Sarbadars

Heads on the gallows

Drafted from Jr., Publications in Near and Middle East Studies, Series A, 11 (1970)formation

The name is a declaration. Sar be dar — head on the gallows — is what they are reported to have said: better our heads on the gallows than to go on living like this. Whether anyone said it in those words at the time is the kind of thing the sources cannot settle, but the name stuck and it is the one the coins and the chronicles use.

The thing itself began in 1337 in a village called Bashtin, near Sabzavar in western Khurasan, and it began over tax. The Ilkhanate had collapsed two years earlier and the collectors were still coming, now on behalf of whichever amir currently claimed the province. A local landowner named Abd al-Razzaq killed one of them — the accounts vary on the provocation and several of them involve his household — and instead of fleeing he raised the district, took Sabzavar, and kept it.

States generally begin with a conquest, a secession, a general, or a family already in possession of something. This one begins with a tax collector being killed in a village, and it lasted forty-four years.

It also began the way it would continue. Within a year Abd al-Razzaq had been stabbed to death by his own brother, Wajih al-Din Mas'ud, during an argument. Mas'ud took the leadership, and turned out to be the best commander the movement produced.

Behind the revolt was something older than the tax. Khurasan in the 1330s was full of dervish brotherhoods, and one of them — the followers of Shaykh Khalifa, who had been murdered in Sabzavar a couple of years earlier, and after him of his disciple Shaykh Hasan Juri — was preaching something more than piety. Mas'ud released Hasan Juri from prison and made him a partner. That decision is what turned a tax revolt into a state, and it is what the state could never afterwards resolve.

Two parties in one town

Drafted from Jr., Publications in Near and Middle East Studies, Series A, 11 (1970)expansion

The Sarbadar state had two constituencies and they wanted incompatible things.

The dervishes — the shaykhiyya, Hasan Juri's organised following, with cells across Khurasan and a discipline the chronicles describe with alarm — wanted a religious order in power: Shi'i, expectant, hostile to the landed and the comfortable, and understanding the movement as a preparation for something. The other party were the landowners and townsmen who had risen in 1337 and who wanted what people in that position usually want, which was to hold the district, collect the tax themselves, and be left alone. They were largely Sunni and were entirely uninterested in a theocracy.

For a few years the combination worked and it worked well. Mas'ud took Nishapur, Tus and Mashhad, pushed west, and by the early 1340s the Sarbadars held most of western Khurasan and were a power the Kartids of Herat and the amirs of Mazandaran had to deal with. The dervishes supplied the discipline and the recruitment; the landowners supplied the administration and the money.

It broke at Zawa in 1342. The Sarbadars fought the Kartids of Herat, and Hasan Juri was killed during the battle — struck down by his own side, according to the version the chronicles preferred. Fasihi's chronicle says it flatly: Shaykh Hasan Juri died at the hands of Wajih al-Din Mas'ud's men. Whether that is what happened is exactly what cannot now be established, and it is the sort of thing a chronicler writing later would be glad to believe. What is not in doubt is the effect. The one man both factions accepted was gone, and for the following thirty-nine years the leadership swung between a dervish and a landowner and back, each new man undoing his predecessor's policy and a good many of them killing him first.

Mas'ud himself was killed in 1344, campaigning north into Mazandaran, and the expansion ended with him. What remains after that is a small, well-defended, internally violent state in Khurasan that outlived several larger neighbours.

The head on the pole

Drafted from Isfandiyar, An Abridged Translation of the History of Tabaristan (1905)peak

The furthest the Sarbadars ever reached was Mazandaran, and the best account of what happened there is in the local chronicle of the country they invaded — which is to say, written by the other side.

What the Tabaristan chronicle saw

The continuation of Ibn Isfandiyar's history of Tabaristan picks up the Sarbadars from underneath. Amir Mas'ud had taken Khurasan from Herat to Gurgan and Qumis, placed governors in the important towns, and come to Astarabad intending to subjugate Mazandaran. He tried first to win the local rulers over, and one of them — Kiya Jamal al-Din Ahmad Jal, whom the chronicler describes as a powerful, sagacious and experienced noble — went to negotiate with his nephews, was well received, and was then made to accompany the army as it marched on.

