Tulunid Emirate

The governor who stopped remitting

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of Egypt, Volume 1: Islamic Egypt 640-1517 (1998)formation

Ahmad ibn Tulun was the son of a Turkish slave soldier sent from Samarra to govern Egypt in 868, at exactly the moment the caliphate's own guard was destroying caliphs at will. He arrived as a deputy of a deputy and within a decade was the effective ruler of Egypt and southern Syria.

The method was fiscal. Egypt's grain and tax surplus had gone to Iraq since the conquest; Ibn Tulun took control of the province's revenue administration and began spending it in Egypt — on his own army of Turkish and Sudanese troops, and on a new administrative quarter north of Fustat with the congregational mosque that still carries his name. He never renounced the caliph, and the Abbasid name stayed on the coinage.

This is the first time since 641 that Egypt's wealth stayed in Egypt, and it set the pattern that the Ikhshidids, Fatimids, Ayyubids and Mamluks all followed. The Abbasids retook the province in 905 and held it for thirty years, which turned out to be the interruption rather than the rule.

A year in Syria

Drafted from Lane-Poole, A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages (1901)expansion

In April 878 the governor of Egypt marched into Syria without permission and took it. He was back within a year, and he came home with a province, a frontier, and — the detail that says most — his own name on the coinage.

The opening

Ibn Tulun had wanted Syria for some time. He had once been on the point of occupying it at the caliph's request, and although the appointment then went to somebody else, he took the view that he retained the prior claim.

The obstacle was Amajur, governor of Syria, whom Lane-Poole calls a formidable and jealous obstacle to his advance. When Amajur died the post passed to his son. Ibn Tulun set the son's title aside, dropped what remained of the pretence of obedience to Baghdad, and marched.

Damascus gave him immediate homage — officials and inhabitants together, with no fighting. From there he made a progress through Syria taking the allegiance of the chief towns, as far as Tarsus, where he had studied as a young man.

Only Antioch held out, under a commander called Sima the Long. It was bombarded with mangonels, betrayed from inside, stormed and sacked in September. Massisa and Adana were occupied next. Tarsus, for the moment, defied him.

What he had at the end of it

His territory now ran from the Euphrates and the Byzantine frontier to Barqa on the Mediterranean and Aswan at the first cataract — Egypt, Syria and the Cilician marches, held from Fustat.

He left strong detachments at Raqqa, Harran and Damascus to hold it, extracted six hundred thousand dinars from Ibn al-Mudabbir, his old enemy and the treasurer of Syria, and went home.

The money is worth pausing on because it explains the whole enterprise. The Egyptian land tax under Ibn al-Mudabbir's administration had produced eight hundred thousand a year; under Ibn Tulun's, one authority puts it at four million three hundred thousand. Whatever the exact figures, a governor who could raise that much and was no longer forwarding it to Iraq could pay for a campaign out of his province and keep the proceeds.

The coins

The declaration is not in any inscription. It is in the mint.

Until this campaign, coins struck in Egypt carried only the reigning caliph's name. From 879-880 the dinars of Misr carry Ahmad ibn Tulun's name alongside it. He went on issuing at Misr every year until he died, and later at Raqqa and at Damascus.

Two things about that are deliberate. He never left the caliph's name off — this is not a claim to be caliph or to be independent of the office. And he never added the name of al-Muwaffaq, the caliph's brother, who was actually running the empire and whose name other provincial governors were putting on their coinage as a matter of course.

So the coins say precisely what the campaign said: I acknowledge the caliph, I do not acknowledge the man who governs for him, and I am now a party rather than a functionary.

What it cost at home

While he was away his eldest son al-Abbas, left as deputy, threw off his father's authority.

On Ibn Tulun's approach the young man lost his nerve, took what treasure and material he could carry, and retreated to Barqa with eight hundred horse and ten thousand of his father's black infantry. Ibn Tulun sent the qadi Bakkar to reason with him; he refused every offer and set about imagining a kingdom of his own in North Africa.

A state built in twelve years by one man's competence had produced, in its first year of empire, a succession problem — and the son's rebellion used the same troops, the same treasury and the same logic his father had used against Baghdad.

The army, and the quarrel

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of Egypt, Volume 1: Islamic Egypt 640-1517 (1998)peak

The first chapter says the method was fiscal. What the money bought is the subject of this one, because it is what made the autonomy real and what the sources are most detailed about.

