Andalus, ed. Luis Molina (Madrid: CSIC, 1994), p. 46; Ibn Idha¯ri, Histoire de l’Afrique _ et de l’Espagne intituleé al-Baya¯no-l-mogrib par Ibn Adhari de Maroc et fragments de la Chronique de Arib de Cordoue, ed. Rheinhardt Dozy (Leiden:Brill, 1848–1851), rev. ed. E´variste Le´vi-Provençal and G. Colin, Al-Baya¯n al-Mughrib, volumes I–II, (Leiden: Brill, 1948–1951), II: 168; Emilio Garcıá Go´mez, ‘‘Notas sobre la topografıá cordobesa en los «Anales de Al–Hakam II» por Isa al-Razi’’, Al–Andalus, 30 (1965): 319–79. 12 Pinilla Melguizo, 194, citing Ibn al-Abba¯r and Ibn ‘Abd al-Malik. 13 Murillo Redondo, Casal Garcıá and Castro del Rıó, 263. 14 Guy Le Strange, Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate, from Contemporary Arabic and Persian Sources (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1924), p. 160. 15 Pinilla Melguizo, 195, n. 99. 16 Eulogius, Memoriale sanctorum, II 1.4, ed. Juan Gil, Corpus scriptorum muzarabicorum, volumes I–II (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientı´ficas, 1973), I: 400. 17 Ibn Hayya¯n, Al-Muqtabas, V, trans. Federico Corriente and Maria-Jesus Viguera Molins, Crońicadel _ califa Abdarrahma¯n III an-Na¯sir entre los anõs 912 y 942 (Zaragoza: Anubar, 1981), p. 72. _

_

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Here, unfortunately, the trail begins to cool, for no trace of the grave of Ibn al-Qu¯tiya or of any other member of his family has been discovered. Yet material _ evidence uncovered in the Barrio de Miraflores indicates that the cemetery of the Quraysh was indeed here. Excavations in the Parque de Miraflores in 1995 and at the south end of the Roman bridge in 2001 uncovered the foundations of domestic buildings extending over 16,000 square metres. They appear to have been abandoned in the early third/ninth century, corroborating the sources’ account of al-Hakam’s destruction of al-rabad .18 No later domestic building from the Islamic _ _ period has been identified apart from the occasional villa (munia). Thousands of graves were also discovered, most of the bodies being buried in accordance with the practice of the Malikite school of Islamic law, which was dominant in al-Andalus. They lay in graves only just deep enough to hold a man lying on his side, dug straight into the earth and sometimes covered with tiles or stones. The bodies were placed in the right lateral decubitus position, orientated NE–SW, i.e., facing Mecca. Later interments were superimposed in up to four layers and are difficult to date, but the cemetery seems to have been in use from the third/ninth to the sixth/twelfth centuries. Only a few graves show traces of a simple head- and/or footstone. Few grave markers remain from Cordoba, since many stones with Arabic inscriptions were re-used or deliberately destroyed after the Reconquista;19 others have re-emerged in deposits of material from elsewhere.20 Several epitaphs were, however, discovered in this area.21 Some are fragmentary,22 but one survives almost intact. Dated 881, it commemorates a concubine of the amir Muhammad. The _ stone was discovered in 1951 during restoration work at the church of La Barnada de la Sagrada Familia, in the Campo de la Verdad; it is now in Cordoba’s archaeological museum.23 The inscription reads: In the name of Alla¯h, the Compassionate, the Merciful. This is the tomb of ‘Uqar, concubine of the amir Muhammad ibn ‘Abd al-Rahma¯n—God have _ _ mercy on her. She recognised that there is no God but God, and that he is unique and has no associate. May Muhammad bless her. God ‘‘who will _ raise whoever is in the tomb’’. In this faith she died and will be raised again, if God wills it. O God! accept the intercession of your Prophet on her behalf. She died, may God have mercy on her, on the evening of Friday the sixth day of Safar in the year 260 [21–22 September 881]. Several more funeral inscriptions commemorate women belonging to the families of the emirs Muhammad and ‘Abd Alla¯h and the caliph ‘Abd al-Rahma¯n III. _ _ Another names Khatra, a mawla¯ (client) of al-Hakam II, who died in 244/858.24 _

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Manuel Acień Almasa and Antonio Vallejo Triano, ‘‘Urbanismo y Estado isla´mico: de Corduba a Qurtuba—Madinat al Zahra’’, in Gene`se de la ville islamique en al-andalus et au Maghreb occidental, ed. Patrice Cressier and Mercedes Garcıá Arenal (Madrid: CSIC, 1998), pp. 107–36 at p.116. 19 ´ Evariste Le´vi-Provencal, Inscriptions arabes d’Espagne (Leiden: Brill and Paris: Larose, 1931), p. xi. 20 Ana Labarta and Elena Ruiz, ‘‘Cuatro epitafios Cordobeses del anõ 1011’’, Al-Qantara, 16 (1995): 151–62. 21 Manuel Ocanã Jimeńez, ‘‘Nuevas inscripciones a´rabes de Co´rdoba’’, Al-Andalus, 17 (1952): 379–88. 22 Carmeń Barcelo´ and Ana Labarta, ‘‘Dos nuevos fragmentos epı´graficos Cordobeses del cementerio del Arrabal’’, in Miscelenea epigra´fica, Al-Qantara, 12 (1992): 549–57. 23 Museo Arqueolo´gico de Co´rdoba no.11, 355. 24 Le´vi-Provençal, Inscriptions arabes d’Espagne.


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The wording used on all these stones is a standard formula, used throughout the medieval Islamic world, as is the archaic Kufic lettering.25 Most of the grave markers that survive from the early centuries of Islam have been found in Egypt; the use of the bismilla¯h and shaha¯da on a grave marker is first attested in Egypt in 691.26 Epitaphs were designed to be read aloud as part of the intercession for the dead, although some religious scholars objected to all forms of intercession, including the reading of the Qur’a¯n at funerals, attributing this ruling to Ma¯lik ibn Anas. The first Sunni scholar to record a neutral opinion regarding the inscription of the name of God, the shaha¯da and Qur’a¯nic verses on grave markers was the Moroccan al-Wansharishi in the tenth/fifteenth century. As so often, practice was out of step with the strictures of the ‘ulama¯’. Qur’a¯nic citations were common, even though frowned upon; a later scholar, Ibn al-Hajj (d.1336) thought that writing Qur’a¯nic _ verses on a grave led to the risk that the holy scripture might be trampled on: accidentally if the offender were a Muslim, but deliberately in the case of a Jew or Christian.27 Religious tensions may be reflected in the choice of wording for a grave marker. Egyptian examples make a pointed reference to non-Muslims, citing su¯ra 9:33 against idolaters: ‘‘It is He who has sent forth His apostle with guidance and the True Faith to make it triumphant over all religions, however much the idolaters (al-mushriku¯n) may dislike it’’. Some 40 epitaphs survive for the whole of al-Andalus in the Umayyad period. The preferred Qur’a¯nic citation was su¯ra 35:5: ‘‘Men, the promise of God is true. Let not the life of this world deceive you, nor let the Dissembler trick you’’. We may assume that any stone marking the grave of the convert Ibn al-Qu¯tiya would have looked very like this, and would also have borne _ the shaha¯da, the Muslim statement of belief, which defended the deceased from the terrors of the grave.28 We should keep this in mind as we move on to consider the relationship between Muslim and non-Muslim burial in Cordoba. Cordoba’s Christian and Jewish dead also appear in both the archaeological and written record, although to a much lesser extent than the Muslims; the Jews are the least well-represented of the three religions in this respect. Had Ibn al-Qu¯tiya’s _ family remained Christian, it is unlikely that his last resting place would have been recorded. Only a few prominent religious merited such commemoration; among them was the third/ninth-century abbot of Cordoba, Speraindeo, the teacher of Eulogius, whose tomb in ‘‘the church of the suburb of the tira¯z makers’’ is mentioned in the Latin version of the Calendar of Cordoba.29 The burial of the martyr Argentea in the Basilica of the Three Saints is also mentioned.30 Most of the evidence for Christian burial comes from some 200 interments, the majority dating from the three centuries after the conquest, which were discovered inside a Roman basilica re-used as a church in the Visigothic period – one of a number of important 25 Carmen Barcelo´, ‘‘El cu´fico andalusı´ de «provincias» durante el Califato (300–403/912–1013)’’, Cuadernos de Madinat al-Zahra¯’, 5 (2004): 173–98. 26 Leon Halevi, Muhammad’s Grave: Death Rites and the Making of Islamic Society (New York: Columbia _ University Press, 2007), pp. 15–30. 27 Cited in ibid. p. 41. 28 Abu¯ al-Layth al-Samarqandi (d.373/983), Kita¯b al-haqa¯’iq wa l-daqa¯’iq, ed. and trans. John _ Macdonald in ‘‘The angel of death in late Islamic tradition’’, Islamic Studies, 3 (1964): 485–519 at p.517 and trans. p.505. 29 Le Calendrier de Cordoue (1861), ed. and trans. Charles Pellat (Leiden: Brill, 1961), p.7. 30 Passio Argentea, ed. Antonio Fabrega Grau [Pasionario Hispańico, volumes I–II] Monumenta Hispaniae Sacra, Serie Litu´rgica (Barcelona and Madrid, 1953–55), II:382–387.

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discoveries made during excavations at Cercedilla, prior to the construction of Cordoba’s new railway station.31 These burials are almost certainly Christian from the context in which they were made. In general, it is often impossible to be sure of the religious affiliation of the dead. Archaeological finds appear to show that Christians, Jews and Muslims – distinguished mainly by different orientations of the corpse – were buried separately. This may seem obvious, and historians have assumed that it was so,32 but it does not seem to have been the case for example in Malaga,33 Jaeń34 and the other Andalusi cities for which there is written or archaeological evidence.35 Toledo may have had only one cemetery, outside the Puerta de Bisagra, where Christians and Muslims were buried together.36 Cemeteries that appear to hold both Christian and Muslim graves have also been discovered in the countryside. However, recent archaeological evidence from Cordoba suggests that it is not as easy to distinguish Muslim from non-Muslim burial as has been supposed.37 Muslims, Christians and Jews were all buried without grave goods in simple ditches. In cemeteries assumed to be Muslim, only about 90% of the bodies were orientated southeast-northwest, as stipulated by Ma¯lik. In some cases, stones were placed on the corpse to keep in it the correct position, or it was positioned against a side-wall of the ditch. Scholars have argued that, where the body was not correctly disposed, this was because the terrain was difficult to dig. However, the identification of the remaining 10% of the bodies in these cemeteries as Muslims results from a circular argument: because Muslims are assumed to have been buried separately, investigators have looked for another explanation for those whose orientation does not obey the norms apart from the suggestion that they were not Muslims. Perhaps a few did not merit honourable burial. Ibn Abi Dunya (d.281/894) recorded the ruling that people who did not obey the sunna were to be buried with their heads facing in the opposite direction to the qibla.38 Even in Cordoba, a graveyard excavated in 2000, close to the site of the church of San Cristo´bal and a leprosarium, does appear to house both Christians and Muslims, although without gravestones or inscriptions one can never be sure.39 31

Guıá Arqueolo´gica de Co´rdoba, ed. Desiderio Vazquerizo Gil, (Cordoba: Plurabelle, 2003), pp.192–193. Evariste Le´vi-Provençal, Histoire de l’Espagne musulmane, volumes I–III (Paris: Maisonneuve et Larose and Leiden: Brill., 1950-3), III:38. 33 C. Peral Bejarono and I. Fernańdez Guirado, Excavaciones en el Cementerio Isla´mico de Yabal Faruh, Ma´laga, (Malaga, 1990), cited in Marıá Isabel Calero Secall and Virgilio Martıńez Enamorado, Ma´laga, ´ gora, 1995), p. 427. Ciudad de al-Andalus (Ma´laga: A 34 Christine Mazzoli-Guintard, ‘‘Espacios de convivencia en las cuidades de al-Andalus’’, in Espiritualidad y convivencia en al-Andalus, ed. Fa´tima Roldań Castro (Huelva: Universidad de Huelva, 2006), pp. 73–90, at p. 83. 35 E.g., at Sego´briga; Roger Collins, Spain: An Archaeological Guide (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 253, and at Iyih/Tolmo de Minateda (Albacete); Sonia Gutie´rrez Lloret, ‘‘Ciudades y conquista. El fin de las civitates visigodas y la genesis de las mudun isla´micas del sureste de al-Andalus’’, in Cressier and Garcıá Arenal, pp.137–158, at p. 149. 36 Clara Delgado Valero et al., Regreso a Tulaytula. Guıá del Toledo Isla´mico siglos VIII-XI (Toledo: Junta de Communidades de Castilla-La Mancha, 1999), p. 131. 37 Casal Garcıá, ‘‘Aspectos morfolo´gicos’’, 309–310. 38 Ibn Abi Dunya Kita¯b al-qubu¯r, nos. 62 and 63, cited in Leah Kinberg, ‘‘Interaction between this world and the afterworld in the early Islamic tradition’’, Oriens, 29–30 (1986): 285–308 at p. 294. 39 Antonio Arjona Castro, Historia de Co´rdoba durante el emirato omeya (Cordoba: Instituto de Estudios Califales de la Real Academia de Ciencias, Bellas Letras y Nobles Artes de Co´rdoba, 2001), p. 113 and n. 334. 32 ´


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Perhaps the strongest evidence for separate Christian burial is provided by my second case study: a legal judgement relating to the behaviour of Christians in a Muslim cemetery. It was preserved in a collection of legal texts40 written between July 1079 and July 1080 by Ibn Sahl (413–486/1022–1093), who served as a judge in the Maghreb as well as in Cordoba and Granada. Three complete manuscripts and two fragments of the collection survive in libraries in Rabat; only one is dated, to 501/1107-8.41 Ibn Sahl’s work was based on some 50 of his own judgments, but he also transmitted and commented upon the opinions of legal scholars of Umayyad Cordoba. Many of these judgements originated with the consolidation of Ma¯likite law in the East and few illustrate Andalusi cases. Van Staevel has argued that the jurists were acting in cases where the law inherited from Ma¯lik had proved inadequate in al-Andalus; they were trying to reduce the diversity of opinion and to adapt to Cordoba legislation formulated in Egypt.42 Unusually, the cemetery example relates specifically to Cordoba; the circumstantial details both of the case and of its transmission are precise. Ibn Sahl stated that he took down the oral testimony of an unnamed man, who is referred to in this text as a qa¯’im bi l-hisba. _ This official, usually known as the muhtasib, was in charge of markets, public morals _ and the general welfare of the community. Another muhtasib, Ibn ‘Abdu¯n, who _ wrote a treatise on the regulation of markets in Seville, also concerned himself with behaviour in cemeteries. Ibn Sahl’s case refers to the cemetery founded as an act of piety by Mut‘a, a concubine of al-Hakam I, early in the third/ninth century; _ it lay outside the city walls – although it is not clear in which direction.43 Burials of prominent men in this cemetery are attested between the late third/ninth and the early fifth/eleventh centuries.44 The magistrate Ibn Sahl quoted cited in turn three legal scholars known to have been active in Cordoba at the beginning of the fourth/ tenth century,45 one of whom said that the injunction should apply to all cemeteries. The judgement is headed ‘‘On the passage of carts and Christians across the cemeteries’’: We heard from al-qa¯’im bi l-hisba about the passage of carts across _ cemeteries [specifically] in the cemetery of Mut‘a and [about]the funeral processions of the ‘ajm [i.e. the non-Muslims, usually Christians] taking a route across our cemeteries. And his judgement in respect of the drivers of carts was that if they cross the cemetery with their carts, their passage should be to the west, via the wide channel that has no graves in it. The ‘ajm should stop crossing our graveyards and flattening the graves and walking on them. The Muslims [themselves] have been forbidden to walk 40

Al-Ahka¯m al-kubra¯’, ed. R. Nu’aymi: ‘‘An edition of Diwan al-Ahkam al-kubra’ by Isa b. Sahl (d.486/ _ 1093 AD)’’, PhD thesis, University of St Andrews, 1978. 41 Mustakhraja min makhtu¯t al-ahka¯m al-kubra¯’ li l-qa¯d i Abi al-Asbagh ‘I¯sa¯ ibn Sahl, ed. Muhammad _ _ _ ‘Abd al-Wahha¯b Khalla¯f, revised and with an introduction by Mahmu¯d ‘Ali Makki (Cairo: Al-Matba¯‘a _ _ al-‘Arabiya al-Haditha, 1980), p. 14. _ 42 Jean-Pierre Van Stae¨vel, ‘‘Pre´voir, juguler, baˆtir: droit de la construction et institutions judiciaries a` Cordoue durant le 4/IX sie`cle’’, Cuadernos de Madinat al-Zahra¯’, 5, (2004): 31–52 at p. 39. 43 Pinilla, ‘‘Aportaciones’’, 207–208. 44 Ibn Bashkuwa¯l, Khalla¯f ibn ‘Abd al-Malik, S ila, ed. Franciso Codera, volumes I–II, (Madrid: _ Bibliotheca Arabico-Hispana, 1883), nos. 235, 553, 760, 1434. 45 Muhammad ibn Luba¯ba [d.314/926], Ayyu¯b ibn Sulayma¯n [d.302/914] and Muhammad ibn Walid _ _ [d.309/921].

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Ann Christys on them; just imagine how much more they [are being] defiled by the unbelievers! They [i.e., the Christians] have a big space to the east of the cemetery towards the turning into the alley that exits to the ditch [around the city walls] and to the north of the cemetery [for their own burials?].46

It is likely that Cordoba, like the rest of the Islamic world, was segmenting into separate communities based on faith.47 In this context, the ruling on segregation in the cemetery looks like one of the strategies of distinction which the Muslims of Cordoba, perhaps still in a minority in the city at the beginning of the fourth/tenth century, could have adopted in an attempt to follow the Prophet Muhammad’s instruction to protect their community from assimilation.48 _ Although it is assumed that Christians and Jews in al-Andalus enjoyed the protection owed to the ‘‘People of the Book’’, in fact much of the surviving legislation of the caliphate from al-Andalus that mentions non-Muslims deals with the protection of Muslims from contamination by contact with their non-Muslim neighbours, rather than vice versa.49 The earliest collection of this legislation to survive from al-Andalus is the one attributed to al-‘Utbi (d.c.869),50 although _ only fragments of the original text survive, and we are dependent on a revision and commentary by the grandfather of Averroes, Ibn Rushd al-Jadd (d.1126).51 This work runs to 20 volumes in the modern edition of Ibn Rushd’s commentary and records 279 judgments referring to Christians, Jews and the dhimmis as a whole.52 They cover such contested matters as whether a Muslim was allowed to wear clothes previously worn by a Christian, to wash in his/her water or to eat an animal that a Christian had slaughtered. It is easy to see how the idea arose that one’s grave would be defiled if a Christian walked across it as an extension of this concern to avoid impurity. Yet it seems that there was, as always, tension between normative legislation and day-to-day relationships between Cordoba’s faith communities. Scholars continue to make assumptions about the settlement of al-Andalus that cannot be substantiated from the sources. The idea, for example, that there were separate barrios for Jews and Christians in the cities of al-Andalus has been derived from the occasional reference to the situation after the Reconquista; it is wrong to project this back to the Islamic period.53 An attempt to locate a Jewish quarter54 inside the 46

Khalla¯f, Mustakhraja, no. 13, pp. 81–2. Michael G. Morony, ‘‘Religious communities in late Sasanian and early Muslim Iraq’’, in Muslims and Others in Early Islamic Society: The Formation of the Classical Islamic World 18, ed. Robert Hoyland (Ashgate: Aldershot, Hampshire, 2004), pp. 1–24; repr. from Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 17 (1974), pp. 113–135. 48 M.J. Kister, ‘‘‘Do not assimilate yourselves’. . . La tashabbahu’’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam, 12 (1989): 321–53; repr. in Muslims and Others, 125–158. 49 Ann Christys, ‘‘Muslims and Christians in Umayyad Cordoba: the formation of a tolerant society?’’ Revista di storia del cristianesimo, 1 (2007): 29–48. 50 Ana Fernańdez Fe´lix, Cuestiones legales del islam temprano: la ‘Utbiyya y el proceso de formacioń de la sociedad isla´mica andalusı´ (Madrid: CSIC, 2003), p. 358. 51 Ibn Rushd al-Jadd, Kita¯b al-baya¯n wa l-tahsil, ed. Muhammad Hajji et al., volumes I–XX, 2nd ed. __ _ _ (Beirut: Da¯r al-Gharb al-Isla¯mi, 1988–91); Vincent Lagarde`re, ‘‘La haute judicature a` l’e´poque almorabide en al-Andalus’’, Al-Qantara, 7 (1986): 135–228 at pp. 148–175. 52 Fernańdez Fe´lix, 359 and appendix C. 53 Mazzoli-Guintard, 76. 54 Arjona Castro, 231. 47


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Ba¯b al-Yahu¯d through which al-Hakam II exited rely on little more than the _ name of the gate, which it is likely to have acquired from the Jewish cemetery, possibly of Roman origin, which Ibn Bashkuwa¯l mentions beside the road going north from Cordoba.55 A synagogue there is mentioned in a judgement of Ibn Sahl, but the quarter was named hawmat masjid shawrab after a mosque whose remains _ have been excavated.56 Fifty-eight bodies uncovered in this quarter have a southeast-northwest orientation, whereas most Jewish burials were east-west facing.57 The picturesque Jewish quarter near the Great Mosque is a modern reconstruction based on late medieval documents.58 In fact, the evidence does not point to segregation. Muslims and Christians met in the marketplace, visited each other’s places of worship and celebrated each other’s festivals. There is little evidence that they dressed differently. The legal texts themselves show that the Christians and Muslims to whom these judgements refer were sometimes living under the same roof. Hence, one of the questions that the jurists were asked to consider was whether it was permitted for a Muslim to take his mother to church.59 This ambiguity extended to death and burial, which also gave rise to legal queries. It was permitted for a Muslim man to take part in the funeral ceremonies for his Christian father.60 Al-‘Utbi collected the case of the son of a Muslim man and _ a Christian woman who married, had a son, and then divorced. When the son died, he was buried in the Christian cemetery. A judge ruled that he should be reburied with the Muslims, but only if this could be done quickly.61 A convert could be buried with Muslims.62 If a Muslim found a dead body and did not know whether the man was Christian or Muslim, he should treat him as a Muslim if he was circumcised.63 It was more important to ensure that every Muslim was buried correctly than to avoid contamination by the misidentified remains of a Christian. The overall impression is of uneasy co-existence. It seems that only in burial practice are there facts on, or rather in, the ground that support, in a limited way, the idea of enforced segregation. Were there additional factors in death that made this distinction more desirable than in life? This is a big subject and one is hampered by the fact that there was little discussion of death and resurrection in early Islam, so one can only project back from later material.64 The Qur’a¯n, concerned only with resurrection and the delights of Paradise, does not say how the body should be prepared, buried or prayed over, although these matters were discussed in the period of the formulation of Hadith, in Ku¯fa and Basra.65 Halevi _ has argued that ‘‘the great leap in Muslim visions of the afterlife happened when the 55

Ibn Bashkuwa¯l, 300 Arjona, 232 n. 624. 57 Ibid. n.618; for paucity of evidence for Jewish burials in Cordoba, see Guıá Archaeolo´gica de Co´rdoba, 237. 58 Mazzoli-Guintard, 76. 59 Ibn Rushd al-Jadd, IV: 208. 60 Ibid., II: 218 and 248. 61 Ibid., II: 270–2722 and 283 62 Ibid., II: 255–256. 63 Ibid., II: 289. 64 Jane Idelman Smith and Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, Islamic Understanding of Death and Resurrection (New York: State University of New York Press, 2002); John Bowker, The Meanings of Death (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 102–128. 65 Halevi, 206. 56

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Qur’a¯nic boundary to the other world was identified with the graves of this world’’, perhaps early in the third/eighth century.66 The translation to Paradise came after the questioning of the dead by the angels Munkar and Nakir and the punishments of the grave, which all would experience, although they would be worse for non-Muslims, lumped together as unbelievers (ka¯firu¯n). Yet most of the theological texts that deal in detail with this subject were written in the fifth/eleventh century or later; their reliance on Hadith gives an impression of timelessness that may be _ misleading, as it is not clear whether all these Hadith were normative in Umayyad _ Cordoba. The victory of Ma¯likism in al-Andalus meant a relative depreciation of Hadith in favour of ra¯’y, the opinion of later scholars, in particular the rulings _ of Ma¯lik himself.67 In the Muwatta’, which Andalusis used from early in the third/ninth century, Ma¯lik had little to say about burial practice, although he stressed the importance of the shaha¯da as witness to the merit of the deceased: Yahya¯ related to me from Ma¯lik from Sa‘id ibn Abi Sa‘id al-Maqbu¯ri from _ his father that he had asked Abu¯ Huraya ‘How do you pray over the dead?’ _ and Abu¯ Huraya replied: ‘‘By the life of Alla¯h, I will tell you! I follow with _ the family and when the corpse is put down, I say ‘Alla¯h is great’ and praise Alla¯h and ask for the blessings on His prophet. Then I say ‘O Alla¯h, he is Your slave and the son of Your male slave and Your female slave. He used to testify that there is no God but you and that Muhammad is Your slave _ and Your messenger, and You know best, O Alla¯h! If he acted well, then increase for him his good action, and if he acted wrongly, then overlook his wrong actions. O Alla¯h! Do not deprive us of his reward, and do not try us after him.68 There is a tension in the modern historiography of medieval Islam between the apparent universalism of many of the written sources and the increasing awareness of the diversity of ‘‘the Islamic city’’ in reality. It is also clear from ethnoarchaeology that burial practices that look very similar can have different meanings attached to them.69 It is at the risk of anachronism, therefore, that I am ending this article with a few observations on the theology of separate burial as it may have been practised in Cordoba. They come from the synthesis which al-Ghaza¯li (1058–1111) based on Hadith and the work of scholars of the third/tenth and fifth/eleventh_ centuries, in particular the synthesis of Ibn Abi Dunya.70 Al-Ghaza¯li had a little to say on the proprieties of funeral processions and visits to the cemetery, which were different for Muslims and Christians; it was, for instance, forbidden for 66

Ibid., 217 Marıá Isabel Fierro, ‘‘El derecho maliki en al-Andalus: siglos II/VII – V/XI’’, Al-Qantara, 12 (1991): 119–132; Fernańdez Fe´lix, 344. 68 Ma¯lik, Al-Muwat t a, 16.6.17, trans. Aisha Abdurrahman Bewley, Al-Muwatta of Imam Ma¯lki ibn Anas. __ The First Formulation of Islamic Law (London and New York: Kegan Paul, 1989), p. 87. 69 Richard Huntingdon and Peter Metcalf, Celebrations of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 43; Mike Parker Pearson, The Archaeology of Death and Burial (Sutton, 1999, repr. 2003), p. 44. 70 Al-Ghaza¯li, The Remembrance of Death and the Afterlife. Kita¯b dhikr al-mawt wa-ma¯ ba‘dahu. Book XL of The Revival of the Religious Sciences. Ihya¯ ‘ulu¯m al-din, trans. with an introduction and notes by T.J. _ Winter (Cambridge: Islamic Texts Society, 1989); Al-Ghaza¯li, Durra, cited in Smith and Haddad, passim. 67


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Muslims to rub, touch or kiss the grave ‘‘for such,’’ said al-Ghaza¯li, ‘‘are the practices of the Christians’’.71 But he was more concerned with the fate of the dead. In order to mitigate the punishments of Hell, the newly-dead must give the correct answer to questions about his or her faith, which was: ‘‘God is my lord, Muhammad my prophet, the Qur’a¯n my guide, Islam my faith, the Ka‘ba my _ direction of prayer and Abraham my father and his community my community.’’72 It is an expansion of the shaha¯da, which we saw on the epitaph of the amir’s concubine, a permanent reminder that the deceased had made her confession of faith. Yet al-Ghaza¯li went on to say that this simple statement might not be enough. It was important that Muslims came to visit one’s grave while one was in this liminal state. Furthermore, the soul must be welcomed in the Afterlife by a member of the Muslim community. Otherwise, it might go astray. Al-Ghaza¯li described what happened to just such an unfortunate Muslim whose funeral obsequies were neglected: . . . . if no-one of his acquaintance comes to meet him [after his death], something happens to make him a Jew or a Christian and he goes to join them. Then when someone else from the world arrives, his neighbours ask him, ‘‘What do you know about Fula¯n [so-and-so, the one who has converted]?’’ [The newly arrived] says to them: ‘‘He has died.’’ They answer: ‘‘Truly we are from God, and to Him we return. But he has been sent down to the community of the pit.’’73 All was not lost, since the deceased could return to his relatives in dreams, demanding that they make amends for their shoddy treatment.74 Al-Ghaza¯li repeated a saying attribute to the caliph ‘Ali. Asked why it was that he lived near the cemetery, ‘Ali replied, ‘‘I find [its inmates] to be the best of neighbours. I find them to be neighbours of truthfulness, who hold their tongues and remind one of the Afterlife.’’75 It seems that one’s neighbours were not all equal in this respect. It was important to be careful about the company one kept after death. If a Christian was inadvertently buried in a Muslim cemetery, the angels would deal with the mistake. But if a Muslim was wrongly interred, he or she might for eternity be condemned to the fires of hell with the unbelievers. Perhaps the separation of Muslims and non-Muslims in the cemeteries of Umayyad Cordoba represents the triumph of Hadith over ra¯’y, with the ideal epitomised by the elite _ burial and funeral prayers for the convert Ibn al-Qu¯tiya. _

71

Al-Ghaza¯li, The Remembrance, 114. Al-Ghaza¯li, Durra, Manuscript, f.25, cited by Smith and Haddad, 44. 73 Ibid., 35–36, cited by Smith and Haddad, 54. 74 Kinberg, ‘‘Interaction’’. 75 Al-Ghaza¯li, The Remembrance, 101. 72


Fidda l-Nu¯biyya: The Woman and her Role in Early Shi_ 6_ite History

KHALID A. SINDAWI

The purpose of the present study is to analyse the role played by an important female figure in early Shi 6ite history. The person in question is Fid d a l-Nu¯biyya, the _ _ servant-girl of Fa¯t ima, the Prophet’s daughter. After a long period of neglect by scholars, _ who have focused on what to their mind were figures of greater import, we shall here attempt to describe the role played by Fid d a in early Shi 6ite history by way of analysing _ _ her biography and her close relations with Fa¯t ima and members of the latter’s family _ ( 6Ali, H asan and H usayn). We shall further describe what has been reported of Fid d a’s _ _ _ _ personality, her family, her admiration for the Prophet’s family, Qur8a¯nic verses which supposedly mention her, and the great respect in which she was held by Fa¯t ima’s family.

ABSTRACT

_

Keywords: Fidda l-Nu¯biyya; Early Shi 6ite history; Muslim women; Miracle; _ _ Kara¯ma; Mu6jiza; Fa¯tima, daughter of Muhammad; Qur 8a¯n exegesis _

_

Modern Western historically-oriented writings on women at the dawn of Islam focus to a great extent on the women in the Prophet’s family because of their function as role-models for the behaviour of Muslim women.1 However, although the Islamic sources for the period in question mention numerous other well-known women who lived during the first century-and-a-half of Islam, interest in these women has not survived into modern times. It is no secret that most of the traditions and anecdotes concerning early Islam can be found in collections that were edited no sooner than about 200/815, that is more than a century after the events they describe. There is also considerable controversy concerning the question of the validity of these sources. Some scholars (Watt, Abbot, Shaban, Ahmed and others) claim that the contents of these traditions and anecdotes can be used, albeit with care, as historical sources, while Correspondence: Khalid A. Sindawi, Department of Mulitidisciplinary Studies, The Max Stern Academic College of Emek Yezreel, Emek Yezreel, 19300, Israel. E-mail: [email protected] 1

The writings in question belong mainly to feminist literature, written in the context of the current debate within Islam on feminism. See, for example, Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam: Historical Roots of a Modern Debate (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1992); Denise Spellberg, ¯ 8isha Bint Abi Bakr (New York: Columbia University Politics, Gender, and the Islamic Past: The Legacy of 6A Press, 1994); Fatima Mernissi, Women and Islam: A Historical and Theological Inquiry (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991; and others. One exception to this generalisation is Ruth Roded’s book on women in Islamic biographical collections: Women in Islamic Biographical Collections, from Ibn Sa6d to Who’s Who (Boulder, CO and London: Lynne Rienner, 1994). ISSN 0950–3110 print/ISSN 1473–348X online/09/030269-19 ß 2009 Society for the Medieval Mediterranean DOI: 10.1080/09503110903343283

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others reject them as unhistorical and prefer instead to use the scant available non-Islamic sources. Yet other scholars have simply stopped doing historical research and instead focus on the study of the Islamic discourse on this topic. The present study adopts the working assumption that traditions and anecdotes are to be treated not as factual reports of actual events, but rather as a narrative whose purpose was to shape a people’s historical and cultural memory in accordance with the political aims and cultural conceptions of those who composed them, who may have lived at any period between the time when the reported events supposedly took place and the time when the collection was put together. These narratives can teach us about the historical period in question in three different ways. First of all, we may assume that the stories were based on a kernel of fact. This enables us, for example, to conclude that a woman mentioned in a story was indeed a real historical figure, with some of the attributes described in the source. Second, since most of the people who composed the anecdotes had some knowledge of the society and the culture which they described, we can, with cautious reservation, learn something from these descriptions about various aspects of the society and culture described in them. Thus, for example, the descriptions that will be discussed below enable us to learn something of women’s mobility and the extent of women’s involvement in political struggles. Third, the anecdotes reflect their authors’ views, which occasionally can enable us to identify the political interests and socio-political discourse of which they form a part, and thereby to reach conclusions concerning the social and political culture and cultural concepts of the period in question.

Muslim women in an era of contradictions Feminist ideas began to penetrate the Islamic world towards the end of the nineteenth century. These ideas gave rise to a growing debate about the biographies and significance of the first Muslim women at the time of the emergence of Islam. The underlying assumption in the debate was that a new interpretation of women’s role in the days of the Prophet would affect the lives of Muslim women in the modern world, and Muslim society as a whole.2 One topic that was debated was whether the appearance of Islam improved the status of women or the opposite. Opinions on the matter were divided. Some claimed that Muhammad’s teaching _ repressed women and removed them from the public sphere, while others pointed to various Muslim laws pertaining to women, for example the laws of inheritance and of marriage, as innovations that enhanced the status of women in comparison with pre-Islamic times.3 At a quite early stage the topic of the status of women became part of the debate on modernism versus tradition in the context of the encounter between Islamic and Western civilisation. The status of women in Islamic society came to symbolise a society’s progress and development. In Western eyes the status of women was perceived as a sign of social backwardness in the Third World, thus providing some 2

Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, p. 129. Jane Smith, ‘‘Women, religion, and social change in early Islam’’, in Women, Religion, and Social Change in Early Islam, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Ellison Banks Findly (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), pp. 19–35. 3

Fid d a l-Nu¯biyya: The Woman and her Role _ _

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justification for Western control of far-away continents. Teaching other societies to improve the lot of women was seen as part of ‘‘the white man’s burden’’, part of the West’s cultural message, and an argument used by colonialists against the societies over which they ruled. The educational effort to improve the status of women created a strong bond between ideas of women’s liberation and other Western influences.4 Qa¯sim Amin was one of the intellectuals who believed that the advancement of women was one Western value that was worth emulating; his books Tahri r al-mar8a (Women’s Liberation)5 and Al-mar8a l-jadida (The New Woman)6 _ 1900) exerted considerable influence. The Western-educated Amin possessed a secular orientation, and argued that the advancement of women could liberate Muslim society from the shackles of its backwardness and help make it the equal of Western societies.7 At the same time Islamic reformers, clerics with a religious education, also called for improving the status of women as part of a reform which would, so they thought, revive Muslim society by way of a return to Islam’s original values, interpreted according to the spirit of the times. One of the most prominent of these was Muhammad 6Abduh, an Egyptian cleric whose influence over the Islamic _ reformist movement was considerable. He was Qa¯sim Amin’s teacher. As early as the 1880s 6Abduh wrote that the need to improve the status of women originates in the values of Islam itself and not in Western civilisation. In this, as in other matters, 6Abduh drew inspiration from the days of the salaf (‘‘ancestors’’), i.e., from the days of the Prophet and the first Caliphs, as he envisaged them.8 Islam’s formative period served as the model both for proponents of women’s advancement and for supporters of the traditional way of life. In the course of the twentieth century, Islamic clerics and jurists wrote quite a number of books in which they presented the traditional interpretation of the Qur 8a¯n’s view on the status of women.9 In the last quarter of that century, perhaps as a counterweight to the increasing strength of fundamentalist Islam in various Muslim countries, secular feminist writers also began to show an interest in the ancient texts, for the purpose of reinterpretation. One of the best-known examples is Fatima Mernissi’s book.10 In the 1990s a kind of ‘‘Islamic feminism’’ appeared, led by educated Muslim women; they read the primary sources with the aim of reinterpreting verses that had in the past been understood as disparaging towards women, and highlighting verses and sayings that support equality between the sexes.11 In both of these cases the authors made an attempt to ‘‘play the game’’ according to the rules of Islam and to compete with Muslim clerics in their own backyard. 4

Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad, ‘‘Islam, women, and revolution in twentieth-century Arab thought’’, in Women, Religion, and Social Change in Early Islam, ed. Yvonne Yazbeck Haddad and Ellison Banks Findly (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), pp. 275–306; Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, p. 152. 5 Qa¯sim Amin, Tahri r al-Mar8a (Women’s Liberation)1899 (Cairo: Dar al-Ma 6a¯rif, 1970). _ 6 Qa¯sim Amin, Al-mar8a l-jadida (The New Woman)1900 (Cairo: Matba 8at al-ma 8arif, 1900). 7 Qa¯sim Amin,‘‘A historical perspective on women’’, in Qa¯sim Amin, The Liberation of Women and The New Women: A Document in the Early Debate on Egyptian Feminism, trans. Samiha Sidhom Peterson (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1995) pp. 119–128. 8 Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, p. 139. 9 Mernissi, Women and Islam, pp. 24, 99. 10 Mernissi, Women and Islam. 11 Margot Badran, ‘‘Islamic feminism: what’s in a name?’’ Al-Ahram Weekly Online, 17–23 January 2002, No. 569, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/569/cu1.htm (accessed 7 October 2009).

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Both women refer back to what they consider Islam’s ‘‘golden age’’, the days of the Prophet, in an attempt to re-examine his sayings on the status of women.

Fidda l-Nu¯biyya and Muslim biographical tradition _ _

Very few women are mentioned in the Qur 8a¯n itself. However, details about the lives of women who lived during the Prophet’s lifetime and later do appear in the biographical lexicons on prominent Muslim personalities written since the Middle Ages. Muslim biography (sira) is a genre that is unique in its scope and its characteristics; the earliest extant remnants of writings of this type date back as far as the third/ninth century. There are those who have explained the great prevalence of biographies as related to the science of hadith, which sought as much information _ as possible about the Prophet’s companions (saha¯ba) and contemporaries. Others _ _ have attributed the genre’s prevalence to the great importance that early Arab tradition attached to analogy. Biographical lexicons about the lives of prominent people in a certain region or generation have been compiled from early times down to the present day. Some of these compilations also contain the biographies of prominent women in the days of the Prophet as well as his female relatives, ¯ 8isha, his youngest especially his first wife Khadija, his young and beloved wife 6A daughter Fa¯tima12 and her servant Fidda l-Nu¯biyya, whose lives and deeds became _ _ _ models to be emulated by Muslim women. Traditions about the Prophet’s utterances transmitted by these women were considered reliable for purposes of Islamic jurisprudence, since they were reported by persons who were constantly at the Prophet’s side, and were also present at his deathbed.13 The Shi 6ite biographical literature has devoted more than usual space to Fidda _ _ l-Nu¯biyya, who was in the service of the Prophet for a long time, and then in the home of Fa¯tima, the Prophet’s daughter. Among Shi 6ites she is considered a model _ of feminine virtue; she is highly respected and every tradition quoted in her name has been accepted as true. As with Fa¯tima, Shi 6ite writers have attached legendary _ and supernatural motifs to Fidda’s life, which has given an added dimension to _ _ the description of her character in tradition. Modern Shi 6ite versions of her story deserve a separate treatment and will not be dealt with in the present article. In the Sunni literature, Fidda is relegated to the sidelines and does not figure as _ _ prominently as other women.

Fidda’s name _ _

Shi 6ite14 sources relate that when the Prophet presented his daughter Fa¯tima with _ a slave girl to help her in her chores at home, he gave her the name Fidda. We can _ _ only guess at the reason why this name (which literally means ‘‘silver’’) was given 12 Laura Veccia Vaglieri, art. ‘‘Fa¯tima’’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1965), II: _ 841–850. 13 Ascha Ghassan, ‘‘The ‘Mother of the Believers’: Stereotypes of the Prophet Muhammad’s wives’’, in Female Stereotypes in Religious Traditions, ed. Ria Kloppenborg and Woulter J. Hanegraaff (Leiden: Brill, 1995), pp. 89–107, at 90–94. 14 Whenever the words Shi 6ite, Shi 6a and Shi 6ism are used in this article, they refer to Ima¯mi or Twelver Shi 6ism.


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to her, perhaps as a good luck wish, or possibly after the name of one of the female mules given to her by Farwa b. 6Umar.15 However, the most likely explanation is that the name refers to her skills as a silversmith, as we shall see below. Unfortunately our sources are silent concerning her previous name. Her second name, al-Nu¯biyya (literally ‘‘the Nubian’’) would appear to have been given her either due to the colour of her skin, which may have been similar to that of the inhabitants of the land of Nubia, south of Egypt, or, as is more likely, due to the fact that she was actually brought over to Arabia from relatively nearby Nubia. However, other sources claim that she was the daughter of the king of India,16 and according to still others she was of Berber origin.17 Her ethnic origin is thus quite uncertain.

Fidda’s family _ _

After 6Ali and Fa¯tima had inherited Fidda from the Prophet, they married her _ _ _ to a man by the name of Abu¯ Tha 6laba al-Habashi,18 whom she bore a male child. _ Afterwards Abu¯ Tha 6laba died and Fidda remarried, this time to Sulayk.19 Her son _ _ from her first husband died, and after her marriage she refused to have sexual intercourse with her second husband until the legally prescribed time (6idda)20 had passed to ensure that she was not pregnant from her deceased first husband. Her second husband complained to the Caliph 6Umar b. al-Khatta¯b (28/644), who __ ruled in Fidda’s favour. _ _ Eventually she apparently bore Sulayk five children—four sons and one daughter. All that is known about them is that their mother was in the habit of reciting the Qur 8a¯nic verse: ‘‘Wealth and children are the adornment of the life of this world’’ 21 out of love to and pride in them. They are mentioned as having searched for their mother when she was lost in the desert.22 The sons’ names were Da¯ 8u¯d, Muhammad, Yahya¯ and Mu¯sa¯. Their names are _ _ mentioned in relation to an incident involving their mother, who became separated from a caravan with which she was travelling through the desert. She met a man in the desert who asked her if she had sons, and she replied by quoting four 15

His full name was Farwa b. 6Umar (or 6Amr) al-Judha¯mi, a Byzantine official who converted to Islam and wrote to the Prophet to inform him of his conversion. In the year 10/632, he sent a member of his tribe named Mas 6u¯d b. Sa 6d to the Prophet with a white she-mule named Fidda, a horse and a donkey _ _ named 6Ufayr. See Rashid al-Din Muhammad b. Shahra¯shu¯b, Mana¯qib a¯l Abi T a¯lib (Qom: Mu 8assasat _ _ al- 6Alla¯ma lil-Nashr, 1959) I:168–169, whence Muhammad Ba¯qir al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r (Beirut: _ _ Da¯r Sa¯dir, 1983), XVI:107, XXI:375, LXI:195; Khalid Sindawi, ‘‘The donkey of the Prophet in Shi 6ite _ tradition’’, Al-Masa¯q, 18:1 (2006): 87–98, at p. 90, note 35. 16 Al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, XLI:273, no. 29; Ali b. Yunis al-Naba¯ti, Al-S ira¯t al-mustaqim ila mustahiqq _ _ _ _ _ al-taqdim (Najaf: al-Maktaba al-Haydariyya, 1964) 2:17. _ 17 ¯ Al-Mirza¯ Hasan al-Nu¯ri, Mustadrak al-wasa¯ 8il (Qom: Mu 8assasat Al al-Bayt li-Ihya¯ 8 al-Tura¯th, 1988), _ _ XVI:88, no. 19236-3. 18 In some sources his name is given as Abu¯ Taghliba. See: al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, XV:227, no. 7. _ 19 Some sources give his name as Abu¯ Mulayk al-Ghatafa¯ni. See: Ibn Shahra¯shu¯b, Mana¯qib, II:361; _ whence al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, XV:227, no. 7. _ 20 For more on the concept of 6idda in Islam, see: Muhammad Sama¯ra, Ahka¯m wa a¯tha¯r al-zawjiyya _ _ (Jerusalem: Printing Workers’ Cooperative Press, 1987), pp. 239–253. 21 Q 18:46. 22 Ibn Shahra¯shu¯b, Mana¯qib, III:343–344; al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, XLIII:86–87, no. 8. _

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Qur 8a¯nic verses23 in which her sons’ names occurred. Note that all four sons were named after prophets. These names are quite popular among Muslims, whom a hadith urges to call their children by the names of prophets: tasammaw bi-asma¯ 8 _ al-anbiya¯ 8 (rawa¯hu Ahmad) (Give the names of prophets).24 _ As for her daughter, according to our sources her name was Miska, mentioned in connection with the latter’s daughter Shahra, a pious woman who worked miracles like her grandmother Fidda, perhaps an indication that such traits were _ _ considered heritable.

