ENCYCLOPEDIA MEDIEVAL ISLAMIC PART 23

OTTOMAN EMPIRE

  The Ottoman Empire was one of the largest and longest lived Islamic empires. It emerged around 1300 CE as a small principality on former Byzantine territory, to the west of Constantinople. It ceased to exist after defeat in the World War I and the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. The term Ottoman,or Osmanli,in Turkish derives from the ruling dynasty, named after Osman (c. 1300–1324), the first ruler of the line.

  At the time of its foundation the emirate not yet an empire of  Osman was one of a large number of Turkish principalities that emerged in western Anatolia following the collapse of Byzantine rule in the late thirteenth century. Several factors favored its rapid expansion. In the second half of the thirteenth century, central and eastern Anatolia had come under the rule of the Ilkhanids, the Mongol dynasty of Iran. The collapse of this dynasty in the early fourteenth century resulted in a political fragmentation. The Balkan Peninsula underwent a similar disintegration. The Latin victors of the Fourth Crusade in 1204 had divided Byzantine Greece among themselves, and for more than a century most of Greece remained a mosaic of Latin principalities. Much of the northern Balkan Peninsula was briefly united in the fourteenth century under the Serbian Tsar Stephen Dushan, but this political unity did not survive his death in 1355. This lack of a major opposing power was a factor that facilitated Ottoman expansion, as was the ability of the Ottoman rulers to exploit rivalries between their neighbors. Most notably, it was as the ally of the Byzantine pretender John VI Kantakouzenos that the second Ottoman ruler, Orhan (c. 1324–1362), occupied territory on the Gallipoli Peninsula, marking the first stage of the Ottoman  conquest of the Balkans. By the end of his reign, Orhan’s successor, Murad I (1362–1389), had, through conquest, marriage, and alliances, become the dominant power in much of the Balkans and western Anatolia. By 1402, his son, Bayezid I (r. 1389–1402), had annexed all of western and central Anatolia. In the Balkans he established the Danube as the Empire’s northern frontier, provoking hostilities with the kingdom of Hungary. The rout of a Hungarian-led crusading army at Nicopolis in 1396 confirmed Bayezid as the dominant ruler south of the Danube.

    In 1402, Timur-i Leng (Tamerlane) defeated Bayezid at Ankara, dismembering his empire in Anatolia and unleashing an eleven-year civil war between his sons. The disaster might have led to the end of the Ottomans. Instead, a hundred years later, the Ottoman Empire was on the verge of becoming a world power, while Timur’s empire had disappeared. Three factors probably favored the Ottoman recovery. First, the Ottomans had adopted the principle that Ottoman territory was indivisible. Bayezid’s sons fought to the death until a single ruler, Mehmed I (r. 1413– 1421), prevailed rather than divide the territory. Second, by the end of the fourteenth century the Ottomans had established, probably on Byzantine and Ilkhanid precedent, a system of registering fiscal and military obligations that allowed administrative continuity in times of political crisis. Third, rivalries among the enemies of the Ottomans prevented a major threat to the warring princes. Mehmed I and his son, Murad II (r. 1421–1451), recovered much of the territory that had been lost in 1402. In central Anatolia, only the emirate of Karaman, reestablished after 1402, escaped reannexation. In the West, the Ottoman annexation of Serbia in 1435 threatened Hungary, triggering Hungarian invasions in 1443 and 1444. It was the Hungarian defeat at Varna in 1444 that ensured that the Balkans would come under Muslim Ottoman rather than Catholic Hungarian rule.

  Murad II’s successors Mehmed II (r. 1451–1481) and Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512) gave the empire a shape familiar from later centuries. Mehmed II’s conquest of Constantinople in 1453 provided the empire with its enduring capital. In thirty years of continuous warfare, he conquered most of the Balkan Peninsula, including Bosnia in 1463, annexed Karaman and other non-Ottoman principalities in Anatolia, and established in these territories direct Ottoman rule rather than rule through vassal dynasties. The work of Mehmed’s son, Bayezid, in sponsoring the codification of Ottoman law gave Mehmed’s conquests an administrative/legal identity. The strongly Sunni identity of the empire was a product of the following reign.

  In 1514, Selim I (r. 1512–1520), after defeating and killing his brothers, routed the Safavid Shah of  Iran, Isma‘il I, at Chaldiran and, in the following two years, conquered Safavid territory in southeastern Anatolia. The Safavids did not present so much a military as an ideological threat. They were both Shi‘i and, more important, heads of a religious order that claimed many Ottoman subjects among its adherents. These religious claims led the Ottoman sultans to emphasize their Sunni orthodoxy as against Safavid heresy. Selim I’s conquest (1516–1517) of the Mamluk domains in Syria, Egypt, and the Hejaz reinforced this tendency. Not only did he double the empire’s size but he also acquired the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, giving him a claim to leadership of the Islamic world. These were claims that his son, Su¨leyman I (r. 1520–1566), reinforced. Su ¨leyman opened his reign with the conquest of Rhodes and of Belgrade, on the southern border of Hungary. In 1526, he defeated the Hungarians at Moha´cs, and from 1526 until 1541, Hungary was a vassal kingdom. The conquest brought Su¨leyman into conflict with the Habsburg, Ferdinand of Austria, who claimed the Hungarian crown, and his brother, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain, Charles V. To counter Habsburg claims, Su¨leyman, in 1541, converted central Hungary to an Ottoman province, leaving Transylvania as a vassal kingdom. Nonetheless, continuing Habsburg claims led to intermittent warfare in Hungary until the end of the reign. At the same time, Ottoman and Spanish rivalries in North Africa Algiers had accepted Ottoman suzerainty in 1519 led to intermittent warfare with the Spanish Habsburgs in the Mediterranean. The third  area of conflict was with the Safavids. From 1533 to 1536, a campaign brought Baghdad, much of Iraq, and eastern Anatolia under Ottoman control; later campaigns between 1548 and 1555 brought no Ottoman gains.

  The sixteenth-century wars against the Safavids, and the Habsburgs, brought the Ottomans into conflict with powerful dynastic empires, and it was as a competitive response to these rivals that Su¨leyman I stressed his Islamic orthodoxy against Safavid heresy and his equivalence to Charles V’s status as Holy Roman Emperor, by assuming the title of ‘‘Caliph.’’ After a favorable treaty with the Habsburgs of 1547, he adopted the title of ‘‘Emperor.’’ The Ottoman dynasty was to use the title Caliph intermittently until 1924.

  It was once customary to designate the period from the death of Su ¨leyman in 1566 as the period of the ‘‘decline’’ of the Ottoman empire. Although this designation is an oversimplification—the Ottomans conquered Cyprus from Venice in 1572 and much of the Caucasus and Azerbaijan from the Safavids between 1578 and 1590—the period saw a setback in Ottoman fortunes. The inconclusive war in Hungary from 1593 to 1606 revealed Ottoman military weakness; by 1606, the Ottomans had lost all territory gained from the Safavids after 1578. An eventual peace with Iran in 1639 confirmed the border as fixed in the treaty of 1555. The last major Ottoman conquest, Crete in 1669, came only at the end of a war that lasted nearly twenty-five years. After the failed siege of Vienna in 1683, the Ottomans began to lose territory, the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699 confirming the loss of Hungary and other possessions. By the outbreak of World War I, almost nothing remained of Ottoman territory in Europe.

  To explain these losses, it is more accurate to think in terms of the ‘‘rise’’ of Europe rather than the ‘‘decline’’ of the Ottomans. The changes in European ways of thinking bearing the labels (of convenience) ‘‘the Renaissance’’ and ‘‘the Scientific Revolution’’ led, from the sixteenth century, to developments in military and naval weapons, tactics, and organization, which the Ottomans had difficulty in emulating. The same developments in European thinking created ‘‘the Industrial Revolution’’ of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which together with the earlier development of mercantile capitalism, led to European domination of the Ottoman economy and the undermining of indigenous industries. Furthermore, after an unsuccessful confrontation with the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean in the sixteenth century, the Ottomans abandoned attempts to control maritime trade westward from India and Southeast Asia, allowing the Atlantic powers to dominate this lucrative field of commerce. Perhaps most significant of all, the import in the nineteenth century of the European concept of nationalism undermined the political unity of an empire based on dynastic and religious identities. The attempts by nineteenth-century reformers to create an Ottoman national identity, and the attempt of Abdulhamid II (r. 1876–1909) to encourage a shared identity among all Muslim subjects, with a loyalty to the sultan/caliph, could not stem the growth of nationalism in the Empire. Even without the defeat in World War I, nationalist separatism would probably by itself have destroyed the Ottoman empire.

Further Reading

Imber, Colin.The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1650: The Structure of Power.Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.

Mantran, Robert (Ed).Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman.Paris: Fayard, 1989.

