[Ansteorra-MiddleEastern] Data about middle east

[willowjonbardc at juno.com]

I just got a CD book that had this information. 
I hope people find it interesting.
Duchess Willow de Wisp

STANLEY LANE-POOLE
Egypt in the Middle Ages 

     Stanley Lane-Poole, born on December 18, 1845, studied Arabic

     under his great-uncle, Lane, the Orientalist, and, before

     going up to Oxford for his degree, began his "Catalogue of

     Oriental Coins in the British Museum," which appeared in

     fourteen volumes between 1875 and 1892, and founded his

     reputation as the first living authority on Arabic

     numismatics. In 1883, 1896, and 1897 he was at Cairo

     officially employed by the British Government upon the

     Mohammedan antiquities, and published his treatise on "The Art

     of the Saracens in Egypt" in 1886, in which year he visited

     Stockholm, Helsingfors, St. Petersburg, Moscow, and

     Constantinople to examine their Oriental collections. He has

     written histories of the "Moors in Spain," "Turkey," "The

     Barbary Corsairs," and "Mediæval India," which have run to

     many editions; and biographies of Saladin, Babar, Aurangzib;

     of Lord Stratford de Redcliffe, and Sir Harry Parkes. He has

     also published a miniature Koran in the "Golden Treasury"

     series, and written "Studies in a Mosque," besides editing

     three volumes of Lane's "Arabic Lexicon." For five years he

     held the post of Professor of Arabic at Trinity College,

     Dublin, of which he is Litt.D. Mohammedan Egypt, his special

     subject, he has treated in several books on Cairo, the latest

     being "The Story of Cairo." But his most complete work on this

     subject is "The History of Egypt in the Middle Ages," here

     epitomised by the author.

 

 

_I.--A Province of the Caliphate_

 

 

Ever since the Arab conquest in 641 Egypt has been ruled by Mohammedans,

and for more than half the time by men of Turkish race. Though now and

again a strong man has gathered all the reins of control into his own

hands and been for a time a personal monarch, as a rule the government

has been, till recent years, a military bureaucracy.

 

The people, of course, had no voice in the government. The Egyptians

have never been a self-governing race, and such a dream as

constitutional democracy was never heard of until a few years ago. By

the Arab conquest in the seventh century the people merely changed

masters. They were probably not indisposed to welcome the Moslems as

their deliverers from the tyranny of the Orthodox Church of the East

Roman or Byzantine Empire, invincibly intolerant of the native

monophysite heresy; and when the conquest was complete they found

themselves, on the whole, better off than before. They paid their taxes

to officials with Arabic instead of Greek titles, but the taxes were

lighter and the amount was strictly laid down by law.

 

The land-tax of about a pound per acre was not excessive on so fertile a

soil, and the poll-tax on nonconformity, of the same amount, was a

moderate price to pay for entire liberty of conscience and freedom in

public worship guaranteed by solemn treaty. The other taxes were

comparatively insignificant, and the total revenue in the eighth century

was about £7,000,000. The surplus went to the caliph, the head of the

vast Mohammedan empire, which then stretched from Seville to Samarkand,

whose capital was first Damascus and afterwards Baghdad.

 

For over 200 years (till 868) Egypt was a mere province of this huge

caliphate, and was governed, like other provinces, with a sole view to

revenue. "Milk till the udder be dry and let blood to the last drop" was

a caliph's instructions to a governor of Egypt. As these governors were

constantly changed--there were sixty-seven in 118 years under the

Abbasid caliphs of Baghdad--and as a governor's main object was to "make

hay while the sun shines," the process of milking the Egyptian cow was

often accelerated by illegal extortion, and the governor's harvest was

reaped before it was due. Illegality was, however, checked to some

extent by the generally wise and just influence of the chief justice, or

kadi, whose probity often formed the best feature of the Arab government

in Egypt.

