Hamdanid Dynasty

Two branches, one family

Drafted from Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century (2004)formation

The Hamdanids were Arabs of the Taghlib, a tribe of the Jazira that had been in that country since before Islam and had been Christian for a good part of it. That matters for the same reason their Shi'ism does: in the tenth century, almost every effective military force in the Islamic world was Turkish, Daylami or Berber, and this was an Arab tribal dynasty holding provinces on its own manpower.

The family rose the way most of the tenth-century dynasties of the east rose, by being useful to a caliphate that was running out of options. Hamdan ibn Hamdun and his sons fought for and against Baghdad in the Jazira through the late ninth century; one of them was made governor of Mosul around 905; and by the 930s the family held the upper Tigris and the upper Euphrates.

Then it split, and the two halves had opposite fortunes.

The Mosul branch under Nasir al-Dawla went south. In the 940s, in the chaos the caliphate went through between the collapse of its own government and the arrival of the Buyids, the Hamdanids of Mosul took Baghdad itself and held the caliph — briefly, twice. They were the last Arab dynasty to have the caliphate in their hands. The Buyids took it off them in 945 and kept it for a hundred and ten years, and Mosul spent the following half-century as a tributary paying to be left alone, under a ruler the sources treat as capable and rapacious in about equal measure. The Uqaylids, another Arab tribal dynasty, removed the branch in 990.

The Aleppo branch under Sayf al-Dawla went west, and the next chapter is about what happened to it there.

Both branches were Twelver Shi'i, ruling populations that were largely not, in a period when the same combination was running Baghdad and its Fatimid page describes a Shi'i caliphate assembling in Ifriqiya. The tenth century is the one in which Shi'i dynasties held most of the central Islamic world without any of them converting the people they governed, and the Hamdanids are the Arab instance of it.

Two titles in one day

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

On the first of Sha'ban 330 — April 942 — the caliph al-Muttaqi granted two honorific titles to two brothers of the Banu Hamdan. The elder became Nasir al-Dawla, champion of the empire. The younger became Sayf al-Dawla, sword of the empire.

Ibn Khallikan records the date and then adds one sentence: their influence then became very great.

What the family had already spent

The titles were not a gift. They were a settlement of accounts.

The brothers' father, Abu'l-Hayja Abdallah ibn Hamdan, had been made governor of Mosul and its dependencies in 904-5 and entered the city at the beginning of the following year. He was a Taghlibi Arab of an old tribal lineage, and Ibn Khallikan gives the genealogy back through fifteen generations, which is what one did for a family whose claim was descent rather than office.

He died at Baghdad in March 929, killed while protecting the caliph al-Qahir.

That is the transaction underneath the two titles. A provincial governor died defending a caliph in his own capital, and thirteen years later that caliph's successor formally recognised the dead man's sons as the champion and the sword of the empire — which is to say, acknowledged that the empire now depended on them and could not pay them in anything but words.

The division

What the brothers did with it was split the north between them and stay split.

Nasir al-Dawla took Mosul and the Jazira. Sayf al-Dawla took the Syrian side and made Aleppo his capital, facing Byzantium. Two capitals, one family, and a frontier of their own choosing between them.

Arrangements like that normally end in a war between cousins within a generation. This one did not, and Ibn Khallikan preserves why in the form the period preserved everything — a poem.

There had been a coolness between them, and Sayf al-Dawla wrote to his elder brother:

Though suffering from your harshness, I shall not act unkindly; neither shall I neglect my duty, in whatever state I may be. You are to me as a parent, and a parent's severity is best repaid with patience and resignation.

And on another occasion, more precisely:

I concede to you exalted rank, although I am worthy of it... I have no aversion for rank, it is true; but I forego my rights, so that you may enjoy the plenitude of yours. I must surely hold the second place, if I consent to yield you up the first.

The younger, more famous, more capable brother put in writing that he was entitled to precedence and was declining to take it. Ibn Khallikan notes elsewhere that Nasir al-Dawla was the elder and stood higher with the caliphs, and that the two had done most of their studies together.

