Uqaylid Emirate

The buffer that took the city

Drafted from Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century (2004)formation

The Banu Uqayl were an Arab tribe of the Jazira, and their entry into the record as a polity is a piece of Buyid frontier management that went wrong in the ordinary way. Around 990 the Buyids, ruling Iraq from Baghdad with the caliph in their custody, settled the Uqayl in Diyar Bakr as a counterweight to Badh ibn Dustak and the Kurds who were then taking the upper Tigris. Muhammad ibn al-Musayyab fought Badh, as commissioned. He then kept going.

By 996 the Uqayl held Mosul. The Hamdanids — who had ruled it for a century and the great Arab dynasty of the tenth-century Jazira — ended there, in a takeover by another Arab tribe that had been hired to guard the road. Their Aleppo branch outlived the Mosul one by eight years and then passed to a freedman of its own, which is the other way these houses finished.

Kennedy's account of the tenth and eleventh centuries treats this as the period's characteristic movement rather than as an accident. The caliphate's fiscal machinery had been failing outward from Baghdad for a hundred years; what replaced it in the Jazira and Syria was not chaos and not a state in the Abbasid sense, but tribal confederations that could raise cavalry, hold a city, collect its taxes and negotiate with empires. They were poor at building institutions and very good at not being defeated, and between about 990 and 1090 they were what the central lands had.

Mosul was a real prize and not a frontier town. It sat on the Tigris at the point where the roads from Syria, Azerbaijan and Iraq met, it had a bridge and a customs post, and its hinterland grew grain. It was the largest revenue in the region outside Baghdad and Aleppo, and the Uqayl had it for a hundred years.

The Friday the caliph changed

Drafted from Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century (2004)expansion

In 1010 Qirwash ibn al-Muqallad, Uqaylid emir of Mosul, had the Friday sermon in his territories — Mosul, Kufa, al-Mada'in, the towns of the middle Euphrates — read in the name of the Fatimid caliph al-Hakim in Cairo instead of the Abbasid caliph al-Qadir, whose city was a few days' ride downriver.

It is one of the most audacious single gestures in the eleventh century and it lasted a few months. The Abbasid caliph and the Buyid amir who controlled him responded with an army and with money, and Qirwash restored the Abbasid khutba, having established what he needed to establish.

What he had established is the shape of the polity. The Uqaylids were too strong to remove and not strong enough to be independent, and the currency in which that position was traded was the name read on a Friday. Cairo would pay for it. Baghdad would pay more not to lose it. The Mirdasids at Aleppo ran the same business against the same two customers, with Byzantium as a third. Both emirates would have said, correctly, that they ruled by caliphal investiture. The formula conceals the whole point, which is that in this corner of the Islamic world the caliph was a variable.

The point is not that a caliph was named. It is that after 1010 both sides knew what the naming cost, and the Uqaylids spent eighty years being paid to remain exactly where they were.

Praised be adversity

Drafted from Khallikan, Ibn Khallikan's Biographical Dictionary (Wafayat al-A'yan) (1843)peak

Qirwash ibn al-Muqallad held Mosul for about half a century and is the reason there is an Uqaylid state to write about. Ibn Khallikan gives him a life, and it opens the way most emirs' lives in this region open — with the family.

Two uncles

His father died while Qirwash was away, and he came back to a principality he had to fight two of his own uncles for.

Ibn Khallikan names them both and then disposes of them in a sentence: one died in 1001-2, the other in 1006-7, after which Qirwash remained sole master of the principality and was delivered from the anxiety which they had given him.

What he was then master of is worth listing because it is larger than the name Mosul suggests: Mosul itself, Kufa, al-Mada'in, and the country along the Euphrates. An Arab tribal dynasty of the Banu Uqayl held the middle of Iraq and the northern approaches to Baghdad, at a moment when the caliph in Baghdad was a Buyid pensioner.

The Ghuzz

Then something arrived that nobody in Mosul had a category for.

The Ghuzz — Turkmen, moving west ahead of the Seljuk state that had not yet happened — got into Mosul, plundered Qirwash's palace, and carried off more than two hundred thousand dinars.

He did not face them alone. He called in Dubais ibn Sadaqa, the Mazyadid chief of Hilla, and their combined forces attacked the Ghuzz, killed a great many of them and won.

An Arab poet of Baghdad wrote a qasida about it, and the terms he reached for are the interesting part:

You spared your native soil the disgrace of entombing their corpses; the only tomb they got was the vulture's maw. Yet they had overrun the land and obtained all that was possible of worldly wealth. They had broken open the gate of the barrier which kept Gog confined, but they found, in your prowess, the might of Alexander.

