Nasrids of al-Hira

The other side

formationDrafted from Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011)

Neither Rome nor Iran could police the steppe between them with regular troops, and both solved the problem the same way: by paying an Arab dynasty to do it. Rome's was the Jafnids on the Syrian side. Iran's was the Nasrids at al-Hira, and this is them.

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

The arrangement was symmetrical and the two empires arrived at it independently. Iran got there first: the Nasrids are on the lower Euphrates from around 300, two centuries before Rome consolidated its own Arab allies under a single phylarch in 529. What each empire bought was cavalry that could operate where regular armies could not, intelligence about the interior, and — the part that mattered most — a counterpart capable of answering a raid with a raid, because nothing else answers one.

Where they were

Al-Hira sits on the western edge of the Euphrates floodplain near modern Kufa, at the point where the desert routes out of Arabia meet the irrigated country. That location is the whole of the polity's logic. It is close enough to Ctesiphon to be supervised and far enough into the desert to be useful, and it is a market before it is anything else.

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

Lakhm, Nasrid, and what to call them

Later Arabic tradition calls the confederacy Lakhm and the dynasty the Lakhmids, and that is the name most readers will know. Nasrid is used here for the ruling family, for the same reason Ghassan's kings are better called Jafnids: the confederacy and the house are different objects, and the sources describing the confederacy are centuries later than the events they describe.

Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011) · Nineteenth-century survey · Public domain

The Namara stone

The earliest object anyone connects to this house is an epitaph cut in 328 for Imru' al-Qays, which calls him king of all the Arabs, lists the tribes he subdued, and is written in the Nabataean script with the Arabic language underneath it.

Whether he was a Nasrid, and whether he served Iran or Rome or both in turn, is argued about, which is why the dynasty is dated from a round 300 rather than from him. The stone matters anyway, because it sits in the middle of the argument about where the Arabic alphabet came from. The Arabic tradition credits al-Hira with inventing it. The Namara epitaph — the earliest substantial text in the Arabic language — is written in Nabataean letters.

The lord of Khawarnaq

formationDrafted from Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (1907)

Arabic tradition remembered almost nothing about the two centuries between the dynasty's founder, Amr ibn Adi, and the reign of Nu'man I, called al-A'war - the One-Eyed - in the first quarter of the fifth century. What survived instead was legend, attached to a single building and a single moral.

Walters Art Museum, Baltimore · Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (1907) · Firdawsi, Shahnama · Public domain

A castle built to turn with the sun

The Sasanian king Yazdegerd I asked Nu'man to build a residence for his own son, Prince Bahram Gor, away from the court intrigues of Ctesiphon - a request that produced Khawarnaq, a castle near al-Hira famous enough to outlive the dynasty that built it. When the building was finished, Nu'man had its architect, a Byzantine subject named Sinimmar, thrown headlong from its own battlements - either because Sinimmar boasted he could have built something still more wonderful, one that would turn to follow the sun, or because he alone knew which single stone held the whole structure together and could bring it down if removed. "The reward of Sinimmar" became an Arabic proverb for gratitude repaid with betrayal, still current centuries after anyone remembered which king had ordered it.

Walters Art Museum, Baltimore · Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (1907) · Firdawsi, Shahnama · Public domain

A vizier's answer that ended a reign

The best-known story about Nu'man is not the murder but what followed it. Sitting with his vizier one spring day, admiring Khawarnaq's view over the Euphrates and the irrigated fen-country to the west, Nu'man asked whether his companion had ever seen anything to equal it. "Not if it would last," the vizier answered. Nu'man asked what could last; the vizier answered, "That which is with God in Heaven." Nu'man, the story goes, resolved on the spot to give up his kingdom - he put on sackcloth that same night, slipped away from his own court unnoticed, and lived out his life as a wandering ascetic. The tale almost certainly grew out of a poem by Adi ibn Zayd rather than recording an actual abdication, but it fixed Nu'man permanently in later Arabic memory as the king who built the most famous palace in pre-Islamic Arabia and then walked away from it.

