Tahirid Sultanate of Yemen

Picking up the state

Drafted from Bosworth, The New Islamic Dynasties: A Chronological and Genealogical Manual (1996)formation

The Rasulid sultanate did not fall to anybody. It came apart over about thirty years of disputed successions, plague and a collapse in the revenue that had held it together, until by the middle of the fifteenth century there were several men calling themselves sultan and none of them governing much.

The Banu Tahir were landowners from Juban, in the highlands south of Sanaa. They had been men of consequence under the Rasulids without being of the ruling family, and through the 1440s they were among the parties fighting over what was left. In 1454 two brothers, Amir and Ali, took what remained of the state and ruled it jointly.

They did not conquer it. There was a state that had stopped working and a family standing closest to it when it stopped, and the distinction matters: nobody besieged Ta'izz and nobody deposed a Rasulid. The revenue failed, the succession was fought over for thirty years, and at the end of it the men holding the southern highlands were the men holding the country.

What the Tahirids picked up was smaller than what the Rasulids had had. The Zaydi imams were back in the northern highlands and were not going to be removed. Aden's customs, which had built the Rasulid state, were falling as the Indian Ocean traffic found ways around them. This dynasty governed a reduced country for sixty-three years, and what it did with them is more interesting than the reduction.

The port that stopped paying

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

Every polity in this region's thread from the Zurayids onwards has stood on the same fact: that ships from India could not sail straight through to Egypt, so Aden collected. The Tahirids inherited the collection and inherited it while it was failing.

Some of the reasons were commercial and predate the Portuguese entirely. Jeddah under the Mamluks had been drawing traffic north past Aden for decades, and merchants who could clear their cargo closer to Cairo did. Some of it was political: the Rasulid administration that had made Aden reliable — the fiscal registers Vallet works from, the fixed and published dues — did not survive its own state, and a port whose charges are unpredictable is a port that gets avoided.

Then in 1498 Vasco da Gama came round the Cape, and within a decade Portuguese squadrons were in the Arabian Sea trying to close the Red Sea mouth altogether.

So the Tahirids inherited a customs house that no longer worked like one. Their actual money came increasingly off the highlands they had come from. What Aden gave them was a reason for other people's fleets to take an interest in Yemen, which is what killed them.

The Amiriyya

Drafted from Porter, PhD thesis, University of Durham (1992)peak

In 1504 Amir II finished a madrasa at Rada'. It has two domes on a raised platform, a facade of stucco panelling, and an interior painted in a way that has no real precedent in Yemeni building, and it is still standing.

A building deserves a chapter here for a reason that is about evidence rather than about architecture. The Tahirids left no fiscal archive of the kind the Rasulids left, and the chronicle material for their sixty-three years is thin. What they left was construction — mosques, madrasas, cisterns and fortifications across the southern highlands — and Porter's study of the dynasty is built on that as much as on the texts, because the distribution of a dynasty's buildings is a reasonably honest map of where its authority and its money actually reached.

Nobody has published an extent for the Tahirid state, and it would be a fabrication to derive one. But the buildings are dated and located, and they cluster in the southern highlands and along the routes to Aden and Zabid, and they are absent from the north where the Zaydi imams were. That is not a measurement. For the question of where these people actually governed, it is better than one.

The other thing the Amiriyya records is intent. A family that had picked up a collapsing state in 1454 was, fifty years later, building on the scale of a dynasty that expected to be there in a century. It had thirteen years.

This orchard

Drafted from younger, The Commentaries of the Great Afonso Dalboquerque, Second Viceroy of India, Part IV (1884)contraction

In March 1513 a Portuguese fleet appeared off Aden. It was the first European force ever to attempt the Red Sea, and its commander intended to take the port, close the strait, and cut the spice route between India and Egypt at its neck.

Aden held.

How the assault failed

The account written up from the commander's own papers is candid about it, because the failure was not the defenders' doing in the first instance. It was the attackers'.

The boats grounded a crossbow-shot from the shore on shelving rock, so the men had to wade in, and the musketeers soaked their powder doing it. They carried the scaling ladders on their backs through the water and got them against the wall anyway.

Then the ladders broke. Not under enemy action — under the weight of Portuguese soldiers racing each other to be first up. The commander's own company put their ladders up and swarmed them without waiting for orders; the ladders came down. The men then ran to the next ladder along and broke that one too, and the halberdiers sent to prop it up had their halberds smashed and were killed or wounded under it.

One party did get onto the wall and planted a banner on a turret. Nobody could reinforce them, because by then every ladder in the fleet was in pieces. The commander's nephew, wounded and covered in blood, made his way along the parapet to ask what to do, and was told: do not excite yourself, for this orchard cannot produce any other kind of fruit than this.

They burst open an embrasure to let crossbowmen through. The defenders saw how few men were on the wall, swarmed the opening, and filled it in with lighted straw and earth and stones. A ladder was patched together out of the splinters of the broken ones. It failed too.