 

Nor did the caliphs extort taxes without giving something in return. The

development of irrigation works was always a main consideration with the

early Mohammedan rules, from Spain to India, and in Egypt, where

irrigation is the country's very life, it was specially cared for, with

a corresponding increase in the yield. Moreover, the governors usually

held to the agreement that the Christians should have liberty of

conscience, and protected them from the Moslem soldiery. As time went

on, this toleration abated, partly because the Moslems had gradually

become the predominant population. At the beginning the caliphs had

taken anxious precautions against the colonising of Egypt; they held it

by an army, but they were insistent that the army should not take root,

but be always free to join the caliph's standard. But it was inevitable

that the Arabs should settle in so fertile and pleasant a land. Each

governor brought a small army as his escort, and these Arab troops

naturally intermarried with Egyptian women, who were constitutionally

inclined to such alliances. A few Arab tribes also settled in Egypt.

 

This gradual and undesigned Arabising of the country would lead to

oppression of the Christians, to the "squeezing" of wealthy natives, and

occasionally to the institution of humiliating distinctions of dress and

other vexations, and even to the spoiling of Coptic churches. Then

sometimes the Copts, as the Egyptian Christians are called, would rebel.

Their last and greatest rebellion, which occurred in the Delta in

830-832, was ruthlessly trampled out by Turkish troops under Mamun, the

only Abbasid caliph who made a visit to Egypt. Many Copts now

apostatised, and from this time dates the predominance of the Moslem

population and the settling of Arabs in the villages and on the land,

instead of as heretofore only in the two or three large towns.

 

The coming of the Turkish troops with the caliph Mamun was an ominous

event for the country. Up to 846 all the successive governors had been

Arabs, and many of them were related to the caliphs themselves. With

some unfortunate exceptions, they seem to have been men of simple

habits--the Arabs were never luxurious--and usually of strict Mohammedan

principles. They made money, honestly if possible, during their brief

tenure; but they did not harass the people much by their personal

interference, and left the local officials to manage matters in their

own way, as had always been the custom. They lived at the new capital,

Fustat, which grew up on the site of the conqueror's camp, and very near

the modern Cairo; for Alexandria, the symbol of Roman domination, was

dismantled in 645 after the Emperor Manuel's attempt at reconquest. If

they did not do much active good, they did little harm, and Egypt

pursued her immemorial ways.

 

The last Arab governor, Anbasa, was a man of fine character, and his

term of office was distinguished by the building of the fort of

Damietta, as a protection against Roman raids, and by a defeat of the

tributary Sudanis near Dongola.

 

 

_II.--Turkish Governors_

 

 

The Arabs have neither the ferocity nor the luxuriousness, nor, it

should be added, the courage and the genius for administration of the

Turkish race. In the arrival of Turkish troops in 830 we see a symptom

of what was going on all over the eastern caliphate. Turks were taking

the place of Arabs in the army and the provincial governments, just as

the Persians were filling up the civil appointments. The caliph's

Turkish bodyguard was the beginning of the dismemberment of the

caliphate. It became the habit of the caliphs to grant the government of

Egypt, as a sort of fief, to a leading Turkish officer, who usually

appointed a deputy to do his work and to pay him the surplus revenue.

Such a deputy was Ahmad-ibn-Tulun (868-884), the first of the many

Turkish despots of Egypt. Ibn-Tulun was the first ruler to raise Egypt

from a mere tax-paying appendage of the caliphate to a kingdom,

independent save for the recognition of the caliph on the coinage, and

he was the first to found a Moslem dynasty there. A man of fair

Mohammedan education, iron will, and ubiquitous personal attention to

affairs, he added Syria to his dominions, defeated the East Romans with

vast slaughter near Tarsus (883), kept an army of 30,000 Turkish slaves

and a fleet of a hundred fighting ships.

 

He beautified his capital by building a sumptuous palace and his

well-known mosque, which still stands in his new royal suburb of Katai;

he encouraged the small farmers and reduced the taxation, yet he left

five millions in the treasury when he died in 884. His son maintained

his power, and more than his luxury and artistic extravagance; but there

were no elements of stability in the dynasty, which depended solely upon

the character of the ruler. The next generation saw Egypt once more

(905) a mere province of the caliphate, but with this difference, that

its governors were now Turks, generally under the control of their own

soldiery, and much less dependent upon the ever-weakening power of the

Caliph of Baghdad. One of them, the Ikhshid, in 935 emulated Ibn-Tulun

and united part of Syria to Egypt; but the sons he left were almost

children, and the power fell into the hands of the regent Kafur, a black

eunuch from the Sudan, bought for £25, who combined a luxurious and

cultivated court with some military successes and real administrative

capacity.

