Syria in Crusader Times Conflict and Coexistence

Home , Atabeg, Banu Munqidh, Carole Hillenbrand, Crusade (Young novel), Hajib, Ibn Asakir

THESYRIA PRESS IN IN THE MIDDLECRUSADER EAST AND NORTHTIMES AFRICA, Conflict and Coexistence

Edited by CAROLE HILLENBRAND Edited by ANTHONY GORMAN and DIDIER MONCIAUD

Edited by Carole Hillenbrand Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com

Edinburgh University Press Ltd The Tun – Holyrood Road 12 (2f) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ

Typeset in Adobe Garamond by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire and printed and bound in Great Britain

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 4744 2970 2 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 2972 6 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 2973 3 (epub)

The right of the contributors to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

Published with the support of the University of Edinburgh Scholarly Publishing Initiatives Fund. Contents

List of Illustrations vi List of Contributors viii Preface xiii Acknowledgements xv

Part 1 Sources 1 Hamdan al-Atharibi’s History of the Franks Revisited, Again 3 Paul M. Cobb 2 Legitimate Authority in the Kitab al-Jihad of ‘Ali b. Tahir al-Sulami 21 Kenneth A. Goudie 3 Politics, Religion and the Occult in the Works of Kamal al-Din Ibn Talha, a Vizier, ‘Alim and Author in Thirteenth- century Syria 34 A. C. S. Peacock

Part 2 Christians 4 Adapting to Muslim Rule: the Syrian Orthodox Community in Twelfth-century Northern Syria and the Jazira 63 R. Stephen Humphreys 5 The Afterlife of Edessa: Remembering Frankish Rule, 1144 and After 86 Christopher MacEvitt iv | syria in crusader times

Part 3 Convivencia 6 Diplomatic Relations and Coinage among the Turcomans, the Ayyubids and the Crusaders: Pragmatism and Change of Identity 105 Taef El-Azhari 7 Symbolic Conflict and Cooperation in the Neglected Chronicle of a Syrian Prince 125 Luke Yarbrough 8 A Critique of the Scholarly Outlook of the Crusades: the Case for Tolerance and Coexistence 144 Suleiman A. Mourad

Part 4 War and Peace 9 The Portrayal of Violence in Walter the Chancellor’s Bella Antiochena 163 Thomas Asbridge 10 Infernalising the Enemy: Images of Hell in Muslim Descriptions of the Franks during the Crusading Period 184 Alex Mallett

Part 5 Cities 11 Sunnites et Chiites à Alep sous le règne d’al-Salih Isma‘il (569–77/1174–81): entre conflits et réconciliations 197 Anne-Marie Eddé 12 The War of Towers: Venice and Genoa at War in Crusader Syria, 1256–8 211 Thomas F. Madden 13 Gaza in the Frankish and Ayyubid Periods: the Run-up to 1260 CE 225 Reuven Amitai

Part 6 Saladin’s Men 14 Picture-poems for Saladin: ‘Abd al-Mun‘im al-Jilyani’s Mudabbajat 247 Julia Bray contents | v

15 Ayyubid Realpolitik and Political–Military Vicissitudes versus Counter-crusading Ideology in the Memoirist–Chronicler al-Katib al-Isfahani 265 Lutz Richter-Bernburg 16 Assessing the Evidence for a Turning Point in Ayyubid– Frankish Relations in a Letter by al-Qadi al-Fadil 285 Bogdan C. Smarandache

Part 7 Key Personalities 17 Saladin, Generosity and Gift-giving 307 Jonathan Phillips 18 Hülegü: the New Constantine? 321 Angus Stewart

Glossary 336 Bibliography 339 Index of Names 372 Index of Places 380 Index of Terms/Concepts 382 Illustrations

Figures

6.1 Bronze follaro of King William II of Sicily in Arabic – late twelfth century 119 6.2 Bronze follaro of King Tancred of Sicily in Arabic and Latin – late twelfth century 119 6.3 Crusader’s imitation of an Ayyubid dirham. Jerusalem mint – CE 1237 120 6.4 Armenian dirham of the thirteenth century with bilingual Armenian–Arabic writings 121 16.1 Letter by al-Qadi al-Fadil 300 18.1 Constantine and Helena with the True Cross (Vatican) 323 18.2 Constantine and Helena with the True Cross (British Library Board) 326 Plates

Between pages 48 and 49 3.1 Ibn Talha’s da’ira, or circle of letters, in al-Durr al-muntazam 3.2 Ibn Talha’s Matalib al-su’ul fi manaqib Al al-Rasul 3.3 Ibn Talha’s al-‘Iqd al-farid li’l-Malik al-Sa‘id 3.4 Final folio of Ibn Talha’s Nafa’is al-‘anasir, showing the mysterious letters 3.5 Table for calculating days of the months from al-‘Iqd al-farid illustrations | vii

Between pages 232 and 233 13.1 Detail from ‘Frankish Palestine, South’ 13.2 Further detail from ‘Frankish Palestine, South’ 13.3 Rural Palestine in the Frankish Period 13.4 The ‘Oxford Map of Matthew Paris’

Between pages 248 and 249 14.1 Al-Jilyani, Diwan al-tadbij, Manchester John Rylands MS Ar. 690, ff. 57b–58a: tree finial of Manadih al-mamadih 14.2 Transcription of reading of al-Jilyani, tree finial of Manadih al-mamadih 14.3 Al-Jilyani, Diwan al-Tadbij, Manchester John Rylands MS Ar. 690, f. 79a: the extemporised ‘Seal’ 14.4 Ibn al-Hajj, al-Diwan al-‘amm (Fez, 1995), 550: tree-shaped poem Contributors

Reuven Amitai is Eliyahu Elath Professor for Muslim History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His areas of research include the Mamluk Sultanate, the Mongols in the Middle East, processes of Islamisation, and medieval Palestine. From 2010 to 2014, he was Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the Hebrew University, and from 2014 to 2016, he was a Senior Fellow at the Annemarie Schimmel Kolleg in Bonn. His recent publications include: Holy War and Rapprochement: Studies in the Relations between the Mamluk Sultanate and the Mongol Ilkhanate (1260–1335) (2013); co-edited with Michal Biran, Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change: the Mongols and Their Eurasian Predecessors (2015); co-edited with Christoph Cluse, Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Eastern Mediterranean, 11th to 15th Centuries (2017); and co-edited with Stephan Conermann, The Mamluk Sultanate from the Perspective of Regional and World History: Economic, Social and Cultural Developments in an Era of Increasing International Interaction and Competition (2019). In 2018, he received the degree of doctor honoris causa from the National University of Mongolia.

Thomas Asbridge is Reader in Medieval History at Queen Mary, University of London. He specialises in the study in the study of the Crusades, knight- hood and chivalry, and medieval violence. His major publications include The Greatest Knight (2015), The Crusades – the War for the Holy Land (2010) and The First Crusade: a New History (2004).

