1. Neville Brown, History and Climate Change (London: Routledge, 2007), 111.
2. Personal communication, 1973. This was a subject of intense interest for Professor Ashtor, who was then a leading economic historian of medieval Islam.
3. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, vol. 3 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 5–6.
4. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Philosophy of History (London: The Colonial Press, 1900), 67.
5. See Chapter 2, “The Hero as Prophet. Mahomet: Islam,” available as an etext at www.guttenberg.org.
CHAPTER 1. HOW TO IDENTIFY A COTTON BOOM
1. All dates will be given in double form with the date of the Common Era preceding the Hijri date.
2. Hayyim J. Cohen, “The Economic Background and the Secular Occupations of Muslim Jurisprudents and Traditionists in the Classical Period of Islam,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 13, no. 1 (1970): 16–71.
3. Al-Hakim al-Naisaburi, “Taʿrikh Naisabur,” facsimile ms contained in Richard N. Frye, ed., The Histories of Nishapur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). Though Cohen uses death dates to determine which century to assign each biographical entry to, I have deducted twenty years from the death dates in making my own calculations. The purpose of this reduction is to approximate the time period during which the subject of a biography was actually practicing his trade.
4. Richard W. Bulliet, “Medieval Nishapur: A Topographic and Demographic Reconstruction,” Studia Iranica V (1976): 67–89.
5. Cohen, “Economic Background,” 27.
6. Chapter 6 of Andrew Watson’s Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming Techniques, 700–1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983) provides a wealth of information about the earliest history of cotton production. However, although he acknowledges the widespread diffusion of cotton growing during the Islamic period, Watson does not mention Sasanid Iran or the earliest cultivation of cotton there. For another comprehensive view of the history of cotton focusing on the Roman Empire, see Maureen Fennell Mazzaoui, The Italian Cotton Industry in the Later Middle Ages, 1100–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
7. Islamic Textiles (London: British Museum Press, 1995), 23. Baker cites no evidence in support of her statement.
8. The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3(2), The Seleucid, Parthian, and Sasanian Periods (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 1107.
9. Mazzaoui, Italian Cotton Industry, 10–11.
10. Thomas Allsen, Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol Empire: A Cultural History of Islamic Textiles (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 68.
11. Liu Bo, The Sogdian Letters from Dunhuang and the Sogdians in Dunhuang and Guzang During the Jin Dynasties [in Chinese, 1995], 152–53, cited in Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History, tr. James Ward (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 52, n. 20.
12. Sogdian Traders, 67–69.
13. Simone-Christiane Raschmann, Baumwolle im türkischen Zentralasien (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1995), 17.
14. Liu Xinru, Silk and Religion: An Exploration of Material Life and the Thought of People, AD 600–1200 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996).
15. The Sanskrit word also shows up in Hebrew karpas, Greek karpasos, and Latin carbasus. (Mazzaoui, Italian Cotton Industry, 9), but it loses its specific denotation as cotton, meaning sometimes fine linen or fine wool. (Gilad J. Gevaryahu and Michael L. Wise, “Why Does the Seder Begin with Karpas?” Jewish Bible Quarterly 27, no. 2 (1999): 104–109). In all likelihood this philological confusion reflects Hellenistic era imports of fine textiles from India rather than an extension of cotton as a cultivar.
16. Mazzaoui (Italian Cotton Industry, 15) writes: “In the Roman period the crop, introduced from India and/or Turkestan, was grown on irrigated land in Iran, Babylonia, Palestine and most probably Asia Minor. . . . This early crop migration via Iran has left a firm imprint on the linguistic record. The low Latin term for cotton, bambacium, is borrowed from the middle Persian pambak. [Modern Persian is pambeh— RWB] In eastern Europe and Anatolia the Persian root has been preserved in the Croatian bambák, the Russian bumága, the Turkish pamuk, and the Hungarian pamut.” Since Iranian traders along the Euphrates frontier would have been the conduits for cotton cloth reaching Roman lands, it is not surprising that the middle Persian word, along with the Sanskrit word, came with it. However, this does not constitute evidence for cotton being cultivated in any particular part of the Sasanid realm.
17. Watson, Agricultural Innovation, Part 4.
18. Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979); and Islam: The View from the Edge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).