Quataert, Donald.The Ottoman Empire, 1700–1922. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

PALESTINE

  The Roman province of Palestine (Palaestina) was created following the suppression of the Bar Kokhba Jewish rebellion of 132–135 CE. It replaced the province of Judea (Iudaea) that existed since 63 BCE, following the conquest of Pompey. Around 400 CE, the province of Palestine was subdivided into three provinces: Palaestina Prima, Secunda, and Tertia. According to Irfan Shahid, the Muslim administrative division of Syria into four provinces (ajnad, sing. jund) was inspired by the Byzantine theme system that Heraclius created between 628 and 636 CE. The Muslim ajnad system included four provinces known as Jund Filastin, Urdunn, Dimashq, and Hims. Jund Filastin consisted of Palaestina Prima, while Palaestina Secunda became Jund Urdunn. Jund Filastin included within its borders the coastal towns of Casearea (Qaysariyya) in the North and Rafah in the South and internal territories, including Jerusalem.

  The impact of the Arab–Muslim conquest of the Middle East was manifold, but two issues Arabization and Islamization stand out. The main question is: Was Islamization driven by the sedentarization of Arab–Muslim tribes from Arabia in the Middle East, or by mass conversion of the local populations? The evidence for Palestine, irrespective of the Arab Muslim administrative division of the area, is that Arabization preceded Islamization, and the Christian and Jewish populations adopted Arabic while resisting Islamization. However, in some places the two processes went hand in hand. During the eight and ninth centuries, the town of Ayla (modern-day ‘Aqaba) became renowned for its scholarship and families of scholars engaged in the transmission of traditions. Local circumstances must always be taken into account. In Samaria (administratively divided between theajnadof Urdunn and Filastin), for example, mass conversion driven by economic hardship and persecutions took place from the ninth century onward. However, the conversion of the Samaritan population reflected local conditions and says little about other populations. The Muslim conquest of Palestine also had repercussions on the agriculture of the region, with cotton replacing flax as the main cash crop. The spread of cotton facilitated the development of the papermaking industry in Syria and Palestine.

  Ramla, the capital of Jund Filastin, was founded by the Umayyad caliph Sulayman ibn ‘Abd al-Malik in 715. The caliph is credited with the construction of a palace, a mosque, an extensive water supply and storage system, and the House of the Dyers. The town proved to be a successful urban creation important enough to attract the attention of the caliph Harun alRashid, who built there a large underground water reservoir. Two pious endowments (awqaf, sing. waqf) set up in AH 300/912–913 CE and 301/913–914 revealed the town’s prosperity. The first pious endowment was established by the Egyptian administrator Abu Bakr Muhammad ibn ‘Ali al-Madhara’i and consisted of water installations for the benefit of the public. The second waqfwas set up by Fa’iq, a Saqlabi eunuch who was freed of the caliph al-Mu’tamid (870–982). Although the exact nature of this foundation remains elusive, the endowed property consisted of an urban commercial building (funduq), which functioned as a place of commerce and an inn.

  Several Fatimid officials resided in Ramla during the Fatimid period (early eleventh century), including the governor, who is referred to aswali, meaning apparently the governor of Jund Filastin. The governor, through his military slave (ghulam), controlled the police force and kept contact with Cairo through the postal service, or thebarid. The town was also the seat of the secret policy (ashab al-akhbar) and the local Fatimid propagandist (da’i). Two other officials whose presence is attested to in the town were the fiscal administrator(‘amil)and auditor (zimmam),both of whom were nominated by the government in Cairo. The social composition of the population of Ramla remains enigmatic, but there was a local Muslim elite made up of notables, judges, and court witnesses.

  Much of our information about Ramla, Jund Filastin, and the other ajnad is derived from the chronicle of  Musabbihi (977–1029) and concerns the governorship of Anushtakin al-Dizbiri and the Bedouin rebellion of 1024–1029. In Muharram 414/ March–April 1023, Anushtakin was appointed as the governor of Jund Filastin, bearing the title of a military governor (mutawalli harb Filastin). The beginnings of his governorship were peaceful and, in April 1024, a large caravan of Khurasani pilgrims from Mecca traveled through Ayla via Ramla and Damascus to Baghdad. The Fatimid regime was quick to take advantage of the need of the Khurasani pilgrims to use the Fatimid territories, due to unsafe roads between Mecca and Baghdad, for propagandistic purposes. The military governors (wula al-harb) were ordered to assist the pilgrims. Khurasan was a staunch Sunni region, and Musabbihi testifies that the Fatimids hoped to demonstrate that the hostile propaganda that depicted them as heretics was unfounded. The pilgrims visited Jerusalem, and the regime in Cairo hoped that they would be impressed by the prosperity of the region under Fatimid rule. However, the situation in Jund Filastin quickly changed for the worst. In September 1024, hostilities erupted between Anushtakin and Hassa ibn al-Jarrah, the leader of the Banu Tayy Bedouins, who was authorized to collect taxes (under the terms of an iqta’ grant) from Bayt Jubrin, in the South of Jund Filastin. This round of hostilities ended with the looting of Tiberias (Tabariyya), the capital of Jund Urdunn, and the occupation of Ramla. The Bedouin conquest of Ramal was a bleak chapter in the history of the town. Hassan executed the soldiers of the Fatimid garrison in the town and confiscated the property and money of several well-to-do people. The town was looted and women and children enslaved. Eventually, after taking vast plunder, Hassan set fire to Ramla. The soap industry suffered ruin, and large quantities of olive oil and soap were destroyed. In spite of the destruction inflicted on Ramla, Hassan tried to win formal concession from the Fatimids, asking for Nablus and Jerusalem to be recognized as his iqta’. Nablus was practically Hassan’s stronghold and was officially added to his territories, but the Fatimids refused to cede Jerusalem. Eventually, Anushtakin, with the cooperation of the governors of Tiberias and Jerusalem, was able to defeat Hassan and by the end of 1025, the high tide of the Bedouin uprising was over. However, in 1029, Anushtakin fought and defeated the Bedouin coalition that challenged the Fatimid rule in Palestine and Syria.

  The impact of the Bedouin rebellion on Palestine (or more precisely theajnadof Filastin and Urdunn) and Bilad al-Shamm (meaning Damascus and Aleppo) was short-lived. In 1047, the Persian traveler Nasiri Khusrau visited these regions and, on the whole, his impression was very favorable. The towns of the Eastern Mediterranean (that is, those of the Syria Palestine littoral) prospered under the Fatimid rule. By the mid-eleventh century the Mediterranean trade of the Fatimid state was in its full swing, and Nasiri Khusrau’s description of Tripoli, Beirut, Sidon, Tyre, and Acre mirrors this booming commerce. As a person coming from the inland territories of the Muslim world he was much impressed by port facilities (mina) that, for his Persian readers, he describes as ‘‘a stable for ships.’’ In Tripoli, anchored ships from Byzantium, Sicily, Maghreb, Muslim Spain, and Europe, and the ten percent tax collected from them, financed the Fatimid garrison in the town. The chain in the entry of the port of Acre (‘Akka) attracted Nasiri Khusrau’s attention, but he is vague about Acre’s commerce. The port of Acre had been built during the rule of Ahmad ibn Tulun (868–884), the semi-independent ruler of Egypt, but only during the Fatimid period did the Mediterranean trade make its full impact on the coastal towns Syria and Palestine. It also had significant internal consequences and facilitated the emergence of local commercial elites. Nasiri Khusrau, for example, refers to the Sunni cadi of Tyre Ibn Abi ‘Aqil as a rich and influential person. During the second half of the eleventh century and the first decades of the twelfth century, Banu ‘Aqil emerged as the local ruler of Tyre and navigated skillfully between the Fatimids, Seljuks, and Franks. Then, in 1124, the town was conquered by the Crusaders.

  Nasiri Khusrau’s description indicates that the eleventh-century Mediterranean trade had greater significance for the coastal towns of Syria (modern Lebanon) than for those of Urdunn and Filastin. With the exception of Jerusalem, Nasiri Khusrau has little to say about the inland towns of these two ajnad. The Jasmine Mosque of Tiberias is fully described, but he has nothing to say about the town itself. Ramla is described as a fortified town with an elaborate system of rainwater collection and storage. An inscription commemorated the 425/1033 earthquake that destroyed many buildings but spared the people. If the soap industry of Ramla recovered from the 1025 destruction remains unknown, but the cultivation of olives continued to prosper and the agriculture of the region abundantly supplied the two stable foods of its population: bread and olives. In 1068, Ramla was hit by an especially destructive earthquake, which destroyed the town and killed fifteen thousand people.

  Nasiri Khusrau estimated the population of Jerusalem at twenty thousand and referred to its endowed hospital, which is not alluded to by other sources. He fully describes the holy places of Jerusalem and Hebron, including measurements, and he also provides a detailed description of the Hebron soup kitchen. This charitable institution was financed by an extensive pious endowment and offered meals to the pilgrims. Little escaped Nasiri Khusrau’s attention: The international dimension of the holy places of Jerusalem is also noted. He mentions the destruction of the Holy Sepulchre by al-Hakim (1008) and the restoration of the place, following Byzantine diplomatic efforts. Another testimony about the life in Jerusalem and Palestine is supplied by the Andalusi scholar Ibn al-‘Arabi, who stayed in Jerusalem between 1092 and 1095. He describes Jerusalem and its Muslim intellectual life, as well as his encounters with scholars in Ascalon and Acre. However, the patterns of life in Syria and Palestine, as described by Nasiri Khusrau and Ibn al-‘Arabi, were completely shattered by the Seljukid invasion of the region and the Fatimid attempts of reconquest (1060–1090) and the wars of the Crusades.

