Jafnid Dynasty

Hiring the frontier

formationDrafted from Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011)

Rome and Sasanian Iran shared a border that ran, for much of its length, through country neither of them could garrison: the steppe between Syria and the Euphrates, and the desert south of it. Both empires solved the problem the same way. They paid Arab dynasties to hold it.

Syrian desert · Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011) · Photograph: Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

On the Persian side this was the Nasrid family at al-Hira on the lower Euphrates, whose confederacy later tradition calls Lakhm. On the Roman side, from about 502, it was the Jafnids. The arrangement gave the empire cavalry that could operate where regular troops could not, intelligence about the interior, and — most importantly — a counterpart who could answer raids in kind, because the only effective response to a raid from the steppe was a raid back, and imperial armies were not built for it.

Syrian desert · Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011) · Photograph: Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

What the Jafnids got was money, rank and recognition. Fisher's point about the money is that it was not a bribe. The subsidies were the ordinary machinery by which Rome retained allies, paid in the same way as to any foederatus — which makes the Jafnid state one financed almost entirely by another state, without that arrangement implying subjection in the way the word tribute usually does.

The frontier they held was not empty and it was not only military. It carried the caravan traffic from Arabia, the pilgrim traffic to shrines like Sergiopolis at Rusafa, and a settled and semi-settled Arab population that had been there for centuries and was increasingly Christian. The Jafnids were the political expression of that world rather than an army stationed in it.

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A thing never before done

expansionDrafted from Caesarea, History of the Wars, Books I-II: The Persian War (1914)

The Jafnid kingdom exists because of a problem on the other side of the frontier, and Procopius — who was there, as secretary to Belisarius — states the problem and the solution in consecutive sentences.

The problem was al-Mundhir of al-Hira. He held the position of king and ruled alone over all the Arabs on the Persian side, which meant he could bring his whole force against any point of the Roman frontier he chose. Against that, Procopius says, neither a Roman dux commanding a district's troops nor any of the phylarchs — the Arab leaders allied to Rome — was strong enough to stand, because the Roman forces were parcelled out among the districts and no single piece of them was a match for him.

Metropolitan Museum of Art · Caesarea, History of the Wars, Books I-II: The Persian War (1914) · Metropolitan Museum of Art · CC0

The concession

So Justinian put al-Harith son of Jabala, who ruled the Arabs of Roman Arabia, in command of as many clans as possible, and bestowed on him the dignity of king.

Procopius adds five words that carry the whole significance of the act: a thing which among the Romans had never before been done.

Rome had used allied Arab leaders on this frontier for centuries and had always given them Roman ranks — phylarch, patrician, gloriosissimus — offices in the imperial hierarchy, held at the emperor's pleasure, over a defined district. What it had never done was recognise one of them as a king, because a king is not an office in somebody else's system.

Bode-Museum, Berlin · Caesarea, History of the Wars, Books I-II: The Persian War (1914) · Photograph: Commons contributor · Public domain

It did it now, and it did it for a purely operational reason: to concentrate enough Arab force under one command to face the man across the desert.

What the grant produced

A great deal, and none of it what was intended.

Al-Harith held the position for forty years. He fought Persia repeatedly, eventually killed al-Mundhir in battle in 554, and made the Jafnid house the paramount Arab power on the Roman side of the steppe. He also used the standing the royal title gave him for purposes that had nothing to do with the frontier — most consequentially, going to Constantinople and obtaining the consecration of bishops for the anti-Chalcedonian church the empire was persecuting.

That is the recurring hazard of the arrangement. A client given enough authority to be useful has enough authority to have his own policy, and the Jafnids' own policy was a church their patron regarded as heretical.

The judgement Rome could not make

There is one more sentence in the passage and it is the most revealing thing Procopius wrote about the man.

Al-Mundhir, he says, went on hurting the Romans just as much as before, if not more — since al-Harith was either extremely unfortunate in every raid and every engagement, or else turned traitor as fast as he could. For as yet we know nothing certain about him.

A serving Roman officer, writing about the empire's own senior Arab commander in the middle of his career, cannot tell whether the man is unlucky or a traitor, and says so in print. That uncertainty is not a failure of evidence. It is the permanent condition of a frontier client: he is judged entirely on results, he operates where nobody from the capital can see, and the difference between bad luck and bad faith is invisible from Constantinople.