A son who made and unmade a Sasanian king

Nu'man's own son Mundhir I proved a far more conventional ruler. When Yazdegerd I died and the Persian priesthood tried to block Bahram Gor's succession, Mundhir intervened with enough force to secure the throne for his father's old ward regardless of clerical objections - a Nasrid king making a Sasanian one. The loyalty was tested almost immediately: war broke out between Persia and Rome soon afterward, and Mundhir, fighting as Persia's vassal, was defeated by Roman forces with heavy losses in 421. Arabic tradition records little else of substance about the reigns between Mundhir I and Mundhir III a century later - a run of obscure kings ruling a dynasty whose court had already, in two generations, produced both a palace legendary enough to give the language a proverb and a king remembered as readily for renouncing his throne as for building one.

Taq-e Bostan, Iran · Nicholson, A Literary History of the Arabs (1907) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY 2.5

No one to stand against him

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

The best measure of what al-Mundhir of al-Hira achieved is the office the Roman empire had to invent in order to deal with him, and the fact that inventing it did not work.

Procopius, secretary to Belisarius and present on the eastern frontier, sets out the problem plainly. This man, he writes, proved himself the most difficult and dangerous enemy of all to the Romans. And he explains exactly why.

Al-Mundhir held the position of king and ruled alone over all the Saracens in Persia. He could therefore make his inroad with the whole army, wherever he wished, in Roman territory. And nothing on the Roman side could match that: not a dux, the commander of the troops of a district, and not any of the phylarchs — the Arab leaders allied to Rome — because the Roman forces were distributed among the districts and the garrisons were not, individually, a match for him.

Taq-e Bostan, Iran · Caesarea, History of the Wars, Books I-II: The Persian War (1914) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY 2.5

The Roman answer

So the emperor Justinian did something new. He put Arethas son of Gabalas, who ruled the Arabs of Roman Arabia, in command of as many clans as possible, and bestowed on him the dignity of king — a thing which among the Romans had never before been done.

An empire that had spent six centuries refusing to let allied Arab leaders hold a royal title conceded one, in order to concentrate enough Arab force under a single command to face the man on the other side.

And it made no difference

Procopius's verdict on the experiment is one sentence long and quite brutal.

Al-Mundhir went on injuring the Romans just as much as before, if not more, since Arethas 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.

The result, he says, was that al-Mundhir had nobody to stand against him and plundered the whole East for an exceedingly long time, because he lived to a very advanced age.

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

What that describes

Read it as a description of the polity rather than of the man and it is exact.

The Nasrid position had one structural advantage over everything Rome could put opposite it: unity of command. The Roman east was administered in districts, each with its own commander and its own troops, and its Arab allies were several groupings with several leaders. Al-Hira had a king who commanded all the Arabs of the Persian side and could move the whole of that force at once, at a time of his own choosing, against a frontier that had to be strong everywhere.

That is not a raiding advantage. It is an institutional one, and it is why a city on the edge of the Euphrates marshes could be a strategic problem for the Roman empire for fifty years.

The forty-year war

peakDrafted from Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011)

Al-Mundhir III held al-Hira for fifty years and spent most of them raiding Roman Syria. Procopius, who loathed him, calls him the most difficult and dangerous enemy the Romans had, says he was king for fifty years, and complains that no Roman commander ever managed to meet him in the field — he arrived, took captives and livestock, and was gone before a response could be organised.

State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg · Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011) · Photograph: Darafsh · CC BY-SA 4.0

The Roman answer was structural rather than military. In 529 Justinian put every Arab ally of Rome under one man, al-Harith ibn Jabala, and gave him patrician rank, specifically so that there would be a single command capable of doing to al-Mundhir what al-Mundhir was doing to Syria. Al-Mundhir is the reason that office exists.

531, and what a client was for

At Callinicum on the Euphrates in 531, al-Mundhir's cavalry broke the Arab allies on the Roman right and the Persian army beat Belisarius.

Raqqa, Syria · Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 3.0

That is the arrangement working, on both sides at once. Two empires that could not fight in the steppe fielded forces that could, forty kilometres apart, and the outcome of a set-piece battle between two regular armies turned on which empire's Arab client performed better. Neither of these dynasties is intelligible on its own, and the interesting fact about each of them is usually what the other was doing.