Fidda’s physical features _ _

Fidda’s only physical feature mentioned by Shi 6ite sources is her dark face,25 _ _ as pointed out above in relation to her name. This feature, as mentioned there, makes it likely that her provenance was indeed the land of Nubia, as testified by her epithet.

Fidda’s death _ _

We know neither the date of Fidda’s death nor her age when she died. However, _ _ it is certain that she was still alive at the time of the battle of Karbala¯ 8 (64/680), in the wake of which she was taken as a prisoner to Damascus, together with Husayn b. 6Ali’s wives, sisters and aunts. The sources are silent concerning her fate _ after that. However, it would appear that Fidda chose to remain in Damascus until her _ _ death, and that she was buried there. At least according to some sources her tomb26 was to be found in the ‘‘Small Gate’’27 cemetery, near the eastern entrance. These same sources describe it as being located inside a green-domed structure, surrounded by other similar shrines, the whole aggregate popularly called ‘‘the prisoners’ cemetery’’, as it was believed that it was populated by a number of women belonging to the Prophet’s family who were with Husayn at Karbala¯ 8. _ According to other sources, the structures dedicated to Fidda and the other _ _ women in Damascus are nothing more than commemorative buildings in honour 23

Q 38:26; 3:144; 19:12; 27:9. It is well-known that prophets’ names are very popular indeed among Shi 6ites. See: Muhammad b. ¯ mili (al-Hurr al- 6A ¯ mili), Wasa¯ 8il al-shi 6a (Qom: Mu 8assasat A ¯ l al-Bayt li-Ihya¯ 8_ al-Tura¯th, al-Hasan al- 6A _ _ _ 1409/1988), XXI:391, no. 27381; al-Nu¯ri, Mustadrak al-wasa¯ 8il, XV:129, no. 17752-4. Note also the following statement attributed to the Prophet: ‘‘Whosoever has four sons born unto him and does not ¯ mili, name one after me has offended me’’ (al-Nu¯ri, Mustadrak al-wasa¯ 8il, XV:13, no. 17754-1; al- 6A Wasa¯ 8il al-shi 6a, XXI:393, no. 27385). 25 Al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, XLIII:174, no. 15. _ 26 See Muhammad Sa¯diq al-Kirba¯ssi, Al-mawsu¯ 6a l-husayniyya: al-mara¯qid (London: Husseini Islamic _ _ _ Centre, 1990), s.v. ‘‘al-mara¯qid’’, IV:221. 27 The ‘‘Small Gate’’ in the city wall of Damascus during the Umayyad period was located on the city’s south-western extremity. The gate, known today as Ba¯b al-Sha¯ghu¯r, is no longer extant. The cemetery, dating from the same time, is located outside the gate whose name it bears. It is one of the largest and best-known in Damascus. For more details see Maqa¯ma¯t wa masha¯hid ahl al-bayt 6alayhim al-sala¯m fi su¯riya¯ (Shrines of the Prophet’s family in Syria), http://www.imamreza.net/arb/imamreza.php?id¼2305 (accessed 7 October 2009). 24


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of these women, who once stayed in that place, while Fidda was in fact buried _ _ in the Baqi 6 al-Gharqad cemetery in Medina.28

How the Prophet gave Fidda to Fa¯tima _ _

_

Shi 6ite sources relate the following story concerning the circumstances of Fidda’s _ _ coming into the service of Fa¯tima. One day, so the story goes, the Prophet visited _ his daughter. She complained to him that she was worn out by the hard work she did and asked her father for a slave girl to help her in her household chores. The Prophet said in reply: ‘‘True, your financial situation is difficult, but know that in the mosque there are four-hundred men with nothing to eat and nothing to wear’’. He added: ‘‘Were I not afraid of harming a single hair of yours I would give you want you want. For I fear that on the Day of Judgment you will be held to account because of the slave girl and 6Ali b. Abi Ta¯lib will deduct you on the Day _ of Judgment before God if 6Ali should call in what was his due’’. Fa¯tima, angry _ at her father’s refusal, returned in disappointment to her home, where her husband 6Ali, seeing the state she was in, asked her what had happened. She told him, whereupon he replied: ‘‘You went to your father asking something for this world, and he gave you a garment for your afterlife’’. After the Prophet’s refusal to accede to his daughter’s request the following verse was reportedly revealed to him: ‘‘And if you turn away from them and you are awaiting a mercy from your Lord for which you hope, then, speak unto them a soft kind word’’,29 telling him that if a relative, in this case his daughter Fa¯tima, _ asked for mercy he should answer kindly. Immediately after the revelation of the verse the Prophet sent his daughter a slave girl to help her in her chores, and named her Fidda.30 _ _

Fa¯tima works together with Fidda _

_ _

After the Prophet gave Fidda l-Nu¯biyya to his daughter, he enjoined her to _ _ share the chores equally with her and to rotate her duties with her every day. This tradition represents the Prophet as treating the slave girl on an equal footing with his own daughter, thus ascribing a principle of equality to him. Fa¯tima, so we are told, honoured her father’s request and acted accordingly. _ We have a report in the name of 6Abd Alla¯h b. Ja 6far b. Muhammad quoting Salma¯n _ al-Fa¯risi (d. 656/1258)31 as saying: One night I went out with the Messenger of God to pray. As I approached 6Ali’s house I heard a voice inside saying: ‘‘My head aches so much, my belly is empty and my hands are weary from grinding barley’’. Salma¯n was 28

That is the cemetery for the local residents of Medina. For more details, see Ya¯qu¯t al-Hamawi (Shiha¯b _ al-Din al-Hamawi), Mu6jam al-bulda¯n (Beirut: Da¯r Ihya¯ 8 al-Tura¯th al- 6Arabi, 1979), I:473–474. _ _ 29 Q 17:28. 30 Ibn Shahra¯shu¯b, Mana¯qib, III:341–342; whence al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, XLIII:85, no. 8. _ 31 G. Levi Della Vida, ‘‘Salma¯n al-Fa¯risi’’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2004), Supplement, XII: 701–702.

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Khalid A. Sindawi disturbed by what he had heard and approached the house. He knocked and Fidda asked: ‘‘Who is at the door?’’ He answered that it was he, _ _ Salma¯n. Fidda asked him not to come in yet, because Fa¯tima was not _ _ _ properly dressed. She then threw her cloak to Fa¯tima, who wrapped _ herself in it and told Fidda that she could let Salma¯n enter. When he came _ _ in he saw Fa¯tima grinding barley and blood flowing from her palm _ unto the millstone. Salma¯n asked her: ‘‘Why do you grind barley with bleeding hands while your slave girl stands next to you and does nothing?’’ Fa¯tima answered that she was obeying her father’s command to take turns _ with Fidda in doing the household chores. She added: ‘‘Yesterday was her _ _ turn and today it is mine’’. Salma¯n then replied: ‘‘May God make me your ransom’’.32

Fidda’s love for the family of Fa¯tima and 6Ali _ _

_

Fidda is reported as having been very fond indeed of 6Ali’s and Fa¯tima’s family, _ _ _ including their two sons, Hasan and Husayn. This affection appears to have _ _ been mutual. Fidda is reported to have empathised deeply with Fa¯tima’s family on _ _ _ a number of both joyous and sad occasions, and the family entrusted her with their innermost secrets, showing their great trust and deep love for this slave woman, whom they considered as part of the family. Among the secrets reportedly entrusted to her was the future date of Fa¯tima’s _ death, of which 6Ali informed her. The relevant tradition relates that Fa¯tima saw her _ 33 father in a dream not long after he had died. In the dream the Prophet told her that she would soon follow in his wake. Later she dreamt that angels were taking her to Paradise, where she was shown her father’s palace and her own. Upon waking from her sleep, Fa¯tima related the dream to 6Ali and asked him not to tell _ anyone of her impending death, apart from three women, Umm Salama, Hind bint Suhayl (d. 61/681), Umm Ayman, Baraka bint Tha 6laba (d. 16/632) and Fidda, and _ _ five men, 6Abd Alla¯h b. 6Abba¯s (d. 67/687), Salma¯n al-Fa¯risi (d. 40/656), al-Miqda¯d b. 6Amr (d. 37/653), Abu¯ Dharr al-Ghifa¯ri Jundub b. Juna¯da (d. 36/652) and Hudhayfa b. al-Yama¯n (d. 40/656).34 Here we see that Fa¯tima considers Fidda one _ _ _ _ of her closest confidantes, on a par even with Umm Salama, the Prophet’s wife. When Fa¯tima died, Fidda was present. She took part in the washing of her body _ _ _ and attended her burial. It is related that when Fa¯tima died her husband 6Ali _ washed her, and that the only other people who were present were Hasan, Husayn, _

_

Qutb al-Din Abu¯ 6Ali Sa 6id b. Hibat Alla¯h al-Ra¯wandi, Al-khara¯ 8ij wa l-jara¯ 8ih (Qom: Mu 8assasat al_ _ Ima¯m al-Mahdi, 1988), II:530–531; whence al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, LXIII:28, no. 33; Muhammad _ _ b. Jarir b. Rustum al-Tabari, Dala¯ 8il al-ima¯ma (Qom: Da¯r al-Dhakha¯ 8ir lil-Matbu¯ 6a¯t, 1963), p. 49. _ _ 33 Shi 6ite scholars claim that visions of the Prophet in dreams are genuine and constitute a revelation of sorts. They support their claim with the following saying attributed to the Prophet: ‘‘Whosoever saw me in a dream has truly seen me, for Satan never takes on my form or that of my regents’’. Another tradition has the Prophet saying, in a similar vein: ‘‘Whosoever visited me in a dream has indeed visited me, for Satan never takes on my form or that of my regents’’. For more details see: al-Sadu¯q Ali b. _ al-Husayn b. Babawayh, 6Uyu¯n akhba¯r al-rid a¯ (Tehran: Dar al-Alam lil-nashr (Jihan), 1958), II:257, no. _ 11; whence al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, LVIII:234–239, ch. 45, no. 1. _ 34 Al-Tabari, Dala¯ 8il al-ima¯ma, p. 44; whence al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, XLIII:207, no. 36; XXX:348, _ _ no. 164; XLIII:171; LXXVIII:310, no. 31; al-Nu¯ri, Mustadrak al-wasa¯ 8il, II:186, no. 1761-9. 32


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Zaynab (d. 14/630), Umm Kulthu¯m (d. 14/630), Fidda and 8Asma¯ 8 bint 6Umays _ _ (d. 45/661).35 Here 6Ali is represented as treating Fidda like an intimate member of _ _ the family. An example of Fidda’s love and concern for Fa¯tima’s family is the following story _ _ _ of her profound reaction when Hasan and Husayn once became lost. In a tradition _ _ related in the name of Salma¯n b. Mahra¯n al-A 6mash,36 the latter reports in his father’s name that his grandfather once told them the following story: We were sitting with the Messenger of God when Fidda, Fa¯tima’s slave girl, _ _ _ entered in tears and said: ‘‘Hasan and Husayn went out from the house _ _ of my mistress Fa¯tima and we do not know where they are’’. She wept and _ the Prophet immediately rose and went to Fa¯tima’s house to see for _ himself. Then the angel Gabriel descended and told him that his two grandchildren were asleep in the shed of the Banu¯ al-Najja¯r and that God had sent an angel to stand guard over them.37 Yet another sign of Fidda’s love for her mistress’s family was her participation _ _ in carrying out their pledge when Hasan and Husayn were taken ill. 6Ali and Fa¯tima _ _ _ vowed to fast for three days if their two sons became well again. When they did, Fidda of her own volition joined the parents in fasting. _ _

Fidda confirms that 6Ali is the rightful caliph _ _

Fidda showed her loyalty to 6Ali when, following the Prophet’s death, she _ _ announced that he, 6Ali, was more fit to be caliph than Abu¯ Bakr. A tradition states that after the Prophet passed away 6Ali was in the Prophet’s house and did what was needed: he consoled the Prophet’s wives, made burial arrangements, collated the text of the Qur 8a¯n, and settled the Prophet’s debts, amounting to 80,000 dirhams, by selling all that he owned. While 6Ali was thus occupied, 6Umar b. al-Khatta¯b __ came to 6Ali’s house, stood outside and demanded that 6Ali come out and pledge allegiance to Abu¯ Bakr, threatening that he would kill 6Ali if he did not come out. Fidda came to the door and courageously told 6Umar that 6Ali was busy and that he _ _ deserved to be appointed caliph rather than Abu¯ Bakr. When 6Umar heard this he was very angry and set fire to the door of the house, intending to burn it down with those in it, Fa¯tima, 6Ali, Hasan, Husayn, Fidda, Zaynab and Umm Kulthu¯m.38 _ _ _ _ _ In this story Fidda is represented as a courageous defender of 6Ali’s right to the _ _ caliphate. Her love and respect for the Prophet’s family drove her to confront even 6Umar b. al-Khatta¯b. __

35

Al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, XLIII:171; XLIII:180; LXXVIII:310, no. 31; al-Nu¯ri, Mustadrak _ al-wasa¯ 8il, II:186, no 1761-9; al-Tabari, Dala¯ 8il al-ima¯ma, p. 46. _ 36 His full name was Sulayma¯n b. Mahra¯n Abu¯ Muhammad al-A 6mash al-Asadi al-Ku¯fi. For details, _ see Taqi l-Din al-Hasan b. 6Ali b. Da¯wu¯d, Kita¯b al-rija¯l (Tehran: Tehran University Press, 1963), p. 177, _ no. 718; Abu¯ Ja 6far al-Tu¯si, Rija¯l al-T u¯si (Qom: Mu 8assasat al-Nashr al-Isla¯mi, 1415/1995), 215, _ _ no. 2834-72; Etan Kohlberg, ‘‘A 6mash’’, Encyclopaedia Iranica (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), I: 926–928. 37 Al-Hasan b. Abi al-Hasan al-Daylami, Irsha¯d al-qulu¯b (Qom: Da¯r al-Harif al-Radi lil-Nashr, 1412/ _ _ _ 1991), II:428–429. 38 Al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, XXX:293; LIII:18. _

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Fidda and the Qur 8a¯n _ _

Fidda was affected by the religious atmosphere that reigned in the house of her first _ _ master, the Prophet, and then in the home of his daughter Fa¯tima. She is reported _ to have known the Qur 8a¯n by heart and to have understood it fully. After she had memorised it, the Qur 8a¯n became a living reality for her, so much so that she would speak in its language and quote it whenever she was asked any question. Abu¯ al-Qa¯sim al-Qushayri (d. 456/1072)39 reports the following conversation between a man who had left the caravan with which he was travelling through the desert and Fidda l-Nu¯biyya. When he asked her who she was, she replied: _ _ ‘‘And say: Sala¯m (peace)! But they will come to know’’.40 So he greeted her and asked her what she was doing there. She answered: ‘‘Whomsoever Alla¯h guides, for him there will be no misleaders’’,41 whereupon he asked her if she was human or a jinni, to which she replied: ‘‘O Children of Adam! Take your adornment’’.42 He then asked her where she was from and she answered: ‘‘They are those who are called from a place far away’’.43 When he asked her what place she meant she said: ‘‘H ajj to the House is a duty that mankind owes to Alla¯h’’.44 He then _ asked her when she was separated from her train and she answered: ‘‘And indeed We created the heavens and the earth and all between them in six Days’’.45 Whereupon he asked her if she wanted something to eat, to which she replied: ‘‘And We did not create them bodies that ate not food’’.46 He fed her and then said: ‘‘Hurry but don’t rush’’. She answered: ‘‘Alla¯h burdens not a person beyond his scope’’.47 He offered to let her ride behind him on his mount. She refused, saying: ‘‘Had there been therein gods besides Alla¯h, then verily both would have been ruined’’.48 So he climbed down and let her ride, and she commented: ‘‘Glory to Him who has subjected this to us’’.49 The man then continued his story and related that, when they had reached the caravan, he asked her if she had an acquaintance there, to which she replied: ‘‘O Da¯wu¯d! Verily! We have placed you as a successor on earth,50 Muhammad is no more than _ a messenger,51 O Yahya¯! Hold fast the Scripture,52 O Mu¯sa¯! Verily! It is I, Alla¯h’’.53 _ Upon hearing these verses the man called out the four names just mentioned and immediately four young men approached her. He asked her who they were and she replied: ‘‘Wealth and children are the adornment of the life of this world’’.54 39

His full name is 6Abd al-Karim b. Hawa¯zin b. 6Abd al-Malik b. Talha al-Naysabu¯ri al-Qushayri. He was _ _ born in Naysabu¯r and died there. He composed many books, of which the most famous is Lata¯ 8if al-isha¯ra; _ for details, see Khayr al-Din al-Zirikli, Al-a 6la¯m. (Beirut: Da¯r al- 6Ilm lil-Mala¯yin, 1986), IV:57. 40 Q 43:89. 41 Q 39:37. 42 Q 7:31. 43 Q 41:44. 44 Q 3:97. 45 Q 50:38. 46 Q 21:8. 47 Q 2:286. 48 Q 21:22. 49 Q 43:13. 50 Q 38:26. 51 Q 3:144. 52 Q 19:12. 53 Q 27:9. 54 Q 18:46.


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When the four young men had reached her, Fidda said: ‘‘O my father! Hire him! _ _ Verily, the best of men for you to hire is the strong, the trustworthy’’.55 Then the man said: ‘‘give me some compensation’’ and Fidda answered: ‘‘Alla¯h gives _ _ manifold increase to whom He pleases’’.56 So her sons increased the amount of his recompense. When he asked them about the woman they answered: ‘‘This is our mother Fidda, the slave of Fa¯tima, who for the last twenty years has spoken _ _ _ only in (the words of) the Qur 8a¯n’’.57 This tradition ascribes to Fidda not only an excellent memory, which enabled _ _ her to learn the entire Qur 8a¯n by heart, but also the wits to utilize the appropriate verse at the right time. Qur 8a¯nic verses that Shi 6ite exegesis associates with Fidda _ _

According to Shi 6ite sources, Fidda l-Nu¯biyya had the rare honour of having been _ _ the instigator, together with 6Ali and Fa¯tima, of the revelation of three Qur 8a¯nic _ verses. The three verses in question are all from Su¯ra 76 (verses 1, 7 and 8). Q 76:1 (‘‘Has there not been over man a period of time, when he was nothing to be mentioned?’’): According to Shi 6ite sources this verse was revealed when Hasan and _ Husayn were ill. They were visited by their grandfather the Prophet, and many _ others. Fa¯tima and Fidda made a vow to fast for three days if the two children _ _ _ became well again,58 and indeed fulfilled their vow when Hasan and Husayn _ _ recovered. On this occasion, so claim the Shi 6ite sources, this verse, whose message is that every person at some time has to go through a difficult period, was revealed. Q 76:7 (‘‘They fulfil vows, and they fear a Day whose evil will be wide-spreading’’). According to Shi 6ite sources59 this verse refers to the vow just referred to, which 55

Q 28:26. Q 2:261. 57 Ibn Shahra¯shu¯b, Mana¯qib, III:343–344; al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, XLIII:86–87, no. 8. _ 58 Ibn Shahra¯shu¯b, Mana¯qib, III:373–374; 6Ali b. Yu¯suf b. Muttahar al-Hilli, Kashf al-yaqin fi fad a¯ 8il amir __ _ _ al-mu8minin (Tehran: Ministry of Culture Press, 1995), pp. 92–93; Abu¯ l-Hasan 6Ali b. 6I¯sa¯ b. Abi l-Fath _ _ al-Irbilli, Kashf al-ghumma fi ma6rifat al-a8imma. With a commentary by Sayyid Ha¯shim al-Rasu¯li (Tabriz: Maktabat Bani Ha¯shimi, 1961), I:303; whence al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, XXXV:245, no. 6; _ 6Ubayd Alla¯h b. 6Abd Alla¯h b. Ahmad al-Haska¯ni, Shawa¯hid al-tanzil li-qawa¯ 6id al-tafd il, ed. Muhammad _ _ _ _ Ba¯qir al-Mahmu¯di (Tehran: Ministry of Culture Press, 1411/1990), II:394, no. 1042; Radi al-Din 6Ali b. _ _ Mu¯sa¯ b. Ta¯wu¯s, Sa6d al-su6u¯d (Qom: Da¯r al-Dhakha¯ 8ir, 1369/1949), pp. 141–142; Muhammad b. _ _ al-Hasan al-Fatta¯l, Rawdat al-wa¯ 6izin wa basirat al-mutta6izin (Qom: Da¯r al-Rida¯ lil-Nashr, 1966), I:161; _ _ _ _ _ _ Ibn Fura¯t Abu¯ l-Qa¯sim Fura¯t b. Ibra¯him al-Ku¯fi, Tafsir Fura¯t al-Ku¯fi (Tehran: Ministry of Culture Press, 1989), p. 520, no. 519–676; whence al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, XXXV:249, no. 7; Sharaf al-Din 6Ali _ al-Husayni al-Astar’a¯ba¯di, Ta8wil al-a¯ya¯t al-za¯hira fi fad l al-6itra l-t a¯hira (Qom: Mu 8assasat al-Nashr _ _ _ _ ¯ ma¯li lil-saddu¯q (Tehran: al-Isla¯mi, 1988), pp. 724–725; al-Sadu¯q Muhammad b. 6Ali b. Babawayh, Al-A _ _ almaktaba al 8islamiyya, 1984), 257, no. 11; Abu¯ Ja 6far al-Tu¯si, Iqba¯l al-a6ma¯l (Tehran: Da¯r al-Kutub _ al-Isla¯miyya, 1947), p. 528; Yahya¯ b. Hasan b. Husayn al-Asadi l-Hilli Ibn al-Bitriq, 6Umdat 6uyu¯n siha¯h _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ al-akhba¯r fi mana¯qib imam al-abra¯r (Qom: Mu 8assasat al-Nashr al-Isla¯mi, 1986), p. 346; Radi al-Din 6Ali _ b. Mu¯sa¯ Ibn Ta¯wu¯s, Al-t ara¯ 8if fi ma6rifat madha¯hib al-t awa¯ 8if (Qom: Matba 6at al-Khayya¯m, 1400/1979), _ _ _ _ I:109–110, no. 161; al-Haska¯ni, Shawa¯hid, II:398, no. 1047; al-Daylami, Irsha¯d al-qulu¯b, II:222–223. _ 59 ¯ Al- 6Amili, Wasa¯ 8il al-shi 6a, XXIII:304–305, no. 29617–29-618; al-Nu¯ri, Mustadrak al-wasa¯ 8il, II:152– 153, no. 1676-25; al-Sadu¯q, Al-ama¯li lil-saddu¯q, pp. 257–260, no. 11; whence al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, _ _ _ XXXV:237–240, no. 1; al-Irbilli, Kashf al-ghumma, I:302–303; whence al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, _ XXXV:245–247, no. 6; Ahmad b. Mu¯sa¯ b. Ta¯wu¯s al-Hilli, Bina¯ 8 al-maqa¯la l-fa¯t imiyya fi naqd al-risa¯la _ _ _ _ ¯ l al-Bayt li-Ihya¯_ l-Tura¯th, 1411/1990), l-6uthma¯niyya, ed 6Ali al- 6Adna¯ni al-Gharifi (Qom: Mu 8assasat A 56

_

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6Ali, Fa¯tima and Fidda made when Hasan and Husayn became ill. After they made _ _ _ _ _ this vow, so claim the sources, God revealed this verse to impress all three with the dire consequences they would have to face on the Day of Judgment if they did not fulfil their vow. We see here once again that, according to the Shi 6ite view, Fidda was _ _ a full-fledged participant in the life of the family, in good times and bad. Q 76:8 (‘‘And they give food, in spite of their love for it, to the poor, the orphan, and the captive’’). According to Shi 6ite sources, this verse was revealed in honour of 6Ali, Fa¯tima and Fidda, who gave food to the needy even when they were _ _ _ desperately in need themselves. The story is as follows: After their three-day fast in fulfilment of their vow, 6Ali went to Sham 6u¯n b. Ha¯rayya¯60 al-Khaybari, a Jew, _ and borrowed three measures of barley. Fa¯tima took one measure from which she _ made five loaves of bread, one for each member of the household. As they prepared to eat their meal, a poor man came to them. They gave him all their food and went to bed hungry. The next day Fa¯tima ground the second measure and baked bread. _ When she set the table they were visited by an orphan. They gave him all their food and tasted none themselves. For the second consecutive day they went to bed hungry. On the third day Fa¯tima made bread out of the third measure, but before _ they could eat a prisoner came to them and asked for food. They gave him all their food and remained hungry for the third day running.61 It was in the wake of this incident that, according to Shi 6ite tradition, the verse was revealed.

Fidda the miracle-worker _ _

The term kara¯ma refers, according to Muslim theologians, to a miracle performed by a saint62 or holy man who does not claim to be a prophet, in contradistinction to mu6jiza, which is an act in defiance of natural law, performed by someone who claims to be a prophet in order to discredit those who dispute his claim and make them incapable of performing a similar act; or an event in violation of natural law, whose purpose is to attain goodness and happiness, in addition to a claim to prophethood and proof of the veracity of someone claiming to be an apostle of God.63 According to this concise definition mu6jiza and kara¯ma are easily distinguished: mu6jiza is a miracle performed by a prophet, whereas kara¯ma is revealed through

(footnote continued) pp. 235–238; al-Ku¯fi, Tafsir, pp. 519–524, no. 519–676; al-Fatta¯l, Rawdat al-wa¯ 6izin, I:160–163; _ _ al-Haska¯ni, Shawa¯hid al-tanzil, II:398–399, no. 1047; Ibn al-Bitriq, 6Umda, pp. 346–348, no. 668. _ 60 _ Ibn al-Bitriq, 6Umda, p. 347; al-Tu¯si, Iqba¯l al-a6ma¯l, p. 528; Ibn Shahra¯shu¯b, Mana¯qib, III:374. _ _ According to another tradition, his name was Sham 6u¯n b. Ha¯na¯ (see Ibn Ta¯wu¯s, T ara¯ 8if, I:107, no. 160; _ _ _ al-Hilli, Bina¯ 8 al-maqa¯la al-fa¯t imiyya, p. 235). Still another tradition calls him Sham 6u¯n b. Ha¯ra¯ _ _ _ (see al-Ku¯fi, Tafsir, p. 521, no. 519–676). A fourth version reads Sham 6u¯n b. Ha¯ba¯ (see al-Hillii, Kashf _ _ al-yaqin, p. 93). 61 Ibn al-Bitriq, 6Umda, pp. 345–347; al-Hillii, Kashf al-yaqin, pp. 92–96; al-Nu¯ri, Mustadrak al-wasa¯ 8il, _ _ XV:153–154, no. 17836-4; al-Sadu¯q, al-Ama¯li lil-saddu¯q, 260–261; al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, _ _ _ XXXV:237–240, no. 1; XXXV:252–255, no. 8–15; al-Daylami, Irsha¯d al-qulu¯b, I:136; al-Ku¯fi, Tafsir, pp. 520–524, no. 519–676; pp. 528–529, nos. 528–679, 528–680. 62 The original text reads ‘‘saint’’; quite likely a translation of the Arabic term wali, which will be explained below. 63 Edward Lane, Arabic–English Lexicon (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1874), s.v. ‘.j.z.


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a wali.64 This definition appears mainly in Sunni sources. Shi 6ites also use the word mu6jiza to refer to a prophetic miracle,65 but also include in the concept miracles performed by an ima¯m.66 In order to gain a better understanding of these concepts, we shall first examine the Sunni definition of mu6jiza and then analyse the Shi 6ite position. According to the Sunni view on the distinctive characteristics of mu6jiza and kara¯ma, the two have one feature in common, namely the violation of natural law (kharq al-6a¯da).67 This condition is so basic that the expression kharq al-6a¯da can by itself serve to refer to a miracle, whether of the mu6jiza or the kara¯ma type.68 According to al-Ba¯qillani,69 the 6a¯da (‘‘normal’’) refers to a repetition, whether in the form of renewal or of continued existence.70 In the case of kharq al-6a¯da this habitual course is violated. The act in question must also violate the laws that apply to the specific type of creature involved. Thus, if a man carries out an action that angels perform as a matter of course but human beings do not, this, too, will be considered kharq al-6a¯da.71 This kind of miracle can only occur among creatures, since it is only the natural laws governing their behaviour which can be violated.72 According to all the definitions of mu6jiza and kara¯ma, both involve kharq al-6a¯da.73 A mu6jiza must also possess a number of additional qualities, besides being a case of kharq al-6a¯da: It must be an act that is beyond the power of humans;74 it must be inimitable;75 and it must occur precisely in the manner in which the person performing it claims it will occur,76 if it is to be considered proof of his claims.77 64

Wali means a ‘‘friend of God’’, who obeys Him and whom He loves; see Lane, Lexicon, s.v. w.l.y. According to al-Ra¯zi, the literal meaning of wali is ‘‘intimate’’, i.e., one who is close to God thanks to his devotion, and whom God in return shows grace and mercy; see Fakhr al-Din al-Ra¯zi, Al-tafsir al-kabir aw mafa¯tih al-ghayb (Beirut: Da¯r al-Kutub al-‘Ilmiyya,1411/1990). _ 65 I.e., revealed through a prophet. 66 I.e., revealed through an ima¯m. Miracles performed by an ima¯m and recognised by Sunnis are considered by the latter to be kara¯ma; see Richard Gramlich, Die Wunder der Freunde Gottes. Theologien und Erscheinungsformen des islamischen Heiligenwunders. Freiburger Islamstudien XI (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1987), p. 39. 67 Gramlich, Die Wunder der Freunde Gottes, p. 16. 68 Al-Ra¯zi, Al-tafsir al-kabir, XXI:175–176. Here the expression kharq al-6a¯da appears in reference to an act that al-Ra¯zi later characterises as a kara¯ma. 69 A theologian and Islamic jurist (d. 403/1013) who made a significant contribution to the development of the Ash 6ari school of jurisprudence. He is reported to have written 56 books, six of which are extant. Among his books is Kita¯b al-baya¯n 6an al-farq bayna l-mu6jiza¯t wa l-karama¯t wa l-hiyal wa l-kaha¯na wa _ l-sirr wa l-na¯rinja¯t, which deals with miracles whose purpose is to validate claims to prophethood. See R.J. McCarthy, ‘‘Al-Ba¯killa¯ni’’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 1965), I:958–959. _ 70 Al-Ba¯qilla¯ni, Kita¯b al-baya¯n, quoted in Gramlich, Die Wunder der Freunde Gottes, pp. 16–17. 71 Gramlich, Die Wunder der Freunde Gottes, pp. 17–18. 72 Gramlich, Die Wunder der Freunde Gottes, p. 17. 73 Gramlich, Die Wunder der Freunde Gottes, p. 25; al-Ra¯zi, al-Barahim dari ilmi al-Kalam, quoted in Gramlich, p. 101; 6Ali b. Yu¯suf b. Muttahar al-Hilli, Anwa¯r al-malaku¯t fi sharh al-Ya¯qu¯t (Tehran: __ _ _ Cha¯pkha¯nah-i Da¯nishga¯h, 1959), p. 184; Kara¯ma, p. 615. 74 According to 6Abd al-Jabba¯r, for example; see Martin McDermott, The Theology of al-Shaikh al-Mufid (Beirut: Dar el-Machreq, 1978), p. 85. 75 Gramlich, Die Wunder der Freunde Gottes, p. 27. 76 McDermot, Theology of al-Shaikh al-Mufid, p. 85. The meaning of this condition is that a person about to perform a miracle must describe what he is about to do. Thus, for example, if he says that he will revive the dead and then proceeds to perform another kind of miracle, it does not constitute proof of his claims (Gramlich, Die Wunder der Freunde Gottes, p. 33). 77 For example, if a person causes a lizard to speak, and that lizard then says that the performer of the miracle is a liar, the act cannot be considered a mu6jiza (Gramlich, Die Wunder der Freunde Gottes, p. 35).

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But the most important single feature a mu6jiza must possess is a connection to prophecy; it is a miracle performed by a prophet, and is always accompanied by a claim or demand for recognition of the performer as a prophet.78 The purpose of a mu6jiza is to validate a person’s claim to prophethood, and can therefore be performed only by a prophet. A kara¯ma, on the other hand, does not accompany any such claim. The presence or absence of the claim to prophethood is thus the main, and sometimes the only, difference between kara¯ma and mu6jiza.79 Therefore, if someone performs an act involving a violation of the laws of nature (kharq al-6a¯da) without at the same time also making a claim of prophethood (even if making a different claim, of wila¯ya, the state of being a wali, for example), that act will be considered a mu6jiza and not a kara¯ma.80 According to this view, a mu6jiza constitutes a necessary condition for proving someone to be a prophet, but no kara¯ma is needed for considering someone to be a wali.81 There are also some other differences between a mu6jiza and a kara¯ma. The former, since it constitutes proof of true prophethood, must be seen by others, whereas the kara¯ma is performed in secret,82 since it only serves to strengthen the person by means of whom it is made manifest.83 The public nature of a mu6jiza is also required so that the prophet can challenge his opponents (tahaddin, also one _ of the characteristics of a mu6jiza). This distinction, between the public nature of a mu6jiza and the private nature of a kara¯ma, is commonly found in Su¯fi writings.84 _ Yet another difference between the two kinds of miracle concerns the performer’s intentions and wishes. A mu6jiza takes place because its performer wishes to prove the truth of his claim, whereas a kara¯ma may be unexpected, and take place without any volitional control by the person who performs it.85 In the Su¯fi view, a kara¯ma _ may constitute an obstacle on the path to unification with God. For that reason it is 86 considered undesirable, and to be viewed with suspicion. In Islam a miracle is a supernatural deed performed by a pious person. A miracle worker is expected to hide the miracle from the public.87 In the Shi 6ite view, not every miracle must necessarily be performed by an ima¯m. However, no miracle can be performed without an ima¯m’s intercession or assistance.88 Fidda l-Nu¯biyya is credited with two miracles, and another miracle is ascribed to _ _ her granddaughter Shahra. Both are thus considered saints. All three were 78

According to al-Ra¯zi, an act involving kharq al-6a¯da may also be performed by a person with claims other than prophethood (a claim of divinity, for example), as well as by tricksters and magicians; however, only an act performed by a true prophet is called mu6jiza (see al-Ra¯zi, Al-tafsir al-kabir, quoted in Gramlich, Die Wunder der Freunde Gottes, pp. 19–20. 79 Gramlich, Die Wunder der Freunde Gottes, p. 41. 80 Gramlich, Die Wunder der Freunde Gottes, p. 20. 81 Gramlich, Die Wunder der Freunde Gottes, pp. 52–53. 82 Gramlich, Die Wunder der Freunde Gottes, p. 43. 83 Gramlich, Die Wunder der Freunde Gottes, p. 49. 84 Gramlich, Die Wunder der Freunde Gottes, p. 43. On the concept of tahaddin see also Peter Antes, _ Prophetenwunder in der Asˇ‘ariya bis al-Ghaza¯li (Freiburg: Br. Walter, 1970), pp. 7–36; Al-Hilli, Anwa¯r _ al-malaku¯t, p. 184. 85 Gremlich, Die Wunder der Freunde Gottes, p. 52. 86 Louis Gardet, ‘‘Kara¯ma’’, Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1965; second edition), IV:616. 87 Gramlich, Die Wunder der Freunde Gottes, p. 43. 88 Muhammad Abu¯ l-Fadl Badra¯n, Adabiyya¯t al-kara¯ma l-su¯fiyya (United Arab Emirates: Markaz Ziya¯d _ _ _ lil-Tura¯th wa l-Ta 8rikh, 2001), p. 57.


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performed in the context of a problem, which they resolved. The author of the text in which the miracle is related raises in the reader an expectation that a supernatural event will provide a satisfactory solution to an apparently impossible situation. The miracle then provides the reader with a satisfactory ending. The first miracle This miracle was performed after Fidda had moved into Fa¯tima’s household. _ _ _ One day she and Fa¯tima wanted to bake some bread. Fa¯tima prepared the dough _ _ and sent Fidda out to get some firewood. Fidda collected a large quantity of wood, _ _ _ _ too heavy for her to carry. She then pronounced the following incantation, which the Prophet had taught her: ‘‘Oh One! There is none like the One. You can make anyone die and destroy anyone. You are on your throne, One, who never sleeps’’. Immediately after she finished saying this, an Arabian from the tribe of Azd Shinu¯ 8a appeared and carried the parcel of wood to Fa¯tima’s house.89 _ This miracle was born of dire necessity. The fact that her invocation was immediately answered shows that the story’s author must have held Fidda in very _ _ high regard, and considered her a saint. The second miracle This miracle happened to Fidda at Karbala¯ 8, after the death of Husayn b. _ _ _ 6Ali (64/680), on the eleventh night of the month of Muharram in the year 61/680. _ 90 Fidda was one of the women of the Prophet’s family who had accompanied _ _ Husayn on his journey from Hija¯z to Ku¯fa, where he was to be proclaimed caliph. _ _ The Umayyad authorities, however, followed his movements and sent a large army to confront him before he arrived in Ku¯fa. The two sides met at Karbala¯ 8. In the battle Husayn lost his life. His head was brought to the Umayyad caliph Yazid _ (d. 67/683), while the rest of his body remained out in the open for a number of days before being buried. According to Shi 6ite sources, the commander of the Umayyad forces, 6Umar b. Sa 6d, ordered Husayn’s body to be trampled by horses, and picked out ten men _ to do the deed.91 When Fidda learned of this she immediately turned to 6Ali’s _ _ daughter Zaynab (d. 66/682) and informed her that she knew an incantation taught to her by the Prophet that would make a lion appear out of the nearby forest to 89 Ibn Hajar Al- 6Asqala¯ni, Al-isa¯ba fi tamyiz al-saha¯ba, ed. 6Ali Muhammad al-Bajja¯wi (Beirut: Da¯r al-Jil, _ _ _ _ _ 1992), VIII:75–76; whence Muhammad Husayn al-A 6lami l-Ha¯ 8iri, Tara¯jim a6la¯m al-nisa¯ 8 (Beirut: _ _ _ Mu 8assasat al-A 6lami lil-Matbu¯ 6a¯t, 1987), II:365–366. _ 90 A total of 15 women were with Husayn at Karbala¯ 8, including his sisters and aunts. They were: six _ daughters of 6Ali b. Abi Ta¯lib (Zaynab, Umm Kulthu¯m, Fa¯tima, Safiyya, Raqqiyya, Umm Ha¯ni 8), two of _ _ _ ¯ tika, Umm Muhsin b. al-Hasan, Husayn’s daughters (Fa¯tima and Sakina), and the following: Raba¯b, 6A _ _ _ _ the daughter of Muslim b. 6Uqayl, Fidda l-Nu¯biyya, Husayn’s slave girl, and Umm Wahb b. 6Abd Alla¯h. _ _ _ 91 The ten were: Isha¯q b. Haywa (according to some sources the father’s name was Hawba, Huwayya or _ _ _ _ Hanwa), Akhnas b. Marthad b. 6Alqama al-Hadrami, Halim b. al-Tufayl (or al-Sabi 6i), 6Umar b. Sabih _ _ _ _ _ _ _ al-Sida¯wi, Raja¯ 8 b. al-Munqidh b. Murra al- 6Abdi, Sa¯lim b. Khuthayma (or Khuyathma) al-Ju 6fi, Sa¯lih b. _ _ _ Wahab al-Ju 6fi, Wa¯hiz b. Na¯ 6im (or Gha¯nim), Ha¯ni b. Shabath (or Tabith) al-Hadrami, and Asyad b. _ _ _ _ Ma¯lik. For more details, see 6Ali b. Mu¯sa¯ b. Ja 6far b. Ta¯wu¯s Ibn Nama¯, Al-malhu¯f 6ala¯ qatla¯ l-t ufu¯f, ed. _ _ Fa¯ris Tabriziya¯n ‘‘al-Hassu¯n’’ (Qom: Da¯r al-Uswa lil-Tiba¯ 6a wa l-Nashr, 1414/1993), p. 182; Ha¯shim _ _ al-Na¯ji al-Mu¯sawi al-Jaza¯ 8iri, Jaza¯ 8 a6da¯ 8 qatalat sayyid al-shuhada¯ 8 fi da¯r al-dunya¯ (Qom: Da¯r al-Kita¯b al-Isla¯mi, n.d.), 9–453.

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protect Husayn’s body from the Umayyad soldiers, similar to the miracle performed _ by Safina, the Prophet’s slave.92 Zaynab immediately agreed to Fidda’s proposal. _ _ Fidda went into the nearby forest and found a lion lying on the path. She addressed _ _ it as ‘‘Abu¯ Ha¯rith’’ and said: ‘‘Do you know what they want to do with Husayn’s _ _ body?’’ She told the lion, who then came with her to guard the body. The lion spread Husayn’s blood on his paws and head and burst into tears. When the _ Umayyad horses came, they were frightened away by the lion, whereupon 6Umar b. Sa 6d (d. 64/680) told his army that temptation was being put in their path and they should not give in to it. The Umayyad army then left, without molesting Husayn’s _ body.93 The lion’s subservience to Fidda as well as the fact that he knew when he _ _ was being called and understood what was said to him, are all features which are meant to emphasize Fidda’s saintly qualities. _ _ Here, again, a miracle takes place in a situation of urgency, whose seriousness is carefully built up in the text, and whose resolution reinforces Fidda’s status. _ _

Shahra, Fidda’s granddaughter, as a miracle worker _ _

Shi 6ite sources refer to Shahra, Fidda’s granddaughter by her daughter Miska, as _ _ a worker of miracles like her grandmother. It would appear that, in the Shi 6ite view, Fidda bequeathed her powers to her descendant. The power to perform miracles _ _ is considered come from God, and Fidda was apparently blessed with it because _ _

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His true name was Mahra¯n, and his epithet Abu¯ 6Abd al-Rahma¯n. The Prophet gave him the name _ Safina (literally ‘‘ship’’) because he was able to carry heavy loads, like a ship or, according to others, because he traveled as much as a camel (a ship of the desert). He was of Persian origin and was the Prophet’s slave, whom Umm Salama (Hind bint Suhayl, d. 681), the Prophet’s wife, purchased and emancipated, on condition that he remain in the service of the Prophet (for details see: Ibn Sayyid al-Na¯s, Al-maqa¯ma¯t al-6a¯liyya fi l-kara¯ma¯t al-ja¯liyya li-ba6d al-saha¯ba rid wa¯n Alla¯h 6alayhim, ed. 6Affat _ _ _ _ Wa¯sil Hamza (no publisher, 1986), p. 86; Yu¯suf b. Isma¯ 6il al-Nabaha¯ni, Ja¯mi6 kara¯ma¯t al-awliya¯ 8, ed. _ _ Ibra¯him 6Atwa 6Awad (Beirut: al-maktaba al-thaqafiyya, 1992), I:143). It is related of him that he was _ _ once at sea when suddenly his boat cracked and he was forced to anchor off a beach near a thick forest. When a lion appeared before him Safina said to it: ‘‘Oh Abu¯ l-Ha¯rith (an epithet for lion), I am Safina, _ servant of the Messenger of God, the Prophet Muhammad’’. When the lion heard this, it inclined its _ head and drew Safina, who was on one of the planks of the broken boat, to safety. When they landed on the beach, the lion gave a farewell roar and left (for more details, see al-Nabaha¯ni, Ja¯mi6 kara¯ma¯t al-awliya¯ 8, I:143). This tradition tells us that the lion recognized Safina as the Prophet’s servant and inclined his head out of respect for him. Safina, too, did not fear the lion, thanks to his ties with the Prophet. In this respect, we see a similarity between this story and the tale about Fidda, whose close _ _ association with the Prophet and his family perhaps gave rise to a similar account. 93 Muhammad b. Ya 6qu¯b al-Kulayni, Al-ka¯fi (Tehran: Da¯r al-Kutub al-Isla¯miyya, 1946), I:465–466, _ no. 8; whence al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, XL:159–170, no. 17. To this day, the spot where Fidda is said _ _ _ to have called the lion, in an alley off 6Abba¯s St. in Karbala¯ 8, is called ‘‘the place of the lion and Fidda’’ _ _ (maqa¯m asad wa-Fid d a). In addition, there is a side-street (6iqd in the local dialect) named ‘‘Fidda of the _ _ _ _ Lion Road’’ (t ariq Fid d at al-asad ). There is a tradition that pilgrims to Husayn’s shrine would, _ _ _ _ if accosted by a lion, recite Fidda’s incantation, which was effective in keeping the lion at a distance _ _ (here I wish to thank Shaykh Muhammad Sa¯diq al-Kirba¯ssi, who provided me with this information in a _ _ telephone conversation from his place of residence in London on 31 August 2006). In the annual Shi 6ite ¯ re-enactment of the events of 6Ashu¯ra¯ 8, one person dresses up in a lion’s skin to represent Fidda’s lion _ _ (for more details see: Jawa¯d Muhaddithi, Mawsu¯ 6at 6a¯shu¯ra¯ 8, trans. Khalil Za¯mil al- 6Isa¯mi (Beirut Da¯r _ _ al-Rasu¯l al-Akram: Da¯r al-Mahajja al-Bayda¯ 8, 1997), p. 40; Mirza¯ Muhammad-Taqi Lisa¯n al-Mulk _ _ _ Sipihr, Na¯sikh al-tawa¯rikh: Dawra-yi kamil-i tarikh-i Qajariya, ed. Jahangir Qa¯ 8im-Maqa¯mi (Tehran: Amir-Kabir, 1344/1965), IV:23).