19. The paucity of data cited for Iran is strikingly evident in Eliyahu Ashtor, Histoire des prix et des salaires dans l’Orient médiéval (Paris: SEVPEN, 1969).
20. For Iran these matters are spelled out in Willem Floor, Agriculture in Qajar Iran. (Washington, DC: Mage, 2003), ch. 17.
21. For a detailed discussion of these processes, including preparation of yarn, bleaching, and dyeing, see Mazzaoui, Italian Cotton Industry, 74–76.
22. Pierre Briant, ed., Irrigation et drainage dans l’antiquité, qanats et canalisations souterraines en Iran, en Égypte et en Grèce (Paris: Thotm éditions, 2001), contains several articles that touch on the age of qanats. The case for a minimal early use of qanats, or possibly no pre-Islamic use at all, is made by Rémy Boucharlat in his contribution on “Les galléries de captage dans la péninsule d’Oman au premier millénaire avant J.-C.” (157–84), most vividly when he quotes approvingly the remark of Peter Christensen: “I am not aware of a single case where qanat have been dated back to pre-historical times with any reasonable degree of certainty on the sole basis of archaeological criteria” (177–78). Briant’s own contribution, however, “Retour à Polybe: hyponomoi et phreatiai” (15–40), makes an irrefutable case for the technology being known by the end of the Achaemenid era.
23. For a thorough discussion of all aspects of the silk trade see Liu Xinru, Silk and Religion. The author’s exclusive focus on silk leaves in question the balance between silk and other textiles. See also Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3, 1107–12.
24. On the survival of the regional barons see Parvaneh Pourshariati, Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire: The Sasanian-Parthian Confederacy and the Arab Conquest of Iran. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008).
25. See, for example, George Stewart, Names on the Land (New York: Random House, 1945).
26. Joseph E. Schwartzberg, ed., A Historical Atlas of South Asia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).
27. For examples of sale documents see Hashem Rajabzade and Kenji Eura, eds., Sixty Persian Documents of the Qajar Period, “Persian Documents,” Series No. 32 (Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, 1999).
28. Mohammad al-Karagi, La civilisation des eaux cachées: traité de l’exploitation des eaux souterraines, ed. and tr. Aly Mazaheri (Nice: Université de Nice, Institut d’Études et de Recherches Interéthniqes et Interculturelles, 1973), 5.
29. Encyclopaedia Iranica, ed. Ehsan Yarshater, vol. 1 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1985), 57. Bibliographical references in the original are retained to demonstrate the scholarly basis of Ashraf’s analysis.
30. A good account of traditional qanat construction and its complications is contained in Anthony Smith, Blind White Fish in Persia (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1953), 79–82, 97–100. “Qanat Irrigation Systems: An Ancient Water Distribution System Allowing Specialized and Diverse Cropping in Desert Regions of Iran” (Islamic Republic of Iran: Centre for Sustainable Development [CENESTA], 2003) is a detailed study of every aspect of contemporary qanat usage in the area of Kashan, a city between Qom and Isfahan. The full text is available on-line at: www.cenesta.org/projects/qanat/Qanat%20Irrigation%20Systems.doc
31. Muhammad b. al-Hasan al-Hasib al-Karkhi, Kitab inbat al-miyah al-khaffiya (Heydarabad: Daʾirat al-Maʿarif al-ʿUthmaniya, 1359 [1940]). It is generally recognized that the name al-Karkhi, referring to a neighborhood in Baghdad, is a corruption of al-Karaji, referring to the town of Karaj in the piedmont region of the Iranian plateau. In his better-known works, al-Karaji made significant advances in the field of algebra. I wish to thank Abigail Schade for bringing this text to my attention.
32. A. Ben Shemesh, tr., Taxation in Islam, vol. 1, Yahya ben Adam’s Kitab al-Kharaj (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967), 65ff.
33. For a full discussion see Briant, “Retour à Polybe: hyponomoi et phreatiai..”
34. Javad Safinezhad, Boneh (Tehran: Bakhsh-e Tahqiqat-e Insan Shenasi, Muʾassaseh-ye Motalaʿat va Tahqiqat Ijtimaʿi, Daneshgah-Tehran, 1350 [1973]).
35. Javad Safinezhad, “The Climate of Iran and the Emergence of Traditional Collective Production Systems,” unpublished article, 1977, map 7.
