Artuqid Dynasty

The Jazira, in three pieces

formationDrafted from Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999)

Artuq ibn Eksuk was a Turkmen commander in Seljuk service who was made governor of Jerusalem in 1086. His sons did not keep Jerusalem — the First Crusade took it in 1099 — but they kept what they had taken in the meantime, which was the Jazira: the country between the upper Tigris and Euphrates, with Mardin, Hisn Kayfa, Amid and Harput.

They then divided it, permanently, into three branches that never reunited and frequently fought. Dividing a state between heirs normally destroys it, as it destroyed the Seljuks and the Danishmendids; here the consequence was the opposite: the division did not destroy the dynasty, it outlasted every neighbour that could have absorbed it whole. The Hisn Kayfa branch fell to the Ayyubids in 1232 and the Harput branch to the Seljuks of Rum in 1234; Mardin went on until 1409.

The middle of that is the interesting part. Mardin survived by being successively a Seljuk vassal, a Zangid vassal, an Ayyubid vassal, a Mongol vassal — Qara Arslan submitted to Hulegu — and then a vassal of whoever held Iraq, for two hundred and seventy-five years, on a rock above a plain that everybody wanted to cross and nobody wanted to garrison. It is the technique of every mountain dynasty that outlives its neighbours — the Bavands in the Elburz, the Karamanids in the Taurus — applied on a smaller and more exposed piece of ground.

Their one moment of being a great power was 1119. Ilghazi took an army against the principality of Antioch and destroyed it at a place the Franks afterwards called the Field of Blood, killing the prince and most of the knighthood of the principality — the heaviest defeat a crusader state suffered before Hattin seventy years later. He then could not follow it up: his Turkmen dispersed with the plunder, as Turkmen did, and Antioch was not taken.

Bibliothèque nationale de France · Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999) · Unknown artist · Public domain

That is why the counter-crusade belongs in the end to the Zangids and the Ayyubids and not to the men who won this battle. Winning is a matter of cavalry; keeping is a matter of an army that stays.

The two who won

expansionDrafted from al-Qalanisi, The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades (1932)

For about five years in the 1120s the most dangerous men in the Levant were two Artuqid cousins, and between them they destroyed a Frankish army, captured the count of Edessa and captured the king of Jerusalem.

Then one died of an illness in a village and the other was killed, and it stopped as suddenly as it had started.

Ilghazi

Ilghazi held Mardin and, from 1118, Aleppo. In June 1119 the Turkmen came to him from every quarter — Ibn al-Qalanisi's phrase is that they gathered like lions seeking their prey and gerfalcons hovering over their victims — and he took them against the prince of Antioch, who had marched out with everything the principality could raise.

It took less than an hour. The Franks were left on the ground in one prostrate mass, and their prince with them. It was the heaviest defeat a crusader state suffered before Hattin, seventy years later.

He did not take Antioch. His Turkmen dispersed with the plunder, which is what Turkmen did, and there was no army left in the field to follow the victory with. This is the recurring shape of Artuqid power: they could assemble a devastating force and could not keep one.

Ilghazi died of an illness in a village called al-Fuhul in Diyar Bakr in November 1122. His sons Sulayman and Timurtash took his lands, held together for a while, and then quarrelled, and neither would give way.

Balak

His nephew Balak had the better run.

In the autumn of 1122 he fell on the Franks of Edessa at Saruj and took their count Joscelin prisoner along with his cousin and a number of their leaders. The following April, King Baldwin came against him near Manzara and Balak defeated and captured him too, with his principal knights, and put him in the castle of Kharput with Joscelin.

al-Qalanisi, The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades (1932) · Kaya Elifnur 72 · CC BY-SA 4.0

Then Aleppo. In May 1123 he came down on the city, burned its crops, blockaded it and took possession of it.

He was holding the king of Jerusalem, the count of Edessa, the bishop of al-Bara and the second city of Syria at the same moment, and he had done it in eight months.

The prisoners then broke out of Kharput by a stratagem and seized the castle itself. Balak marched back, besieged his own citadel until he had it again, put a proper garrison in it, and told them to be more careful.

Why it did not last

Nothing was built on any of it.

The victories were won with tribal cavalry that came for plunder and left with it. Aleppo was held for a moment and not integrated. The prisoners were worth ransoms rather than territory. And the moment the two men were gone, the family's own division — three branches that never reunited — meant that no single Artuqid could put that kind of force in the field again.

What the dynasty took from the decade was a reputation, and then the sense to stop trying. For the next two hundred and eighty years the Artuqids of Mardin acknowledged whoever was strongest and were left alone, which is a duller and far more successful policy than the one that made them briefly famous.

The bridge

peakDrafted from Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999)

The Artuqids built a bridge over the Batman river, in the hill country east of Diyarbakır, and it is still standing. It went up in the 1140s, it is a single stone arch, and the span is a little under forty-one metres.

Near Silvan, Diyarbakır Province, Turkey · Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999) · Photograph: Kaya Elifnur 72 · CC BY-SA 4.0

That figure is worth pausing on. It is among the widest stone arches built anywhere before the modern period — wider than any Roman arch, and not exceeded in Europe for centuries. It was raised by a minor Turkmen dynasty whose political history, as the previous chapter says, is a list of the overlords it acknowledged.