 

 

_III.--The Fatimid Caliphs_

 

 

The Mohammedan world is roughly divided into Sunnis and Shia. The Shia

are the idealists, the mystics of Islam; the Sunnis are the formalists,

the schoolmen. The Shia trace an apostolic succession from Ali, the

husband of the prophet Mohammed's daughter Fatima, hold doctrines of

immanence and illumination, adopt an allegorical interpretation of

scripture, and believe in the coming of a Mahdi or Messiah. The Sunnis

adhere to the elective historical caliphate descended from Mohammed's

uncle, maintain the eternal uncreated sufficiency of the Koran,

literally interpreted, and believe in no Messiah save Mohammed.

 

The Shia, whatever their racial origin, form the Persian, the Aryan,

adaptation of Islam, which is an essentially Semitic creed. In the tenth

century they had established a caliph among the Berbers at Kayrawan

(908). They had thence invaded Egypt with temporary success in 914 and

919. When the death of Kafur in 968 left the country a prey to rival

military factions, the fourth of the caliphs of Kayrawan--called the

Fatimid caliphs, because they claimed a very doubtful descent from

Fatima--sent his army into Egypt. The people, who had too long been the

sport of Turkish mercenaries, received the invaders as deliverers, just

as the Copts had welcomed the Arabs three centuries before. Gauhar, the

Fatimid general, entered Fustat (or Misr, as it was usually called, a

name still applied both to Egypt and to its capital) amid acclamations

in 969, and immediately laid the foundations of the fortified palace

which he named, astrologically, after the planet Mars (Kahir),

El-Kahira, "the Martial," or "the Victorious," which gradually expanded

to the city of Cairo. He also founded the great historic university

mosque of the Azhar, which, begun by the heretical Shia, became the

bulwark of rigid scholasticism and the theological centre of orthodox

Islam.

 

The theological change was abrupt. It was as though Presbyterian

Scotland had suddenly been put under the rule of the Jesuits. But, like

the Society of Jesus, the Shia were pre-eminently intellectual and

recognised the necessity of adapting their teaching to the capacities of

their hearers, and the conditions of the time. They did not force

extreme Shia doctrine upon the Egyptians. Their esoteric system, with

its graduated stages of initiation, permitted a large latitude, and they

were content to add their distinctive formulas to the ordinary

Mohammedan ritual, and to set them conspicuously on their coinage,

without entering upon a propaganda. The bulk of the Egyptian Moslems

apparently preserved their orthodoxy and suffered an heretical caliphate

for two centuries with traditional composure. The Christian Copts found

the new _régime_ a marked improvement. Mysticism finds kindred elements

in many faiths, and the Fatimid caliphs soon struck up relations with

the local heads of the Christian religion.

 

The second Egyptian caliph, Aziz (975-996), was greatly influenced by a

Christian wife, who encouraged his natural clemency. Bishop Severus

attended his court, and Coptic churches were rebuilt. Throughout the

Fatimid period we constantly find Christians and Jews, and especially

Armenians, advanced to the highest offices of state. This was partly

due, of course, to their special qualifications as scribes and

accountants, for Arabs and Turks were no hands at "sums." The land had

rest under this wise and tolerant caliph. If he set a dangerous example

in his luxury and love of display, he unquestionably maintained law,

enforced equity, punished corruption, and valiantly defended his

kingdom. He fitted out a fleet of 600 sail at Maks (then the port of

Cairo, on the Nile), which kept the Emperor Basil at a distance and

assured the caliph's ascendancy from end to end of the Mediterranean

Sea.