Primary Sources

Ibn al-Qalanisi. Dhayl Ta’rikh Dimashq. Edited by H. F. Amedroz. Leiden, 1908.

Muqaddasi.Kitab Ahsan al-Taqasim (The Best Division for Knowledge of the Regions). Translated into English by B. A. Collins. Reading, 1994.

Musabbihi.Akhbar Misr. Edited by A. F. Sayyid. Cairo, 1978.

Naser-e Khosraw.Book of Travels (Safarnama). Translated into English by W. M. Thackston Jr. New York, 1986.

Further Reading

Amar, Zohar. ‘‘The History of the Paper Industry in al-Sham in the Middle Ages.’’ InTowns and Material Culture in the Medieval Middle East, edited by Y. Lev, 119–135. Leiden, 2002.

Bacharach, Jere L. ‘‘Palestine in the Policies of Tulunid and Ikhshidid Governors of Egypt (AH 254–358/868–969 AD)’’ InEgypt and Palestine. A Millennium of Association (868–1948), edited by A. Cohen and G. Baer, 51–66. New York, 1984.

Cobb, Paul M. ‘‘Scholars and Society in Early Islamic Ayla.’’JESHOXXXVIII (1995): 417–428. Drory, Joseph. ‘‘Some Observations During a Visitto Palestine by Ibn al-‘Arabi of Seville in 1092–1095.’’ Crusades3 (2004): 101–124.

El’ad, Amikam. ‘‘The Coastal Cities of Palestine During the Early Middle Ages.’’ InThe Juraselam Cathedra. Jerusalem: Detroit, 1982.

Gil, Moshe.A History of Palestine 634–1099. Translated into English by Ethel Broido. Cambridge, 1992.

Le Strange, G.Palestine Under the Moslem. London, 1890.

Levy-Rubin, Milka. ‘‘New Evidence Relating to the Process of Islamization in Palestine in the Early Muslim Period—the Case of Samaria.’’JESHOXLIII (2000): 257–276.

Luz, Nimrod. ‘‘The Construction of an Islamic City in Palestine: The Case of Umayyad al-Ramla.’’JRAS7 (1997): 27–54.

Shahid, Irfan. ‘‘Heraclius and the Theme System: New Light from the Arabic.’’ByzantionLVII (1987): 391– 406.; ‘‘Heraclius and the Theme System. Further Observations.’’ ByzantionLIX (1989): 208–243; ‘‘Heraclius and the Unfinished Themes of Oriens. Some Final Observations.’’ByzantionLXIV (1994): 352–376.

Sharon, Moshe, ‘‘A Waqf Inscription from Ramlah.’’Arabica 13 (1966): 77–84; ‘‘Waqf Inscription from Ramla c. 300/912–13.’’BSOAS(1997): 98–108.

PAPER MANUFACTURE

  Paper was unknown before the coming of Islam in the 600s CE to Southwest Asia and North Africa, where papyrus and parchment were used for writing documents and books. Muslims learned the technique of papermaking in the eighth century after they conquered Transoxiana, where Buddhist missionaries and merchants along the Silk Road had introduced paper from China. The Chinese had invented paper in the second or first century BCE; it was made from cellulose fibers suspended in water and then collected on a screen and dried. Chinese paper was normally made from bast fibers extracted from such semitropical plants as bamboo and paper mulberry, whereas new sources of cellulose were needed in arid Central Asia. Therefore papermakers there, as well as in the Muslim lands, used such fibers as flax and hemp, as well as waste fibers from rags and old ropes.

  Paper mills were established in Baghdad soon after its founding in 762 CE, for the ‘Abbasid bureaucracy centered there had an insatiable demand for materials on which to write innumerable documents and records. By the middle of the ninth century the ready availability of relatively inexpensive paper had sparked a cultural revolution throughout ‘Abbasid society, as writers on every subject from theology to cookery committed their thoughts to paper and began thinking about things in ways they had not done before. Nevertheless, manuscripts of the Koran were copied on parchment codices until the end of the tenth century. Baghdad remained an important center of paper manufacture until the fourteenth century, and the finest papers continued to be manufactured in Iran and India (where it had been introduced in the fourteenth century) into the 1600s.

  By ca. 800, paper was available in Damascus, and Syria quickly became known for its quality product. Although papyrus was used in Egypt into the tenth century, it was steadily replaced by paper, either imported from Syria or manufactured locally, and by the end of the century the papyrus industry was dead. Although parchment remained popular for longer than elsewhere in North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula, paper was already used in al-Andalus in the tenth century, and several hundred paper mills are reported in twelfth-century Fez. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Andalusi papermakers were responsible for the transfer of the technology to regions under Christian rule, whence it eventually spread to other regions of Europe. The Byzantines used but did not manufacture it, although Istanbul became a center of paper manufacture after the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Early Italian papermakers seem to have also learned their craft in Syria or Egypt, and by the fifteenth century, Europeans were selling cheap but low-quality papers in Southwest Asian and North African markets, initiating the decline and eventual demise of the local paper industry.

Further Reading

Bloom, Jonathan M.Paper before Print: The History and Impact of Paper in the Islamic Lands. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001.

Le Le´annec-Bavave´as, Marie-The´re`se.Les papiers non filigrane´sme´die´vaux de la Perse a` l’Espagne. Bibliographie 1950–1995. Paris: CNRS Editions, 1998.

PARTY KINGDOMS, IBERIAN PENINSULA

  The Party Kingdoms, or Taifa Kingdoms, emerged out of the anarchy that followed the collapse of the Umayyad caliphate of Co´rdoba in 1009 CE and the ensuing period of civil war (fitna) that lasted until 1031. The Arabic term muluk al-tawa’if (factional kings) was applied to the rulers of these petty states, because their existence defied the Islamic ideal of political unity under the authority of a single caliph.

  The era of the Party Kingdoms, which lasted until 1110 CE, was one of great cultural florescence in alAndalus, particularly among Muslims and Jews. It was also the period in which native Iberian Muslims lost control of their political destiny; from this time forward they would dominated by Iberian Christian and North African Muslim powers.

  The Umayyad caliphate had been run, in fact, if not in name, by the ‘Amirid dynasty of ‘‘chamberlains’’ (hajib) since Muhammad ibn Abi ‘Amir alMansur (976–1002) seized power during the reign of Hisham II (976–1009/1010–1113). On his death, alMansur was succeeded by two sons, ‘Abd al-Malik (r. 1002–1008), and ‘Abd al-Rahman (or ‘‘Sanjul’’), who took power in 1008. Unable to maintain the delicate and volatile balance of factions within the government and Andalusi society, or to counter popular resentment of the growing prestige of Berber groups who had been invited to al-Andalus as part of caliphal military policy, Sanjul provoked the outrage of the Umayyad aristocracy, the religious elite (‘ulama’), and the populace by pressuring the aging and childless Hisham to name him as successor in 1008. Sanjul was deposed by elements of the military, and the people of Cordoba rampaged against local Berbers. As civil war erupted in the capital, power was seized in the various provincial cities by local governors, members of the palace slave (saqaliba) contingent, the‘ulama’, and Berber clans, which had come to dominate the army. The variety of political leadership reflected the divisions that had emerged in Andalusi politics and society since the time of ‘Abd al-Rahman III (r. 912–961). Until the death of Hisham III in 1031, each of the rulers maintained a patina of legitimacy by styling himself as the hajib ruling in the name of the Umayyad caliph, while struggling against neighboring Party Kingdoms both for survival and a greater share of Andalusi territory.

  By the 1040s, most of the smaller states had been swallowed up, leaving several major players, which included: Badajoz, ruled by the Aftasids, an Andalusi dynasty; Toledo, ruled by the Dhi’l-Nun, of Berber origin; Zaragoza, ruled by the Banu Hud, of Arab origin; Seville, ruled by the Andalusi ‘Abbasids; Granada, ruled by the Berber Zirid clan; Valencia, ruled by ‘Amirids; and Almerı´a, ruled by a succession of factions. By this point the slave regimes were no more; lacking a broader constituency they fell victim to Andalusi and Berber cliques who had a wider popular base or a more cohesive military core. Among the great rivalries that emerged were those of Seville and Granada (which also faced the hostility of Almerıa), and Toledo and Zaragoza. Zaragoza was further plagued by internal divisions thanks to the custom of Hudid rulers of dividing their patrimony among their heirs.

