Marwanid Emirate

The shepherd

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

Badh ibn Dustak was a Kurd of the Humaydi tribe on the upper Tigris, and the Arabic sources are unanimous and slightly derisive about where he started: he kept cattle, then took up arms. In the 980s the Buyid grip on northern Iraq was loosening and the Hamdanids of Mosul were finishing, and Badh took Mayyafariqin and then Amid and then most of Diyar Bakr, in the manner of a man who has noticed that nobody is coming.

He overreached in the usual direction — south, towards Mosul, which was the prize everyone in the Jazira wanted — and it killed him. In 990 the Uqayl, whom the Buyids had settled in the region precisely as a counterweight to Kurds like him, beat and killed him. That fight is two things at once: it is the beginning of the Uqaylid emirate on the next page, and the end of the founder on this one.

What happened afterwards is the interesting part, and it is why this is a polity and not an episode. Badh's conquest did not dissolve. His sister's sons — the sons of a man called Marwan, who never ruled anything — took it up, held it, and gave it a hundred years and a name. Abu Ali al-Hasan first, then his brother Mumahhid al-Dawla, then the third brother Ahmad, and the third brother turned out to be the reason anyone remembers the family.

Kennedy's framing of the tenth and eleventh centuries in the Jazira applies exactly: the caliphate's collapse outward did not produce anarchy, it produced locally-raised powers that could hold a city and negotiate with an empire. What the Marwanids added to the pattern is that they did it for three generations, which none of their Arab neighbours managed.

The vizier who had run out of courts

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

The way a small Kurdish emirate in Diyar Bakr turned into a state was not by taking ground. It was by hiring people the great powers had finished with, and the clearest case is the man who died in office at Mayyafariqin in October 1027.

What he was

Ibn Khallikan opens the life of al-Wazir al-Maghribi with a genealogy that runs back through Sasanian kings to Bahram Gur, and then quietly notes that people disagree about whether the family was even from the Maghrib.

His father's note on the flyleaf of one of his books survives, and it is the note of a man who knows what he has produced. The boy was born in June 981. Before he was fourteen he had by heart the Qur'an, a number of grammatical and philological textbooks without their commentaries, and about fifteen thousand verses of the old Arabic poets; he wrote poetry, wrote prose, and surpassed his contemporaries in penmanship, in casting nativities and in algebra. Before he was seventeen he had abridged a standard work on lexicography, reorganised its chapters, and begun turning the whole thing into verse — a number of sheets in a single night.

And all this, the father writes, before he had completed his fourteenth year.

What happened to him

In June 1010 the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim had his father, his uncle and two of his brothers put to death.

He fled to Ramla and attached himself to the Jarrahid chiefs of Tayy who had seized the town, and set about turning them against Egypt. Then he went to the Hijaz and worked on the governor of Mecca, holding out the prospect of overthrowing al-Hakim and taking Egypt. The intrigue got far enough that the sharif of Mecca was brought to Ramla and proclaimed caliph under the title al-Rashid, and it alarmed al-Hakim seriously enough that he bought the Jarrahids off with a large sum of money.

The scheme collapsed. The sharif fled home. Al-Maghribi went to Iraq to be out of reach — where the Abbasid caliph al-Qadir, hearing that he had arrived and assuming he had come to plot against the Abbasids too, ordered him expelled from the caliphate's territory.

He was sheltered anyway by the vizier Fakhr al-Mulk, who kept him in his suite and protected him until Fakhr al-Mulk was himself executed. He then talked his way back into the caliph's tolerance, went to Mosul, and was taken on by Qirwash the Uqaylid as secretary of state. From there he intrigued for the vizierate of the Buyid Musharraf al-Dawla at Baghdad and did not stop until the sitting vizier had been arrested and he had the post.

By the mid-1020s he had worked for or against the Fatimids, the Abbasids, the Uqaylids and the Buyids, and had run out of courts.

Diyar Bakr

So he went to Ahmad ibn Marwan, and was his vizier until he died.