Julia Bray has taught Arabic language and medieval literature at the uni- versities of Manchester, Edinburgh, St Andrews and Paris 8-Vincennes – Saint Denis. She is currently Abdulaziz Saud AlBabtain Laudian Professor contributors | ix of Arabic Literature at the University of Oxford. She works on medieval to Early Modern literature, life writing and society, and on the Arabic history of emotions and has published Stories of Piety and Prayer (2019), the first part of an edition and translation of the tenth-century al-Tanukhi’s Deliverance Follows Adversity, in the Library of Arabic Literature.

Paul M. Cobb is Professor of Islamic History and Chair of the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, USA. He is the author of numerous books and articles dealing with the history of the medieval Levant including, most recently, The Race for Paradise: an Islamic History of the Crusades (2014). He is also the translator of Usama b. Munqidh’s Book of Contemplation for Penguin Classics.

Anne-Marie Eddé is Emerita Professor in Medieval Islamic History at Panthéon-Sorbonne University in Paris. Her research interests include medieval Arabic sources and the history of Syria from the eleventh to the fourteenth century. She is the author of La principauté ayyoubide d’Alep (579/1183–658/1260), Freiburger Islamstudien, XXI, Stuttgart, 1999, and Saladin, Paris, Flammarion, 2008, repr. 2012 (English translation, by Jane Mary Todd, 2011).

Taef El-Azhari is Professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern History at the University of Helwan, Egypt. He received his doctorate in Middle Eastern history from the University of Manchester. His interests, both in research and teaching, focus principally on Turcoman–Kurdish social–political history and the Crusades. His most recent books include Queens, Eunuchs and Concubines in Islamic History (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and Zengi and the Muslim Response to the Crusades (2016).

Kenneth A. Goudie received his PhD in 2016 from the University of St Andrews for a thesis entitled ‘The Reinvention of Jihad in Twelfth-century al-Sham’. He is now a postdoctoral research fellow at Ghent University. His current research focuses on the historical writings of the fifteenth-century Qur’an exegete and historian, Burhan al-Din al-Biqa‘i. x | syria in crusader times

R. Stephen Humphreys is Professor Emeritus in History and Islamic Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Before coming to Santa Barbara, he taught at the University of Chicago and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is the author of From Saladin to the Mongols: the Ayyubids of Damascus, 1193–1260 (1977), Islamic History: a Framework for Inquiry (1991) and Mu’awiya ibn Abi Sufyan: from Arabia to Empire (2006), in addition to other books and articles. He has been a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and a visiting fellow at All Souls College, Oxford.

Christopher MacEvitt is Associate Professor of Religion at Dartmouth College. His first book, The Crusades and the Christian World of the East: Rough Tolerance (2009), examines the ways in which Frankish rule and religious difference gave rise to what he calls ‘rough tolerance’, a mode of coexistence distinctive to the era of the Crusades. He has just com- pleted a book on the narratives about Franciscans who died as martyrs in Islamic lands in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, arguing that the stories shape expectations of martyrdom and the image of Islam as the Franciscan Order grappled with accusations of heresy and controversies over poverty.

Thomas F. Madden is Professor of History and Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University. His books include Venice: A New History (2013), Istanbul: City of Majesty at the Crossroads of the World (2016), The Concise History of the Crusades (2014) and Enrico Dandolo and the Rise of Venice (2003). He is a Fellow of the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies and the Medieval Academy of America.

Alex Mallett is Assistant Professor at the Waseda Institute for Advanced Study, Waseda University, Tokyo. He is the author of Popular Muslim Reactions to the Franks in the Levant (2014) and editor of Medieval Muslim Historians and the Franks in the Levant (2014). He is currently working on an edition and translation of the Ayyubid period in al-Maqrizi’s chronicle al-Suluk, as part of the Bibliotheca Maqriziana project. contributors | xi

Suleiman A. Mourad is a historian of Islam and the Middle East and Professor of Religion at Smith College. He is also Associate Fellow at the Nantes Institute for Advanced Study (France). His publications include The Intensification and Reorientation of Sunni Jihad Ideology in the Crusader Period (2013) and The Mosaic of Islam (2016).

A. C. S. Peacock is Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic History at the University of St Andrews. His research focuses on the history and intellectual history of the premodern Islamic world and Islamic manuscripts. His publications include Early Seljuq History: a new interpretation (2010), The Great Seljuk Empire (2015) and Islam, Literature and Society in Mongol Anatolia (2019). He has also edited Islamisation: Comparative Perspectives from History (2017).

Jonathan Phillips is Professor of Crusading History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of several books including The Life and Legend of the Sultan Saladin (2019) and The Second Crusade: Extending the Frontiers of Christendom (2006) and, with Mike Horswell, he edited Perceptions of the Crusades from the Nineteenth to the Twenty-first Century: Engaging the Crusades I (2018). He is a convener of the MA in Crusader Studies at Royal Holloway and, with Professor Benjamin Kedar, the co- editor of the journal Crusades.

Lutz Richter-Bernburg was Chair of Islamic Studies at the University of Tübingen from 2000 until his (mandatory) retirement in 2010. Previously he held a variety of research and teaching positions at Los Angeles (UCLA), Göttingen, Aleppo, Bonn, New York (Columbia), Berlin (Free University), and Leipzig. His publications include studies in Graeco-Islamic medicine and science, Ayyubid historiography and the intellectual history of forma- tive and medieval Islam.

Bogdan C. Smarandache finished his undergraduate studies at McGill University in 2011 and his MPhil at St Catharine’s College, University of Cambridge, in 2012. Bogdan is now a PhD candidate at the Centre for Medieval Studies in the University of Toronto and a former recipient of xii | syria in crusader times the Joseph-Armand Bombardier Graduate Scholarship. He recently finished his thesis on Christian–Muslim relations and the conditions of religious minorities in the Eastern Mediterranean under the supervision of Professor Mark Meyerson, Professor Linda Northrup and Professor Michael Gervers.

Angus Stewart is Lecturer in Middle Eastern History at the University of St Andrews, and the author of The Armenian Kingdom and the Mamluks: War and Diplomacy during the Reigns of King Het‘um II (2001). His research focuses on the eastern Mediterranean area in the Ayyubid and early Mamluk era, looking especially at the arrival of the Mongols in the region.