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of her dutiful service to Fa¯tima and her family. It is likely that the Shi 6i attribution _ of miracle-working powers to Fidda and her granddaughter has as its purpose the _ _ promotion of love for Fa¯tima and her descendants among the believers. _ The following tradition tells the story of a miracle performed by Shahra. It is related by Ma¯lik b. Dina¯r, who states that he was among a group of people who wanted to go on the pilgrimage to Mecca. As they gathered to say their farewells before leaving, he saw a weak woman on a thin mount, whom some people were trying to persuade to change her mind, but she insisted on going. On the way, her mount became exhausted and would not walk any further. The woman then raised her head and called out to her God: ‘‘You did not leave me at home, nor did You carry me to Yours. I swear by Your glory and majesty that if anyone else had treated me this way I would have complained to no one but You’’. The moment her words were said a man appeared out of the desert, leading a she-camel. He told the woman to ride the camel, which then walked with the speed of lightning. Ma¯lik b. Dina¯r adds: ‘‘When I arrived at the place where one circles [the Ka 6ba] I saw that woman circling. I asked her who she was and she replied: ‘I am Shahra daughter of Miska daughter of Fidda, Fa¯tima’s servant girl’’’.94 _ _ _ This tradition is based on the report of a single transmitter, Ma¯lik b. Dina¯r. The miracle here has the function of saving the woman from the dire straits in which she found herself. The nature of the miracle is a mixture of the realistic and the fantastic. The she-camel looks like any other, but its speed is fabulous.

Fidda the alchemist _ _

Fidda reportedly possessed some expertise in alchemy, especially in the field of the _ _ transmutation of metals. Stories of her alchemical activities relate to two different periods in her life, first in her native land before she came into the service of the Prophet’s household, and later when she was with Fa¯tima. In Biha¯r al-anwa¯r95 it is _ _ related that when Fidda arrived at Fa¯tima’s house she brought with her some _ _ _ 96 elixir. She took a piece of copper, softened it, wrought it into the shape of an ingot and poured the elixir on it. The ingot changed colour and now looked like gold. When 6Ali came, Fidda put the ingot before him. 6Ali said to her: ‘‘You did _ _ well, Fidda, but if you had melted the copper the colour would have been better _ _ and fetched a higher price’’. Fidda, surprised by 6Ali’s perspicuity, asked him _ _ if he was familiar with the secrets of alchemy. He answered that he was, and that he had passed on his knowledge to his son Husayn. He added: ‘‘We [i.e. the _ ima¯ms from the Prophet’s family] know even greater secrets’’. He then pointed and there appeared before them a buried treasure. He asked Fidda to place her ingot _ _ with the treasure. She did so and the treasure disappeared once more. 94

Ibn Shahra¯shu¯b, Mana¯qib, III:338; whence al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, XLIII:46, no. 46. _ Al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, XLI:273–274, no. 29. _ 96 Elixir was a potion which was believed to be able to turn base metal (iron, copper and so on) into gold. Arab alchemists made great efforts to obtain it. In Arabic it is known under several different names: hajar _ al-fala¯sifa (‘‘philosophers’ stone’’), al-ru¯h, al-khamira. According to the well-known Arab alchemist Ja¯bir _ b. Hayya¯n elixir can be produced by boiling gold in various liquids 1,000 times consecutively. For details _ see: 6Umar Faru¯kh, Ta8rikh al-6ulu¯m 6ind al-6arab (Beirut: Da¯r al- 6Ilm lil-Mala¯yin, 1977), p. 243; M. Ullmann, ‘‘al-Iksir’’, Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 1986; second edition), III:1087–1088. 95

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This story reflects the Shi 6ite view that 6Ali, and in fact all ima¯ms, know not just alchemy, but all there is to know, and that nothing can be kept secret from them.

Fidda and hadith _ _

_

Fidda, who was a member of Fa¯tima’s household, is held to be a transmitter _ _ _ of many traditions passed on to her by her mistress. However, it is quite difficult to determine which of these traditions were in fact transmitted by her, and which were ascribed to her by later writers. In addition to traditions in Fa¯tima’s name, Fidda also appears as the transmitter _ _ _ of traditions from 6Ali, Hasan and Husayn.97 Waraqa b. 6Abd Alla¯h al-Azdi,98 _ _ Salma¯n al-Fa¯risi99 and 6Abd Alla¯h b. Idris al-Awdi are reported to have transmitted traditions in Fidda’s name.100 _ _ Among the matters on which Fidda is reported to have transmitted traditions _ _ are Fa¯tima’s grief at the death of her father the Prophet101 and the elegies she _ composed on that occasion,102 as well as Fidda’s own grief at her mistress’s death. _ _

Fidda al-Nu¯biyya in modern scholarship _ _

The Lebanese Shi 6ite writer Zaynab Fawwa¯z103 was apparently the first person in modern times who evoked the name of Fidda l-Nu¯biyya in her al-Durr al-manthu¯r fi _ _ t abaqa¯t rabba¯t al-khudu¯r,104 in which she provided a short 20-line biography _ (pp. 439–440), where she delineated Fidda’s character and mentioned her three_ _ day fast in fulfillment of the vow she and her masters made when Hasan and _ Husayn were ill. _ The contemporary Kuwaiti writer Mahmu¯d al-Gharifi has recently published a _ small 61-page book in which he tells the story of Fidda l-Nu¯biyya for children.105 It _ _ is part of a series on Islamic sites and personalities. Naturally in a book of this kind one expects neither unalloyed objectivity nor a list of sources.

A l-Nu¯ri, Mustadrak al-wasa¯ 8il, II:137, no. 1629-3; II:203, no. 1799-14; al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, _ XXXIX:174; XLIII:174, no. 15. 98 His name does not appear in any biographical collection of which we are aware. 99 Al-Ra¯wandi, Al-khara¯ 6ij wa l-jara¯ 8ih, II:530; whence al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, XLIII:28, no. 33. _ _ 100 Al-Tu¯si, Rija¯l al-T u¯si, p. 233, no. 3148-57. _ _ 101 See for example: al-Majlisi, Biha¯r al-anwa¯r, XLIII:174–180, no. 15. _ 102 See for example Kha¯lid Sinda¯wi, Fa¯t ima al-zahra¯ 8 sha¯ 6ira (Kafr Qari 6: Da¯r al-Huda¯ lil-Tiba¯ 6a wa _ _ l-Nashr Karim, 2001) pp. 32–41, 55ff. 103 ¯ mil region (today in southern Lebanon), She was born in the town of Tibnin in 1860 in the Jabal 6A and died in Egypt in 1914. A well-known writer and historian, she was called Durrat al-mashriq (‘‘Pearl of the Orient’’). She went to school in Alexandria and studied under the poet Hasan Husni al-Tawira¯ni _ _ _ (d.1897), the owner of the newspaper Al-Nil. She published a number of books. For more details see: ¯ mil (Intellectual and Literary Muhammad Ka¯zim Makki, Al-haraka l-fikriyya wa l-adabiyya fi Jabal 6A _ _ ¯ mil) (Beirut: _ Da¯r al-Andalus, 1963), pp. 183–193; Muhsin al-Amin, A6ya¯n al-shi 6a Activity in Jabal 6A _ (Shi 6ite Notables) (Beirut: Da¯r al-Ta 6a¯ruf lil-Matbu¯ 6a¯t, 1986), VII:134–135; al-Zirikli, Al-a6la¯m, III:67. _ 104 Cairo: Bu¯la¯q, 1894. A large-format, 562-page biographical dictionary with entries for 456 prominent women from both East and West. 105 Mahmu¯d al-Gharifi, Ya¯ Fid d a sandini . . . shaha¯da la¯ turadd (Kuwait: Ida¯rat Thamin al-Hujaj, 2005). 97

_

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¯ dil al-Ka¯zimi has put on the internet a 22-line poem Recently the Iraqi poet 6A _ entitled 8Ila¯ sayyidati Fid d a,106 in which he lists her virtues and those of the _ _ Prophet’s family.

Conclusion In the preceding pages we have made the acquaintance of Fidda l-Nu¯biyya, a dark_ _ skinned slave girl, probably of Nubian origin, who was owned by the Prophet and then given to his daughter Fa¯tima to help her in her household chores. _ Fidda was married to Abu¯ Tha 6laba l-Habashi, to whom she bore four sons and _ _ _ one daughter, named after prophets. Fidda was intelligent and forthright. She is reported as having known the Qur 8a¯n _ _ by heart and used Qur 8a¯nic verses in her conversation. Among the qualities attributed to her by Shi 6ite sources are a knowledge of alchemy and miracle-working powers. She is also quoted as a transmitter of traditions in the name of Fa¯tima, 6Ali, Hasan and Husayn. _ _ _ Is there a purpose behind the various tales told about this woman? It would appear that Shi 6ite sources want to stress the fact that anyone who is loyal to the Prophet’s family, be it even a lowly, black slave girl, is as one of the family, beloved by them and by God. In other words, Shi 6ism wishes in this way to stress the equality of all its believers, whatever their ethnic origin or social status.

106

For details, see www.alhaidaria.com/showthread.php?p¼7250


Diplomatic Shock and Awe: Moving, Sometimes Speaking, Islamic Sculptures1

T.M.P. DUGGAN

This article traces the development of a type of statue found mainly in palaces, those statues which sources both Islamic and Latin record moved and some of them even spoke or uttered sounds. These ‘‘living’’ statues were the finest works of figural sculpture to be produced in the Islamic world in the period from the eighth to the thirteenth centuries, the work of the ‘‘jinn’’ - master craftsmen-engineers, building upon the knowledge of automata primarily derived from translated Greek and Roman texts, Byzantine and possible Chinese examples. The religious justification for these works in Islamic palaces appears to stem from the precedent provided in the Qur’a¯n concerning the prophet Sulayman b. Da’ud, his palace and his wonder working jinn. It seems these Islamic statues were employed to awe foreign diplomats and envoys, as was also the case with those employed at the Byzantine court, with the power of the ruler, often described in Islamic sources as ‘‘the Second Sulayma¯n’’ and therefore having the jinn-craftsmen-engineers at his command. It seems probable that depictions of some of these statues are recorded both in surviving manuscript illuminations, including those not directly concerned with automata, and on some of the eight-pointed star tiles from thirteenth century Rum Seljuk palaces in Anatolia. This type of moving, speaking, largely palace sculpture, derived primarily from the caliphal example, offers an explanation for the repeated references in Latin texts to the allegation that Muslims worshipped statues. The fact that these works of Islamic figural sculpture produced for more than 500 years no longer survive should not prevent us from understanding the vast sculptural as well as the technological gulf existing between the Islamic and Latin Christian worlds during this period.

ABSTRACT

Keywords: Islamic figural sculpture; Islamic statues; Automata; Robots; Solomon, prophet; Ru¯m (sultanate)

Amongst the most important works of figural sculpture that were produced in the Islamic world from perhaps as early as the second/eighth to the seventh/thirteenthcenturies (and later),2 were life-sized sculptures of humans and other figures that Correspondence: T.M.P. Duggan, Akdeniz University, Archaeology Department, Rhodiapolis Excavation Team, Campus, Antalya, Turkey. E-mail: [email protected] 1

This article is dedicated to the young Su¨leyman Tharaud. Such as the mechanical sculpture of a lion that mangled a figure wearing European dress at the court of Tipu Sultan in the 1780s: see D. Kinkaid, British Social Life in India 1608–1937, 2nd edn (London: _ Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 89; for examples in the Topkap| Palace Istanbul, see, for example, _ C. Ko¨seog˘lu, The Topkapi Palace: Treasury of the Empire (Emperial Treasury) (Istanbul: Akbank, 1989), 2

ISSN 0950–3110 print/ISSN 1473–348X online/09/030229-39 2009 Society for the Medieval Mediterranean DOI: 10.1080/09503110903343267

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seemed to move and speak. These works of art and artifice were therefore, apparently, living statues. Sadly, as is the case with the many wonderful carpets that were woven and embroidered, the naturalistic portraits that were drawn on silk and paper, the many figural wall paintings and the illuminated manuscript paintings made in the 600 years before the end of the seventh/thirteenth century and of whose existence only fragments and the written record provide evidence, these important works of sculpture unfortunately only survive as slight accounts in the written sources and in a few manuals for scientist–engineers. None of these moving statues, not one sculptural automaton from this 600-year-long period of Islamic art, has survived to the present day. These moving statues, often embellished with precious materials and dressed in precious cloth, were as fugitive as the sculptures,3 figures4 and figurines,5 the works of art made by the court and urban sweet makers during this same period. These moving statues were broken up, the jewels extracted, the metals melted down, and the materials employed for other purposes, leaving a vast void in our understanding of Islamic sculpture. It is recorded, however, that sculptural figural automata of a variety of types and sizes were located in palaces, state audience halls and pavilions, as also in some of the audience chambers of some members of the powerful and wealthy urban elite. There is no reason to ignore these works of sculpture, these sculptural automata, for these moving statues were the expression of the highest creative, artistic, engineering and technological skills of the period. They were produced at a time when Western Europeans were carving somewhat crude figural sculptures, largely in wood, stucco and stone that were then painted, such as the second/eighthcentury relief carvings in stone and stucco in S. Martino at Cividale in Friuli in Lombard Italy. There are no freestanding life sized sculptures or any record (footnote continued) _ p. 59, for a gilded jeweled elephant on a music box, Inv. No. 3/143; the elephant’s trunk and tail move, as do the boats in the scene on the music box beneath, when the automata is engaged and the music box wound. It measures 130 cm high. by 72 cm wide by 80 cm deep. Early Ottoman devices and mechanisms hinting at some continuum of knowledge of the technology employed in seventh/thirteenth-century automata following the Mongol devastations and the plague pandemic include: ‘‘in 1421 Sultan Mehmet I’s corpse was propped up in a litter and presented to the suspicious troops; the masterstroke was to make the Sultan gravely stroke his beard, while under the litter a cunning official worked the dead man’s arms with a concoction of gears and strings’’ ( J. Goodwin, Lords of the Horizons: A History of the Ottoman Empire (New York: Henry Holt, 1998), p. 155); while at the end of the century, amongst the property of Sehzade Cem (d. 1495) given to Sultan Beyazit II on Sehzade Cem’s burial in Bursa in 904/1499, records Evliya C ¸ elibi, ‘‘were an enchanted cup, which became brimful as soon as delivered empty into the cup bearer’s hand, a white parrot, a chess playing monkey and some thousands of splendid books’’ ( J. Freely, Inside the Seraglio: Private Lives of the Sultans of Istanbul (London: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 33), the ‘‘enchanted cup’’ being a continuation of recorded second- to fourteenth-century examples and of those mentioned in contemporary literature, e.g., in The Tale of the Unending Treasure, 822nd Night, in E. Powys Mathers, trans., The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night: Rendered into English from the Literal and Complete French Translation of Dr. J. C. Mardrus, volumes I–IV (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1996), IV:23. 3 Naser-e Khosraw’s Book of Travels (Safernama), trans. W.M. Thackston Jr. (New York: Persian Heritage Foundation, 1986), p. 57. 4 The Tale of the Chick Pea Seller’s Daughter, 889th Night (Mathers, trans., The Thousand Nights and One Night, IV:213) records the making of a life sized sugar doll a portrait of Zainah, dated at the latest to the eighth/fourteenth century. 5 Shams-i Tabriz in the seventh/thirteenth century records that in Baghdad, ‘‘He saw a candy maker who had made little birds of sugar candy’’ (W.C. Chittick, Me and Rumi: The Autobiography of Shams-i Tabriz (Louisville, KY: Fons Vitae, 2004), p. 271).

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of moving statues from contemporary Latin states with which comparisons can be drawn—only such works as the Carolingian reliquary statue of St Foy in Conques, or the bronze statuette of Charlemagne from the cathedral treasury at Metz, now in the Louvre, dating from the late fourth/tenth to fifth/eleventh centuries. There is also a reference made by Villard de Honnecourt in his sketchbook of c. 630/1235: ‘‘When the deacon read the Gospel, the eagle on which wings the Gospel rests will turn his head to listen’’,6 that describes an automata-like device. Yet more than four centuries earlier, at the ‘Abba¯sid court, sculptures were being made of metal, of life size figures that moved, on occasions spoke, and which were designed to deceive the mind and senses of the onlooker into thinking these statues were alive: a tradition at Islamic courts that continued into the thirteenth-century. It is regrettable that the moving statues to be mentioned in this article have to date received far greater attention as examples of technology and as elements of the history of the science of mechanics7 than as the great and wonderful works of sculpture that they undoubtedly were. Most unfortunately these long vanished works of Islamic sculpture are all too frequently consigned to a limbo of science and technology, to the theory and history of mechanics and as rare surviving examples of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century miniature illuminations of scientific subjects by both art historians and historians of science, consequently distorting our understanding of Islamic figural art, of the art of Islamic sculpture, of which these works form both a part and were arguably the finest and certainly the most important examples of all the works of figural sculpture that were produced in the Islamic world between the eighth and the thirteenth centuries. It is unfortunate for both the historical record and for our present understanding of these sculptures, that the very success of these automata, which were primarily expressions of the ruler’s power, in causing amazement, wonder, astonishment and fear, in part relied upon the element of surprise, and they are only rarely mentioned by chroniclers. Many seem to have passed largely unrecorded, except as elements in popular stories such as those in The Tales of the Thousand Nights and a Night,8 which seem in their references to these sculptures largely to confirm other records of them, rather than being the completely fantastic imaginings of ninth-century and later storytellers, which is why they are cited from below.

6 G.G. Coulton, The Fate of Medieval Art in the Renaissance and Reformation (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1958), p. xiv. Also, ‘‘to install a lectern eagle which at the appropriate moment would snap around to attract the eyes of the faithful to the pulpit’’ (Henry Kraus, The Living Theatre of Medieval Art (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), p. 186). 7 This article is not concerned with the mechanical engineering qualities incorporated in these sculptures, nor with the relative historical precedence of the invention of important technological aspects of these works of sculpture. For the scientific-technological aspects of these sculptures–automata, see for example: Jack Lindsay, Blast-Power and Ballistics: Concepts of Force and Energy in the Ancient World (London: Muller, 1974); A.Y. Hassan and D.R. Hill, Islamic Technology: An Illustrated History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); S.H. Nasr, Islamic Science: An Illustrated Study (Westerham, UK: World of Islam Festival Publishing Co., 1976); D.R. Hill 1974; as also the numerous articles on this subject by G. Sarton and G. Saliba. 8 For the early history of the text dating to the early third/ninth century, see R. Irwin, Night and Horses and the Desert: An Anthology of Classical Arabic Literature (Cairo: Al-Ahram Centre for Translation and Publishing, 1999), p. 116; Sandra Naddaff, Arabesque (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1991), pp. 3ff.; R.A. Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (New York: Kegan Paul International, 1998), pp. 456–459.

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Because these works of sculpture moved, sometimes produced sounds, were dressed, bejewelled, were enamelled, covered in gold leaf and otherwise decorated, they were works of ‘aja¯’ib, marvels, designed and made to inspire wonder and awe at the power of the owner, usually the ruler, who had these marvellous, soulless, mobile devices under his command. These works were classed as ‘ilm al-hiyal, a _ term related to ruse or stratagem,9 which of course they were. They were employed where deception was particularly prized and important, in the treatment of envoys—ambassadors from foreign rulers and other important guests—where the shock and astonishment administered by these wondrous sculptures was worth their weight in gold. Other works of sculptural automata were made to amuse, confound or irritate, still others to record the time, and in some instances they may also have been employed to play a part in religious rites, but only when transferred into a Latin Christian context10. These sculptural devices, works of wonder, were continued, modified and further developed in the Islamic world from a knowledge of Hellenistic, later Alexandrian, East Roman (Byzantine) and probably Sa¯ssa¯nid moving statuary, as well as, from the third/ninth century onwards, with perhaps some knowledge of the Chinese examples. Some, including those built by Procopius of Gaza c. 465 (d. 528), who built a water-driven clock automata erected in Gaza, Palestine, that included representations of the 12 Labours of Hercules, signifying the 12 hours of daylight,11 were certainly known to the Arabs of the sixth to seventh centuries.

Precedents Ktesibios of Alexandria (c. 270 BC), an inventive engineer employed by Ptolemy II (308–246 BC), designed accurate water clocks and devised water, air pressure driven and other automata. He was followed by Philon of Byzantium (c. 200 BC), who was his imitator and though of Philon’s nine books, comprising ‘‘a compendium of technology’’, the sixth volume on automata has not survived, it is referred to by Heron. The Fifth Book, on Siphons survives, but only in its Arabic translation and Philon influenced both Vitruvius12 and Heron of Alexandria (c. 62 AD). Heron produced treatises on the automaton theatre ‘‘Automata’’ and on water clocks, building upon Ktesibios of Alexandria’s experiments and written works and on Philon’s, and in his pneumatika, employed steam, water and air pressure, belopoeika and cheirobalistra. These texts were subsequently repeatedly modified and emended, as they were not regarded as a part of the cannon of unalterable classic texts, and these largely Alexandrian texts formed the bedrock that was mined, modified and developed by later researchers. Both Heron and Philon’s related works, dependant in part on those of Ktestibios, had been translated into 9

Nasr, Islamic Science, p. 145. As also to ‘ilm al-simiya¯, the science of sorcery and works of illusion. See below n. 52. 11 The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, ed. A.P. Kazhdan, volumes I–III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 947; for the water clock, see Lindsay, Blast-Power and Ballistics, pp. 287–292, citing Vitruvius Bk IX, Ch. VIII, 5–8. Frequently, other than the 12 Labours of Hercules, the 12 signs of the Zodiac were depicted. 12 His book is dedicated to Emperor Augustus 63 BC to 14 AD. He mentions in Bk. X, Ch. VII, 5, ‘‘four blackbirds singing by means of waterworks and angobatae and figures that drink and move’’; he describes the water organ in Bk. X, Ch. VIII, 1–6, and water clocks in Bk. IX, Ch. VIII. 10


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Arabic by the third/ninth century,13 including the scientific translations and emendations sponsored by the Banu¯ Mu¯sa¯, the brothers Muhammad, Ahmad _ _ and Hasan,14 in third/ninth-century Baghdad, and the variants and developments _ of these texts written later by al-Sa¯‘a¯ti in sixth/twelfth-century Damascus and by al-Jaziri at Diyarbakr at the start of the seventh/thirteenth century.15 The colouring and the dressing of moving sculptures in gold jewellery and in actual clothes, gold leaf and jewels was quite simply a continuation under the ‘Abba¯sids, Tulu¯nids, Fa¯timids, Ayyu¯bids and other Muslim rulers, as also _ _ under the East Romans. The whole tradition of brightly painted sculptures of gods, humans and other figures and animals, carved from wood and stone, fashioned from clay and cast in metal, often with gilded additions, such as wreaths, swords, bows and arrows, was typical of Roman, Hellenistic, Achaemnid, Classical Greek and earlier works of sculpture. Sometimes these statues had jewelled16 or ivory eyes and silvered teeth. These works of ancient sculpture were both intensely colourful, as recent research has proved beyond any reasonable doubt,17 and often so realistic that one must have felt one was inhabiting the same physical space as these figures of gods, emperors and otherworldly creatures, and in consequence it is hardly surprising in this context to find tales such as Pygmalion, in which a statue comes to life.18 For the Greek-speaking world, Homer described the automata devised by Hephaestius in the Iliad: And he (Hephaestius) had set golden wheels underneath the bases of each one (tripods) so that of their own motion they could wheel into the immortal gathering, and return to his house, a wonder to look at. These were so far finished, but the elaborate ear handles were not yet on. He was forging these, and beating the chains out. As he was at work on this in his craftsmanship and his cunning . . . And in support of (Hephaistos) their master moved his attendants. These are golden, and in appearance like living young women,19 providing an indication of the very early date of some sculptural automata. Pausanius, amongst others, records some of the earliest painted and dressed wooden statues20 and the sixth-century BC Periclean East frieze of the Parthenon in Athens records the procession for the annual re-dressing with a newly woven 13

Hassan and Hill, Islamic Technology, p. 60. H. Kennedy, The Court of the Caliphs: The Rise and Fall of Islam’s Greatest Dynasty (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2004), pp. 254–255. 15 Lindsay, Blast-Power and Ballistics, pp. 313–347; Gervase Mathew, Byzantine Aesthetics (London: Murray, 1963), p. 27. Nasr, Islamic Science, p. 147, n. 29, records that Ibn al-‘Arabi (560–637/1165– 1240) in his Al-futu¯ha¯t al-makkiya describes a dream related to the Alexandrian school of automata, _ of the device whereby the doors of a temple open apparently of their own accord. 16 As with the jewels in the eyes of the colossal gold statue of Apollo made by Bryaxis at Antioch. 17 See for example, Renkli Tanr|lar, Istanbul Arkeoloji Mu¨zesi: Antik Heykel Sanat|nda C ¸ okrenklilik, ed. V. Brinkmann and R. Wu¨nsche (2006). 18 Perhaps also for the same reasons in the Tale of the Fisherman and the Jinn (7th Night), with its half marble-half human young man (Mathers, trans., The Thousand Nights and One Night), IV:41–42. 19 Iliad Bk. 18, vv. 375ff, 417–418. Also Apollo seems to have made one that may have moved, ‘‘But he of the silver bow, Apollo, fashioned an image in the likeness of Aineias himself and in armour like him, and all about this image brilliant Achaians and Trojans hewed at each other’’ (Iliad Bk. 5, v. 449). 20 See also Iliad Bk. 6, vv. 285–310, for the dressing of the statue of Athena at Troy. 14

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peplos of the ancient wooden cult statue of Athena,21 kept on the acropolis in the Erechtheion. This statue, which may have dated from the Mycenean period, and Themistius in the fourth century, indicate that cult statues were stripped bare (of their clothing) for the wonder of the cult initiates.22 The vibrantly painted sculptures and reliefs of Egypt, of Persia, such as in the Achaemnid glazed tile-work reliefs of the ‘‘immortals’’, bodyguards of the Great King at the Palace at Susa, those in Central Asia and Northern India, in China, as in Greece, Asia Minor, North Africa and Italy and elsewhere, were an accepted part of civilisation. Bronze statues were also coloured,23 as well as inlaid with metals and glass and often gilded. It was the lifelikeness of the paintwork on the myriad works of sculpture that surrounded the Early Christian community, the painted statues of the Roman emperors and their gods, as lifelike as the wax death-mask-images of members of patrician Roman families, or as the encaustic portraits of the deceased from Fayyum in Egypt, as well as the ability of some of these statues to move head, limbs, hands and attributes and at times to speak, that caused the waves of vandalism, of statue smashing by Christian fanatics, that swept over the East Roman Empire in the centuries after Constantine’s conversion to Christianity.24 Homer did not invent the idea of the automata deployed by Hephaestius. Automata were already known to exist or were reported upon in the region of the Mediterranean Sea, from Egypt, Mesopotamia and from further east. Some ancient colourful statues were at the same time automata; they moved, not only in the minds of the recently converted but in fact, such as the statue of the bronze naked Apollo at Didyma cast by Kanachos (c. 500 B.C.) with a bow in his left hand and a stag in his right - the stag ‘‘which could be moved by an artful mechanism’’,25 while the temple statue of Arsinoe, sister-wife of Ptolemaios II (308-246 BC) carried a rhyton, designed by Ktesibios, having the form of the god Bes, which gave out a shrill note as the spout was opened to pour wine for the celebrants at the temple.26 Heron of Alexandria advised on making moving statues, together with

21

R. Ling, ‘‘The sculptures of the Parthenon’’, in Making Classical Art: Process and Practice, ed. R. Ling (Stroud, UK: Tempus, 2000), pp. 124–140, here at 129–132. 22 R. Lane-Fox, Pagans and Christians in the Mediterranean World from the Second Century AD to the Conversion of Constantine (London: Viking, 1986), p. 154. The deliberate theft of the cult statue of Artemis’s wardrobe of clothes from Ephesus, clearly indicating the dressing of this cult statue. 23 Hermann Born, ‘‘Patinated and painted bronzes: exotic technique or ancient tradition’’, in Small Bronze Sculpture from the Ancient World, ed. Marion True and Jerry Podany (Malibu, CA: Getty Museum, 1990), pp. 179–196. See also W.A. Oddy et al., ‘‘The gilding of bronze sculpture in the Classical World’’, in ibid., pp. 103–121. 24 Lane-Fox, Pagans and Christians, p. 673. ‘‘Eusebius tells how his agents broke up divine statues and exhibited their stuffing as mere rubbish’’ and presumably this ‘‘stuffing’’ included internal rods, speaking tubes and other component parts essential for the movement of these statues or their parts and for them to speak. For the Imperial legislation encouraging the destruction of pagan shrines, see S. Mitchell, Anatolia: Land, Men and Gods in Asia Minor, Vol. II, The Rise of the Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 67, n. 83. 25 Lane-Fox, Pagans and Christians, p. 181. This bronze moving statue automata was removed to Susa by the Persians in 494 BC, but it was returned to Didyma by Alexander’s General Seleucus and it remained on view by the altar for the next 500 years. It also seems that Apollo’s priestess at Didyma, to present her oracular statements on behalf of Apollo, sat upon a mechanically revolving cylindrical block surrounded by water in an underground cave at Didyma (ibid, p. 183). 26 Lindsay, Blast-Power and Ballistics, p. 293.


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speaking statues.27 Water was transformed through the underground pipe-work into wine at the temple of Dionysus at Corinth,28 and in some of Heron’s drinking vessel designs, water was poured in and wine poured out.29 Doors of temples apparently swung open and the temple trumpets sounded of their own volition to reveal the cult statue, amongst other eye and mind bedazzling phenomena. As Apuleius in the second century AD records when confronted with these wonders, I would tell if it were lawful . . . I trod the confines of death and the threshold of Proserpine. I was swept round all the elements and returned. I beheld the sun at midnight shining with purest radiance, gods of heaven and gods of hell! I saw you face to face and adored in (your) presence.30 Such was the impact on a man’s senses when face to face with these lifelike images, which were understood to have been inhabited at times by the gods they represented—this in part because some moved and spoke.

The prophet Sulayma¯n ibn Da¯’u¯d and craftsmen jinn There is a clear precedent given for the making of wondrous statues in the Qur’a¯n (Q 34:13), where the jinn make statues, amongst other items, including vast cauldrons, ‘‘basins like wells and boilers built into the ground’’, at the command of the prophet Sulayma¯n b. Da¯’u¯d (Solomon son of David).31 Evidently, as 27

Lane-Fox, Pagans and Christians, p. 135, concerning a re-modeled head of Epicurus, designed to distort sound. 28 Lane-Fox, Pagans and Christians, p. 136. 29 Lindsay, Blast-Power and Ballistics, p. 328. 30 Apuleius Metam. xi cc. 11, 24, cited in H.B. Workman, Persecution in the Early Church (London: Epworth Press, 1923), p. 161. 31 As in the Bible (1 Kings 6:23–30): ‘‘And within the oracle he made two cherubims of olive tree, each ten cubits high. And five cubits was the one wing of the cherub, and five cubits the other wing of the cherub; from the uttermost part of the one wing to the uttermost part of the other were ten cubits. And the other cherub was ten cubits; both the cherubims were of one measurement and one size. The height of the one cherub was ten cubits, and so was it of the other cherub. And he set the cherubims within the inner house: and they stretched forth the wings of the cherubims, so that the wing of the one touched the one wall, and the wing of the other cherub touched the other wall; and their wings touched one another in the midst of the house. And he overlaid the cherubims with gold. And he carved all the walls of the house round about with carved figures of cherubims and palm trees and open flowers within and without’’. The jinn indicated in this context by the skills of the man sent by King Hiram of Tyre, ‘‘A widow’s son of the tribe of Naphtalia, and his father was a man of Tyre, a worker in brass: and he was filled with wisdom, and understanding, and cunning to work all works in brass. And he came to King Solomon, and wrought all his work’’, including, of brass: pillars, nets of checker-work and chain-work, capitals of lily and 400 pomegranates, two cast bowls on the pillars, a cast bowl containing ‘‘a molten sea’’ that was 10 cubits across and of 30 cubits circumference, supported by 12 cast oxen and cast bases of lions, oxen and cherubims, and gold items for the temple its fixtures and fittings including hinges for the door, and also items of silver (1 Kings 7:14–51; also 2 Chronicles 3:5–4:22, including ‘‘palm trees and chains’’ (3:5). This cunning man was skilled in working gold, silver, brass, iron, stone and timber, ‘‘in purple, in blue, and in fine linen, and in crimson; as also to grave any manner of graving, and to find out every device which shall be put to him, with thy cunning men and with the cunning men of my lord David thy father’’ (2 Chronicles 2:13–14). Hence the association made of skilful and cunning craftsmen with the jinn, who were under the prophet Solomon’s command.

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marvellous, mobile, coloured sculptural automata—moving life size sculptures of human figures dressed and bejewelled, some mounted on horseback, on horses that moved, sculptures of birds, lions, and other wondrous creatures, making sounds, roaring, the smaller birds singing, the leaves rustling and the sculpted tree swaying—they were regarded at Islamic courts as the work of the jinn,32 who were under the prophet Solomon/Sulayma¯n’s command, ‘‘And (We gave him) certain of the jinn who worked before him by permission of his Lord’’.33 Islamic tradition relates that Solomon killed the King of Sidon and took his daughter Jarada as wife and that she professed her belief in the ‘‘One True God’’. Solomon loved her but she suffered inconsolable grief for her dead father, So Solomon ordered the satans (jinn) to fashion an image of her father and dress it in his clothes. Jarada and her servants went and worshipped this image every morning and evening, as was customary in her father’s kingdom. When his vizier Assaf reported this, Solomon ordered the idol destroyed and he punished the woman.34 This passage clearly defines the prophet Sulayma¯n/Solomon’s distinction between a portrait statue representing the deceased King of Sidon, a statue that was dressed in the former king’s clothes, made by the jinn to the prophet’s own order as a consolation for his grief-stricken wife, and the subsequent destruction of this statue that he had ordered to be made, when, and only when, it was reported by a trustworthy man to have become an object of worship, to have become an idol, the object of idolatry. The change from a portrait statue, an acceptable object made at the prophet Sulayma¯n’s specific command, to an idol that was destroyed by the prophet himself, hinged around the worship that was given to it.35 It was 32

Jinn are made of fire, neither angel nor corporeal but include elements of both, luminous and dark. Solomon controlled four armies, composed of jinn, men, animals and birds (Q 27:17). 33 Q 34:12. 34 F.E. Peters, A Reader on Classical Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 26–27, citing Zamakshari’s (d. 1143) commentary on the Qur’a¯n, Al-kashsha¯f, on Q 38:34. 35 Idolatry is stated in the Qur’a¯n to be the one sin that the Almighty will not forgive (Q 4:116; ‘‘Idolatry is worse than carnage’’ (Q 2:191–194); cf. Q 46:5; 16:20–21, 73; 7:190–200. Following the precedent set by the Prophet Muhammad, idols as such, objects of idolatrous worship, were destroyed by Muslim _ rulers, for example, the Ghaznavid Yamin al-Dawla Mahmu¯d destroyed Hindu temples in India, _ including the temple of Somanath in Saurastra on the west coast of India in 416/1026, (P.K. Hitti, History of the Arabs (1991), p. 464, but human figural sculpture in the round, in bronze, stucco and marble was a feature of both Mahmu¯d and Mu’sud’s palaces at Ghazna (see C.E. Bosworth, _ The Ghaznavids: Their Empire in Afghanistan and Eastern Iran 994–1040 (Beirut: Khayats, 1973), pp. 135–136, 140), clearly indicating the distinction drawn by these rulers between idol and statue, as also the sending of the gold idol to Mecca, where it obviously ceased to be an idol and rather was seen as a proof of victory over idolatry and evidence of the Sultan’s waging of jiha¯d. Mahmu¯d’s Sunni _ religious faith is unquestioned in the sources. He dispatched to Mecca each year two copies of the Qur’a¯n written by him (see T.W. Arnold, Painting in Islam: A Study of the Place of Pictorial Art in Muslim Culture (New York: Dover, 1965), p. 1, n. 2), as well as being a famous warrior for the faith who employed noted religious scholars at his court (cf., Bosworth, The Ghaznavids, pp. 51–54, 129–130). Likewise the Mamlu¯k Sultan al-Za¯hir Baybars, who smashed an idol in the Crusader citadel of Safad _ in 664–665/1266–1267 (C. Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), p. 308; as also Zahir al-Din Ba¯bur in the sixteenth century, who ordered the destruction of idols at Urwa (Za¯hir al-Din Ba¯bur Padshah Ghazi, Barbur-nama (Memoirs of Barbur), _ trans. A.S. Beveridge (Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1990), p. 612), yet had a considerable interest in paintings and portraiture. For a seventh/thirteenth-century view of idolatry, see A.J. Arberry,


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therefore evident that there was nothing wrong with making lifelike statues, moving or otherwise, in a palace, or with statues wearing clothes in a palace; what was wrong in the eyes of the prophet Sulayma¯n was the worship of them. The relationship between the prophet Sulayma¯n and deliberately formulated perceptions of the ruler in the Islamic world as the ‘‘Second Sulayma¯n’’ are evident both in literary works36 and in surviving palace structures and works of art from palaces.37 Every detail of the palace was central: its contents and gardens of dwarf palm trees, captive lions, menagerie, relics, pools of mercury, or of water lined with tin or silver, buildings veiled with carved and painted stucco, ablaq work, ceramic revetments, wall paintings, portrait reliefs, cauldrons38 and moving–speaking sculptures. These were all a demonstration of the ruler’s power over the jinn of the temporal world, the skilled craftsmen and engineers who worked for the ruler, caliph, sultan or emir, who worked for the ‘‘Second Sulayman’’. The use made of the example provided by the prophet Sulayman was in part, perhaps, a consequence of the longstanding struggle to demonstrate the legitimacy (footnote continued) Discourses of Rumi (1977), p. 89: ‘‘The Na’ib said: Before this, the unbelievers used to worship and bow down to idols. We are doing the selfsame thing in the present time. We go and bow down and wait upon the Mongols, and yet we consider ourselves Muslims. We have so many other idols in our hearts too. . .’’. Jala¯l al-Din Ru¯mi makes only two passing references in his Mathnavi to the distraction provided by figural work (The Mathnawi of Jalalud’din Rumi, trans. R.A. Nicholson, Bks I-IV, rev. edn (Cambridge: Gibb Memorial Trust, 1982), IV:v. 911–912 and V:v. 1502), and otherwise makes no mention of any possible Muslim idolatry towards contemporary Rum Seljuk seventh/thirteenth-century images, pictorial, sculptural or automata; rather, his references to idolatry are concerned with idolatry in the heart, as this discourse makes clear. 36 For example, Sultan Mahmu¯d of Ghazna was described as ‘‘a second Solomon’’, by Badi‘ al-Zama¯n _ al-Hamadha¯ni (d. 399/1009) (E.G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, volumes I–II (Bethesda, MD: Ibex, 1997), II:113); the palace of Jehoseph bar Najrallah, vizier to the mid-fifth/eleventh-century ruler of Granada, that was erected on the site of the Alhambra, was described by Ibn Gabirol in his poetry as repeating the architectural works of the prophet Sulayma¯n (R. Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000), p. 452); and the Great Seljuk Sultan Sanjar was described as ‘‘a second Solomon’’ by the poet Khaqa¯ni (499–580/1106/7–1185) (Browne, Literary History of Persia, II:396). The same epithet was also applied to the Ghaznavid Sultan Ma‘su¯d III (492–508/1099–1115) by Abu¯ l-Faraj Ru¯ni, who called him ‘‘The Solomon of the Age’’ (C.E. Bosworth, The Later Ghaznavids: Splendour and Decay, the Dynasty in Afghanistan and Northern India 1040–1186 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), p. 89; Mas‘u¯d-i Sa‘d-i Salma¯n referred to Sultan Malik Arsla¯n Ma‘su¯d b. Ma‘su¯d III (509/1116): ‘‘With the power and omnipotence of Su¨leyman since I am from the origin and progeny of Da’ud’’ (ibid., p. 91); it was a title of the Salghurid ruler of Fars, Abu¯ Bakr Muzaffar al-Din, Qutlugh Kha¯n b. Sad-i b. Zangi (622–658/1226–1260) recorded by the poet _ Sadi in his dedication of the Gulistan, ‘‘The Lord of the Earth, The Axis of the Revolution of Time, the Successor of Sulaiman, the Defender of the People of the True Faith, the Puissant King of Kings, the Great Atabak’’, and the Atabak is again described as ‘‘Heir to the Throne of Sulaiman’’ (The Rose Garden of Shekh Muslihu’d-Din Sadi of Shiraz, trans. E.B. Eastwick (London: Octagon, 1974), pp. 6, 15. See below n. 140, for reference to the Rum Seljuk rulers described as the ‘‘Second Sulayma¯n’’. Similarly, in the fourteenth century, the rulers of Fars adopted the title ‘‘Heir to Solomon’s Kingdom’’ (S.S. Blair and J. Bloom, Art and Architecture of Islam 1250–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), p. 23. 37 For examples of this symbolism see below; also T.M.P. Duggan, ‘‘The motifs employed on Rum Seljuk 13th century eight-pointed star tiles from Antalya province and elsewhere in Anatolia: An interpretation’’, Adalya, 9 (2006): 149–219, esp. pp. 206–208. There are innumerable later examples of Islamic works related to the jinn under the prophet Sulayman or the second Su¨leyman’s command, many marked as such by the six- or eight-pointed star, and see for example the illuminated copy of the Su¨leymaname, the ‘‘Book of Solomon’’, by Firdaws (c. 900/1500), in the Chester Beatty Library, Dublin, for some later depictions of the jinn. 38 Blair and Bloom, Art and Architecture of Islam, p. 56.

