Rasulid Sultanate

The deputies who stayed

Drafted from Smith, E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, New Series XXVI (1974)formation

Saladin's brother Turanshah conquered Yemen in 1173, and the Ayyubid branch left to govern it was one of the several pieces that family divided its conquests into. It held the country, badly and intermittently, for fifty-six years. When the last Ayyubid prince of Yemen left for Syria in 1229 he appointed a deputy to hold it for him, from a family that had come south in Ayyubid service.

The deputy did not hold it for him. Umar ibn Ali ibn Rasul had the khutba read in his own name, took the title al-Malik al-Mansur, and founded a state that lasted two hundred and twenty-five years — considerably longer than the Ayyubid confederation that had appointed him.

It is the most ordinary way a medieval Islamic dynasty begins. The Tulunids and Ikhshidids did it to the Abbasids in Egypt; Toghtekin did it to the Seljuks at Damascus; Zangi did it at Mosul. And in almost every case the overlord had no alternative: governing Yemen from Cairo required either an army permanently stationed there or a man on the spot who could be trusted, and Cairo could not afford the first.

The family's origins are the interesting complication. Rasul — the name means messenger, and was reportedly a title earned by an ancestor who had served as an envoy — was of Turkmen stock, and the family had arrived in the Arab world with the Oghuz migrations like the Seljuks and the Artuqids. Their own court historians said otherwise. The Rasulid genealogy as the dynasty published it traced the house to the Ghassanids: the Arab federate kings of the Roman frontier, six centuries earlier and two thousand kilometres to the north.

Nobody has to believe it. What is worth noticing is which ancestors were selected. A Turkmen family ruling Arabs in the most self-consciously Arab country in the world chose the most prestigious Arab kings on offer — and did it at a moment when the actual Ghassanids had been gone for six hundred years and were remembered mainly in poetry.

Yemen as alms

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

A deputy becomes a sovereign in two acts. He puts his name on the coinage, and he has it read in the Friday prayer. Nur al-Din Umar did both in the year 630, which is 1232, and the dynasty's own chronicler notes it as the moment: he commanded money to be coined in his name, and ordered the preachers to offer public prayer for him in every region of Yemen.

Then he spent the next three years getting somebody else to say it was true.

The diploma

Sovereignty in this world was not a thing a man simply took. It was a thing a caliph confirmed, and the caliph was in Baghdad — powerless, four decades from being killed by the Mongols, and still the only source of the document that made a ruler a ruler rather than a soldier who had won.

So Nur al-Din sent a large offering to al-Mustansir at Baghdad and asked for the diploma of sovereignty, requesting appointment as the caliph's lieutenant, which the chronicler notes is the ordinary practice of princes. The answer came back: the diploma will reach you by the eve of the day of sacrifices.

It did not. The caliph sent it with the Iraqi pilgrim caravan, and the caravan never arrived: the Bedouin blocked the road and filled in the watering places along it, the pilgrims were held up until the season had passed, and every one of them turned round and went back to Baghdad. Nobody from Iraq made the pilgrimage that year.

The next year the curtain of the Ka'ba came from Baghdad, and with it a message that the diploma would come by sea instead, by way of Basra. It did. The caliph's envoy found the sultan at al-Janad, climbed into the pulpit of the mosque, and delivered it in public:

O Nur al-Din, the mighty one greets thee and says: I have bestowed Yemen upon thee as an alms, and I have set thee over it.

Then he put the caliph's robe of honour on him, in the pulpit, in front of the congregation.

A whole country given away as sadaqa — charity — by a man in Baghdad who could not have collected a dirham of its revenue, to a soldier in Yemen who already held it and had been coining money in his own name for two years. Both parties knew exactly what the transaction was, and both wanted it done in a pulpit where people could see.

Mecca, and the money

The other half of the strategy was the holy cities, and it was conducted almost entirely with money.

Nur al-Din sent a large treasure and a force to the sharif of Mecca, who used them to throw the Egyptian garrison out of the city. He sent gold and silver lamps to hang in the Ka'ba. He made the pilgrimage himself, on blood-camels, in comfort — and was wounded to find that the sharif he had paid for slipped out of Mecca rather than perform it in his company, and came back only once the sultan had gone home.

Then five hundred Egyptian horsemen arrived under five commanders, one of them named Gabriel, and the sharif left for Yemen with them at his back. The pattern holds for the next century: Yemen could buy Mecca, and Egypt could take it, and whichever of them had a force there at the moment of the pilgrimage was the power whose name was said.

The ancestors

There was one more thing to acquire, and it could not be bought or fought for.

The family was of Turkmen origin. Its ancestor Rasul had been in Egypt in Ayyubid service and was sent down to Yemen when Saladin sent his brother to take the country. That is a perfectly respectable origin for a soldier and no origin at all for a king of the Arabs.