Luke Yarbrough is Assistant Professor in the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Premodern Islamic Thought(2019) and the editor and translator of ‘Uthman ibn Ibrahim al-Nabulusi, The Sword of Ambition: Bureaucratic Rivalry in Medieval Egypt (2016). Preface

ince remote antiquity Greater Syria (which extended well beyond the Sfrontiers of the modern state of Syria) has been a conflict zone. Its geo- graphical position – bordering Egypt, the Holy Land, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq – made that well-nigh inevitable. So these lands have endured violent military struggles from all sides for millennia: Greece and Rome against Persia, Byzantines against Sasanians and then against Arabs. However, the coming of Christian European enemies to the Holy Land and Syria under Muslim rule from the 1090s was the beginning of an almost two centuries’ struggle of a rather different kind. Crusaders and Muslims in Syria undoubtedly waged violent war – battles, raids and sieges – against each other during the years of the Crusader presence (1099–1291) in the Holy Land, Egypt and Syria. Muslim disunity and apathy after the fall of Jerusalem in 1099 allowed the Crusaders to embed themselves in impressive and well-defended castles in remote rural areas of Syria, and they proved hard to dislodge. However, the Crusaders never succeeded in capturing the two key Syrian cities of Aleppo and Damascus. That meant that their military and political success in Syria was doomed to be partial at best. Moreover, only the First Crusade enjoyed full military success; all the other Crusades which reached the Levant failed, fizzled out or ended in truces. Nor was warfare in Crusader Syria continuous by any means. Truces and trading agreements across the religious divide brought about lengthy periods of peaceful contact between Crusaders and Muslims. Crusaders adopted aspects of the Muslim way of life and Muslims pragmatically developed their own commercial activities with Crusaders because they needed access to the Syrian ports, held by the Crusaders, in order to export their xiv | syria in crusader times goods. Coexistence rather than conflict between Crusaders and Muslims was therefore much more the norm for lengthy periods. Not surprisingly, then, their cultural interactions often found fascinating and unexpected expression. This book presents little-known and fascinating topics of Crusading and Muslim history. The special focus is on Syria in the twelfth century, though the later periods of the Crusader presence are also represented. There are chap- ters which deal with little-known Crusader and Muslim sources – chronicles, biographies, letters and poems. Other themes discussed include internal relations between Sunni and Shi‘ite Muslims, rivalries among Crusader factions, and contacts between Crusader and Oriental Christians. New insights into the career of Saladin are revealed, as well as unfamiliar aspects of the rule of his family dynasty. In sum, then, this book may justly claim to open a host of new perspectives on war and peace in twelfth- and thirteenth-century Syria, and what it was like to live there in those colourful times. It is also a testament to the vitality of this field which remains undimmed even though it has captured the Western imagination for centuries, and which nowadays has received much fresh impetus from the growing awareness of how Muslims themselves reacted to these events.

Carole Hillenbrand Acknowledgements

n April 2016 I organised in St Andrews a symposium entitled The History Iof Syria, 1099–1250: Conflict and Co-existence. Thanks to the wonderful generosity of the University of St Andrews, the symposium received full financial support and it became possible to invite a very impressive group of specialists – from the UK, France, Germany, Belgium, Qatar, Israel, Canada and the USA – all of whom study twelfth-century Syria, whether from Muslim, Crusader or Eastern Christian perspectives. A good number of the scholars who came to the conference had already produced path-breaking research; other younger ones were poised to do so. The beautiful environment of the Fife coastline in Scotland, wonderful accommodation and a most friendly and intimate atmosphere helped to make the symposium every bit as enjoyable and thought-provoking as I had hoped it would be. I should like to thank especially warmly Paul Churchill who, with his exceptional administrative skills, organised all the arrangements for the conference and managed everything so smoothly and amicably. A number of key colleagues at Edinburgh University Press have been most helpful and supportive in the publication of this book and I should like to give special thanks to Nicola Ramsey, Kirsty Woods, Eddie Clark and Lel Gillingwater for all their work in producing this book.

PART I SOURCES

Hamdan al-Atharibi’s History of the Franks Revisited, Again Paul M. Cobb

Introduction

his chapter has two minor goals: to clarify and to speculate. The subject Tof both of these goals is the twelfth-century Syrian Muslim historian and man of letters Hamdan b. ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Atharibi (d. 1147). For many scholars of the Crusades in Syria, his name and the few details we have about him will already be familiar: what follows is thus not so much anything that is radically new, as it is a clarification of the details we do have about him (and which, to my mind, have not received adequate scrutiny) and an opportunity to speculate about some details that we, frankly, do not have. But, for all that, I do hope it will at least stimulate some new thought on the worlds – political, economic and literary – that he inhabited. My clarification and speculation will be spread over three broad areas: first, Hamdan’s context and career in northern Syria in the era of the First Crusade; second, his literary production, in particular his History of the Franks, which I feel is a somewhat misunder- stood work; and finally, some thoughts about his place in the constellation of Syrian historiography so that we all might gain a better understanding of what Hamdan wrote, and what, therefore, we have lost. The Syrian Context

As no complete works of his own survive, what little we know about Hamdan comes from the biographical entry (tarjama) devoted to him in Ibn al-‘Adim’s biographical dictionary of Aleppo, the Bughyat al-talab fi ta’rikh Halab.1 This entry offers some important details about Hamdan’s career, his prose writings 4 | syria in crusader times and samples of his poetry. Moreover, Ibn al-‘Adim (d. 1262) knew some of Hamdan’s descendants personally and they served as direct sources for him for some family lore that he reported in his own historical works. He also had in his possession some sections of Hamdan’s writings, and he quoted them here and there in the Bughya. Ibn al-‘Adim also made use of Hamdan in compiling his chronicle, the Zubdat al-halab min ta’rikh Halab, but – as was usually the case in that work – he is nowhere acknowledged by name.2 Here are the specifics that we know: Hamdan was born around 460/1067 and died in the year 542/1147 in his eighties. Ibn al-‘Adim tells us he spent almost all of his life in the al-Jazr district, that once-fertile land of the country homes, villages, rural monasteries, vineyards and orchards that populate the extant verses of Hamdan’s poetry, and which became a contested border-zone between Muslim Aleppo and Frankish Antioch.3 In this zone, to use Ibn al-‘Adim’s words, Hamdan ‘went back and forth between the Islamic and Frankish regimes’ over the course of his life. And what a life he lived: those eighty years, from around 1067 to 1147, cover one of the most turbulent periods in the history of Syria. It is instructive to link the major events of northern Syrian history at this time with Hamdan’s own lifespan: his child- hood saw the coming of the Seljuq Turks to Syria under Alp Arslan (1071), his young adulthood the second reassertion of Seljuq power under Malikshah (1086), and the establishment of the Seljuq prince Ridwan in Aleppo in the 1090s. When the Frankish Crusaders appeared before the walls of Antioch in 1097, Hamdan was an accomplished man of about thirty. When the Turcoman dynasty known as the Artuqids began its unstable, on again–off again rule of Aleppo in the 1110s, he had hit middle age, and he was in his sixties when another Turcoman ruler, ‘Imad al-Din Zengi, gained control of the city more successfully in 1128 and took over most of northern Syria (Frankish or Muslim) as a sequel. Hamdan died without witnessing the failed Second Crusade, which arrived in Syria by late 1147. One wonders what he would have made of it. Geographically speaking, Hamdan was a local talent, spending most of his life in the orbit of Aleppo, albeit with a few journeys to other regional courts. He was born in a village in the vicinity of Aleppo called Ma‘ratha al-Atharib, that is, the modern Ma‘arat al-Atarib, just a few miles north of the larger town of Atarib, medieval al-Atharib, between Aleppo and Antioch. He history of the franks revisited, again | 5 and his father then moved to al-Atharib proper and settled there, presumably when he was still a child. The outlines of his adult career are rather more complicated. It seems impossible to reconcile the very clear and specific information that we have about the places he lived, the jobs he held and the dates he held them with what is the best known aspect of Hamdan’s life: that over the course of his life he served both Frankish and Muslim lords, and that, as is often remarked, Hamdan stands as one of the few Muslim subalterns mentioned in the sources who worked willingly for a Frankish lord. While there were undoubtedly many more, his case is the best documented, even if it seems impossible to add any detail. What follows is, nevertheless, an attempt to do just that. Since Ibn al-‘Adim’s tarjama of Hamdan mentions Zengi by name (waliya ‘amalan li’l-diwan fi dawlat atabak zanki ibn aq-sunqur), it has always been assumed that Hamdan worked first for the Franks after they took control of the region, even becoming a vassal and landlord under the Frankish lord of al-Atharib, and then shifted his allegiance to Zengi, once he pushed the Franks out around 1130. Indeed, this seems confirmed by the nisba Ibn al-‘Adim grants him in the rubric of his tarjama, where Hamdan is listed as al-atharibi thumma al-halabi (of al-Atharib, latterly of Aleppo), implying that, after living in al-Atharib for some time, he moved to Aleppo to serve his new lord, Zengi. But a close reading of the tarjama suggests there is another line to add to Hamdan’s curriculum vitae: namely, that he had first lived in Aleppo and worked for the Turcoman lords there long before Zengi ever entered the picture. This seems borne out by some of the details of the diplomatic missions he was sent on, all from Aleppo. Ibn al-‘Adim is quite clear about this, although he provides no dates:

Hamdan settled in Aleppo and served as a messenger to the Franks, and travelled to Egypt to al-Amir, the Fatimid, and he was also sent to Damascus as a messenger to the atabeg Tughtegin. He also entered Baghdad.5

Based on the vague information that Ibn al-‘Adim provides in this passage we might well assume that these Aleppo-based activities were missions on behalf of Zengi, since he names him explicitly as Hamdan’s patron early on, and the missions to the Fatimid caliph al-Amir and the atabeg Tughtegin in Damascus could well have occurred in Zengi’s early career. However, a 6 | syria in crusader times later chronicler, Ibn Muyassar (d. 1278), happens to also mention the arrival of Hamdan in the Fatimid court, bearing a message from Aleppo, and he provides the crucial datum-point that this mission took place in the year 520/1126. At that time, Zengi was not on the scene at all and Aleppo was under the control of the commander Aq-Sunqur al-Bursuqi, or rather one of his deputies.6 What Hamdan’s business was in Cairo is unknown, but a family tale that was recounted to Ibn al-‘Adim says that he was at first denied access to al-Amir, because the caliph had heard Hamdan was a hashishi, that is, a Nizari Isma‘ili opposed to al-Amir’s rule. This might well be true (we know little of Hamdan’s religious beliefs), and it certainly didn’t help Hamdan that he was associated with Aleppo and the district of al-Jazr, which was solid Nizari country. According to the tale, it was only after Hamdan offered some clever verse to reassure the caliph that he was finally allowed an audience.7 Similarly, we can establish Hamdan’s mission to Damascus as occurring before Zengi, too, since Ibn al-‘Adim, quoting Ibn ‘Asakir, specifies that Hamdan was to meet with the atabeg of Damascus, Tughtegin, who ruled from 1104 until his death in 1128. Now, it happens that 1128 is also the year Zengi took control of Aleppo, but as Tughtegin died in February of 1128, and Zengi only took power in June, Hamdan’s mission to Damascus, like his visit to Cairo, must have been for some other lord of Aleppo before Zengi.8 So at least two of the official voyages that Hamdan took from Aleppo that Ibn al-‘Adim mentions took place before Zengi took power, though we cannot be very precise under whom, given the very fluid situation in the city at the time and the absence of any further details in Ibn al-‘Adim’s account. The other voyages that Ibn al-‘Adim mentions, to the Franks and to Baghdad, could have happened at any time, though the Baghdad trip is almost certainly to be identified with a trip he took to Baghdad that Ibn al-‘Adim specifies occurred in 540/1145, two years before Hamdan’s death. Appropriately enough, this is also the last voyage mentioned in Ibn al-‘Adim’s little list, suggesting that the whole passage is arranged chronologically. This, too, accords with the evidence from Cairo and Damascus, which also appear in chronological sequence in this list. It seems, then, that Hamdan made his move to Aleppo before he began working for Zengi. This would make sense: Hamdan would have been among history of the franks revisited, again | 7 the local bureaucratic talent already working in Aleppo when Zengi arrived and the warlord simply absorbed him into his administration. The many anecdotes that Ibn al-‘Adim recounts about Hamdan’s salons and drinking parties in Aleppo, then, could equally have belonged to this earlier period as to some later time of residence under Zengi. And it was probably in these earlier years in Aleppo and not later under Zengi that he gained the literary skills for which he was famous: studying adab with the Aleppine shaykh Ibn Abi Jarada (d. 1153), and also grammar, history, astronomy, mathematics and medicine. What then of his service to the Franks, that much commented-upon feature of Hamdan’s career track? We have established that Hamdan worked in the service of Muslim lords of Aleppo before Zengi arrived, and this earlier period in Aleppo adds a new colour to how he entered the service of the Franks. It is usually assumed, for example, that Hamdan was already working for the Franks when the Frankish lord of al-Atharib famously granted him lands of his own. The story begins with a simple general statement that when the al-Jazr district was ‘in the hands of the Franks’, they appointed him to administer some lands and then later confiscated his wealth (wa-sad- iruhu ba‘da dhalika) – the common fate of many a medieval administrator. However, the al-Jazr district was in the hands of the Franks by c.1111 when the Franks took al-Atharib. So Hamdan’s tax administrative job and subse- quent disgrace could have taken place at any time in the period from 1111 to 1126, when, as we’ve seen, he was already working for Aleppo’s Muslim rulers on a mission to Fatimid Cairo. To this general picture, another phrase elsewhere in his tarjama adds the detail that Hamdan was administering the diwan of Ma‘arrat al-Nu‘man when the Frankish lord of al-Atharib granted him lands. Note that this text does not tell us for whom he was administering this diwan. It is usually assumed, as by Cahen, that these two reports refer to one and the same position of service – that the supervision of the diwan of Ma‘arrat al-Nu‘man mentioned in this second account took place as part of the vaguely described administrative work he did for the Franks described in the first, in short, that the diwan in question was a Frankish-controlled office. But, leaving aside matters of administrative terminology, there are a few reasons not to make this assumption. For one, in still a third account in Hamdan’s tarjama, Ibn al-‘Adim specifies that Hamdan received his lands 8 | syria in crusader times from the Frankish lord of al-Atharib in late 521/1127. That is, less than a year after he was, as we have seen, working as a messenger to Egypt for the rulers of Aleppo, and before Zengi had taken over. I suggest, therefore, that when Hamdan was administering the diwan of Ma‘arrat al-Nu‘man, he was doing so for Muslim Aleppo and not the Franks. That means that the first short account that describes him administering lands for the Franks before subsequently having his wealth seized must be situated before his move to Aleppo, perhaps in the late 1110s. This also makes narrative sense with that third and most detailed account of this granting of lands. The account is narrated by one of Hamdan’s kins- men, and it begins as an account about Hamdan’s studies in Aleppo and his relationship with his master, Ibn Abi Jarada. The account then simply says: ‘It then occurred to Hamdan go out to Ma‘aratha al-Atharib [the village near al-Atharib where Hamdan was born], which was his property though it was in the hands of the Franks at that time.’ Hearing that the Frankish lord of al-Atharib was ill, Hamdan stopped to treat him and he cured him. In return, the Frankish lord asks him what he would like as a reward. Hamdan, whom, you will recall, is described as having had his wealth confiscated during his earlier period of employment under the Franks, simply replies that he would like a village. So the lord granted him a village called Ma‘arbuniyya in the vicinity of Ma‘arat Misrin (probably the modern Kafr Buniya), and this village remained in the hands of Hamdan’s kin right up until Ibn al-‘Adim’s day. At the time he received it, the village was a deserted wasteland, but Hamdan developed it and made it his home, bringing his whole household there, building a palace, settling peasants, planting and harvesting. Ibn al- ‘Adim says he remained there ‘for thirty years’, though this can hardly be accurate since he died within twenty. It is worth pointing out, moreover, that nowhere does it say that Hamdan served the lord of al-Atharib in any capacity, only that his master back in Aleppo, Ibn Abi Jarada, criticised him for dwelling among the Franks in this way. To this he humbly apologised in verse, reminding his master that even perfumed musk has its home in stinking glands, and the pearl in the crusty shell of the oyster. Granted, when a Frankish lord gives lands to someone else in return for a service rendered, it certainly looks like feudalism; but the fact is we have no details at all about Hamdan’s relationship with the lord of al-Atharib – so talk history of the franks revisited, again | 9 of Hamdan’s ‘vassalage’ to the Franks may be a bit premature. Having thus lost his property while first serving the Franks in some vague administrative capacity, during his tenure under the Muslim lords of Aleppo he was able to gain new property at the expense of the Franks because of his kindness and skill as a physician. It is entirely possible that he continued to serve Aleppo while residing at his lands at Ma‘arbuniyya. Whatever the case, when Zengi finally captured Aleppo in 1128, Hamdan continued to administer the lands of the al-Jazr district for his diwan, as he had done for the Franks in his early career, and as he had done for the lords of Aleppo before Zengi. Hamdan’s career path, upon a close-reading, thus turns out to be a bit more complicated than it is usually understood to be.9 Literary Output