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of ruler-ship within the Islamic world by the erection of palaces, court protocol and the ruler’s increasing seclusion from the population, practices that had no precedent in the Prophet Muhammad’s lifetime. The precedent that was found to _ justify the palace and its marvels was in the example provided by the prophet Sulayman, the wise and just ruler described in the Qur’a¯n, with armies of men, birds, animals and jinn at his command39 and, more questionably, in the surviving works and the preserved literary record of the Persian Sassa¯nid monarchs, such as Cyrus-Khusrev.40 When the prophet Sulayma¯n remarked of the Queen of Sheba, ‘‘She is possessed of every virtue and has a splendid throne’’,41 he called her to the faith in the One God and to renounce her worship of the sun. He summoned the Queen of Sheba (Belkis)’s throne to his palace, brought in the twinkling of an eye by his vizier Assaf bin Berachia, and then had it altered, to determine whether she clearly recognised it as her own throne. Solomon asked her, ‘‘Is your throne like this?’’ And she replied, ‘‘It looks as though it were the same’’.42 She did not recognise her own throne, but could only see a resemblance between the throne she saw before her and her own throne. Consequently Solomon comments, ‘‘Her false gods have led her astray, for she comes from an unbelieving nation’’.43 The queen then mistook the glass, polished, mirror-like floor of his audience chamber for a pool of water, and, ‘‘when she saw it she thought it was a pool of water, and she bared her legs. 39

For the battle between the armies of Sulayman and the King of the Sea and his jinn, see Mathers, trans. The Thousand Nights and One Night, II:292–294. 40 The historian Abu¯ l-Hasan ‘Ali al-Mas‘u¯di (d. 345/957) records that he saw in 302/915–6 at Istakhr, _ a copy of the history of the Sassa¯nid Kings, the fifth-sixth-century Royal Book, Xwaday-Namag-Khudhay Namak, a copy of which was used by Abu¯ l-Qa¯sim Firdawsi of Tus (d. 415/1025–6) at the end of the fourth/tenth century for his monumental Sha¯h-Na¯meh, and which was also the source for the Persian King list given in the work of Abu¯ l-Rayha¯n Muhammad b. Ahmad al-Biru¯ni (325–439/973–1048) _ _ ¯ tha¯r al-ba¯qiya ‘an al-quru¯n al-kha¯_liya, detailing entitled, A the calendars and eras of ancient peoples. The illustrated manuscript of the Sassa¯nid Kings that was seen by al-Mas‘u¯di was written in Arabic and was probably a copy, rather than the original, of the translation of the Royal Book that had been made in 112/731, translated into Arabic from Persian by ‘Abd Alla¯h ibn al-Muqaffa‘ (d. 139/757) for the Omayyad Caliph Abu¯ l-Walid Hisha¯m b. ‘Abd al-Malik (105–125/724–743). It contained individual miniatures of 27 Sassa¯nid rulers in their royal robes (revised translation in R. Irwin, Islamic Art (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1997), p. 181). Another similar volume also survived into the fourth/ tenth century in the castle of Shiz, by Takht-i Sleyma¯n, the site of the fire temple of Atur Gushnasp, which was recorded by Abu¯ Isha¯q al-Fa¯risi (Istakhri) (Arnold, Painting in Islam, p. 82. This copying of _ __ the Sassa¯nid Royal Book is important, first, because it indicates an interest in the Sassa¯nid dynasty at the apex of the Umayyad state in the second/eighth century; second, because it may indicate an interest in portraits of rulers by this caliph, and there are indications that portraits were made of Umayyad caliphs, which were then added to a Persian copy of this, or to a related Sassa¯nid illuminated text depicting rulers; and third, because one can assume that these miniatures, copies of those in the Persian original, were painted for this translation made for the caliph by 112/731, and later copied, indicating the production of illuminated portrait miniatures in the early second/eighth century, influenced by Sassa¯nid models, prior to the ‘Abba¯sids’ wholesale adoption of Sassanid court style, which also influenced, for example, the choice of names of the later Rum Seljuk seventh/thirteenth-century Sultans, with repeated reference to the Persian Kayani rulers in the names taken by Ru¯m Seljuk Sultans after Kilij Arsla¯n II (550–587/1156–1192), three rulers adopting the name Keykubad (Qubad, Kawadh/Kubadh father of Khusraw-Kayhurev) on their accession, three Keyhusrev (Cyrus/Kisra/Kurush/Chosroes) and two Keykavas (Cyrus’s son Cambyses, Kambujiya). 41 Q 27:24. 42 Q 27:41–42. 43 Q 27:43.


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But Solomon said: It is a palace paved with glass’’.44 This apparent pool of water in Solomon’s audience chamber was a work of ‘aja¯’ib, wonder, like the subtle change made to the Queen of Sheba’s throne, sufficient to cause a misapprehension in her mind, she being unaware of this device, and confirming, together with her inability to recognise her own throne, that she did not recognise reality—what was real, what was the Truth—when she saw it in before her own eyes, that she had in fact been misled in her judgement, a realisation that resulted in her conversion. It was this ability to deceive all who were brought before the ruler, except for those who saw truly or who had some prior knowledge (one of the reasons why automata were not used repeatedly upon each and every envoy but at times disappear, to re-appear when required to startle and amaze), that helps to explain the longevity of the tradition at Islamic courts of employing moving, speaking statues, and of their powerful impact. They were designed and were employed to overthrow the senses of envoys and others, so that the ruler with such wondrous devices at his command prevailed, and was seen to prevail by envoys and courtiers alike within a diplomatic context, which seems to have been the most important function of the moving statues, amongst other palace devices and marvels. The Throne of Solomon,45 the throne of the ruler, the sculptures of lions and the tree, usually a date palm with its army of birds46 on the branches, together with a pool, of mercury, or lined with plates of silver or tin, and highly polished marble floors, large decorated bronze and brass cauldrons, all echoed the attributes of Solomon’s Palace. They were symbols of the archetypal ruler and of his control over the creative powers of the jinn and of jinn-like works of wonder, works that at times were clearly marked by the seal of Solomon device, the six or eight pointed star. A consequence of this precedent, of the prophet Sulayma¯n as the just and wise ruler with the jinn at his command, was that in palaces from Baghdad to Co´rdoba, Konya to Cairo, these devices, the sculptures and other known features of Solomon’s Palace, were repeated, in tile work designs, in designs on decorated pottery, metalwork and woodwork as on textiles, tanks and pools and their like, and in the production of moving statues. The polished mosaic floors of the Omayyad palaces and the pool lined with plates of silver in ‘Abbasid Samarra, as also the 44

Q 27:44. Described in the Bible: ‘‘Moreover the King (Solomon) made a great throne of ivory, and overlaid it with the best gold. The throne had six steps, and the top of the throne was round behind: and there were stays on either side on the place of the seat, and two lions stood beside the stays. And twelve lions stood there on the one side and upon the other on the six steps; and there was not the like made in any kingdom’’ (1 Kings. 10:18–20); also ‘‘Moreover the king made a great throne of ivory, and overlaid it with pure gold. And there were six steps to the throne, with a footstool of gold, which were fastened to the throne, and stays on each side of the sitting place, and two lions standing by the stays: And twelve lions stood there on the one side and upon the other on the six steps. There was not the like made in any kingdom’’ (2 Chronicles 9:17–19). 46 A reminder of one of the four armies, the army of birds, commanded by Sulayma¯n. A description of the armies at the prophet Sulayma¯n’s command occurs in The Extraordinary Tale of the City of Brass (341st Night) (Mathers, trans., The Thousand Nights and One Night, II:293): ‘‘When Su¨leyman learned the treatment which his envoy had undergone, he grew mightily indignant and at once assembled all his forces, of jinn, of men, of birds and of animals. To Asaf ibn Barakhya he gave command of his human soldiers; to Dimiryat, King of the Afarit (of the air), the leadership of all the forces of the jinn to the number of sixty millions and also of the troops of animals and birds of prey which he had assembled from the earth and sky and sea. Heading the combined force himself, Su¨leyman entered the lands of my master and drew his army up into battle array’’. 45

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pools of quicksilver-mercury,47 sometimes stirred to illuminate the ceiling of a decorated iwan or hall,48 or pools of water lined with tin or silver in many palaces in the Islamic world,49 echoed and served a similar function to the prophet Sulayma¯n’s glass floor in his palace, reflecting, mirroring,50 blinding with reflected sunlight. These were combined with gilded ceilings, lustre tile work and lustre vessels, vessels inlaid with silver, gold and niello, light reflecting, embroidered, woven and iridescent textiles, fountains and water slides, rich carpets, scents and incense; figural sculpture in metal of lions and birds, life-sized horsemen and sometimes human-headed jinn with the body of a feline creature or a bird, that moved and sometimes spoke, in a secluded environment with controlled lighting. These devices of the ‘‘Second Sulayma¯n’’ were not for everyday use, but were part of the expression of ruler-ship, power and court culture, and they were employed in carefully staged performances that could take months or years to plan and prepare, to achieve the desired effect upon a group of foreign envoys or other important guests. The distinction between these works of wonder, echoing the prophet Sulayma¯n and the works made at his command by the jinn, and the sin of idolatry, of worshipping a speaking statue is clearly stated in the Qur’a¯n (20:87): ‘‘They said: We broke not tryst with thee of our own will, but we were laden with burdens of ornaments of the folk, then cast them (into the fire), for thus Al-Samiri proposed. Then he produced for them a calf, of saffron hue, which gave forth a lowing sound. And they cried: This is your god and the god of Moses, but he hath forgotten’’.51 The passage records the making of a metal statue of a calf that produced a lowing sound, which they worshipped. There is no evidence whatsoever to suggest that the moving, speaking statues at Islamic courts were worshipped, although there are hints that something close to this was perhaps the case for at least one possible sixth–seventh/twelfth–thirteenth-century automata, which was probably of Islamic origin, in Christian hands in the seventh/thirteenth century.52 47

For the symbolism of mercury, as the dissolver of gold, the royal metal, see T. Burckhardt, Mirror of the Intellect: Essays on Traditional Science and Sacred Art, trans. W. Stoddart (Cambridge: Quinta Essentia, 1987), pp. 132–141. For the occurrence of mercury coated dinars, see A. Kaczmarczyk, R.E.M. Hedges and H. Brown, ‘‘On the occurrence of mercury coated dirhems’’, Numismatic Chronicle, 7th ser., 17:137 (1977), 162–170. 48 The mercury-filled pool beneath a domed pavilion at Madinat al-Zahra¯’, was stirred at the caliph’s command to cast light into the dome (Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture, p. 443). 49 Such as at the palace of the Tulu¯nid Khumarawayh (270–281/884–895) at Fusta¯t (Hitti, History of the _ _ _ Arabs, p. 454); as also at Madinat al-Zahra¯ in the tenth century, where there was a mercury-filled pool beneath a domed pavilion (Irwin, Islamic Art, p. 121); as also at the Artukid palace at Diyarbakr. See O. Watson, Ceramics from Islamic Lands (London: Thames & Hudson, 2004), pp. 128–129, re the possibility of mercury transport in spherical-conical vessels. There was also the tin (mercury?) filled (lined) pool in the New Ko¨s¸ k (pavilion) in Baghdad, with four boats floating on it, that was seen by the Byzantine envoys in 917 (Kennedy, The Court of the Caliphs, p. 154, citing Hila¯l al-Sa¯bi (d. 447/1056)). _ 50 On the symbolism of the mirror, applicable to the numerous surviving Seljuk examples, see Burckhardt, Mirror of the Intellect, pp. 117–123, and for thirteenth-century examples of the significance of the mirror, see Chittick, Me and Rumi, pp. 228, 290–291. 51 Also Q 7:148: ‘‘And the folk of Moses, after (he had left them) chose a calf (for worship), (made) out of their ornaments, of saffron hue, which gave a lowing sound’’. 52 M. Barber, The Trial of the Templars (Cambridge: Canto, 2000), p. 183: ‘‘the idol in the form of a head, which according to these witnesses had up to four faces, was also described by one Templar as having two small horns and possessing the ability to reply to questions put to it’’, which may indicate some form


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Some references to moving statues and related devices in the Islamic world and adjacent territories to the end of the seventh/thirteenth century Building upon earlier examples,53 the organ54 (Arabic, urghun; Turkish, org), both the bellows type and the true organ, were employed in Byzantium, in the palaces, at banquets and processions; both the green and the blue factions – into which popular politics was organised – had an organ of the bellows type at the chariot races held in the hippodrome, and organs were employed at imperial weddings.55 An organ was sent as a diplomatic gift by the Emperor Constantine V (123–158/ 741–775) to King Pepin in 139/757. Ha¯ru¯n b. Yahya¯ records an East Roman organ _ with 60 copper pipes, while al-Mas‘u¯di records one with two or three bellows, which fed air into a pipe chest. Organs were not employed in the churches of the Empire. Two organ constructors are known to have flourished in sixth/twelfthcentury Syria: Abu¯ l-Majd b. Abi l-Hakim (d. 575/1180) of Damascus and Abu¯ Zakariyya Yahya¯ l-Baya¯si, an organ constructor who was in the service of al-Malik _ Na¯sir I, Sala¯h al-Din al-Ayyu¯bi (Saladin) (564–588/1169–1193).56 _ _ _ Possibly the first record of a sculptural automata made in the Islamic world is the famous metal hollow sculpture of a lancer on horseback,57 made of copper covered with gold leaf. It was erected by order of the ‘Abba¯sid Caliph Abu¯ Ja‘far al-Mansu¯r (136–158/754–775) on top of the Green Dome-Dome of Heaven _ (al-Qubba l-Khad ra¯’) above his audience chamber in his palace of the Golden Gate _ at the centre of the round city-palace complex of Baghdad, which enclosed an area of 450 hectares, and similar mobile sculptural devices were erected over each of the four domed audience halls located above the four gates to the city.58 Perhaps the figures mounted on the domes over the four entrances to the city included (footnote continued) of automata, that appears to have been described on occasion as the head of Baphomet, presumably a gift from Muslim ruler to the Order. 53 Lindsay, Blast-Power and Ballistics, p. 329. Heron has a design for an organ driven by wind power from a windmill (Fig. 2), another driven by water power (Fig. 58), and another powered by manual labour. 54 The reason for the inclusion of references to organs in this article is because of the connection between organs and automata, not only at the engineering-technological level, but also because organs are reportedly associated with the singing birds and tree by the throne of the Emperor in the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries, as may have been the case under the ‘Abba¯sids, and because of the later references to organs in connection with the automata of the tree in Latin sources, such as the sixth/ twelfth-century German illustration of a drawing made by Dom Martin Gerbert of St Blasien (described as ‘‘A tree of cast metal, whereof we read in the Deeds of Alexander that it takes its breath from below and gives forth divers sweet sounds through birds’ beaks’’), and in Albrecht von Scharffenberg’s continuation of Wolfram von Eschenbach’s unfinished Parsival, where the organ’s connection with birds is repeated (Coulton, The Fate of Medieval Art, App. 31, XVIII). 55 J. Herrin, Women in Purple: Rulers of Medieval Byzantium (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 63. 56 Hitti, History of the Arabs, II:155, 163, citing Ibn Abi Usaybi‘a. 57 A miniature of this type of dome surmounted by a mounted figure with a lance survives in various copies of Badi‘ al-Zama¯n ibn al-Razza¯z al-Jazari’s work (Istanbul, Topkapi Saray Museum (TSM) (Manuscript), Kitabl|g˘|, Ahmet III, 3472, f. 88b), where it forms the finial to a clock automata, as in the 754/1354 copy of the same work from Mamluk Egypt (T. Falk, Treasures of Islam [Exh. Cat.] (London: Sotheby’s, 1985), Cat. Nos. 12, 41). 58 M. Hattstein & P. Delius (eds), Islam: Art and Architecture (Cologne: Ko¨hnmann, 2000), pp. 96–98; Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 293; K.A.C. Creswell, A Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1958), p. 165, citing al-Khatib’s description: ‘‘These halls of audience _

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birds, such as the singing bird depicted surmounting a dome in one of the devices in Badi‘ al-Zama¯n b. al-Razza¯z al-Jazari’s seventh/thirteenth-century work, Al-ja¯mi‘ bayn al-‘ilm wa l-a‘ma¯l al-na¯fi‘ f i sina¯‘at al-hiyal, ‘‘A compendium of theory and _ _ useful practice in the mechanical arts’’—birds that were perhaps to be read as symbols of the army of birds under Sulayma¯n’s command, and thus were a reference to the Second Sulayma¯n, the caliph, with this horseman regarded as a symbol of the ‘Abba¯sid caliphate and perhaps representing the caliph himself. Built between 144/762 and 148/766, this statue of the lancer was erected over the dome, 40 metres above the ground, and was of a significant size. It is reported to have rotated on the dome, to have turned about and to have pointed to indicate the direction of threat to the caliphate and was not therefore a weather-vane-like sculpture, but had a different mechanism. With the Green Dome—the Dome of Heaven—visible from the edge of the vast city surrounding the inner city, it must have been a truly impressive sight. The horseman and the dome were brought down in a storm in 329/941. The lance/spear this figure carried may have been understood to represent the spear of the prophet Sulayma¯n that was possessed by the ‘Abba¯sid caliphs,59 or perhaps the caliphal lance (harba), that was at times carried in procession.60 _ It may be that the symbolic significance of this horseman and his lance was recognised by the Emperor Theophilus (213–227/829–842) in his Roman-style triumph, marking his attack on Muslim settlements of 215/831, celebrated in Constantinople when the first recorded East Roman joust took place,61 during which the eunuch Krateras challenged an Arab captive and unseated him with his lance. The ‘Abba¯sid response to this East Roman attack was the siege and sack of Amorium 6–18 Ramada¯n 223/1–12 August 838, during the reign of the _ Caliph Abu¯ Isha¯q al-Mu‘tasim (218–227/833–842). _ The horseman on the Green Dome was famous and was described in the fourth/ tenth century as ‘‘the crown of Baghdad, a guidepost for the region and one of the great achievements of the Abbasids’’.62 Ya¯qu¯t b. ‘Abdalla¯h al-Hamawi (575–626/ _ _ 1179–1229) recorded in his Mu‘jam al-bulda¯n that the lance of the horseman always pointed towards any danger that threatened the caliphate,63 and the image of the brass lancer on horseback on top of the green dome in Baghdad has marched on through the centuries. It was later copied by the founder of the Nasrid Sultanate _ of Granada, Muhammad I al-Gha¯lib, Muhammad b. Yu¯suf b. Nasr, Ibn-al-Ahmar _ _ _ _ (629–671/1232–1272, ruling in the city of Granada from 634/1237 onwards) who: ‘‘had an equestrian statue made of himself in full armour with lance and shield (footnote continued) (over each of the 4 gates to the city) were each covered by a great dome 50 cubits high and gilt. Each dome was surmounted by a figure which turned in the wind’’. 59 Kennedy, The Court of the Caliphs, p. 282, citing the History of al-Tabari, 1, 638–639, which records _ that the Caliph Musta‘in attended Friday prayers on 11 Dhu¯ l-Hijja 251/2 January 866, the Feast of _ Sacrifice, preceded by the both the caliphal spear of authority and the prophet Solomon’s spear. 60 M.S. Gordon, The Breaking of a Thousand Swords: A History of the Turkish Military of Samarra A.H. 200–275/815–889 C.E. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), p. 179, n.152. The Caliph al-Mutawakkil’s palace had three huge gates ‘‘through which a rider could pass lance in hand’’, al-Ya‘qu¯bi reports (Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture, p. 402), presumably for the procession of the caliphal lance. 61 Herrin, Women in Purple, p. 199. 62 Kennedy, The Court of the Caliphs, p. 136, n. 12, from Ibra¯him b. ‘Ali al-Khutabi (d. 340/951). 63 Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 293.


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that revolved like a weather vane to all points of the compass. Under it was written: ‘Habuz Aben Habuz (sic), The Wise, lets it be known that thus Andalusia must be defended’ ’’.64 The report of this device in this tenth/sixteenth-century account raises the question as to whether the statue in Baghdad erected on top of the domed hall of audience between 145/762 and 149/766, actually depicted, or was regarded, as a likeness of the Caliph al-Mansu¯r, a point upon which the _ surviving sources are silent, but which seems not entirely improbable. The image of this moving lancer statue was carried on Islamic coins and seals,65 an image which may be understood to have been utilised as a symbol of the ‘Abbasid caliphate itself, as also through the depictions of the horseman on the green dome in manuscript copies that must predate those contained in copies of al-Jazari’s manuscripts. This was also carried through the centuries on the breath of storytellers. A similar sculptural device is recorded in The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night, in the ‘‘Tale of the Third Kalandar’’, the brass rider of the Magnetic Mountain: ‘‘On the top of the mountain there is a dome of brass lifted on ten columns, and upon this dome stands a rider mounted upon a brazen horse, with a brazen spear in his hand and a plate of graven lead upon his breast bearing unknown and talismanic signs’’.66 It may be echoed in a further image described in ‘‘The Extraordinary Tale of the City of Brass’’, during the search for the copper jars sealed with the seal of Sulayma¯n, son of Da¯’u¯d, (David), which contained the disobedient jinn.67 This search was said to have been led by the Amir Mu¯sa¯ on the orders of the Umayyad Caliph ‘Abd al-Malik b. Marwa¯n (65–86/685–705),68 ‘‘ . . . they saw, outlined against the setting sun, the appearance of a motionless rider, 64

D. Hurtado de Mendoza, The War in Granada, trans. M. Shuttleworth (London: Folio Society, 1982), pp. 31–32. This account was recorded by one of the most informed of Spaniards writing in the tenth/sixteenth century, who was both familiar with Granada and the accomplishments of Andalusian civilisation, and who was banished from the Spanish court as a result of this work, a factual account, rather than a panegyric in praise of the Catholic Spanish monarchy and its genocidal activities in favour of the ‘‘New Christians’’, which resulted in the expulsion of the non-Catholic populations. Irving reports that this device was located on a turret of a tower (later called La casa del Gallo de Viento) of the Albaicin, opposite the Alhamra (W. Irving, Tales of the Alhambra (London: Henry Colburn, 1832), pp. 132–134). 65 Rather than necessarily being a copy of St George, as this lancer figure is often said to be, it may represent the caliph or his representative on horseback with the lance (cf. E. Batur, A Rainbow Linking East and West, Yap| Kred| Exh. Cat. 1994, Cat Nos. 17, 20, 21, 25, 26, 27, 29). 66 Mathers, trans., The Thousand Nights and One Night, I:90 (14th Night). H. Haddawy, The Arabian Nights (London: Everyman, 1992), p. 115, from an eighth/fourteenth-century Syrian mss by Muhsin _ Mahdi reads: ‘‘As soon as we sail below the mountain, the ship’s sides will come apart and every nail will fly out and stick to the mountain, for the Almighty God has endowed the magnetic stone with a mysterious virtue that makes the iron love it. For this reason and because of the many ships that have been passing by for a long time, the mountain has attracted so much iron that most of it is already covered with it. On the summit facing the sea, there is a dome of Andalusian brass, supported by ten brass pillars, and on top of the dome there is a brass horseman, bearing on his breast a lead tablet inscribed with talismans’’. This version of the story may refer to the statue erected in Granada, rather than or combined with that on the Green Dome in Baghdad. It also offers an explanation for the use of copra cords to bind together the planks forming a ship, as traditionally employed in ship construction in the Red Sea, Arabian Gulf and Indian Ocean, in preference to nails, which would spring out, if, as was frequently the case, a ship struck or touched a coral reef. For sewn boats see, G.F. Hourani, Arab Seafaring (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), pp. 91–98,151–152; E.B. & C. Martin, Cargoes of the East: The Ports, Trade and Cultures of the Arabian Seas and Western Indian Ocean (London: Elm Tree Books, 1978), pp. 9–10. 67 Defeated in battle by Sulayma¯n’s armies and imprisoned in these jars for insulting his envoy. 68 Mathers, trans., The Thousand Nights and One Night, II:285–286.

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set high upon a pedestal, brandishing a mighty iron lance which glowed like a flame by reason of the fiery star upon the horizon’’. When they came close, they could distinguish that the rider, his horse, and his pedestal were all of brass and that, upon the iron of the lance, were graved these words in fiery character: If you know not where to go In this forbidden place, Turn me about with all your strength And I will show Your path by the direction which at length I face. The Emir Mu¯sa¯ approached this statue and pushed it with his hand; at once, with the quickness of light, the rider turned and halted with his face towards a point of the compass directly opposed to that which the travellers had been following, so that ‘Abd al-Samad knew that he had been mistaken and that the new direction _ was the right one’’.69 This tale describes the lancer statue-automata and its ability not only to rotate, but also to indicate the right-true direction for travellers, recalling to the listener the lancer on the green dome and its reputed rotational capacity and that it provided an indication of direction to follow, either to meet with approaching danger as in Ya¯qu¯t’s description of it, or, as in this tale, to indicate _ the true path—that taken by the caliph. It is possible that the mechanical flying horse of brass upon which an Arabian knight travels to the Tartar court of King Cambuscan (Chingiz Khan) recorded by Geoffrey Chaucer at the end of the eighth/fourteenth in the Canterbury Tales, in his unfinished ‘‘Squire’s Tale’’,70 was an echo of the tales that were related concerning this revolving lancer on the green dome—the dome of heaven in Baghdad, or of a related equestrian sculpture such as that erected by Muhammad I al-Gha¯lib, _ in seventh/thirteenth-century Granada.71 Chaucer also seems to have had some confused knowledge of elements of Muslim court protocol, as the other gifts sent by the ‘‘Lord of Araby and India’’ to Chengiz Khan in this tale, in addition to the flying brass horse were: a magic mirror, Solomon’s seal ring allowing the wearer to know the language of birds, and a marvellous sword. The seal ring, the sword and a finely harnessed steed, were all gifts that were, as a matter of caliphal protocol, given by the ‘Abba¯sid caliph to sultans as a part of their official investiture by the caliph or his representative. This combination of investiture gifts from the caliph resonated powerfully with the symbolism of Sulayma¯n, which in part, maintained the association of the just Islamic ruler with the prophet Sulayma¯n b. Da¯’u¯d, in addition to the references in the Qur’a¯n and their echo found in dedications of works and in the eulogies of court poets to, ‘‘the second Sulayma¯n’’, and to ‘‘the throne of Sulayma¯n’’, that is, to the throne of the just and wise ruler. An intricate water clock automata is reported to have been presented by the Caliph Ha¯ru¯n al-Rashid (170–193/786–809) to the Emperor Charlemagne 69

Mathers, trans., The Thousand Nights and One Night, II:291. R. Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1994), p. 96. 71 Or perhaps of the Tale of the Ebony Horse, from some version or fragment of The Tales of the Thousand Nights and a Night. 70


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(c. 124–198/742–814), as well as fabrics, aromatics and an elephant,72 by the Carolingian envoy Radbert, who returned from Baghdad in 190–191/806–807 together with Ha¯ru¯n al-Rashid’s envoy to Charlemagne, ‘Abd Alla¯h. The Palace of the Magnaura was built by Constantine opposite the Church of St Sophia, east of the Augustaion in Constantinople, and probably served as the Senate House. It was rebuilt by Justinian I (527–565) and was restored by Heraclius (610–641) after 7/628, and it served as the nuptial chamber for the marriage of Leo and Irene in 152/769.73 This building was of a basilica plan, with apses to the east and two lateral aisles supporting galleries. The Emperor Theophilus (214–227/829–842) installed in the central eastern apse splendid automata, ‘‘the working of wonders’’, thaumatopoiike, ‘‘where the imperial throne was overshadowed by a golden plane tree, its branches full of jewelled birds, some of which are said to have hopped off the tree and onto the throne itself. Around the trunk of the tree were lions and griffons couchant, also of gold. Still greater would be the visitors wonder when, at a given signal, the animals would rise up, the lions would roar and all the birds would burst simultaneously into song.74 After a while the chorus would be interrupted by a peal of music from a golden organ,75 after which there would be silence to permit the emperor and his guests to talk. Then, the moment the ambassador rose to leave, the whole chorus would start up again and continue until he left the chamber’’.76 These automata representing the ‘‘throne of Solomon’’ are reported by Glykas to have been constructed by the engineer Leo the mathematician 174–c.255/790–c.869,77 relative of the iconoclast Patriarch John VII Grammatikos, and teacher of philosophy, who re-introduced the study of higher mathematics to Constantinople and was elected Metropolitan of Thessalonike (225–228/840–843). His knowledge of higher mathematics was gained from copies of the works of Euclid, Archimedes and Diophantus, and from Pappus’s ‘‘Synagogue’’, which he was taught on Andros. He also designed a visual signalling system, linking the capital on the Bosphorus to the Eastern borders.78 Leo’s ability and fame was such that the ‘Abba¯sid Caliph al-Ma’mu¯n (197–218/ 813–833) offered the Emperor Theophilus 2,000 pounds of gold and peace between the Caliphate and Byzantium, peace between Islam and Christendom, if Leo would reside for a while in Baghdad;79 this indicates the enormous value placed upon such jinn-like wonder workers/engineers, by both the caliph and the

72

Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 298. Herrin, Women in Purple, p. 62. 74 The production of singing bird automata, the notes of the blackbird produced by the motion of water and the production of walking automata, little figures that drink and move, is dated back to Ktesibios of Alexandria by Vitruvius, from Ktesibios’s books Lindsay, Blast-Power and Ballistics, p. 293, citing Vitruvius, ix, 8), and this was continued by Heron of Alexandria in his automata (Lindsay, Blast-Power and Ballistics, pp. 313–347). 75 Coulton, The Fate of Medieval Art, App. 31, XIX, records that these two great organs were set with precious stones, (and enamels) in which the sound from the organ issued through birds. 76 J.J. Norwich, Byzantium: The Apogee (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1993), p. 44; T. Bent, ‘‘Byzantine palaces’’, English Historical Review, 2:7 (1887): 466–481, at pp. 473–474; J. Beckwith, Early Christian and Byzantine Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), p. 171. 77 Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, pp. 235, 1217. 78 R. Browning, The Byzantine Empire (New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980), p. 73. 79 K.M. Setton, ‘‘The Byzantine background to the Italian Renaissance’’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 100:1 (1956): 1–76, at p. 30. 73

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emperor. The caliph’s offer of gold and peace in exchange for the loan of Leo the Engineer was rejected by the emperor. The caliph also sent envoys with requests to Emperor Theophilus for copies of Greek works to be translated into Arabic at the Bayt al-H ikma, or House of Wisdom in Baghdad, the centre for translators _ established by al-Ma’mu¯n in 215/830.80 Here works concerning the science of the ancients, ‘ulu¯m al-awa¯’il, including works by Ptolomey, Galen, Dioscorides and Platonic, Aristotelian and Hippocratic works that were taught at the Da¯r al-‘Ilm, including mathematics, physics, astronomy, medicine, philosophy and grammar, were translated from Greek and Syriac into Arabic. Theophilus also built new palaces and pavilions, including the Trikonchas, the Sigma and the palace at Bryas, Maltepe, completed by 216/831, modelled on the caliph’s palace in Baghdad, on the basis of reports supplied by the ambassador, John the Grammarian. He had been sent by Theophilus to Baghdad, specifically to record the palace at Baghdad, the court dress, ceremony and decoration.81 A probable further consequence of this embassy was that polo was introduced from Baghdad, rather than direct from Persia, and which then became so popular that a field was built within the palace by Basil I (253–273/867–886). This echoing of ‘Abba¯sid court style was repeated 300 years later, under John II Comnenus (512–538/1118–1143), or more probably Manuel I Comnenus (538–576/1143–1180) in the mid sixth/twelfth century, when an imitation ‘Abba¯sid-style palace/pavilion, the Mouchroutas, was built in the grounds of the Great Palace, west of the Chrysotriklinos. It was decorated with a muqarnas dome and tile-work,82 and possibly also had automata and a fountain,83 the whole being a symbol of the wondrous devices (‘aja¯’ib) belonging to the elite culture of rulers of civilised states. Emperor Michael III (227–253/ 842–867) converted the Palace of the Magnaura into a school, where Leo taught, and it seems as if this was the end of these automata; they were perhaps broken up and melted down, sold off to pay military costs84 or put into storage. However, a very similar collection, possibly with the addition of an elevating throne, as earlier sources do not record this marvel, was seen in the same place a century later (see below). These automata were recreated with additions or were returned to the same palace, as they formed a key expression of power in dealing with foreign, more superstitious and less technologically advanced or aware envoys and rulers. Knowledge of the wonders of the Caliph al-Ma’mu¯n’s throne room is lacking, but al-Mutawwakil (232–247/847–861) had a throne room at Samarra, which 80 Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 310; Irwin, Night and Horses and the Desert, pp. 74 ff, in addition to the mainly medical works taken from Ancyra (Ankara) and Amorium, by Ha¯ru¯n al-Rashid in the 165–190/ 782–806 campaigns, and translated by Yuhanna (Yahya¯) ibn Masawayh (d. 243/857) (Hitti, History of _ _ the Arabs, pp. 311–312). 81 Herrin, Women in Purple, pp. 198–199; Beckwith, Early Christian and Byzantine Art, pp. 170–171; _ S. Eyice, ‘‘Istanbul’da Abbasi Saraylarinin Benzen olorak yapilan bir Bizans Saray-Bryas Saray’’, Belleten 23:89, (1959): 79–111. 82 S. Redford, ‘‘Byzantium and the Islamic world’’, in Byzantium: Faith and Power 1261–1557 [Exh.Cat.], ed. H.C. Evans (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004), pp. 389–414, at p. 390; Y. Tabbaa, The Transformation of Islamic Art during the Sunni Revival (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), pp. 131–132; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, p. 870. 83 Fountains are linked to automata in the literature of the period as they employ many of the same mechanical and hydraulic techniques and power. For a seventh/thirteenth-century design of a fountain with automatically changing jets by al-Jazari, see Hassan and Hill, Islamic Technology, p. 64, fig 2.18. 84 Beckwith, Early Christian and Byzantine Art, p. 171.


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Figure 1. Underglaze Rum Seljuk eight-pointed star tile from the Palace of Kubadabad, largely completed by 633/1236, by Lake Beys¸ehir, Turkey, possibly depicting one of the palm tree and birds automata, as in the da¯r al-shajara in caliphal palaces from the third/ninth century onwards (from Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years 600–1600, ed. D.J. Roxburgh [Exh. Cat.] (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2005), Fig. 64).

Shabushti records was ‘‘decorated with great images of gold and silver and (he) made a great pool whose surface inside and out was in plates of silver. He put in it a tree made of gold in which birds twittered and whistled85 (Figure 1). He had a great 85

This fabulous tree became an image that echoed through time, repeatedly employed by rulers in palaces and employed by storytellers, for example, in ‘‘The Tale of the Unending Treasure’’, 815th Night: ‘‘in the other hand was a little tree whose trunk was of silver, whose leaves were of emerald and whose fruits were of rubies. When his host had set this tree before him the Khalifah noticed that there was a gold peacock of rare workmanship perched on top of it. As soon as Abu al-Kasim tapped this birds head with the amber wand, it stretched its wings, flirted the splendour of its tail, and began to turn round and round very fast upon itself. With this movement, it jetted threads of aloe and nard scent from a multitude of pin pricks in its sides, until all the air of the hall was freshened with the perfume’’ (Mathers, trans., The Thousand Nights and One Night, IV:22. Likewise in ‘‘The Tale of the Lazy Youth’’, 367th Night: ‘‘Abu Muhammed had two chests brought into the hall and drew from the first, among other marvels ravishing to the eye, three gold trees with gold branches, whose leaves were emerald and aquamarine, whose fruit were rubies for pomegranates, pearls for apples, and topaz in place of apples’’ (ibid., III:287; as also 360th Night: ‘‘artificial trees whose leaves were emeralds and their fruit rubies’’ (II:340).

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throne made of gold on which there were two images of huge lions86 and the steps to it had images of lions and eagles and other things, just as the throne of Solomon son of David is described. The walls of the palace were covered inside and out with mosaics and gilded marble’’.87. However the caliph suffered from insomnia and developed a fever and when he recovered, he ordered the demolition of this throne room and the gold decoration melted down and minted as coin. As A. Grabar has indicated,88 it seems the sculptural automata in the East Roman Magnaura Palace were copied, at least in part, from those in ‘Abba¯sid Baghdad and Samarra palaces. There are Chinese reports from T’ang Dynasty (618–907) envoys to the East Roman court of a gold human figure that struck bells on the hour in Constantinople,89 possibly a reference to the horologium with 24 doors, one for each hour, that stood by the Church of Hagia Sophia.90 Abu¯ l-Qa¯sim ‘Abba¯s b. Firna¯s (d. 275/888) not only introduced oriental music from Baghdad into Andalusia and is credited with the introduction of making glass ‘‘from stones’’, but he also constructed in his home a sort of planetarium from which one could see stars, clouds and even lightning upon demand, generated by some form of automata.91 This celestial ceiling perhaps echoed some of the features that had been built into the ‘Abbasid palaces of Baghdad and Samarra and in the later Palace of the Pleiades, al-Thurayya, built by the Caliph al-Mu‘tadid (279–289/ _ 892–902) at a cost of 400,000 dinars, which was destroyed in the sixth/twelfth 92 _ century. A palace pavilion was built by Ilgin, at Afyon in Anatolia, by order of Sultan Alaed-Din Keykubat I (616–634/1219–1237), over a natural warm spring where a pool was constructed into which the water poured from the mouths of two lions; this pavilion had a glass dome (dating to c. 633/1236).93 This continued the relationship of the temporal ruler with the ruler of the seven heavens; buttressing the legitimacy provided by the prophet Sulayma¯n’s example and expressed later in the decoration of the dome of the C ¸ inili Ko¨s¸ k in the Topkapi Palace in Istanbul, built by order of Sultan Mehmet II, which depicted the planets; the pool constructed in front of this ko¨¸sk-pavilion reflected the 13 columns of the facade, indicating the 26 lunar mansions. 86

As also with the earlier stucco-plaster painted, life-size standing frontal statue of the Umayyad Caliph Abu¯ ‘Abd al-Malik Marwa¯n II (126–132/744–750), with the pair of lions beneath him, from Khirbat al-Mafjar, and later, with a silver gilt and niello, repousse´ dish, dating from the early fifth/eleventh century in the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg, depicting a frontal seated ruler wearing a Sassanid style winged headdress, which is thought to represent Sultan Mahmu¯d of Ghazna, with an attendant on either _ side and two lions beneath his throne (M. Barry, Figurative Art in Medieval Islam and the Riddle of Bihzad of Herat (1465-1535) (Paris: Flammarion, 2004), pp. 52–53, 61, citing V. Lukonin and A. Ivanov, L’art persan/Persian Art (Bournemouth, UK: Parkstone, 1995); for this possible representation _ ¨ . Erginsoy, Islam of Sultan Mahmu¯d, see U Maden Sanat|n|n Gel|s¸ mesi (Istanbul: Kultur Bakanligi, _ 1978), pp. 54–55, res. 2. 87 Kennedy, The Court of the Caliphs, pp. 147–148. 88 A. Grabar, L’art de la fin de l’antiquite´ et du moyen age, volumes I–III (Paris: Colle`ge de France, 1968), I:286. 89 Beckwith, Early Christian and Byzantine Art, p. 171; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, p. 235, art. ‘‘automata’’. 90 Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium, p. 947. 91 Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 598, citing Maqqari, Vol. II, 254. 92 Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 417, citing al-Mas ‘u¯di, Vol. VIII, 116. 93 ¨ ¨ U.U. Bates, ‘‘Evliya C ¸ elibi’s comments on the Saljuqs of Rum’’, in The Art of the Saljuqs in Iran and Anatolia, ed. R. Hillenbrand (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 1994), pp. 257–262, at p. 259, n. 12.


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The Caliph al-Mu‘tadid built his new da¯r al-khila¯fa (caliphal palace) in Baghdad _ in 892, following the court’s return from Samarra; the palace included automata. The palace built by the ‘Abba¯sid Caliph al-Muqtadir (295–320/908–932) contained another da¯r al-shajara (Hall of the Tree),94 with a gold and silver tree with 18 branches rising from a pool/tank,95 which was perhaps also lined with silver plates, like that of al-Mutawakkil. This tree of gold and silver weighed 500,000 drams, and was engineered so that it swayed at times, and its metal leaves rustled. In its branches were birds of many species made from the same precious metals, silver and gold, birds that chirped,96 the sound being made by automatic devices. The tree was crowned with gemstones carved in the shape of fruits with gold birds, perhaps seemingly pecking at this succulent fruit. On each side of this tank stood statues of 15 horsemen, 30 life-sized statues of horsemen, dressed in brocade and armed with lances, horsemen automata that constantly moved as though in combat. This complex of automata in this Hall of the Tree, was seen by the envoys of the East Roman Emperor Constantine VII (300–348/913–959). They were concerned in 305/917 with the ransom and exchange of East Roman prisoners and were kept waiting for two months97 so that everything they would see on their guided tour of the palace could be properly prepared, including the laying of 22,000 carpets and 38,000 curtains.98 What the envoys saw after their two-month wait truly astonished them. They also visited the lake of tin, or rather a tin-lined lake that measured 30m.by 20m. inside the palace complex, upon which floated four 94

Timurid rulers at Samarkand had a similar tree, as tall as a man, with turquoises, emeralds, rubies, sapphires and pearls shaped like fruit, with gold birds eating the fruit. It was seen by Clavijo in 1405. 95 Kennedy, The Court of the Caliphs, p. 154; Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 303, citing Khatib, Vol. 1, 100-5; Abu¯ l-Fida¯’, Vol. 2, 73; Ya¯qu¯t, Vol. 2, 520-1; see also Hitti, History of the Arabs, pp. 417, 419–420. _ 96 On the symbolism of ‘‘the language of birds’’, see Q 27:15: ‘‘And Solomon was David’s heir and he said: O men we have been taught the language of the birds, and all favors have been showered upon us.’’, see also, for example, Mant iq al-t ayr (‘‘The Conference of the Birds’’), by Farid al-Din al-‘Atta¯r _ _ __ (c. 514–617/1120–1220), on the language of the birds, the language of the spirits of people. 97 Kennedy, The Court of the Caliphs, p. 153, citing the account by Hila¯l al-Sabi (d. 448/1056) from that _ recorded by one of al-Muqtadir’s grandsons. 98 A later record of this kind of preparation for an important event comes from the reign of the Ghaznavid Sultan Shiha¯b al-Dawla Mas‘u¯d I (422–432/1031–1041, 432–442/1041–1050) who held a celebration in 429/1038. The preparations for it took three years and the reports about it, although not including reference to sculptural automata, provide an indication of the usual setting for these devices and of the care and planning with which events of this kind were conducted: ‘‘They informed the Amir, and he ordered that they should install and set it down (the throne) on the great dais of the new palace, and put the building in order. Everyone who on that day saw the adornment never saw anything after it that could compare with it. The throne was constructed entirely of red gold, overlaid with shapes and patterns of branches and palm fronds. It was set with a large number of precious jewels, and over it was stretched lattice-work, again all encrusted with jewels. The throne itself was overlaid with covers of Rumi brocade. It had four well-filled cushions, made of silk and sewn with gold thread, laid down for the feet; a cushion for the back; and four other cushions, two for each side. A golden-plated chain hung from the ceiling of the chamber containing the dais, and came over the dais where the crown and throne were. The crown was attached to this chain, and there were four bronze figures fashioned in the shape of human beings and mounted on columns which were secured to the throne itself, so that their hands were outstretched and thus held the crown safely. In this way, the crown did not hurt the head since the chains and columns supported it, and the Sultan’s cap could go underneath it . . . Within that opulentlyappointed hall they set out a table, and in the middle of it, stretching towards the ceiling, was a pavilion made out of halva, and there was ample other food . . . ’’ (C.E. Bosworth, The Ghaznavids: Their Empire in Afghanistan and Eastern Iran 994–1040 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1963), pp. 135–136, citing Abu¯ l-Fadl Bayhaqi, Ta’rikh-i Mas‘u¯di, ed. Q. Ghani, 1940–53, 539–41. _

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Egyptian pleasure boats covered with gold embroidered Egyptian linen.99 From the indications provided by the painted tile-work from seventh/thirteenth-century Rum Seljuk palaces, it seems probable that there was a similar palm tree with bird automata in the 630s/1230s in Anatolia (Figure 1), and an echo of the tree in the caliph’s da¯r al-shajara can be sensed in the design, centuries later, of an Ottoman period fragrance coffer, a tree decorated with gold and enamel and ornamented with diamonds, pearls and rubies, like fruit hanging from it. At the apex of this tree is an enamelled sphere with diamonds that held the incense.100 Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus (295–347/908–959) had fixed into one side of his throne a golden organ tree with birds, continuing the association of the throne with the tree and the singing birds.101 The fountain erected by ‘Abd al-Rahma¯n III (299–349/912–961) in the Palace _ at Madinat al-Zahra¯’ had a marble basin carved with human figures brought from Constantinople. Added to this basin were 12 creatures of gold with pearls applied, made at Co´rdoba, a lion with a gazelle beside it, a crocodile, a serpent, an eagle, an elephant, a dove, a falcon, a peacock, a hen, a cock, a hawk and a vulture, from whose mouths spouted water.102 It is not known if these statues of creatures on the palace fountain spoke,103 but it is not altogether impossible, given the link between running water and sound, and these statues may also have moved. Husayn b. Mansu¯r al-Halla¯j (d. 309/922) is recorded as possessing the _ _ _ ‘‘expanding chamber’’ containing concealed pipes and partitions that allowed al-Halla¯j to create the appearance of a living lamb in a fiery furnace, to bring a fish _ from out of thin air and to make his own body appear to swell so that it filled most of the expanding chamber.104 On other occasions he is reported to have produced an apple, musk and coins out of nowhere and a fresh cucumber from a snowdrift,105 as well as raising the dead and compelling the jinn to serve him. He is also reported to have restored a dead parrot to life for the Caliph al-Muqtadir (295–316/908–929). He described in one of his books a model of the Ka‘ba built in his room for pilgrimage,106 perhaps following the replica of the Ka‘ba at Mecca, with places intended to represent both Mina and ‘Arafat, that was built by the Caliph

99

Another somewhat deceptive palace pool of the type related to Q 27.44 (Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture, p. 382. 100 Ko¨seog˘lu, The Topkapi Palace, p. 56, Inv. No. 2390, measuring 16 cm by 12 cm. 101 Coulton, The Fate of Medieval Art, Appendix 31, XIX. 102 Arnold, Painting in Islam, p. 23, citing Makkari. 103 ‘‘The Tale of the Fair Sad Youth’’ relates: ‘‘I saw, in the middle of a pavilion whose floor was formed with a mosaic of many coloured jewels, a silver fountain basin surrounded by birds made of gold, from whose mouths the water jetted with so sweet a noise that it seemed as if the living voices of these creatures which the fountain copied were echoing back from the silver walls in forest music’’, 367th Night, Mathers, trans., The Thousand Nights and One Night, II:352. 104 Louis Massignon, The Passion of al-Hallaj, Mystic and Martyr of Islam, trans. H. Mason, volumes I–IV (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982), I:155–161. Irwin, Night and Horses and the Desert, p. 129: ‘‘According to one witness, ‘I was summoned. . .by the slave in charge of Hallaj, and when I went out to meet him he told me he had been taking to Hallaj the tray which was his daily custom to bring to him, when he found that Hallaj was filling the room with his person, stretching from roof to floor and from side to side, so that there was no space left; this spectacle frightened him so much that he dropped the tray and fled’. He added that, ‘the slave was in a fever, shaking and trembling’’’. 105 Browne, Literary History of Persia, I:429–433. 106 Browne, Literary History of Persia, I:431–432.