The kings of Mazandaran refused, in blunt terms. Mas'ud marched on Amul, and the two armies met on the plain outside it on 13 April 1343, the Mazandaranis defending a stockade they had thrown up beside their king's palace.

Then the chronicler gives the speech that decided it. Jamal al-Din, seeing the battle was unavoidable and that Mas'ud would not listen to him, sent repeated messages to his kinsmen telling them to defend the honour of Mazandaran and not to trouble themselves about what became of him: I am an old man, who have lived my life; if I perish and Mazandaran continue in honour it is better than that ye should submit to subjection and abasement.

The province responded. All of them, from Tammisha to the frontier of Gilan, forgot their private quarrels and presented a united face.

The bargain

Mas'ud, alarmed by their firmness, asked the men he had been holding to get him out of Amul. One of his own amirs deserted to the Mazandaranis, which frightened him further, and he gave Kiya Ahmad Jal five kharwars of silver to guide him out of the country.

The Kiya sent the money to his kinsmen and told them to build earthworks from the river Hurmuz to Sari and close the roads.

After ten days in Amul the Sarbadar army left, and a parasang outside the city it was met in front by the ustandar and attacked in the flank by the soldiers of Mazandaran. Mas'ud's head was cut off, stuffed with straw, and displayed to everyone on the exact spot where he had camped a few days before with so great and well-equipped an army.

What it cost

That is the end of Sarbadar expansion. The state held western Khurasan for another thirty-eight years and never again threatened anybody outside it.

Two things are worth taking from the way this is recorded. The first is that the Khurasani sources date Mas'ud's death to 1344 and the Tabaristan chronicle puts the battle at Amul in April 1343, and the discrepancy has never been resolved; it is the ordinary condition of a period in which every province kept its own chronicle and nobody reconciled them.

The second is the picture from below. Seen from Sabzavar the Sarbadars are a movement of villagers and dervishes against oppression. Seen from Amul they are a Khurasani army arriving to subjugate the province, bought off with silver by an old man who then used the money to dig earthworks against them, and beaten by a country that briefly stopped quarrelling with itself in order to do it.

Not a dynasty

Drafted from Jr., Publications in Near and Middle East Studies, Series A, 11 (1970)aside?What aside means

Almost every state of this period is a dynasty or is trying to become one. This one never was, and two things about it are consequently hard to describe in the ordinary vocabulary.

The first is how the leadership passed, which is that it did not pass at all. In forty-four years there were about a dozen leaders, most of them killed by their own side, with the position alternating between two parties that could neither agree nor separate. Lane-Poole counts twelve successive chiefs of whom nine suffered violent deaths, and notes that not one of them held the command for more than six or seven years. That is not a succession rule with a name. It is a standing fight, interrupted by funerals.

The second is what the army was. It was the movement in arms: a religious brotherhood's membership under discipline, alongside the armed retainers of the landowners who had risen with it. It was not a tribal levy — these were villagers and townsmen, explicitly not a tribe. It was not a conscription, because there was no administration to do the levying when it started. It was not a slave guard, a mercenary corps, or men holding land against service. Nobody has a word for a state whose army is a Sufi order and a landowners' association in an uneasy alliance, and it is better to say so than to reach for the nearest familiar label.

There is a third thing, which is what this polity has been made to mean. Soviet and Iranian Marxist historiography read the Sarbadars as a peasant republic — an early rising of the common people against feudal oppression, with the dervishes as its ideological cadre. Hostile medieval chroniclers read them as heretics and bandits. Smith's book is largely an attempt to get behind both readings to what the coins and the inscriptions can actually establish, and his answer is more modest than either: a factional regional state, unusual in its origins, held together by the fact that everyone in it had more to fear from outside than from each other.

The saddled horse

Drafted from Jr., Publications in Near and Middle East Studies, Series A, 11 (1970)aside?What aside means

The Sarbadars were Shi'i, at least in the dervish half, and the form their Shi'ism took is the most striking thing recorded about them. They are said to have kept a horse saddled and bridled at Sabzavar, brought out at appointed times, for the Twelfth Imam to ride when he returned — which was expected not as a doctrine about the end of time but as an event that might occur that year.