So the dynasty's own history opens somewhere else entirely. Before it reaches any Rasulid it goes through Saba and his sons Himyar and Kahlan, the great dam at Marib and the springs of Bilqis, the dream that warned of the dam's collapse, the dispersal of the Azd, Khuza'a taking charge of the Ka'ba, Aws and Khazraj going up to Yathrib — and then Jafna going north with Ghassan, the Ghassanid princes of the Syrian frontier, and their last king. Only after that does it arrive at a man called Rasul in Egypt.

The Rasulids, in other words, claimed to be Ghassanids: the Arab kings who had held the desert frontier for Rome, six centuries earlier and two thousand kilometres away, and who trace in the same genealogy back to the kingdom at Marib. It is not true. It is also the most expensive-looking pedigree available in Arabic, and a dynasty that had just been given its country as alms by a caliph it could not see had every reason to want one.

Aden

Drafted from Vallet, L'Arabie marchande: État et commerce sous les sultans rasulides du Yémen (626-858/1229-1454) (2010)peak

Aden is a harbour inside a dead volcano on the corner of Arabia, and in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries it was the hinge of the trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean.

The monsoon made it so. Ships from Gujarat, Malabar and the Persian Gulf sailed west on one season's wind and could not continue up the Red Sea, which is difficult sailing against contrary winds and full of reefs; goods were landed, warehoused, taxed and reloaded onto Red Sea craft for Egypt. Aden was where that happened, and whoever held Aden took a percentage of everything Europe bought from Asia.

Vallet's book is an argument that the Rasulid state should be understood as the administration of that percentage. It is not a claim made from inference: the dynasty left behind fiscal and administrative registers — the Nur al-ma'arif among them — that almost no medieval Islamic polity did, listing tariffs by commodity, the customs procedure, the officials, the presents given to visiting merchants and the rates at which each was assessed. The customs came first and the land second, and the registers say so rather than leaving it to inference; the coding rests on documents rather than on a chronicler's impression.

What the sultans did with the money is the rest of the story: the madrasas at Ta'izz and Zabid, the endowments, the scholarship, and a court that received and sent embassies to Cairo, to Delhi, to the Ilkhanate, to Ethiopia and to China. They also spent it on the Hejaz, which is the next chapter.

The state had one strategic weakness and it was the same as its strength. A polity whose treasury is a customs house depends on ships choosing to stop there, and ships stop where they are made welcome and where the alternative is worse. The Rasulids understood this perfectly — the registers show deliberate inducements to merchants, remissions, gifts, protection — and it worked for two centuries, until somebody with more force than they had made the alternative compulsory.

The contest for the holy cities

Drafted from Vallet, L'Arabie marchande: État et commerce sous les sultans rasulides du Yémen (626-858/1229-1454) (2010)peak

Yemen is the nearest substantial power to Mecca, and for most of the Rasulid period the sultans in Ta'izz behaved accordingly: they sent money to the sharifs, sent grain in bad years, sent the annual pilgrimage caravan, intervened in the sharifate's own succession quarrels, and on several occasions had the khutba at Mecca read in their name.

They were competing with Cairo for it, and the competition was conducted in ceremony and money rather than in armies. The Mamluk sultans regarded the guardianship of the holy cities as theirs, sent their own caravan and their own kiswa — the embroidered covering of the Ka'ba, replaced annually, and a public statement about whose sultan was paying for it — and objected when a Rasulid kiswa arrived first or when a Rasulid name was preached. There were years when two coverings arrived and the sharif had to choose, and years when the choice was made by whichever caravan reached the city earlier.

That sounds like protocol and it was politics. The Hafsids of Tunis the sharif of Mecca's acknowledgement as the one recognition a claimant to the caliphate could point to; the Ikhshidid and Sulayhid pages record the same thing from other directions. A ruler whose name was heard in the Friday sermon at Mecca by pilgrims from Morocco to Sumatra had a claim nothing else could buy, and the sharifs — who held a small territory, no army worth the name and the most valuable real estate in the Muslim world — spent nine centuries selling that recognition to whoever offered most and could reach them.

The Rasulids lost the contest slowly and then completely. Mamluk pressure on the Hejaz increased through the fourteenth century, and once Cairo controlled Jeddah's customs it controlled the sharif's income, which settled the question. By the fifteenth century the holy cities were unambiguously in the Mamluk sphere, and the sultanate that had been the alternative was losing its own revenue at the same time and for the same reason.

Sultans who wrote books

Drafted from Smith, E. J. W. Gibb Memorial, New Series XXVI (1974)aside?What aside means

Royal patronage of scholarship is ordinary and can be recorded of thirty pages. Rulers who were themselves working scholars are not ordinary, and the Rasulids produced several.

