Buyid Confederation

Down from Daylam

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 4: From the Arab Invasion to the Saljuqs (1975)formation

Daylam is the mountain country south-west of the Caspian: high, poor, and late to Islam — it held out for two centuries after the plains below it had been conquered. What it exported was soldiers. Daylamite infantry were sought across the Iranian world at a time when almost every other army was cavalry, and in the early tenth century, when nobody in western Iran could pay reliably for long, there were a great many of them for hire.

Three brothers — Ali, Hasan and Ahmad, sons of a man named Buya — were among them. They took service under a Daylami commander in Samanid employ, and then did what mercenary captains occasionally do in a decade when their employers are failing: they stopped being the hired and became the hirers. Ali took Fars in 934. Hasan took the Jibal. In 945 Ahmad walked into Baghdad.

What Ahmad did there is the thing the Buyids are for. He did not depose the caliph. He did not claim the caliphate — he could not have held it as a Shi'i and evidently did not want it. He took the title amir al-umara, commander of commanders, accepted a caliphal grant confirming him in everything he had already taken, and left al-Mustakfi on the throne, briefly, before blinding him and installing someone more cooperative. For the following hundred and ten years the Abbasid caliph was a Buyid appointment: the institution intact, its grants still worth having, and entirely in the hands of men who did not share its confession.

That last point is usually run together with the first and the two need separating.

The Buyids were Shi'i — Zaydi in origin, moving towards Twelver Shi'ism — and they kept a Sunni caliph for a century without removing him, when they had both the power to do it and an alternative allegiance available in the Fatimid caliph at Cairo, who shared their confession. They never took it. What they did instead was patronise Shi'i institutions inside a Sunni polity: the shrines at Najaf and Karbala, the public observance of Ashura and Ghadir Khumm at Baghdad from 962, and the scholars who gave Twelver Shi'ism its legal and theological shape.

The reason is the arithmetic of what they held. The caliph's legitimacy was the only thing that made a Daylami mercenary family the lawful rulers of Iraq. Destroying it would have destroyed the title deed to their own conquest. So they kept him, paid him, governed in his name — and reached back four centuries for a second claim of their own, out of Iranian kingship rather than Islam.

The mule

Drafted from al-Rudhrawari, The Eclipse of the 'Abbasid Caliphate: Original Chronicles of the Fourth Islamic Century (1921)expansion

Miskawayh, who spent his working life inside the administration the Buyids ran, stops his year-by-year narrative to ask directly how Ali ibn Buya got from being one captain among several to being a sovereign, and gives an answer in four parts: liberality, courage, a run of lucky coincidences, and a favourable horoscope. Then he tells the story about the mule, which is really an argument about the first two.

Ali and his brother Hasan had been captains under Makan ibn Kaki. When Makan's fortunes collapsed they asked his permission to desert to Mardavij, putting it to him that they would be doing him a kindness by taking their upkeep off his hands, and promising to come back when his luck turned. He gave them leave, and half his other commanders followed their example. Mardavij received the brothers with robes of honour and parcelled the districts of the Jibal out among the newcomers: Karaj to Ali, Dinawand to Lashkari, Hamadan to Sulayman, and so on down the list.

All of them went to Rayy to collect their deeds of appointment. Rayy was run by Mardavij's brother Vushmgir, with an administrator called al-Amid doing the actual work. Al-Amid was shown a good mule belonging to Ali ibn Buya, who was selling it because he needed the three thousand dirhams; al-Amid bought it and sent the money. When Ali learned who the buyer was he led the mule to al-Amid himself, swore he would take nothing for it, and followed that up with a stream of other attentions. Not long after, Mardavij changed his mind about the appointments and wrote to Rayy ordering that none of the new governors be allowed to leave, and that any who had already gone be stopped. The official post reached al-Amid first, as it always did; he read the order, sent word privately to Ali to get to his province at once, and only the next morning laid the correspondence before Vushmgir. By then Ali had been riding without resting at the stages and was far away. Every other commander was detained. Miskawayh's verdict: this was the post that led to his conquests and his sovereignty, and the only cause of it anyone could name, after the divine decree, was his open-handedness.

From Karaj he went south. The brothers took Arrajan and then worked through Fars, extracting enormous sums and digging up treasures that had belonged to the Sasanian kings and had descended in local families. In 934 the governor of Fars, Yaqut, cut him off at a bridge on the road to Kirman and forced him to fight. The battle ran three days. On the second night Ali told his men he would dismount and fight on foot as one of them, made lavish promises, and took oaths from them that they would hold.