The reports come from writers who did not approve, and the saddled horse is therefore a report rather than an established fact about the state's liturgy. What is better established is that the coins carry Shi'i formulae, and that the dervish faction's authority came from the hidden imam rather than from any caliph, any ancestor or any army — which is an unusual thing for a government to rest on, and an unstable one, because an imam who has not arrived cannot settle an argument.

The other episode belongs to the last ruler and points forwards. Ali Mu'ayyad, by then trying to hold a Shi'i state together against a Sunni majority population and his own factions, wrote to Muhammad ibn Makki al-Amili — the Twelver jurist from Jabal Amil in what is now southern Lebanon, known to the tradition as al-Shahid al-Awwal, the First Martyr — and asked him to come to Khurasan and give the state a body of law. He did not come. He wrote a book instead, al-Lum'a al-Dimashqiyya, the Damascene Glitter, which became one of the standard texts of Twelver jurisprudence and is still taught.

Read that against what happened in 1501. A dynasty declared Twelver Shi'ism the religion of Iran, discovered it had no clergy to enforce it with, and imported jurists from Jabal Amil to build one. A hundred and twenty years earlier a small state in Khurasan had run into the same problem on a smaller scale and written to the same place. The Safavid programme was unprecedented in scale and was not, on this evidence, unprecedented in kind.

Al-Shahid al-Awwal was executed in Damascus in 1384, on charges arising from his Shi'ism, three years after the Sarbadar state had ended.

The neighbour who lasted forty years

Drafted from Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Volume III: The Tartar Dominion (1265-1502) (1920)contraction

The Sarbadar rising had a near neighbour of almost exactly its own age and the opposite character, and for most of both their existences they were fighting each other.

Mu'izz al-Din of the Kart dynasty came to the throne at Herat in 1331. Browne notes what his accession nearly coincided with: the death of Abu Sa'id, which in practice ended Mongol rule over Iran; the birth of Timur; and the rising at Sabzavar. Those are the three things that decide the next sixty years of Khurasan, and two of them arrived within a few years of each other in the same province, a fortnight's ride apart.

Everything about the two states was opposed. Herat was a dynasty with a genealogy, a settled capital, a forty-year reign and the Sunni law; Sabzavar had a shifting command, Shi'i and expectant, and a leadership that killed itself about once every five years. Browne, following Lane-Poole, gives the figure that defines the period between Mas'ud's death and Ali Mu'ayyad's long tenure: twelve chiefs, nine of them violently killed, not one of them holding the command more than six or seven years. Herat had one ruler for the whole of it.

That did not make Herat the civilised party. After taking Badghis, Mu'izz al-Din built two towers of the heads of his enemies — Browne's phrase is that it was done in the style later made familiar by Timur, and the point is that the style was familiar in Khurasan a generation before Timur reached it. He reigned, in Browne's careful formula, not ingloriously, though not without occasional acts of barbarity which were characteristic of the time. He died in 1369 and was buried at Herat beside the Ghurid sultan Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad Sam.

The frontier between them ran through Nishapur and it moved. Ali Mu'ayyad, the one Sarbadar who held power long enough to have a policy, took Bistam and Farhadjird and brought Nishapur over; the Karts took Nishapur back in 1375 or 1376. That is the whole of it. In forty years neither state could finish the other, and neither could stop trying, and what they succeeded in doing was exhausting the province they were both living on at the moment a third party was assembling an army in Transoxiana.

Both were finished by that third party within a few years. Timur occupied Herat in the spring of 1381, took Ghiyath al-Din Pir Ali and his eldest son to Samarkand and imprisoned them, imprisoned two more of the family elsewhere, and had all of them put to death after a rebellion at Herat in 1389 gave him the occasion. Browne's chronology has the Kart dynasty ending in that year and puts the extinction of the Sarbadars a year earlier, in 1388 — which does not agree with the modern reckoning that closes the Sarbadar account in 1381, when Ali Mu'ayyad submitted and went into Timur's service. Both dates are defensible and they are measuring different things: one the last Sarbadar regime, the other the last Sarbadar. The disagreement is worth leaving standing rather than split, because there was never a moment at which this state was formally abolished, and a polity without a dynasty does not have the kind of ending that can be dated by a death.