A dynasty that divided its territory in two and did not fight over it for a generation is rare enough to want an explanation. This is the only one the sources offer, and it is a family arrangement rather than a constitutional one.

What it could not survive

The arrangement was personal, and personal arrangements end with people.

When Sayf al-Dawla died, Ibn Khallikan writes, a great change came over his brother, who had loved him dearly: his intellectual faculties became so weak that his own children and servants no longer had any respect for him. In May 967 he was arrested at Mosul by his son Abu Taghlib — with the approval of the other brothers — and sent to a fortress, where he stayed until he died about eighteen months later. His body was carried back to Mosul and buried on a hill east of the city.

He had been emir over those provinces for thirty-two years.

The house that had been given two titles on one day, for a father who died defending a caliph, ended its unity with a son imprisoning a father, and it never had a mechanism for the succession that did not depend on brothers liking each other.

Sayf al-Dawla's frontier

Drafted from Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century (2004)peak

The Hamdanids were an Arab dynasty from the Jazira, unusual in a century when almost every effective military force in the Islamic world was Turkish, Daylami or Berber. One branch held Mosul. The other, under Sayf al-Dawla, took Aleppo in 944 and spent twenty-three years fighting the Byzantine empire on the Anatolian frontier.

He mostly lost. The Byzantine recovery under Nicephorus Phocas and John Tzimiskes was the strongest the empire had mounted in three centuries, and by 969 Antioch was Byzantine again and Aleppo was tributary. What Sayf al-Dawla achieved was not strategic but cultural: the frontier war gave the Islamic world a symbol of jihad against Byzantium at precisely the moment the caliphate had stopped providing one, and his court at Aleppo held al-Mutanabbi, the most celebrated Arabic poet of the age, along with the philosopher al-Farabi.

The Hamdanid court is the standing reminder that the tenth century — politically the caliphate's worst, with the caliph a Buyid pensioner and the provinces gone — was among the best centuries Arabic letters and Islamic philosophy ever had. The site's rating axes do not capture that, and this is one of several polities where the empty bars are the more honest half of the page.

The brick of dust

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

The court at Aleppo is described by al-Tha'alibi, who saw the tail end of it, in terms that are worth quoting because they are what a tenth-century writer thought a court was for. The sons of Hamdan were princes whose faces were formed for beauty, whose tongues were formed for eloquence, whose hands were formed for liberality and whose minds were formed for pre-eminence; and Sayf al-Dawla was the middle pearl of the necklace.

His court, the same writer says, was where visitors were drawn, where beneficence rose like the sun, the qibla towards which the hopes of the needy were turned, the place where caravans put down their travellers, the meeting ground of men of letters and the lists in which poets contended. Never, except at the doors of the caliphs, had so many masters of the poetic art been assembled at one prince's gate.

Then he adds the sentence that stops it being flattery: but sovereignty is the market to which such wares are brought, because that is where they fetch the best price.

What the price actually was

Ibn Khallikan collected the transactions, and they are specific.

A secretary compiled an anthology of ten thousand verses selected from the panegyrics composed on Sayf al-Dawla. A desert Arab in shabby clothes stepped forward at an audience, recited four lines ending with the observation that fortune was the prince's slave and had wronged the petitioner, and was given two hundred gold pieces. A judge from Nishapur pulled an empty purse and a rolled paper from his sleeve, recited a poem whose first line said his master's generosity was undiminished and his servant needed somebody to mend his silver; the prince laughed and had a thousand gold pieces put into the purse he had brought with him.

Sayf al-Dawla once set his companions to cap a line of his own, remarking that only his nephew Abu Firas could do it. He recited: you are mistress of my body and have made it languish; how can you lawfully shed my blood? Abu Firas answered on the spot: she replied — if sovereign power be mine, my authority extends over everything. For that couplet he was given an estate near Manbaj worth two thousand gold pieces a year.

The prince as poet

He wrote himself, and what survives is not the work of a soldier dabbling.

There is a description of a rainbow — the wind spreading dark mantles over the sky with their trains sweeping the ground, embroidered yellow on red and green overlaid with white, like girls approaching in gowns of different colours each shorter than the last.