Al-Harith

peakDrafted from Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011)

In 529 Justinian did something Rome had not done before: he put all the Arab allies of the eastern provinces under one man. Al-Harith ibn Jabala — Arethas to the Greek sources — was made supreme phylarch and given the rank of patrician, the highest dignity ever conferred on a foreign ally, and he held it for forty years.

The reason was al-Hira. The Nasrid al-Mundhir had been raiding Roman Syria for decades with Persian backing, reaching as far as Antioch's hinterland, and the separate Roman phylarchs could not coordinate against him. A single command could. In 554 al-Harith met him in battle and killed him, and the Nasrid threat that the phylarchate had been assembled to answer was finished.

Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi, Syria · Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011) · Photograph: Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

Al-Harith is a substantial figure in the Greek sources and they are not flattering. Procopius accuses him of treachery at the battle of Callinicum in 531 — the standard charge against an allied commander when a Roman general loses — and Fisher's reading of these passages is that they say more about how Roman writers handled Arab success than about what happened. The same historian's account is the only one we have.

The court that al-Harith and his son ran is the part that outlasted them. It patronised Arabic poetry — the pre-Islamic poets name Jafnid patrons, and the tradition of the Arab warrior-court with its poets and its wine and its generosity is substantially a memory of this one. It built and endowed churches across the frontier. And the later Umayyad caliphs, ruling the same country from the same Golan, took the model: a court in the Syrian steppe, Arabic verse, audience halls out in the country, and Jabiya as a centre. The Umayyad caliphate begins in 661. The kind of court it kept was assembled here first.

Qusayr Amra, Jordan · Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 4.0

Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi, Syria · Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011) · Photograph: Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

Jafnid, not Ghassanid

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011)

Almost everything written about this dynasty calls it Ghassanid, and that name is avoided here. The reason is Fisher's, and it is a claim about what kind of object we are looking at.

Ghassan is a confederacy — a large tribal grouping that later Arabic genealogy traces to the Azd and brings north out of Yemen. The Jafnids are a family: the descendants of Jafna, who were the people Rome actually dealt with. Later Arabic tradition merged the two, so that the family became the royal house of the confederacy and the confederacy's history became the family's, running back to the third century.

Jordan Museum · Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 4.0

Fisher's argument is that the merger obscures how the arrangement worked. Rome's agreements were personal. Justinian appointed al-Harith, not Ghassan; the rank and the subsidy were his; and when Maurice wanted the arrangement to stop, he arrested a man and the following dispersed. A polity that can be ended by detaining one person is not a nation with a dynasty at its head. It is a dynasty with a following, and the difference is visible in 582.

Musée du Louvre, AO 30045 · Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011) · Musée du Louvre · Public domain

It matters beyond the label. Writing history at all assumes that polities persist independently of the individuals running them — that is what licenses a sentence like the dynasty ruled for two hundred years. The Jafnid case sits right at the edge of that assumption. Its beginning is a range between a treaty and an appointment; its end is a range between a deposition and a battle fifty-four years later that a different tradition attributes to the same house. What is being dated is not obviously one object.

Two further consequences follow from that, and neither should be smoothed over. Exactly when the court moved to Jabiya is not securely fixed. And who actually held the position last is not securely known either: the line after 582 is disputed, and the man later tradition places at Yarmuk rests on that tradition's own authority rather than on anything closer to the event.

The bishops they got consecrated

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011)

The Christological controversies of the fifth and sixth centuries had left the eastern provinces divided between the Chalcedonian settlement the imperial court held to and the Miaphysite position most of Syria and Egypt held to. The imperial government persecuted the Miaphysites intermittently, and by the 540s the confession was running out of bishops: without bishops there are no ordinations, and without ordinations a church expires within a generation.

San Vitale, Ravenna · Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011) · Photographer unknown · Public domain

Al-Harith was Miaphysite, and he asked the empress Theodora for bishops. He got them. Jacob Baradaeus was consecrated and spent decades travelling the east in disguise ordaining clergy, and the hierarchy he built is the ancestor of the Syriac Orthodox Church, which still exists. A body of Christians survived as a separate church because an Arab client king asked the emperor's wife for a favour.