36. Ann K. S. Lambton, “An Account of the Tarikhi Qumm,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 12, no.3–4 (1948): 586–96; and “Qum: The Evolution of a Medieval City,” Journal of the American Oriental Society (1990): 322–39.
37. Andreas Drechsler, Geschichte der Stadt Qom im Mittelalter (Berlin: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1999).
38. Michael G. Morony, “The Age of Conversions: A Reassessment,” in Michael Gervers and Ramzi J. Bikhazi, eds., Conversion and Continuity: Indigenous Christian Communities in Islamic Lands, Eighth to Eighteenth Centuries (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 1990), 135–50.
39. Bulliet, Conversion, 44.
40. Bulliet, Conversion, 66–71.
41. On the personalities associated with these names see Andrew J. Newman, The Formative Period of Twelver Shiʿism: Hadith as Discourse Between Qum and Baghdad (London: Routledge Curzon, 2000), 38–41.
42. Lambton, “Account,” 592.
43. Bulliet, View from the Edge, ch. 4.
44. Bulliet, View from the Edge, ch. 8.
45. Rudi Matthee, The Pursuit of Pleasure: Drugs and Stimulants in Iranian History, 1500–1900 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 217.
46. Ibn Hawqal, Configuration, 297.
47. Lambton, “Account,” 588.
48. Smith, White Fish, 79–82.
49. See examples in Richard W. Bulliet, The Patricians of Nishapur: A Study in Medieval Islamic Social History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), Part 2 passim.
50. Cotton is included among the taxes in kind sent to Baghdad from the Caspian coast as early as the caliphate of the Abbasid al-Mansur (754–775/136–158), but the abundant water and torrid summers of that region presented a very different agricultural situation from that on the plateau (Liu, Silk, 152).
CHAPTER 2. ISLAM AND COTTON
1. The data in table 2.1 come from the following biographical dictionaries: Isfahan—Abu Nuʿaim al-Isfahani, Kitab dhikr akhbar Isbahan, ed. S. Dedering (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1931), 34, 2 v. Nishapur—Al-Hakim al-Naisaburi, “Taʿrikh Naisabur,” facsimile ms contained in Richard N. Frye, ed., The Histories of Nishapur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). Qazvin—ʿAbd al-Rahim al-Qazvini, Al-Tadwin fi akhbar Qazvin (Beirut: Dar al-Kutub al-ʿIlmiya, 1987), 5 v. Gorgan—Hamza al-Sahmi, Taʾrikh Jurjan aw kitab maʿrifa ʿulamaʾ ahl Jurjan (Hyderabad: Osmania Oriental Publications Bureau, 1967). Baghdad—al-Khatib al-Baghdadi, Taʾrikh Baghdad (Beirut: Dar al-Kitab al-ʿArabi, [nd]), 14 v.
2. Sam Isaac Gellens, “Scholars and Travelers: The Social History of Early Muslim Egypt, 218–487/833–1094,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 1986, 70–1, 145.
3. Ambiguity haunts this ratio. In Arabic the words Bazzaz and Bazzar differ only by a dot above the final letter. Bazzar can mean a dealer in linseed oil. Or it can be a scribal error or misprint in the published edition of the Taʾrikh Baghdad. Since each of the first three volumes of this fourteen-volume compilation contain ten or more Bazzars, and the remaining volumes contain only a sprinkling, it appears as though the editors changed their minds about whether the absence of a dot signified a different trade or was just a scribal omission. The total of 258 given in table 2.1 lumps Bazzaz and Bazzar entries together. If they were separated, the ratio would be four to one instead of five to one.
4. A precise study of Jewish merchant activity based on letters preserved in the Cairo Geniza, a trove of manuscripts dating from the late ninth/third century onward, shows strong trading links between Egypt and Syria but very few between Syria and Iraq or Iran. Jessica Goldberg, “Geographies of Trade and Traders in the Mediterranean in the Eleventh Century: A Study Based on Documents from the Cairo Geniza,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, Columbia University, 2006.
5. Mazzaoui, The Italian Cotton Industry in the Later Middle Ages, 1100–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 17.