Ibn Tulun built an army for Egypt. It had not had one of its own since the Arab conquest: the province had been garrisoned by troops the caliphate posted and paid, and its surplus had gone to Iraq to pay for troops elsewhere. He reversed that. Turkish slave soldiers of the kind he had come out of himself, black African infantry from the Sudan, and Greek and Slav mercenaries, bought and paid from Egyptian revenue, quartered in a purpose-built quarter — plus a fleet, and the arsenal to maintain it.

That gave Egypt something it would keep for six centuries. The Ikhshidids, the Fatimids, the Ayyubids and the Mamluks were all, in their different ways, states funded by Egyptian agriculture and defended by purchased foreign soldiers, and every one of them was running the arrangement Ibn Tulun assembled in the 870s.

He then used it. In 878 he took southern Syria and the frontier districts, on the argument that Egypt could not be defended from Egypt — which is also true, and which every later Egyptian regime acted on. Syria is what the Fatimids fought the Seljuks for, what Saladin unified, and what the Mamluks held against the Mongols.

The quarrel is what makes the constitutional position clear. Al-Muwaffaq, the brother of the caliph and the actual government in Baghdad, wanted Egypt's money and could not get it. He denounced Ibn Tulun; Ibn Tulun assembled jurists at Damascus in 882 and had them declare al-Muwaffaq deposed from the succession for failing in his duties, and offered the caliph refuge in Egypt from his own brother. Neither side could reach the other. Ibn Tulun died in 884 with the dispute unresolved.

What that exchange demonstrates is what was happening to the caliphate all over its eastern provinces at the same moment: by the 880s a provincial governor with an army and a tax base could argue with the caliphate as an equal, in the caliphate's own legal vocabulary, and neither party could enforce anything.

The Wards

Drafted from Lane-Poole, A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages (1901)peak

Fustat was too small for the retinue and the army Ibn Tulun had assembled, and he had no intention of living in a governor's house in any case. In 870 he took a site on the hill of Yashkur between Fustat and the Muqattam, levelled the graves of the Christian cemetery there, and laid out a new town.

It was called al-Qata'i, the Wards, because each class and each nationality — household servants, Greeks, Sudanis — was assigned a quarter of its own. It covered a square mile. There was a palace with a great garden, an enclosed maydan for horses with mews and a menagerie beside it, a separate palace for the household, baths, markets, and a private passage from the residence to the emir's oratory.

The building that outlived the town

The great mosque was begun in 876 and took two years.

Two things about it are firsts. It uses brick piers instead of stone columns robbed from older buildings, which is what everyone else had been doing. And it is the earliest dated building carried entirely on pointed arches — at least two hundred years before anything of the kind in England.

Its architect was a Copt. He was given a hundred thousand dinars to build it, ten thousand for himself, and a handsome allowance for the rest of his life. The same man built the aqueduct that brought water to the palace from a spring in the southern desert. Ibn Tulun also dredged the Alexandria canal, repaired the Nilometer on Roda and put a fort there.

What the aqueduct cost a scholar

Somebody objected to the water. Ibn Tulun sent for the jurist Muhammad ibn Abd al-Hakam, and the scholar's own account of the evening is preserved.

A slave came to his house at night and said the emir wanted him. He mounted in a panic and was led off the road. Where are you taking me? To the desert; the emir is there. Certain his last hour had come — an old and feeble man, he says — he asked whether the slave knew what this was about. The slave took pity on him: beware of speaking disrespectfully of the aqueduct.

Then torches in the desert, and Ibn Tulun on horseback at the aqueduct door with great wax candles burning in front of him. The jurist dismounted and gave the greeting and got nothing back. So he said he was exhausted and thirsty and asked leave to drink. Pages offered him water; he refused it and drew for himself, under the emir's eye, and drank until he thought he would burst. Then: God quench your thirst at the rivers of Paradise, for I have drunk my fill, and I do not know which to praise more, the excellence of this cool sweet clear water or the delicious smell of the aqueduct.

Let him retire, said Ibn Tulun. And the slave whispered: you have hit the mark.

The sums that will not close

Egypt's revenue under Ibn Tulun is given as 4,300,000 dinars a year.

Against that: 750,000 sent to the caliph as tribute in 870 and 2,200,000 over four years; buildings at al-Qata'i estimated near half a million; at least a thousand dinars a month to the poor over and above the obligatory alms; a thousand a day on his table; open house; generosity to scholars; a large army and household; and frontier forts to keep up.