528 and 554

Two dates bracket al-Mundhir's reign.

In 525 he lost al-Hira to al-Harith ibn Amr, a chief out of central Arabia backed by a South Arabian kingdom — the only occasion when a power from the Arabian interior held the Euphrates frontier. He took the city back in 528, defeated al-Harith and killed him with much of his family, and the Persians supported the recovery throughout. From Ctesiphon it reads as a client being restored rather than a war being won, which is the correct reading: it is a change in the Nasrid position, not in the Persian one.

Fisher, Oxford Classical Monographs (2011) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 2.0

In 554 al-Harith ibn Jabala, the Jafnid, killed him.

The same day, two conclusions

The Jafnid record carries 554 as its second turning point and draws a conclusion from it about patrons: a client that has finished its task becomes a different proposition to the empire paying for it, and the following thirty years of Jafnid history are about what Rome did with one.

From this side the conclusion is about the client. Al-Mundhir's fifty years are the dynasty's peak and they are also the only period in which the Nasrids were independently formidable. His successors are competent and unremarkable. Within fifty years of his death both dynasties had been dismantled by the empires that made them, and there is no evidence either empire thought the two decisions had anything to do with each other.

A city, not a camp

peakDrafted from Toral-Niehoff, Islamic History and Civilization 104 (2014)

The Jafnids had no capital. Their court moved; Jabiya in the Golan is the place the sources keep returning to, and calling it a capital would import a fixed seat they are not recorded as having had.

Al-Hira was a city. It had churches, monasteries, a bishop from the fifth century, a palace, markets, a resident Persian garrison, a school of poets, and a permanent population of Arabs, Persians and Aramaeans who were mostly Christian. Toral-Niehoff's book is about the city rather than the dynasty, and that is the right way round: the Nasrids are the least interesting thing that happened at al-Hira.

The David Collection, Copenhagen · Toral-Niehoff, Islamic History and Civilization 104 (2014) · Photograph: Richard Mortel · CC BY 2.0

The Church of the East

The tradition al-Hira carried outward was the Church of the East — the Christianity the Sasanian empire tolerated precisely because Rome persecuted it.

It is worth being exact about what is and is not being claimed. The Nasrid kings were not Christians for most of the period; they were pagans presiding over a substantially Christian population, and Procopius has al-Mundhir sacrificing a captured Roman prince's sons to al-Uzza. What al-Hira did was serve as the northern base from which the Church of the East reached the tribes of eastern and central Arabia. Its bishops appear in the synodal lists. Its monasteries ringed the desert edge. When Christianity turns up among the Arabs of the Gulf coast and the interior in the sixth century, the channel is usually this city.

That is a count about effect rather than about faith, and the ruler being a pagan while it happened is a feature of the rule rather than a problem for it. The Jafnid record's count is made under the same test and is more conventional, the Jafnids having actively obtained bishops for a confession that had none.

The poets

The other thing al-Hira produced cannot be counted at all.

The Nasrid court was a centre of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry, and the poetry is not a decoration on the history — it is a substantial part of the surviving evidence for the whole period, and it is the foundation of the later Arabic literary canon. The Mu'allaqat tradition runs through this court. Al-Nabigha al-Dhubyani, Adi ibn Zayd and Tarafa are associated with it, the last of them in a story about a king having him killed for a satire.

A court that a Persian shah maintained as a military convenience on his desert edge turned out to be one of the two or three places where the classical Arabic literary tradition was assembled. There is no way of registering that alongside territory and revenue, and no reason to try: it is simply the most consequential thing the place did.

Kufa

The last thing worth saying about the city is what happened to it after the dynasty was gone.

Around 638 the Arab armies founded a garrison town called Kufa a few kilometres away, and al-Hira emptied into it over the following century. Toral-Niehoff's argument is that this was continuity rather than replacement: the Arab urban culture assembled at al-Hira — the Christianity, the poetry, the script, the mixed population, the habits of a court — moved down the road and became the culture of the city that produced Kufic script and a great deal of early Islamic scholarship.

