Mirdasid Emirate

A hundred years outside the wall

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 Banu Kilab were an Arab tribe of northern Syria who had been in the country around Aleppo since well before the Hamdanids and had spent the tenth century being hired by whoever held the city. They supplied the Hamdanid cavalry. When the Hamdanids failed they supplied the Fatimids, and when it suited them they supplied the Byzantines, and none of these employments was exclusive or permanent.

What they had not done was hold Aleppo. Kennedy's account of the tenth and eleventh centuries in the Jazira and Syria makes the point that the bedouin confederations of this period were not an interruption of settled government but a form of it — powers with real revenue, real diplomacy and no city — and that the recurring question is whether a tribe could take a walled town without ceasing to be a tribe.

Salih ibn Mirdas answered it. He was imprisoned by Mansur ibn Lu'lu', the man then holding Aleppo, escaped in 1014, raised the Kilab, beat Mansur in the field and forced recognition as paramount emir of the countryside. He then spent ten years taking the forts — al-Rahba on the Euphrates first — that made the city untenable without him. He besieged Aleppo in late 1024 and was inside it by the new year.

The dynasty is named for his father, which is the usual Arab practice and is a small piece of evidence for the argument: nobody had heard of Mirdas, and the name was the tribe's, not a house's.

The price of the khutba

Drafted from Zakkar, The Emirate of Aleppo, 1004-1094 (1971)expansion

Aleppo in the eleventh century sat between two empires that both wanted it and neither of which could hold it cheaply. The Fatimids were in Egypt and southern Syria; the Byzantines had come back to northern Syria under Nikephoros Phokas and held Antioch, sixty miles away. The Mirdasid emirate existed in the space between, and its foreign policy was to be worth more to each of them as a buffer than as a province.

The instrument was the khutba — the Friday sermon, which named whichever sovereign the city acknowledged. Naming the Fatimid imam bought Cairo's recognition and Cairo's money. Naming nobody, or renaming, was the standing threat. Zakkar's judgement on the Kilab is that they served whoever paid most and, in a crisis, would sell their employer to the highest bidder, and it is worth reading that as a description of how the emirate was financed rather than as a complaint about tribal character. A polity with no army it did not have to feed and no revenue base larger than one city has a short list of assets, and its position was the largest of them.

Salih forgot this once and it killed him. In 1029 he took a Mirdasid army south into Palestine against the Fatimids, in alliance with other bedouin, and was destroyed at al-Uqhuwana near Lake Tiberias. His sons Nasr and Thimal inherited half the territory and the whole lesson. For the fifty years that followed, the Mirdasids fought their neighbours, their cousins and their own tribe, and never again fought an empire for land.

They fought each other constantly. Nasr and Thimal divided the emirate, then took it from each other; Thimal lost Aleppo to a Fatimid governor and got it back; nephews and brothers held it in turn, and on at least three occasions the city changed hands without a siege because the Kilab outside had decided which Mirdasid they preferred.

Thimal's peace

Drafted from Zakkar, The Emirate of Aleppo, 1004-1094 (1971)peak

Mu'izz al-Dawla Thimal held Aleppo, with interruptions, for most of thirty years, and the stretch from about 1050 to 1057 is the emirate working as designed. He was recognised by the Fatimids, left alone by the Byzantines, and at peace with his own tribe, and Aleppo went into a building boom — walls, markets, and the kind of construction a city only undertakes when it expects to keep what it puts up.

The arrangement Thimal ran is the answer to the question the first chapter asked, and it is not the one either the tribe or the city would have chosen. The Mirdasids did not govern Aleppo the way the Hamdanids had. They lived largely outside it with the Kilab, drew the revenue, and left the city's day-to-day administration to its own notables and its own judges — a division of labour that was stable while the emir was strong and ambiguous the moment he was not. His wife Alawiyya bint Waththab, a Kilabi noblewoman, held al-Rahba in her own right and negotiated with Cairo directly.

The emirate's ceiling is visible in what Thimal did with his good years, which was nothing. There was no expansion, no institution founded, no army built that did not disperse at harvest. A polity whose income is its own strategic awkwardness has no reason to become anything else and no way to survive the awkwardness ending.

The city's own soldiers

Drafted from Zakkar, The Emirate of Aleppo, 1004-1094 (1971)aside?What aside means

Eleventh-century Aleppo, like Damascus, had an ahdath: an armed militia raised from the quarters of the city, commanded by a ra'is drawn from the local notables, and answering to neither the emir nor the caliph. It policed the markets, took sides in factional fighting, opened and closed the gates, and on more than one occasion decided who ruled.