6. Robert Serjeant, Islamic Textiles (Beirut: Librairie du Liban, 1972).
7. Liu Xinru, Silk and Religion: An Exploration of Material Life and the Thought of People, AD 600–1200 (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1996), 156.
8. A. S. Tritton, The Caliphs and Their Non-Muslim Subjects: A Critical Study of the Covenant of ʿUmar (London: H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1930).
9. Masʿudi, The Meadows of Gold, cited in Liu, Silk, 135.
10. Abu Muhammad Jaʿfar b. Jarir al-Tabari, The Reign of Muʿtasim (833–842), tr. Elma Marin (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1951), 116.
11. The earliest known Islamic fabric is a specimen of Tunisian tiraz datable to the brief caliphate of Marwan I (684–85/64–65). However, it antedates the emergence of the contest between brocade and plain linen/cotton, and hence the hadith about fingers, because the silk embroidery is on a fabric with a typically complex brocade design. F. E. Day, “The Tiraz Silk of Marwan” in G. C. Miles, ed., Archaeologica Orientalia in Memoriam Ernst Herzfeld (Locust Valley, NY: J. J. Augustin, 1952), 39–61 and Plate VI.
12. Liu, Silk, 141–49. Mazzaoui presents a more realistic appraisal of tiraz in the context of cotton production in Italian Cotton Industry, 21–22.
13. For scores of examples including translations of inscriptions see ʿAbd Allah Quchani, Katibahʾha-yi sufal-i Nishabur (Tehran: Muzah-i Riza ʿAbbasi, 1986).
14. Esin Atil, Freer Gallery of Art Fiftieth Anniversary Exhibition, vol. 3, Ceramics from the World of Islam (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1973), 26–29.
15. Charles K. Wilkinson, Nishapur: Pottery of the Early Islamic Period (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, [nd]), 3–7.
16. Richard W. Bulliet, “Pottery Styles and Social Status in Medieval Khurasan,” in A. Bernard Knapp, ed., Archaeology, Annales, and Ethnohistory, 74–82
17. The cotton revolution did eventually affect Zoroastrian practice. “In modern times, bodies are washed with water for purification, then dressed in white garments and wrapped in a white cotton shroud and buried.” (Personal communication from Jamsheed K. Choksy.) More generally on Zoroastrian funerary practice see Jamsheed K. Choksy, “Aging, Death, and the Afterlife in Zoroastrianism,” in How Different Religions View Death and Afterlife, 2nd ed., C. J. Johnson and M. G. McGee, eds. (Philadelphia: Charles Press, 1998), 246–263.
18. The exact meaning of karbas in the early Islamic centuries is uncertain, but one specialist on Iranian textiles in the eighteenth century describes it this way: “[A] coarse white [cotton] cloth of loose texture and varying quality was made for home use in every village. It was used by the poor in many articles of clothing, and as garment linings by the middle class. . . . And it was used as a tent material. . . .” Willem Floor, “Economy and Society: Fibers, Fabrics, Factories,” in Woven from the Soul, Spun from the Heart: Textile Arts of Safavid and Qajar Iran 16th-19th Centuries, Carol Bier, ed. (Washington, DC: The Textile Museum, 1987), 26.
19. Richard Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204–1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, rpt 1996).
20. Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2000), ch. 5.
21. J. Behnam, “Population,” in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968), 479.
22. For regional differentials in rates of conversion, see Bulliet, Conversion, ch. 7–10.
23. Safinezhad, Boneh, 143–55 contains a specific discussion of how one sahraʾ functions in the Torbat-e Jam district of Khurasan.
24. Abu Nuʿaim, Akhbar Isbahan, vol. 1, 37. I am grateful to Hossein Kamaly for bringing this anecdote to my attention.
25. Cited and discussed in Étienne de la Vaissière, Sogdian Traders: A History, James Ward, tr. (Leiden: Brill, 2005), 239. The use of karbas to designate fine cloth in this passage differs from other usages in which it is a coarse cloth.
CHAPTER 3. THE BIG CHILL
1. Carter Vaughn Findley, The Turks in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 15.
2. Ibn al-Jawzi, Al-Muntazam fi Taʾrikh al-Muluk wa’l-Umam (Heydarabad: Matbaʿat Daʾirat al-Maʿarif al-ʿUthmaniyah, 1357–59 [1938–40]), vol. 6, 201–202.