  These rivalries were capitalized on by the Christian kingdoms of the peninsula, particularly Castile and Leo´n, which were united under the strong leadership of Fernando I of Castile (r. 1035–1065) and his successor Alfonso VI (r. 1065–1109). Fernando, who exploited Andalusi weakness by pushing far south of the Duero and taking Coımbra in 1064, initiated a policy in which military pressure was used to convert the Party Kingdoms into tributary states. As a consequence, Badajoz, Seville, Toledo, Zaragoza, and Granada were forced to pay large indemnities (parias) of gold and silver in exchange for military support and protection from attack. Other Christian principalities, notably Aragon and Barcelona, quickly imitated this. As a result, Christian powers became increasingly embroiled in Andalusi affairs, supporting their taifa clients against rival kingdoms and using them in their own internecine struggles. Hence, Castile-supported Toledo fought Aragon-supported Zaragoza, and Zaragoza faced a rebellious Le´rida aided by Barcelona. It was in this context that the famous Rodrigo Diaz del Vivar, ‘‘El Cid,’’ an exile from Castile, found himself commanding the military forces of Zaragoza against the troops of Aragon and Barcelona. Indeed, ‘‘El Cid’’ had earned his moniker from Sevillan troops in 1064 after he led them to victory against the forces of taifa Granada, when they referred to him gratefully as ‘‘my lord’’ (sidi). Such interventions were symptomatic of a general dependence of the taifa kingdoms on Christian military strength, which further undermined their autonomy.

  The taifa kingdoms were able to support the paria regime because of the fact that their economic infrastructure had remained largely undamaged by the unrest of the fitna. These were economies based on intensive agriculture and market gardening, manufacture and craft and, particularly in the case of the Mediterranean coast, trade. The trans-Saharan gold trade that had fueled the incredible prosperity of the caliphate also continued, providing the taifa kings with the funds they needed to meet their tributary obligations. The vibrant Andalusi economy also sustained a cultural renaissance, encouraged by the new political plurality in which rival courts vied as patrons of Arabic letters, science, and theology; the great poet Ibn Hazm (b. Co ´rdoba, 993) is the best-known figure of this age. Jewish culture and letters, including both Arabic- and Hebrew-language literature, also throve, producing remarkable figures such as the poet Isma’il ibn Naghrilla (b. Co ´rdoba, 991), who exercised power as effective head of state of thetaifaof Granada from 1027 to 1056. This cultural diversity reflected the ethnoreligious composition of the kingdoms, most of which had significant Jewish and Mozarab Christian minorities, members of which not infrequently enjoyed great prestige and wielded considerable political power. For example, Isma’il ibn Naghrilla, wazir and military commander of Granada, was succeeded by his son Yusuf. Sisnando Davı´dez, a Mozarab who later served as Alfonso VI’s envoy, had been an administrator in Muslim Badajoz, and a number of dhimmis (non-Muslim subjects) served in the government of Zaragoza.

  For the most part this diversity was tolerated by the Muslim majority, including the ‘ulama’, although some of the latter were outraged by the prospect that dhimmis should hold formal office under a Muslim regime. Their ire, however, came to be directed increasingly at the taifa kings themselves, many of whom were Berbers who shared no ethnocultural affiliation with the Andalusi population and who ruled as a foreign military elite. Popular dissatisfaction was aggravated by the increasing burden of taxation, which the ‘ulama’ (who tended to come from the commercial class) and the common people were expected to bear as a result of the paria system. The taifa kings’ imposition of uncanonical taxes and their submission as tributaries to Christian powers served as an ideological rallying point for popular revolt. The situation of the‘ulama’ was further exacerbated by the disruption of long-distance trade networks, thanks to incursions of the Normans in the Mediterranean and the Banu Hilal in Tunisia, and by the growing unrest in the Andalusi countryside, where the inter-taifa warfare and banditry led to general disorder. In 1085, the populace of Toledo led by the religious elite ejected the taifa king al-Qadir from the city. Turning to his patron, Alfonso VI, al-Qadir agreed that if reinstated he would hand the city over to the Castilian king, on the promise of later being installed as king in Valencia. Thus, in that same year, after negotiating a treaty with the local ‘ulama’, Alfonso entered Toledo as king.

  This event made evident the corruption and debility of thetaifakings, who were derided in learned and pious Andalusi circles as decadent and effete. A wellknown contemporary satirical verse mocked them: ‘‘They give themselves grandiose names like ‘The Powerful,’ and ‘The Invincible,’ but these are empty titles; they are like little pussycats who, puffing themselves up, imagine they can roar like lions.’’ It also demonstrated to thetaifa kings that Alfonso’s aim was conquest; indeed, following up his seizure of Toledo, Alfonso laid siege to the other powerful northern taifa, Zaragoza (as a means of blocking the expansion on his Christian rival, the Kingdom of Aragon). By now both the‘ulama’and the taifa rulers agreed outside help was desperately required. The only group to which they could turn was the Almoravids, a dynamic Berber faction that had coalesced on the southern reaches of the African gold routes and had managed to impose their political will on the region of Morocco, having taken Marrakech in 1061 and Fez in 1069. Self-styled champions of a Sunni Islam revival (which resonated with that of the Seljuks in the East), they saw their mission not only as halting the Christian advance in al-Andalus but also of deposing the illegitimate taifa rulers.

  In 1086, the Almoravid Yusuf ibn Tashfin led a sizeable army to al-Andalus at the invitation of alMu‘tamid of Seville. With the half-hearted help of the Andalusi troops the Almoravid faced Alfonso VI and his loyal Muslim clients in battle at Zallaqa (or Sagrajas) and issued them a major defeat. He did not follow this up, returning instead to Morocco. For the next two years the taifa kings were confident enough to defy Alfonso VI, but when he began to attack them again, they were forced to call on the Almoravids for help once more. Ibn Tashfin waited until 1089 when, having obtained juridical opinions from the‘ulama’of the East authorizing him to take power in al-Andalus, he returned and set about deposing the remaining taifa rulers one by one. By 1094, virtually all of the kingdoms had fallen, their rulers having been either killed or shipped off as prisoners to Almoravid Morocco.

  Valencia did not fall until 1002. By 1087, ‘‘El Cid,’’ against the opposition of Zaragoza and the various Christian kings, had determined to take the city for himself and was provided with a pretext when an ‘ulama’-led uprising deposed and executed al-Qadir in 1092. Rodrigo besieged the city, which, forsaken by the Almoravids, surrendered in 1093. Having negotiated a treaty with the Muslim population, Rodrigo ruled the city and surrounding territory until his death in 1099—a Christian taifa king. Three years later, unable to resist the growing pressure of the Almoravids, Rodrigo’s wife and successor, Jimena, and her troops abandoned the city to its inhabitants, setting it ablaze as they left. The remaining Party Kingdom, Zaragoza, remained independent partly because the Almoravids were content to use it as a buffer state and partly because its rulers became so adept at playing off their Christian rivals against each other. As in the case of Toledo, however, the populace and the religious elite became increasingly frustrated by a leadership that was so deeply embroiled with the very Christian powers who seemed determined to defeat them. In 1110, a popular uprising banished the last Hudid king from power, and the city submitted to Almoravid rule. Zaragoza would ultimately fall to Alfonso I of Aragon in 1118, surrendering after a lengthy siege, after the surviving members of the Banu Hud struggled vainly with Alfonso VI’s help to regain their patrimony.

  The period of the Party Kingdoms marks a turning point in the history of medieval Iberia, when the balance of political and economic initiative shifted from the Muslim-dominated South to the Christian dominated North. Whether as a consequence of a crisis of ‘asabiyya (group identity) on the part of the Andalusis, or as the result of larger political and economic trends, the destiny of the Muslims of Spain would henceforth be in the hands of foreigners. The politics of thetaifa period, however, defy the notion that this process or the so-called Christian Reconquest that looms so largely in it was the result of an epic civilizational struggle between Islam and Christendom; the most striking aspect oftaifaera alAndalus was the relative absence of religious sectarianism and the profound enmeshment of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish individuals and political factions.

Further Reading

Benaboud, M’hammad. ‘‘ ‘Asabiyya and Social Relations in Al-Andalus During the Period of the Taifa States.’’ Hesperis-Tamuda19 (1980–1981): 5–45.

Cle´ment, Franc¸ois.Pouvoir et Le´gitimite´en Espagne Musulmane a` l’E ´poque des Taifas (Ve-XIe sie`cle): L’Imam Fictif. Paris, 1997.

Wasserstein, David.The Rise and Fall of the Party-Kings: Politics and Society in Islamic Spain 1002–1086. Princeton, NJ, 1985.

PERSIAN

  Persian belongs to the Southwest Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. Sir William Jones, who wrote the first Persian grammar in a European language (1771), and who proposed the existence of this linguistic family, claimed it was his realization that Persian had lexical cognates in both Sanskrit and Greek, which first led him to his discovery. Medieval Persian is continuous with, and both morphologically and lexically very similar to, modern Persian: The two are known collectively as New Persian, to distinguish them from Old Persian (also called Avestan) and Middle Persian (Pahlavi).