The ordinary categories for a medieval army all describe how a ruler raised a force — a tribal levy, a grant of land for service, purchased slaves, conscription. None of them fits, because the ahdath was not raised by a ruler. It was the armed expression of a city that had learned, across the collapse of Hamdanid rule and four decades of Fatimid, Byzantine and bedouin claimants, that it would need to hold its own walls between regimes. Calling it a state levy would be wrong, and calling it a following owed to some chief would be wrong too. The emirate's own soldiers were the Kilab; the city's soldiers were something else entirely.

The ahdath is what the eleventh century in Syria has instead of a state. Aleppo and Damascus both spent this period being fought over by outsiders whose armies came and went, and both cities retained a permanent, local, non-dynastic armed body that outlasted every claimant. When Nur al-Din takes Damascus in 1154 the gates are opened from the inside, and the reason there is an inside to open them is a hundred and fifty years of this.

It ends when the Turkish military households arrive with soldiers they own. The Zangids and after them the Ayyubids had no use for an armed citizenry and suppressed it, and the militia disappears from the record in the twelfth century. Every polity that holds Aleppo or Damascus after 1128 raised its army by purchase or by revenue assignment, and none of them let a city keep weapons.

Tread on my carpet

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

Alp Arslan crossed the Euphrates in 1070 and besieged Aleppo, and Ibn Khallikan records what he demanded and what was done about it. The demand was one sentence and the answer took place at night.

A thing that had not happened before

Ibn Khallikan quotes al-Ma'muni's history for the significance of the crossing itself, and it is worth taking literally:

It is said that neither in ancient nor in Islamic times did any Turkish king, prior to Alp Arslan, cross the Euphrates.

Turks had been in Syria for a century — as slave soldiers, as mercenaries, as governors, latterly as the Turkmen bands the Mirdasids had hired and could not dismiss. What had never happened was a Turkish sovereign bringing his own army over the river.

Aleppo at that moment was held by Mahmud ibn Nasr ibn Salih ibn Mirdas al-Kilabi — three generations from the Bedouin chief who had taken the city.

The terms

Negotiations opened, and Alp Arslan's condition was not territorial. It was physical.

Mahmud, he said, should come and tread on his carpet — should stand on the sultan's rug — if he wished for peace.

That is the whole of it. No tribute is mentioned, no cession, no garrison. The sultan of the largest empire in the Islamic world wanted the emir of Aleppo to walk into his tent and be seen doing it.

So Mahmud went, at night, and he took his mother with him.

Alp Arslan received them both with great kindness, put robes of honour on them, sent them back to their city — and decamped.

What was actually transacted

Read one way this is a humiliation, and the night and the mother are the evidence: a man going in the dark, with the woman whose lineage was half his claim, to stand on a carpet.

Read another way it is the cheapest settlement any Syrian ruler got out of the Seljuk advance. Aleppo was not besieged to a finish, not sacked, not garrisoned and not given to somebody else. The Mirdasids kept it for another decade. What they surrendered was the proposition that they were nobody's subjects — and by 1070 that proposition was not worth defending, because the Turkmen who were eating their countryside had been invited in by Mahmud himself.

The court that Alp Arslan's grandfather's people had once served as hired bows now required its emir to come and be looked at. Both sides understood the ceremony exactly, which is why there is no fighting in the account and why the robes of honour matter as much as the carpet.

Afterwards

Alp Arslan went on north, and in the following year fought the battle at Manzikert that took Anatolia off the Byzantines.

Aleppo's own reckoning came later and from a different direction. Mahmud died in 1075; his sons quarrelled; and in 1080 the city passed out of the family altogether — handed over, not stormed, which by then was how things in northern Syria were done.

The Turkmen

Drafted from Wilson, Medieval Syria and the Onset of the Crusades: The Political World of Bilad al-Sham 1050-1128 (2023)contraction

From the 1060s the emirate's problem stopped being empires and became migration. Turkmen bands moving west ahead of and alongside the Seljuk advance arrived in northern Syria in numbers, and they were not an army that could be bought off once. They raided the countryside the Kilab grazed, took service with whichever Mirdasid was paying, and left when the pay stopped. Mahmud ibn Nasr used them to take Aleppo from his uncle and then could not get rid of them.