Al-Malik al-Ashraf Umar, who ruled for barely two years in the 1290s, wrote a treatise on astronomy and the construction of instruments, a work on medicine, one on agriculture, one on veterinary science, and a genealogy of his own house. An astrolabe he made with his own hands survives and is in a museum. He was not commissioning these; he was writing them, and the astronomical work includes instructions for constructing the instrument the reader is holding.

Al-Malik al-Afdal al-Abbas, who ruled from 1363 to 1377, compiled an agricultural almanac correlating the Yemeni farming year with the several calendars in use, and the six-language glossary that is the subject of the next chapter.

There is a Rasulid literature of this kind — on agronomy in particular, which matters in a country of terraced hillsides where the difference between a crop and a famine is water management — and a modern scholarship devoted to editing it. The dynasty also founded madrasas at Ta'izz and Zabid and endowed them properly, and Zabid in this period was a centre of Shafi'i legal study with a reputation across the Indian Ocean.

The site has no field for this and has said so before, most recently on the Muzaffarid page about Hafez. What it can do is put the observation where the comparison is available. Political weight and cultural output come apart — that the Artuqids built machines while acknowledging nine sovereigns, that Trebizond produced Bessarion while paying everyone. The Rasulids are the case where they do not come apart at all: the richest state in the region's history was also its most productive court, and the money and the books came from the same customs house at Aden.

Six languages

Drafted from others, Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section 8 (2000)aside?What aside means

Some time in the third quarter of the fourteenth century, a Rasulid sultan compiled a dictionary. It gives vocabulary in six languages in parallel columns: Arabic, Persian, Turkic, Greek, Armenian and Mongol. It is known as the Rasulid Hexaglot, and it was edited over twenty-five years by four scholars, three of whom died before it was finished.

Consider what it is evidence of. A ruler in Ta'izz, in the Yemeni highlands, had reason to compile working vocabularies of the languages of Anatolia, the Caucasus, Iran and the Mongol world — not classical Arabic and Persian, which any educated man had, but the spoken forms, arranged for use. The Greek and Armenian and Mongol sections are among the very few transcriptions of the living vernaculars of the period that exist anywhere, which is why linguists care about the manuscript and why Brill published it.

The reason a Yemeni sultan needed them is Aden. The port was where the Indian Ocean met the Red Sea, and the people passing through it were merchants, envoys, pilgrims, sailors and slaves from everywhere the trade reached. A court that ran a customs house on that scale was dealing with all of them, and the Hexaglot is the practical residue: somebody wanted to be able to talk to the people who arrived.

There is no square-kilometre figure for the Rasulid state here and no population, because none of the sources consulted publishes one, and the influence counts are all null. A reader working from the measures block alone would conclude this was a small polity of no consequence.

It was a small polity. The Hexaglot is a better description of what it was connected to than any figure of extent could — and the argument for having the page is that a corpus which measures reach in square kilometres will systematically undervalue every polity whose importance was that things passed through it. Srivijaya held a strait and reads as a gap in the extent axis. Palmyra taxed a road. Aden taxed a monsoon.

A whistler whistled

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

On a Thursday in December 1369 the governor of Zabid rode to the palace, and so did the emir of the city, and the tax collector of the valley, and the overseer of the country, and the lord of Fashal. They had agreed among themselves to get ready for the troops.

The troops in question were the 'Awarin, irregulars of Zabid and the northern districts, and what they wanted was to be paid on the same footing as the regular army. They had sworn an oath to each other in the night.

About ten of their notables came to the governor to put the demand. He reviled them, reproached them, upbraided them, and ordered the soldiers to seize them.

He did not know how many more of them were standing outside the palace gate.

The soldiers rushed the ten; the ten fought back; and then, in the chronicler's phrase, a whistler whistled. The whole city turned — the 'Awarin who lived in it, the 'Awarin who had come down from the north, and the Arab tribesmen who happened to be there — and the army was plundered in one instant.

The governor had counted on the strangers in the city siding with him. It had filled up with garrison men from the northern cantons, and he assumed they would say whatever he said. Every one of them, the chronicler notes, was ready for disorder and for what could be got out of it.

He ran, and the commanders ran, and the soldiers scattered. He was caught in a room of the palace and killed at the hour of sunset prayer. In the morning he was washed, shrouded and buried inside the city, near the Lotus-bush Mosque by the Shubariq Gate. By sunrise on the Friday the sharifs had arrived and were pitching their tents in the eastern garden.

What the entry is really telling you

That is not a rebellion against the dynasty. Nobody in it wanted a different sultan; they wanted their pay. And it is recorded in a court chronicle written to glorify the dynasty, with the date, the hour, the names of the five officials who had met that morning, and the mosque near which the dead man was buried.