 

After these two great rulers the Fatimid caliphate subsisted for nearly

two centuries by no virtue or energy of its own. The caliphs lived

secluded, like veiled prophets, in their huge palace at Cairo, given

over to sensual delights (Saladin found 12,000 women in the Great Palace

when he entered it in 1171), and wholly regardless of their kingdom,

which they left to the care of vezirs, who were chiefly bent on making

their own fortunes, though there were many able, and a few honest men

amongst them. The real power rested with the army, and the only check

upon the tyranny and debauchery of the army lay in its own jealous

divisions. The fanatical Berber regiments imported from Tunis, the

bloody blacks recruited in the Sudan, and the mutinous Turkish troops

long established in the country, were always at daggers drawn, and their

rivalry was the vezirs' opportunity. In such anarchy the country fell

from bad to worse.

 

The reign of Hakim, the frantic son of Aziz and his Christian wife, was

a personal despotism of the most eccentric kind, marked by apparently

unreasonable regulations, such as keeping the shops open by night

instead of by day, and confining all women to the house for seven years,

as well as by intermittent persecution of Christians and Jews; and also

by enlightened acts, such as the founding of the Hall of Science and the

building of mosques, for all the Fatimides were friends to the arts; and

ending in the proclamation of Hakim as the incarnation of the Divine

Reason, in which capacity he is still adored by the Druses of the

Lebanon. This assumption led to popular tumults and an orgy of carnage,

in the midst of which Hakim mysteriously disappeared (1021).

 

His successors, Zahir (1021-1036), and Mustansir (1036-1096) did nothing

to retrieve the anarchic situation, of which the soldiers were the

unruly masters. Palace cliques, disastrous famines (one of which lasted

seven years, 1066-1072, and even led to the public selling of human

joints as butcher's meat), slave, or rather freedmen's, revolts,

military tumults, and the occasional temporary ascendancy of a talented

vezir, sum up the history of Egypt during most of the eleventh century.

The wisdom and firmness of two great Armenian vezirs, Bedr-el-Gemali

(1073-1094) and his son Afdal (1094-1121), brought a large degree of

order, but the last years of the Fatimid caliphate were blotted by

savage murders both of caliphs and vezirs, and by the loss of their

Syrian dominions to Seljuks and Crusaders.

 

 

_IV.--The House of Saladin_

 

 

It was a question whether Egypt would fall to the Christian king of

Jerusalem or the Moslem king of Damascus; but, after several invasions

by both, Nur-ed-din settled the problem by sending his Syrian army to

Cairo in 1169, when the Crusaders withdrew without offering battle, and

the Fatimid caliphate came to an end in 1171.

 

On the Syrian general's death, two months after the conquest, his

nephew, Salah-ed-din ibn-Ayyub (Saladin), succeeded to the vezirate, and

after Nur-ed-din's death, in 1174, he made himself independent sultan,

not only of Egypt but of Syria and Mesopotamia. Saladin was a Kurd from

the Tigris districts; but his training and his following were purely

Turkish, moulded on the Seljuk model, and recruited largely from the

Seljuk lands. His fame was won outside Egypt, and only eight of the

twenty-four years of his reign were spent in Cairo; the rest was passed

in waging wars in Syria, Mesopotamia, and Palestine, culminating in the

catastrophic defeat of the Crusaders near Tiberias in 1187, and the

conquest of Jerusalem and all of the Holy Land.

 

The famous crusade of Richard I., though it resulted only in recovering

a strip of coast from Acre to Jaffa, and did not rescue Jerusalem, wore

out Saladin's strength, and in 1193 the chivalrous and magnanimous

"Soldan" died. In Egypt his chief work, after repressing revolts of

black troops and Shia conspiracies, and repelling successive naval

attacks on Damietta and Alexandria by the Eastern emperor and the kings

of Jerusalem and Sicily, was the building of the Citadel of Cairo after

the model of Norman fortresses in Syria, and the encouragement of Sunni

orthodoxy by the founding and endowment of medresas, or theological

colleges. The people, who had never been really converted to the Fatimid

creed, accepted the latest reformation with their habitual nonchalance.

This was really the greatest achievement of Saladin and his house. Cairo

succeeded to Baghdad and Cordova as the true metropolis of Islam, and

Egypt has remained true to the most narrow school of orthodoxy ever

since.