Kufa, Iraq · Toral-Niehoff, Islamic History and Civilization 104 (2014) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 4.0

Kufa, Iraq · Toral-Niehoff, Islamic History and Civilization 104 (2014) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 4.0

It is tempting to call Kufa a continuation of al-Hira and the temptation should be resisted. One place emptied into another over several decades while both existed; there was no interruption and no succession. What moved was a population and the habits it had — the Christianity, the poetry, the script, the Arabic-writing administrative class — into a new town founded for a different purpose by a different power.

The Strata

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

In 539 Khusrau I wanted a war with Rome and did not want to be the one who broke the treaty. What he did about it is the clearest illustration anywhere of what the Arab client kingdoms were actually for, and of the position it left them in.

Procopius reports the instruction without embarrassment. Khusrau conferred with al-Mundhir on the matter and commanded him to provide causes for war.

So al-Mundhir brought a complaint against Arethas, the Roman client on the other side, alleging that Arethas was doing him violence over boundary lines. He attacked him in time of peace, and began raiding Roman territory on that pretext.

The legal argument

And then he made an argument which Procopius, who has no reason to help him, concedes is correct.

Al-Mundhir declared that he was not breaking the treaty between the Persians and the Romans, because neither party had included him in it.

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

That is the whole position of these dynasties stated in two sentences. They were sovereign enough to command armies and be called kings, and invisible enough not to appear in the documents. Which meant that anything they did was deniable by the empire that had told them to do it, and that nothing done to them was a breach of anything.

The land

The territory in dispute is called Strata and lies south of Palmyra. Procopius describes it: nowhere watered, entirely without trees or crops, burnt dry by the sun, and used for pasturing 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 referred the arbitration to two men. Summus, who had commanded the troops in Palestine, insisted that Rome should not give the country up. Strategius, the patrician in charge of the imperial treasures, begged the emperor not to do the Persians the favour of handing them a pretext for the war they already wanted — for the sake of a small piece of ground of absolutely no account, unproductive and unfit for crops.

The emperor took the matter under consideration, and a long time was spent on the settlement of the question.

What the quarrel was worth

Khusrau then produced a counter-charge: that Justinian had broken the treaty by trying to detach al-Mundhir from Persia — that Summus had offered him great sums of money to come over, and that there were letters. Procopius records the accusation and adds, characteristically, that whether the man was telling the truth he cannot say.

Both empires, in other words, spent the run-up to a major war arguing about which of them had tampered with an Arab king, over a strip of waterless pasture neither of them wanted.

The Nasrids were at the height of their usefulness in that moment and it is also the moment their limit is visible. A power whose value is that it can be used without consequence is a power that will one day be discarded without consequence too, and sixty years later Khusrau II did exactly that.

Caesarea, History of the Wars, Books I-II: The Persian War (1914) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 2.5

602

endDrafted from Toral-Niehoff, Islamic History and Civilization 104 (2014)

Khusrau II had al-Nu'man III seized, imprisoned and killed — the accounts differ on whether by execution or by plague, in the way accounts do when the answer is inconvenient — and replaced the client kingship with a Persian governor. The Nasrid dynasty ended after three centuries.

Taq-e Bostan, Iran · Toral-Niehoff, Islamic History and Civilization 104 (2014) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 2.0

The immediate reasons given are personal and probably real: a refusal of a marriage demand, a quarrel over tribute, a king who had grown too independent and had converted to a church with connections across the frontier. The structural reason is the one the Jafnid record gives for 582 and it is the same reason. A client that has been useful for a long time looks, to the empire paying for it, like a standing concession rather than a service.

Dhu Qar

Two years later an Arab coalition met a Persian army at a place called Dhu Qar and beat it.

The later Arabic tradition made a great deal of this — the first time the Arabs defeated the Persians, and a portent — and modern accounts are more restrained about its scale. What is not in dispute is the sequence. Iran removed the dynasty that had held its desert frontier for three hundred years, put a governor in its place, and inside twenty-four months discovered that a governor could not do what the dynasty had done.