As we’ve already established, Hamdan was an acknowledged member of the literary circles of Aleppo and northern Syria, a generous host and companion to other literati. He was also something of a hellraiser, famous for his drinking parties at various pastoral settings across the district, some of them raucous. In one such party, he nearly killed himself falling off the roof of a house he had fallen asleep on. He was known for his sharp-tongued satire as much as his social graces. He was a proud member of the venerable Arab tribe of Tamim, and traced his ancestry to the pre-Islamic Tamimi hero and poet Hajib b. Zurara. Indeed, he is said to have compiled a book on the various ayyam of the Banu Tamim, their deeds, heroic battles and their poetry. He also produced a diwan of his own poetry, an autograph manuscript of which Ibn al-‘Adim had consulted, though it had lost a few pages. But certainly his most famous work, the one for which we still write about him, is his now-lost history of the Franks. How much do we really know for certain about this work? It has become a trope in writing about Hamdan that modern authors must mourn the loss of this work, and I can hardly disagree. Any coverage of the Franks and their coming to the Near East by a Muslim observer is a rare thing to be treasured. But what more can we say about it? We might start with its title. Cahen was the first to bring Ibn al-‘Adim’s tarjama of Hamdan to our attention, and he read the title of Hamdan’s history as al-Muwaffaq (‘The Suitable’), a perfectly acceptable title for a book of history, I suppose. More recently, Eddé, following the edition of Zakkar, 10 | syria in crusader times reads the title as al-Mufawwaf, meaning ‘Thin’ or perhaps ‘White-striped’. Less comprehensible, but entirely feasible titles, too, both plausible readings of the same unpointed text. And this must be the same title behind the book al-Sakhawi calls al-Qut (‘Nourishment’), which I take to be a copyist’s error for al-muwaffaq/al-mufawwaf. Indeed al-Sakhawi’s description of the work is a direct quotation of Ibn al-‘Adim, so I presume this was his source. In other words: we don’t really know what it was called.10 We do, however, have some useful details about its contents. Yaqut only mentions him as the author of a ta’rikh without any details, though he acknowledges him too as a physician and poet and cites some of the same samples of verse that Ibn al-‘Adim preserves. Ibn al-‘Adim, however, has by far the earliest and most detailed account of Hamdan’s historical works, which he describes as follows:

He compiled a book on the history of Aleppo from the year 490 [1096] which includes accounts (akhbar] of the Franks and their deeds and their going forth to Syria in the aforementioned year and what happened afterward, calling it al-Mufawwaf. 12

Ibn Muyassar, the chronicler of Fatimid Egypt, in his account of Hamdan’s mission to Cairo, describes him as the author of a book with a rather different focus: A History of the Franks Who Went Out to the Lands of Islam in These Years. The conventional wisdom on Hamdan’s output has always been that these two descriptions refer to the same work, what is usually called by way of paraphrase his History of the Franks. But I would like to suggest that this information could be read quite differently, and that what we really have are descriptions of two lost works about the Franks. From the description of the Mufawwaf, the work described by Ibn al-‘Adim, that work sounds like a larger history of Aleppo, with perhaps a separate section devoted to the Frankish material: wada‘a kitaban fi ta’rikh halab min sanati tisa‘in wa-arba‘ami’atin dimnahu akhbar al-firanj wa-ayyamihim wa-khurujihim ila al-Sham min al- sanati al-madhkurati wa-ma ba‘dahu (‘He composed a book on the history of Aleppo from the year 490, which includes accounts of the Franks, their deeds, and their coming out to Syria in the aforementioned year and the events that followed [my emphasis].’) history of the franks revisited, again | 11