The last one invited Timur in

Drafted from Jr., Publications in Near and Middle East Studies, Series A, 11 (1970)end

Ali Mu'ayyad took Sabzavar in 1362 and held it, with interruptions, for nineteen years — much the longest tenure in the state's history, achieved by breaking the dervish faction and killing or expelling its leadership. That solved the internal problem by removing half the polity, and left him ruling a small state in a crowded neighbourhood: the Kartids at Herat, the Jalayirids and the Muzaffarids to the west, Turkmen amirs in Mazandaran, and a rival Sarbadar claimant backed by some of the dervishes he had driven out.

In 1381 Timur crossed into Khurasan. Ali Mu'ayyad submitted, and did more than submit: he had already written asking him to come, wanting the Timurid army against his own neighbours and his own exiles. He got what he asked for, joined Timur's service, and died a few years later on campaign in Timur's army.

So there was no siege and no massacre. The Muzaffarids, a few hundred miles south-west, were exterminated to a man; the difference was entirely in whether the ruler had made his calculation early enough. Sabzavar became a Timurid town. The Sarbadar name turns up once or twice afterwards attached to risings, and then does not.

Forty-four years is not long. It is longer than the Palmyrene empire, longer than most reigns anywhere, and it was managed without a dynasty, without a succession rule, without a tribal army and without a legitimating genealogy, in the middle of a country where every neighbour had all four.

The last of them ended it by writing to Timur and asking him to come.

The lost divan

Drafted from Browne, A Literary History of Persia, Volume III: The Tartar Dominion (1265-1502) (1920)afterlife

The one substantial poet attached to the Sarbadars lost his entire life's work in the battle that broke them, and the consequence is that nobody can now establish whose side he was on.

What happened at Zawa

Ibn-i Yamin — Amir Mahmud, son of Yamin al-Din, a government accountant of Faryumad — was at the battle between Zawa and Khwaf in July 1342, where the Sarbadars fought the Kartids of Herat and Shaykh Hasan Juri was killed.

Fasihi's chronicle records the two events in the same breath, which is how they have come down: the death of the shaykh, and the loss of the complete poetical works of Amir Fakhr al-Din Mahmud ibn-i Yamin, looted in the battle. The poet wrote a fragment about it himself. It fell into the hands of the spoilers, and thereafter no trace of it was found.

He was taken prisoner by Malik Mu'izz al-Din Kart, the enemy commander, who received him well and treated him with honour — and afterwards Ibn-i Yamin sent him verses from Sabzavar.

Why the loss matters

Browne is precise about the consequence, and it is not merely sentimental.

Because the divan is gone, it is impossible to determine with certainty who Ibn-i Yamin's patrons were or to whom his panegyrics were chiefly addressed. One biographical tradition says he was the panegyrist of the Sarbadars, which Browne doubts. Another says he was the panegyrist of Toghay Temür, one of the Mongol claimants the Sarbadars fought. A third gives a date for his death that is almost certainly wrong.

So the single literary figure the movement produced cannot be assigned to it. Everything that would have settled the question — the dedications, the occasional poems, the addresses — was in the book that was carried off the field at Zawa by the men who had just killed the shaykh.

What is left

The Muqatta'at, the Fragments: several hundred short pieces, mostly philosophical, ethical or mystical, which Browne thought among the best things of their kind. They survived because they had already been copied out separately, being the sort of verse people write down for themselves.

That is a fair description of what happened to the Sarbadars as a whole. The thing that was organised — the dervish order, the alliance, the state — was destroyed and left almost no record it wrote itself. What came through was the loose material that had already been dispersed: the coins with the Shi'i formulae, the name, a legal manual written in Damascus for a state that no longer existed by the time it arrived, and a few hundred fragments by a man whose politics cannot be recovered.

Nine of twelve chiefs died violently, and the poet lost his book. It was not a regime that was good at keeping things.