Thirty years after that, Arab armies took Iraq.

Toral-Niehoff, Islamic History and Civilization 104 (2014) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 2.5

It does not follow that abolishing the Nasrids caused the conquest, and that claim is not being made here. What can be said is narrower and still substantial: both empires dismantled their own Arab frontier arrangements within twenty years of each other, each for reasons that were sound in its own terms, and neither had anything in place when the frontier became the decisive one. A third empire, Himyar, had done the same thing to its own Arabian clients in the 530s. Three empires, three sound decisions, one outcome.

Toral-Niehoff, Islamic History and Civilization 104 (2014) · Photograph: Commons contributor · CC BY-SA 3.0

Two endings for one decision

The two dynasties ended differently on paper and almost identically in fact.

Rome arrested its supreme phylarch in 582 and divided his following among fifteen chiefs, which is fragmentation carried out deliberately by the polity's own patron. Iran killed its king in 602 and put an official in his place, which is a dynasty replaced by direct administration — not by another dynasty, which is what the vocabulary word implies, and there is no better value on the list.

Two closed-vocabulary endings, chosen honestly, that make an identical decision by two empires look like two different kinds of event when they were one decision taken twice.

Not a succession

Neither of these dynasties succeeded the other. They were exact contemporaries, exact opposites, and killed each other's kings. What connects them is not inheritance but symmetry: two Arab houses, on two sides of one frontier, doing the same job for two empires that each concluded, twenty years apart, that the job was no longer worth paying for.

The poets lived on it

afterlifeDrafted from Lyall, Translations of Ancient Arabian Poetry, Chiefly Pre-Islamic (1885)

Al-Hira was destroyed as a political entity in about 602, and what it had paid for outlived it by a very long way.

The court of al-Nu'man, the last king of al-Hira, was — in the summary of the scholar who put the pre-Islamic poetry into English — the resort of the most famous poets of the day, who lived luxuriously on the bounty their poems brought them. The same was true at Ghassan on the Roman side, with a smaller circle. And inside the peninsula the great chiefs competed with one another over the magnificence of the presents they gave to whoever praised them in verse.

That is a description of an economy, and the Nasrids were at the top of it.

What patronage did to the poetry

The verdict on it is not flattering, and it comes from the same page.

The earliest poets, on this account, practised the art neither for fear nor favour. By the end of the pre-Islamic period it had become customary to reward panegyric lavishly, and the poets had become professionals living on it — which led, the argument runs, straight to the extravagances of the following centuries.

So al-Hira's contribution to Arabic literature was money, and money changed what the literature was for. A tradition that had produced boasting, lament and the description of a journey acquired a paying market for praise, and the men who supplied it went where the payment was.

Why any of it survives

The transmission is the point, and it explains why a small Christian Arab kingdom on the Euphrates matters more to Arabic than to the history of Iraq.

Pre-Islamic verse was not written down at the time. It was carried by professional reciters attached to individual poets and passed on by memory, and it reached paper in eighth-century Iraq when scholars went looking for it. What they found was disproportionately the poetry of the courts — because court poems had been paid for, performed publicly, and preserved by people whose living depended on knowing them.

The David Collection, Copenhagen · Lyall, Translations of Ancient Arabian Poetry, Chiefly Pre-Islamic (1885) · Photograph: Richard Mortel · CC BY 2.0

Al-Hira was one of the two or three places where that was true. Its kings bought poems for a century and a half, and the language of the poems is the language that became the standard of Arabic eloquence before the Qur'an, against which the Qur'an was first heard.

And the city

Al-Hira itself did not last. Within a generation of the Muslim conquest the population had drifted the few miles to the new garrison town of Kufa, which became one of the two great centres of Arabic philology — the place, along with Basra, where the eighth-century scholars did the work of collecting, editing and arguing about the old poetry.

So the men who assembled the pre-Islamic canon were working a short walk from the ruin of the court that had paid for a good deal of it. That is not a coincidence either. Scholarship goes where the material is, and the material was in the memories of people whose grandfathers had recited for kings.