Lane-Poole's conclusion is that it cannot be made to add up, and that this is why the legend grew that Ibn Tulun paid for his mosque with buried treasure he had dug up. The likelier answer, on the Christian sources, is that the Coptic patriarch was fined heavily from time to time — though the Coptic population at large was taxed no worse than anyone else and was, unusually for the period, left alone.

The most expensive wedding of the ninth century

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of Egypt, Volume 1: Islamic Egypt 640-1517 (1998)contraction

Khumarawayh succeeded his father in 884 at about twenty and held Egypt and Syria for twelve years, and the way he held them is the reason the dynasty lasted twenty-one years after him rather than a hundred.

He settled the quarrel by paying for it. An agreement with Baghdad recognised Tulunid rule over Egypt and Syria as hereditary for thirty years in exchange for a large annual tribute. It is the same arrangement the Aghlabids had at the other end of the Mediterranean a century earlier, except bought rather than granted. Then he cemented it with a marriage: his daughter Qatr al-Nada was sent to Baghdad to marry the caliph al-Mu'tadid, with a trousseau and a progress that the sources describe at length and in figures they clearly enjoy repeating. It is remembered as the most lavish wedding of the age and it cost a substantial fraction of a year's revenue.

The rest of the spending was on himself. Al-Qata'i under Khumarawayh had gardens with trees whose trunks were sheathed in gilded copper and a menagerie including a blue-eyed lion that kept his door — some of it chronicle embroidery of the kind that attaches to a prince the next regime wants remembered as decadent, and worth taking with the same caution his own sleeping arrangements deserve, further on. What is not in doubt is the direction of travel: a revenue that his father had turned into an army and an aqueduct, his son turned into a court.

His own household killed him in Damascus in 896, in circumstances worth telling properly rather than in passing. What followed is a familiar sequence — young successors, a treasury emptied, and the Turkish and Sudanese regiments his grandfather had bought discovering that they could choose between them. It is the standard way a slave-soldier state comes apart, and it happened at Samarra, at Bukhara, in Cairo under the Ayyubids and in Isfahan under the Buyids.

The tribute stopped being payable, and Baghdad had spent a decade rebuilding its capacity to collect.

The quicksilver lake

Drafted from Lane-Poole, A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages (1901)contraction

Khumarawayh had his father's appetite for building and none of his judgement about what it was for.

He enlarged the palace and turned the horse-ground into a garden: sweet-smelling flowers planted in the shapes of sentences and other designs, rare trees, date palms set about with gilded tanks of water, an aviary of beautiful birds. His "golden house" was decorated with painted images of himself, his wives and his singers, which Muslim opinion of the period did not approve of.

And because he slept badly, he had an air-bed floated on a lake of quicksilver said to be nearly a hundred feet square, moored by silken cords to silver columns, so that it rocked. A tame lion out of the menagerie lay guard while he slept.

The kitchen alone cost twenty-three thousand dinars a month. The caliph in Baghdad, watching a dangerous vassal spend himself into weakness, was well pleased.

The verse at the graveside

Neither the lion nor his bodyguard of Hawf Arabs was any use against his own household. Early in 896, on a visit to Damascus, some domestic intrigue ended with his slaves murdering him. They were crucified. His body was brought home and buried beside his father's under the Muqattam, near the palace.

Seven Qur'an readers were reciting at Ibn Tulun's tomb. As the bearers lowered the son into the grave, the verse they had reached was seize him and hurl him into the fire of hell.

There are your emirs for you

What followed is the ordinary machinery of a slave-soldier state without an adult at the top of it.

The heir, Jaysh, was fourteen, incapable of taking his position seriously, and absorbed in the amusements of his age. Syria and the northern frontier stopped obeying him, the army and the administration were neglected, and the treasury was empty. He murdered three of his uncles. Then his own troops mutinied and killed him after a few months.

His last public act was to throw two of the murdered uncles' heads to the mutineers with the words: there are your emirs for you.

His younger brother was set up next, with the major-domo as regent. The prince was as careless as his brother and the regent was no statesman; the Turkish officers did as they liked; an uncle brought a rebel army to Fustat and was beaten; and Syria and Tarsus were under nobody's control at all.