  The first texts in Old Persian are the cuneiform rock inscriptions of the Achaemenid emperors, which date from the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE. Even though extant manuscripts of the Avesta date only to the thirteenth century CE, the most ancient parts of the Avesta (the hymns, or Gathas), indicate a more archaic stage of the language than these inscriptions and must therefore be dated to before this period (although there is considerable scholarly dispute as to just how long before). Archaeological and textual evidence indicates that Old Persian was current in an area roughly coterminous with modern Iran and much of Afghanistan, as well as in southern Central Asia, extending as far as the steppes of southern Russia and eastward to Sinkiang.

  Middle Persian, or Pahlavi, a term that derives from ‘‘Parthava’’ meaning Parthian the name of the dynasty that ruled Iran from the fall of the Seleucids (247 BCE) to the rise of the Sasanians (225 CE) is mainly represented by Sasanian examples; these include rock inscriptions, inscriptions on coins, and secular and religious texts, including a considerable number of Manichean texts from Central Asia. The Middle Persian script derives from a Parthian script;  the northeastern Parthian form of the language differed somewhat from the southern Sasanian for that replaced it. Documents in a related language, Sogdian, have also survived from the same period.

  Up to the period of the Arab invasion of Iran in the mid-seventh century CE, Persian had developed within a virtually closed Indo-European linguistic environment, and shows no significant influence from languages outside this family. This situation changed radically with the Arab conquest of the country. As the language of its conquerors, Arabic became the dominant political and administrative language of Iran throughout the Umayyad period (651–750 CE) and during the early ‘Abbasid period (750–1258 CE): As the vehicle of the religion of Islam, to which a majority of Iranians had probably converted within two or three hundred years of the conquest, it also occupied a privileged position in any discourse involving theological or philosophical topics. Persian survived as a folk/oral language, and when it reemerged as a written language in the ninth century CE, it had absorbed considerable influence from Arabic. The script was now a modified form of the Arabic script (though the earliest surviving written examples of New Persian are in Hebrew characters and date from the mid-eighth century), and much of the vocabulary, especially as it relates to abstract or ‘‘sophisticated’’ matters, is also Arabic. An analogous situation, familiar to English speakers, is the development of English after the eleventh-century Norman French conquest. Although English retained a core Germanic (Anglo-Saxon) vocabulary, this was overlaid with a predominantly French-derived vocabulary, and the more sophisticated the speaker, and the topic being treated, the more this vocabulary becomes evident. Similarly, the core vocabulary of Persian continued to be derived from Pahlavi, but Arabic lexical items predominated for more abstract or abstruse subjects and often replaced their Persian equivalents in polite discourse. Just as English has been modified to the extent that an untutored English speaker cannot read an Anglo-Saxon text with comprehension, an untutored Persian speaker cannot read Pahlavi with comprehension. This is compounded for Persian because of the change of script from Pahlavi to Arabic, but it would still be the case if the script were readily legible to a modern Persian speaker. However, the parallel breaks down at a certain point: French and English are both Indo-European languages and share many cognates and much of their semantic structure, whereas Arabic and Persian belong to quite separate linguistic families (Semitic and Indo-European, respectively), have virtually no cognates except through loan words from one to the other, and have wholly differing semantic structures. Persian has, in general, confined its borrowings from Arabic to lexical items, and its morphology is relatively unaffected by the influence of Arabic, being confined to a few conventions such as the (usually optional) use of Arabic plurals for Arabic-derived words (as an English speaker may use Latin plurals for Latin loan words in English).

  The grammar of New Persian is similar to that of many contemporary European languages: The case system has virtually disappeared and has been replaced largely by a system of prepositions and postpositions; normal sentence word order is subject object verb; gender markers are generally absent; and plurals and other modifications to words are generally made by the addition of suffixes, prefixes, or, in the case of Arabic-derived vocabulary, infixes. The theoretical availability of the whole of Arabic to Persian speakers means that the language has a very large vocabulary and is rich in synonyms, near synonyms, and fine shades of distinct meaning in a given semantic area; some Arabic loan words are used in Persian with meanings quite distinct from their meanings in Arabic. Persian is also a highly idiomatic language, and a comprehension of the literal meaning of each word in a phrase by no means guarantees comprehension of the import of the phrase as a whole. For the nonnative speaker, Persian’s immense vocabulary, and the prevalence of idioms, are the chief obstacles to achieving fluency.

  In the same way that the emergence of New Persian can be seen as a linguistic result of political circumstances, new political conditions ensured the language’s literary survival. In the ninth and tenth centuries CE, areas of eastern Iran, under local dynasties, began to achieve de facto independence from the ‘Abbasid caliphate centered on Baghdad. The consequent loosening of Arabic cultural ties signaled a reemergence of Persian, and the first recorded poem in New Persian is a panegyric written on the occasion of the conquest of Herat by the Saffarid ruler Ya’qub Lais, in 867 CE. The main impetus for Persian’s literary revival was provided by the vigorous patronage of the Samanids, who ruled Khorasan from c. 875 CE to 1005 CE, and who instigated an extensive program of translation from Arabic into Persian, as well as assiduously promoting the writing of Persian poetry. Samanid literary production in Persian clearly looks to Arabic for many of its models, both as regards its chief forms and its rhetoric but is also distinctively Persian in its idiomatic vocabulary and often more or less nationalist preoccupations. Epic poetry, drawing on pre-Islamic native tradition and revived under the Samanids, is particularly Persian in its cultural orientation and owes little or nothing to Arabic models. The success and prestige of  Khorasanian New Persian literature meant that subsequent dynasties also encouraged literary production in Persian, and within two centuries or so Persian had become the major literary language of Southwest Asia. The twelfthcentury CE author Ibn al-Balkhi claimed that Persian was current ‘‘from the Oxus to the Euphrates,’’ and by this period it had also been carried into Northern India by (mainly Turkish) conquerors. By the thirteenth century the acclaim given to the Persian poetry of both Amir Khosrow in India, and Jalal addin Rumi in Asia Minor, indicates that Persian now had a significant literary presence well beyond the confines of Iran. Indeed, in Asia, from ca. the twelfth century CE to the sixteenth century CE, Persian was considered as the Islamic language of belles lettres par excellence, and it became a cliche´ that just as Arabic was the language of theology and law, and Turkish the language of the administration and the army, so Persian was the language of literate polite society. In the sixteenth century, and subsequently, Persian, especially Persian poetry, was cultivated at both the Ottoman courts in Turkey, and at the Moghul courts in India; in the latter environment especially, it produced a significant local literature. The diffusion of Persian beyond its heartland of Iran and western Afghanistan meant that dialectal differences gradually emerged, and this was particularly true of both the Persian spoken in Northern India and that in Central Asia, where its speakers gradually became an enclave surrounded by Turkish-speaking communities and where the local dialect began, in time, to show considerable Turkish influence. However, the canonical status of Persian literary classics as models, especially works by Ferdowsi, Sa’di, and (later) Hafez, also meant that written Persian during the middle ages differed little from one dialectal area to another.

Further Reading

Lazard, Gilbert.La Langue Des Plus Anciens Monuments de la Prose Perse. Paris, 1963.

———.The Origins of Literary Persian. Bethesda, 1993.

Levy, Reuben;The Persian Language. New York, 1951.

Windfuhr, Gernot L. ‘‘Persian.’’ InThe World’s Major Languages, edited by Bernard Comrie, 523–546. Oxford, 1990.

PERSIANS

Pre-Islamic Period

  The Persians were part of the Indo-Iranian Aryan migrations of the second millennium BCE, and Assyrian inscriptions talk of a ‘‘people of Parsua’’ based in the region of Hamadan as early as the ninth century BCE. By the seventh century BCE, the Persians had emerged as a distinct ethnolinguistic and political group based in the arid, southern climes of the Iranian Plateau among many competing Iranian and Semitic groups (Bactrian, Soghdian, Babylonian, Assyrian). Under the leadership of Cyrus the Great (580–530 BCE), the Achaemenian empire emerged from its home province of  Pars from which ‘‘Persia’’ is derived thanks to the Greek sources and was extended to comprise the Iranian Plateau, the Mesopotamian river valleys, and western Khurasan. The Persians incorporated preexisting Median notions of divine rule and various administrative practices, and there is evidence to suggest that they were henceforth exposed to early Avestan texts and Magian traditions. The internationality of the Achaemenian empire is readily apparent in their provincial satrapy system whereby regions such as Phoenicia, Lydia, Cilicia, Babylon, and Egypt remitted regular tribute to the Persians. This far-flung empire was maintained from administrative centers in Ectabana and Susa, and Darius built a majestic ceremonial capital near Persepolis in the early fifth century BCE to formally receive envoys and tribute bearers during the Persian New Year( Nawruz) celebrations. It was also during the Achaemenian period that the earlier teachings and prescriptions of Zarathustra (Greek, Zoroaster) contained in the Avestan scriptures gained great currency in western Asia.