That is the transaction the emirate turned on. Nasr al-Dawla acquired, for a frontier emirate of no great size, an administrator who had run a Buyid government at Baghdad, had been a Fatimid insider before that, and had personally attempted to make a new caliph. Ibn Khallikan notes elsewhere that Nasr al-Dawla had two viziers who had served caliphs in that capacity — this one, and Ibn Jahir, who left Mayyafariqin to become vizier at Baghdad.

A court that can attract that kind of man twice is not a chieftaincy. It is a place where a serious career could be continued, and the emirate's growth in the eleventh century is largely a matter of having been the place people went when the larger courts became fatal.

The tomb

He died at Mayyafariqin in October 1027, forty-five years old, in office.

His will directed that his body be carried to Kufa and buried near the shrine of Ali. On the tomb, by his own instruction, they cut verses he had written:

I had long travelled in the path of error and ignorance; it was time for me to arrive at my journey's end. I have repented of all my sins, and this last part of my conduct may perhaps efface the former. After five and forty years, I had hoped for a longer respite, did I not know that my creditor is generous.

A man who had spent his adult life trying to bring down the dynasty that killed his family, and who found employment at last in the Kurdish highlands, arranged to be buried in Iraq with an apology on the stone.

Fifty years

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

Nasr al-Dawla Ahmad ibn Marwan ruled Diyar Bakr from 1011 to 1061. Fifty years on one throne is exceptional anywhere in the medieval Near East, and he spent them in a corner of the world that four larger powers were fighting across.

The method was not military. Nasr al-Dawla was on terms with the Byzantines under Basil II and after him, with the Buyids and then the Abbasids at Baghdad, with the Fatimids in Egypt, and eventually with the Seljuks — simultaneously, and by acknowledging whichever of them was closest that decade while conceding nothing that mattered. He held two strong cities, Mayyafariqin and Amid, on ground that is difficult to march an army into and expensive to besiege, and he made the price of taking them consistently higher than the value of having them.

The result was a half-century of prosperity that the chroniclers, who are not usually sentimental about small dynasties, describe with something like astonishment: full markets, working irrigation, walls and bridges and mosques built and kept, and a court that paid poets and scholars and physicians well enough that they came from Baghdad. Mayyafariqin in the middle of the eleventh century was a place people went to.

Political weight and the quality of life underneath it come apart, and this is one of the clearest cases. The Marwanids were never a great power and contributed nothing to anybody's military history — and the fifty years they bought were, for the people living in Diyar Bakr, better than anything the region got from the empires on either side of them.

A Kurdish state

Drafted from Ripper, Mitteilungen zur Sozial- und Kulturgeschichte der islamischen Welt (2000)aside?What aside means

Kurdish states are rare in the record of this period. The Ayyubids were Kurdish by origin, but Saladin's house was Arabized within a generation, ruled in Arabic, and is remembered as an Egyptian and Syrian dynasty rather than a Kurdish one. The Marwanids are the other entry, and they are the one that stayed what it was.

Ripper's monograph — the only book-length study of the dynasty, and in German, which is worth stating rather than hiding — makes a claim about the emirate that goes beyond its hundred years. The Marwanid century is when the westward movement of Kurdish population into Diyar Bakr intensified under a Kurdish ruler, and it is a substantial part of why the upper Tigris is Kurdish country now rather than Armenian or Arab or Syriac. A polity that lasted from 983 to 1085 is still visible in a map of who lives where.

That is the kind of consequence nothing measures. The Marwanids carried no religion outward, produced no script, and nobody claimed to succeed them; by every ordinary index of influence they left nothing at all.

What they left was people, in places where those people are still living. It is the largest thing they did and the hardest to state as a fact, because migration in this period is attested unevenly, is contested wherever it is attested, and resists being counted by anybody honest about the evidence.

The counterweight goes

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

Nasr al-Dawla's whole method required that there be several great powers within reach and none of them dominant. From the 1050s that stopped being the case.

Tughril Beg's Seljuks took Baghdad in 1055 and made the Abbasid caliph their client, which merged two of the four powers the Marwanids had been balancing into one. Turkmen bands were already in the Jazira and Armenia, grazing and raiding, attached to the sultanate loosely or not at all. Nasr al-Dawla acknowledged the sultan, which was the correct move and was also the end of the game he had been playing: an emirate whose product is its own convenient neutrality has nothing to sell once there is only one buyer.