And there is the poem about the Greek slave girl. She was the daughter of a Greek prince and his favourite, and his other women were sufficiently jealous to be planning to poison her. He was told, and he sent her away to a castle where she would be safe, and wrote:

I therefore wished thee far away, our mutual love still subsisting. Thus absence is sometimes caused through fear of absence, and separation through dread of separation.

The brick

He died at Aleppo on a Friday in February 967, of a retention of urine, and his body was carried to Mayyafariqin and buried in the tomb he had built over his mother's grave inside the city walls.

He had left instructions. Through the years of campaigning against the Byzantines, the dust that settled on his clothes had been shaken off and collected on his orders. It was made into a brick about the size of a hand, and by his dying command it was put under his head in the tomb.

A man who paid a thousand dinars for a joke about a purse, and kept the dirt of his own campaigns for a pillow, is not two people. He was performing both, for an audience he had assembled and paid, and the performance is the reason anything about him survives at all.

The poet and the frontier

Drafted from Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century (2004)aside?What aside means

Al-Mutanabbi spent nine years at Sayf al-Dawla's court at Aleppo, and the poems he wrote there are the reason a minor Arab dynasty of the Jazira is remembered at all outside specialist history.

They are panegyrics, written for payment, about campaigns that were largely unsuccessful against a Byzantine empire in the middle of its strongest recovery in three centuries. They are also, by common consent, the summit of classical Arabic verse. Both things are true at once, and the combination is the most useful thing about the whole dynasty.

What Sayf al-Dawla bought was not a record of victories. It was a permanent literary statement that someone was still fighting the frontier war, at a moment when the caliph in Baghdad was a Buyid pensioner and the institution that had justified that war for three centuries could no longer prosecute it. The Hamdanids supplied the symbol, and the symbol outlasted the emirate by a thousand years.

Measured by territory, population or the things it exported, the emirate of Aleppo is a small item. Measured by what came out of that court and is still being read, it is one of the more consequential places of its century. The two statements do not contradict each other, and any account that keeps only the first has lost the reason anyone remembers Sayf al-Dawla at all.

The second teacher

Drafted from Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century (2004)aside?What aside means

Sayf al-Dawla's court is famous for its poet. It also held, in the last years of his life, the most important philosopher in the Islamic world.

Al-Farabi came to Aleppo around 942 and died in Damascus in 950, an old man, after a career spent mostly in Baghdad. What he had done there is the reason Arabic philosophy exists as a tradition rather than as a set of translations. Two centuries of Greek science and philosophy had been put into Arabic on caliphal money; al-Farabi is the generation that started arguing with it.

He wrote commentaries on Aristotle so thorough that the tradition afterwards called him al-Mu'allim al-Thani, the Second Teacher — Aristotle being the first. He wrote on logic, on music with a treatise still cited by ethnomusicologists, and on political philosophy: The Principles of the Views of the Inhabitants of the Virtuous City, which takes Plato's question about the best-ordered state and works it through in the vocabulary of a religion Plato had never heard of, arguing that the ideal ruler is one whose intellect has been perfected and who therefore governs by knowledge rather than by force.

He was writing that at the court of a man losing a war.

Ibn Sina, a generation later and a thousand miles east, said he had read Aristotle's Metaphysics forty times without understanding it until he came across al-Farabi's commentary in a Bukhara bookstall. Ibn Rushd, on the Almohad page, worked from him. The line runs from Baghdad through Aleppo to Bukhara and Isfahan and then to Cordoba and out into Latin Europe, and Aleppo is one of its stations.

The chapter before this one argues that a minor dynasty bought a permanent literary statement. This one is the same observation about philosophy and it sharpens the point the site's rating panel cannot make: for a few years in the 940s, in a small emirate on a losing frontier, the best poet and the best philosopher writing in Arabic were being paid by the same man.

Paying both sides

Drafted from Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century (2004)end

Sayf al-Dawla died in 967, and what he had been holding off arrived immediately.