3. Ibid., vol. 7, 237.
4. Ibid., vol. 6, 156.
5. Ibid., vol. 6, 39.
6. David Koenig, “Medieval Winters in Baghdad: A Study in the History of Climate Between 296 A.H. and 493 A.H. Based on Ibn al-Jawzi’s Kitab al-Muntazam,” unpublished MA thesis, Columbia University, 1991.
7. R. D’Arrigo, G. Jacoby, et al. “1738 Years of Mongolian Temperature Variability Inferred from a Tree-Ring Record of Siberian Pine,” Geophysical Research Letters, 28 (2001), 543–46.
8. For a recent and detailed review of the evidence for and against a Medieval Warm Period and a Little Ice Age—primarily the latter—see Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, “Reconstructing Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Past 1000 Years: A Reappraisal,” Energy & Environment 14:2–3 (March 2003): 233–39.
9. Because the climate of China is affected by the global monsoon system, which does not influence the northern Middle East, the relevance of temperature fluctuations there to weather patterns in the northern Middle East is unclear. Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to surmise that northern China at least would have been affected by any marked change in the intensity of the Siberian High. Unfortunately, the data available to non-specialists pertain to China as a whole, and in a separate series to eastern China, but not specifically to northern China. The data covering China as a whole indicate no noteworthy cooling before the year 1090/482. At that point, however, temperatures did plummet rapidly. Though the onset of this cold period is substantially later than what is indicated for Iran, it lasted in both areas until approximately 1130/524. (Yang Bao et al., “General characteristics of temperature variation in China during the last two millennia,” Geophysical Research Letters, 10.1029/2001GL014485 [11 May 2002], available on-line at www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/tan2003/tan2003.html.) This post -1090/482 episode of generally colder weather took place during a period of generally quite warm summers in northern China (Beijing), and thus may be presumed to relate specifically to cold winters. (Ming Tan et al., “Cyclic Rapid Warming on Centennial-Scale Revealed by a 2650-Year Stalagmite Secord of Warm Season Temperature,” Geophysical Research Letters 30, no. 12, 1617 (June 2003), available on-line at www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/tan2003/tan2003.html) I am grateful to Professor Victor B. Lieberman for his cautionary thoughts about climate effects in China.
10. For a classic introduction to climate history see Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Times of Feast, Times of Famine: A History of Climate since the Year 1000, tr. Barbara Bray (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1971).
11. “Was there a ‘Little Ice Age’ and a ‘Medieval Warm Period’?” in 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/070.htm
12. Willie Soon, “Reconstructing,” 270.
13. G. C. Jacoby, R. D. D’Arrigo, et al., “Mongolian Tree Rings and 20th-Century Warming,” Science 273, no. 5276 (1996): 771–73.
14. Iran was stricken in 1870–72/1286–88, Russia and the Ottoman Empire in 1873–74/1289–90. The severe famine in northern China in 1876–79/1292–95 may be related to these catastrophes.
15. For example, both Mongolian data series show a near-record cold snap at the outset of the seventeenth/second decade of the eleventh century. Historical narratives of the time report severe famine stalking Russia from 1602/1010 to 1604/1012 during the last years of the reign of Tsar Boris Godunov, and catastrophic famine striking Ottoman Anatolia and touching off a “Great Flight,” or Büyük Kaçgun, that saw thousands of peasants abandoning their barren villages. In this case, however, the cold was truly global and was caused by the eruption on February 19, 1600, of the Huaynaputina volcano in Peru. I wish to thank Professor Sam White for alerting me to this correlation.
16. Hamza b. al-Hasan al-Isfahani, Kitab taʾrikh sanni muluk al-ard wa’l-anbiya (Berlin: Buchdruckerei und Verlagsanstalt “Kaviani,” [nd]), 122. I wish to thank Dr. Asef Kholdani for bringing this to my attention.
17. For a sample of such a study of nearby Turkey, see Peter Ian Kuniholm, “Archaeological Evidence and Non-evidence for Climatic Change,” in S. K. Runcorn and J.-C. Pecker, eds., The Earth’s Climate and Variability of the Sun Over Recent Millennia (London: The Royal Society, 1990), 645–55.