  A revolt of Greek colonists in Ionia against the Persian-installed governor ushered in a new era of Irano-Mediterranean geopolitics whereby the Athenian and Persian empires fought a series of devastating wars in the fifth century BCE under Darius and Xerxes. The Persian invasions of Greece, culminating with the battles of Marathon (490 BCE) and Salamis (480 BCE), were in turn followed by a lengthy phase of Greek brinkmanship in the Achaemenian empire, as it stagnated under the rule of Artaxerxes (465–425 BCE) and Artaxerxes II (404–359 BCE). This set the stage for the devastating invasions of Alexander the Great in 334–331 BCE, and the formal termination of the Achaemenian Persian empire. For the next five centuries, Hellenistic culture enjoyed considerable prominence in the Iranian world under the successor Greco-Iranian dynasties of the Seleucids and Parthians. The Persians would be able to reclaim political primacy in the third century CE, when a local notable named Ardashir, from the town of Istakhr (near Shiraz), overthrew Parthian rule in 224 and revived many of the existing Achaemenian political, religious, and cultural traditions under the new dynastic banner of the Sasanians. In addition to carving out a formidable empire that included Central Iran, Iraq, and parts of Transoxiana, this dynasty (224–642 CE) is acknowledged for its intense dedication to the notion of divine kingship and its vigorous sponsorship of Zoroastrianism as a state religion. The peak of Sasanian rule came during the reign of Anushirvan (531–579 CE), who among other things instituted a series of wide-ranging reforms designed to promote social stability, responsible administration, and efficient tax collection. A wide array of treatises on political theory and princely advice literature was produced in Middle Persian in the sixth century, a practice that would reemerge during the Persian literary renaissance of the tenth and eleventh centuries. Indeed, the legacy of the Sasanian administrative infrastructure and the continuity of Persian bureaucratic culture in Islamic times would be key to the later success of the Islamic ‘Abbasid caliphate (750–1258 CE).

Islamic Period

  The Sasanian empire, with its centralized capital citycomplex of Mada’in on the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, was one of the two great land-based empires (the other being Byzantium) capable of opposing the Arab Islamic invasions of the seventh century. However, paralyzing rivalries and strife within the royal Sasanian household and decades of exhausting wars with the Byzantines conspired to undermine any cohesive Persian resistance to the revolutionary movement of Islam. More telling perhaps were the somewhat bigoted policies of the Sasanians toward non-Zoroastrian groups (Christians, Jews, Sabeans, Mazdakites), which no doubt contributed to the social anarchy surrounding the Islamic invasions. Although a series of skirmishes and clashes had taken place, it was the pitched battle at al-Qadisiyya where the Sasanian main host under Yazdgird III was routed by the general of Caliph ‘Umar ra, Sa’d b. Abi Waqqas ra in 637. Military encampments at Basra and Kufa facilitated further incursions into Iran, and Muslim Arab armies pushed resistance farther north along the Zagros Mountains into Azarbaijan. Persian communities of Zoroastrians, Christians, and Jews were by and large content to negotiate treaties of surrender with these newly arrived Arab tribal armies, and there is no reason to accept popularly held views that Iran was Islamicized at these early dates. Conversion to Islam for reasons of political expediency was not uncommon, however, and we read of prominent individual Sasanian bureaucrats and various prominent landholders (dihqans) who accepted Islam to either ingratiate themselves with the new political order or to escape certain canonical taxes levied on non-Muslims. By the end of the Umayyad caliphate (661–750 CE), the Persian-speaking world of the Iranian Plateau, Azarbaijan, Sistan, Khvarazm, Khurasan, and Transoxiana had been conquered.

  During the seventh and eighth centuries, large numbers of Arab tribespeople began settling in these newly conquered regions, particularly in the prosperous province of Khurasan, and converted Persian elite and nobility became ‘‘clients’’(mawali) of various Arab tribal networks. A collaborative taxation system emerged where by mawali Persian administrators established and maintained registers of taxation (diwan) on behalf of the Arab governors and military elite in urban settlements and rural garrisons. However, the Umayyad caliphate based in Damascus was unsympathetic to complaints from classes of Persian mawali who found themselves not only shut out of elite Arab political circles but were also being forced to levy both Muslim and non-Muslim canonical taxes on the Persian population. This regional resentment made Iran, particularly Khurasan, fertile propagandistic terrain for the panoply of Muslim groups who openly challenged and berated the Umayyad rulers on the basis of venality, corruption, and irreligiousness. The most successful of these were led by Abu Muslim in the mid-eighth century, who championed a revolution against the Arab/Syrian-centric Umayyad dynasty and the establishment of a ruling household whose provenance was ideologically and genealogically more palatable. This was a revolution supported by a coalition of groups: disgruntled Arab tribesmen in the East, proto-Shi‘i groups,mawaliPersian administrators, Persian dihqans, and Khurasani peasants and troops. The subsequent establishment of the ‘Abbasids in 750, and their relocation of the capital to Baghdad built near the former Persian Sasanian capital of Ctesiphon was a profound development for Persian political and administrative culture during the medieval period.

  The epicenter of Arabo-Islamic civilization in the ninth and tenth centuries was undoubtedly Baghdad. The greatest claim to fame of early medieval Baghdad was its sponsorship and promotion of extensive translations into Arabic of Greek, Syriac, Pahlavi, and Sanskrit treatises on philosophy, logic, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, and political philosophy. This transmission was to some extent influenced by a number of Persian scholar–bureaucrats who were able to combine their extensive training in Arabic with their Pahlavi roots to translate a number of Sasanian works that were, in fact, translations of much older Greek sources that had made their way to Iran during the sixth-century reign of Anushirvan. Concurrent with this was the rise of court lyshu’ubiya literature, whereby non-Arab Muslims, including many Persian literati, used formal Arabic rhetorical poetry to lionize and praise non-Arab traditions in the face of Arab cultural domination. This sense of independence often took militaristic manifestations, and we find a number of hybrid Shi‘i/Zoroastrian revolts, such as those by Sunpad in Nishapur, Babak in Azarbaijan, and Ustad Sis in Baghdis, plaguing the ‘Abbasid caliphate in the eighth to tenth centuries.

  The rise of New Persian and renaissance of Persian literature in the medieval period took place well east of the original home province of Fars. A number of semiautonomous Eastern dynasties (Tahirids, Samanids, Ghaznavids) based in the Iranian-speaking oasis-settlements of Bactria, Herat, Bukhara, and Samarqand were influenced by longstanding Persian mythical and literary traditions. Thanks to the efforts of historians such as al-Bal’ami who translated alTabari’s monumental historical chronicle from Arabic into Persian and poets such as Rudaki and Daqiqi, New Persian had emerged as the administrative and creative language of choice for the Samanid dynasty based in Samarqand. However, the Ghaznavid patronage of men like Abu al-Fazl Baihaqi and Abu al-Qasim Ferdowsi in the city of Ghazna would prove to be pivotal. Ferdowsi’s production of the monumental Shahnam (Shahnameh), an epic poem recounting the deeds and glories of Iranian kings and heroes in legend and history, accomplished much for the revival and preservation of Persian language and culture. This Iranicizing of the Eastern Islamic lands was further complemented by the Shi‘i Buyid dynasty, originally from Daylam, who had assumed custodianship of Baghdad and the ‘Abbasid caliphate in the tenth century. Although Arabic was still the dominant administrative language, Buyid rulers such as Azud al-Daula resuscitated a number of pre-Islamic Iranian practices, most notably the titulature of shahanshah(king of kings) and the celebration of the Persian New Year. Thus, the conveyance of the Persian revival from east to west by the Seljuk Turks after their conquest of Baghdad in 1055 was well received by networks of Iranian administrators, poets, and literateurs who had been serving for generations under Arab rule.

  The increased use of New Persian for administrative and poetic purposes during the Seljuk period reinforced the importance of Iranian bureaucracy and scholarship in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries. It would also be during the medieval period that rivalry between Persian city dwellers and Turkic nomads would intensify as a result of the large-scale arrival of Turkic tribes in the Iranian Plateau since the ninth century. Iran would undergo considerable Turkification with the arrival of the Seljuks, and the uneasy relationship between the Turkic military, tribal elite (ar bab-i saif, or ‘‘men of the sword’’) and the Persian administrative/religious classes (ar bab-i qalam, or ‘‘men of the pen’’) would often turn rancorous. Charged by their Seljuk Turkic overlords with the financial welfare of the state, Persian chief administrators (vazirs)used their status to secure power and patronize religious and cultural projects. A case in point is Nizam al-Mulk, who acted as vizier to the Seljuk rulers Arp Aslan and Malikshah during the eleventh century. In addition to promoting the spread of the madrasa collegial system, Nizam al-Mulk penned one of the most authoritative political advice manuals of the medieval period, the Siyasat nama (Book of Government). Indeed, this celebrated text constituted a revival of Sasanian political culture that demanded leadership from a ‘‘just ruler’’(al-sultan al-’adil) akin to Anushirvan, who in turn guaranteed religious conformity and responsible taxation.