Nikephoros Phokas and then John Tzimiskes ran the strongest Byzantine offensive in three centuries down through Cilicia and northern Syria. Tarsus and Antioch went in 969. Aleppo was taken and then, rather than annexed, made a tributary under the treaty of Safar the same year — the emirate kept its ruler and its religion and paid, and Byzantine forces raided as far as Palestine in the following decade.

That left the Hamdanids of Aleppo in the position that would be recorded for the Nasrids, the Trapezuntines and the Zayyanids: a small state whose survival depended on paying one large neighbour and being useful to another. They paid Constantinople and looked to Cairo, where the Fatimids in their caliphates page had taken Egypt in 969 and wanted Syria. Then they looked back to Constantinople when Cairo pressed too hard. It worked for a generation and then it did not: the Fatimids deposed the last Hamdanid of Aleppo in 1004 and the emirate passed to one of its own officers.

The Mosul branch had gone fourteen years earlier, to the Uqaylids.

Two things to keep from a page whose rating panel is entirely empty.

The Hamdanids are the last Arab tribal dynasty to matter in the central Islamic lands. After them the region belongs to Turks, Kurds, Daylamis and Berbers for eight hundred years — the Seljuks, the Zangids and the Ayyubids in their own Egypt and Syria pages, the Mamluks, the Ottomans. An Arab dynasty holding Arab provinces with Arab tribal manpower stops being a thing that happens.

And the frontier they fought on stopped existing. Manzikert came a hundred and two years after Sayf al-Dawla's death, after which the Byzantine frontier is in Anatolia rather than Cilicia and the war the Hamdanids made their name on is somebody else's war in a different country. What survived them is the poems.

The poets scattered

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

Sayf al-Dawla died in 967 and the emirate of Aleppo lasted another thirty-seven years without him, paying Constantinople and looking to Cairo. What ended at once was the court.

Ibn Khallikan follows one of its members out. Al-Babbagha, "the parrot", had been in Sayf al-Dawla's service and was one of the better poets there; on the prince's death he travelled from one country to another, and went on doing so for forty years, and died in 1008. That is the ordinary fate of a man whose profession depended on a particular patron in a particular room.

The room does not reassemble. There was never another market in Aleppo where a judge could arrive with an empty purse and leave with a thousand dinars in it.

What did survive

The verse did, and it survived better than the dynasty by a very long way.

By Ibn Khallikan's own century, two hundred and fifty years later, the Diwan of al-Mutanabbi was an industry: scholars wrote commentaries on it, other scholars wrote commentaries on the commentaries, men are described in his dictionary as having spent careers on the text, and poets had written elegies on the death of a man they had never met. Al-Mutanabbi's reputation as the greatest of the Arab poets was made at Aleppo, in a nine-year quarrel with a patron he could not flatter honestly and would not leave quietly.

The anthology of ten thousand verses in praise of Sayf al-Dawla went on being read too. So did the prince's own poems — with one complication that says everything about what a literary afterlife is worth.

Whose lines are these

Ibn Khallikan gives Sayf al-Dawla's poem about the Greek slave girl, the one ending with the observation that absence is sometimes caused by the fear of absence. Then he adds, with the flatness of a man who has checked: I have seen these identical verses in the collected poetical works of Abu al-Muhsin al-Suri, and am unable to decide which of the two was the author of them.

The same doubt hangs over the description of the rainbow, which some attribute to a different poet, and which al-Tha'alibi insists is the prince's.

So the most durable thing the Hamdanids produced is a body of poetry, and some of the pieces most confidently attributed to the greatest of them may not be his. The court that was assembled to make a name permanent succeeded, and the name that became permanent is his poet's.

The frontier, and after

The emirate was finished by the Fatimids and their allies in 1004; the family's Mosul branch had gone a generation earlier.

The war they had made their reputation on outlasted them by less than a century. After Manzikert in 1071 the Byzantine frontier was in Anatolia and not in Cilicia, and the annual raiding across the Taurus that had given Sayf al-Dawla his title and his poets their subject simply stopped being a thing that happened.

What is left is a brick of campaign dust under a dead man's head in Mayyafariqin, and several thousand lines that are still set for examination.