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al-Mu‘tasim (217–227/833–842) at Samarra, to prevent his Turkish troops leaving _ to visit the Noble Sanctuary.107 The fourth/tenth-century historian, Luidprand, Bishop of Cremona and envoy of Berengar of Ivrea, came to Constantinople in September 337/949 during the reign of Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus (295–347/908–959). He stayed in the city until 9 Shawwa¯l 338/31 March 950 and records in his Antapodosis that he, together with Spanish envoys, probably envoys from al-Andalus, saw automata in the Palace called the Magnaura by the Church of St Sophia: A tree made of brass but gilded over stood before the throne. The boughs were full of birds of different kinds, also made of brass and also gilt, which sang in a chorus of different birdsongs according to their kind. The Emperor’s throne was constructed with such skill that at one time it was level with the ground, at another it was raised above it and then in a moment it hung aloft. It was guarded as it were by lions of immense size-one could not be sure if they were made of brass or wood but they were certainly covered with gold on the surface-which opening their mouths and moving their tongues roared aloud and shook the ground with their tails. Here I was brought into the presence of the Emperor supported on the shoulders of two eunuchs. The lions roared at my coming and the birds sang according to their kind. Thrice I performed the act of adoration prone at full length upon the ground. Then I raised my head. Behold, the Emperor whom I had just before seen seated almost on the level of the ground now appeared to my eyes dressed in different robes almost level with the ceiling of the palace.108 Other automata, including clock automata, seem to have been functioning in Constantinople (see below). Luidprand also records that at a feast in the palace, three solid gold bowls filled with fruit and too heavy to lift, were suspended from the ceiling on chains covered with gilded leather and that they were moved (through pulleys) from guest to guest, hovering in the air between them.109 The Diwa¯n of al-Mutannabi (d. 354/965) records a statuette of a female dancing girl with long hair, a bouquet of flowers held in one hand and with one leg raised, that spun around and around until it came to rest on the table in front of a guest. The guest selected by the halting of this clockwork sculptural automata in front of his place then had to drain a cup of wine and improvise some verses. It was designed to irritate and mock al-Mutannabi by distracting the guests from the poet’s verses, and it was ordered and employed by Karawwas, boon companion of Badr b. ‘Amma¯r.110 107

Gordon 2001, 65, from al-Muqaddasi’s Taqa¯sim, ‘‘Al-Mutasim built a Ka‘ba there (at Samarra), laid out a route for circumambulation and created places meant to resemble Mina and Arafat so the allure the military chiefs in his service when they wanted to participate in the actual Hajj, fearing they would withdraw (from his service).’’ 108 G. Mathew, Byzantine Aesthetics, p. 113; Liutprand of Cremona:The embassy to Constantinople and other writings, ed. J.J. Norwich (London: Everyman, 1993), p. 153; Norwich, Byzantium: The Apogee, pp. 169–170. 109 Liutprand of Cremona, pp. 154–155. 110 D.S. Rice, ‘‘A drawing of the Fatimid period’’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 21:1/3 (1958): 31–39.

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Naser-e Khosraw records in his visit to the Fa¯timid Palace in Cairo on 8 _ Ramada¯n 438/8 March 1047, the day before the festival celebrating the birth of _ a son to the Fa¯timid Caliph Abu¯ Tamim al-Mustansir (427–487/1036–1094), _ _ that ‘‘For decoration on the banqueting table I saw a confection like an orange tree, every branch and leaf of which had been executed in sugar, and thousands of images and statuettes in sugar’’.111 The artificial trees and clockwork singing birds in this Fa¯timid palace112 are an echo not only of ‘Abba¯sid court culture, as in the various da¯r _ al-shajara, but also of the intention of the Fatimid caliph to be seen and remembered as the Second Sulayma¯n; neither Naser-e Khosraw nor Maqrizi113 records whether the golden peacock studded with precious gems, with eyes of rubies and a tail made of enamel in imitation of the varied colours of the living bird, and a huge cock, also of gold, covered with jewels, and a number of other sculptures of animals in the Palace of the Fa¯timid Caliph al-Mustansir were sculptural automata, but it is not impossible. _ _ The Andalusian al-Mura¯di in the fifth/eleventh century describes a series of automata in his work, including one, driven by a waterwheel, that opened successive doors to expose automata figures, and involved complex methods of gearing.114 Under the Fa¯timids in sixth/twelfth-century Cairo, there is record of concubine _ automata in the hall of the Fa¯timid Vizier al-Afdal Sha¯hansha¯h (d. 514/1121). _ _ These were eight life-size female sculptures wearing splendid clothes and bedecked with jewellery, four black and four white, called amber and camphor respectively, that bowed low to the vizier on his entrance to his hall, as he crossed the threshold. Then, following this ceremonial entrance, when he sat down, they then stood upright again, forming an impressive entrance for the Fatimid vizier in front of his guests.115 One part of the mechanism, the bowing action, was set in motion by a device by the threshold, and they were returned to the upright position through a mechanism attached to the vizier’s seat, probably started by the pressure of the vizier’s bodyweight. Without doubt al-Afdal’s female automata were a high point in the development _ of figural sculpture at Islamic courts that extends back, past the series of life-size wooden figures carved in the likeness of the Tulu¯nid ruler, son of Ahmad b. Tulu¯n, _ _ _ Khumarawayh (270–283/884–896) and of his concubines and singing girls, which stood within his palace at Fusta¯t; all these wooden painted figures were dressed _ _ in gold and wearing jewellery.116 The palace also had a 50 cubits117 square pool of mercury in the gardens, upon which Khumarawayh floated on air-filled leather cushions, moored by silver cords and silver rings to massive silver pillars at the corners, and in the gardens were gold-sheathed palm tree trunks, reminiscent of the palm tree in the da¯r al-shajara, gilded water tanks and gold-covered carvings of figures.118 111

Naser-e Khosraw’s Book of Travels, p. 57. Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture, p. 435. 113 Cited in Arnold, Painting in Islam, p. 22, n. 2. 114 Hassan and Hill, Islamic Technology, p. 62; see also Donald R. Hill, ‘‘Technology and its influence on European mechanical engineering’’, in The Arab Influence in Medieval Europe, eds. Dionisius A. Agius and Richard Hitchcock (Reading: Ithaca Press, 1994), pp. 25–43. 115 Rice, ‘‘A drawing of the Fatimid Period’’, citing Ibn al-Muyassar’s Akhba¯r Misr. _ 116 Irwin, Islamic Art, p. 111. 117 Creswell, Short Account of Early Muslim Architecture, p. 1, records the cubit as 0.5 m, thus indicating a size of 5 5 m, 25 m2, for this pool of mercury. 118 Hitti, History of the Arabs, p. 454; Hillenbrand, Islamic Architecture, p. 382. 112


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Muhammad al-Sa¯‘a¯ti built a monumental water clock automata attached to the _ Jayrun Gate, Ba¯b al-Jabiye, of Damascus in 559/1164,119 consisting of ‘‘a pair of brazen falcon clock automata that every two hours dropped brass balls from their beaks into brass cups, from where the balls returned automatically to the interior of the device’’,120 a development of Archimedes’ device for ejecting balls from the beak of a bird to mark the passage of time.121 This device122 was seen by Ibn Jubayr in 579/1184123 and was recorded in Badi‘ al-Zama¯n Isma¯‘il b. Razza¯z Abu¯ l‘Izz al-Jazari’s book, Al-ja¯mi‘ bayn al-‘ilm wa l-a‘ma¯l al-na¯fi‘ fi sina¯‘at al-hiyal, _ _ ‘‘A compendium of theory and useful practice in the mechanical arts’’ ‘‘A compendium of theory and useful practice in the mechanical arts’’, of c. 602/ 1206.124 Part of the work was still functioning into the eighth/fourteenth century when Ibn Battu¯ta recorded it in 726/1326: __ _

To the right as one comes out of the Jayrun door, which is also called the ‘Door of the Hours’, is an upper gallery shaped like a large arch, within which there are small open arches furnished with doors, to the number of hours in the day. These doors are painted green on the inside and yellow on the outside and as each hour of the day passes the green inner side of the door is turned to the outside and visa versa. They say125 that inside the gallery there is a person in the room who is responsible for turning them by hand as the hours pass.126 It seems the falcons were no longer functioning in the eighth/fourteenth century. It is possible that Muhammad al-Sa¯‘a¯ti was also responsible for the mechanism _ of the fountain that was called ‘‘The Waterspout’’, in Damascus close to the Jayrun Gate, recorded by Ibn Battu¯ta in 726/1326: __ _

In the middle of the passage there is a large round marble basin, surrounded by a pavilion supported on marble columns but lacking a roof. In the centre of the basin is a copper pipe which forces out water under pressure so it rises into the air to more than a man’s height. They call it ‘‘The Waterspout,’’ and it is a fine sight.127

119

R. Burns, Monuments of Syria: A Historical Guide, 2nd edn (London: I.B. Tauris, 1999), p. 99. P.H. Newby, Saladin in His Time (London: Faber & Faber, 1983), p. 35. Recorded in 602/1206 by Ja¯bir ibn al-Sa¯‘a¯ti who describes this clock automata that was built by his father (Hassan and Hill, Islamic Technology, p. 57; Nasr, Islamic Science, p. 145). 121 Hassan-Hill 1986, 56. 122 Another water clock automata was recorded in Fez in 1317, with 13 consoles and bronze bowls rung to mark the hours, Blair and Bloom, Art and Architecture of Islam, p. 122. 123 G. Le Strange, Palestine under the Moslems (Boston/New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1890, p. 50. 124 _ ¨ ney, Anadolu Seluklu Mimari Su¨slemesi ve El Istanbul, TSM, Kitabl|g˘|, Ahmet III, 3472, s. 9b; G. O _¸ Bankas|, 1992), res. 125, s.187. Sanatlar| (Ankara: Is 125 My italics, to emphasise the casualness of the educated Ibn Battu¯ta’s reference to the fact that this __ _ was an automata—there were no men inside it as was believed by the uninformed. 126 H.A.R. Gibb, Ibn Battuta: Travels in Asia and Africa, 1325–1354 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1939), pp. 66–67. 127 Gibb, Ibn Battuta, p. 66, n. 56, suggests it was Byzantine in origin, although perhaps in reference to the materials employed, rather than necessarily the device itself, which remains extant. 120

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It seems that some Islamic scholars in the sixth/twelfth and seventh/thirteenth centuries were even dreaming of automata. Nasr records that Muhyi al-Din b. _ al-‘Arabi, in his Al-futu¯ha¯t al-makkiyya, describes a dream he had that is related _ to the Alexandrian school of automata, to the device whereby the double leaves of the bronze door to a Roman temple open, apparently of their own accord.128 Badi‘ al-Zama¯n’s book records various automata that built further upon the works of the Alexandrian school129 and the developments to this work made by the Banu¯ Mu¯sa¯ brothers in the third/ninth century, and al-Sa¯‘a¯ti in the sixth/ twelfth century, in his work for the Artukids at their palace at Diyarbakr under Mahmud b. Muhammad, al-Malik al-Sa¯lih Na¯sir al-Din (597–619/1201– _ _ _ _ _ 1222). He designed a variety of automata including moving sculptures of various palace servants, some as centrepieces, mechanical boats for palace pools130 (Figure 3), combination locks, water clocks, other devices and pumps. His combination of paired dragons and a lion’s head for the palace door knockers, a design also employed on the main doors of the Cizre Congregational Mosque, reflect the symbolism of the prophet Sulayma¯n, the lion of faith controlling the jinn, represented by the dragons to either side.131 His work describes and depicts one figure of a life-sized sculpture of a youth, a mechanical servant bearing a water ewer (Figure 2). The water flows from the breast of the figure into the jug held in its right hand along pipes inside the outstretched arm; when the bird on top of the ewer sings, the water is poured and the left hand, holding a towel and mirror is lowered. When the towel and mirror are taken from the moving statue, the arm returns to its original position. Another life-size sculpture of a mechanical servant held a flask in its left hand and filled a cup held in its right, which it then offered to a guest. Another life-size sculpture of a servant figure held a glass in its right hand, filled with wine from the mouth of the fish held in the left hand. When the glass was full, the right arm extended the filled glass to the guest to take and drink. Like the automatic boat designed by Abu¯ l-‘Izz al-Jazari132 (Figure 3), in the ‘‘Tale of the Third Kalendar’’ in The Thousand Nights and One Night, an automata is described rowing a boat,133 but this boat contained a single powerful sculptural automata figure: In a few moments I saw a boat coming to me out of the sea, at the sight of which I secretly thanked Allah. In it was a man of brass bearing on his

128

Nasr, Islamic Science, p. 147, n. 29. Nasr, Islamic Science, p. 145, n. 27. 130 A development of the pleasure boats built in the shape of a lion, an eagle and a dolphin to sail on the Tigris for the ‘Abba¯sid Caliph Abu¯ Mu¯sa¯ l-Amin (193–197/809–813). 131 Similar to the protective relief on the Talisman Gate at Baghdad of 618/1221, built by order of the Caliph al-Na¯sir and destroyed in 1335/1917, which probably represented the prophet Sulayma¯n _ controlling the jinn, depicted as serpents, one held fast in each hand. 132 ¨ ney, Anadolu Seluklu Mimari, res. 124. Istanbul TSM, Kitabl|g˘|, Ahmet III, 3472, 98b; O 133 Mathers, trans., The Thousand Nights and One Night, I:91, 14th Night. Husain Haddawy’s translation reads: ‘‘When the skiff came up to me, I saw there a man of brass, bearing on his breast a lead tablet inscribed with names and talismans’’ Haddawy, Arabian Nights, p. 116. 129


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Figure 2. Technical drawing from Badi‘ al-Zama¯n Isma¯‘il b. Razza¯z Abu¯ l-‘Izz al-Jazari’s c. 602/1206 manuscript illustrating an automata statue of a youth who pours water as required from the jug held in his right hand (from Tekeli, Dosay and Unat, El-Cami Beyne’l-‘ilm ve’l-‘Amel, plate 1.36).

breast a plate of lead graven with names and talismans. Without a word I climbed aboard, and the man of brass rowed me for one, for two, for three, for ten whole days . . . It seems the description of ‘‘a plate of lead graven with names and talismans’’ on a figure, or the description of object or figure as made ‘‘of brass’’, served to alert the eighth/fourteenth-century or earlier Muslim audience134 to the fact that a sculptural automata was being described, as with the ‘‘man of brass’’ in this

134

There is an eighth/fourteenth-century Syrian manuscript of the Thousand Nights and One Night, by Muhsin Mahdi, used by Haddawy for his translation. _

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Figure 3. Technical drawing from a 714/1315 Syrian copy of Badi‘ al-Zama¯n Isma¯‘il b. Razza¯z Abu¯ l-‘Izz al-Jazari’s c. 602/1206 manuscript illustrating an automata of a mechanical boat (from At|l, Art of the Arab World, Cat. No.47).

tale, in the ‘‘brass rider’’ in the ‘‘Tale of the Third Kalendar’’ and in the ‘‘Tale of the Mysterious City of Brass’’, with its sculptural automata. In his seventh/thirteenth-century treatise entitled Kashf al-asra¯r, ‘‘The Unveiling of Secrets’’, written for an Iraqi Prince, al-Jawbari explains how the swordwielding arms of statue-automata are activated by tubes of mercury attached to trip wires.135 This passage indicates one of the techniques employed to activate the sword arm of a life-size sword-wielding statue of brass, such as seem to have been made in the sixth–seventh/twelfth–thirteenth century as court sculptural automata, as is indicated by other references, including the sword wielding ‘‘black ghulam’’ that each hour during the night extinguished a candle, in a clock sculptural automata designed by al-Jazari.136 A version of these clothed sculptural automata is mention in the Book of The Thousand Nights and a Night, in the ‘‘Tale of the Mysterious City of Brass’’;137 there are armed slaves (sculptural automata) by the bed of the princess. And they are also described in the ‘‘Tale of King Umar al-Numan’’: He (Prince Sharkan) saw a great hall carpeted with silk rugs of Khurasan and lighted by high windows giving upon leafy gardens and pleasant springs. Against the walls were ranged figures, dressed as if they were alive, 135

Irwin, Arabian Nights, p. 188. E. At|l, Art of the Arab World [Exh. Cat.] (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery, 1975), No. 46, p. 105. 137 Mathers, trans., The Thousand Nights and One Night, II:302–303, 345th and 346th Nights. 136


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which moved their arms and legs astonishingly, and spoke and sang by some concealed device.138 The response of a viewer of these speaking, moving and singing, life-size sculptural automata in a palace audience hall was—unsurprisingly—one of amazement. There is one later reference and one possible contemporary reference to palace sculptural automata in Rum Seljuk seventh/thirteenth-century Anatolia, the confirmation of a body of indications that suggest that Rum Seljuk sultans, frequently described as ‘‘the Second Sulayma¯n’’,139 like other powerful and related rulers,140 had sculpted automata in their palaces, with probable representations of these automata-figures on the palace eight pointed star tile revetments. Some of these palace tiles may represent a type of the famous caliphal palm tree with bird automata in the da¯r al-shajara (Figure 1). Jala¯l al-Din Ru¯mi (d. 671/1273) uses the term, ‘‘The palm tree of the Caliphate’’,141 and this may in part refer to the famous palm tree automata. There may have been a related sculptural automata erected in a Rum Seljuk palace, as he also refers to a wax palm tree and to wax birds,142 possibly employed in casting a copy of palm tree with bird automata. These seventh/thirteenth-century Rum Seljuk palace tiles also clearly depict the four armies of the prophet Sulayma¯n:143 jinn of the land and of the air (Figures 4, 6), men—simulacra slaves of the ruler automata (Figure 5), like those recorded by al-Jazari (Figure 2), and of various birds and animals. Further, given the similarity of the human-headed jinn on these Rum Seljuk palace tiles to those depicted on f. 121 of the ‘‘Schefer Hariri’’ of 633/1236, painted in Baghdad by al-Wa¯siti144 _ (Figure 7), it seems probable that the caliphal palace in Baghdad may have had 138 Mathers, trans., The Thousand Nights and One Night, I:362, 49th Night. The storyteller located these clothed, sculptural automata in the hall of a monastery in the territory of the Byzantine ruler Hardud of Ceserea (Kayseri), close to the Byzantine-Muslim border in S.E. Anatolia. 139 ¨ ztu¨rk (çev.), El Evamiru’lIbn Bibi, El-Hu¨seyin b. Muhammed b. Ali El-Ca’feri Er-Rugadi, M. O Ale’iye fi’L-Umuri’l-Ala’iye (Selçukname) (Ankara: Tu¨rk Tarih Kurumu, 1996), c.1, pp. 232; 238, fn. 594, where the Rum Seljuk Sultan Alaed-Din Keykubat I is described as ‘‘a second Sulayma¯n’’, sitting on his four cushions on his throne, and his vizier as a second Assa¯f (ibn Barkhiya), to receive the envoy from the ‘Abba¯sid caliph. Ibn Bibi also describes the Rum Seljuk Sultans K|l|ç Arslan II, Giyathsed-Din Keyhusrev I and Izzed-Din Keykavas I as like the prophet Su¨leyman (Ibn Bibi c. 1, 79, 89–90, 181), and Sultan Giyathsed-Din Kethusrev II and his wife as like ‘‘Belkis’’ the Queen of Sheba. Ibn Bibi equates the arrival of the Seljuk household to the wind of the prophet Sulayma¯n, as in Q 21.81 and Q 38.36, doubtless in part because the founder of the dynasty in Anatolia was Sulayma¯n ibn Kutlumush. There was also Sultan Rukn al-Din Sulayna¯n II, ‘‘the second Sulayma¯n’’ (Ibn Bibi, c. 1, 20). For a seventh/thirteenth-century commentary on Solomon and Bilkis/Belkis, see the chapter on Solomon in Muhyi al-Din b. al-‘Arabi’s Fusu¯s al-hikam, written in Damascus in 626/1229 (Wisdom of the _ _ _ _ Prophets (Fusus al-Hikam), trans. T. Burckhardt [Arabic to French] and A. Culme-Seymour [French to English] (Aldsworth, UK: Beshara, 1975), pp. 83–95). See also W.C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Love: The Spiritual Teachings of Rumi (Albany: State University of New York, 1983), 1373; 1747, from Jelal ad-Din Rumi’s Divan-i Shams-i Tabrizi: ‘‘Today I am Asaf Solomon’s vizier, sword and firman in hand—I will break the neck of any who are arrogant before the king’’ and, ‘‘Love has made me Solomon and my tongue Asaf—how should I be tied to all these remedies and incantations?’’ 140 Sultan Alaed-Din Keykubat I for example was related to the Ayyubids through marriage in 623/1226 to Gaziye Hatun. 141 Mathnavi 1982, Bk. 1, 3947, as also to ‘‘the palm tree of Paradise’’, Mathnavi 1982, Bk. 4, v. 1771 & 3509; as also to the palm tree as a sign of generosity, Mathnavi 1982, Bk. 5, v. 810 & 1189-90. 142 Arberry, Discourses of Rumi, p. 117 and Mathnavi Bk.5. v. 419. 143 Duggan, ‘‘Motifs’’, pp. 206–208. 144 Bib.Nat. Paris, MS Arabe 5847.

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Figure 4. Eight-pointed Rum Seljuk star tile in lustre technique from the Palace of Kubadabad, largely completed by 633/1236, by Lake Beys¸ehir, Turkey, of a ‘‘jinn of the land’’, probably recording the appearance of a Rum Seljuk palace automata of a jinn of the land (from Roxburgh, ed., Turks).

jinn automata of this type, the caliphal example providing the legitimising model for Rum Seljuk, as for other Islamic rulers’, sculptural automata. The later reference to Seljuk automata was made in the eleventh/seventeenth century by Evliya C ¸ elibi, who relates that the entrance gateway to the White Palace at Ak Seray (Aksaray), built by Sultan ‘Izzed-Din Kaykavas I (607–615/1211–1219) b. K|l|ç Arslan II, had on either side of it sculptures of lions that ‘‘gave off a roaring sound’’,145 probably generated in the same manner as the ‘‘roaring sound’’, recorded by Glykas, of the lions by the East Roman emperor’s throne, constructed by the engineer Leo the mathematician 173–c.255/790–c.869. This ‘‘roaring sound’’ was also recorded by Luidprand in relation to the lions by the emperor’s throne in the palace in Constantinople in 337/949, as was probably also the case for the sculptured automata lions by the ‘Abba¯sid caliph’s throne in Baghdad and Samarra. Although outside the palace and so presumably made of stone rather 145

Bates, Bates, ‘‘Evliya C ¸ elibi’s comments’’, p. 259.


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Figure 5. Underglaze eight-pointed star tile from the Palace of Kubadabad, largely completed by 633/1236, by Lake Beys¸ehir, Turkey, depicting a servant-possibly recording a servant automata (from Roxburgh, ed., Turks).

than sheet metal, these lions at the entrance to the White Palace incorporated part of the technology common to the palace sculptural automata, suggesting the Rum Seljuks had palace automata, like the adjacent Ayyu¯bid, Artukid and East Roman rulers, for these stone lions ‘‘spoke’’. They may even have moved, as Jala¯l al-Din Ru¯mi’s Mathnevi may be referring to these same speaking stone lions at Ak Saray:: ‘‘He felt at the moment when he became rapt (in devotion) and bewildered, that the stone spoke and made signs. When the wretched man bestowed his devotion in the wrong place and deemed the lion of stone to be a (real) lion’’.146 Rumi was drawing a distinction between a figure that moved and appeared to speak but was without a soul, and the Real, the lion mentioned in the Qur’a¯n (74:50), where the unbelievers are described as behaving like frightened asses, fleeing from the lion of Prophetic revelation, the distinction being between the Real and the illusion of the apparently real, the veils of illusions of the world and worlds extending beyond the seven heavens. The Qur’a¯n makes the same point concerning Belkis’ encounter with the prophet Sulayma¯n. It seems most probable that some of the formerly metal-lined holes in the mouths of seventh/thirteenthcentury Rum Seljuk stone sculptures of various forms, including stone lions and human-headed birds, were for the production of sounds. These tubes were not 146

Mathnavi 1982, Bk. IV, v. 911–12.

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Figure 6. Underglaze eight-pointed star tile from the Palace of Kubadabad, largely completed by 633/1236, by Lake Beys¸ehir, Turkey, of a ‘‘jinn of the air’’, probably recording the form of a palace automata-sculpture in the form of a jinn of the air (From R. Ar|k, Kubad Abad (Istanbul: Bankas| Yay, 2000).

just to jet water into pools, but to make stone sculptures speak, as was probably also the case for some of the no longer extant metal, dressed, enamelled and bejewelled sculptural automata in Rum Seljuk palaces. The water supply to Rum Seljuk, as to other Islamic palaces served not just to fill the fountains, cisterns and pools but also permitted some of the sculptural automata in these palaces to speak. The accounts of a speaking head of Baphomet in the possession of the Knights Templar,147 reported by various witness at their trial in 706–710/1307–1311, would seem to refer to a speaking automata, perhaps a gift from an amir or ruler to a Master of the Order of the Temple, given its name, and so it would have been made by a Muslim court engineer. This was a speaking head sculptural automata that some Templars seem to have come into contact with, and which was suspected or alleged to have served some ritual function in Templar practice. A trace perhaps 147 Barber, Trial of the Templars, p. 183: ‘‘the idol in the form of a head, which according to these witnesses had up to four faces, was also described by one Templar as having two small horns and possessing the ability to reply to questions put to it’’.


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Figure 7. Detail from f. 121 of the ‘‘Schefer Hariri’’ of 633/1236, painted in Baghdad by al-Wa¯siti, Bib.Nat. Paris, MS Arabe 5847 (from P.J. Mu¨ller, Arabische Minaturen _ (Genf: Weber, 1979) showing a human-headed lion, ‘‘a jinn of the land’’, and the humanheaded bird, ‘‘a jinn of the air’’, both it is suggested, recording the appearance of palace automata-sculptures in the form of jinn.

of some speaking head sculptural automata also occurs in the ‘‘Tale of the Wazir of King Yunan and Rayyan the Doctor’’, related on the 5th Night of The Thousand Nights and One Night.148 148

‘‘Indeed a book that is the extract of extracts, the rarities of rarities of science, and I would offer it to you that you might keep it forever amongst your chests of books. . . It holds devices that are above price, the least of its secrets being this: if, when my head is (cut) off, you turn three pages of the book, then read three lines on the left-hand page, my severed head will speak and answer any manner of question. . . Doctor, is this true? Even if I cut your head off will you speak? Indeed it is true my king, he answered, It is one of the prodigies of my science. . .Take this book, my King, but do not use it until you have cut off my head. When my head is off, set it upon this plate and have it pressed down firm upon the powder to stop the bleeding. After that open the book’’ Mathers, trans., The Thousand Nights and One Night, I:34. The idea of the book with poisoned pages was later employed by Umberto Eco in The Name of the Rose (New York: Harcourt, 1980).

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¯ tha¯r al-bila¯d wa Zakariyya l-Qazwini (604–681/1208–1283) reports in his A akhba¯r al-‘iba¯d, that, ‘‘in the lighthouse of Constantinople there is a horologium which is made up of 12 doors, each representing an hour. At every hour, one of the doors opens and a statue comes out . . . The Byzantines say it is the work of the wise Binas’’.149 The Pharos tower was located on the sea walls of the palace and seems to have kept its automata even after the sack of 600/1204, if al-Qazwini was not reporting on what once was but now was no more. The Latin Robert de Clari, in his account of the 600/1204 Latin Crusaders sack of Constantinople, seems to have been aware of classical East Roman (Byzantine) automata, as he writes, ‘‘And the hippodrome with its wealth of statues, which (Clari assures us) of old moved by magic, but which nowadays never work’’.150 These statues-automata were melted down by the Catholic Crusaders. Interestingly the Orthodox Christians are not charged with worshipping these automata, perhaps because they are said no longer to work; it was asserted by Catholic authors that Islamic automata were in fact idols that were worshipped by Muslims. A further indication of the importance attached to these sculptural automata is provided in The Thousand Nights and One Night, in ‘‘The Magic Tale of the Ebony Horse’’: The king, who had a great love of science, geometry and astronomy, was seated on his throne when three wise men presented themselves before him, masters of secret knowledge and hidden arts, who could mould the images of things with a perfection which confounded the beholder and were deeply versed in those mysteries of which ordinary folk know nothing. One of the wise men was from India, another possibly from Anatolia, a Ru¯mi, and the third, a Persian. Each offered the ruler different sculptural automata in exchange for the hand of one of the ruler’s three daughters, indicating the value of moving speaking sculptural automata at court—like the 2,000 pounds of gold offered by the Caliph al-Ma’mu¯n for Leo the engineer. The first offered, a man of gold incrusted with rare diamonds, who held a golden trumpet in his hand . . . If you set him up at the gate of your city he will be a sleepless guardian of it; for, if an enemy approaches, he will divine him from far and, raising the trumpet to his lips, blow a blast which shall paralyse your foe with fear and kill him with terror. The second offered, a vast silver basin, in which was a gold peacock surrounded by twenty-four gold peahens . . . each time that an hour passes of the day or night, the peacock pecks one of the twenty-four peahens and mounts her, with a great 149

N.M. El-Cheikh, ‘‘Byzantium through the Islamic prism from the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries’’, in The Crusades from the Perspective of Byzantium and the Muslims, ed. A. E. Laiou and R.P. Mottahedeh (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2001), pp. 53-69, at p. 65. The ‘‘Binas’’ referred to is most unlikely to have been Apollonius of Tyana, a wandering holy man of the first century AD and not a known engineer. It is perhaps a garbled reference to Philon of Byzantium’s work on water clocks. 150 _ Robert De Clari, Istanbul’un Zapti (1204), çev. B. Akyavas¸ , Tu¨rk Tarih Kurumu, 1994), XC, 45.


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beating of his wings, thus marking the hours until all the females have been mounted. Further than that, when the month had passed, he will open his mouth and the crescent of the new moon will appear in his throat. The third offered the ruler, a horse made from the blackest and rarest ebony, inlaid with gold and diamonds, and bearing a saddle, bridle and stirrups such as are not seen even upon the horses of kings . . . it carries its rider through the air with the speed of light, taking him wheresoever he would go and covering in a day a year’s journey of a horse of flesh and blood . . . Do you see that gold peg on the right of the pommel? That is the mechanism of ascent; you have but to turn it.151 A type of the first automata figure can be seen in al-Jazari’s miniature of the waterclock with drummers and trumpeters,152 which also hints, in its protective function, at the horseman on the Green Dome. The second offers a spiced-up reworking of the sixth/twelfth-century Damascus Jayrun Gate figural clock automata by Muhammad al-Sa¯‘a¯ti with, instead of the balls dropping from each of the falcons _ beaks, the crescent moon appearing in the mouth of the peacock at the appearance of each new moon. However, the third offering, although perhaps hinting at the 30 life-sized mounted horsemen automata in the hall of the tree, da¯r al-shajara, in Baghdad in 278/892, and the twisting of pins to activate some automata, seems different; it may in part relate to the horse that was kept saddled every night at various town gates,153 ready for the return of al-Mahdi, the Expected or Hidden Ima¯m, due to appear towards the end of the world.

The Latin record of contact with these marvels Excluding clock automata, it was largely envoys, as in Luitpand’s astonished encounter with the roaring lions and elevating imperial throne, who came into contact with these moving statues and for whom they sprang into movement and voice, and who, in rare cases, recorded them. However, the majority of envoys, regrettably for us and our perception of Islamic figural sculpture, did not record what they saw for the simple reason that what they saw was quite unbelievable, so incredible that if they had recounted what they had seen upon their return to less civilized, less urbane circumstances, they would have been entirely discredited for having been ensorcelled, enchanted and deceived. Facing a dangerous and sceptical audience confident in its ignorance, they would have been accused of telling lies or imagining things, and would have met with a response such as that given by an 151

Mathers, trans., The Thousand Nights and One Night, II:460–461. At|l, Art of the Arab World, Cat. No. 45, 104. 153 For example, at Hilla in Iraq in 727/1327, Ibn Battu¯ta records the daily sunset procession of 100 of __ _ the townsmen, with arms and drawn swords, to the governor of the city to receive a saddled and bridled horse or mule, which they then escorted to the sanctuary of the Master of the Age, the mosque where Muhammad, the twelfth ima¯m of the Twelver Shi‘ites, the son of al-Hasan al-‘Askari had entered and _ _ then disappeared, ‘‘for he, in their view, is the ‘Expected Imam’, the Hidden Imam’’ (H.A.R. Gibb, Ibn Battuta, pp. 98–99). 152

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Italian eighth/fourteenth-century audience to Marco Polo’s limited account of his observations recorded in his travels in distant lands, some ruled by Muslims, so different from the world the Latins inhabited that they called his book of observations, ‘‘a million lies’’. When he was on his deathbed, the Dominican Jacopo d’Acqui related, ‘‘Because there are many great and strange things in his book, which are reckoned past all credence, he was asked by his friends to correct it by removing everything that went beyond the facts. To which his reply was that he had not told one half of what he had actually seen!’’154 The cultural, artistic and technological gulf was so vast that to give an accurate written account of these palace automata would have demanded quite unobtainable levels of credulity and a most rare degree of trust in the envoy’s veracity on the part of the recipients, whether readers or hearers of any dispatch or record made of what an envoy had seen with his own two eyes in the caliph, sultan or amir’s audience hall. However, it was almost certainly some contact at Muslim courts with these moving speaking sculptures, automata of both human and animal form, that gave rise to the Latin Christian allegations of Muslim idol worship, supposed worship of the trinity of gods ‘‘Mahom, Apollin and Tervagant’’, a subject that is repeatedly referred to from the period of the early Crusades onwards in Western European literature, in the late fifth/eleventh century, the later Chansons de Geste and other155 and later Latin romances into the ninth/fifteenth century. ‘‘In the adventure story Simon de Pouille, the ‘idols’ are activated by a man inside. The priest Goras enters (these ‘idols’) one after another, as the hero breaks them up in turn. Usually, when these images are described, they are richly covered in jewels’’.156 This repeated Latin assertion that these moving statues were inhabited by people and were worshipped by Muslims was of course entirely without foundation. There is no indication that any of these works clothed living people, nor were they made as objects for worship or idols—a false assumption and allegation made by the Latins as a result of their ignorance of courts and court practices in both Islamic and East Roman courts for centuries. The fact that a work of ‘aja¯’ib, a marvel, a wonder, a moving, speaking statue, was described by the Western observer or reporter as an idol only reveals the ignorance of the Latin Christians during these centuries. These works were not in any way intended to rival or imitate the creative act of the Almighty,157 a self-evident impossibility. Except for the fact there was no 154

J. Larner, Marco Polo and the Discovery of the World (New Haven. CT: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 45. 155 E.g., in the elements of the marvellous in Wolfram’s Parzival. This same idea may have some relationship to the description of the deity said to have been worshipped by Muhammad contained in the _ widespread third/ninth-century Orthodox Christian ‘‘Formula of Abjuration’’, which records, ‘‘. . .God made of solid hammer-beaten metal. . .’’ (C.L. Hanson, ‘‘Manuel I Comnenus and the ‘God of Muhammad’: A study in Byzantine ecclesiastical politics’’, in Medieval Christian Perceptions of Islam, ed. J.V. Tolan (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 55–82, at p. 55, a mistranslation made by Nicetas of Byzantium and current into the sixth/twelfth century that the word samad in Q 112:2 meant, _ ‘‘hammered together’’ (ibid. 63–64). 156 N. Daniel, The Arabs and Medieval Europe, 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, 1979), pp. 238–239, and references provided in the notes to these pages. 157 The distinction between man’s forming an object and the Almighty’s creative actions is clearly stated in the Qur’a¯n (5:110), where the Prophet ‘I¯sa¯ (Jesus) shapes a bird from clay, but it flies when the Spirit is breathed into it, clearly distinguishing between the Almighty, who both forms and gives Spirit, as in the Creation and the making of Adam, and a simple forming from clay. Jelal al-Din Rumi similarly remarks on this distinction (Mathavi 1982, Bk. 1, v. 1020): ‘‘The painting on the wall is like Adam; see from that (pictured) form what is wanting’’; that which is lacking being the Spirit as distinct from the


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man inside them, which, if it were known, would have made these figures even more frightening and inexplicable to a sixth/twelfth- or seventh/thirteenth-century Latin observer, who would then have seen them as the result of magic, not of soulless technology, these short references preserve some brief record of Islamic court automata, of moving speaking statues. However, an Occidental’s familiarity with the thinking that underlay the technology and devices at Islamic palaces and courts might have resulted in the charge of necromancy being levelled at that person.158 These allegations were made against Gerbert, the Archbishop of Ravenna and teacher of the Emperor Otto III before being elected Pope as Silvester II (389–393/ 999–1003) due to the time he spent in Catalonia studying mathematics and astronomy,159 acquiring his knowledge of Arabic numerals and wisdom. Later this same charge was levelled against Roger Bacon (c.606–693/1210–1294) amongst others, for his knowledge of and use of Muslim works, for otherwise incomprehensible wonders must, in the view of the then relatively technologically ignorant Latin West, be the work of necromancy, conducted with the aid of devilish forces.160

Conclusions The record presented above would seem to suggest, first, that the idea that the Islamic world had no significant tradition of free standing figural sculpture seems to be an entirely ill-founded opinion, foisted upon an uninformed public by the Western scholarly community for a number of reasons161 over the past more than 150 years, and subsequently repeatedly echoed in the Islamic world, for a number

(footnote continued) su¯ra, ‘‘form’’. Consequently, it seems to this author that those who assert that sculptors, engineers or _ painters were or are in their activities competing with, or imitating, the actions of the Creator, thereby exhibit a lack of discrimination between a form infused with the Spirit and an empty material form which may be mobile, and, as such, these accusers would seem to be guilty of shirk, that is of associating partners, forms, with the Divine—that is to have confused the Real with that which is conditional upon it. 158 J. Farrow, Pageant of the Popes (London: Sheed & Ward, 1943), pp. 100–103. Gerbert was an advocate of the Crusades before the demolition of the Holy Sepulchre by the reportedly mad Fa¯timid _ Shi‘ite Caliph al-Ha¯kim (385–411/996–1021) in 399/1009. _ 159 A. Chejne, ‘‘The role of Al-Andalus in the movement of ideas between Islam and the West’’, in Islam and the Medieval West: Aspects of Intercultural Relations, ed. K.I. Semann (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1980), pp. 110–133. 160 The charge of necromancy was still being levelled against him 300 years after his death (D. Knowles, Saints and Scholars: Twenty-five Medieval Portraits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 105. 161 Including: the physical loss of these sculptural automata, although the record of them exists and was known in the thirteenth/nineteenth century; a certain lack of historical imagination and an unwillingness give credit to the ‘‘other’’, to the colonized Muslims, for their development of sculptural automata, of robots; a refusal to allow the results of excavations in palace complexes alter long established ideas on this matter; and the concentration, in the thirteenth/nineteenth and early fourteenth/twentieth centuries, on the translation and investigation of hadith and other religious texts, which for obvious reasons make _ only slight reference to palace sculptures or automata, although the key texts for these marvellous sculptures are in the Qur’a¯n and the sources that relate to the prophet Sulayma¯n, the jinn and the making of statues and other wonders, and the commentaries upon them.