In 1070 he appealed to the Seljuk sultan Alp Arslan to control the Turkmen he had invited in, and got a sultan on his doorstep instead. What that submission consisted of is told separately. Its lasting consequence was the khutba: the Friday prayer at Aleppo passed from the Fatimid imam in Cairo to the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad and the Seljuk sultan.

Wilson's argument about this period is that reading it as two invasions — Turkish from the east, Frankish from the west — arriving at a passive Syria gets the causation backwards, and the Mirdasid case is his kind of example: the Turkmen were in Aleppo because an Aleppan emir hired them, and the Seljuk sultan was at the walls because that emir wrote to him.

What the submission cost was the emirate's entire business. For fifty years the Mirdasids had been paid to be the thing between Cairo and Constantinople. Once Aleppo read the khutba for Baghdad and a Seljuk sultan had beaten the Byzantine emperor in the field, there were no longer two customers, and a bedouin emirate holding one city had nothing else to sell.

Handed over

Drafted from Wilson, Medieval Syria and the Onset of the Crusades: The Political World of Bilad al-Sham 1050-1128 (2023)end

The last Mirdasid years are a decline with no battle in them. Mahmud died in 1075; his sons Nasr and Sabiq held Aleppo in turn and fought each other for it, while Turkmen bands took the countryside and the city's food supply, and the ahdath and the notables watched their emirs fail to protect either.

In 1080 the Aleppans opened negotiations with somebody else. Sharaf al-Dawla Muslim ibn Quraysh, the Uqaylid lord of Mosul and the largest Arab power left in the Jazira, was invited to take the city on the argument that he could keep the Turkmen out. Sabiq ibn Mahmud gave it up. There was no siege and no massacre, and the Mirdasid emirate ended in a negotiation between a city and a stranger about who would defend it.

It is not a conquest, and the way it happened is the honest verdict on the dynasty. The Mirdasids held Aleppo for fifty-five years without ever making themselves necessary to it. They were a tribal confederation that took a city, drew its revenue, quarrelled over it in public and never built anything inside the walls that would have made their removal expensive.

Muslim ibn Quraysh kept Aleppo for five years and was killed by the Seljuks in 1085. The Kilab were still there, still raising horsemen, still selling them.

What the translator could not name

Drafted from al-Qalanisi, The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades (1932)afterlife

The Mirdasids handed Aleppo over in 1080 and the city carried on without them, as it had carried on before them.

Over the next seventy years it belonged in turn to the Uqaylids, to the Seljuk Tutush, to Tutush's son Ridwan, to a succession of Turkish officers, to Ilghazi the Artuqid, to his nephew Balak, to Zangi, and finally to Nur al-Din. Some of those transfers were sieges. Most were negotiations, and the party being negotiated with was frequently not an army at all.

The word in the footnote

Ibn al-Qalanisi keeps mentioning the ahdath of Aleppo, and when H. A. R. Gibb came to translate him in 1932 he had to stop and admit that he did not know exactly what to call them.

His note says it is difficult to assign a precise meaning to the word; that it may be applied loosely to young men in general, to apprentices, or even to the town rabble; and that certain passages nevertheless make it clear that they were a definite military organisation, for which he settles on "armed bands" or gens d'armes.

That footnote is the afterlife of the Mirdasid emirate in one paragraph. The institution that repeatedly decided who governed Aleppo has no stable name in the sources, no founder, no charter and no formal place in anybody's government, and a great Arabist working from the fullest contemporary chronicle could not pin it down beyond a guess and a hedge.

Why it is hard to name

Because it was not part of the state. Every category the period offers describes a force a ruler raised — a tribal levy, a grant of land in return for service, purchased slaves, conscription. The ahdath was the armed expression of a city that had learned it would be governed by strangers and had better be able to choose which ones.

That is why it survived every dynasty. The Kilab who put the Mirdasids in Aleppo were gone by 1080. The Uqaylids lasted five years, Ridwan and his officers a generation, the Artuqids months at a time. The militia of the quarters was there throughout, opening and closing gates, and in 1154 the same institution in Damascus let Nur al-Din in over the wall.

What the dynasty is worth

The Mirdasids ruled Aleppo for fifty-five years and left almost nothing inside its walls that made them hard to replace, which is the judgement their own ending delivers.

But the thing they governed through — a city with its own armed body, its own notables, its own opinion about who should hold the citadel, and the ability to act on it — outlasted them by a century and a half and settled the fate of both of Syria's great cities in the end. The eleventh century in Syria is usually written as a list of dynasties passing through. It reads better as the history of two towns deciding, repeatedly, whom to let in.