Rusafa, Syria · Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011) · Photograph: Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

The Jafnids also built. Churches and shrines along the frontier, endowments at Rusafa — the pilgrimage centre of Saint Sergius, the soldier-saint whose cult the frontier Arabs took up in numbers — and structures at Nitl and elsewhere that excavation has attached to them. The point is not that the Jafnids were Christian — plenty of client dynasties were — but that they propagated a particular confession among populations that had not held it, and endowed the institutions that kept it there.

Rusafa, Syria · Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011) · Photograph: Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

It also explains part of what happened in 582. A client who is the political patron of the confession the imperial court is trying to suppress is a client with an independent constituency, and the Jafnid phylarchs used it — al-Mundhir convened Miaphysite bishops and intervened in their disputes, which is the behaviour of a sovereign rather than a subsidised ally. Rome noticed.

Rusafa, Syria · Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011) · Photograph: Verity Cridland · CC BY 2.0

What Rome gave

aside?What aside meansDrafted from Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011)

The Jafnids ruled because an emperor said they did, and they never pretended otherwise.

Al-Harith was phylarch and patrician because Justinian made him so. The rank was conferred, announced and displayed, and the family's standing among the Arabs of the frontier rested visibly on Constantinople's recognition of it. They did not claim to be kings in their own right, they did not claim descent from anyone who had been, and they did not claim that God had chosen them. They held an office, and the office had an owner.

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A common arrangement, rarely named

It is easy to read that as weakness, or as a colonial relationship dressed up. It is neither. Holding authority by grant from a sovereign you do not claim to be is one of the most durable ways power has been arranged, and once you start noticing it, it is everywhere.

The kings of Caucasian Iberia were invested by Rome, which acquired the right by treaty in 298. The kings of Greater Armenia were nominated by Parthia and crowned by Rome under the settlement of AD 63 — a throne with two owners, which worked for longer than it had any right to. A Hujrid phylarch held his position from Himyar. A Shaddadid branch held Ani on a Seljuk diploma. The sharifs of Mecca were qualified by descent from the Prophet and appointed by whoever happened to hold Egypt.

And some of the most powerful men of the medieval world chose the arrangement deliberately. Timur ruled for thirty-five years beside a Chinggisid puppet, because descent barred him from the title himself and he wanted the authority more than the name. Hasan Buzurg had done the same with Ilkhanid figureheads a generation earlier. Karim Khan Zand refused the title of shah outright and governed as deputy for a Safavid infant.

Why it lasts

What these have in common is that the ruler's right to rule is portable and revocable, and both of those turn out to be advantages.

Portable, because a grant can be made to a family that has no local claim at all — which is precisely why frontier powers used it. Rome did not need the Jafnids to be legitimate among the Arabs before appointing them; the appointment was what made them so.

Revocable, because it gives the conferring power a lever short of war. The Jafnids did not fall in a battle. In 582 Maurice deposed the phylarch and broke the confederation up deliberately, dividing the following among fifteen chiefs, and the frontier Rome had spent a century assembling went with it. A family that had risen by grant fell by cancellation, which is the risk built into the whole arrangement, and the reason those who could afford a different claim usually made one.

Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi, Syria · Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011) · Photograph: Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

A strip of pasture

contractionDrafted from Caesarea, History of the Wars, Books I-II: The Persian War (1914)

In 539 the Persian king wanted a war and needed somebody else to start it. Procopius describes the mechanism without any evident sense that it requires apology, and it is the clearest account there is of what the Jafnids had become by the middle of the century.

Khusrau conferred with al-Mundhir of al-Hira on the matter and commanded him to provide causes for war.

Al-Mundhir accordingly brought a complaint against al-Harith — that al-Harith was doing him violence over boundary lines — attacked him in a time of peace, and began raiding Roman territory on that pretext.

The argument that was true

When challenged, al-Mundhir made a legal case which Procopius, no friend of his, concedes.

He was not breaking the treaty between Persia and Rome, he said, because neither of them had included him in it.

And this was true. No mention of Saracens was ever made in the treaties, on the ground that they were covered by the words Persians and Romans.

Both Arab kings were therefore in the same position, and it is worth stating it from the Jafnid side because it is usually described from the other. Al-Harith was a king by Roman grant, commanding Roman-allied clans on Roman territory, and he did not exist in the document that governed war and peace between the two empires. He could be attacked without a treaty being broken. He could attack without a treaty being broken. Everything he did was deniable by the people who had told him to do it.