Then Yaqut made two mistakes that Miskawayh treats as a lesson in command. Two Daylamite chiefs deserted to him, and he had them beheaded on sight — which informed every Daylamite on the other side that surrender was not available, so they fought like men seeking martyrdom. And he opened the third morning by putting naphtha-throwers in front of his line; the wind shifted and blew the fire back into his own ranks, and the Daylamites came through and killed the flame-troops where they stood. When his cavalry broke, Yaqut took four thousand men up a hill and waited for the enemy to scatter into his baggage so that he could counterattack, which is a manoeuvre that has retrieved many lost battles. Ali rode out in front of his own line and told his men exactly what was being planned, that they were to keep their ranks and not touch the plunder, and that the plunder was not going anywhere. They held; Yaqut fled.

In his baggage were boxes of burnouses and fetters, made ready for the prisoners he had expected to take. Ali's officers proposed using them on Yaqut's men — the hoods on their heads and the irons on their legs, paraded first through the camp and then through the town. He refused, and said that they should rather pardon the enemies God had put in their power and give thanks, as being the way to receive more and to avoid arrogance. He then rode to Shiraz picking up deserters the whole distance, pardoning everyone who was reported to him as having spoken against him, and camped outside the city.

That is how a mercenary captain acquires a province. It is also, almost item for item, how he keeps one.

Paying an army with land

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 4: From the Arab Invasion to the Saljuqs (1975)peak

The Buyids arrived in Iraq with an army they could not afford and a treasury that had been failing for fifty years. What they did about it changed how states in this part of the world paid soldiers for the next six centuries.

Instead of cash from a central treasury, a commander was assigned the revenue of a district and told to collect it himself. The assignment is an iqta. It solved the immediate problem completely: the soldier was paid, the treasury did not have to move money it did not have, and the chain of clerks between the land and the wage disappeared.

Then it did what such arrangements do. A man collecting his own pay from a district has every reason to take the maximum this year and none to maintain what produces it next year, and the thing being taken in southern Iraq was the yield of an irrigation system two thousand years old that required constant work. The Sawad — the alluvium that had funded every empire in Mesopotamia since Babylon — declined under the Buyids, and the sources describe canals silting, villages abandoned and revenue falling. The state was consuming the asset it was assigned against.

Two things follow, and they run a long way past this dynasty.

The first is that the iqta did not die with the Buyids. Nizam al-Mulk is usually credited with it, and what he systematised and made durable under the Seljuks — the standard way of paying an army across the Islamic world for the next several centuries — had been improvised in Buyid Iraq a hundred years earlier by men who needed the soldiers paid by the end of the month.

The second is that the Buyids were paying two armies with it, and they hated each other. The Daylamite infantry who had brought the family to power were Shi'i highlanders; the cavalry the state increasingly needed were Turks, Sunni, bought on the market the Samanids ran. They competed for assignments, and their commanders competed through them. By the eleventh century the Turks predominated in Iraq and the Daylamites in Iran, and the instrument that had raised the family had been superseded inside its own army. The Abbasids, the Samanids and the Ayyubids all reached the same position by different roads.

Adud al-Dawla takes an old title

Drafted from Busse, The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 4 (1975)peak

Adud al-Dawla ruled Fars from 949 and Iraq from 977, and briefly held the whole Buyid domain as one thing, which none of his relatives managed before or after.

He is remembered for hydraulic works — the Band-e Amir on the Kur river — and for the Bimaristan al-Adudi, the great hospital he endowed at Baghdad. He is remembered here for a title. Adud al-Dawla styled himself shahanshah, king of kings.

That is a Sasanian title, unused by a Muslim ruler before him. It is a public, formal, unmistakable claim on the legitimacy of a pre-Islamic Persian empire, made by a man who simultaneously held a caliphal investiture and struck coin in the caliph's name.

It is worth being exact about the direction of that. The Buyids claimed the Sasanians; nobody ever claimed the Buyids. The Seljuks who replaced them justified themselves by the caliph's blessing and by their own conquest, and never once by Buyid descent — which is the ordinary fate of a dynasty that borrows a title rather than establishing one.

Holding both facts at once is the accurate picture of what Adud al-Dawla was. He reached back four hundred years for a title that carried weight and left behind a dynastic name that carried none.

The Shi'i century, mostly in Arabic

Drafted from Busse, The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 4 (1975)aside?What aside means

The hundred years when the Buyids held Baghdad are called the Shi'i century, and the label is accurate about patronage and misleading about almost everything else.