  The most harrowing development for medieval Persians was the Mongol shockwave of the midthirteenth century. While Eastern Iranian cities such as Herat, Nishapur, and Balkh were ruthlessly sacked by Chingiz Khan in the 1220s, the remainder of Iran would be conquered thirty years later by the Great

Khan’s nephew, Hulegu. Approximating the demographic and economic impact of the Mongols would be challenging, but it is clear that the urban and agricultural prosperity of Iran regressed considerably after the thirteenth century. Descendants of Hulegu Khan established their own dynasty in Iran, the Il-Khans (1265–1365), and later rulers such as Oljeitu and Ghazan Khan were known for their attempts to implement a number of social and economic reforms in the hopes of rehabilitating the Iranian economy. The Persian bureaucratic elite once again stepped into serve as intermediaries between the subject population and the Mongol overlords, and the continued adoption of New Persian as the courtly lingua franca saw the rise of a strong Persian historiographical school thanks to administrators like al-Juvaini and Rashid al-Din. The Mongol and post-Mongol eras witnessed a flourishing of Persian poetry in the province of Fars under Sa’di and Hafez, while the Timurid rulers of Transoxiana and Khurasan actively sponsored scholars producing works on poetry, philosophy, and mysticism in Persian. It was also during the post-Mongol age that we see a dilution of centralized Sunni orthodoxy and the corresponding proliferation of Shi‘i and mystical Sufi activity across the Iranian world. Arguably the best example of these syncretist trends was the Persian Safavid millennarian mystical order in Azarbaijan of the fifteenth century. When Shaikh Isma’il conquered Tabriz in 1501, he assumed the ancient Persian Achaemenian title of shah (king) while at the same time proclaiming that Twelver Shi‘ism was henceforth the state religion. From the sixteenth century onward, Turco-Mongol dominance in Iran would be increasingly repressed by transplanted Caucasus ghulam slave troops and an ascending Persian administrative and clerical elite.

Further Reading

Bailey, H. (Ed.).The Cambridge History of Iran. 8 vols. Cambridge, 1968–1993.

Barthold, W.An Historical Geography of Iran. Edited and translated by S. Soucek. Princeton, 1984.

Bausani, Allesandro.The Persians. London, 1971.

———.Religion in Iran: From Zoroaster to Baha‘u‘llah. New York, 2000.

Bosworth, C. E.The Medieval History of Iran, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. London, 1977.

Briant, Pierre.From Cyrus to Alexander: A History of the Persian Empire. Eisenbraun, 2002.

Browne, E. G.A Literary History of Persia. 4 vols. Cambridge, 1958.

Corbin, Henri.Spiritual Body and Celestial Earth: From Mazdean Iran to Shi’ite Iran. Translated by N. Pearson. Princeton, 1977.

Frye, Richard.Bukhara: The Medieval Achievment. Norman, 1965.

———.The Golden Age of Persia: The Arabs in the East. London, 1975.

———.The Heritage of Persia. London, 1962.

Lambton, Anne K. S.Continuity and Change in Medieval Persia: Aspects of Administrative, Economic and Social History, 11 th–14th Century. Albany, 1988.

———. ‘‘Justice in the Medieval Persian Theory of Kingship.’’Studia Islamica17 (1962): 91–119.

———.Landlord and Peasant in Persia. London, 1953.

———.Theory and Practice in Medieval Persian Government. London, 1980

Lentz, Thomas W., and Lowry, Glenn D.Timur and the Princely Vision: Persian Art and Culture in the Fifteenth Century. Washington, 1989.

Lewisohn, L., and Morgan, D.The Heritage of Sufism.3 vols. Oxford, 1999.

———.The Legacy of Mediaeval Persian Sufism. London, 1992.

Madelung, Wilferd.Religious and Ethnic Movements in Medieval Islam. Aldershot, 1992.

Meisami, Julie Scott.Medieval Persian Court Poetry. Princeton, 1987.

Minorsky, Vladimir.Medieval Iran and Its Neighbours. London, 1982.

———.The Turks, Iran and the Caucasus in the Middle Ages. London, 1978.

Morgan, David.Medieval Persia, 1040–1797. London, 1988.

Paul, Ju¨rgen.Herrscher, Gemeinwesen, Vermittler: Ost Iran und Transoxanian in vormongolischer Zeit. Stuttgart, 1996.

Rypka, Jan.History of Iranian Literature. Edited by K. Jahn. Dordrecht, 1968.

Savory, Roger.Iran Under the Safavids. Cambridge, 1980.

Spuler, B.Iran in der fru ¨h-islamischer Zeit: Politik, Kultur, Verwaltung und o¨ffentliches Leben 633–1055. Wiesbaden,.

PHARMACOLOGY

  In contemporary medical sciences,pharmacology designates the clinical analysis of the action of medicines on the human body; in historical sciences, it designates thediscipline of medicines (o peri pharmakonl ogos [the Discourse on Medicines]), according to Dioscorides,De materia medica (praef., 5). As in antiquity and Byzantium, medicines in the Arabic world were products made of one or more natural substances (materia medica) coming from the three natural realms (vegetal, mineral, and animal).

Origins

  Arabic pharmacology arose from the assimilation of previous knowledge, particularly Greek. Assimilation proceeded in a cumulative way: The first translators did not necessarily render all plant names by their exact translation, but transliterated them. Due to the possible misidentification and, consequently, the incorrect therapeutic uses of plants this process could provoke, previous translations were revised or new ones were made to replace transliterated terms with exact translations. Translation proceeded in three main phases:

1. Translations were first made into Syriac. They continued the work of Sergios of Res’ayna (sixth century CE), who translated from Greek books VI–XI from De simplicium medicamentorum temperamentis et facultatibus (On the Mixtures and Properties of Simple Medicines, in 11 books) by Galen (129 to after ca. 216 CE) devoted to materia medica. Hunayn ibn Ishaq (800–873 CE) revised Sergios’ translation of books VI–XI and translated himself  books I–V from Greek into Syriac. Hunayn also translated from Greek into Syriac Galen’s other pharmacological treatises: De compositione medicamentorum per genera (On the Composition of Medicines by Types), De compositione medicamentorum secundum locos(On the Composition of Medicines by [Affected] Places of [the Human] Body), and De antidotis (On Antidotes).He completed this corpus with the most important treatise on materia medica of antiquity, De materia medicaby Dioscoride (first century CE) (five books, with two inauthentic treatises on venoms and poisons), and the medical encyclopedia by Oribasius (fourth century CE), which includes pharmacology.

2. Hunayn, first working alone and later on in collaboration with Istifaˆn ibn Basıl and his nephew Hubaish, translated from Greek into Arabic the works previously translated into Syriac by Sergios of  Res’ayna or himself: Dioscorides, De materia medica (including the two inauthentic treatises on toxicology); Galen, De simplicium medicamentorum temperamentis et facultatibus, books VI–XI, De compositione medicamentorum per genera, and De compositione medicamentorum secundum locos; and the medical encyclopedia of Oribasius. For De materia medica by Dioscorides, he translated it twice: In the first version, Istifan translated the seven books and Hunayn revisedn his work; in the second, Hunayn translated De materia medica I–IV, and Istifan the rest, including the two spurious works on poisons and venoms, and Hunayn revised the whole. Hunayn also translated the medical encyclopedia of the Byzantine physician Paul of Egina (seventh century CE).

3. Previous translations of Dioscorides were revised, or new ones were made. In the East, al-Natilı (tenth century CE), supposed to be Avicenna’s teacher, revised Hunayn’s and Istifan’s second translation. During the twelfth century CE, two new translations were made from Hunayn’s Syriac version. The first was commissioned by the Ortukid king of Kayfa, Fakhr ad-Din Kara Arslan (1148–1174 CE). Since it was not considered good enough, another one was commissioned to another translator, who did it for Kara Arslan’s cousin, Najm al-Din Alpi (r. 1152–1176 CE), at the court of Maridin. In the West, Hunayn and Istifan’s first translation was known prior to mid-tenth century CE. ‘Abd ar-Rahman III (912–961 CE), the Emir and, further on (929), Caliph of Cordova, received in 948 CE an illustrated copy of  Dioscorides’ Greek text from a Byzantine emperor called Romanos, who is not exactly identified because of a contradiction in the report of the story. Local Arabic scientists working with a Byzantine monk sent to Cordova by the emperor upon the Caliph’s request identified the plants of the Greek text to local species and revised Hunayn’s and Istifan’s Arabic text on this basis, without translating afresh the Greek text into Arabic, as has often been affirmed. This work is considered to be at the origin of the so-called Andalusian school of pharmacology.

  In many manuscripts of Dioscorides’ Arabic translation, the text is illustrated with color plant representations not made from direct observation of nature, but from Greek sources, which they gradually transformed, however, in three major ways, as follows:

a. Drawings of plants were stylized over time by stressing the main characteristics of the plants. Such essentialism led to a simplification that sometimes made drawings unrealistic.

b. Materia medica were represented in a context, be it their natural biota (with such elements as water, rocks, and animals) or a scene with representations of personages (harvesting of plants, preparation of medicines, and pharmacological treatment of sick patients).

c. The layout of such representations evolved from a full-page picture (with some lines of text in the upper or lower part of the page) to only a portion of the page width (on the outer side), as happened in Greek manuscripts also. This new layout did not eliminate the previous one, however, at least in deluxe Arabic manuscripts produced in Baghdad in the thirteenth century CE.