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of reasons, some different.162 It is rather the case that the Islamic world had a widespread and longstanding tradition of figural sculpture, often of life-size figures,163 some made of stucco and painted in lifelike colours.164 But there were also other more valued and valuable sculptures, sculptures that moved and sometimes spoke, in a sculptural tradition that extended over the course of more than 500 years, and which, like East Roman sculpture and sculptural automata, was built in part upon earlier models and technology, modified and improved upon. With the exception of clock automata and the moving lancer figure positioned in elevated locations, sculptural automata were largely confined to palaces and courts and did not, for sound theological reasons (lest the sin of idolatry be induced), extend into explicitly religious contexts or spread far into the wider community, who might well have been distracted from belief by these wonders, as was the case with the ‘‘wretched man’’ mentioned by Jala¯l al-Din Ru¯mi.165 Islamic sculpture, including these moving, speaking statue-automata, was largely confined to palaces and was employed for particular reasons of state connected to the expression of the power of ‘‘the second Sulayma¯n’’, that is the caliph or other ruler, and his ability, in the controlled environment of his palace, to shock and awe the envoy or guest, if he so desired, with the lifelike sculptures produced by the wonderworking jinn,

162 In part due to the success, following the destruction wrought by the seventh/thirteenth-century Mongol invasions, of the Hanbalite, Wahha¯bi and related strands of Islam in influencing public opinion, _ both in the Islamic world and beyond, with its understandable if simplistic and seemingly ignorant confusion of the making of images and statues with idols and with the practice of idolatry. The Qur’a¯n is explicit in this matter: idolatry is forbidden to Muslims. Statues, moving or otherwise, and pictures of various forms and types are neither forbidden nor required, but are of course not necessarily hara¯m, _ unless they are worshipped and so become idols. The figural works of sculpture referred to in this article were employed by believing, upright Muslims for centuries in Islamic courts and palaces, not primarily in the wider community where they would have been exposed to the accusations of the ignorant. See for _ example: A.M. Issa, Painting in Islam: Between Prohibition and Aversion (Istanbul: Waqf for Research on Islamic History Art and Culture, 1996); Arnold, Painting in Islam, pp. 1–40; T.M.P. Duggan, ‘‘A 13th century profile portrait seal depicting the face of the Rum Seljuk Sultan Alaed-Din Keykubat I (1220–37)’’, Adalya 10 (2007): 309–351, n. 127. 163 Figurative works of sculpture in the round, as in relief, and painted were made from the start of early Islam, as the surviving evidence from Omayyad palaces shows, including the life size, painted stucco slave girl/concubines from Kirbat al–Mafjar, sculptural precursors of al-Afdal’s sculptural automata _ (cf. R. Ettinghausen, M. Jenkins-Madina and O. Graber, The Art and Architecture of Islam, 650–1250 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), pp. 56–71, Figs 28, 30, 31; Islam: Art and Architecture, ed. M. Hattstein and P. Delius (Cologne: Konemann, 2000), pp. 81–87). Sculpture in the round, as well as in relief, and sculptural automata were a common feature of palace culture under the ‘Abbasids and Tulunids (see above), as this is also indicated by the examples of statues found in excavations at Ghaznavid palaces, and in the reuse of ancient statues, possibly modified with stucco work, such as the Hercules built into the Seljuk walls of Konya (Irwin, Islamic Art, 1997), p. 211), and the ancient sculpture of a lion built into the Seljuk walls of Hamadan, reportedly made by the prophet Sulayma¯n and having a talismanic function, as Ibn al-Faqih relates. For examples of life size sculptures of Muzaffar _ al-Din b. Na¯sir al-Din Sha¯h (1313–1324/1896–1907), erected within both mosques and shrines in _ 1920’s Shi‘ite Persia, see A.U. Pope, An Introduction to Persian Art since the Seventh Century AD (London: Davis, 1930), pp. 227–228. 164 First made widely known by R.M. Riefstahl’s, ‘‘Persian Islamic stucco sculpture’’, The Art Bulletin, 13 (1931): Plates, 514ff.; also, T.T. Rice, ‘‘Some reflections aroused by four Seljukid stucco statues’’, _ Anatolica, 2 (1968): 112–121; O. Aslanapa, Tu¨rk Sanat| (Istanbul: Remzi Yay, 1989), pp. 309–311; Oya Pancarog˘lu, ‘‘The Seljuks of Iran and their successors’’, in Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years 600– 1600, ed. D.J. Roxburgh [Exh. Cat.] (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 2005), pp. 70–100, Nos. 39, 41. 165 Op. cit fn. 147.


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the engineer-craftsmen, and these moving speaking statues representing the jinn and the other armies of the prophet Sulayma¯n, that lay at the ruler’s command. Second, there can be no doubt, when these astonishing works of Islamic sculpture are placed in the balance, that at the time of the Crusades the art of sculpture in the Islamic Near East was far in advance of Western concepts of sculpture—so far in advance that these sculptures were referred to as ‘‘idols that moved and spoke’’ by the few Latin Franks who came in contact with them or obtained reports about them. The visiting Western Latin envoy or visitor who experienced the full force of the life-sized dressed and bejewelled sculptures that moved and spoke at Islamic courts, knew beyond any shadow of doubt which civilization made the more impressive figural sculpture and subconsciously knew which civilization had continued and improved upon the arts and artifices of the ancients in the intervening centuries: it was the civilization of Islam and also of Orthodox Christianity. The wonder-workers, the ‘‘jinn’’, and the works that they produced, these man-made marvels, these palace robots, were not originally in or of the Occident. They were not an organic part of Latin European culture, and contact and rumour concerning them may have helped to form the Occidental attitude towards Islam and the Islamic world, including repeated references to the ‘‘other’’ as possessing ‘‘idols that moved and spoke’’, and elements of the exotic, of the wonders of the east, of the Orient, established in the Latin mind when the Latin West encountered the civilizations of the Orient in Andalusia, Sicily, Syria-Palestine, Constantinople and Rum Seljuk Anatolia in the fifth/eleventh– seventh/thirteenth centuries, when they met face to face with the inheritors, modifiers and developers of the arts, sciences and technologies of antiquity, and where a few experienced at first hand these moving, speaking statues.

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past set the agenda for subsequent modern historians of early Islamic Spain until Hitchcock questioned it. Rather than recognising that he has identified the Mozarabs once and for all, however, Hitchcock opts for a chronological survey of what he calls ‘‘Mozarabism’’, which he defines as ‘‘a phenomenon’’ with ‘‘chameleon-like properties’’. His decision to adopt the use of ‘‘Mozarab’’ when talking about the early medieval period leads into a discussion of references to Christians in the biographical dictionary of al-Khushani (d. 361/971), an important aspect of this work that has been neglected. Hitchcock analyses the vocabulary of this and other Arabic sources, dividing the Christians into practising and non-practising believers, a division which he argues is reflected in a distinction between the religiously-neutral terms ‘ajam, ru¯m, afranj, musalimu¯n and the nasra¯ni, who ‘‘were unambiguously Christian; they were Latin speaking’’ (p. xvi). He further divides the practising Christians into accommodators, such as the tenth-century bishop John of Cordoba, who urged this line on John of Gorze, an ambassador from Otto I, and the ninth-century martyrs of Cordoba. Hitchcock argues that it makes no sense to use ‘‘Mozarab’’ of the martyrs, who resisted assimilation with their lives. On the basis of their religious stance, this is must be correct. Yet two of the martyrs, Perfectus and Isaac, knew Arabic and worked in the administration, which surely entailed a degree of cultural assimilation with the Islamic conquerors. Hitchcock has given us an object lesson in how historians of all ages have muddied the waters for their own reasons. In a postscript, he acknowledges that his own approach to the Mozarabs has led him to not one, but several incommensurate conclusions. It is an honest reflection of the slippery, and changing, meaning of ethnic and religious terms, which this book has clarified, even if we still can’t see down to the bottom to the problem. ANN CHRISTYS Independent Scholar [email protected] ß 2009 Ann Christys

Her Day in Court. Women’s Property Rights in Fifteenth-Century Granada MAYA SHATZMILLER, 2007 Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 230 pp. US$28.95/£21.95 (hardback) ISBN 9780674025011 This work studies the property of women from Granada and their capacity to gain access to it, using 95 judicial documents from the Kingdom of Granada written between 1421 and 1496 (those of 1480 being particularly plentiful). The documents were published and translated into Spanish by Seco de Lucena in 1961 (Madrid: Instituto Hispano-a´rabe de cultura). Shatzmiller takes a special interest in property rights and in the economic effects that derived from them, rather than in

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property per se. The texts chosen reveal the enormous involvement of women from that region and time in legal property questions, much greater than that indicated in documents from other places. Shatzmiller’s explanation for this is that the Kingdom of Granada in the fifteenth century was a society at war, with special demographic conditions. In order to study these documents from Granada, Shatzmiller turns to other legal sources: works of Maliki doctrine, Andalusi notarial forms (kutub al-watha¯’iq) and collections of legal opinions (fata¯wa¯), and in particular the work of the North African al-Wansaharıˆsıˆ in the sixteenth century. From the beginning, Islamic jurisprudence took into account the question of the rights of women to manage their property, as is expressed in the various sections devoted to commercial law in legal works. Although, as Shatzmiller points out, no general theory was developed concerning the right to property; different kinds of fiqh bear witness to different rights and obligations. On the one hand, Islamic jurisprudence guarantees women’s property rights and, on the other, indicates differences between the male’s property rights and those of the female, as there is no aspiration to equality. The author does not limit her study to juridical works, as she employs other kinds of sources that are necessary to understand the content of the jurisprudence. An example worth noting is her analysis of certain medical works to contribute to her understanding of the Islamic conception of the female body, which has relevant legal implications. Her Day in Court falls into three parts: (1) Rights and their Acquisition; (2) Body and Soul; and (3) Economy and Class. The first part contains four chapters: (1) dowry; (2) gifts or donations inter vivos; (3) inheritance; and (4) paternal custody or control over a woman. In all of the cases studied, the circumstances of the legal actions are analysed, as well as the part played in them by the gender of the plaintiffs or other parties. Similarly, Shatzmiller also studies the repercussion of social structures in fifteenth-century Granada on the way these actions unfold. The second part is divided into two chapters: (1) The Body as Property, which examines women’s rights regarding their reproductive capacity as one of their property rights; and (2) the property rights of converts, where the religious status of women was what interfered in their access to property. The third part, devoted to economic matters relating to women, also consists of two chapters: (1) work, which the author analyses as one of the property rights; and (2) business transactions, which, as the title ‘‘sales and loans’’ indicates, deals with documented cases in which women carried out these activities and the greater or lesser intervention of men in them. Shatzmiller highlights the fact that these legal actions continued to take place even after the Christian conquest. Shatzmiller has produced a clear and well-structured work, in which she provides a study of the legal status of Muslim women, through their property rights and the way in which they were exercised. As she herself indicates, despite the fact that the study concentrates on a specific region and historical period in the Islamic world, the results of her investigation are relevant for the understanding of the legal conditions affecting women within Islamic jurisprudence as a whole and the results can be partially extrapolated to other societies. Shatzmiller is aware of the significance that these legal rights had for the economy and also for women’s conjugal rights and suggests that these female prerogatives might, to some degree, have mitigated patriarchal rights.

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I should also like to point out that this work is not only useful for the study of women in the Islamic world, because their economic legal capacity always stands in relation to other individuals, who are not usually other women, but rather men. Thus, the author puts forward some novel and interesting hypotheses concerning the economic consequences that paternal custody had for the rights of daughters and which must have influenced social structures in their entirety. Likewise, she studies the benefits of female property rights for the economy, compared with the detrimental effects produced by female social segregation. Shatzmiller’s Her Day in Court is an indispensable work for any study regarding property rights in the Islamic world, the legal status of human beings where their economic rights are concerned, and Islamic social structures in general. It is also, of course, a fundamental work for acquiring knowledge about the last century of Nasrid Granada and for broadening what is known about the status of the women of al-Andalus. As such it covers a lot of ground and is of much interest to historians. CRISTINA DE LA PUENTE Centro de Ciencias Humans y Sociales (Madrid) Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientı´ficas [email protected] ß 2009 Cristina de la Puente

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prohibitions were energetically reiterated against blasphemy and gambling (which were deemed to be closely related, as gambling encourages blasphemy). The repair effort was usually slow and in extreme cases the sense of devastation was complete and discouraging. Serious thought was given to abandoning the site of Camprodon. In October 1428, eight months after the earthquake, the officials of the wrecked town subscribed a report to Girona with the mournful words ‘‘written near that which was once the town of Camprodon’’ (no. 167). The king was petitioned to provide relief and alms were collected by the episcopal administration specifically to aid the affected villages and to repair churches. The earthquakes were regarded as signs to amend conduct, but there was little in the way of sustained efforts at reform. Only with the 1428 earthquake was there visible (or at least surviving) reflection on moral renewal that might be said to touch the basic levels of political authority. A week after the worst tremor of 1428 (which was experienced in Barcelona with a 6 or 7-degree intensity), the deputies of the Catalan government wrote to King Alfonso the Magnanimous and followed up an outline of the damage with warnings about further divine punishment if nothing was done, an affliction that would hurt not only the sinful, wayward population of Catalonia but also its ruler: ‘‘for a universal castigation of such gravity does not spare your royal crown but rather results in loss and harm to you, for the good and evil of the vassals redounds to the condition of the prince’’ (no. 126). The king responded earnestly and tried to alleviate fiscal burdens, especially the long-term municipal debt obligations (censals). These were annuities regarded as safe and steady investments by those who bought the obligations, but outside the circle of beneficiaries censals were frequently (especially in times of crisis) considered unearned and quasiusurious income. In February 1430, Queen Maria remonstrated with note-holders who initially balked at voluntarily renouncing or postponing rights to payments that ultimately were financed by current taxes. This study is in Catalan and so its detailed account will have a limited audience outside of Catalonia. There is, however, a fairly extensive English summary (pp. 395–407). PAUL FREEDMAN Yale University [email protected] ß 2009 Paul Freedman

Mozarabs in Medieval and Early Modern Spain. Identities and Influences RICHARD HITCHCOCK, 2008 Aldershot: Ashgate 172 pp. £50.00 (hardback) ISBN 9780754663140 On 16 November 1118, Alfonso VII of Castile issued a fuero general addressed to ‘‘omnes cives Toletanos, scilicet Castellanos, Mozarabes atque Francos’’. It is fairly clear who the Castilians and Franks were, but the meaning of the label ‘‘Mozarab’’

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is controversial. Chief among the disputants, Richard Hitchcock has given much thought to categorizing the Mozarabs. This synthesis of his ideas will be of interest not only to Hispanists but also to anyone interested in medieval, early modern and modern interpretations of ethnic and religious identity. Hitchcock begins with a meticulous introduction to the meaning and origin of the term ‘‘Mozarab’’, warning that to translate musta‘rib as ‘‘to make oneself similar to the Arabs’’ or ‘‘having assimilated Arab customs’’ is an approximation to its use by heterogeneous authors. To paraphrase the tenth-century lexicographer al-Azhari from Iraq, writing about the Eastern musta‘riba: they looked like Arabs, but they were not real Arabs. It is the question of how this term should be applied when talking about Spain that the controversy arises. Although in origin an Arabic term, musta‘rib does not seem to have been used in Arabic by the inhabitants of al-Andalus. It first appears in a Latin document of 1026 from Christian northern Spain: in a land dispute between the monks of San Cipriań de Valdesalce and three muzaraves de rex tiraceros (royal silk-workers) nominates Vincente et Abiahia et Iohannes. This is a unique instance of ethnic labelling, for the men with Arabic names who appear in charters of northern Spain dating from the tenth century onwards are assumed to be Christian immigrants from al-Andalus. After the Reconquest of Toledo in 1085, ‘‘Mozarab’’ came into general use to designate the Christians who had lived in that city under the Muslims, although the term was first preserved in this context in 1101. These Christians, who spoke Arabic and had Arabic names, secured special privileges from Alfonso VI and his successors, among them the right to use their own liturgy rather than the Roman rite. They held onto aspects of this separate identity for centuries. Christians who remained under Muslim rule in the south were also labelled mozarabes, again in the Latin tradition. Hitchcock argues that, even though the designation was not re-invented after 1085, its meaning was not the same as in the charter of 1026: a plausible argument, but one that depends entirely upon the earlier document. In modern historiography, the Mozarabs of Toledo became subsumed into a portmanteau ‘‘Mozarab’’ identity that includes the Christians of al-Andalus in the eighth to eleventh centuries and the emigrants to Northern Spain in the same period. It is used as a shorthand for Islamic elements in Christian architecture and manuscript illumination that has been attributed to the incomers. The most powerful section of Hitchcock’s monograph is his elucidation of the way this new Mozarab identity was created in the early modern period. By the sixteenth century, the status of the Mozarabs in Christian Spain had declined to the point that the Mozarabic rite had not only long fallen out of use, but had been lost, so that Cardinal Jimenez de Cisneros had to recreate it, in the context of the Mozarabs’ disputed limpieza de sangre. Some authorities accused the Arabicised Christians of collaboration with Spain’s invaders after 711. In 1554, Pedro de Alcocer was compelled to defend the Mozarabs, who ‘‘had always and courageously persevered in our Holy Catholic Faith, refusing to be corrupted by Islam and the knavish behaviour of the Muslims’’ (p. xi). Toledo’s history as a bastion of Christianity was rewritten on the basis of a chronicle exposed as false only in the eighteenth century. Simonet’s History of the Mozarabs (completed in 1867 and published in 1903) acclaimed the majority of the Christians under Muslim rule for this heroic resistance to Islam and applied this anachronistic label. Simonet’s re-reading of the

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past set the agenda for subsequent modern historians of early Islamic Spain until Hitchcock questioned it. Rather than recognising that he has identified the Mozarabs once and for all, however, Hitchcock opts for a chronological survey of what he calls ‘‘Mozarabism’’, which he defines as ‘‘a phenomenon’’ with ‘‘chameleon-like properties’’. His decision to adopt the use of ‘‘Mozarab’’ when talking about the early medieval period leads into a discussion of references to Christians in the biographical dictionary of al-Khushani (d. 361/971), an important aspect of this work that has been neglected. Hitchcock analyses the vocabulary of this and other Arabic sources, dividing the Christians into practising and non-practising believers, a division which he argues is reflected in a distinction between the religiously-neutral terms ‘ajam, ru¯m, afranj, musalimu¯n and the nasra¯ni, who ‘‘were unambiguously Christian; they were Latin speaking’’ (p. xvi). He further divides the practising Christians into accommodators, such as the tenth-century bishop John of Cordoba, who urged this line on John of Gorze, an ambassador from Otto I, and the ninth-century martyrs of Cordoba. Hitchcock argues that it makes no sense to use ‘‘Mozarab’’ of the martyrs, who resisted assimilation with their lives. On the basis of their religious stance, this is must be correct. Yet two of the martyrs, Perfectus and Isaac, knew Arabic and worked in the administration, which surely entailed a degree of cultural assimilation with the Islamic conquerors. Hitchcock has given us an object lesson in how historians of all ages have muddied the waters for their own reasons. In a postscript, he acknowledges that his own approach to the Mozarabs has led him to not one, but several incommensurate conclusions. It is an honest reflection of the slippery, and changing, meaning of ethnic and religious terms, which this book has clarified, even if we still can’t see down to the bottom to the problem. ANN CHRISTYS Independent Scholar [email protected] ß 2009 Ann Christys

Her Day in Court. Women’s Property Rights in Fifteenth-Century Granada MAYA SHATZMILLER, 2007 Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press 230 pp. US$28.95/£21.95 (hardback) ISBN 9780674025011 This work studies the property of women from Granada and their capacity to gain access to it, using 95 judicial documents from the Kingdom of Granada written between 1421 and 1496 (those of 1480 being particularly plentiful). The documents were published and translated into Spanish by Seco de Lucena in 1961 (Madrid: Instituto Hispano-a´rabe de cultura). Shatzmiller takes a special interest in property rights and in the economic effects that derived from them, rather than in

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Els terratre`mols dels segles XIV i XV a Catalunya C. OLIVERA, E. REDONDO, J. LAMBERT, A. RIERA MELIS and A. ROCA, 2006 Barcelona: Institut Cartogra`fic de Catalunya 407 pp. ISBN 9788439369615 Between 1373 and 1448, 47 earthquakes were recorded in Catalonia, of which four were major tremors (in 1373, 1427, 1428 and 1448). That of 2 February 1428 was the largest and most destructive in this series, measuring 8 or 9 on a 12 point scale of intensity and it appears to have killed about 1,000 people. The rose window in the church of Santa Maria del Mar in Barcelona collapsed, the monastic town of Camprodon was leveled, and almost all the inhabitants of the village of Queralbs in the Pyrenean Ribes Valley were killed. Late medieval seismic activity is meticulously analysed in this collaboration between historians and seismic geologists. The purpose of the book is partly to evaluate the current risk of substantial earthquakes in the Pyrenees, where all these geological events were centred. The research into medieval records makes it possible definitively to separate real tremors from false or confused reports. There is also a more purely historical significance to this work. Using archival documents, the authors are able to depict the response of the populace and authorities to these ‘‘frightening signals’’. By referring to chronicles, diaries and administrative records, the extent of the damage can be assessed both by mapping the places affected and understanding relative intensities. The latter evaluation has allowed the seismologists to locate the epicentres more accurately than in previous studies. Particularly notable is that the 1428 earthquake, always thought to have been oriented around Olot in the sub-region of the Garrotxa, was actually centreed on Camprodon in the Ripolle`s, northwest of Olot. The geological-historical dossier is extremely detailed and much of it quite scientifically technical. The book presents exhaustive lists of places affected, topographic maps, and ingenious efforts to make narrative sources yield statistical data. The results are extremely interesting to historians of medieval Catalonia, although much of the supporting information will be opaque to non-scientists. The book has some broader implications about group and individual responses to this particular kind of disaster, but its contents deal exclusively with northern Catalonia. Once the debris of misidentified earthquakes and other errors have been cleared away, the most interesting aspect of the study for the medieval historian is the sources themselves, some 300 of which are edited or registered in the first appendix. These include municipal records, letters to and from the king reporting damage and offering relief (usually in the form of deferred taxes), petitions for aid from ecclesiastical and civic corporations and, most extensively, records of episcopal visitations in the diocese of Girona carried out in 1432, which demonstrate the extent of the damage to ecclesiastical structures four years after the catastrophe. The documents vividly describe the initial panicked response to the earthquakes: buildings damaged or destroyed, fires started after the tremors, the loss of life, and people living in improvised shelters away from the town in fear of further shocks. There was a consensus that earthquakes were a direct rebuke from an offended Deity. In the immediate aftermath processions were therefore organised and

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prohibitions were energetically reiterated against blasphemy and gambling (which were deemed to be closely related, as gambling encourages blasphemy). The repair effort was usually slow and in extreme cases the sense of devastation was complete and discouraging. Serious thought was given to abandoning the site of Camprodon. In October 1428, eight months after the earthquake, the officials of the wrecked town subscribed a report to Girona with the mournful words ‘‘written near that which was once the town of Camprodon’’ (no. 167). The king was petitioned to provide relief and alms were collected by the episcopal administration specifically to aid the affected villages and to repair churches. The earthquakes were regarded as signs to amend conduct, but there was little in the way of sustained efforts at reform. Only with the 1428 earthquake was there visible (or at least surviving) reflection on moral renewal that might be said to touch the basic levels of political authority. A week after the worst tremor of 1428 (which was experienced in Barcelona with a 6 or 7-degree intensity), the deputies of the Catalan government wrote to King Alfonso the Magnanimous and followed up an outline of the damage with warnings about further divine punishment if nothing was done, an affliction that would hurt not only the sinful, wayward population of Catalonia but also its ruler: ‘‘for a universal castigation of such gravity does not spare your royal crown but rather results in loss and harm to you, for the good and evil of the vassals redounds to the condition of the prince’’ (no. 126). The king responded earnestly and tried to alleviate fiscal burdens, especially the long-term municipal debt obligations (censals). These were annuities regarded as safe and steady investments by those who bought the obligations, but outside the circle of beneficiaries censals were frequently (especially in times of crisis) considered unearned and quasiusurious income. In February 1430, Queen Maria remonstrated with note-holders who initially balked at voluntarily renouncing or postponing rights to payments that ultimately were financed by current taxes. This study is in Catalan and so its detailed account will have a limited audience outside of Catalonia. There is, however, a fairly extensive English summary (pp. 395–407). PAUL FREEDMAN Yale University [email protected] ß 2009 Paul Freedman

Mozarabs in Medieval and Early Modern Spain. Identities and Influences RICHARD HITCHCOCK, 2008 Aldershot: Ashgate 172 pp. £50.00 (hardback) ISBN 9780754663140 On 16 November 1118, Alfonso VII of Castile issued a fuero general addressed to ‘‘omnes cives Toletanos, scilicet Castellanos, Mozarabes atque Francos’’. It is fairly clear who the Castilians and Franks were, but the meaning of the label ‘‘Mozarab’’

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children and other family members, the book greatly enriches our understanding of gender and convivencia in the medieval Mediterranean. ELMA BRENNER Department of History and Philosophy of Science University of Cambridge, UK [email protected] ß 2009 Elma Brenner

Archaeology of the Military Orders. A Survey of the Urban Centres, Rural Settlements and Castles of the Military Orders in the Latin East (c. 1120–1291) ADRIAN J. BOAS, 2006 London: Routledge 336 pp. £65.00 (hardback) ISBN 9780415299800 £20.00 (paperback) ISBN 9780415487238 Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code (Bantam Press, 2003) and speculative writing such as Keith Laidler’s The Head of God: The Lost Treasure of the Templars (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), has prompted considerable popular interest in the archaeology of the military religious orders, especially the Templars. Nonacademics who wish to learn more about the historical military religious orders and their archaeology will find this book to be of interest. Adrian Boas, senior lecturer at the University of Haifa in Israel, is a specialist in the archaeology of the states founded by Western European Catholic Christians in Syria and Palestine between the end of the eleventh and the end of the thirteenth century, the so-called ‘‘Latin East’’. The book begins with an historical overview of all the military religious orders, not only the major supranational orders (the Templars, the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Knights), but also the smaller orders dedicated respectively to St Lazarus and to St Thomas of Canterbury. It goes on to examine the archaeological legacy of the military orders in the Latin East, their headquarters in Jerusalem and/or Acre, their rural possessions and farming, their castles, weapons and art, and material evidence for the details of their daily life. The book includes a chronology of events, a chronology of castles, and a gazetteer of the sites of the military orders, with a description of each location, the history of the site, details of excavations, and a bibliography of published work. It concludes with references to each chapter, a long bibliography and an index. There are also many maps, drawings and photographs. Boas combines archaeological evidence with historical sources to produce a more rounded account than historical sources alone can achieve. For example, in the chapter on the daily life of the military orders, details from the rules and statutes of the Templars, the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Order are illustrated from archaeological evidence, so that the reader is presented with a vivid picture of the brothers’ everyday life. Some of the sites Boas discusses are those on which he himself has worked; such as Toron des Chevaliers (p. 255) and Vadum

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Iacob (p. 258). In the majority of cases, however, he is discussing the work of other scholars, which sometimes leads to apparent conflicts of interpretation. For example, on p. 160: ‘‘In the south corner of the inner ward of Belvoir there is a small kitchen containing three ovens or perhaps hobs for cooking in metal cauldrons (figure 57)’’. Figure 57 shows what appears to be a stonework hob with three arches, under which fires could be built for boiling water in cauldrons placed in the purpose-built hollows in the top of the hob. The caption to the photograph, however, states: ‘‘Ovens in the kitchen at Belvoir’’ with no indication of the alternative interpretation mentioned in the main text. Scholarly discussions of the archaeology of the military orders’ castles in the Latin East generally define the orders’ fortresses by the nature of the built defences: tower keeps, tower keeps with enclosures and concentric castles. In contrast, Boas’s typologies or categories combine the built defences with the natural defences. Having identified the familiar tower keeps (a square or rectangular tower with a small walled enclosure) and large enclosure castles, he next discusses quadrangular enclosure castles with projecting towers: this was a more sophisticated design of tower with a large enclosure, including concentric castles based around a quadrangular tower. Then come the ‘‘spur castle’’ (pp. 126–136), a castle constructed on the end of a mountain spur, and ‘‘hilltop (and island) castles’’ (pp. 136–148). The latter ‘‘occupies a hilltop (or alternatively an island) and . . . the defensive works are built around the contours of the hill (or the shore of the island)’’ (p. 136). Some of these are basically towers with enclosures that were adapted to the terrain, while some (such as Saphet) were concentric constructions. Although castle typology can aid understanding up to a point, this extensive categorisation may confuse the reader. Perhaps because of his archaeological rather than historical expertise, Boas does not explain some points fully. On p. 5, we are told: ‘‘as early as 1123 an emergency unit of mounted knights was formed against the Fatimid threat’’ by the Hospitallers, but no reference is given for this debateable point. Again, there is no reference for King Edward I of England becoming a patron of the Order of St Thomas of Canterbury in the late thirteenth century (p. 7). This point would have benefited from more context: Edward I’s father, King Henry III of England, was also a patron of that Order. On pp. 19–20, the discussion over when the Templars obtained the whole of the Aqsa Mosque as their headquarters will puzzle readers who are aware of Archbishop William of Tyre’s assertion that the Templars were given a base in ‘‘the Temple of Solomon’’ by King Baldwin II when the Order was first founded, but who have not seen Boas’s earlier work and were not aware that there was any question over when the Templars obtained the rest of the building. Academic scholars who are specialists in the history of the Latin East or of the military religious orders may consider that this study presents an over-simplified interpretation of some points. Non-specialists and newcomers to the subject will find it a readable book that gives them a general overview of the history and activities of the military religious orders in the Latin East, including the archaeological dimension which is so often absent from historical works. HELEN J. NICHOLSON Cardiff University [email protected] ß 2009 Helen J. Nicholson


Book Reviews

Women, Wealth, and Community in Perpignan, c. 1250–1300: Christians, Jews, and Enslaved Muslims in a Medieval Mediterranean Town REBECCA LYNN WINER, 2006 Aldershot: Ashgate 276 pp. £60.00 (hardback) ISBN 0754608042 This study of the Christian, Jewish and enslaved Muslim women of thirteenthcentury Perpignan, a major commercial centre in this period, marks an important contribution to our understanding of the diverse roles and statuses of women in the medieval Mediterranean. Winer assesses the extent of women’s economic empowerment, and their agency within the family, by analysing notarial registers (protocols) – an exceptional set of these sources survives for thirteenthcentury Perpignan – wills, legal cases and civil codes. In particular, she focuses on women’s roles as daughters, wives, mothers, widows and servants/slaves, skilfully interpreting the data she has derived from her often difficult source material. The introduction presents a feminist perspective, suggesting that what follows will be more sympathetic towards women than men. Winer states that ‘‘. . . women were dominated by a gender system that was built by and for men’’ (p. 11), and refers (at the beginning of Chapter 2) to ‘‘. . . the inheritance and marriage customs created by men to further their own economic interests’’ (p. 18). These statements cast men as women’s oppressors, imbuing them with intentions for which we do not necessarily have evidence. Interestingly, however, the chapters that follow in fact highlight how some women in thirteenth-century Perpignan came to have individual agency, often more so than their counterparts elsewhere in the medieval Mediterranean. Nonetheless, in the case of Christian women, this ‘‘independence’’ resulted from Christian society’s understanding of the needs of fatherless children, not from a concern to empower women, and still entailed social restrictions for women. Christian widowed mothers of minor children were entitled to become their legal guardians, enabling them to dispose of their deceased husband’s estate on their children’s behalf, to make business investments, and to arrange marriage contracts for their children. However, if they wished to retain guardianship of their children, widows were prohibited from remarrying and, furthermore, when a fatherless son reached adulthood his mother was expected to cede her control of the household to him. Winer’s discussion of the Jewish women of thirteenth-century Perpignan is particularly fascinating, as it reveals how Jewish women’s experiences were affected by their membership of a religious culture that was not only different, but also

ISSN 0950–3110 print/ISSN 1473–348X online/09/030331-10 DOI: 10.1080/09503110903343358

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a minority one in Perpignan. By the mid-thirteenth century, Perpignan had one of the most significant Jewish communities in Europe north of the Pyrenees. Perpignan’s Jews had many different occupations, but they engaged above all in moneylending in this increasingly prosperous town. Some Jewish women lent money, revealing ‘‘. . . widespread financial knowledge among women and a sophisticated sense of the realities of doing business in Perpignan’’ (p. 89). However, many fewer women than men were involved in credit, pointing towards the fact that their agency was ultimately subordinate to the needs of the family and the community. Nonetheless, the difficulties of life as a minority group still ‘‘. . . required many women to operate independently outside of the household’’ (p. 80). There are interesting differences between the roles of Jewish and Christian women as widowed mothers. While a Christian widow automatically became the guardian of her child or children, a Jewish widow did not generally act alone as guardian, but instead might become a member of a committee which took overall responsibility for the welfare and financial affairs of the child or children. These ‘‘panels’’ usually included important male members of the Jewish community, although their role was secondary to that of the family members on the committee. Winer observes that, although this system did not afford widowed Jewish women autonomy over their children, it did ensure that the financial estates of both widows and children were protected, and that widows were supported at this difficult time. Both the Jewish and Christian systems of guardianship were concerned with providing for the needs of fatherless children, not with promoting women’s agency. Instances in which widows’ autonomy did increase resulted incidentally from their essential role in the care of these children. The final chapter, addressing the situation of enslaved Muslim women and Christian servants in medieval Perpignan, powerfully reinforces the book’s message that women’s varying experiences depended on their religious, social and legal status. Although female Christian domestic servants were vulnerable to injustices, such as the refusal of their masters to pay them, they were undoubtedly better off than enslaved Muslim women. The latter could not marry, did not have a wider community in Perpignan to fall back on, and were treated as possessions, having no legal rights. Although many Muslim women converted to Christianity, this did not usually result in their emancipation. The role of enslaved women as wet nurses points particularly towards ‘‘. . .the stark double standards generated by the gender system operating in Perpignan during this period’’ (p. 154). Although wet nurses were extremely valuable, and free servants who worked as wet nurses earned high wages, enslaved wet nurses ‘‘. . . performed extremely unattractive duties’’ (p. 154), and remained at the lowest level of the domestic hierarchy. The book concludes by inviting more research on mothers and mothering in the medieval Mediterranean. Indeed, Winer’s analysis demonstrates that women’s situations, ranging from the degree of autonomy enjoyed by guardians to the servile position of enslaved wet nurses, frequently related to their maternal role. This valuable study points towards the importance of examining the family unit and the household in any social history of a medieval society. By not only considering the experiences of women, but also touching upon those of men,

Book Reviews

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children and other family members, the book greatly enriches our understanding of gender and convivencia in the medieval Mediterranean. ELMA BRENNER Department of History and Philosophy of Science University of Cambridge, UK [email protected] ß 2009 Elma Brenner

Archaeology of the Military Orders. A Survey of the Urban Centres, Rural Settlements and Castles of the Military Orders in the Latin East (c. 1120–1291) ADRIAN J. BOAS, 2006 London: Routledge 336 pp. £65.00 (hardback) ISBN 9780415299800 £20.00 (paperback) ISBN 9780415487238 Dan Brown’s novel The Da Vinci Code (Bantam Press, 2003) and speculative writing such as Keith Laidler’s The Head of God: The Lost Treasure of the Templars (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998), has prompted considerable popular interest in the archaeology of the military religious orders, especially the Templars. Nonacademics who wish to learn more about the historical military religious orders and their archaeology will find this book to be of interest. Adrian Boas, senior lecturer at the University of Haifa in Israel, is a specialist in the archaeology of the states founded by Western European Catholic Christians in Syria and Palestine between the end of the eleventh and the end of the thirteenth century, the so-called ‘‘Latin East’’. The book begins with an historical overview of all the military religious orders, not only the major supranational orders (the Templars, the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Knights), but also the smaller orders dedicated respectively to St Lazarus and to St Thomas of Canterbury. It goes on to examine the archaeological legacy of the military orders in the Latin East, their headquarters in Jerusalem and/or Acre, their rural possessions and farming, their castles, weapons and art, and material evidence for the details of their daily life. The book includes a chronology of events, a chronology of castles, and a gazetteer of the sites of the military orders, with a description of each location, the history of the site, details of excavations, and a bibliography of published work. It concludes with references to each chapter, a long bibliography and an index. There are also many maps, drawings and photographs. Boas combines archaeological evidence with historical sources to produce a more rounded account than historical sources alone can achieve. For example, in the chapter on the daily life of the military orders, details from the rules and statutes of the Templars, the Hospitallers and the Teutonic Order are illustrated from archaeological evidence, so that the reader is presented with a vivid picture of the brothers’ everyday life. Some of the sites Boas discusses are those on which he himself has worked; such as Toron des Chevaliers (p. 255) and Vadum


Sultan Barqu¯q and his Complaining Subjects in the Royal Stables1

FUMIHIKO HASEBE

In 789/1387, Sultan al-Z a¯hir Barqu¯q (r. 784–792/1382–89, 793–802/ _ 1390–99), the founder of the Circassian Mamluk State, moved the royal maza¯lim sessions _ for hearing petitions from Da¯r al-‘Adl, the time-honoured building at the centre of the Cairo Citadel, to the Royal Stables situated in the peripheral and lower enclosure of the Citadel. Thereafter, Barqu¯q utilised the stable area as a stronghold of his new paternalistic rule. This paper examines the background, political intention, and social meaning of this important change, with special attention to various actions of urban and rural Egyptian people during the two reigns of the sultan.

ABSTRACT

Keywords: Maza¯lim institution; Urban space; Circassian Mamluks; Popular _ movements; Cairo, Egypt – citadel; Barqu¯q, Mamlu¯k sultan; Egypt – administration Introduction After the death of Sultan al-Na¯sir Muhammad b. Qala¯wu¯n, who ruled with _ _ absolute authority over the Mamlu¯k sultanate and maintained stability in his spectacular third reign (710–742/1310–41),2 powerful Mamlu¯k amirs continued to struggle for real power and installed the descendents of al-Na¯sir one after another as _ puppet sultans.3 It was al-Za¯hir Barqu¯q who put an end to this regime of amirs who _ had been taking advantage of the Qala¯wu¯nid sultanate. He was Circassian by origin and had been a member of the Yalbugha¯wiyya, mamlu¯ks of Amir Yalbugha¯ al-Kha¯ssaki, who gained real power in the 762s/1360s. In 784/1382, Barqu¯q __ overthrew the Qala¯wu¯nid dynasty by dethroning al-Sa¯lih al-Ha¯jji (r. 783–784/ _ _ _ 1381–82), who had been sultan only in name, and began to construct his regime as a sultan, basing it on his Za¯hiriyya, the Circassian mamlu¯ks whom he purchased in _ large numbers from the Northern Caucasus. He was succeeded by his son Faraj (r. 802–808/1399–1405, 808–815/1405–12) and then by members of the Za¯hiriyya, _

Correspondence: Fumihiko Hasebe, Faculty of Letters, Keio University, 2-15-45 Mita, Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-8345, Japan. E-mail: [email protected] 1 This article, that I finished writing in October 2008, is a revised version of my paper given to the International Medieval Congress 2007 at the University of Leeds. 2 On the third reign of al-Na¯sir Muhammad, see Amalia Levanoni, A Turning Point in Mamluk History: _ _ The Third Reign of al-Na¯sir Muhammad Ibn Qala¯wu¯n (1310–1341) (Leiden: Brill, 1995). _ _ 3 On this turbulent period, see the recent study based on detailed prosopographical analysis: Jo Van Steenbergen, Order out of Chaos: Patronage, Conflict and Mamluk Socio-Political Culture, 1341–1382 (Leiden: Brill, 2006).


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such as al-Mu’ayyad Shaykh (r. 815–825/1412–21), al-Ashraf Barsba¯y (r. 826–842/ 1422–38), and al-Za¯hir Jaqmaq (r. 842–857/1438–53). In 1389, Barqu¯q’s rule was _ interrupted by the rebellion of two powerful governors, Minta¯sh and Yalbugha¯ _ al-Na¯siri. This was a backlash political movement aimed at reconstructing the _ Qala¯wu¯nid sultanate in cooperation with the powerful Syrian Bedouin tribe Al Fadl _ and Turkmen in the northern periphery of the sultanate. Finally, in February 1390, Barqu¯q succeeded in winning a victory and regained the throne. Although his two reigns were no doubt important turning points in Mamluk history, we nonetheless need more detailed studies on them to make a comprehensive evaluation.4 This article aims to clarify an aspect of Barqu¯q’s rule, focusing on the political intention and social meaning of the move of maza¯lim sessions to the Royal Stables in _ the Cairo Citadel in October 789/1387 and the actual conditions after that. In the Islamic middle period, especially under the successor states of the Seljukids, such as the Zangids, the Ayyu¯bids and the Mamlu¯ks, the maza¯lim sessions were _ usually presided over by the military rulers for the purpose of nazar fi l-maza¯lim, _ _ which means ‘‘to look into acts of injustice’’, basing this on either unwritten administrative law, or Islamic law, or precedents, or the like depending on the circumstances. From the viewpoint of social and political history, the most important function of this ‘‘secular’’ judicial institution was to try cases in which government officials and military officers were accused by the subjects, though it also treated various other types of cases, such as disputes about property, problems on waqf and iqt a¯‘, problems in trade, status of dhimmis, religious matters and so on. As for _ procedures in the Mamlu¯k period, when a petition (qissa) was filed by a complainant, __ a sultan or his deputy judged it and replied to it with the signed decision (marsu¯m). Petitioners were permitted to present their petitions at any time, as long as they observed the standard written formulation. In the actual management of this institution, therefore, the ka¯tib al-sirr (chief of chancery and confidential secretary to the sultan) and the clerks under him played a main part. On the maza¯lim institution _ under the Bahri Mamlu¯ks, we have a detailed monograph by Nielsen and more recent _ 5 studies by Rabbat that examined the places used for the maza¯lim. But we know little _ about the maza¯lim under the Circassian Mamlu¯ks, although rich contemporary _ Arabic chronicles were written by Cairene intellectuals such as Ibn al-Fura¯t, Ibn Hajar, al-Maqrizi, and al-‘Ayni on this period. _ This article is also probably the first attempt to connect the study of popular movements to that of the maza¯lim institution.6 Nielsen’s above-mentioned _

4

On the reigns of Barqu¯q, see Linda Northrup, ‘‘The Bahri Mamluk sultanate, 1250–1390’’, _ in The Cambridge History of Egypt, Volume 1, Islamic Egypt, 640-1517, ed. Carl F. Petry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 286–289; Jean-Claude Garçin, ‘‘The regime of the Circassian Mamluks’’, in The Cambridge History of Egypt, Volume 1, Islamic Egypt, 640-1517, pp. 290–291; Peter M. Holt, The Age of the Crusades: The Near East from the Eleventh Century to 1517 (London: Longman, 1986), pp. 121–129. 5 Jørgen S. Nielsen, Secular Justice in an Islamic State: Maza¯lim under the Bahri Mamlu¯ks, 662/1264-789/ _ _ 1387 (Leiden: Nederlands Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut, 1985); Nasser O. Rabbat, ‘‘Mamluk throne hall: qubba or iwa¯n?’’, Ars Orientalis, 23 (1993): 201–218; idem, The Citadel of Cairo: A New Interpretation of Royal Mamluk Architecture (Leiden: Brill, 1995); idem, ‘‘The ideological significance of the Da¯r al-‘Adl in the medieval Islamic orient’’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 27 (1995): 3–28. 6 On popular movements in Mamluk Cairo, see Boaz Shoshan, Popular Culture in Medieval Cairo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 52–66; idem, ‘‘Grain riots and the ‘moral economy’: Cairo, 1350–1517’’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 10/3 (1980): 459–478; Ira M.

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monograph is indispensable but lacks a consideration of this institution in the context of popular or politico-cultural history. We are liable to have the fixed image that the Mamlu¯ks ruled the people by means of strong military power since they extinguished the Crusades in Syria in 690/1291 and contested the invincible Mongols on almost even terms. But Mamlu¯k sultans spared no effort in currying favour with their subjects, especially so Sultan Barqu¯q who dared to stop taking advantage of Qala¯wu¯nid political tradition.

Transfer of maza¯lim sessions to the Royal Stables _

Before October 789/1387, when al-Za¯hir Barqu¯q moved the maza¯lim sessions to _ _ the Royal Stables, they had almost always been held in a huge monumental structure called Da¯r al-‘Adl (Palace of Justice), the building that symbolised the just rule of the Mamlu¯k Sultanate, built by al-Na¯sir Muhammad in 715/1315 during his _ _ third reign. It was located in the Southern Enclosure at the top level of the Cairo Citadel and was the last of five that are no longer extant but whose existence is confirmed in historical sources. The Da¯r al-‘Adl of al-Na¯sir, also called al-I¯wa¯n al_ Kabir (the Great Hall), was one of the largest edifices anywhere in the Mamluk Sultanate. The basilica-like structure was supported by many red columns taken from ancient Egyptian temples, and was crowned by an impressive green dome. AlNa¯sir presided over the maza¯lim sessions on Mondays and Thursdays in this Da¯r al_ _ ‘Adl, whose interior was exposed to view from the outside, apart from one side which was attached to the sultan’s royal residences. Under his rule, the maza¯lim _ sessions became a spectacular royal ceremony including a military parade (mawkib) and a banquet (sima¯t ), attended by four chief judges of Cairo, many high-ranking _ Mamluk amirs and high officials of the sultanate.7 Towards the end of Ramada¯n 789/September–October 1387, Sultan al-Za¯hir _ _ Barqu¯q ordered in his proclamation that accusers should come to ist abul al-sult a¯n __

_

( footnote continued ) Lapidus, Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), pp. 143–184; Fumihiko Hasebe, ‘‘Popular movements and Jaqmaq, the less paternalistic sultan: some aspects of conflict in the Egyptian cities, 1449-52’’, Annals of Japan Association for Middle East Studies, 20/2 (2005): 27–51. 7 Rabbat, ‘‘The ideological significance’’, 3–18; idem, The Citadel of Cairo, 244–263. The other four were: the first, built by Nu¯r al-Din ibn Zanki in his capital Damascus in ca.1163; the second, built in Aleppo by the Ayyubid ruler al-Za¯hir Gha¯zi in 1189; the third, built in the Northern Enclosure of the Cairo _ Citadel by another Ayyubid ruler, al-Ka¯mil Muhmmad in ca. 1207; and the fourth, built at the foot of _ the Cairo Citadel by the famous Mamluk sultan al-Za¯hir Baybars in 1262. Although Rabbat claims that _ maza¯lim sessions in Cairo were held in Da¯r al-Niya¯ba (Palace of the deputy sultan) rather than Da¯r al_ ‘Adl from 1341 to 1382, this is inaccurate. Certainly, al-Maqrizi states so in his topographic history (alMaqrizi, al-Mawa¯‘iz wa l-i‘tiba¯r bi-dhikr al-khit at wa l-a¯tha¯r, volumes I–IV, (London: Mu’assasat al_ _ _ Furqa¯n li l-Tura¯th al-Isla¯mi, 2002–2003), III: 695–696), on the other hand, in his chronicle, he clearly refers to some cases judged in Da¯r al-‘Adl. See al-Maqrizi, Kita¯b al-sulu¯k li-ma‘rifat duwal al-mulu¯k, volumes I–IV, (Cairo: Matba‘a Da¯r al-Kutub al-Misriyya, 1956–1973), II: 863; III: 918, 922–925. _ _ Moreover, for this period, Nielsen finds no cases treated in Da¯r al-Niya¯ba, whereas he confirms eight cases unquestionably treated in Da¯r al-‘Adl. See Nilsen, 153–156 (Case nos. 65, 66, 70, 71, 72, 73, 75, 76). At present, we can only say that both Da¯r al-Niya¯ba and Da¯r al-‘Adl functioned as maza¯lim courts _ during the period 1341–1382.