Ibn Muyassar, on the other hand, seems to be describing a monograph on Frankish history, and indeed his description of it, The History of the Franks Who Went Out to the Lands of Islam in These Years, does not sound like its description so much as, given its metre and rhyme in Arabic, its title. Hamdan is called: the composer (musannaf ) of Sirat al-ifranj al-kharijin ila bilad al-islam fi hadhihi’l sinin. Note that this is not called a ta’rikh. This seems to me to be altogether different, and rather more robust, than a history of Aleppo that includes some akhbar of the Franks and their history. It is perhaps telling that, of the quotations from Hamdan that Ibn al-‘Adim uses, most are from a work that he describes as ta’rikhuhu alladhi jama‘ahu (the history that he compiled), and none of these mention the Franks but rather the internal history of Aleppo, and are described as being on loose pages that came into his possession, in Hamdan’s own handwriting – what I am suggesting is the history of Aleppo known to him as al-Mufawwaf/al-Muwaffaq. The one account that does discuss the Franks, however, is said to come from something called the Akhbar al-Ifranj, which Ibn al-‘Adim says he read in a manuscript copy by Yahya b. al-Marawi al-Halabi, so not loose pages in Hamdan’s own hand. The accounts about Aleppo are short, straightforward entries of the sort one expects to find in a chronicle of Aleppo, as in Ibn al- ‘Adim’s own Zubda or in al-‘Azimi’s Ta’rikh. The account from the Akhbar al-Ifranj, on the other hand, is a much longer, and more literary affair (see the translation in the Appendix). It happened, Hamdan tells us, that some workmen in the employ of Yaghi-Siyan, the ill-fated governor of Antioch, who would lose his city to the Franks in the First Crusade, discovered a covered stone basin. Peeking inside, they discovered a group of brass figurines of mysterious horsemen, ‘each dressed in a long coat of chain mail, grasping a shield and spear’.13 Puzzled, the amir asked a group of the local city elders – native Christians – what they thought these figures could represent. The elders too were at a loss. But the figurines reminded them of something that took place many years before, when the city was still in Byzantine hands. In 1084 the walls of a local monastery had collapsed, and, during the reconstruction work that took place back then, they discovered a similar stone basin, containing brass figurines of horsemen bearing bows and arrows, which they easily identified as Turks. They thought little of the discovery. 12 | syria in crusader times

Little, that is, until a short time later, when an army of precisely these sorts of horsemen – the Seljuq Turks – captured the city and subjected it to decades of Turkish rule. Perhaps, the elders suggested to the amir, these strange new figurines in chain mail represented some other conquering nation still unknown to Antioch? Yaghi-Siyan merely scoffed at them, ignoring their interpretation. Nevertheless, as one might have predicted with a tale like this, word soon arrived that the Franks, undoubtedly dressed in the distinctive armour of these figurines, had encamped before Constantinople, an ironic end to Yaghi-Siyan’s story. But the tale of the figurines doesn’t end there, as Hamdan added a contemporary postscript of his own. In the year 1118, Hamdan tells us, Roger of Salerno, the lord of Antioch, found himself in need of building materials, so he sent some men to a ruined palace in Antioch to strip it of what they could use. It was there that Roger’s workmen found, just as in the past, a covered stone basin containing a figurine of a horseman (this time, only one): ‘except that the mount had features inconsistent with a horse and the horseman wore a head-wrap such that only his eyes showed’. When this figurine was presented to Roger, someone related that story about the Turkish and Frankish figurines, and so he dutifully looked into the matter. One of the priests he questioned begged him to destroy the figure. Roger did as he was told, and at that moment word came that an Egyptian army had arrived before Jerusalem. Roger marched south to the defence of the Holy City, yet to his surprise the Egyptians were routed, and Jerusalem was unharmed. Roger returned in triumph to Antioch, having concluded, no doubt, that the curse of the figurines had been broken. But then, a few days later, Roger decided to attack A‘zaz, and it was only then that Aleppo called upon the group that was truly signified in that mysterious figurine: the Turcoman troops of Il-Ghazi, who swiftly defeated Roger and the flower of Antioch’s fighting men at the Battle of the Field of Blood. Interestingly, this entertaining story was reused by a later Christian source. A version of the tale that closely matches Hamdan’s, but which ends with the defeat of Yaghi-Siyan, appears in the Chronicle of Michael the Syrian (d. 1199) and, with some small changes, in Vardan Arewelc‘i’s later Armenian translation (d. 1271).14 The precise direction of borrowing is impossible to determine; it is just as likely that both Hamdan and Michael history of the franks revisited, again | 13 got it from a missing third source than one from the other. Be that as it may, for these Christian sources, as for Hamdan, the tale conveniently explained the fall of Antioch to the Crusaders as fated from the first, and a result of Yaghi-Siyan’s stubbornness.15 For his part, Michael adds a few details to highlight Yaghi-Siyan’s cruelty and, in a rather wistful concluding phrase, states that when the Franks arrived and took Antioch, they ‘promised to the Lord that if they were granted entry to Jerusalem, they would live in peace with all Christians and grant churches and monasteries to every nation that confessed the faith of Christ’. Hamdan, however, was seeking a different moral to this story, and this suggests that the postscript about Il-Ghazi and the more recent battle at the Field of Blood was his own addition. It was important for Hamdan to note that the Frankish ruler Roger never managed to escape his fate, but the Turcomans never conquered Antioch either, as the Seljuqs and the Franks had done. There was a lesson here: ‘If only the army of Il-Ghazi had continued on to Antioch, he would have taken it. But he was over-cautious in the affair. To God alone belongs the Will!’ For Hamdan, the Muslim reconquest of Antioch was simply not to be, no matter what ominous figurines from the past may promise. For God’s will can reverse all fates, even those laid down in remote antiquity and proven time and again to be built into our foundations. This story of talismanic figures, rather like Hamdan himself, then, served both Christians and Muslims in the age of Crusades, in similar form, even if to differing ends. Conclusion