 

Saladin's kinsmen, known as the Ayyubid dynasty, ruled Egypt for over

half a century after the death of their great leader. First his politic

brother, Adil Seyf-ed-din ("Saphadin") carried on his fine tradition for

a quarter of a century, and then from 1218 to 1238 Seyf-ed-din's able

son Kamil, who had long been the ruler of Egypt during his father's

frequent absences, followed in his steps. The futile efforts of the

discredited Crusaders disturbed their peace. John of Brienne's seizure

of Damietta was a serious menace, and it took all Kamil's energy to

defeat the "Franks" at Mansura (1219) and drive them out of the country.

 

On the other hand, he cultivated very friendly relations with the

Emperor Frederic II., who concluded a singular defensive alliance with

him in 1229, to the indignation of the Pope. He was tolerant to

Christians, and listened to the preaching of St. Francis of Assisi; he

granted trading concessions to the Venetians and Pisans, who established

a consulate at Alexandria. At the same time he notably encouraged Moslem

learning, built colleges, and developed the resources of the kingdom in

every way. What had happened to the dynasties of Tulun, Ikhshid, and the

Fatimides, was repeated on the death of Kamil. Two sons kept the throne

successively till 1249, and then, in the midst of Louis IX's crusade,

the salvation of Egypt devolved on the famous Mamluks, or white slaves,

who had formed the _corps d'élite_ of Saladin's army.

 

 

_V.--The Mamluks_

 

 

Political women have played a great rôle in Egypt from Hatshepsut and

Cleopatra to the Christian wife of Aziz, the princess royal who

engineered the downfall of Hakim, and the black mother who dominated

Mustansir; and it was a woman who was the first queen of the Mamluks.

Sheger-ed-durr ("Tree of Pearls"), widow of Salih, the last reigning

Ayyubid of Egypt, was the brain of the army which broke the chivalry of

France.

 

At the second battle of Mansura in 1249, she took Louis prisoner. Then

she married a leading Mamluk emir, to conciliate Moslem prejudice

against a woman's rule, and thenceforth for more than two centuries and

a half one Mamluk after another seized the throne, held it as long as he

could, and sometimes transmitted it to his son. When it is noted that

forty-eight sultans (twenty-five Bahri Mamluks, or "white slaves of the

river," so called from the barracks on an island in the Nile, and

twenty-three Burgis, named after the burg, or citadel, where their

quarters originally were), succeeded one another from 1250 to 1517, it

will be seen that their average reign was but three and a half years.

The throne, in fact, belonged to the man with the longest sword.

 

The bravest and richest generals and court officials surrounded

themselves with bands of warrior slaves, and reached a power almost

equal to the reigning sultan, who was, in fact, only _primus inter

pares_, and on his death--usually by assassination--they fought for his

title. All were alike slaves by origin, but this term implied no

degradation. Any slave with courage and address had the chance of

becoming a freedman, rising to influence, and climbing into his master's

seat. Every man was every other man's equal--if he could prove it; but

the process of proving it often turned Cairo into a shambles.

 

The Mamluks were physically superb, a race of born soldiers, dashing

horsemen, skilled leaders, brilliant alike in battle and in all manly

sports. They were at the same time the most luxurious of men, heavy

drinkers, debauched sensualists, magnificent in their profusion, in

their splendid prodigality in works of art and luxury, and in the

munificence with which they filled their capital with noble monuments of

the most exquisite Saracenic architecture. Most of the beautiful mosques

of Cairo were built by these truculent soldiers, all foreigners, chiefly

Turks, a caste apart, with no thought for the native Egyptians whose

lands they received as fiefs from the sultan; with no mercy when

ambition called for secret assassination or wholesale massacre; yet

fastidious in dress, equipment, and manners, given to superb pageants,

laborious in business, and fond of music and poetry. Their orthodoxy is

attested not only by their innumerable religious foundations and

endowments, but by their importing into Cairo a line of Abbasid

caliphs--_fainéants_ indeed, but in a manner representative of the great

caliphs of Baghdad, extinguished by the Mongols in 1258--and in

maintaining them till the Ottoman sultan usurped their very nominal

authority as Commanders of the Faithful.

