Emirate of Derbend

The gate of gates

Drafted from Minorsky, A History of Sharvan and Darband in the 10th-11th Centuries (1958)formation

The Caucasus range runs from the Black Sea to the Caspian and is crossable, by an army, in very few places. At the eastern end the mountains come down almost to the sea and leave a gap about three kilometres wide between the last ridge and the water. Everything moving by land between the steppe north of the Caucasus and the countries south of it goes through that gap.

Khusrau I Anushirvan fortified it in the sixth century, and the work is extraordinary and still standing: a citadel on the hill, two parallel walls running down the slope to the sea about four hundred metres apart with the town between them, and a long wall, the Dagh-Bary, running west into the mountains for tens of kilometres to close the flanking routes. The Arabic name is Bab al-Abwab, the gate of gates. The Persian is Darband, the barred gate.

What it was built against was the steppe: Huns first, and then for three centuries the Khazars, who fought the Umayyads through the gap in a series of wars that reached deep in both directions. After the Arab conquest Derbend became the caliphate's northern frontier post and one of the great ribats — a garrison town settled with volunteers endowed to hold a frontier against unbelievers, on the same model as the frontier towns of Ifriqiya and Central Asia.

So it began as somebody else's fortress, and in 869 it stopped being one. Hashim ibn Suraqa, an Arab of the Sulaym, established a hereditary emirate at Derbend as Abbasid authority in the provinces failed. It lasted two hundred and eight years.

Almost everything known about it comes from one text: a local chronicle preserved only inside a much later Ottoman compilation, which Minorsky reconstructed, edited and translated together with the parallel chronicle of the Shirvanshahs next door. The two dynasties come down to us in one book because they came down in one chronicle, and the chronicle exists because a seventeenth-century Turkish historian copied it out.

The city and the emir

Drafted from Minorsky, A History of Sharvan and Darband in the 10th-11th Centuries (1958)peak

Derbend is a small place with a very large asset, and its politics for two centuries are the politics of who controlled the asset.

The emir did, formally. The Hashimid family held the emirate by inheritance, named the Abbasid caliph in the khutba, and took the tolls. But the chronicle Minorsky edited is largely a record of that family being deposed, exiled, recalled, imprisoned and killed — not by outside conquerors, and not usually by rivals within the house, but by the city.

Derbend had a rais, a head of the community drawn from its notables, and an armed population organised by quarter. The ghazis endowed to hold the frontier had descendants who were still there and still armed. The merchant families who handled the traffic had their own interests, and the highland principalities beyond the wall — the Sarir in Daghestan, the pagan and Christian mountain lordships — could be appealed to by any faction. An emir who taxed too hard, or made the wrong alliance with the Shirvanshahs next door, discovered that his city could remove him and frequently did.

Nobody can say how the emirate of Derbend raised troops, and the reason is that the question is wrongly put. Its fighting strength was not something the emir raised. It was a city that armed itself, by quarter, out of the descendants of a garrison, and it was as often pointed at him as anywhere else. Aleppo's ahdath under the Mirdasids were the same kind of thing, and are the same kind of problem: a militia that belongs to a town rather than to a ruler is not a levy, not a conscription and not a tribe, and does not behave like any of them.

The relationship with the Shirvanshahs is the other constant. The two are the two subjects of Minorsky's book and they behaved like it — intermarrying, campaigning against each other, each intervening in the other's succession disputes, and neither ever finishing the other. Shirvan had the land, the naphtha and the silk; Derbend had the pass. Neither could take what the other lived on.

Two centuries of the same thing

Drafted from Minorsky, A History of Sharvan and Darband in the 10th-11th Centuries (1958)aside?What aside means

Nothing happened at Derbend, and that is the most accurate thing that can be said about it.

Two hundred and eight years of the same three things, over and over: the pass taxed, the city deposing its emir, and the Shirvanshahs and the highland lordships manoeuvring around both. The chronicle records dozens of events. Not one of them altered what the emirate was subsequently able to do, because what the emirate was able to do was determined by a gap in a mountain range, and the gap did not move.

That is a rarer condition than it sounds. Most polities have hinges — a battle, a conversion, a capital moved, a dynasty replaced, after which the same state is doing something different. Derbend had none. Its whole strategic position was a standing arrangement rather than a sequence of decisive days, and a standing arrangement produces revenue, not history.

Palmyra is the instructive comparison, because it began the same way and did not end that way. An oasis with water where there was none, taxing a road across a desert, its ground producing nothing and its position producing everything — and then thirteen years in which it used that position to try to become an empire, which is what Palmyra is remembered for and very nearly all it is remembered for.

Derbend never tried. It held the gate for two centuries, taxed what came through, argued about who was collecting, and produced no campaign, no conquest and no claim on anybody. The emirate outlived states many times its size for exactly that reason: it was worth more to everyone functioning than conquered, and it never gave anybody a reason to reconsider.

The side the wall did not cover

Drafted from al-Masudi, El-Mas'udi's Historical Encyclopaedia, entitled 'Meadows of Gold and Mines of Gems', Volume I (1841)aside?What aside means

Al-Mas'udi described the Gate in the 940s, and what he found worth writing down is the country it stood in rather than the fortification, which is the more useful half.

The wall he gives as Anushirvan's work: a town built in one of the passes of the Caucasus, a wall running from it a full mile out into the Caspian and away west about forty farsakhs to the summit of the range, crossing mountains and valleys, ending at the fortress of Tabarsaran. Every three miles, more or less, depending on how important the route it closed was, an iron gate; and behind every gate a population settled there on purpose to guard that gate and the stretch of wall beside it.