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(the Royal Stables) on Sundays and Wednesdays.8 Ibn al-Fura¯t, whose chronicle gives us most minute information on this change, says: The man who had a complaint (shakwa¯) or [suffered] injustice brought a suit to the sultan (waqafa li l-sult a¯n) at the ist abul. Whoever stood _ __ before the sultan was asked whether he had already asked either the judge (qa¯d i) or the chamberlain (ha¯jib). If he answered ‘‘No’’, the sultan ordered _ _ him to be beaten and driven out. If he answered, ‘‘Yes, I had sued but they did not judge my case’’, the sultan brought the defendant before him. The complainant accused the defendant and the sultan personally gave a decision. We do not know of such a thing with respect to the rulers (mulu¯k) that we know about before him and have not heard about this from our sheikhs.9 We may suggest at least two reasons why Ibn al-Fura¯t regards this reform as unheard-of. First, the transfer of maza¯lim sessions to the Royal Sables in the _ Lower Enclosure of the Citadel was unprecedented. Second, this chronicler, who was a Muslim jurist, appears to have felt it a little problematic that the sultan would make decisions on cases personally, that is, entirely at his own discretion. In fact, the judicial participants in the sessions, in addition to the sultan were ka¯tib al-sirr (confidential secretary), dawa¯da¯rs (ink-bearers), and naqib al-jaysh (military policeman). The sources do not refer to the attendance of the Islamic legal professionals such as the four chief judges of Cairo and the mufti, unlike al-Na¯sir’s _ maza¯lim sessions, where they were all present. This appears to be a significant point _ in this reform by Barqu¯q. According to al-Maqrizi, the sultan made decisions after hearing the petitions read out by his confidential secretary.10 It can be confirmed here that the formal procedure of submitting the written petitions was followed by this sultan. According to Ibn al-Fura¯t’s account, Barqu¯q did not regard his new maza¯lim sessions as a higher court of appeals from the qa¯d i’s Shari‘a court or the _ _ jurisdiction of the military ha¯jib. The sultan decreed clearly that his maza¯lim _ _ sessions would deal with the cases that were not judged by these other two jurisdictions. So he basically respected the jurisdiction of qa¯d is and did not attempt _ to encroach on it.11 The first maza¯lim sessions in the Royal Stables were held on 23 Ramada¯n 789/7 _ _ October 1387. But this was a Monday, curiously inconsistent with the direction of the above-mentioned proclamation. The reason is not clear, but another proclamation designating Sundays and Wednesdays was issued a few days later.12 8 Ibn al-Fura¯t, Ta’rikh Ibn al-Fura¯t, volumes VII–IX (Beirut: American University of Beirut Press, 1936– 1942), IX: 17–18. According to the later chronicler, Ibn al-Sayrafi, it was on 16 Ramada¯n 789/30 _ _ September 1387. See Ibn al-Sayrafi, Nuzhat al-nufu¯s wa l-abda¯n fi tawa¯rikh al-zama¯n, volumes I–IV _ (Cairo: al-Hay’a l-Misriyya l-‘Amma li l-Kita¯b, 1970–1994), I: 157. _ 9 Ibn al-Fura¯t, IX: 17. 10 Al-Maqrizi, Khit at , III: 666. According to this topographical work, such formality did not cease until _ _ at least the reign of al-Mu’ayyad Shaykh. 11 For the extending jurisdiction of ha¯jibs and their encroachment on the jurisdiction of the qa¯d is from _ _ the late fourteenth century, see al-Maqrizi, Khit at , III: 717–718; Robert Irwin, ‘‘The privatization of _ _ ‘justice’ under the Circassian Mamluks’’, Mamluk Studies Review, 6 (2002): 63–70. 12 Ibn al-Fura¯t, IX: 18. cf. Ibn Hajar, Inba¯’ al-ghumr bi-abna¯’ al-‘umr, volumes I–IV, (Cairo: _ al-Jumhu¯riyya l-‘Arabiyya l-Muttahida and Jumhu¯riyyat Misr al-‘Arabiyya, al-Majlis al-A‘la¯ li _ _ l-Shu’u¯n al-Isla¯miyya, Lajnat Ihya¯’ al-Tura¯th al-Isla¯mi, 1969–1998), I: 331; al-Maqrizi, Sulu¯k,

_


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As for the place, the exact point where Sultan Barqu¯q sat within the Royal Stables area is not clear in the sources. Generally speaking, we can know little about the actual condition of the Lower Enclosure. But according to Ibn al-Sayrafi, ‘‘The _ Sultan sat for the trial on a maq‘ad looking down at the ist abul and the mayda¯n __ [the Mamluks’ hippodrome attached to Rumayla Square below the Citadel].’’13 Although the original meaning of maq‘ad is ‘‘a place for sitting’’, it also means a loggia. So it seems likely that it was the Harra¯qa Pavilion in the Lower Enclosure, _ which could have a space for loggia.14 After about eight years, on 6 Shawwa¯l 797/25 July 1395, Barqu¯q again changed the days of maza¯lim to Saturdays and Tuesdays.15 As the polymath Ibn Hajar _ _ critically points out in his chronicle, this was in order to separate the maza¯lim from _ the banquet for drinking shara¯b Tamurbugha¯wi, liquor made from grapes, that was held on Wednesdays in the Royal Stables, probably after the maza¯lim sessions.16 _ Ibn al-Sayrafi says, ‘‘He made Sundays and Wednesdays the days of his amusement, _ relaxation and practice of drinking.’’17 Barqu¯q decided to preside over the sessions on the previous days.

Maza¯lim cases after the transfer _

How were the new maza¯lim sessions in the Royal Stables, then? With regard to the _ maza¯lim cases during the reigns of Barqu¯q, Nielsen confirms three cases from the _ decree documents of St Catherine’s in Sinai and only four from literary sources.18 Scrutinising the Arabic chronicles, however, we find 18 cases, in addition to the three St Catherine’s cases confirmed by Nielsen (see Appendix).19 Among the 18 cases from the literary sources, there are 14 that belong to the period after the transfer to the Royal Stables, in marked contrast to only four cases that belong to the period before the transfer. Although we need to take into account the possibility that the chroniclers paid more attention to the maza¯lim sessions after _

( footnote continued ) III: 566; al-‘Ayni, ‘Iqd al-juma¯n fi ta’rikh ahl al-zama¯n, in Al-Sult a¯n Barqu¯q: Mu’assis dawlat al-Mama¯lik _ al-Jara¯kisa, ed. I¯ma¯n ‘Umar Shukri (Cairo: Maktabat Madbu¯li, 2002), p. 216; Ibn al-Sayrafi, I: 157. _ 13 Ibn al-Sayrafi, I: 157. _ 14 Rabbat also thinks that the place was most probably the Harra¯qa. See Rabbat, The Citadel of Cairo, _ 245. According to al-‘Ayni’s accounts, the maq‘ad was a building located in the Royal Stables (al-‘Ayni, 298, 481, 493). 15 Ibn al-Fura¯t, IX: 412. 16 Ibn Hajar, I: 487, 489. Ibn Hajar states that Barqu¯q started this drinking banquet in Rabi’ I _ _ 797/December 1394–January 1395. 17 Ibn al-Sayrafi, I: 413. _ 18 Nielsen, 143–144 (Case nos. 19, 20, 21), and 157 (Case nos. 81, 82, 83, 84) respectively. The cases from the St Catherine’s decree documents are matters concerning lack of security and excessive taxation. On the Sinai documents of the Mamluk period, see Samuel M. Stern, ‘‘Petitions from the Mamlu¯k period (Notes on the Mamlu¯k documents from Sinai)’’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 29 (1966): 233–276; Hans Ernst, Die mamalukischen Sultansurkunden des Sinai-Klosters (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassovitz, 1960). 19 Nielsen, 37, 40. For the reigns of al-Na¯sir Muhammad, the total number of cases found in the sources _ _ is 23 (21 reported cases and two St Catherine’s cases), and for the reign of al-Za¯hir Baybars, the total _ number is 18 (15 reported cases and three St Catherine’s cases) according to Nielsen. So with regard to the number of cases, we can say that the reigns of Barqu¯q belong to the top three.

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the surprising transfer, Barqu¯q’s reform appears to have resulted in prompting his subjects to utilise the maza¯lim court more. _ As for the cases after the transfer, the most distinct feature is that there are many cases of complaints against local military governors (wa¯li or ka¯shif) in Egypt (Appendix, Case nos. 5, 8, 9, 10, 12, 14). In Rajab 795/June 1393, a group of farmers living in Giza and Minu¯fiyya ( jama¯‘a min al-falla¯hin bi l-Jiziyya wa-falla¯hin bi _ _ l-Minu¯fiyya), not far from the Mamluk capital, laid a complaint to the sultan (shakaw-hu ila¯ al-sult a¯n) against Amir Na¯sir al-Din Muhammad Sha¯h b. Aqbugha¯, _ _ _ governor of Giza (ka¯shif al-Jiziyya). Barqu¯q ordered the governor to be stripped naked, whipped and dismissed. Soon enough, however, Barqu¯q reappointed this amir to the same post after pressing him for the payment of 100,000 dirhams, a huge amount of money. Seeing this treatment, the farmers filed a suit again in the maza¯lim _ sessions, on Wednesday 7 Sha‘ba¯n 795/18 June 1393. According to Ibn al-Fura¯t, they complained that the governor carried out evil deeds among them, committed immoralities with their children, raped their women, and even plundered their property. Hearing the farmers’ statements, the sultan summoned the amir again and ordered him to tell the truth. Although he denied the charge, the sultan had him whipped again and returned their properties to the farmers.20 This case clearly shows us that the maza¯lim presided over by Barqu¯q in the Royal Stables functioned as a _ place in which his subjects living in the rural areas could air their grievances about local rule. It must not be overlooked, however, that this reformer sultan occasionally made use of the maza¯lim institution for his own economic profit. _ Petitions were also filed by inhabitants who made their lives further from the Mamluk capital. In Safar 793/January 1391, using the state postal system (barid), _ Barqu¯q summoned Aqbugha¯ al-Ma¯rida¯ni, governor of Upper Egypt (na¯’ib al-salt ana bi l-wajh al-qibli), as the sultan had received many complaints about _ this Mamluk governor. On Sunday 15 Safar 793/22 January 1391, the day of the _ maza¯lim sessions, Amir Aqbugha¯ was stripped of his clothes and struck with a rod, _ and four days later a new governor of Upper Egypt was appointed.21 On Wednesday 27 Rabi’I 797/20 January 1395, Amir Yalbugha¯ al-Zayni, who had been the governor (wa¯li) of Ushmu¯nayn in Upper Egypt, stood before the sultan, since many petitions (qisas) had been submitted. Although the source does not reveal details of _ _ the trial, Barqu¯q dismissed this Yalbugha¯ al-Zayni, sentenced him to 51 lashes, and had the governor of Cairo (wa¯li al-Qa¯hira) force him to ‘‘make restitution (khala¯s) _ for the Muslims’ rights’’.22 On the eve of Sunday 21 Juma¯da¯ I 797/14 March 1395, a group of inhabitants of Qu¯s (jama¯‘a min ahl Qu¯s) in Upper Egypt came to Cairo _ _ and brought an action in the maza¯lim against Amir Mankli Bugha¯ al-Zayni, _ governor of Qu¯s. At that very time, Mankli Bugha¯ was returning to Qu¯s from Cairo _ _ after being reappointed to the post. Barqu¯q soon recalled him to Cairo and eventually ordered him to ‘‘make restitution for people’s rights’’, dismissed him, and appointed another amir Aqbugha¯ al-Bashta¯ki in his place.23 With regard to these appeals to the sultan in the capital by provincial farmers and local urban people taking advantage of the maza¯lim institution, it is difficult _

20

Ibn al-Fura¯t, IX: 335. In relation to this case, it is noteworthy that in Juma¯da¯ I 781/August-September 1379, people of Minu¯f submitted petitions against their governor to the amir kabir Barqu¯q and the governor was punished. See al-Maqrizi, Sulu¯k, III: 355. 21 Ibn al-Fura¯t, IX: 247–248. At the same time, the governor of Gaza was also punished and dismissed. 22 Ibid., 402. 23 Ibid., 404–405.


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to know what their grievances, dissatisfactions, and resentments about the governors really were. However, from Ibn al-Fura¯t’s valuable account of the statements by the farmers of Giza and Minu¯fiyya, and such expression as ‘‘restitution for people’s rights’’, it can at least be inferred that the problems concerned the local governors’ infringements of people’s rights or extorting their property. Sultan Barqu¯q took a serious view of this type of complaint and determined on further steps. On the occasion of the first session after the above-mentioned change of maza¯lim days, on Saturday 6 Shawwal 797/25 July 1395, the sultan summoned _ all the administrators (muba¯shiru¯n) who worked under the amirs for their iqt a¯‘s. _ Then the sultan threatened them with severe punishment if anyone were to impose a hima¯ya (protection rate, i.e., an illegal tax) on farmers. Furthermore, procla_ mations with the same content were made all over Egypt.24 This severe deterrent is an indication of how common it was at that time for local governors and iqt a¯’ _ holders to extort money from local residents. We can find no recorded cases under the Bahri Mamluks in which Egyptian _ local people used the maza¯lim institution to express their grievances against the _ local governors, apart from some St Catherine’s cases,25 so special attention must be paid to the concentration of such cases in the second reign of Sultan Barqu¯q. Macroscopically speaking, the illegal actions of local rulers should be interpreted in the context of the economic crisis of the latter half of fourteenth-century Egypt, which was a synchronic phenomenon in the Middle East and Europe,26 but we should nevertheless not overlook the fact that Barqu¯q’s reform of maza¯lim _ did prompt such active appeals of his local subjects. Another noteworthy case is no.13. On Wednesday 20 January 1395, a Christian man (nasra¯ni) laid a complaint before the sultan against a deputy Ma¯liki judge. _ Although we do not know the details, according to Ibn al-Fura¯t, the deputy judge was beaten and ‘‘ordered to give him (i.e. the Christian) what he complained about’’. On this case, Ibn Hajar again shows his displeasure, stating in his chronicle, _ ‘‘People felt pain for him (i.e., the deputy judge)’’.27 Such a case as the right of dhimmi protected by the Muslim ruler in the maza¯lim was not rare throughout _ the Mamluk period, but during the post-al-Na¯sir and ante-Barqu¯q period _ (1341–1382), there are some notable cases in which the petitions of Christians suffering social problems were rejected. Moreover, they were punished severely, as in the cases of Gharbiyya province in 1354.28 In this sense, Barqu¯q’s decision in case no.13, about which Ibn Hajar had reservations, may have been significant _ in that it was a reversal of a general trend, but we must research more closely before reaching a conclusion on this issue. Apart from case no. 13, that was a case in which an Islamic judge was tried in a maza¯lim institution, and we can _

24

Ibid., 412. Nielsen, 140–144 (Case nos. 1, 2, 11). 26 A.L. Udovich, ‘‘Long-term trends and long-distance trade’’, in Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East from the Rise of Islam to the Present Day, ed. Michael A. Cook (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), pp. 93–128; Eliyahu Ashtor, A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 305–319; Michael Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977); Stuart J. Borsch, The Black Death in Egypt and England: A Comparative Study (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005). 27 Ibn Hajar, I: 489; Ibn al-Fura¯t, IX: 402. _ 28 Al-Maqrizi, Sulu¯k, II: 918, 922–927; Nielsen, 111. 25

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find four other such cases. (Cases no.4, 6, 11, and 18). Although such a case is not rare in the Bahri period, we may say that the maza¯lim sometimes functioned as _ _ a ‘‘Judge Impeachment Court’’ in Mamluk society. Case no.16 seems to be exceptional because it treated the serious Islamic religious problem of unbelief. Only on this occasion did the sultan looked to the chief qa¯d is and Shaykh al-Isla¯m Sira¯j al-Din al-Bulqini, the supreme authority _ on Islamic jurisprudence at that time in Egypt. Also, only in this case, we can confirm that the evidence (bayyina) was brought forward in the procedure.

Socio-political meanings of the transfer In his accounts of the events in the year of 794/1391–1392, the contemporary chronicler Ibn Duqma¯q speaks highly of Barqu¯q for his running of the new maza¯lim _ sessions. He praises the fact that the sultan made decisions on the cases with justice (‘adl ), responding to the people’s desire for his tolerance and favour, and then justice and favor spread among his subjects (ra‘a¯ya¯), with ‘‘the weak saying the truth had overcome the tyrant (za¯lim)’’.29 _ But, on the other hand, Ibn Hajar again laments: ‘‘People, especially their leaders _ (ru’asa¯’), were visited by great difficulties. Some among the lower stratum (ara¯dhil) who wanted to look down on the distinguished men (kiba¯r) now got to do that.’’30 The famous jurist looked with disgust on Barqu¯q’s maza¯lim sessions and his _ distinctively populist rule. This critical view of the new maza¯lim sessions at the _ Royal Stables appears to be directed mainly to the sultan’s arrogance in presiding over the maza¯lim sessions, his free decision, and its popularity, whereas Ibn Hajar’s _ _ critical point of view makes us aware of another noteworthy aspect, that is, the sultan’s political utilisation of the maza¯lim. In 794/1391–1392, Barqu¯q discovered _ that Amir Tughaytamur, the governor of Sis in Cilicia region, was going to rebel. He had the people of Karak complain against the provincial governor of their home town and demand that Tughaytamur be appointed to a southern Syrian post instead. As Karak was the place where Barqu¯q’s fortunes revived in the difficult days of 1389–1390, it is not surprising that he could influence the people, using his special bond with them. The sultan’s scheme succeeded. Pretending he had given the new post in response to the petition, Barqu¯q called Amir Tughaytamur to Cairo and easily captured him.31 Then why did Sultan Barqu¯q move the place he used for his maza¯lim sessions? _ Nielsen, who focuses on the maza¯lim in the period before this change, only says: _ ‘‘The danger, which the convergence of maza¯lim and other state functions in a _ single building and ceremonial posed to the status of maza¯lim, was recognized by _ Barqu¯q when he started to reorganize the state.’’32 But this explanation is not satisfactory. Rather, as Rabbat mentions briefly,33 we should pay more attention to the practice that Sultan Barqu¯q tried to depart 29

Ibn Duqma¯q, al-Jawhar al-thamin fi siyar al-mulu¯k wa l-sala¯t in (Beirut: ‘Alam al-Kutub, 1985), p. 284. _ Ibn Hajar, I: 331. Al-Maqrizi refers to the great dread of notables (a‘ya¯n) for being accused for _ (Sulu¯k, III: 566). 31 Ibn Hajar, I: 436. _ 32 Nielsen, 51–52. 33 Rabbat, The Citadel of Cairo, 245. 30


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from – the preceding political tradition of the Qala¯wu¯nid dynasty founded by Sultan Qala¯wu¯n and established by his son al-Na¯sir Muhammad. Barqu¯q strove to _ _ create a new ruling style that attached great importance to ‘‘the consent of the ruled’’, with an emphasis on cultural politics. For example, Barqu¯q built his madrasa in Bayna al-Qasrayn at the centre of al-Qa¯hira district in the capital. _ His construction work must be understood as a representation of his will to compete with both Sultan Qala¯wu¯n and al-Na¯sir Muhammad, whose large religious _ _ buildings magnificently erected there. Through this project, Barqu¯q seems to have succeeded in impressing people so that they realized that he had a power at least not inferior to them.34 It was in the same vein that Barqu¯q carried out his ambitious attempt to take away from the magnificent Da¯r al-‘Adl of al-Na¯sir Muhammad its _ _ original function of the maza¯lim.35 _ How then can we understand that the Royal Stables were selected for the site of his new maza¯lim sessions? Here, three points can be presented: First, taking the _ long-term view, the significance of Royal Stables in the Citadel was not suddenly enhanced by Barqu¯q; it had already become prominent during the third reign of al-Na¯sir Muhhammad. Al-Na¯sir was well known as a hippomaniac and extended _ _ _ the royal holding of horses dramatically.36 Accompanying this development, two superior posts in the Royal Stables, amir a¯khu¯r kabir (military supervisor of the Royal Stables) and na¯zir al-ist abla¯t al-sult a¯niyya (supervisor of the Royal Stables), _ __ _ also increased their political importance during and after al-Na¯sir’s third reign.37 _ Secondly, Barqu¯q, who was another hippomaniac,38 had been particularly attached to the Royal Stables before his reigns started. In August 1377, reaching the position of amir a¯khu¯r kabir in place of above-mentioned Amir Yalbugha¯ al-Na¯siri, _ Amir Barqu¯q settled in the Royal Stables like his predecessor. Then, even after seizing real power in partnership with Amir Barka al-Ju¯ba¯ni and reaching the highest posts of amir kabir and ata¯bak al-‘asa¯kir (commander-in-chief of the Mamluk army) and taking a real power in April 1378, he kept living and ruling in the above-mentioned Harra¯qa Pavilion in the Royal Stables.39 Then, in _ November 1382, it was in this pavilion that he got the consent of the amirs and chief judges for both the dethronement of Sultan al-Sa¯lih Ha¯jji, al-Na¯sir’s grandson, and _ _ _ _ his own inauguration.40 Although, after his enthronement, Barqu¯q moved his dwelling to the sultan’s residence at the top level of the Citadel, the importance of the Royal Stables was enhanced not only by the transfer of the maza¯lim there but also by another action in _

34

On the completion of Barqu¯q’s madrasa, see Ibn Hajar, I: 313–314; al-Maqrizi, Sulu¯k, III: 547; _ al-‘Ayni, 191–193; Ibn Taghri Birdi, al-Nuju¯m al-za¯hira fi mulu¯k Misr wa l-Qa¯hira, volumes I–XVI _ (Cairo: al-Mu’assasa al-Misriyya al-‘Amma li l-Ta‘rif wa l-Tarjama wa l-Tiba¯‘a wa l-Nashr, 1963–1972), _ _ XI: 243–244. 35 But attention must be paid to the way in which Barqu¯q neither destroyed Da¯r al-‘Adl nor reconstructed it on a large scale, but only repaired it a little. See al-Maqrizi, Sulu¯k, III: 530. 36 David Ayalon, ‘‘The system of payment in Mamluk military society’’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of Orient, 1/3 (1958): 263–266. 37 David Ayalon, ‘‘Amir a¯khu¯r’’, Encyclopaedia of Islam, New Edition, 12 vols (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2004), I: 442; Ayalon, ‘‘The system of payment’’, 265–266. 38 Ayalon, ‘‘The system of payment’’, 267. 39 Al-Maqrizi, Sulu¯k, III: 315, 317, 323–324. He usually climbed up to the sultan’s palace at the top of Citadel on Mondays and Thursdays. According to al-Maqrizi, the landmark event was the settlement of amir kabir Aynabak in the Royal Stables in July 1377. See ibid., 308, 314. 40 Ibid., 474–475; al-‘Ayni, 119–120.

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his first reign. Just before moving the maza¯lim, in May 1387, he moved the Royal _ Mint (Da¯r al-Darb) there and forged his new silver coins under the supervision _ of his trusted amir a¯khu¯r kabir Jarkas al-Khalili (whose name is preserved in the Kha¯n al-Khalili Bazaar in Cairo).41 In addition, the official ceremony of his restoration in February 1390 took place in the Royal Stables.42 In 1399, the meeting set for the abdication of the throne in favour of his son Faraj was also held in the maq‘ad of al-ist abul al-sult a¯ni.43 __ _ The third point is related to the politico-cultural and social meaning of the maza¯lim’s move in the context of the disposition of power, not in the Citadel but _ in the capital space. The transfer of the maza¯lim to the Royal Stables in the Lower _ Enclosure adjacent to the Rumayla Square implied that the sultan went down willingly from the power base at the top of the Citadel to the living world of his subjects to hear their complaints. During the third reign of al-Na¯sir, a complainant _ had a considerable way to go to reach the maza¯lim sessions held in Da¯r al-‘Adl: _ first through the Mudarraj Gate into the Northern Enclosure, where lay the state bureaus, then through the Qulla Gate to enter the Southern Enclosure, and at last to Da¯r al-‘Adl. It is true that the Mamluk Citadel, even under the Bahri Mamluks, _ had a somewhat open character, since it permitted some of the people to go inside at least twice a week to attend the maza¯lim sessions. But the complainants had _ to walk further into the Citadel, no doubt feeling very intimidated. In contrast, Barqu¯q’s new setting gave them easy access to the maza¯lim, by merely passing _ through the Silsila Gate from Rumayla Square, where the horse market was. This was obvious pleasing to the ruled. Barqu¯q may possibly have selected this location under the influence of al-Za¯hir Baybars, whose Da¯r al-‘Adl had also been located at _ a point near the residential area under the Northern Enclosure, though no evidence can be found in the sources.44 Rumayla Square was not only the horse market but also a centre for popular movements, especially after the 1370s, when food disturbances began to occur frequently at the time of the sharp rises in the prices of grain in Cairo. In September 1373, and again in February 1382, crowds of common people (‘awa¯mm) gathered 41

Ibn al-Fura¯t, IX: 6–8. Jarkas al-Khalili was in the post of amir a¯khu¯r kabir from June 1380 to May 1389. See Ibn Hajar, I: 211, al-Maqrizi, Sulu¯k, III: 389; Ibn Taghri Birdi, al-Manhal al-sa¯fi wa _ _ l-mustawfi ba‘da l-wa¯fi , volumes I–XV (Cairo: Al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Amma li l-Kita¯b, 1986-2004), _ IV: 205–207. Holders of the office of amir a¯khu¯r kabir during two reigns of Barqu¯q after the death of Jarkas al-Khalili in battle were as follows: Tamurbugha¯ al-Manjaki (May 1389–June 1389), Baklamish al-‘Ala¯’i (February 1390–September 1392), Ta¯ni Bak al-Yahya¯wi (September 1392–February 1398), _ Nawru¯z al-Ha¯fizi (February 1398–October 1398), Su¯dun Ta¯z (October 1398–July 1399). See Ibn _ _ _ al-Fura¯t, IX: 73, 97, 202, 310; al-Maqrizi, Sulu¯k, III: 894, 919–921, 969. 42 Ibn al-Fura¯t, IX: 200; Ibn Taghri Birdi, Nuju¯m, XII: 3–4. 43 Al-‘Ayni, 493. Another two facts that indicate the political importance of the Royal Stables during this period can be added: At the time of his expedition to fight with Barqu¯q in Syria, the puppet sultan al-Ha¯jji, who had changed his regal title from ‘‘al-Sa¯lih’’ to ‘‘al-Mansu¯r’’ at his second inauguration, _ _ _ _ appointed two na¯’ib al-ghayba (deputies during his absence), one for the Citadel, and the other for the Royal Stables. Sources say that the important strategic aim for Barqu¯q, who struggled for his restoration, was occupation of the Royal Stables. See Ibn al-Fura¯t, IX: 189–190. 44 On the location of Baybars’ Da¯r al-‘Adl, see Rabbat, ‘‘The ideological significance’’, 12–13. Barqu¯q tried to imitate the ruling style of Baybars, who was the most powerful Mamluk sultan before the Qalawunid sultanates. For example, Barqu¯q chose the same regal title ‘‘al-Za¯hir’’ as Baybars and also _ performed the ritual of ‘‘perfuming’’ (takhliq) in the Nilometer of al-Rawda Island in person, just like _ Baybars, something that had been carried out by representatives during reigns of the Qalawunid sultans. See Ibn Hajar, I: 273; al-Maqrizi, Sulu¯k, III: 491. _


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in this square and demanded that the market inspector (muhtasib) be changed as he _ was incompetent at dealing with the current high prices. In both cases, they yelled out ‘‘May God give the sultan victory!’’ (Alla¯h yansur al-sult a¯n), raising copies of the _ _ Qur’anic holy books and flags. The sultan then changed the market inspector 45 in response to the people’s demand. For these subjects, then, the maza¯lim _ sessions’ move close to such a lively stage for popular protest movements meant that the sultan was always ready to give ear to their demands and attached a great deal of importance to dialogue between the ruler and the ruled.46 Barqu¯q obviously intended to use the Royal Stables as a meeting place between the ruler and the people. On 19 Rabi’II 798/31 January 1396, the sultan extended his hands to the poor in the Royal Stables and gave alms (sadaqa) on the scale of _ as much as 50 dirhams each for about 500 poor people. After five days, however, on Saturday when the maza¯lim sessions were held, a large number of needy people _ and beggars gathered there. Shut out of the Royal Stables’ gate, 47 of them died 47 in the disturbance. The Royal Stables became an important place in which the sultan had an opportunity to get in touch with his subjects and make his paternalistic rule visible in a capital space that also functioned as ‘‘the main theatre’’ for the Mamluk Sultanate as a whole.48 This easy contact of the sultan with the people, however, gave rise to an incident. On Saturday 25 Rabi’II 801/4 January 1399, when Barqu¯q was sitting in the Royal Stables for the maza¯lim, a Persian (‘Ajami) approached and sat down by him. _ Suddenly the man grabbed the sultan’s beard and heaped abuse on him. This bold complainant was soon arrested by wa¯li al-Qa¯hira and beaten to death.49 It is notable that even a foreign man in the street could sit near the sultan on the day of maza¯lim, but this ease of access should not be interpreted as the result of mere _ negligence; it was a difficulty related to the new approach of the Circassian Mamluk sultan, who regarded talk and close contact with the subjects as an important political characteristic of his rule.

Concluding remarks After 1387, twice a week, at the Royal Stables in the Lower Enclosure of the Citadel, Sultan al-Za¯hir Barqu¯q seems to have judged the various cases freely and _ at his own discretion, but his fundamental attitude was one of respect for the qa¯d is’ _ jurisdiction in their courts. His reform of maza¯lim sessions should not be belittled, _ as the new sessions close to the civil living space functioned to some extent as a forum for popular political objections, not only by Cairenes but even by Egyptians from remote areas. We can state that the rule of Barqu¯q was Ibn Iya¯s, Bada8i 6 al-zuhu¯r fi waqa¯8i 6 al-duhu¯r, volumes I–V (Wiesbaden-Cairo: Franz Steiner, 1960–1975), I/2: 126, 298. 46 Levanoni refers to Barquq’s effort to win the trust of the people when he was an amir (Levanoni, A Turning Point, 112). 47 Ibn al-Fura¯t, IX 433; Ibn Hajar, I: 507–508; al-‘Ayni, 396. _ 48 For paternalism in Mamluk Cairo, see Shoshan, Popular Culture, 52–66; Hasebe, ‘‘Popular movements and Jaqmaq’’, 27–51. 49 Al-Maqrizi, Sulu¯k, III: 924; al-‘Ayni, 490. According to al-‘Ayni, the Persian ‘‘wanted to grab’’ the beard of sultan. Cf. Ibn Hajar, II: 41. Ibn Hajar says, ‘‘He (i.e., The Persian) took advantage of _ _ negligence of the persons present.’’ 45

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characterised by a clear paternalism, active dialogue with the people, and (so to speak) ‘‘open Citadel’’. This ruling style also showed itself in other ways too, including his stance on popular religion and Sufism. He expressed his strong inclination to many socially marginal and popular venerated people such as Talha b. ‘Abd Alla¯h al-Maghribi, _ _ Abu¯ Bakr b. ‘Abd Alla¯h al-Bija¯’i, and Ibn al-Zuqqa¯‘a, was in close contact with 50 them and invited them into the Citadel. The sultan had one of them, Ahmad _ al-Zuhu¯ri, a majdhu¯b (‘‘attracted [by God]’’, insane) type of Muslim holy man, enter freely deep into the Citadel, even into his harem and official meeting place.51 This fascinating aspect of his ‘‘open Citadel’’ policy must be examined in detail on another occasion.

Appendix List of maza¯lim cases reported in literary sources (1382–1399) _

1) Before the Transfer to Royal Stables Case no. 1 Sources: Date: Place: Subject: Procedure: Decision: Decided by:

Ibn Hajar, Inba¯’, I: 273–274; al-Maqrizi, Sulu¯k, III: 492. Juma¯_da¯ I 785/July 1383. Cairo. Conflict between Christian villagers and Muslim leaders of a mosque on the occasion of a wedding at Birma in Gharbiyya. The villagers went to Cairo and laid a complaint before Su¯dun al-Shaykhu¯ni na¯’ib al-sult a¯n. Su¯dun al-Shaykhu¯ni entrusted the judgment to Amir Jarkas al-Khalili, _who was an iqt a¯‘holder of the village. _ Three Muslim leaders were beaten and jailed. Amir Jarkas al-Khalili. (Sultan Barqu¯q subsequently ordered their release and an investigation in the village, following which some new converts to Islam in the village were executed.)

Case no. 2 Sources: Date: Place: Subject: Procedure: Decision: Decided by:

50

Ibn Hajar, Inba¯’, I: 318. _ 788/1386. Cairo. An iqt a¯‘holder of Damanhu¯r complained against Shaykh Shiha¯b al-Din _ al-Jundi al-Damanhu¯ri, who practised ‘‘commanding right and forbidding wrong (al-amr bi l-ma‘ru¯f wa l-nahy ‘an al-munkar). The sheikh was called. The sheikh was beaten. Sultan Barqu¯q.

On Talha, see Ibn Hajar, I: 442. On al-Bija¯’i, see Ibn Hajar, I: 497; Ibn Hajar, al-Durar al-ka¯mina fi _ _ _ _ _ a‘ya¯n al-mi’a al-tha¯mina, volumes I–V (Cairo: Da¯r al-Kutub al-Haditha, 1966–1967), I: 475–476; _ Ibn al-Fura¯t, IX: 418. On Ibn al-Zuqqa¯‘a (Ibra¯him b. Muhammad al-Ghazzi), see al-Maqrizi, Durar _ al-‘uqu¯d al-farida, volumes I–II (Beirut: ‘Alam al-Kutub, 1992), I: 97; Ibn Taghri Birdi, Nuju¯m, XII: 73. 51 Al-Maqrizi, Durar al-‘uqu¯d, I: 224.


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Al-Maqrizi, Sulu¯k, III: 562; Ibn Hajar, Inba¯’, I: 317, 334; Ibn al-Fura¯t, _ Ta’rikh, IX: 6. Rabi’II 789/May 1387. Probably Cairo. Complaint against Mikha¯’il na¯zir al-Iskandariyya, a recent convert to Islam, who had been a soap boiler in _Old Cairo. Many inhabitants of Alexandria testified that Mikha¯’il was a zindiq (an unbeliever). Mikha¯’il was dismissed and executed. Sultan Barqu¯q.

Case no. 4 Sources: Date: Place: Subject: Procedure:

Decision: Decided by: Notes:

Ibn al-Fura¯t, Ta’rikh, IX: 11-12; Ibn Hajar, Inba¯’, I: 331. _ Rajab 789/July 1387. Cairo. An unlawful seizure of the property left by a merchant at a funduq in Cairo. A woman complained. The guardian of the property, amin al-hukm Muhibb _ al-Din, and the Chief Sha¯fi‘i Judge Baha¯’ al-Din Muhammad _al-Subki were _ called before the sultan. The guardian stated that Muhibb al-Din and Baha¯’ _ al-Din al-Subki had usurped the property. Muhibb al-Din was beaten. _ Sultan Barqu¯q. Baha¯’ al-Din al-Subki pleaded not guilty to the offence. After that, the guardian stated that he had borne the false witness, because he could not have borne the severity of beating at that time.

2) After the transfer to Royal Stables Case no. 5 Sources: Date: Place: Subject: Procedure: Decision: Decided by:

Ibn al-Fura¯t, Ta’rikh, IX: 247. Sunday 15 Safar 793/22 January 1391. _ Royal Stables, Cairo. Complaint against na¯’ib al-salt ana bi l-wajh al-qibli Amir Aqbugha¯ _ al-Ma¯rida¯ni. Aqbugha¯ was called before the sultan from Asyu¯t. _ Aqbugha¯ was given lashes and dismissed. Sultan Barqu¯q.


Ibn al-Fura¯t, Ta’rikh, IX: 253; Ibn al-Sayrafi, Nuzha al-nufu¯s, I: 326. _ Sunday 15 Juma¯da¯ II 793/20 May 1391. Royal Stables, Cairo. A Persian merchant complained against the judge of Damascus Shiha¯b al-Din al-Qurashi who was accused of usurpation. The judge was called before the sultan. The judge was given 33 lashes and given more lashes by wa¯li al-Qa¯hira until he repaid the demanded sum. Sultan Barqu¯q.

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Case no. 7 Sources: Date: Place: Subject: Procedure: Decision; Decided by:

Ibn al-Fura¯t, Ta’rikh, IX: 254; Ibn al-Sayrafi, Nuzha al-nufu¯s, I: 327. _ Sunday 22 Juma¯da¯ II 793/27 May 1391. Royal Stables, Cairo. Jama¯l al-Din al-Hadba¯ni complained against Amir Malik, because the amir had deprived him of 600,000 dirhams and beat him. The amir was called before the sultan. The amir was given about 200 lashes. (After three days, he died.) Sultan Barqu¯q.

Case no. 8 Sources: Date: Subject: Procedure: Decision: Decided by:

Ibn Hajar, Inba¯’, I: 436. _ 794/1391–1392. The sultan made the people of Karak complain against their governor and demand the appointment of Tughaytamur na¯’ib Sis, who was going to rebel. Tughaytamur was called to Cairo. (Tughaytabur was arrested.) Sultan Barqu¯q.


Ibn al-Fura¯t, Ta’rikh, IX: 335. Rajab 795/June 1393. Probably Royal Stables, Cairo The oppression of ka¯shif al-Jiziyya Amir Na¯sir al-Din Muhammad Sha¯h. _ Farmers living in Jiziyya and Minu¯fiyya complained against_ the amir. The amir was stripped naked, beaten, and dismissed. Sultan Barqu¯q.


Ibn al-Fura¯t, Ta’rikh, IX: 335. Wednesday 7 Sha‘ba¯n 795/18 June 1393. Royal Stables, Cairo. Farmers living in Jiziyya and Minu¯fiyya complained about the immediate reappointment of Amir Na¯sir al-Din Muhammad Sha¯h. _ Sultan Barqu¯q called and questioned the _amir. The amir denied the charge. The amir was beaten and delivered to wa¯li al-Qa¯hira. Sultan Barqu¯q.

Case no. 11 Sources: Date: Subject: Decision: Decided by:

Ibn Hajar, Inba¯’, I: 486. _ Muharram 797/October–November 1394. One_ of the common people complained against the chief Sha¯fi‘i judge Shiha¯b al-Din al-Ba¯‘u¯ni. The judge was dismissed. Sultan Barqu¯q.

Case no. 12 Sources: Date: Place:

Ibn al-Fura¯t, Ta’rikh, IX: 402. Wednesday 27 Rabi‘I797/20 January 1395. Royal Stables, Cairo.

Sultan Barqu¯q and his Complaining Subjects Subject: Procedure: Decision: Decided by:

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Misrule of wa¯li al-Ushmu¯nayn Amir Yalbugha¯ al-Zayni. Many petitions were raised. The amir was called before the sultan. Yalbugha¯ al-Zayni was dismissed, given 51 lashes, and delivered to the wa¯li al-Qa¯hira. Sultan Barqu¯q.


Ibn al-Fura¯t, Ta’rikh, IX: 402; Ibn Hajar, Inba¯’, I: 489. _ Wednesday 27 Rabi’I 797/20 January 1395. Royal Stables, Cairo. A Christian man complained against Ma¯liki deputy qa¯d i Muhammad _ _ al-Difri. The deputy qa¯d i was called. The deputy qa¯_d i was beaten and ordered to give what the accuser had _ demanded. Sultan Barqu¯q.


Ibn al-Fura¯t, Ta’rikh, IX: 404–405. Sunday 21 Juma¯da¯ I 797/14 March 1395. Royal Stables, Cairo. People of Qu¯s complained about reappointment of Amir Mankli Bugha¯ al-Zayni to the_ post of wa¯li Qu¯s. _ The amir was called and the people rebuked him. The amir was delivered to the wa¯li al-Qa¯hira and forced to pay the sum that they had a right to. Sultan Barqu¯q.

Case no. 15 Sources: Date: Subject: Procedure: Decision: Decided by:

Ibn al-Fura¯t, Ta’rikh, IX: 406–409; al-Maqrizi, Sulu¯k, III: 834–837. Before 18 Juma¯da¯ II 797/10 April 1395. The supervisors of Kha¯nqa¯h Sa‘id al-Su‘ada¯’ in Cairo intended to cut down the amount spent on food for Sufis. The Sufis complained. Barqu¯q’s confidential amir Yalbugha¯ al-Sa¯limi was appointed to the post of supervisor of the system to reform it. Sultan Barqu¯q.

Case no. 16 Sources: Date: Place: Subject: Procedure: Pesonnel: Decision: Decided by:

Ibn al-Fura¯t, Ta’rikh, IX: 406–409; al-Maqrizi, Sulu¯k, III: 834–837. Thursday 8 Rajab 797/29 April 1395. Somewhere in the sultan’s palaces, Cairo. Deputy qa¯d i Ahmad al-‘Abba¯di accused Amir Yalbugha¯ al-Sa¯limi of being an _ unbeliever._ Two men were called before the committee: the chief judges and a leading jurist Sira¯j al-Din al-Bulqini. Witnesses testified that Yalbugha¯ al-Sa¯limi was not an unbeliever. Four chief judges of Cairo and Shaykh al-Isla¯m Sira¯j al-Din al-Bulqini. Ahmad al-‘Abba¯di was found guilty and jailed. The Hanafi judge decided _ _ sentence. Four chief judges of Cairo and Shaykh al-Isla¯m Sira¯j al-Din al-Bulqini.

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Al-Maqrizi, Sulu¯k, III: 892. Saturday 15 Rabi’II 800/5 January 1398. Probably Royal Stables, Cairo. Ahmad al-‘Abba¯di again accused Amir Yalbugha¯ al-Sa¯limi of being an _ unbeliever. Complaint was presented. Ahmad al-‘Abba¯di was jailed again. _ Sultan Barqu¯q.


Al-Maqrizi, Sulu¯k, III: 898. Saturday 17 Sha‘ba¯n 800/4 May 1398. Probably Royal Stables, Cairo. Complaint against the judge of Alexandria. The judge was called before the sultan. The judge was given lashes and ordered to respond to the complaint. Sultan Barqu¯q.


Muslims and Jews in Exempla Collections: A Case Study on Stephen of Bourbon’s Tractatus de materiis praedicabilibus1

SARAH LAMM

This article assesses the overall impact of images of Muslims and Jews presented in the Tractatus de materiis praedicabilibus, a thirteenth-century exempla collection by Stephen of Bourbon (d. c. 1261), a Dominican friar from Lyon. By reading exempla within the context of the collections used by preachers when composing their sermons, we can better understand a key stage in the dissemination of ideas about Muslims and Jews. In keeping with Dominican priorities, Stephen’s approach to Islam focused on crusade and mission. However, conversion is largely absent from his material on Jews, which is primarily scriptural or Marian in its focus. It is clear from this survey that approaches to Muslims and Jews remained separate. Also, Stephen did not use the full range of anti-Jewish or anti-Muslim polemic in circulation in the thirteenth century, instead focusing on material that resonated with his interests as a Dominican and an inquisitor. As Stephen’s Tractatus demonstrates, each exempla collection represents only one aspect of a heterogeneous response to both Jews and Muslims.