New Works, New Problems, New Medicines

  Dioscorides’ treatise was widely diffused in the Arabic world, as the high number of preserved manuscript copies indicates, and it deeply influenced pharmacology. As early as the late ninth century CE, scientists of different provenances wrote new and original works in Arabic. The dynamic of their production should not necessarily be attributed to the desire of their authors to be original, as has been suggested, but can result at least in part from the problems the assimilation of Dioscorides’De materia medicacreated: Its plants, typical of the Eastern Mediterranean, which were not necessarily well known by Arabic scientists, were tentatively equated with local species; their representations, which originally reproduced those of the Greek manuscripts, did not necessarily correspond to species in the Arabic world; plant classification, which relied in part on the names of the plants in Dioscorides’ Greek text, became less perceptible after such names had been fully Arabized. The solution of such problems was all the more urgent because knowledge of medicinal plants coming from other cultures (Mesopotamia, Persia, India) was agglutinated in De materia medica.

  The new syntheses on pharmacology associated data from Dioscorides (descriptions of the plants, animal and mineral products) and Galen (therapeutic properties), as did Byzantine works. The most significant contributions were by Rhazes (865–925), alBıˆru ˆnıˆ (943–1078), Ibn Sına (980–1037), al-Ga ˆfiqıˆ (twelfth century CE) and Ibn al-Baita ˆr (ca. 1190– 1248), who wrote specific works on pharmacology or devoted significant parts of larger medical encyclopedias to pharmacology. The works by al-Gafiqı and Ibn al-Baita ˆr, both from the so-called Andalusian school of pharmacology, are usually considered as the most complete and achieved of the Arabic world in matters of pharmacology.

  Even after such new works were produced, lexicology of materia medica remained a field of particular importance. The Andalusian, Ibn Gulgul (944 –post 994), and Ibn al-Baitar commented on Dioscorides’ Arabic version in order to clarify untranslated or incorrectly translated plant names, and to accurately identify botanical species.

  Medicines made of more than one ingredient (compound medicines), which started to be particularly developed in antiquity in the first century CE and reached their most achieved form with the so-called theriac (made of up to 60þingredients), were also used in the Arabic world where their recipes circulated in the form of collections of recipes (the so-called aqrabadın from the Greek grafidion[notebook]). They raised a specific question, which was left unanswered by classical physicians, particularly Galen in his treatises De antidotis and De theriaca ad Pisonem (On the Theriac, to Piso): What is their actual therapeutic property? Is it greater than or equal to the sum of the individual components? The question wall the more complicated because Galen introduced the notion that every property of a drug results from the association of two opposite properties (hot and cold; dry and wet). Several answers were given to that fundamental question: al-Kindı  (ca. 800–870) proceeded in a mathematical way, proposing a formula aimed at calculating the final property of compound medicines. Ibn Sına distinguished a primary property (that is, the excess of one quality over the other in a couple of opposites) and the specific property (that is, the property of the specific substance of a medicine).On the other hand, he estimated that the properties of medicines should be determined empirically by administering the medicines to the patients. Such empiricism was radical: Properties were considered to vary not only from one patient to another but also for the same patient from one moment to another according to possible individual physiological modifications. Ibn Rushd (1126–1298) (Averroe¨s) criticized the Galenic concept of two opposite properties being associated in one and the same materia medica. Such reflection on the properties of medicines was further used as a paradigm for a philosophical analysis of the transformation of matter. In this way, pharmacology got the status of a heuristic tool in philosophical enquiry, as had already been the case in classical antiquity (first century CE). Such status was transmitted to the Latin Middle Ages, particularly with Robert Grosseteste (d. 1253 CE) and Roger Bacon (d. 1294).

  Presentation of data, which first reproduced the discursive way of Greek pharmacological handbooks (including plant representations), was modified by Ibn Butlan (d. 1068) in the Taqwın as-sihha. Data are presented in tables (one for each materium medica) and reduced to single words or short phrases. This layout was largely diffused in the Late Middle Ages with the Latin translation and adaptation of Taqwın as-sihha known as Tacuinum sanitatis.

  The development of new alimentary products and new technologies had a deep impact on pharmacology. The production of sugar and alcohol made it possible to develop new forms of medicines: syrupsand the gums for sugar; extracts obtained by distillation with alcohol. The major novelty of such forms was that they guaranteed a better stability of theproducts and avoided rapid alteration. New Arabic treatises on pharmacology classified medicines by their pharmaceutical form. Such a prolonged life cycle of medicines might be among the causes that contributed to the development of the pharmaceutical profession in the Arabic world, which, in previous cultures, was mainly concerned with providing fresh drugs and preparing medicines, in a more limited way. Complementarily, the development of glazed ceramic transformed the technique of medicine conservation, particularly for the liquid and semiliquid ones. Earth wares with a porous surface did not guarantee a good conservation of medicines: The substance in contact with the internal wall of containers saturated it and it became oxidized when reaching the external wall by a constant process of evaporation. As a consequence, medicines contained in such pots were quickly altered. Glazed medicine containers had a special oblong shape, better known under its Italian name albarello, and allowed a much better conservation of their content by reducing the process of oxidation resulting from absorption of the content in the wall of the container. This kind of ceramic was transmitted from the Arabic world to the West through Sicily and Spain, and, from there, to Italy, where it was particularly developed during the Renaissance.

Further Reading

Dietrich, A.Dioscurides Triumphans. Ein anonyme arabischer Kommentar (E. 12. Jh. n. Chr.) zur Materia medica. 2 vols, 1988.

———.Die Dioskurides-Erkla¨rungen des Ibn al-Baitar. Ein Beitrag zur arabischen Planzensynonymik des MA, 1991.

———.Die Erga¨nzungen Ibn Gulgul’s zur Materia medica des Dioskurides, 1993.

Dubler, C. E.La ‘‘Materia medica’’ de Dioscorides. Transmisio´n medieval y renacentista. 6 vols, 1953–1959.

Elkhadem, H.Le taqwıˆm al-Sihha (Tacuini Sanitatis) d’Ibn Butlaˆn: un traite´ me´dical du XIe sie`cle. Histoire du texte, e´dition critique, traduction, commentaire, 1990.

Grube, E. J. ‘‘Materialen zum Dioskurides Arabicus.’’ In Aus der Welt des Islamischen Kunst, 1959, 163–194.

Hamarneh, S.Bibliography on Medicine and Pharmacy in Medieval Islam, 1964.

———.Origins of Pharmacy and Therapy in the Near East, 1973.

Hamarneh, S., and G. Sonnedecker.A Pharmaceutical View of Albucasis Al-Zahraˆwıˆin Moorish Spain, 1963.

Kahl, O.Saˆbuˆr ibn Sahl. The Small Dispensatory. Translated from the Arabic together with a study and glossaries, 2003.

Leclerc, L.Traite´ des simples par Ibn El-Beı¨thar. 3 vols, 1877–1883 (repr. 1996).

Levey, M.Early Arabic Pharmacology, 1973.

———.The Medical Formulary or Aqraˆbaˆdhıˆn of Al-Kindıˆ. translated with a study of its materia medica, 1966.

Sadek, M. M.The Arabic Materia Medica of Dioscorides, 1983.

Samso´,J.Las ciencias de los antiguos en Al-Andalus, 1992.

Sezgin, F.Geschichte des arabischen Schriftums, vol. 3, 1970.

Strohmaier, G., and Sadek. ‘‘The Arabic Materia Medica of Dioscorides.’’Gnomon57 (1985): 743–745.

Touwaide, A. ‘‘L’inte´gration de la pharmacologie grecque dans le monde arabe. Une vue d’ensemble.’’Medicina nei Secoli7 (1995): 159–189.

———. ‘‘La traduction arabe duTraite´de matie`re me´dicale de Dioscoride. Etat de la recherche´.’’ Ethnopharmacologia18 (1996): 16–41.

———.Farmacopea araba medievale. 4 vols, 1992–1993.

———. ‘‘Tradition and Innovation in Mediaeval Arabic Medicine. The Translations and the Heuristic role of the Word.’’Forum5 (1995): 203–213.

———. ‘‘Le paradigme culturel et e´piste´mologique dans la science arabe a ` la lumie `re de l’histoire de la matie`re me´dicale.’’Revue du Monde Musulman et de la Me´diterrane ´e77–78 (1995): 247–273.

———. ‘‘Theoretical Concepts and Problems of Greek Pharmacology in Arabic Medicine.’’Forum6 (1996): 21–30.

Ullmann, M.Die Medizin im Islam, 1970.

Vernet, J.Ce que la culture doit aux arabes d’Espagne, 1985