Gog and Magog, penned behind Alexander's wall until the end of the world. That is the register in which the first Turkmen incursion into Iraq was described by the people it happened to — not as a raid or a migration but as an eschatological event, an apocalyptic barrier giving way.

The wall was breached and this time it held. Two Arab tribal chiefs, acting together, beat the Ghuzz off. Within forty years the Seljuks would take Baghdad and neither the Uqaylids nor the Mazyadids would be able to do anything about it.

The man himself

Ibn Khallikan is a biographer rather than a chronicler, and what he wants recorded about Qirwash is that he was a good scholar and an elegant poet whose pieces got into general circulation.

One of them:

Praised be adversity! It tarnishes the vile but gives polish to the noble. I was a mere mass of iron when adversity forged me into a sword, and the vicissitudes of fortune gave to my edge a free career.

A man who had taken his inheritance off two uncles and had his palace emptied by strangers out of the steppe wrote a couplet arguing that being hammered is what makes a blade. It is a boast, and it is also an accurate description of the career.

He bore the honorific Majd al-Din, glory of religion. His mother was sister to the lord of Irbil. And in 1010 he had the Friday prayer said throughout his territories for the Fatimid caliph in Cairo — and then, Ibn Khallikan notes without elaboration, discontinued the practice.

Sharaf al-Dawla

Drafted from Wilson, Medieval Syria and the Onset of the Crusades: The Political World of Bilad al-Sham 1050-1128 (2023)peak

Muslim ibn Quraysh, titled Sharaf al-Dawla, ruled from 1061 and made the Uqaylids briefly into the largest Arab power between Egypt and Iran. He held Mosul and the Jazira; he took Harran and Raqqa; he acknowledged the Seljuk sultan Malikshah and used the acknowledgement as cover. In 1080 the people of Aleppo, unable to get protection from their own Mirdasid emirs against Turkmen raiding, invited him in, and he took the city without a siege.

That is the high point on the map and it lasted five years. The problem was the one every Arab power in this period eventually hit: the Turkmen bands moving into the Jazira and northern Syria were not a state that could be treated with and not a raid that could be waited out. Muslim used them, hired them, fought them, and was in the end destroyed by one of their commanders. In 1085, near Antioch, he was killed fighting Sulayman ibn Qutulmish — the Seljuk prince who had taken Anatolia after Manzikert, and who founded the line recorded as the Sultanate of Rum.

Wilson's reading of the decade is that the Syrian and Jaziran elites were not overwhelmed by an invasion so much as outcompeted inside their own political system: they used Turkmen troops the way they had always used auxiliaries, and the auxiliaries turned out to have a sultan behind them, a claim on the land they grazed, and no interest in going home. The Uqaylids, the Mirdasids and the Marwanids all made the same calculation and all lost within fifteen years of each other.

Everything Muslim had assembled came apart in a season. Aleppo went to the Seljuks; the Jazira was divided among his relatives; Mosul held out, smaller each decade.

Writing on the wall

Drafted from Khallikan, Ibn Khallikan's Biographical Dictionary (Wafayat al-A'yan) (1843)aside?What aside means

A man called Abu'l-Hayja was travelling the road between Sinjar and Nisibin, in the Jazira, in the company of the Uqaylid emir Kirwash. They stopped for the night, and some time after dismounting the emir sent for him. He was lodged in a castle nearby — a fine building looking out over gardens and watercourses, named after a soldier called al-Abbas ibn Amr al-Ghanawi, who had been dead about a century.

He found Kirwash standing and staring at something written on the wall.

The first inscription

The traveller read it. It ran:

Castle of al-Abbas ibn Amr! Why did your Ibn Amr leave you? Long did you defy the strokes of fortune; how then did fortune take you by surprise? Alas! Where is your magnificence? Or rather, where is your hospitality? Or rather, where is your renown? Or rather, where is your glory?

Underneath was written: Written by Ali, the son of Abd Allah, the son of Hamdan, with his own hand, in the year 331.

That is Sayf al-Dawla, the Hamdanid, in 942 or 943 — a year or two before he took Aleppo, at the very start of the career that made him the most celebrated prince of his century.

The second inscription

Beside it was a second poem:

O castle! What has become of the noble ones who dwelt here in former times? You were their contemporary and, in long duration, have outlived them all. The lines traced upon your walls renew my grief for the son of al-Musayyab. Know that I shall soon join him and that I am hastening on in his footsteps.

Subscribed: Written by Kirwash, the son of al-Mukallad ibn al-Musayyab, with his own hand, in the year 401 — 1010 or 1011. The son of al-Musayyab he is grieving for is his own father.