The engineering is legible in the shape. The arch is not a half-circle: it is a segmental arch on a rising approach, with chambers built into the haunches to take weight out of the structure where weight does no work, and side rooms in the piers where travellers could shelter. It was built to carry a road across a river that floods, in a country where the alternative was a ford that is impassable for part of the year.

Set it beside the chapter after next and a pattern appears. The Artuqids also paid for al-Jazari's book of machines — pumps, crankshafts, gearing, water clocks — written at Amid for the ruler of the same family a few decades later. A dynasty of no military weight in a poor province produced, within about sixty years, one of the widest stone spans in the pre-modern world and the best surviving medieval treatise on mechanism.

That is not a coincidence and the connection is water. The Jazira is a country between two rivers where everything depends on getting water lifted, moved and crossed: irrigation off the Tigris and Euphrates, mills, and roads that have to survive a flood season. A ruling house in that country with money to spend and no prospect of spending it on conquest spent it on hydraulic works, and the people it employed were the best in the field because the field was where the demand was.

Measured by territory, army or anything they exported, the Artuqids barely register. What they are worth knowing about is what they built — the bridge, and, next, the book.

The book of machines

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999)

In 1206, at Amid, an engineer named al-Jazari finished a book for his patron, the Artuqid ruler Nasr al-Din Mahmud, whose father and grandfather he had also served. It is called al-Jami bayn al-ilm wa'l-amal — the compendium of theory and practice — and it is usually known as the Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices.

It describes about fifty machines, with instructions for building them and drawings of the parts. Water clocks and candle clocks, including one with a figure that drops a ball onto a cymbal on the hour. Automatic vessels for serving drink. A waitress automaton. A hand-washing device with a flush mechanism. Fountains whose patterns change on a cycle. And, less decoratively, the water-raising machines the region actually needed: a crank-driven pump, a twin-cylinder suction pump with a genuine crankshaft, and a segmental gear.

Cleveland Museum of Art (1945.383.a) · Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999) · Cleveland Museum of Art, Purchase from the J. H. Wade Fund · CC0 / Public Domain (Open Access)

Historians of technology treat several of those as the first surviving descriptions anywhere. The simpler fact is who paid for it. The book was commissioned, paid for and preserved by a minor Turkmen dynasty in the Jazira whose political history is a list of the overlords it acknowledged, in the century between the crusade it defeated and the Mongols it submitted to.

Topkapı Palace Museum Library, Istanbul · Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999) · Unknown artist · Public domain

The same thing keeps happening in that century and it is worth stating plainly. The Sultanate of Rum's cultural peak came while it was a Mongol tributary. The Ilkhanate produced the first world history after destroying the caliphate. The Ma'munids of Khwarazm held al-Biruni and Ibn Sina for fifteen years and lasted twenty-two. The Kakuyids gave Ibn Sina the only settled decade he ever had. The relationship between how much power a court had and what got made there is much weaker than any account organised around power will suggest.

The Artuqids left no measurable trace of any other kind. They also have, on the strength of one patron in one small city, a permanent claim on the history of mechanical engineering.

The boy who inherited Mayyafariqin

contractionDrafted from Khallikan, Ibn Khallikan's Biographical Dictionary (Wafayat al-A'yan) (1843)

Ibn Khallikan came from this region and was writing about the men who took it apart. He tracks the Artuqids the way he tracks everyone — by genealogy — and the genealogies are what show the shape of the decline.

1185: a minority

In the summer of 1185 Saladin was in the north, trying and failing to get Khilat, and he turned aside to besiege Mayyafariqin.

Ibn Khallikan explains why that city and why then. Qutb al-Din Ilghazi ibn Alpi ibn Kartash ibn Ghazi ibn Ortoq, its lord, had died and left it to his son Husam al-Din Baluk Arslan, a mere boy — and this circumstance, he writes, had encouraged Saladin to undertake its siege.

The place was taken at the end of August, and not by assault. Saladin succeeded by a stratagem in persuading the garrison to capitulate and hand it over.

That is the whole condition of the dynasty in one sentence. The Artuqids held strong cities in difficult country and were extremely hard to remove by force. A minority was the opening, and their neighbours had learned to watch for one.

1232: seven generations, and Amid

Half a century later the same thing happened on a larger scale, and Ibn Khallikan was close enough to it to have been passing through.

In 1229, he says, he went through Harran and found al-Kamil established there with the Egyptian army. Three years afterwards al-Kamil took the field with a large force and took Amid, Hisn Kayfa and other cities of the region from their Artuqid lord — whom Ibn Khallikan names in full:

al-Malik al-Mas'ud Rukn al-Din Mawdud, the son of al-Malik al-Salih Mahmud, the son of Nur al-Din Muhammad, the son of Fakhr al-Din Kara Arslan, the son of Rukn al-Dawla Dawud, the son of Nur al-Dawla Sokman, the son of Ortoq.