What the Buyids paid for is remarkable and it is not confessionally tidy. Their viziers were men of letters famous in their own right: Ibn al-Amid at Rayy, whose prose style was studied for centuries, and al-Sahib ibn Abbad, who ran the Jibal administration and kept a library said to require camels to move. Miskawayh — philosopher, historian, and the Sahib's librarian — wrote a history of the period that is one of the very few contemporary narratives surviving for any tenth-century state. Shaykh al-Mufid gave Twelver Shi'ism its systematic theology in Baghdad, and al-Sharif al-Radi compiled the Nahj al-Balagha, the collection of sayings attributed to Ali that became the central Shi'i literary text after the Qur'an.

And they did nearly all of it in Arabic. A Persian-speaking Daylamite dynasty, in the exact century when a court at Bukhara was turning New Persian into a literature, patronised Arabic almost exclusively. That is the opposite choice from the one their contemporaries and neighbours were making, and it is worth registering rather than smoothing over: the Buyids were governing the Arabic-speaking imperial centre and behaved accordingly, while the dynasties out on the plateau were building something else.

The confessional picture is equally unclean. Twelver institutions were built, funded and made public under Buyid protection — but so was the Sunni caliphate they were built next to, and the Ashura processions the Buyids licensed at Baghdad from 962 produced Sunni counter-processions and periodic riots between the two, in a city that had both. This is the period in which Sunni and Shi'i Islam acquired the institutional and legal definition that made them separable traditions rather than positions in an argument, and it happened under a government that was patronising both ends of it at once, for reasons that were mostly about who held Baghdad.

What actually counts as spreading a faith, rather than simply holding one, is the shrines, the observances and the scholarly establishment the Buyids paid to build in territory that had not had them — not the amirs' own confession, which is a fact about the rulers and not about what they propagated.

Three titles in one year

Drafted from al-Rudhrawari, The Eclipse of the 'Abbasid Caliphate: Original Chronicles of the Fourth Islamic Century (1921)contraction

Adud al-Dawla died in 983 and the succession was managed, for about a fortnight, brilliantly. He had left instructions and the men to carry them out, and Abu Shuja — who continued Miskawayh's chronicle and had the papers of people who were there — records the machinery admiringly. The death was concealed. The chosen son was summoned to the palace as though his father had sent for him, and informed on arrival that he was the heir. Letters went out to the provinces in the dead man's name, carrying that news along with an arrest, a ministerial appointment and a copy of the oath of allegiance every governor and officer was to swear. A message went to the caliph al-Ta'i asking for a deed in favour of the heir, with robes, titles and a banner; the caliph obliged and supplied the title Samsam al-Dawla, Scimitar of the Empire. Only when all of it was in place and the new amir had held his public reception was the father allowed to be dead.

Within a year there were three of them.

Samsam al-Dawla arrested his brother Abu'l-Husayn in the palace at Baghdad. Their mother, who was a daughter of the king of the Daylamites and therefore had the ear of the most dangerous body of men in the city, laid a plan to get into the palace in disguise on a day the Daylamites were assembled and beg them to storm it and free her son. Samsam al-Dawla heard about it and made her a civil offer instead: he would release Abu'l-Husayn and make him governor of Fars, if he went at once and got there before their other brother Sharaf al-Dawla did. Abu'l-Husayn went, stopped at Ahwaz to extract money and clothes from the governor — who refused him publicly and supplied him privately, being afraid of Baghdad — and reached Arrajan to learn that Sharaf al-Dawla was already in Shiraz. So he turned back to Ahwaz, made the obliging governor his vizier, declared himself sovereign under the title Taj al-Dawla, Crown of the Empire, and had the Friday prayer said in his own name.

The state Adud al-Dawla had spent his life consolidating now had three rulers, each with a caliphal-sounding title, and no rule for deciding between them except which of them could pay soldiers.

Which brings the arrangement to its own arithmetic. In January 987 Sharaf al-Dawla came to Baghdad with an army of nineteen thousand Daylamites and three thousand Turkish retainers, and the Daylamites, proud of the numbers, treated the Turks with contempt. Two men quarrelled over a house and a stable. The Daylamites assembled in the racecourse, the Turks mounted, and the two halves of the Buyid army fought a battle in the capital.

Samsam al-Dawla, by then a prisoner, was lying in a hut separated from his brother's tent by nothing but felt and canvas, and heard the eunuch Nizr urging Sharaf al-Dawla to kill him at once, on the reasoning that if the Daylamites won and freed him they would all change places. His brother argued against it; as the fighting worsened, a retainer with a drawn sword was posted at the door of the hut. Samsam al-Dawla said afterwards that he read the Qur'an he had in his hand and prayed.