So the Uqaylid emir had stood in this room before, read the Hamdanid's lament for a dead soldier, and answered it with a lament for his own dead father and for himself.

What he said next

The traveller was astonished and asked whether Kirwash had really written it. He said he had, and then added: I am thinking of having this castle thrown down, for it is an unlucky place and has sent many to their graves.

His companion wished him long life. Three days later they rode on, and — Ibn Khallikan finishes the anecdote in a single clause — the castle has not yet been demolished.

Three hands on one wall

A tenth-century commander mourning an earlier one; an eleventh-century emir mourning him and himself; a thirteenth-century judge in Cairo writing all of it down because somebody told him about it; and a building that outlived every one of them and was still standing when the last of them wrote.

The Uqaylids ran Mosul and the Jazira for a century by manoeuvring between Baghdad and Cairo and being paid by both. Kirwash was the one who made that pay best. What he wrote on the wall of somebody else's ruined castle, in his own hand, is that he knew exactly how long it lasts.

What the eleventh century was

Drafted from Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates: The Islamic Near East from the Sixth to the Eleventh Century (2004)aside?What aside means

For six hundred years the lands between the Nile and the Tigris were governed by slave soldiers. Turkish and Circassian boys bought on a frontier, trained in barracks, attached to a household — Tulunid, Ikhshidid, Zangid, Ayyubid, Mamluk, and the Hamdanids alongside their tribal cavalry. It is the single most durable political fact about the region.

The eleventh century is the exception, and it is the reason this hundred years is worth separating out.

Governed by tribes

Between the Hamdanids ending in 1004 and the Turkmen arriving a century later, the Jazira and northern Syria were held by Arab and Kurdish confederations: the Uqaylids at Mosul, the Mirdasids at Aleppo, the Marwanids at Diyarbakr.

They raised horsemen through kinship. They held cities they largely lived outside. They financed themselves by being strategically inconvenient to two empires at once — Fatimid Cairo on one side, Byzantium and then the Seljuks on the other — and by being cheaper to subsidise than to remove.

None of them bought a regiment. None of them built an institution that outlived a strong emir. And all three were finished within about fifteen years of each other by the arrival of Turkmen who fought for a sultan.

Why it closed

Damascus is where it closes. Toghtekin was a purchased Turkish soldier, his army was a purchased Turkish askar, and after 1104 no polity ruling from Damascus or Cairo ever raised its troops another way.

The qualifier matters, though. Tribal cavalry did not stop working: the Artuqids arrived in the Jazira two years earlier, raised their men exactly the same way as the Uqaylids had, and held their rocks on that basis until 1409. What tribal cavalry stopped being was enough to hold a capital.

That makes the eleventh century something better than an interlude. It is the closest thing available to a control: the same country, the same revenues, the same neighbours, governed for a hundred years by the alternative system.

The slave-soldier arrangement is easy to read as a pathology, and the failure mode is real and recurs from the Samanids to the Mamluks — an army that can make a ruler eventually makes one it prefers. But the alternative could not raise a force that stayed in the field past harvest, could not hold a city against a state, and did not last. Neither arrangement is being recommended. The point is that the world of the slave regiments looks inevitable only if you never look at the century when it was not there.

God makes no account of them

Drafted from Khallikan, Ibn Khallikan's Biographical Dictionary (Wafayat al-A'yan) (1843)contraction

Kirwash governed the Uqaylid state for fifty years — Mosul, Kufa, Mada'in and the Euphrates bank — and Ibn Khallikan's portrait of him is the sharpest thing written about any ruler of the Jazira in that century.

He was, the dictionary says, very generous, a great plunderer and a free giver, following in this the custom of the desert Arabs. He was a good scholar and an elegant poet, and some of his pieces were in general circulation.

Two remarks

Two of his sayings were remembered, and both are the sort of thing a man says when he is certain nothing will happen to him.

He was reproached for being married to two sisters at the same time, which is plainly forbidden. He answered: tell me what thing we ever did which was permitted by law.

And on his own conscience, he said: I have nothing on my conscience except the death of five or six inhabitants of the desert whom I slew; as for the townspeople, God makes no account of them.

That is the whole political theory of an Arab tribal dynasty holding cities it did not belong to, delivered in one sentence by its most successful ruler. The Uqaylids drew Mosul's revenue for a century and never stopped regarding the people who produced it as a different order of being from the tribe. Killing a bedouin was a matter for the conscience. Killing a townsman was not an event.

What it cost him

In 1049 or 1050, after fifty years in power, Kirwash quarrelled with his brother Baraka, who was living outside the city. He fell into his brother's hands, was put in chains and thrown into prison.