What it was built to check he lists by name: the Khazars, the Alans, the various Turkish hordes, the Sarir. Every one of them comes from the north, by land, through a pass.

Around the Gate, Mas'udi found the kind of country that makes a wall necessary and a state impossible. Seventy-two nations on the mountain, each with its own king and its own language. The nearest people to Derbend are the Haydan, whose king is a Muslim descended, he says, from Kahlan — and whose children and household are the only Muslims in his entire dominions. Between Haydan and the Gate lives a population of Arab descent who speak nothing but Arabic, settled there since the conquest, living in villages among forests, jungles, valleys and big rivers; they are on the frontier of Haydan and nobody's subjects, because their country cannot be got into.

And then, in a different chapter and without connecting the two, Mas'udi records what happened shortly after the year 300 of the Hijra. The Rus brought their ships out of the Black Sea, down the Khazar river, and into the Caspian. Everyone on that sea rose at once — the Byzantine borderlands, Adharbayjan, Baylaqan, the country round Bardha'a, Daylam, Gilan, Jurjan, Tabaristan — and Mas'udi gives the reason in a single sentence: they had never before seen an enemy coming against them from that quarter, nor was such an invasion recorded since the most remote time. He adds that the event is too widely known in those countries to be denied.

Derbend was the most expensive fortification in the Caucasus and it closed the only land route between the steppe and Iran, and the wall ran a mile into the water precisely so that nobody could wade round the end of it. It worked. What it could not do was hold a sea, and in about 913 a fleet came down a sea that no hostile fleet had ever used, passed the Gate, and raided the coasts on both sides of it for as long as it chose.

The emirate went on taxing the pass for another century and a half after that, because the pass was still there and still had to be used by everyone travelling by land. A standing arrangement does not stop being profitable because somebody has proved it can be bypassed. It stops being the answer to the question it was built to answer, which is a different thing, and harder to notice from inside.

The Seljuks come through

Drafted from Minorsky, A History of Sharvan and Darband in the 10th-11th Centuries (1958)end

The Seljuk sultanate reached the eastern Caucasus in the 1060s and 1070s, in the same movement that took Ani in 1064 and reached Manzikert in 1071. Derbend was taken in 1077 and the Hashimid emirate ended.

There is a particular irony in the direction of it, and the chronicle's compilers were aware of it. The pass and its walls had been built by a Sasanian emperor and maintained by four centuries of Muslim rulers for one purpose: to stop Turkic-speaking peoples from the northern steppe from entering the countries south of the Caucasus. In the eleventh century Turkic-speaking peoples entered those countries anyway — not through the gate but round it, out of Central Asia by way of Iran, and they took the gate from the south.

The fortifications were not superseded. Derbend went on being a fortress and a frontier post under the Seljuks, the Shirvanshahs — one branch of whose house took the name Derbendid from this place — the Mongols, the Safavids, the Ottomans, the Afsharids, and finally Russia, which took it in 1806 and held it as a Caucasian frontier. The walls are standing and are a UNESCO site.

What ended in 1077 was the emirate, not the position. That is the ordinary fate of a polity whose whole basis is a piece of ground: the ground goes on being valuable and somebody else collects.

What the geographers found there

Drafted from Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate: Mesopotamia, Persia, and Central Asia, from the Moslem Conquest to the Time of Timur (1905)afterlife

The emirate ended in 1077. The gate did not, and the descriptions the Arabic geographers left of it are worth having in full, because they are a portrait of what a polity built on a piece of ground actually looks like from the outside.

The harbour

Ibn Hawkal, writing in the tenth century, says Bab al-Abwab was larger than Ardabil, which was then the capital of Adharbayjan — a considerable claim for a frontier fort.

The harbour was closed. Two moles ran out into the Caspian, built of stone blocks fastened together with lead, and at their far ends stood a water-gate shut with chains, so that no ship could enter or leave except by permission. A stone wall with towers enclosed the town, and it had two land gates besides. They made linen there and exported it, and saffron came from the country round about.

Read that back slowly. The pass through the mountains was walled; the flanking routes were walled; and the sea approach was closed with a chain across a purpose-built harbour mouth. Everything that could pass was made to pass through something that could be taxed or refused.

The frontier of Islam

The geographers are also clear about what kind of place it was. There was a fine mosque in the market square, and Bab al-Abwab was the frontier town of Islam, because in early days it was surrounded on the landward side by people who were not Muslims.

Yaqut, describing the mountains west of it, says that among the tribes of the Caucasus seventy different languages were spoken and no man could understand his neighbour. He also describes the long wall running west along the hill-crests from Derbend to keep the barbarians out, and attributes it — correctly — to Khusrau Anushirvan in the sixth century.

That is the whole thing in one paragraph of a thirteenth-century dictionary: a Sasanian wall, a Muslim frontier town behind it, and seventy languages on the other side.

The position outlives everybody

The Hashimid emirs held it for two hundred and eight years and are remembered by one chronicle that survived by being copied into a later book. The wall they inherited was six centuries old when they got it and is fifteen centuries old now, and it is still standing, and Derbend is still a town on the same three kilometres of ground.

An emirate is an arrangement about a piece of geography. When the arrangement lapses, the geography does not, and the next arrangement is made about the same thing. Nothing about this position has ever needed a dynasty. It needed a wall, and it got a very good one.