What they were arguing about

The disputed ground was called Strata and lay south of Palmyra. Procopius, who seems to have taken some care over this, describes it: no water anywhere, no trees, no crops, burnt dry by the sun, used for grazing a few flocks.

Syrian desert · Caesarea, History of the Wars, Books I-II: The Persian War (1914) · Photograph: Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

Justinian sent two men to arbitrate. Summus, formerly commander of the troops in Palestine, held that Rome should not surrender the country. Strategius, the patrician who ran the imperial treasury, begged the emperor not to do the Persians the favour of handing them a pretext for a war they already wanted — over a small piece of ground of absolutely no account, unproductive and unfit for crops.

Justinian took the matter under consideration, and a long time was spent on the question.

Syrian desert · Caesarea, History of the Wars, Books I-II: The Persian War (1914) · Photograph: Vyacheslav Argenberg · CC BY 4.0

What the episode did to the position

Nothing on the ground. Everything to the standing of the office.

Al-Harith had been made a king in order to be the equal of the man on the other side. What the Strata affair demonstrated was the limit of that equality: the two kings could be set at each other by their patrons at any time, on any pretext, over anything, and neither empire needed to explain itself afterwards because neither had ever put them in writing.

The war came in 540 and Khusrau sacked Antioch. Al-Harith went on serving, killed al-Mundhir fourteen years later, and remained the most successful client Rome had on that frontier.

Forty years after his death the empire arrested his grandson, broke the confederation into fifteen pieces, and stopped paying.

How it was known

contractionDrafted from Caesarea, History of the Wars, Books I-II: The Persian War (1914)

Procopius spent twenty years insinuating that al-Harith was a traitor, and then recorded the thing that proved he was not. The proof is the worst sentence in the Jafnid record.

The insinuations run through the Wars. Callinicum in 531 was lost because the Arab wing gave way; the Assyrian campaign of 541 failed because al-Harith went off with the plunder and sent no word back; whenever a Roman general is embarrassed, the phylarch is nearby. Procopius is the only continuous source for any of it, and he never quite states the charge — he arranges the facts so that a reader will make it for him.

Then, under the year 545, he describes something that happened without either empire in it. Rome and Persia had just concluded a five-year truce. Al-Harith and al-Mundhir went to war with each other anyway, unaided by the Romans or the Persians, on their own account. Al-Mundhir caught one of al-Harith's sons in a sudden raid while the young man was out pasturing horses, and sacrificed him immediately to Aphrodite — the Greek name Procopius uses for al-Uzza.

And then Procopius writes the clause: and from this it was known that Arethas was not betraying the Romans to the Persians.

That is the whole of his acquittal and it is delivered in a subordinate clause. The evidence that the supreme phylarch of the Roman east was loyal is not anything he did for Rome over forty years — not the patriciate, not the campaigns, not killing al-Mundhir at Chalcis nine years later. It is that the Persians' client killed his son on an altar, which he would not have done to a man who was working for him.

The rest of the notice is brief. The two of them met in a general engagement afterwards, al-Harith's forces won overwhelmingly, and he came close to capturing two of al-Mundhir's sons alive but did not. Such, then, was the course of events among the Saracens.

Two things follow, and the second is the more important.

The first is that the two client dynasties fought their own war during an armistice between the empires that employed them. Procopius records elsewhere that no treaty between Rome and Persia ever mentioned the Arabs, on the theory that they were covered by the names of the principals — which al-Mundhir had once pointed out meant that nothing in such a treaty bound him. The clients had a quarrel of their own and a calendar of their own.

The second is what counts as proof in a Greek historian's account of an Arab ally. Forty years of service produce a permanent suspicion; one atrocity committed against him by the other side produces a grudging clause. It is not that Procopius disbelieved al-Harith. It is that nothing al-Harith could do would have settled the question, and the thing that settled it was done to him.

582

endDrafted from Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011)

Al-Mundhir ibn al-Harith succeeded his father in 569 and inherited both halves of the position: the frontier command and the patronage of a church the imperial government was trying to suppress. Relations with Constantinople deteriorated across the 570s — there was a period when the subsidy stopped and the frontier went unguarded, and a Roman campaign that failed with each side blaming the other.

In 580 he went to Constantinople and was received with honour. Two years later he was arrested and exiled to Sicily. His son was taken shortly afterwards, and the emperor Maurice divided the following among fifteen chiefs, none of them supreme.