The Daylamites won the opening and lost the battle by winning it. The Turks fell back, meaning to get out; the Daylamites, contemptuous of so small a force, broke their line to chase them, and once Daylamite infantry loses its alignment it has nothing left. The Turks found ground their horses could work in, charged front and rear, and killed about three thousand of them in under an hour, then rode into the city and plundered the Daylamite houses. The survivors scattered; most of them took refuge in Sharaf al-Dawla's tent, and the next morning he entered Baghdad with the Daylamites crowding round his stirrups to beg. The caliph came down the river in a barge to congratulate him on his safety, and Sharaf al-Dawla went out and kissed the ground in front of him.

Both of the things the family had been paying for since Fars had now happened at once. The army was at war with itself, and the caliph was still the person whose congratulations mattered.

What the arrangement could not survive

Drafted from Busse, The Cambridge History of Iran, Volume 4 (1975)end

The Buyid settlement was three or four related principalities — Fars, Jibal, Iraq, Kirman — held by cousins who cooperated when it suited them. It had no succession law, no capital, and no mechanism for producing another Adud al-Dawla. The three brothers of 983 were the first instalment of seventy years of the same thing.

The military basis went on eroding from underneath. After 987 the Turks were the stronger half of the army and knew it, and by the eleventh century their commanders had the same relationship to their employers that the Buyids had once had to theirs.

In 1055 Tughril Beg entered Baghdad. Al-Malik al-Rahim was arrested. The caliph al-Qa'im, who had spent his reign under Buyid control, received Tughril and granted him the sultanate.

The caliph's position had not changed at all. He was still the source of legitimacy and still not the source of power, still issuing investitures to the man who already held the city. Only the identity of the man had changed: Shi'i Daylamite out, Sunni Turk in, the same office, the same grant, the same building.

A branch held on in Fars until about 1062, which is why the dynasty has two ending dates. The thing that ended in 1055 was the arrangement.

The dyke and the hospital

Drafted from Strange, Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate, from contemporary Arabic and Persian sources (1900)afterlife

The Buyids held Baghdad for a hundred and ten years as occupiers of a city that was not theirs, keeping a caliph they did not believe in and taxing an irrigation system they were letting decay. Two things they built there are the answer to what they left, and one of them lasted three hundred years.

Mu'izz al-Dawla's dyke

The first Buyid to take Baghdad also did the least glamorous thing any of them did. Le Strange, assembling the topography of the city out of the Arabic authorities, singles it out: Mu'izz al-Dawla especially entitled himself to the lasting gratitude of the people of Baghdad by erecting the huge dyke which, when kept in repair, prevented the inundation of the city by the flooding of the streams that ran out into the Tigris at the Shammasiyah lowlands.

A great deal of what a government does that matters looks like that. It is a bank of earth, and its whole merit is that a flood did not happen, and it needed maintaining forever.

Adud al-Dawla's hospital

The second is the one with the name on it.

Adud al-Dawla built a hospital in West Baghdad on the ruins of the Khuld Palace — the pleasure palace of the early caliphs, whose review ground and royal stables had disappeared long before, and whose site became the new quarter of the Bimaristan. Muqaddasi, writing within a few years, describes it as newly built, opposite the bridge of boats leading to East Baghdad.

For three centuries the Bimaristan Adudi was a school of medical science famous throughout the east.

That is the Buyid afterlife, and it is worth pausing on what kind of thing it is. A Daylamite amir occupying somebody else's capital, holding a caliph he regarded as theologically wrong, whose army was eating the province it was paid out of, put up a teaching hospital that outlived his dynasty by two hundred years and taught medicine to people who had never heard of him.

Where he was buried, and what happened to all of it

Adud al-Dawla died at Baghdad in 982, and was buried — as Le Strange puts it, as all good Shi'ahs should be — at Mashhad Ali on the Euphrates, the shrine at Najaf. Not in the capital he had ruled from, and not in the Caspian mountains his family came from.

After his death the Buyid power declined and the internecine wars began, and Muqaddasi, writing at exactly that moment, laments the ruin of the great city and fears it will soon rival Samarra in chronic insurrection and misrule. He was not far wrong. In 1055 Tughril Beg the Seljuk suppressed the last Buyid prince and took Baghdad.

The hospital kept working. By the fourteenth century it was a ruin standing on the right bank of the Tigris where the old main bridge of boats had crossed to Rusafah. By Le Strange's own day every vestige of it had gone — along with the Mosque of Mansur and the Rusafah Mosque, the last three great buildings of the older capital that any traveller records seeing.

So a dynasty that claimed the title king of kings and had it read in the Friday prayer is remembered, in the topography of the city it ruled, by a flood defence and a hospital, and neither of them is there.