18. Ibn al-Jawzi, Al-Muntazam, vol. 8, 25.
19. Ibid., 28.
20. Ibid., 36.
21. Ahmad ibn Fadlan, Risalat Ibn Fadlan fi wasf al-rihla ila bilad al-Turk wa’l-Khazar wa’l-Rus wa’l-Saqaliba (Damascus: Matbuʿat al-Majmaʿ al-ʿIlmi al-ʿArabi, 1959/1379). I wish to thank Prof. Karen Pinto for bringing the relevant passages from this text to my attention, and her mother Adele Pinto, for making her English version of a Russian translation of the work available to me.
22. Ibid., 83.
23. Ibid., 84–85.
24. Ibid., 86–90.
25. Al-Isfahani, Kitab Sanni, 124.
26. Ibid.
27. Abul’l-Fazl Beyhaqi, The History of Beyhaqi, tr. with commentary by C. E. Bosworth and revised by M. Ashtiany, Persian Heritage Series, 3 vols. (New York: 2009).
28. Wilhelm Barthold , Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion, 3e (London: Luzac & Co., 1968), 298, n. 4.
29. Beyhaqi vol. 2, 209.
30. Beyhaqi, vol. 2, 247–48.
31. Beyhaqi, vol. 2, 299.
32. Beyhaqi, vol. 2, 304.
33. Ibid.
34. Abu al-Hasan ʿAli Bayhaqi “Ibn Funduq,” Tarikh-e Baihaq, 2e (Tehran: Ketabforushi Foroughi, [nd]), 268, 273.
35. Abu Nasr Muhammad Al-Utbi, Kitab-i-Yamini, James Reynolds, tr. (London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1858), ch. 33. Full text of this chronicle is available at persian.pack-hum.org/persian/intro.html
36. Ibn al-Athir, Al-Kamil fi ’l-Ta’rikh, vol. 10 (Beirut: Dar Sadir-Dar Beirut, 1966/1386), 291.
37. Ibid., 301.
38. Dorothea Krawulsky, ed. and tr., Briefe und Reden des Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Gazzali (Freiburg im Briesgau: Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 1971), 65. I am most grateful to Professor Kenneth Garden for this reference.
39. These points are discussed at length with corroborating evidence in Bulliet, View from the Edge, ch. 8–9.
40. Printed chintzes and calicos rather than plain cloth have been the hallmark of Iranian cotton production during the past three centuries. See Woven from the Soul, Spun from the Heart, 29, 146–50.
41. André Miquel, La géographie humaine du monde musulman jusqu’au milieu du 11e siècle, vol. 1 (Paris: Mouton, 1967–1988).
42. Hamd-Allah Mustawfi , The Geographical Part of the Nuzhat-al-Qulub, G. Le Strange, tr. (London: Luzac & Co., 1919).
43. Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo, Narrative of the Embassy of Ruy Gonzalez de Clavijo to the Court of Timour at Samarcand, A.D., 1403–6, Clements R. Markham, tr. (London: Hakluyt Society, 1859).
44. Daniel Martin Varisco, Medieval Agriculture and Islamic Science: The Almanac of a Yemeni Sultan (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1994), 202.
45. For an analysis of the depressive effect of low temperatures on the germination of winter wheat see Burhan Ozkan and Handan Akcaoz, “Impacts of Climate Factors on Yields for Selected Crops in Southern Turkey,” Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, 7 (2002): 367–80. I am greateful to Professor Sam White for bringing this article to my attention.
46. Bulliet, View from the Edge, ch. 8.
47. Two abbreviated manuscripts of this work are contained in Richard N. Frye, Histories of Nishapur.
48. Cf. table 1.1 and accompanying discussion in chapter 1.
49. Beyhaqi, vol. 1, 246–47.
50. ʿAbd al-Karim al-Samʿani, Adab al-imlaʾ waʾl-istimlaʾ Max Weisweiler, tr. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1952), 30.
51. Bulliet,Conversion, ch. 5.
52. Beyhaqi, vol. 1, 162.
CHAPTER 4. OF TURKS AND CAMELS
1. Wilhelm Barthold , Turkestan Down to the Mongol Invasion, 3e (London: Luzac & Co., 1968), 285.
2. Naseem Ahmad, Religion and Politics in Central Asia Under the Saljuqs (Srinagar: Sahil Publications, 2003), 49. The word cattle obviously follows the British usage, meaning hoofed livestock in general.