Eleven years separate the quicksilver lake from the Abbasid army that came to take Egypt back.

Building where the money stayed

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of Egypt, Volume 1: Islamic Egypt 640-1517 (1998)aside?What aside means

Ibn Tulun built a new administrative quarter, al-Qata'i, north of Fustat, and in it a congregational mosque that still stands — one of the oldest in Egypt in substantially its original form, with a spiral minaret that copies Samarra, the city he had come from.

That copy is the whole political statement. A governor who has stopped remitting Egypt's revenue to Iraq builds, in Egypt, an imitation of the caliphal capital's architecture, while continuing to name the caliph in the Friday prayer. It asserts equivalence rather than independence, and it is the same posture the Samanids adopted in the east at the same time and for the same reason: a formal subordination nobody intended to test.

The mosque was paid for out of a surplus that had previously left the country. This is what autonomy meant in practice — not a change of flag, but a redirection of the tax base into local troops, local building, and a local court. Ibn Tulun also built a hospital and an aqueduct, and expanded the Egyptian army with Turkish and Sudanese soldiers bought for the purpose.

The dynasty lasted thirty-seven years and the Abbasids retook Egypt in 905. But the demonstration held: Egypt could pay for itself and for an army, and every subsequent regime in Cairo — Ikhshidid, Fatimid, Ayyubid, Mamluk — was built on that discovery.

What was left of the quarter

Drafted from (ed.), The Cambridge History of Egypt, Volume 1: Islamic Egypt 640-1517 (1998)end

In 904 an Abbasid army under Muhammad ibn Sulayman moved into Syria, took it without much fighting, and came down into Egypt. The Tulunid fleet went over. The Tulunid regiments were bought or beaten. In January 905 the last Tulunid was sent to Baghdad, and Egypt was a caliphal province again for the first time in thirty-seven years.

Then the army sacked al-Qata'i and burned it.

That is the detail worth ending on, because it is unusually explicit about what the reconquest was for. The quarter Ibn Tulun had built north of Fustat — the palaces, the barracks, the hippodrome, the administrative offices, the whole apparatus of a capital that had been paid for out of revenue that should have gone to Iraq — was systematically destroyed. What was deliberately left standing was the mosque, which is the subject of the previous chapter and which is still there.

The message is not subtle and it was not wrong. What Baghdad objected to was never the mosque, or the Friday prayer, in which Ibn Tulun had always named the caliph. It was a provincial capital, an independent army and a treasury that did not remit. Those were flattened; the religious building, which conceded the caliph's authority, was spared.

And it did not work. Egypt was governed from Baghdad for thirty years, and then the Ikhshidids did the same thing again, and then the Fatimids came and did it permanently. The dynasty lasted thirty-seven years, and the demonstration it had made was irreversible: every regime that held Egypt afterwards kept Egypt's revenue in Egypt and used it to buy an army.

The ruined quarter was not rebuilt. Its ground was used as a rubbish tip and a cemetery for a century until the Fatimids built Cairo a little to the north, on the same instinct and for the same reason.

What is left of the Wards

Drafted from Lane-Poole, A History of Egypt in the Middle Ages (1901)afterlife

The sack that ended al-Qata'i worked, in the sense that there is almost nothing to see of a square mile built over thirty-five years.

The list

When Lane-Poole set out the evidence available for this period, the monuments he could name came to three things: the mosque of Ibn Tulun, the aqueduct south of Cairo, and the second Nilometer on the island of Roda. To those he could add inscriptions from the mosque and the Nilometer, some gravestones, and two title deeds to shops, written on wood.

That is the surviving physical record of a state that ran Egypt and Syria for thirty-seven years: one mosque, one water channel, one river gauge, two shop deeds.

The coins are better, and they say something the buildings cannot. The mints worked at Fustat, Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Antioch, Harran, Raqqa and Ramla — which is the map of what the dynasty actually held, issued in metal, by a governor who never stopped naming the caliph on it.

The lake

There is one more trace, and it is the one worth finishing on.

Years afterwards, when the ground where Khumarawayh's palace had stood was dug over, they found the quicksilver.

The garden planted in the shapes of sentences, the aviary, the painted golden house, the silver columns and the silken cords had all gone the way of everything else in the Wards. What was left in the soil was the mercury, because mercury does not burn and nobody could carry it away, and because the thing a demolition leaves behind is whichever part of the extravagance was least useful to anyone else.