Which is the point. The Rasulid state was the best-documented government Yemen ever had, and what the documentation shows in its later decades is a machine that had to be wound constantly. Judges and emirs going out on circuits to get in the revenue of the northern cantons and coming back to court with the money. The sultan moving between Ta'izz in the highlands and Zabid on the plain by season, holding the festivals in a garden by a watercourse. And, threaded through it, revolt after revolt in the same coastal towns, put down and recurring.

The famine of 1391 in the same district reads the same way: the rains late, the prices up, the cattle dead, the streams stopped, corn at ninety-odd ducats, and then the rain arriving at the end of Ramadan, the streams flowing, prices breathing more freely by the middle of the next month, and the new corn coming to market — followed immediately by an emir setting out to collect the revenue of the north.

Why it held anyway

A state that has to reconquer its own tax base every few years usually does not last two hundred and twenty-five.

This one did, and the reason was Aden. The customs of the port arrived whether or not the Tihama was quiet, and they arrived in quantities no Yemeni government had ever had, and they paid for the troops who put the districts back in order and for the judges who went out with them.

The arrangement was sound for as long as the ships came to Aden. It contained no provision for their going somewhere else.

What happened when the ships stopped

Drafted from Vallet, L'Arabie marchande: État et commerce sous les sultans rasulides du Yémen (626-858/1229-1454) (2010)end

From the 1420s the Mamluk sultan Barsbay set about moving the Indian Ocean trade off Aden and onto Jeddah, where Cairo could tax it. From the Egyptian side it was one half of a programme that also made the state the sole buyer of pepper at Alexandria. From the Yemeni side it was the removal of the thing the Rasulid state consisted of.

It was not done in a day and it was not done only by decree. Merchants were required, pressed, inducted and eventually compelled; the Mamluks had the naval reach in the Red Sea to make Aden's welcome less attractive than Jeddah's compulsion, and once the sharif of Mecca's customs income depended on Cairo the Hejaz end of the route was closed too.

The Rasulid collapse follows the revenue with a lag. The last decades are factional: contested successions, the mamluk regiments taking sides, tribal confederations in the highlands withdrawing recognition, and Zaydi imams from the north taking back districts they had lost two centuries earlier. In 1454 the last Rasulid was gone and the Tahirids — a Yemeni family of highland landowners who had been men of consequence in the Rasulid state, and no relation to the Khurasanis of the same name — took what was left.

Two things follow that are worth keeping. The first is that the Rasulid state's rise and fall are the same fact seen twice — a polity built on the customs of one harbour is exactly as durable as the reasons ships have to enter it. The second is that the Portuguese reached Calicut forty-four years after the last Rasulid sultan. The route Barsbay had fought to control was itself about to be circumvented, and the Mamluk page records what that did to Cairo. Aden did not live to see it.

One manuscript

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

The Rasulid court of the late fourteenth century had two men in it worth naming together. One was Firuzabadi, chief judge of the kingdom, who compiled the Qamus — for centuries the standard dictionary of the Arabic language, used from Morocco to Java by people who had no idea it had been finished in Yemen. The other was Khazraji, who wrote the history of the dynasty he served.

That pairing is the Rasulid afterlife in miniature. A state built on a customs house produced, at its own expense and for its own prestige, work that outlived it by centuries and travelled far further than its armies ever did.

What the chronicle is, and where it stops

Khazraji's history stops in 1400, at the death of the seventh sultan. He died himself in 1409. The dynasty went on for another fifty-four years.

So the best-documented state in medieval Yemen has almost no documentation of its own collapse. The years when Aden's trade was diverted up the Red Sea, when the revenue that had paid for everything stopped arriving, when the family fell to fighting over what was left — those years are outside the book. The chronicle covers the decades when the machine worked, week by week, and goes dark before the interesting part.

That is a common shape and it is worth naming when it occurs. Court histories are commissioned by courts. They are most detailed exactly where the court was most confident, and they end when the money for copying them does.

A single copy

What survived of it is stranger still.

When the book was translated in the 1880s it was from what its translator believed to be a unique manuscript — one copy, in the India Office Library in London, transcribed by hand by a British lexicographer who then made his own transcript a gift to Cambridge in thanks for an honorary degree.

He was candid about why he had bothered. His interest, he wrote in the preface, was Aden: the ancient emporium that had been the centre of the maritime commerce of the world until the Cape route drew the traffic away and sapped the source of its wealth, and which was in his own day the British Empire's most important coaling station.

Which means the chain runs like this. A dynasty of Turkmen soldiers claiming descent from the kings of Ghassan built the richest state Yemen ever had on the customs of a port. The port lost its traffic to a new sea route, and the state died of it within a lifetime. Four centuries later the same port was refuelling British steamships on the way to India, and an Englishman working for that empire copied out the dynasty's chronicle by hand because he wanted to know how the harbour had been rich before.

The wealthiest polity in Yemen's history came through to the modern world as one manuscript, kept because the harbour it was written about had become useful again for a different reason.