Khallikan, Ibn Khallikan's Biographical Dictionary (Wafayat al-A'yan) (1843) · PHGCOM · Public domain

Seven generations back to the founder, recited in the sentence that records the loss of the dynasty's principal city. He then adds where he got the date: from a well-informed native of Amid, who told him the city was surrendered on 19 Dhu'l-Hijja — October 1232 — and that al-Kamil's son entered the next day and al-Kamil himself a fortnight later.

The Ayyubid did not have to besiege it either.

Why the dynasty did not end

What is striking about both episodes is how little either changed.

The Artuqids lost Mayyafariqin in 1185 and Amid in 1232 and went on existing. They kept Mardin, and they kept it for another century and three quarters, through Ayyubid overlordship, through the Mongols, through the Ilkhanate and past it.

This is not a dynasty that was destroyed. It is one that was serially demoted — from an independent power that had beaten the Franks in the field to a lord of one citadel who paid whoever was currently strongest and was left alone because removing him was more trouble than it was worth.

The genealogies are the evidence for that reading, and they cut both ways. A family that can be named seven generations deep in a chronicle is a family that mattered enough to be tracked. It is also, by the point Ibn Khallikan is writing, a family whose principal remaining asset is the genealogy — the claim to be the descendants of Ortoq, holding what is left of Ortoq's country, on somebody else's sufferance.

Two hundred and seventy-five years of somebody else's

endDrafted from Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999)

The Mardin branch outlasted its two siblings by nearly two centuries as a vassal of whoever held Iraq, and what a longevity built entirely on submission is actually worth is the question worth asking of it.

The list of overlords is the point. Mardin acknowledged, in order: the Great Seljuks; the Zangids; Saladin and the Ayyubids after him; the Rum Seljuks briefly; the Khwarazmshahs in their last years; the Mongols under Hulegu, to whom Qara Arslan submitted in person; the Ilkhanate for as long as it existed; and finally the Kara Koyunlu, who ended the line in 1409. That is nine sovereignties across two hundred and seventy-five years, and the Artuqids outlasted every one of them in Mardin.

Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999) · Classical Numismatic Group · CC BY-SA 2.5

The technique was not clever diplomacy. It was a rock. Mardin sits on a scarp above the Mesopotamian plain with a citadel on the summit, in a position that can be blockaded and starved but is expensive to storm, above a plain that every army crossing between Anatolia and Iraq wants to move through quickly. A power heading somewhere else prefers a tributary on that rock to a siege, and the Artuqids made sure that preference was always available.

Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (1999) · Dosseman · CC BY-SA 4.0

It is the same calculation the Bavands made in the Elburz, the Nizaris in the Alborz, the Karamanids in the Taurus and the imams of Oman behind the Hajar. Mardin is the version on the smallest and most exposed ground, which is why it required the most consistent submission.

The end came from the direction that had never been an overlord. The Kara Koyunlu were a Turkmen confederation competing for pasture rather than a state collecting tribute, and a confederation has no use for a tributary. They took Mardin in 1409 and the dynasty stopped.

The dynasty's end is usually given as a range, 1232 to 1409, because the three branches ended separately — Hisn Kayfa to the Ayyubids, Harput to the Seljuks of Rum, Mardin to the Black Sheep — and the sources date the dynasty by whichever branch is meant.

On duration the Artuqids outlast most of the empires of their world. On every other measure they register nothing at all. They held a small province by conceding to everybody, and spent the quiet that bought on a bridge and a book, which is a defensible way to use three centuries and leaves almost no trace in any account organised around power.

Nine generations

afterlifeDrafted from Khallikan, Ibn Khallikan's Biographical Dictionary (Wafayat al-A'yan) (1843)

Ibn Khallikan was compiling his dictionary of eminent men in the middle of the thirteenth century, and when he came to record how the Ayyubid sultan al-Kamil took Amid and Hisn Kayfa, he wrote down whom he took them from.

The nine-name chain back to Artuq, and the three dates a day apart for Amid's surrender, are described above. Ibn Khallikan gives the whole thing and then adds, in the manner of a careful man, that he had already dealt with Artuq, the ancestor of this dynasty, earlier in the book.

What matters here is the proportion. The genealogy and the dates are given in a paragraph about somebody else's conquests, in a list that continues immediately to Damascus, to Yemen, to Mecca and to the ten kings riding in al-Kamil's train.

That is the Artuqid afterlife in its exact proportion. The family that had destroyed the army of Antioch and held the king of Jerusalem in a dungeon ends as a genealogy in a sentence about somebody else's year.

What was left at Mardin

The Hisn Kayfa branch went in 1232 and the Harput branch to the Seljuks of Rum. The branch on the rock at Mardin outlasted them both by a hundred and seventy-seven years, acknowledging Ayyubids, Mongols, Ilkhans and whoever else came through, until the Kara Koyunlu — a Turkmen confederation that had no use for tributaries — took the city in 1409.

Nothing of the dynasty went on afterwards except its buildings, which is more than most of the states that outranked it can say. The bridge is still there. The book of machines is still copied and studied. And the pedigree survives because a judge in Damascus, writing about a sultan who had just taken their city, thought it worth recording who exactly had lost it.