Istanbul · Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 4.0

That is the ending, and it does not fit any of the usual words. The polity was not conquered, did not collapse and was not replaced by a successor. Its patron took it apart on purpose, having decided that the instrument built in 529 had become more dangerous than the problem it was built for.

There is no ordinary term for a state disassembled by the power that assembled it, and the absence is worth noticing rather than papering over. Conquest, collapse and usurpation all assume the state's end is caused by somebody who wanted what it had. This one was ended by the only party with an interest in its continuing.

Istanbul · Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 4.0

What that decision cost is one of the standing questions of the period, and it should be stated carefully rather than dramatically. Fifty-four years later the Roman army was destroyed at the Yarmuk, in exactly the country the phylarchate had held, by an Arab force from the peninsula. Later Arabic tradition puts a Jafnid, Jabala ibn al-Ayham, on the Roman side of that battle. It is a very old argument that the empire had dismantled its own Arab frontier and could not reconstruct it in time, and it is not provable: the Roman east in the 630s had just survived twenty-six years of Persian war and plague, and there is more than one thing wrong with it.

Library of Congress · Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011) · American Colony, Jerusalem · Public domain

What is certain is narrower. Rome had spent eighty years building an Arab political authority in Syria — a court, a subsidy, a church, a poetry — and then ended it. Sixty years after that, Syria was ruled from Damascus by an Arab dynasty that used the same steppe residences, patronised the same kind of court, and made Jabiya a centre again.

Thirty princes

afterlifeDrafted from al-Khazraji, The Pearl-Strings: A History of the Resuliyy Dynasty of Yemen (1906)

What the Jafnids left was not a state, a church or a successor. It was a list of names, and the list travelled a very long way.

Nine centuries after the confederation was broken up, a court historian in Yemen sat down to write the official history of the Rasulid sultans, and opened it with a genealogy. Before reaching any Rasulid he goes through Saba and his sons, the great dam at Marib, the dream that warned of its collapse, the dispersal of the Azd — and then Jafna going north with Ghassan, the Ghassanid princes of the Syrian frontier, and their last king.

Only after that does he arrive at the soldier in Egypt whom Saladin sent to Yemen.

Marib, Yemen · al-Khazraji, The Pearl-Strings: A History of the Resuliyy Dynasty of Yemen (1906) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 3.0

The list itself

It is worth looking at what the genealogy actually consists of, because it is almost entirely epithets.

The first of the princes of Ghassan was Mazin son of Azd, called the Gatherer Together of Ghassan and the Slayer of Famine. Then his son Tha'laba, called the Provision of Travel. Then Imru' al-Qays, surnamed Buhlul; then Haritha; then Amir, who was designated Water of the Sky, or as some say Water of the Rain-Cloud; then Imran, who was a diviner; then his brother Amr, surnamed the Little Tatterer. Then Jafna. Then a run of Hariths distinguished only by nicknames — Harith the Greater, Harith the Halter, Harith the Lesser.

And at the end: Jabala son of al-Ayham son of Jabala. And he was the last of their princes. And God knows best.

The numbers do not agree

The compiler is candid about how much of this is guesswork.

The number of their princes, he writes, was thirty sovereigns. It has been said thirty-two sovereigns, and even thirty-six sovereigns. And the period of their rule was six hundred and sixteen years — though in some history, he adds, the duration of their rule was one thousand six hundred years.

A range of six hundred to sixteen hundred years is not a chronology. It is a statement that nobody knew, and that the not-knowing did not matter for the purpose the list was serving.

What the purpose was

A dynasty of Turkmen soldiers ruling Arabs in Yemen needed an Arab ancestry, and the most prestigious available were the Ghassanid kings of the Roman frontier — famous, extinct, sufficiently distant that nobody could check, and attached at the far end to the kingdom at Marib.

So the Jafnid afterlife is a pedigree. Not a claim by anybody with a plausible connection, but a name kept in circulation for nine hundred years because it was the best thing an ambitious house could say about itself, in a country two thousand kilometres from Jabiya, in a book whose author was not sure whether the dynasty had lasted six centuries or sixteen.

The empire that made them a kingdom, and then unmade it in a single arrest, would have found that outcome incomprehensible. It is also the only part of them that outlived the seventh century.