3. Ibid.
4. Carter Vaughn Findley, The Turks in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 68
5. Anne K. S. Lambton, “Aspects of Saljuq-Ghuzz Settlement in Persia,” in Islamic Civilization, 950–1150, D. H. Richards, ed. (Oxford: Cassirer, 1973), 111.
6. For a discussion of horse domestication see Richard W. Bulliet, Hunters, Herders, and Hamburgers (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), ch. 5–7.
7. An extensive collection of photographs of this part of Iran that is currently occupied in part by Turkoman nomads is available on-line at: www.turkmensahra.com
8. Wilhelm Barthold, An Historical Geography of Iran, Svat Soucek, tr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 88.
9. Robert A. Lewis, “Early Irrigation in West Turkestan,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 56/3 (September, 1966): 472.
10. Bayhaqi, vol. 2, 133.
11. Jean Aubin has shown that when true horse nomads traversed the area in Mongol and Timurid times they preferred east–west routes that followed the valley between the Binalud and Kopet Dagh. The comparatively flat east–west route that ran south of the Binalud had long been preferred by Silk Road caravaneers, with their enormous strings of camels. But it was too arid for the Mongol horse herds. The sources do not even mention the third alternative from Nasa to Abivard to Sarakhs. (“Réseau pastoral et réseau caravanier. Les grand’routes du Khurassan à l’époque mongole,” Hautes Études Islamiques et Orientales d’Histoire Comparée, IV Le Monde Iranien et l’Islam [Paris: Librairie Minard, 1971], 105–30.)
12. Barthold, Historical Geography, 88.
13. Hudud al-ʿAlam “The Regions of the World”: A Persian Geography, V. Minorsky, tr. (London: Luzac & Co., 1937), 104.
14. Hudud al-ʿAlam, 133–34.
15. Ibid.
16. Richard W. Bulliet, The Camel and the Wheel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975).
17. The websites are www.ansi.okstate.edu/breeds/other/camel/arvana/ and www.turkmens.com/Turkmenistan.html. The scientific source, which I have not been able to consult, is N. G. Dmitriev and L. K. Ernst, Animal Genetic Resources of the USSR, Food and Agriculture Organization Animal Production and Health Paper No. 65, 1985. In addition to this apparently scientific finding, a nineteenth-century European traveler to the city of Khiva in Khwarazm noted that “the dromedaries, both nar and irkek breeds, are sensitive to cold.” (“Tartarie,” in Louis Dubeux and V. Valmont, Tartarie, Beloutchistan, Boutan et Népal [Paris: Didot Frères, 1848], 62.) In modern Turkmen usage, the word nar means the same thing as bukht, a hybrid. Irkek, however, should denote a two-humped camel, not a dromedary (one-humped camel). Regardless of this terminological confusion, however, the report confirms the susceptibility of camels to cold.
18. ʿAmr b. Bahr al-Jahiz, Kitab al-Hayawan (Beirut: Dar Ihyaʾal-Turath al-ʿArabi, [nd]), vol. 7, 135.
19. Ibid., vol. 3, 434. I mistranslated this passage in The Camel and the Wheel.
20. Ahmad ibn Fadlan, Risalat Ibn Fadlan fi wasf al-rihla ila bilad al-Turk wa’l-Khazar wa’l-Rus wa’l-Saqaliba (Damascus: Matbuʿat al-Majmaʿal-ʿIlmi al-ʿArabi, 1959/1379), 83.
21. “Court Art of Sogdian Samarqand in the 7th century ad: Some remarks to an old problem,” A web publication by Markus Mode, 2002 ( www.orientarch.uni-halle.de/ca/afras/index.htm).
22. A. Gubaev, “Raskopki Zamka Ak-depe,” in B. A. Rybakov, Arkheologischeskie Otkrytiya 1971 goda (Moscow, 1972),536–37.
23. The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 3(1) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 254–55, pl. 24:14–15.
24. Ahmad al-Yaʿqubi, Kitab al-Buldan, de Goeje, ed. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1892), 277.
25. The cross-breeding of camels and the relevant sources are extensively discussed in Bulliet, Camel, chap. 6. The Arabic column in the accompanying table of defi nitions is incomplete on the meaning of bukht.
