ALEX METCALFE Dynamic landscapes and dominant kin groups: hydronymy and water-management in Arab-Norman western

I. Introduction and problematisation

A defining characteristic of Muslim Sicily was the dominant role played by the island’s metropolitan centre, .1 Long-held support for this finds justifi- cation in its rapid growth after its fall to the Muslims in 831 when it became an increasingly centripetal gathering place for the colony’s rulers, generals, clerics and officials. Renamed al-Madīna (‘the city’), Muslim Palermo attracted scores of religious scholars, jurists and literati; it served as the main garrison for the army, and as a commercial hub for merchants. Given that Palermo was the great focal point of the island, it is tempting to think that Muslim Sicily was therefore a highly centralised state, or at least that Palermo’s size and gravity should in- form, if not define, ideas about the capital’s relationship with its provinces. On this, however, the non-survival of charter material has left historians with rela- tively little to say, and the centre-periphery debate has been driven by archaeol- ogy. Here, a disparate record of settlement finds fitted into structuralist frame- works has shaped important models about rural Sicily’s political, economic and territorial organisation, with implications for the island’s putative centralisa- tion.2 In whatever ways we choose to reconstruct Sicily’s social, political and eco- nomic dynamics, there is widespread agreement that the agricultural sector of the economy was robust, especially in Muslim-dominated western Sicily.3 These

1 While there are many isolated articles on Muslim Palermo, probably the most comprehensive study remains the collected essays in Rosario LA DUCA (Ed.), Storia di Palermo, vol. 2: Dal tardo-antico all’Islam, Palermo 1999; also Francesco GABRIELI / Umberto SCERRATO (Ed.), Gli arabi in Italia: cultura, contatti e tradizioni, Milan 1979. See also the more recent studies in Annliese NEF (Ed.), A Companion to Medieval Palermo. The History of a Mediterranean City from 600 to 1500, Leiden 2013, especially pp. 39–132, which deal with the Islamic period. For Arab-Sicilian cultural centres outside Palermo, see Adalgisa DE SIMONE, I luoghi di cultura arabo-islamica, in: Centri di produzione della cultura nel Mezzogiorno normanno-svevo. Atti delle dodicesime giornate normanno-sveve, Bari, 17–20 ottobre 1995, ed. Giosuè MUSCA, Bari 1997, pp. 55–87. 2 See the influential thoughts of Henri BRESC, La formazione del popolo siciliano, in: Tre mil- lenni di storia linguistica della Sicilia. Atti del convegno della Società italiana in Glottologia, Palermo 1983, Pisa 1985, pp. 241–258; also Alessandra MOLINARI, Le campagne siciliane tra il periodo bizantino e quello arabo, in: Acculturazione e mutamenti. Prospettive nell’archeolo- gia medievale del Mediterraneo. VI ciclo di lezioni sulla ricerca applicata in archeologia (Cer- tosa di Pontignano – Museo di Montelupo, 1993), ed. Enrica BOLDRINI / Riccardo FRAN- COVICH, 1995, pp. 361–377; EADEM, Paesaggi rurali e formazioni sociali nella Sicilia islamica, normanna e sveva, in: Archeologia Medievale 37 (2010), pp. 229–245. 3 For an introduction and overview of the rural economy, see Michele AMARI, Storia dei Musulmani 98 ALEX METCALFE lands were the first to be conquered and inhabited by the Muslims from the 840s, and even if there are doubts about the extent of latifundia estates in Late Antique Sicily or the subsequent impact and innovation brought by the ‘Green Revolution’, it is generally accepted that both the internal and export economies were driven by agricultural production of a type later signalled in the Cairo Ge- niza letters, and supported by eyewitness reports of the island’s fertility and productivity. The role of Palermo in all this in terms of input, investment and intervention is unclear, but the long-held suspicion again points to bureaucratic, metropolitan regulation in which high-ranking state officials were concession- aires, beneficiaries and stakeholders in the rural economy. Thus, we find in the Fatimid and Kalbid periods, the eunuch Ǧawḏar with his logging interests, and the amīr Yūsuf who seems to have had a monopoly on pack animals, presuma- bly for use by the army.4 The scribe and poet Ibn al-Ṣabbāġ was also known to have held an orchard and plot from the state in the time of last Kalbid amir of Sicily, Ṣamṣām al-Dawla, between around 1040 and 1053.5 Again we run into a series of unknowns: how much land was managed by the state? How were disputes resolved? What relations held between small land- holders and tax-collecting agencies? The issues concern not only the rural econ- omy, but also questions of centre and periphery. That these relationships were fundamentally important to the political stability and well-being of Palermo is shown by repeated tax revolts which began in the countryside in the first dec- ades of the 1000s when both ‘the great and the small’ eventually descended on the capital, precipitating the dissolution of central power from the 1030s that unhinged provincial Sicily from its metropolitan centre in the so-called ṭāʾifa pe- riod.6

di Sicilia, ed. Carlo A. NALLINO, vol. 2, 2nd ed. Catania 1933, pp. 506–511; more recently, Leon- ard C. CHIARELLI, A History of Muslim Sicily (Central Mediterranean Studies Series 1), Santa Venera 2011, pp. 213–222. 4 Al-Ustāḍ al-Ǧawḏar, Inside the Immaculate Portal. A History from Early Fatimid Archives. A New Edition and English Translation of Manṣūr al-ʿAzīzī al-Jawdharī’s Biography of al- Ustādh Jawdhar, ed. and transl. Hamid HAJI (Ismaili Texts and Translations Series 16), London 2012, here nos. 49, 52 and 56, pp. 126–127, 129f. and p. 132; for the Arabic see pp. 129f., p. 134 and 137. See also the Kalbids’ monopoly on pack animals and horses, Al-Nuwayrī, Nihāyat al-arib, in: Biblioteca Arabo-Sicula. Ossia raccolta di testi Arabici che toccano la ge- ografia, la storia le biografie e la bibliografia della Sicilia, ed. Michele AMARI / Umberto RIZZITANO, vol. 2, 2nd ed. Palermo 1988, p. 497 (following BAS2 Ar.); Idem, Nihāyat al-arib, in: Biblioteca Arabo-Sicula. Ossia raccolta di testi Arabici che toccano la geografia, la storia le biografie e la bibliografia della Sicilia. Raccolti e tradotti in Italiano, ed. Michele AMARI / Umberto RIZZITANO / Andrea BORRUSO et al., vol. 2, Palermo 1997, p. 140 (following as BAS2 It.); also Giuseppe MANDALÀ, The Martyrdom of Yūḥannā, Physician of Ibn Abī l-Ḥusayn Ruler of the Island of Sicily. Editio Princeps and Historical Commentary, in: Journal of Trans- cultural Medieval Studies 3,1‒2 (2016), pp. 3‒118. 5 Iḥsān ʿABBĀS, Muʿǧam al-ʿulamāʾ wa-l-šuʿrāʾ al-Ṣiqilliyyūn, Beirut 1994, pp. 211–220; see also the important article by Mirella CASSARINO, Arabic Epistolography in Sicily: the Case of Ibn al-Ṣabbāġ al-Ṣiqillī, in: Quaderni di studi arabi nov. ser. 10 (2015), pp. 123–138. 6 Al-Nuwayrī, Nihāyat al-arib, in: BAS2 Ar. 2 (as n. 4), p. 496; BAS2 It. 2 (as n. 4), p. 139.