He died in 1061, at about seventy, having ruled for half a century. His sons and grandsons held Diyar Bakr for another twenty-four years and are hard to see in the sources, which is itself informative.

Ten years after his death, at Manzikert — a day's ride north of Marwanid territory — Alp Arslan destroyed a Byzantine army and captured its emperor. The Marwanids were not in that battle, and it changed nothing for them directly. What it did was remove the last counterweight. Byzantium had been the power on the other side of the Marwanid position for a hundred years, and after 1071 it was not on that side of anything.

The vizier

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

Fakhr al-Dawla ibn Jahir had been the Marwanids' vizier. He left, went to Baghdad, rose in the Seljuk administration, and in 1085 persuaded the sultan Malikshah that Diyar Bakr was worth taking and that he was the man to take it. He led the campaign in person. Mayyafariqin fell, the emirate ended, and the treasury a hundred years of careful neutrality had accumulated in the citadel was carried east.

The sources on that treasury are the kind of thing chroniclers enjoy — the libraries, the jewels, the manuscripts, the itemised catalogue of a small dynasty's century — and the enjoyment is the point of including it here. A polity like this one is legible in the record mainly at the moment it is looted. For fifty years under Nasr al-Dawla the chronicles say very little about Mayyafariqin because nothing was happening there that a chronicler in Baghdad needed to explain, which is the condition every ruler in the period claimed to want and almost none of them achieves.

Diyar Bakr became a Seljuk province and never governed itself again. Within twenty years the Artuqids were at Hisn Kayfa and then Mardin — Turkmen, holding the same rocks by the same logic — and what governed the country next begins in 1102. Nobody afterward claimed to be continuing the Marwanids, and the only thing joining them to anything else is the plain fact of who ended them: the Seljuks, from outside the region entirely.

What the emirate left was not a claim or an institution. It was a population.

The astrologer

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

An astrologer once came to Nasr al-Dawla, the great Marwanid, and told him among other things that a man he had been the benefactor of would attack his kingdom and take it from his children.

The prince thought for a moment, then raised his head and looked at Fakhr al-Dawla ibn Jahir, who was sitting there. If these words are true, he said, this shaykh is the man.

Then he turned to him and commended his children to his care.

What happened

Ibn Jahir left Marwanid service, rose to be vizier at Baghdad, and came back in 1085 at the head of a force of Turkomans, Kurds and emirs supplied by the Seljuks. Amid fell to his son after a hard siege. Three months later he took Mayyafariqin from Nasr al-Dawla's son and seized the treasures of the Marwanid dynasty.

Ibn Khallikan tells the prophecy and the outcome in the same paragraph, without any suggestion that it was a coincidence, and then declines to give the details of the conquest because they would take too long. The anecdote is the part he wanted preserved.

Why the story was told

It is not really a story about astrology. It is a story about what everyone in eleventh-century Iraq and the Jazira knew: that the man who ended a dynasty was usually somebody it had raised.

That had happened to the Abbasids, whose Turkish guards took over the caliphate; to the Samanids, whose slave general founded Ghazna; to the Buyids and to the Seljuks after them. The Marwanids had themselves come out of an adventurer's household. Nasr al-Dawla did not need an astrologer to tell him where the danger was, and the story preserves the moment as a joke he made at his own expense in front of the man concerned.

The bleak part is the last line. Having identified his successor's murderer, so to speak, he commended his children to that man's protection — because there was nobody else to commend them to. The only people strong enough to defend a dynasty are the people strong enough to take it.

What was taken

The Marwanid treasury went to Baghdad. Ibn Jahir did not keep Diyar Bakr either; the Seljuks who had lent him the army took the country a few years afterwards, and it was governed from outside for the next four hundred years.

What was left in place was the population. The Kurdish settlement of the upper Tigris that the Marwanid fifty years had consolidated outlasted the treasury, the dynasty, the vizier who took it, the sultans who took it from him, and every government that has ruled the region since.