ABSTRACT

Keywords: Stephen of Bourbon; Exempla; Jews; Muslims; Polemic; Dominican order – sermons and preaching

The modern approach to the study of exempla has done a great deal to advance awareness of the value of sermon stories as evidence for a wide range of medieval ideas and attitudes.2 Over the past century, scholars have worked to catalogue and publish as many of these innumerable anecdotes as possible, increasing awareness of and access to the genre. However, an emphasis on exempla as self-contained units of information, and on their categorisation, has led to a dangerous de-contextualisation of the genre. Whether looking for evidence of Christian Europe’s attitudes towards Muslims or Jews, or insight into some other aspect of the medieval worldview, historians looking at exempla have tended to focus Correspondence: Sarah Lamm, Downing College, Cambridge, CB2 1DQ, UK. E-mail: SL356@ cam.ac.uk 1 This article forms a part of the author’s current doctoral research under the supervision of Dr Anna Sapir Abulafia. 2 For an overview of the state of the field, see Claude Bre´mond, Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude ˆ ge Occidental, volume XL] (Turnhout: Schmitt, L’exemplum [Typologie des Sources du Moyen A Brepols, 1982).


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on the tales themselves with little attention paid to the collections in which they are found.3 Modern indices of exempla, which catalogue stories by theme rather than source, have contributed to this approach.4 Presented in this way, the relationship between appearances of similar tales in different texts overshadows the relationship between different stories presented side-by-side in the same collection. By glossing over variations and reducing each exemplum to a single central theme, indices place an overemphasis on the universal elements of exempla, often with baffling results. In Frederick Tubach’s Index exemplorum, for instance, a tale in which a Saracen convert to Christianity gives away his goods in alms only to have his sons sue the bishop after his death, claiming that their father was promised a hundredfold reward, is grouped together in a single entry with two very different tales. The other stories tell of a greedy merchant who gives away his wealth in hopes of the hundredfold return but receives instead three lumps of coal, and of St John the Almoner, who is rewarded a hundredfold for his generosity.5 A list of 30 sources known to contain any one of these exempla follows. Yet other than illustrating the hundredfold reward awaiting the well-intentioned almsgiver, these stories have little in common. The appearance of a Saracen convert rather than a merchant, let alone St. John, radically alters the tone of the exemplum. How did authors who used this story to illustrate the rewards for giving alms situate it within their work? Was the hundredfold reward indeed its central moral? What relationship does the image of the convert and his Muslim son have with the author’s portrayal of Islam elsewhere in the collection? Surely such considerations would have had an impact on how the story was read and interpreted by its medieval audience. After all, the medieval preacher did not have the Index exemplorum to hand when composing his sermons, but an exempla collection, a preaching aid influenced in content and tone by its author. It is also vital to remember that no one thirteenth-century compiler of exempla included in his collection the full range of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim stories available at the time. With a vast number of exempla to select from in sources ranging from histories to hagiographies, and a variety of tropes with which to characterise both Jew and Muslim, authors of medieval exempla collections often reflected in their work only one or two of the available approaches to the nonChristian other. This process was affected by the author’s own attitudes and ideas, as well as the sources available to him. By assessing the overall impact of the exempla in one collection, the Tractatus de materiis praedicabilibus of Stephen of Bourbon (d. ca 1261), this article sets out to dispel the notion that exempla are free-floating nuggets of cultural data. Preaching 3

Examples of historians focusing on the development of one tale or theme include Miri Rubin’s work on host desecration tales: ‘‘Imagining the Jew: the late medieval Eucharistic discourse: on stories of host desecration’’, in In and out of the ghetto: Jewish-Gentile relations in late medieval and early modern Germany, ed. R.P. Hsia and H. Lehmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 177–208. Also, on the Jew in the sewer, see Martha Bayless, ‘‘The story of the fallen Jew and the iconography of Jewish unbelief’’, Viator, 34 (2003): 142–156. 4 Frederic C. Tubach, Index exemplorum: a handbook of medieval religious tales [FF Communications, volume CCIV] (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1969). Stith Thompson, Motif-Index of Folk-Literature: A Classification of Narrative Elements in Folk-Tales, Ballads, Myths, Fables, Mediaeval Romances, Exempla, Fabliaux, Jest-Books, and Local Legends, volumes I–VI [FF Communications, volumes CVI–CIX, CXVI–CXVII] (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1932–1936). 5 Tubach, 20: entry 176, ‘‘Alms, repaid hundredfold (Var)’’.

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aids were often the first port of call for preachers in search of exempla to use in their sermons. By reading exempla as components of these collections, we can better understand a key stage in the dissemination of images of Jews and Muslims to medieval audiences outside of the scholarly elite. Looking at the material on Muslims and Jews presented side-by-side in Stephen’s Tractatus also makes it possible to compare views of Muslims and Jews, and modify recent claims by scholars such as Jeremy Cohen and Dominique Iogna-Prat that both groups received similar polemical treatment by the thirteenth-century Church.6 The vast preaching aid known as the Tractatus de materiis praedicabilibus is the only work that Stephen of Bourbon, a Dominican inquisitor from Lyon, is known to have composed – and even it is unfinished. Stephen died around 1261 while writing the fifth of an intended seven books, each dedicated to one gift of the Holy Spirit. What remains consists of a collection of over 3,000 exempla surrounded by a web of theological material on the gifts of fear, piety, knowledge, strength, and counsel. Despite its uncompleted status, the Tractatus is one of the largest preaching aids known, and has proved irresistible to historians of popular culture in search of exempla evidence.7 Unfortunately, it has suffered from an ill-conceived nineteenth-century compilation of excerpts which omitted any exempla published elsewhere and almost all of the theological material, vastly distorting the overall impression of the collection as a whole.8 This partial edition was, for many years, the only version of the Tractatus available in print. Fortunately, Jacques Berlioz has undertaken a modern edition; books one and three have now appeared in print, and Prof. Berlioz has kindly shared his initial edition of book two with me as well.9 Combining my own survey of the manuscripts with Prof. Berlioz’s endeavours allows for a much fuller understanding of Stephen’s project, particularly with regard to his portrayal of Jews and Muslims.10 From a consideration of the Tractatus as a whole, it becomes clear that Stephen selected the material most relevant to his own ideas and experiences as an inquisitor, as well as tapping the sources most readily available to him as a Dominican friar. The preacher using Stephen’s collection, then, would not have received an overview of all anti-Jewish or anti6 Jeremy Cohen, ‘‘The Muslim connection, or the changing role of the Jew in high medieval theology’’, in From Witness to Witchcraft: Jews and Judaism in medieval Christian Thought, ed. J. Cohen [Wolfenbu¨tteler Mittelalter-Studien, volume XI] (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1996), pp. 141–162. Dominque Iogna-Prat, Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism, and Islam (1000-1150), trans. G.R. Edwards (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), p. 323. 7 Studies that rely on Stephen’s exempla for evidence include: Jacques Berlioz, ‘‘Crapauds et cadavres dans la litte´rature exemplaire (XIIe-XIVe sie`cles)’’, Micrologus: Natura, Scienze e Societa` Medievali, 7 (1999): 231–246; Jacques Le Goff, La Naissance du Purgatoire (Paris: Gallimard, 1981); Alan Bernstein, ‘‘The invocation of hell in thirteenth-century Paris’’, in Supplementum festivum. Studies in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. J. Hankins, J. Monfasani, and F. Purnell (Binghamton: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1987), pp. 13–54. 8 Anecdotes historiques, le´gendes et apologues tire´s du recueil ine´dit d’E´tienne de Bourbon, Dominicain du XIIIe sie`cle, ed. Albert Lecoy de La Marche (Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1877). 9 Berlioz completed his edition of the prologue and book one with Jean-Luc Eichenlaub: Stephen of Bourbon, Tractatus de diversis materiis predicabilibus: prologus et liber primus, ed. J. Berlioz and J.-L. Eichenlaub [Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis, volume CXXIV] (Turnhout: Brepols, 2002). Book three he edited alone; Tractatus de diversis materiis predicabilibus: liber tertius, ed. J. Berlioz [CCCM, volume CXXIVb] (Turnhout: Brepols, 2006). 10 This article uses Oxford, Bodleian, Oriel College MS 68 in conjunction with the printed editions and Prof. Berlioz’s initial edition of book two. Citations are listed by book, title, and chapter, as well as reference to a published source (where possible).

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Muslim exempla available in the thirteenth century, but those which promoted certain images that, when read together, display specific, if not unique, attitudes towards both groups. Ironically, the most striking fact about Stephen’s anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish material is its paucity. Of the approximately 3,000 exempla estimated to be in the Tractatus, I have found less than 50 that deal with Jews or Muslims. By contrast, Stephen dedicates the best part of the fourth book – itself larger than the first three combined – to Christian heresies. This emphasis on heresy is not surprising. In 1236 Stephen was granted the office of inquisitor, and dedicated the remainder of his career to the discovery and correction of heresy. Stephen himself confirms that he actively pursued his duties in that capacity, including in his collection several anecdotes mined from inquisitorial experiences. The description of the origin of the Waldensian heresy found in the Tractatus was based on information collected from priests who had known the sect’s founder Valdes.11 The famed fourteenth-century inquisitor Bernard Gui (d. 1331) considered Stephen’s information so accurate that he lifted much of it directly into his own manual for inquisitors.12 What information Stephen did include about Muslims continues to betray his inquisitorial emphasis on heterodoxy. Stephen consistently framed Islam as a heresy, using similar terms and tropes to those employed against past and present heresies. The collection includes a biography of Muhammad, found sandwiched _ between lives of the early Church heresiarchs Arius and Pelagius.13 It is clear from this positioning that Stephen cast Muhammad in the role of heresiarch too, and the _ contents of the biography bear this out. With information gleaned from the Historia Orientalis by Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240), Stephen tells us that Muhammad’s _ laws were fed to him by two advisors – a Jew and an apostate Christian who, failing to convert the faithful to his heresy in Europe, travelled across the sea in search of a more corruptible audience.14 A host of further exempla reinforce the view of Islam as heresy. The tone of many of these stories mirrors that found in several dealing with the Albigensian crusade. For instance, Stephen notes that the faces of Muslim casualties are contorted into terrible grimaces, while the heads of dead crusaders are seen to smile, and even laugh – a clear indication in his mind, of exactly who was having a better time of it in the afterlife.15 Similarly, in a story concerning the Albigensian crusade, 11

One of Stephen’s sources was a priest named Bernard Ydros, who had been employed by Valdes as a scribe (Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 209). 12 Wakefield and Evans, 346. Peter Biller notes that Stephen is one of only two sources from which Gui uses ‘‘extensive verbatim quotation’’ concerning the Waldensians. Peter Biller, ‘‘Bernard Gui, sex and luciferanism’’, in Praedicatores, inquisitores 1. The Dominicans and the medieval inquisition: acts of the 1st International seminar on the Dominicans and the Inquisition, 23–25 February 2002, ed. W. Hoyer [Dissertationes Historicae, volume XXIX] (Rome: Istituto Storico Domenicano, 2004), pp. 455–470 at p. 462. For Stephen’s interest in the Cathars, see Jacques Berlioz, ‘‘La pre´dication des Cathares selon l’inquisiteur Etienne de Bourbon (mort vers 1261)’’, Heresis: Revue d’he´re´siologie me´die´vale, 31 (1999): 9–35. 13 4.7.29. Oriel Coll. MS 68, fol. 212r-v. 14 Oriel Coll. MS 68, fol. 212r. See Jacques de Vitry, Historia Orientalis, ed. F. Moschus (Farnborough: Gregg, 1971), pp. 18–20. (This is a facsimilie reprint of the 1597 Douai edition). 15 See, for instance, 2.5.10, ‘‘Item, audivi a quodam quod cum fuisset in campo ubi multa corpora prostrata iacebant cruce signatorum et Sarracenorum, cruce signati etiam mortui videbantur ridere. Sarraceni autem


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Stephen declares that ‘‘martyrs, comforted, went to death rejoicing like one who goes to be married. In contrast, heretics go sadly to death.’’16 The parallels between the fate of the Saracen and Cathar dead are readily apparent. Stephen’s assumption that military action against Muslims was a part of the same campaign as that against Cathars is implicit in his assertion that Waldensians condemn preachers of crusades ‘‘against Saracens or Albigensians’’.17 Stephen himself preached the Albigensian crusade at Ve´zelay, and so needed a ready store of exempla to draw knights to the cause.18 To add similar stories originally meant for recruiting for another crusade – that against the Muslims in the East – must not have been a great stretch. Nor did Stephen have to expend a great deal of energy to find this material. He took his anti-Muslim exempla from sources that were popular and readily available – primarily Jacques de Vitry’s Historia Orientalis and an unattributed Historia Antiochena.19 The Historia Antiochena, used by at least four other Dominican authors of exempla collections as a source of information on the First Crusade, has yet to be identified conclusively, and may no longer exist.20 James MacGregor argues convincingly that the collection probably ‘‘is an historical compilation, albeit not necessarily wholly about crusading, that circulated, and may even have been compiled, within the Dominican Order’’ from the accounts of Fulcher of Chartres, Peter Tudebode, Raymond D’Augiles, and possibly the Chanson d’Antioch.21 The use of an in-house Dominican compilation would certainly fit with Stephen’s use of material known to be promoted for circulation within Dominican libraries. Stephen probably also gleaned some interest in eastern crusades from Humbert of Romans (d. 1277), first lector and then prior of Stephen’s monastery at Lyon before becoming master general of the entire order in 1254. Humbert penned a crusade preaching manual that Penny Cole describes as ‘‘an omnibus, a reference collection of ideas and information about crusading up to his own day’’, as well as his own collection of exempla based around the gift of fear.22 Stephen’s characterisation of Muslim fasting practices, for instance, closely mirrors that found in a festial sermon by Humbert. In a chapter exploring the correct procedures for Christian fasting, Stephen declares that fasts, ‘‘ought not to be like those of the Saracens, who abstain from food by day, but by night make time for ‘feasting

(footnote continued) horribiles risus et vultus habebant’’, ed. J. Berlioz, unpublished. A similar description can be found at 3.6.6; Berlioz, Tractatus: liber tertius, 228. 16 4.7.30, Lecoy de la Marche, 286. 17 4.7.31, Lecoy de La Marche, 296. 18 2.7.13, Lecoy de la Marche, 140. 19 The exempla on the siege of Antioch, the aid of St George, and Godfrey of Bouillon can all be traced to Jacques’ work, which Stephen cites as the ‘‘Historia Transmarina’’. The stories of the laughing heads and the prostitutes at Antioch are from the Historia Antiochena. 20 Stephen of Bourbon, Humbert of Romans, Jacobus de Voragine, Jean Gobi, and John Bromyard all cite a Historia Antiochena as a source of crusade exempla. James MacGregor provides an overview of scholarship on the identification of the Historia Antiochena as well as his own theories about its identity. James MacGregor, ‘‘The First Crusade in late medieval exempla’’, The Historian, 68 (2006): 29–48. 21 MacGregor, 47. 22 Penny Cole, ‘‘Humbert of Romans and the crusades’’, in The Experience of Crusading, 1: Western Approaches, ed. M. Bull and N. Housley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 151–174 at p. 164.

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and drunkenness’ and filthy licentiousness’’.23 Similarly, Humbert derides the morals of Saracens ‘‘who spend their feast-days in lust, drunkenness, and all that sort of wickedness’’.24 It is unclear whether Stephen relied on Humbert for his information, or vice-versa; however, it is clear that the two men shared both exempla and theological conceptions of the Muslim other. Several stories of the eastern crusades made their way into the Tractatus. Stephen credits Godfrey of Bouillon and his compatriots with the slaughter of an ‘‘infinite’’ number of Saracens at the siege of Jerusalem in a chapter on ‘‘the power of the cross to annihilate one’s enemies’’.25 A veritable panoply of saints, including James, George and Andrew are drafted in to aid the crusading armies.26 In an effort to shame Christians into taking up the cross, Stephen recounts the tale of a Muslim convert to Christianity who was captured and endured tortures at the hands of his abandoned Saracen compatriots.27 In another exemplum, crusaders are provided with a noble and worthy foe in the person of Saladin, who is wise enough to recognise the ephemeral nature of material wealth. In the story we are told that ‘‘Saladin, great among the Saracens, when he saw that he was nearing death, ordered his shroud to be carried out, and ordered that the one carrying it should declare ‘of all his possessions, the great emperor Saladin will take only this with him’’’.28 Not all of Stephen’s exempla are explicitly crusade-related, however. Stephen tells the tale of a wealthy Egyptian Muslim, who generously opened his grain stores during a famine. The empty stores are miraculously refilled by the Virgin Mary, after which the man and his household convert to Christianity.29 Stephen also includes the exemplum mentioned above, in which the sons of a converted Saracen take the bishop responsible for his conversion to court. The sons claim that their father, now dead, was promised a hundredfold return if he gave away all of his money as alms. According to the sons, the bishop’s deception has robbed them of their inheritance. The bishop is redeemed, however, when the dead man himself proclaims that the bishop’s promise had indeed been fulfilled, and that he has been rewarded with eternal life.30 If these stories provide a more ambiguous tone to Stephen’s material on Muslims, their optimism is tempered. Both tales rely on conversion to Christianity to make their characters acceptable. Stephen’s inclusion of these exempla within his collection reflects a contemporary sentiment that was not ready to demonise the Muslim foe completely, perhaps harbouring continued hopes for the possibility of conversion. Stephen believed that many Muslims had already converted in secret, and others would convert once given the opportunity to compare the 23

‘‘Non debent esse Sarracenorum qui de die abstinent a cibis, de nocte vacant commessationibus et ebrietatibus et immunditiis luxurie. Ro. 13 c: Non in cubilibus, etc.’’, 3.5.6, in Berlioz, Tractatus: liber tertius, 205. 24 Quoted in Alexander Murray, ‘‘Religion among the poor in thirteenth-century France: the testimony of Humbert de Romans’’, Traditio: Studies in Ancient and Medieval History, Thought, and Religion, 30 (1974): 285–324 at 304. 25 2.5.6, ed. J. Berlioz, unpublished. 26 James: 3.6.5; George: 3.6.10; Andrew: 3.6.10, all in Berlioz, Tractatus: liber tertius, 227, 252–253, 255–256. 27 4.9.5, Lecoy de la Marche, 337–338. 28 1.7.4, Berlioz and Eichenlaub, 289. 29 2.3.1, Lecoy de la Marche, 83–84. 30 2.7.2, Lecoy de la Marche, 122.


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Gospels to the Qur’a¯n.31 Ongoing military campaigns also created space for the portrayal of the Muslims as a worthy enemy, a depiction that does not allow for a complete condemnation of the Muslim foe. Stephen provides an example of this image with the exemplum of Saladin’s shroud. Stephen may also have picked up on a particularly Dominican strain of thought with the Marian miracle in Egypt. Krijnie Ciggaar claims that ‘‘the Dominican order had contacts in Egypt and possibly ‘created’ its own Marian miracles, especially in the context of its missionary activities among the Saracens’’.32 While the claim of invention may be a step too far, Ciggaar is certainly right to believe that Dominicans would have made use of eastern Marian miracles to convert Muslims. After all, for Dominicans, Mary was as a holy figure recognised by both religions. This shared belief in Mary as virgin mother provided Dominicans with a clear point of access for missionary efforts.33 The story’s obvious and favourable parallels between the wealthy Egyptian and the actions of the biblical figure of Joseph during another famine in Egypt reinforce a sympathetic interpretation of the relationship between the two faiths. Stephen’s material on Muslims provided exempla for recruiting both crusaders and missionaries, and these two goals are by no means contradictory. Benjamin Kedar notes that the mendicant orders were active in the promotion of both mission and crusade, and that it was even possible to see ‘‘the same friar engaged in both activities’’.34 Thus, Stephen appears to have embraced the wider Dominican mission to the Saracens in the material that he includes on Muslims, at least where it complimented his writings against heresy, and was readily available in popular histories. The picture when we move to his ideas about Jews changes radically. The differences in Stephen’s approach to Jews as compared with his approach to Muslims become obvious in his assessment of their respective fasting practices. Stephen follows his accusations that Muslims engage in licentious and gluttonous behaviour after fasting with a condemnation of Jewish fasting practices as well. Stephen adds that fasts ought not to be like those of the Jews who, when fasting, are open to cruelty. As Isaiah 58:4, ‘‘Behold you fast for debates and strife, and strike with the fist wickedly’’. Those who fasted, and preached fasting, and killed Naboth acted in this manner 3. Reg. 21.

31

4.7.29, Lecoy de la Marche, 275. Jacques de Vitry made similar claims about secret converts: Jacques de Vitry, Lettres de la Cinquie`me Croisade, ed. R. B. C. Huygens [Sous la Re`gle de Saint Augustin, volume V] (Turnhout: Brepols, 1998), p. 68. 32 Krijnie Ciggaar, ‘‘Glimpses of Outremer in exempla and miracula’’, in East and West in the Crusader States: Context, Contacts, Confrontations, ed. K. Ciggaar and H. Teule, volume II [Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, volume XCII] (Leuven: Peeters, 1999), pp. 131–152 at p. 143. 33 A model for the use of an eastern Marian tale for missionary purposes can be found in the accounts of a miracle-working icon of the Virgin Mary at the Greek convent of Saydnaya, venerated by both Muslims and Christians. See Benjamin Z. Kedar, ‘‘Convergence of Oriental Christian, Muslim, and Frankish worshippers: the case of Saydnaya’’, in De Sion exhibit lex et verbum domini de Hierusalem: essays on medieval law, liturgy, and literature in honour of Amnon Linder, ed. Y. Hen [Cultural Encounters in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, I](Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), pp. 59–69. 34 Benjamin Z. Kedar, Crusade and Mission: European Approaches toward the Muslims (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 138.

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As a final example of how scheming Jews employ fasting, Stephen points to Acts 23:12, in which a group of conspirators seal their pact to kill the apostle Paul with a promise to neither eat nor drink until the deed has been done.35 While Stephen’s understanding of Muslim fasting is not based on any authority, but presented as a contemporary observation, his conception of the Jewish fast is entirely rooted in the biblical, and his examples are drawn exclusively from Scripture. This difference is evident throughout the work. While all the Muslims in Stephen’s exempla are contemporary, or near contemporary, the Jews mentioned in the work are overwhelmingly scriptural. This portrayal stands in sharp contrast to the missionary efforts of Dominicans such as Ramoń Martı´, or the friars responsible for the burning of the Talmud in Paris, for whom the decidedly un-biblical, contemporary Jew was paramount. Both the Old and New Testaments provided Stephen with examples of bad behaviour by Jews. At one point readers are urged ‘‘be not like the wicked Jews. . . who worshipped the golden calf’’, and four whole chapters, with titles such as ‘‘Christ’s personal suffering’’ and ‘‘reasons for pain on the cross’’, deal with the insults, spittle, etc. hurled at Christ by the Jews during the crucifixion.36 Material concerning biblical Jews is present throughout the work. Each of the five books contains some mention of Old or New Testament Jews in several titles. Clearly, for Stephen, Jews – at least in their scriptural form – were a pervasive force in all aspects of Christian theology. This omnipresence stands in stark contrast to the information that Stephen includes about Muslims, which is confined to one or two titles. The paucity of contemporary material concerning Jews only adds to a sense throughout the Tractatus that the time for the Jews has past. Unlike the more ambiguous portrayal of Muslims, it feels as though the hope of Jewish conversion is very distant indeed. We are reminded that the Jews were given 40 years after the death of Christ to repent before they were punished with the destruction of the Temple, and that in that time they ignored a panoply of signs sent to show them that they were on the wrong path.37 When they tried to rebuild the Temple in the time of the emperor Julian (361–363), their error was confirmed, as an earthquake swallowed them along with their efforts.38 Jews, it seems, had been given ample opportunities to change. Indeed, it seems better simply not to have these hopeless Jews around. According to Stephen, Edessa is said to have had a letter, written by Christ to King Abgar, which prevented Jews from settling in the area.39 In emphasising the historical nature of Judaism, superseded by Christianity, Stephen was following centuries of Christian doctrine concerning the appropriate response to the continued existence of the Jewish faith after Christ. The trope of the hard-hearted, static Jew, cursed to live subservient in diaspora as punishment for killing Christ, had long been established.40 Again demonstrating his preference

35

3.5.6, Berlioz, Tractatus: liber tertius, 205. Golden calf: 3.1.5, Berlioz, Tractatus: liber tertius, 48. On Jewish torment of Christ on the cross: 2.4.3-6, ed. J. Berlioz, unpublished. 37 2.2.1, ed. J. Berlioz, unpublished. 38 2.5.6, ed. J. Berlioz, unpublished. 39 2.1.6, ed. J. Berlioz, unpublished. 40 Amos Funkenstein, ‘‘Basic types of Christian anti-Jewish polemics’’, Viator, 2 (1971): 373–382 at 373. 36


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for easily accessible material, Stephen relied heavily on Rufinus’ translation of Eusebius’ Ecclesiastica Historia and Cassiodorus’ Historia Tripartita for his information on New Testament-era Jewry.41 Both histories fit the criteria for reference works that Humbert of Romans deemed mandatory for every Dominican library.42 Notwithstanding the fact that the vast majority of Stephen’s references to Jews are derived from the Old and New Testaments, he does sometimes tell tales of post-biblical Jews, whose lives and actions would have been more recognisable to a contemporary audience. The most striking characteristic of Stephen’s portrayal of non-scriptural Jews is the frequency with which they appear in opposition to the Virgin Mary. In this small cache of exempla, Stephen begins to move away from more traditional interpretations of continued Jewish existence in a Christian world. Combining the contemporary popularity of Mary’s cult and his own inquisitorial suspicions about the content of the Jewish liturgy with the traditional Augustinian doctrine of witness, Stephen paints a picture of a post-biblical Jew who is both evil and dangerous, an active enemy attacking the Church and its favourite saint. The Jews’ rejection of Mary’s virginity and their implication in the death of her son put Jews in a vastly different position from their Muslim counterparts. Far from being rewarded by the Virgin for good deeds, like the Egyptian Muslim who opened his grain stores, it is Mary’s wrath that the Jews incur throughout Stephen’s collection. A series of exempla, primarily found in one title dedicated entirely to the Blessed Virgin, catalogue a number of Jewish affronts to Mary, including throwing her image down a latrine, abusing a waxen figure of her son, and promising magical assistance to any who will curse her name.43 Nor is Mary a passive recipient of such insults. In the case of the waxen image, for instance, Mary orchestrates a Christian raid on the houses of the Jewish perpetrators, who are captured and killed. Jewish hatred of Mary can also be seen in the exemplum of a young Jewish boy thrown into a raging furnace by his horrified and horrifyingly callous father for visiting a church dedicated to the Virgin with his Christian playmates.44 The story of the Jewish boy is one of the most enduring anti-Jewish exempla of the Middle Ages, and it has been studied extensively by Miri Rubin.45 Indeed, each of the antiJewish Marian stories that Stephen includes in the Tractatus had a long pedigree and enjoyed a massive circulation throughout the thirteenth century. Most have been catalogued and studied in the context of Marian miracle collections.46 Stephen must have used one such collection as a prominent source for the behaviour of non-scriptural Jews.

41

Stephen mistakenly believed his translation of Eusebius to be by Jerome. Berlioz and Eichenlaub, 5. Edward Brett, ‘‘The Dominican library in the thirteenth century’’, Journal of Library History, 15 (1980): 303–308 at 308. The list can be found in Humbert’s Opera de vita regulari, ed. J. J. Berthier, volumes I–II (Rome: Befani, 1888), II: 265. 43 Latrine: 2.6.16; Magical assisstance: 2.6.18, ed. J. Berlioz, unpublished; Waxen figure: 4.9.9, Oriel Coll. MS 68, fol. 243r. 44 1.5.8, Berlioz and Eichenlaub, 182–183. 45 For an introduction to work on the story, see Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), pp. 7–28. 46 In addition to Rubin’s work, see for instance, William Chester Jordan, ‘‘Marian devotion and the Talmud trial of 1240’’, in Religionsgespra¨che im Mittelalter, ed. B Lewis and F. Niewo¨hner [Wolfenbu¨tteler Mittelalter-Studien, volume IV] (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1992), pp. 61–76 for a good introduction. 42

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Jennifer Shea has demonstrated an intimate link between anti-Jewish sentiment and stories of the Virgin contained in Marian miracle collections.47 Marian miracle stories in the thirteenth century increasingly set up the contemporary Jew in direct opposition to Mary, attributing to Jews an active hatred of and desire to malign the Virgin. Although William Chester Jordan has proclaimed thirteenth-century Northern France as the epicentre of Marian anti-Judaism, it is clear that by the second half of the century the trend for associating the Jews with attacks on the mother of Christ reached at least as far south as Stephen in Lyon.48 The miracle collections that Stephen mined for material on Judaism’s active antipathy towards Mary and her son would have been confirmed by similar accounts from his work as an inquisitor. It is likely that during his training as an inquisitor Stephen learned of the claim that Jews curse Mary’s name as a part of Sabbath observances, an accusation that he repeats in the Tractatus.49 Yoseph Yerushalmi notes that an interrogation formula traced to the late thirteenth century asks: ‘‘In what way do Jews pray against goyim and against the clergy of the Roman church?’’50 Bernard Gui included Latin translations of several Jewish prayers, including the alenu, as proof of anti-Christian and anti-Marian liturgy in his manual for inquisitors.51 Furthermore, similar accusations that Jews attack Christ and Christians in their prayers appeared in papal bulls by Clement IV in 1267 and Honorius IV in 1268.52 The idea that Jews curse Mary as part of their daily religious activities fits well with the Marian emphasis in Stephen’s version of the tale of the Jewish boy cast into the furnace. In contrast to the strong Eucharistic emphasis of most tellings of the tale, Stephen’s version highlights the boy’s adoration of Mary’s image while in church, and the benefits of such worship in the shape of Mary’s miraculous assistance.53 An underlying belief in Jewish hatred of Mary heightens the surprise when a Jewish child adores her image, and explains the father’s violent reaction. This is not to say that Stephen was unaware of the Eucharistic undertones usually associated with the story, in which the child is protected after partaking of the Eucharist and even, as a Christ-child baking in an oven, acts as a metaphor for the host himself. Stephen admits that he is merely paraphrasing the miracle, which he has read elsewhere, to illustrate the benefits of worshipping Mary. 47

Jennifer Shea, ‘‘The influence of the cult of the Virgin Mary on Christian perceptions of Jews, with particular reference to the role of Marian miracle stories in England and France, c. 1050–c. 1300’’, PhD Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2004. 48 Jordan, 75. 49 ‘‘Item, quia illa die Iudei perfidi eam in synagogis suis maxime solebant et eius filium blasphemare, in recompensationem huius christiani in die illa maxime voluerunt eam laudare et honorare’’, 2.6.10, ed. J. Berlioz, unpublished. 50 Yosef Yerushalmi, ‘‘The Inquisition and the Jews of France in the time of Bernard Gui’’, Harvard Theological Review, 63 (1970): 317–376 at 356–357. 51 Yerushalmi catalogues and analyses Gui’s list, pp. 357–363. Anna Sapir Abulafia notes that there may be some truth in such accusations in her article ‘‘Invectives against Christianity in the Hebrew Chronicles of the First Crusade’’, in Crusade and Settlement: Papers Read at the First Conference of the Society for the Study of the Crusades and the Latin East and presented to R.C. Smail, ed. P. W. Edbury (Cardiff: University College Cardiff Press, 1985), pp. 66–72. 52 Yerushalmi, 356–357. 53 ‘‘Item, si beata Virgo Iudeum Iudei filium qui, quia cum aliis pueris christianis ad ecclesiam beate Virginis iuerat et coram ymagine eius adoraverat, proiectus est a patre in furnum ardentem, eum sub pallio suo occultans ab incendio liberavit, sicut legitur in libro de miraculis eius, quare non liberet ipsa a purgatorio vel in toto vel in parte eos qui christiani servierunt sibi devote, et alii sancti?’’, Berlioz and Eichenlaub, 182–183.


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Once again, we are reminded of the importance of reading exempla in context. These are complex tales open to several layers of interpretation, and it would be an inexperienced preacher indeed who would try to tackle them all in one sermon. By focusing exclusively on the Marian element of the tale, Stephen’s aid supplied the potential preacher with enough material to make his point, but no more, while reinforcing his own views on Jewish antipathy towards the Virgin. Curiously, none of the characters in Stephen’s versions of these Marian tales convert. Even the tale of the Jewish boy ends before either he or his mother are converted – the traditional conclusion to the exemplum,54 although Stephen may have assumed that his readers would have been sufficiently familiar with the tale from other sources to infer this happy ending. However, the picture from the exempla taken as a whole indicate that conversion was not Stephen’s aim. Many Jews in the remaining post-biblical tales are either punished, killed, or simply return to their life as Jews once their part in the story has been played. Some even benefit from their status – as usurers they ‘‘partake of profit without danger’’, and are even granted lands taken unjustly from Christians.55 To some extent, Stephen’s lack of interest in Jewish conversion can be explained by the context in which these exempla are placed. The tale of the Jewish boy, for instance, is in a section that is not concerned with Jews, but with the Virgin Mary. Mary’s power to aid the dead in the afterlife is lauded – if she will save a Jew from a fire, how much more a devout Christian from the perils of purgatory?56 Simply put, Stephen’s collection, meant for Catholic preachers addressing Christian flocks, is more interested in presenting examples of right behaviour for Christians than opportunities for Jewish conversion. Yet the fact that Stephen employed Jewish characters to illustrate Mary’s power, and furthermore allowed these Jews to remain unconverted, requires further exploration. Stephen was not alone in the portrayal of unconverted Jews. Fellow exempla compiler Caesarius of Heisterbach (d. c. 1240) also allows several of his Jewish characters to remain unconverted in the face of miraculous evidence.57 Caesarius’ decision appears to be influenced by a desire to maintain the integrity of the Jew as unbiased witness to Christian truth, a role first allocated to them by St Augustine. In one instance, a Jew, although unbelieving, is willing to confirm to the local lord abbot that he has witnessed a miracle in which a crucifix bled after being pierced by an arrow during a siege at a church. The abbot declares that he is satisfied with the veracity of the miracle, having heard it from an infidel Jew.58 Stephen’s portrayal of unconverted Jews is, however, considerably more malicious than that of the benign and impartial witness, voluntarily confirming Christian miracles. And so we must look for another explanation for the presence of unconverted Jews in Stephen’s work. Stephen’s inquisitorial understanding of Jews as active enemies of Mary, combined with the traditional theological opposition of Jews to Mary seem to have 54

Miri Rubin notes that the version in the Legenda aurea also ends without conversion. Rubin, Gentile Tales, 11. 55 Lands: 2.6, ed. J. Berlioz, unpublished; Profits: 3.4.20, Berlioz, Tractatus: liber tertius, 167. 56 Berlioz and Eichenlaub, 183. 57 Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialogus miraculorum, ed. J. Strange, volumes I-II (Cologne: J. M. Heberle, 1851), II: 232 and I:94. 58 Ibid., II: 232. See Ivan Marcus, ‘‘Images of the Jews in the exempla of Caesarius of Heisterbach’’, in From Witness to Witchcraft, p. 248, for an overview of the tale.

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reached a head in these anti-Jewish Marian tales. As Mary’s ultimate enemy, the Jews’ conversion becomes a narrative impossibility. Just as God would not pardon the devil, Mary, as God’s agent, cannot intercede on behalf of the Jew, who is the devil’s agent. Stephen’s portrayal of contemporary Jewish characters in his exempla collection works well within this model. Jews are associated with the demonic and Jewish sorcerers act as go-betweens for desperate Christians and the demons that promise wealth and professional advancement. Stephen includes the popular Marian miracle story of Theophilus, which tells of a cleric who contracts the services of a Jewish sorcerer in order to be elected bishop.59 The Jew and Mary are cast in insurmountable opposition.60 To be sure, Stephen’s ultimate goal remains the glorification of Mary, with the Jews in a secondary role as the evil that provides the opportunity for an illustration of Mary’s intercessory powers. And so the Jews in the Marian miracles in Stephen’s Tractatus, like those in Caesarius’ collection, continue to serve as witnesses providing the opportunity to confirm Christian truth. But their role has been transformed from passive bystander to active enemy, and it is an undeniable result of this re-casting of their service that the Jews themselves are effectively ruled out from salvation through conversion in this setting. This is not to say that Stephen believed the conversion of Jews impossible. Such a stance would have contravened Paul’s teachings on the eventual conversion of the Jewish remnant along with all subsequent ecclesiastical rulings on the subject. An inquisitor like Stephen was unlikely to have adopted such a heretical stance. The presence of Jewish conversion in other contexts within the Tractatus confirms the suspicion that for Stephen, Marian exempla did not provide the appropriate setting for such conversions. In material mined from traditional, patristic sources, Stephen finally provides for the possibility of Jewish conversion and twice includes one tale taken from the Dialogues of Gregory I, in which a Jewish traveller is forced to shelter in a pagan temple overnight. When the demons that inhabit the temple come out after dark, the frightened Jew makes the sign of the cross to ward them off. When the gesture proves successful, having survived the night, the Jew converts to Christianity.61 Stephen includes another tale with a long pedigree, in which Jews torturing a cross left in their house by a previous Christian owner convert when the cross miraculously begins to bleed.62 Stephen claims to have heard the tale during the feast of the exaltation of the cross, a holiday dating back to the dedication of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 335. As with this patristic material, many of Stephen of Bourbon’s Marian anti-Jewish tales also originate from late antique or early medieval sources and frequently ended in conversion according to their other versions. His decision to omit any mention of conversion from the Marian tales, then, appears all the more to be the result of attitudes resulting from more modern popular Marian devotion.

59

2.6.19, ed. J. Berlioz, unpublished. Harvey Hames has noted a similar stance in an account of the ritual murder of Adam of Bristol: Harvey Hames, ‘‘The limits of conversion: ritual murder and the Virgin Mary in the account of Adam of Bristol’’, Journal of Medieval History, 33 (2007): 43–59 at 45. 61 1.8.4, Berlioz and Eichenlaub, 317, and 2.5.8, ed. J. Berlioz, unpublished. 62 2.5.4, ed. J. Berloz, unpublished. One final Jewish conversion is found at 1.9.2, Berlioz and Eichenlaub, 351. 60


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The relative lack of contemporary Jewish conversion stories in Stephen’s work stands in stark contrast to other Dominican preaching aids, and indeed, to several modern analyses of anti-Jewish activity in the period. Jeremy Cohen places mendicant missionary efforts at the heart of thirteenth-century anti-Judaism, and Robert Stacey sees in the thirteenth century ‘‘a shift towards genuine missionary campaigns’’.63 Their theories are indeed reflected in an exempla collection by Stephen’s contemporary and fellow Dominican friar Thomas of Cantimpre´ (d. 1272). Thomas’ Bonum universale de apibus includes a number of exempla in which Jews, especially women, convert.64 One Jewish woman is converted by her Christian nursemaid, for example, while in Louvain a young girl converts at the tender age of six.65 This difference in approach might be explained by the difference in circumstances between Stephen and Thomas. Thomas, never an inquisitor, entered the Dominican house at Louvain.66 His stories concern conversions that reportedly took place nearby, in the Low Countries and Germany.67 Stephen, in Lyon, may simply not have heard of these cases. Furthermore, Thomas wrote hagiographies of several female saints, and so took a keen interest in the inner spirituality of women, including Jewish converts. Also, while a student at Cologne during the tenure of Albertus Magnus, Thomas may have met Ramon Martı´, an avid campaigner for mission to Jews.68 Thomas was also a student in Paris during the Talmud trials, and recounts the episode in detail in the Bonum universale. By 1240, Stephen’s student days in Paris were far behind him, and he had long been engaged in the battle against the heretics of his home province. Occupied by inquisitorial duties, his understanding of the Jewish enemy was coloured by what he heard from suspected heretics and apostates, rather than the academic developments of Paris or the missionary agendas of his confreres. First and foremost an inquisitor, Stephen was far more interested in the behaviour and activity of heretics, and how the Catholic Church ought to protect against their heresies, than in either Jews or Muslims. As the author of a manual for preachers, Stephen focused on material for use in sermons to other Christians, including Jewish or Muslim characters only when they appear in exempla, or theological examples that serve to edify a Christian audience about their own behaviour. The images of Jews and Muslims that resulted, however damaging, 63

Jeremy Cohen, The Friars and the Jews: The Evolution of Medieval Anti-Judaism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1982); Robert Stacey, ‘‘The conversion of Jews to Christianity in thirteenth-century England’’, Speculum, 67 (1992): 263–283 at 264. 64 For an overview of Thomas’s anti-Jewish material, see H. Schreckenberg, Die christlichen AdversusJudaeos-Texte und ihr literarisches und historisches Umfeld (13.–20. Jh.) [Europaïsche Hochschulschriften, volume XXIII] (Frankfurt: Lang, 1994), p. 246, as well as the introduction to Henri Platelle’s translation of the Bonum Universale: Henri Platelle, Les exemples du ‘‘Livre des abeilles’’: une vision me´die´vale (Paris: Brepols, 1997), pp. 41–56. 65 Thomas of Cantimpre´, Bonum universale de apibus, ed. G. Colvenere (Douay: Belleri, 1605), pp. 296–303. 66 For a brief biography of Thomas, see Marie-Anne Polo de Beaulieu, ‘‘Le statut de l’auctor dans l’Ordre des Preˆcheurs, d’apre`s les recueils d’exempla’’, Cahiers de Fanjeaux, 36 (2001): 269. See also Platelle, 11–17. 67 The story of the nursemaid occurred in Germany, while the other women converted in Louvain. Thomas also recounts a blood libel from Pforzheim, and the tale of a Dominican novice tempted to convert to Judaism in Bruges. 68 For information on the timing of Thomas’s visit to Cologne, see A. Deboutte, ‘‘Thomas von Cantimpre´ als auditor van Albertus Magnus’’, Ons geestelijk Erf, 58 (1984): 192–209.

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were not his primary aim. Nor did Stephen go out of his way to find such material. For the most part his Jewish and Muslim stories are mined from readily available sources that crop up in any number of other collections throughout the Middle Ages. But here the similarity between the material on Jews and Muslims ends. For while Stephen was apparently willing to borrow material from Dominicans involved in crusade preaching and eastern missions, he showed little inclination to do the same with regard to the Jews. No mention is made of Ramoń of Penyafort’s sermons to Jews, Dominican lessons in Hebrew, or the Talmud trials of Paris. Indeed, while the Dominicans of the thirteenth century have often been singled out as being at the forefront of anti-Jewish thinking, discarding older patristic models for new more dangerous ways of thinking about Jews, Stephen is content to stick mainly to traditional, biblical images of them. Where he does address the non-scriptural Jew, he chooses to follow not the mendicant agenda described by Jeremy Cohen, but the more popular anti-Jewish attitudes forming around the cult of the Virgin Mary, which complimented his inquisitor’s instinct about the blasphemous nature of Jewish worship. If a lesson is to be taken from this case study on the role of Jews and Muslims in the Stephen’s exempla collection, it is that historians of Christian–Jewish relations have, perhaps, been too hasty in the past to speak of a united front when discussing the formulation of the Church’s thirteenth-century policy against its non-Christian foes. Stephen’s attacks on Jews differ vastly from his approach to Muslims. The latter, a military foe who shared some, if not all, Christian beliefs might still find salvation in conversion. The Jews, relegated to spiritual antiquity, carried into contemporary life only an all-encompassing enmity to the Virgin Mary, and their conversion would have to wait. Nor was Stephen’s approach to Jews part of a universal Church policy. As Stephen’s collection demonstrates, we cannot assume that all exempla resonated with every author, nor would every preacher who picked up a sermon-writing aid be exposed to the full range of anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim images, and so modern historians must remain aware of the context in which such tales are found. With a range of tropes to choose from, from witness to remnant, Mary-hater to potential convert, Stephen focused only on those images that resonated with his own ideas and concerns. Preachers in search of conversion stories to include in their sermons would have had to turn to someone like Thomas of Cantimpre´, and those looking for the passive Jewish witness could find him still in Caesarius of Heisterbach’s Dialogus miraculorum. Each of these collections makes up only one part of what was clearly a heterogeneous response to the nonChristian other in the thirteenth century.

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