It appears then that we can at least provide some greater articulation to both Hamdan’s career and his works. On the one hand, Hamdan worked for the Muslim lords of Aleppo as an administrator well before he joined Zengi’s service, as the chronology of his visits to various regional courts makes clear. Moreover, although he was clearly employed by the Franks before working for Aleppo, the episode in which Hamdan was famously granted lands in gratitude from the Frankish lord of al-Atharib may well have occurred after, rather than during, his period of service to the Franks. Indeed, the account of this land-granting seems to require this sequence of events, as it is part of a narrative in which Hamdan loses his property during his earliest period 14 | syria in crusader times of service to the Franks, but then, as a satisfactory and ironic testament to Fate, he gains new lands later on. It is, admittedly, unclear whether this granting happened while he was still employed by the Muslim lord of Aleppo, but it makes the resolution and irony all the more powerful if he was. Understanding the sequence of his service in this way thus raises the question about the degree to which Hamdan ever thought of himself as a ‘vassal’ to the lord of al-Atharib, but that remains unanswerable. On the other hand, there is good evidence to suggest, I think, that Hamdan had composed not one, but two, works that involved accounts about the history of the Franks in Syria. One of these seems to have been a chronicle of Aleppo in the manner of many similar chronicles of Aleppo, known as Al-Muwaffaq/Al-Mufawwaf and contained some accounts of Frankish history. This I identify with the work that Ibn al-‘Adim cites as Hamdan’s ta’rikh, of which he has seen only a few sheets in the author’s hand. Another work is described in slightly separate terms as if it were solely devoted to the Franks and their coming to Syria, known as Sirat al-Ifranj and this is what I am identifying with the work Ibn al-‘Adim calls Hamdan’s Akhbar al-Ifranj, which he cites only as a work cited by another companion of his. Granted, titles of medieval Arabic works are famously mutable, and there remains also the possibility that the Sirat al-Ifranj is not so much a separate, independently circulating work of its own so much as a discrete section within Hamdan’s larger history of Aleppo. But by positing two separate works we can at least account for the varying description of Hamdan’s oeuvre that appear across the sources. In providing this articulation, we are now in a better place to assess Hamdan’s legacy. Consider him, for example, in comparison with his younger and better-known near-contemporary, the warrior-poet Usama b. Munqidh (d. 1188). Both were products of the milieu of northern Syria. Both were Arab elites who came under Seljuq rule. Both were udaba’, literati versed in prose and poetry and driven by diverse intellectual interests. Both of their families probably had dealings with one another, given the early history of the Banu Munqidh with the court of Aleppo. But whereas Usama was a product of the ruling military elites at Shayzar, and later the military men that he served, Hamdan was a civilian. His skills marked out him out as an administrator and bureaucrat, not a courtier or warrior. And whereas Usama history of the franks revisited, again | 15

spent most of his life wandering the Near East in service to various patrons in Egypt, Syria and northern Mesopotamia, Hamdan remained for almost the entirety of his life in al-Jazr in Syria. As much as Usama embodied the cosmopolitan, transregional elite culture of the military elites of the middle periods of Islamic history, Hamdan was, for his part, profoundly local, a civilian administrator for Franks and Muslims, who hardly spent any time beyond a few kilometres from Aleppo. Whether this would have coloured his works in any distinctive fashion, we can only guess. But the fragments of his writings that do survive thanks to zealous compilers like Ibn al-‘Adim (most of which are translated here; see the appendix) do suggest that it is still appropriate to mourn the loss of his works, maybe now even doubly so.

Appendix: Fragments from Hamdan in Ibn al-‘Adim’s Bughyat al-talab

1. Ibn al-‘Adim, 1988, I: 481–483

Ibn al-Muhadhdhab and al-‘Azimi agree that this [Seljuq conquest of Antioch] was in the year 467. But that isn’t how the matter stands; rather, Sulayman b. Qutulmish conquered Antioch in 477, and so it seems that Ibn al-Muhadhdhab was writing that but his pen slipped making 77 into 67, and so he wrote it down in error, and al-‘Azimi simply transcribed that error in his Ta’rikh. The truth is what Hamdan b. ‘Abd al-Rahim al-Atharibi mentioned in Akhbar al-Firanj. I read a copy of it written in the hand of al-ra’is Yahya b. al-Marawi al-Halabi, who mentioned that he transcribed it from an autograph manuscript of Hamdan b. ‘Abd al-Rahim, who said: One of the wonders of the age was that a great earthquake destroyed Antioch four years before its conquest, causing a number of its towers to fall from its walls. The qadi Hasan b. al-Muj al-Faw‘i related the following, saying: I had fled from al-Mijann and arrived at Antioch, entering the service of the Most Venerable Mas‘ud, the vizier of Yaghi-Siyan, and he put me in charge of public works … we rebuilt the portions of the city walls that the earthquake had destroyed, but one of the towers collapsed again and failed. We were advised to rebuild it and to firmly establish its foundations, so we tore it down. We dug down to the lowest course of its foundations, and we discovered there a stone basin, with a great lid that had broken on top of it. We examined it and we found inside it seven brass figurines, sitting astride horses 16 | syria in crusader times made of brass. Each figure was dressed in a long robe of chain mail, grasping a shield and spear. He said: ‘So I informed the Most Venerable Mas‘ud, and he sent out his assistant, who removed the figurines and examined what lay beneath the basin, but he found nothing else there. So, he carried the figurines to the vizier, who took them in his turn and presented them during the majlis of the amir Yaghi-Siyan. One of those present said, “Perhaps if the amir requests the presence of one of the old men of the city, he could reveal for him the truth of this matter.”’ So, he went ahead and assembled such a group, and I showed them the figurines. It was then said to them, ‘Do you know what these figurines are?’ They replied, ‘We don’t know. But we can relate to the amir something very similar to this affair.’ [I: 482] ‘We have a monastery here known as King’s Monastery (Dayr al-Malik), [built in the form of] one large, wide space. In the year 477, it collapsed upon us, and most of its timbers were broken. So, we rebuilt it and sought out timbers for it of an appropriate span, but we couldn’t find anything in Antioch or its hinterland. As a result, one of the builders advised us to move the outer walls. So, we dug the foundation trenches for the new wall and when we reached the bottom, we discovered figurines of Turks made of brass, with bows and arrows on their torsos, but we didn’t make a fuss over it and built the wall. It was only a small space of time that passed when Sulayman b. Qutulmish seized the city in early Sha‘ban in the year 477, with four hundred or so ghulams, and he ruled us as the amir has heard tell. Perhaps these figurines are from this other nation [we have heard of], whose features are like the Arabs or other Muslim groups.’ And they proceeded to make allusions to the subject of Franks, but only odd tales had reached them, and [stories] that would embolden anyone who heard them against them. And so Yaghi-Siyan cursed them in the harshest terms, saying: ‘What, there are infidels in this world other than Turks?!’ And he ordered them to be taken away. But the affair had barely concluded when it was reported that the Franks had encamped before Constantinople. [Ibn al-‘Adim interjects] This is what the qadi Hasan b. al-Muj related, and all of the dating confirms the fact that Sulayman b. Qutulmish attacked Antioch in the year 477. history of the franks revisited, again | 17

Hamdan b. ‘Abd al-Rahim reported after this tale (and I [Ibn al-‘Adim] transcribed it from the manuscript of Ibn al-Marawi): An example similar to this was when Roger, the lord of Antioch, found himself in need of marble to make use of. Someone mentioned to him, ‘As it happens, in such-and-such a place there is a palace that was built by the king who founded Antioch, and there is indeed wonderful sorts of marble to be had there.’ So, he ordered that it be located (this was in the year 512). As it was being explored a marble basin was found, with a horseman astride a horse inside it, except that the mount had features inconsistent with a horse and the horseman wore a head- wrap such that only his eyes showed. When this figurine was presented before Roger someone related that story about the Turkish and Frankish figurines, and so he looked into it. One of the priests told him, ‘Dash it on the ground so that it breaks and breaks its evil with it!’ And so Roger dashed it against the ground until it broke. And on that Friday, the watchman arrived from Jerusalem to inform him that the Egyptian army had encamped before them. And so he marched out and until [I: 483] he reached them and made a show of fighting their army and the two sides fought for a few days. Then the Egyptian army retreated, as it had been broken, and Roger returned to Antioch. He did not remain there for ten days before he went out to A‘zaz and besieged it, and so the Aleppines sent word to Il-Ghazi b. Artuq, request- ing his aid and offering him control of Aleppo. He roused the Turcomans and they came to him and they assembled at Laylun Notch at a place named Tell ‘Aqbarin. He destroyed the Franks, killed Roger and took his head. Thousands of Franks were killed and if only the army of Il-Ghazi had continued on to Antioch, he would have taken it. But he was over-cautious in the affair. To God alone belongs the Will!