The fleet withdrew, went into the Red Sea, found no water and no useful landfall, and came back out having achieved nothing.

Why a successful defence was a catastrophe

The Tahirids had beaten off the most formidable naval power then operating in the Indian Ocean, at their own richest port, and it did them no good at all.

What the attempt announced was that the Red Sea was now contested by a force that came from the ocean rather than from Egypt or Arabia, and that the spice route which had already been drifting away from Aden could now be cut at will by somebody with better ships. Yemen's whole fiscal position depended on that route touching its coast.

More immediately, it brought the fleets. The next year an Egyptian fleet took most of the Yemeni ports — not Aden, which held again — and the Mamluk sultanate began operating in the Red Sea as a matter of survival, because the Portuguese threatened Egypt's revenue far more than they threatened Yemen's.

Four years later a Mamluk expedition sent into those waters against the Portuguese would turn inland instead and destroy the dynasty that had held the wall in 1513.

The defence of Aden was competent, and it was the beginning of the end. The Tahirids were not conquered because they were weak at sea. They were conquered because their coast had become strategically interesting to two empires at once, and neither of those empires was going to leave it in the hands of a family of highland landowners.

An army from a state that no longer existed

Drafted from Porter, PhD thesis, University of Durham (1992)end

The force that ended Yemeni self-rule had not been sent to Yemen.

Cairo had despatched a Mamluk expedition into the Red Sea to deal with the Portuguese, who were raiding shipping and had attempted Aden. It was a naval problem and the expedition was a naval answer to it. In Yemen the expedition found a quarrel with Amir II instead — over supply, over money, over the Tahirid refusal to be treated as a subordinate — and turned inland. It defeated him and killed him in 1517, and took Sanaa and Zabid.

While it was doing that, Selim I destroyed the Mamluk Sultanate. Qansuh al-Ghawri had been killed at Marj Dabiq in August 1516 and Tuman Bay was hanged at Cairo in April 1517. The men who conquered Yemen were the army of a state that had been abolished, and they found it out afterwards, and went over to the Ottomans, who thereby acquired a country they had not fought for.

The conquerors were Mamluks, and they are named as such here even though the result reads strangely: a state destroyed in 1517 by a state that itself ended in 1517. Assigning the conquest to the Ottomans instead would be tidier and would be false. The Ottomans acquired Yemen by inheriting the men who took it, several months after the fact, without sending anybody.

What did not end in 1517 was the Zaydi imamate in the northern highlands, which had outlasted the Sulayhids, the Ayyubids, the Rasulids and now the Tahirids, and which took the Ottomans a century to subdue and another thirty years to lose to. Its record is elsewhere in this region and carries no edge to this one. The imams were not the Tahirids' heirs and did not claim to be. They were simply still there, which in this country was the more durable achievement.

A hundred and thirteen years

Drafted from Bury, Arabia Infelix, or the Turks in Yamen (1915)afterlife

What replaced the Tahirids was not another Yemeni dynasty. It was a century of somebody else's empire, and the interval is worth counting: from the killing of the last sultan in 1517 to the point at which Yemen was governed from inside itself again is a hundred and thirteen years.

The sequence, as a later British account sets it out, is short and almost entirely about the coast.

Egypt came under Ottoman suzerainty in 1517 — the same year the expedition it had sent killed the Tahirid sultan. In 1538 the Ottoman governor of Egypt occupied the coastal towns of Yemen and laid the foundation of Ottoman dominion there. The Portuguese took Aden in 1540. A Turkish admiral took it back. A governor named Hasan Pasha eventually occupied the whole province in the sultan's name, and that occupation lasted until 1630, when the Porte decided to evacuate Yemen on account of its remoteness and the expense involved.

Yemen was then governed by a family descended from a sharif of Mecca, one of whom took the title of imam.

The shape of it

Read that again with the dates removed and it is a familiar Yemeni pattern running one more time.

An outside power arrives because the coast is valuable. It takes the ports easily and the highlands with difficulty. It holds the country for as long as it is willing to pay for it, discovers that Yemen costs more than it yields, and leaves. What fills the space afterwards is not the dynasty that was there before — that family is gone — but whoever in the mountains can raise men.

The Ayyubids did this in the twelfth century and left the Rasulids behind. The Ottomans did it in the sixteenth and left an imamate behind. The Ottomans did it again in the nineteenth. The variable is which empire; the constant is that the highlands outlast it and the coast pays for it.

What the Tahirids left standing

The dynasty itself left very little in the way of institutions, having had sixty-three years and no successor.

What it left was buildings. The madrasa the last sultan finished at Rada' in 1504 — domed, painted, unlike anything built in Yemen before it — was thirteen years old when its patron was killed, and it is still there. A family of provincial landowners who governed for two generations and were destroyed by an army acting on behalf of a state that had already ceased to exist are remembered mostly because of what they put up in a small highland town while they had the money.

That is a thin legacy by the standards of the dynasties on either side of them. It is also the last thing built in Yemen by a Yemeni government for a very long time.