Baraka took the supreme command, gave himself a title meaning guardian of the empire, ruled two years and died in 1052. His nephew Quraysh succeeded, and the first thing Quraysh did was hold a public audience and have his uncle Kirwash put to death in front of him.

He was buried at Tell Tawba, east of Mosul.

The pattern

A man who had written verses on a ruined castle wall about the transience of princes, and who had said in so many words that the lives of townsmen did not count, spent his last three years chained up by his brother and was executed at an audience by his nephew.

The dynasty had thirty-four years left. What killed it in the end was Turkish armies out of the east, and they walked into a state that had spent two generations demonstrating that its own family could not hold a succession, in a city whose inhabitants had been told plainly where they stood.

Kerbogha

Drafted from Wilson, Medieval Syria and the Onset of the Crusades: The Political World of Bilad al-Sham 1050-1128 (2023)end

After 1085 the Uqaylid emirate was a Mosul-sized thing with a Jazira-sized memory. Muslim's brothers and sons held pieces of it, quarrelled, and acknowledged the Seljuks, and Malikshah's officers took the Jaziran towns one by one. When Malikshah died in 1092 and the sultanate went into its own succession war, Mosul survived a few years longer in the confusion.

In late 1096 a Turkish officer named Kerbogha took the city and made himself its amir, and Uqaylid rule at Mosul ended. There is no battle in the sources worth naming and no securely attested last emir, because the sources do not supply one — the dynasty at Mosul stops being mentioned rather than being defeated.

The timing is the thing worth noticing. Kerbogha took Mosul in 1096, which is the year the First Crusade set out, and he is remembered in European writing for one thing: the great relief army he brought to Antioch in 1098 and lost outside its walls to a starving Frankish garrison. The atabeg who ends this polity is a footnote in somebody else's founding story.

A branch of the family held Qal'at Ja'bar, a fortress on the Euphrates, until 1169, when Nur al-Din took it. That is seventy years of an Arab tribal emirate surviving as a rock with a garrison, alongside the Artuqids doing the same thing at Mardin for three centuries, and it is the ordinary fate of these houses: not extinction, but a long reduction to whatever could not be conveniently besieged.

The man who asked for alms

Drafted from al-Qalanisi, The Damascus Chronicle of the Crusades (1932)afterlife

Mosul passed out of Arab hands in 1096 and never came back into them.

What it got instead was a series of Turkish amirs appointed from the east, and the best account of what that looked like is Ibn al-Qalanisi's description of one of them dying in Damascus seventeen years later.

The procession

On the last Friday of Second Rabi' 507 — 2 October 1113 — Mawdud, lord of Mosul, came in from his camp outside the Iron Gate to the great mosque of Damascus, as he did every week, with the atabeg of the city walking in front of him as a mark of respect.

Around the two of them were Daylamites, Turks, Khurasanis, armed men and armour-bearers with weapons of every kind — tempered blades, thrusting-swords, rapiers, drawn poniards — so that, Qalanisi writes, they walked as if through a tangled thicket of intertwined spikes, while the people stood around to see their pomp and the magnificence of their state.

They entered the courtyard. A man came out of the crowd, unnoticed by anybody, approached Mawdud as though to bless him and beg alms, took hold of his cloak belt and struck him twice below the navel.

Swords fell on the assassin from every side. His head was cut off so that he could be identified, and he could not be, so a fire was lit and he was thrown onto it.

Mawdud walked on a few paces. The crowd, seeing him upright and moving, calmed down and assumed he had survived. He collapsed near the north gate, was carried to the atabeg's residence with the atabeg walking beside him, and died a few hours later after a surgeon had sewn up part of the wounds.

The province he had left

Qalanisi appends a judgement on his government at Mosul that is worth having.

His conduct there had at first been tyrannical, and his treatment of the citizens was such that a great many people fled the province to get away from him. Then he learned that the sultan's attitude towards him had changed, and he abandoned that conduct entirely; his actions became upright and his fairness was manifest, and he started again on exactly the opposite lines.

A governor's justice, in other words, was a function of whether his master was pleased with him.

What the Uqaylids had been

Set that beside what Mosul had had before. The Uqaylids were an Arab tribal dynasty of the country itself, who could be bad rulers and often were, but who were nobody's appointment and had nowhere else to be. Their emirs were buried outside Mosul.

Mawdud's followers, when he died, packed his baggage, his jewels and his treasure and went home to Mosul and elsewhere, which is the sentence that describes the new arrangement exactly: the province was somewhere its rulers came from and returned to, and their property travelled with them.

Fourteen years after Mawdud's death the sultan sent another officer to Mosul, and that one was Zangi. The Jazira never again produced a state of its own.