 

The greatest of all the Mamluks was Beybars (1260-1277). He it was who

had charged St. Louis's knights at Mansura in 1249, and afterwards

helped to rout the Mongol hordes at the critical battle of Goliath's

Spring in 1260; and he was the real founder of the Mamluk empire, and

organised and consolidated his wide dominions so skilfully and firmly

that all the follies and jealousies and crimes of his successors could

not destroy the fabric. He made his army perfect in discipline, built a

navy, made canals, roads, and bridges, annexed Nubia, organised a

regular postal service, built fortifications, mosques, colleges, halls

of justice, and managed everything, from the fourth cataract of the Nile

and the Holy Cities of Arabia to the Pyramus and the Euphrates, by his

immense capacity for work and amazing rapidity of movements.

 

Egypt prospered exceedingly under his just, firm, and capable rule; he

was severe to immorality and strictly prohibited wine, beer, and

hashish. He entered into diplomatic relations with European powers to

the great advantage of his country's trade; and his bravery,

munificence, and justice have made him a popular hero in Arabic romances

down to the present day.

 

None of his successors approached his high example Khalil indeed

recovered Acre and all that remained of the Crusader's possessions in

Palestine, and the Mamluks, who never lost their soldierly qualities

whoever happened to be their nominal ruler, handsomely defeated the

Mongols again in 1299 and 1303, and for ever saved Egypt from the

unspeakable curse of a Mongol conquest Nasir, whose reign covers most of

the first half of the fourteenth century, was a great builder, and so

were many of the nobles of his court. It was the golden age of Saracenic

architecture, and Cairo is still full of the monuments of Nasir's emirs.

He encouraged agriculture, stockbreeding, farming, falconry, as well as

literature and art, everything, in short, except vice, wine, and

Christians.

 

The Burgi, or Circassian Mamluks (1382-1517), were little more than

chief among the emirs. Widespread corruption, the open sale of high

offices and of "justice," and general debauchery characterised their

rule. Yet they built many of the loveliest mosques in Cairo, and the

conquest of Cyprus, long a nest of Mediterranean piracy, by Bars Bey in

1426 may be added to their credit. Kait Bey (1468-1496) was a great

builder, and in every way a wise, brave, and energetic, public-spirited

sovereign, and was an exception to the general baseness.

 

Egypt was rich in his day. The European trade had swelled enormously,

and the duties brought in a prodigious revenue. The Italian Republics

had their consulates or their marts in Alexandria, and Marseilles,

Narbonne, and Catalonia sent their representatives. The Indian trade was

also very considerable; we read of £36,000 paid at one time in customs

dues at Gidda, then an Egyptian port on the Red Sea. The Mamluk sultan

took toll on every bale of goods that passed between Europe and India in

the palmy days that preceded Vasco de Gama's discovery of the Cape route

in 1497. It was an immense monopoly, extortionately used, and it was not

resigned without a struggle. The Mamluk fleet engaged the Portuguese off

Chaul in the Bay of Bengal in 1508 and defeated them; but Almeida

avenged the honour of his country by a victory over the Mamluk admiral

Hoseyn off Diu in the following year, and the prolific transit trade of

Egypt was to a great extent lost.

 

This final effort was made by the last great sultan of the Circassian

dynasty, Kansuh Ghuri (1501-1516), who also exerted himself manfully in

defending his country from the impending disaster of Ottoman invasion.

But the Othmanli Turks, greatly heartened by the conquest of

Constantinople in 1453, had been steadily encroaching in Asia, and,

after defeating the shah of Persia, their advance upon Syria and Egypt

was only a matter of time. The victory was made easier by jealousies and

treachery among the Mamluks. Kansuh fell at the head of his gallant

troops in a battle near Aleppo in August 1516; a last desperate stand of

the Mamluks under the Mukattam Hill at Cairo in January 1517, was

overcome, and Sultan Selim made Egypt a province of the Turkish empire.

Such it remains, formally, to this day.

 

       *       *


___________________________________________________________________
Speed up your surfing with Juno SpeedBand.
Now includes pop-up blocker!
Only $14.95/month -visit http://www.juno.com/surf to sign up today!