26. Al-Jahiz, vol. 1, 138.
27. Bulliet, Camel, 144–45.
28. Ibn Fadlan, Risalat, 86.
29. Ibn Hawqal, Configuration, 436. The translators mistakenly render bukht as “Bactrian,” but the context makes the proper identification clear.
30. Hudud al-ʿAlam, 108.
31. Bayhaqi, vol. 2, 95.
32. Bayhaqi, vol. 2, 133.
33. Bayhaqi, vol. 2, 131.
34. Bayhaqi, vol. 2, 396.
35. Ibn Hawqal, Configuration, 413.
36. Professor Karen Pinto has greatly informed my understanding of Islamic cartographic issues, especially regarding the placement of the Oghuz.
37. Among important recent works see Jürgen Paul, Herrscher, Gemeinwesen, Vermittler: Ostiran und Transoxanien in vormongolischer Zeit (Beirut: Franz Steiner Verlag Stuttgart, 1996); and Omid Safi, The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam: Negotiating Ideology and Religious Inquiry (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).
38. Table 4.1 was compiled from Abu al-Fath ʿAbd al-Hayy Ibn al-ʿImad, Shadharat al-dhahab fi akhbar man dhahab, 8 v. (Cairo: Maktaba al-Qudsi, 1931–32). The work used to test the reliability of the findings was Abu ʿAbd Allah Muhammad al-Dhahabi, Kitab al-ʿibar fi khabar man ghabar, ed. Salah al-Din Munajjid and Fuʾad Sayyid, 5 vols. (Kuwait: Office of Printing and Publication, 1960–66). For further discussion see Bulliet, Conversion, ch. 2.
39. Bulliet, Patricians, ch. 5–6; Bulliet, View from the Edge, ch. 8–9.
40. Bulliet, Patricians, Part II; Bulliet, View from the Edge, ch. 9.
41. A. Kazhdan and Ann Wharton Epstein, Change in Byzantine Culture in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 26. The authors express some reservations about the accuracy of this general view, but the evidence they cite to the contrary comes from Greece and Macedonia rather than from eastern Anatolia, where the impact of the Siberian High would have been most strongly felt.
42. Famines affected Kievan Russia in 1024/394, 1071/463, and 1092/484. How these may have correlated with weather events in Iran remains to be researched. Janet Martin, Medieval Russia 980–1584 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 60.
43. See, for example, Safi, Politics of Knowledge, ch. 2.
44. Discussions of what numismatists call the “silver famine” concentrate on the disappearance of silver coins in the eleventh/fifth century, but the debasing of silver dirhams in the tenth/fourth century was remarked on at the time. Ibn Fadlan in 921/308 comments disparagingly on the adulteration of dirhams in Bukhara and Khwarazm. (Risalat, 79, 82).
45. George C. Miles, The Numismatic History of Rayy (New York: The American Numismatic Society, 1938). Miles added many specimens to this corpus before his death in 1975, but a second edition of his book has never been published. Nevertheless, it is unlikely that the added coins substantially alter the ratios of gold and silver.
46. Lambton, “Aspects,” discusses at length the wider migrations of the Oghuz in Iran.
47. Bulliet, Camel, 231–34.
CHAPTER 5. A MOMENT IN WORLD HISTORY
1. Richard N. Frye, The Golden Age of Persia: The Arabs in the East (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1975).
2. The most complete coverage, dynasty by dynasty, is in Richard N. Frye, ed., The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 4, From the Arab Invasion to the Saljuqs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
3. For recent one-volume examples see Elton Daniel, The History of Iran (Westport: The Greenwood Press, 2000); Gene R. Garthwaite, The Persians (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2005); and Michael Axworthy, A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
4. Hamza al-Sahmi, Taʾrikh Jurjan aw kitab maʿrifaʿulamaʾ ahl Jurjan (Hyderabad: Osmania Oriental Publications Bureau, 1967), 134–35.
5. Richard W. Bulliet, Islam: The View from the Edge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 136–37.
6. Anne K. S. Lambton, “Aspects of Saljuq-Ghuzz Settlement in Persia,” in Islamic Civilization, 950–1150, D. H. Richards, ed. (Oxford: Cassirer, 1973), 116.