2. Ibn al-‘Adim, 1988, IV: 1969–1970 (s.v. Aq Sunqur b. ‘Abd Allah al-Bursuqi)

I read in an autograph manuscript of Abu’l-Fawaris Hamdan b. ‘Abd al- Rahim of the chronicle (ta’rikh) that he compiled, of which a few leaves came into my possession, and from which I have extracted some of the events of the year 520 (1126): Al-Bursuqi handed over Aleppo and its administration to his son, the commander ‘Izz al-Din Mas‘ud, who entered the city, and improved its affairs and took pleasure in doing good deeds. His father 18 | syria in crusader times

[al-Bursuqi], meanwhile, moved on to Mosul, the two Jaziras, and other of the lands adjoining his realm. On Friday, the ninth of Dhu’l-Qa‘da of that year, al-Bursuqi went out to the mosque in Mosul, intending to perform the Friday prayer and listen to the preacher, as was his custom on most Fridays. He entered the mosque and headed in the direction of the pulpit. When he got close to it, eight individuals dressed as ascetics attacked him, brandishing daggers and making right for him. They passed through the bodyguards who were around him and they struck at him until he was covered in wounds, injuring some of the bodyguards in the process. The guards managed to kill some of the attackers and took the others into custody, and al-Bursuqi was carried back to his home breathing his last breath. Everyone in the mosque fled, and the Friday prayer service was cancelled. Al-Bursuqi died that same day, and his companions killed those Batinis who remained in their custody. Not a single one of the Batinis escaped except for one youth, who was from Kafr Nasih, a village in the district of A‘zaz to the north of Aleppo. Hamdan said, according to what I copied down from his autograph manuscript: A man from that village related to me that that youth had an elderly mother. When she heard about the murder of al-Bursuqi – and she knew that her son was among the group that had been inciting his death – she celebrated the fact and adorned herself in kohl, sitting back in utter delight as if it was for her a feast day. But then, a few days later, her son returned to her safe and sound, and this grieved her. So, she rose and cut her hair and blackened her face.

3. Ibn al-‘Adim, 1988, IV: 1972–1973 (s.v. Alp Arslan)

I read in an autograph manuscript of Abu al-Fawaris Hamdan b. ‘Abd al- Rahim: Mahmud [b. Nasr, the Mirdasid lord of Aleppo] and his mother both came out [of Aleppo] to meet [the sultan Alp Arslan, who was besieging it], and he ceded the city back to them after a siege of thirty-one days. The sultan heard that the king of the Greeks, [Romanos] Diogenes, had left Constantinople on the road to the Syrian passes, so he travelled out from Aleppo five days after meeting with Mahmud. The sultan made directly for [Romanos] until he encountered him at Manzikert, battling against him until he routed him. He captured the king of the Greeks and plundered their camp. The number of the Turks was 700,000 men. history of the franks revisited, again | 19

4. Ibn al-‘Adim, 1988, IX: 4158–4159 (s.v. Salim b. Malik b. Badran al-‘Uqayli)

I read in an autograph manuscript of Hamdan b. ‘Abd al-Rahim: I saw in some work of commentary that the amir Siraj al-Din Salim b. Malik b. Badran al-‘Uqayli, lord of al-Dawsariyya, which is to say Qal‘at Ja‘bar, died on 20 Sha‘ban of the year 519.

Notes

1. Ibn al-‘Adim, 1988, VI: 2926–2932. This is the earliest reference to Hamdan, though he is also cited, largely under the influence of this tarjama, by Yaqut, Ibn Shaddad and others. 2. Cf. the account of the embellished tale of the aftermath of Aq-Sunqur al- Bursuqi in the Zubda (Ibn al-‘Adim, 1968, II: 235) with that quoted in Bughya (Ibn al-‘Adim, 1988, IV: 1969–1970). 3. Even in Ibn al-‘Adim’s day the al-Jazr district was famous as the favoured locale for the country homes of Aleppo’s elite. Ibn al-‘Adim, 1988, I: 133–134. 5. Ibn al-‘Adim, 1988, VI: 2926. 6. On the career of Aq-Sunqur, see Mallett, 2011, 39–56. 7. Ibn Muyassar, 1919, 70; Ibn al-‘Adim, 1988, VI: 2928; Ibn al-‘Adim, 1968, II: 231–236, which covers the reign of al-Bursuqi, offers no evidence of any ges- tures toward Egypt. But Hamdan may have been sent, for example, to announce al-Bursuqi’s taking power, to suggest a coordinated attack against the Franks, or to solicit aid during the famine that struck the region that year. 8. Ibn al-‘Adim, 1988, VI: 2927; from Ibn ‘Asakir, 1996, XV: 161. On the events of 1128, see Ibn al-‘Adim, 1968, II: 242 for the date of Zengi’s arrival at Aleppo, and Ibn al-Qalanisi, 1983, 348 for the date of Tughtegin’s death. 9. There is another small chronological problem with this account of his alleged ‘vassalage’ among the Franks, namely just who the Frankish lord of Aleppo was when Hamdan gained his new village late in the year 521/1127. Ibn al- ‘Adim names him as Manuel, the brother of the sister of the lord of Antioch, that is, the nephew of Bohemond II. But the Frankish Lord of al-Atharib in 1123, Muslim and Christian sources agree, was one Alan, not Manuel, and we know little about him, or if he was the nephew of Bohemond II. It is not known how long this Alan remained as lord of al-Atharib after 1123, except that he held it until his death; perhaps this Manuel, if he indeed ever existed, came after him. Or perhaps these details are hopelessly garbled. I’m grateful to 20 | syria in crusader times

Tom Asbridge for working with me to untangle these details, fruitless though it was. 10. Cahen, 1940, 41–42; Eddé, 1994, 293–308; cf. al-Sakhawi cited in Rosenthal, 1968, 62 and at 466; see also Kedar, 1990, 156–157; Hillenbrand, 2000, 32 and 358. 12. Ibn al-‘Adim, 1988, VI: 2926–2927. Quoted later by al-Sakhawi. 13. Ibn al-‘Adim, 1988, VI: 2926. 14. Many thanks to our colleague Christopher MacEvitt for calling this Syriac version to my attention. See Michael the Syrian, 1910, IV: 586/III: 183, discussed in MacEvitt, 2014, 1–16. 15. See also my discussion of this tale in Cobb, 2014, 271–274.