The Daylamīs were the most conspicuous of the indigenous peoples of eastern and central Iran to take advantage of the weakening of ‘Abbasid government, but they were not the only ones. The Kurds, a people with their own language and culture distinct from Arabs and Persians, had inhabited much of the area of the Zagros Mountains and the uplands to the north of Mosul for many centuries before the coming of Islam. Like the Daylamīs, however, they had played only a marginal part in the politics of the Islamic state until the fourth/tenth century, being mentioned as rebels or mercenaries in the chronicles. The failure of central government, coinciding with the spread of Islam among the Kurdish tribes, however, allowed the emergence of a number of independent Kurdish principalities alongside of, and sometimes in competition with, the Daylamite ones. This Kurdish efflorescence survived until the coming of the Ghuzz Turkmen in the 430s/1040s, who sought to take over their pastures and effectively squeezed them out of many of their traditional areas.
In the mid-fourth/tenth century, the Kurds were distributed all along the Zagros chain from Fārs in the south to Āzarbayjān and the Araxes river in the north. They were also influential in southeastern Anatolia as far west as Āmid, and we even hear of Kurdish leaders in the mountains of northern Syria at the time of the Hamdanids. The geographer Ibn Ḥawqal describes the Kurds as the bedouin of Iran, and it would appear that they were largely sheep-rearing transhumants who exploited the pastures of the high Zagros in the summer and the lowland plains of eastern Iraq in the winter. They must have lived very much like their Turkish successors in the southern Zagros, the Qashqā’ī and the Bakhtiyārī, do today, each group occupying a summer pasturage and a winter area and the route through the mountains connecting them. The Hadhbānī Kurds, one of the most powerful tribes in the period, are described as spending the summer in Āzarbayjān around the area of Salmās, northeast of Lake Urmiyya, and the winter on the plains along the Greater and Lesser Zāb rivers east of Mosul. Interestingly, the winter pastures of the Hadhbānī Kurds were the same as the summer pastures of the Shaybānī Arabs, who would move in from the desert to be near the permanent water supply provided by the rivers, a clear example of the complementary role of these two pastoral peoples. Not all Kurds, however, were transhumant shepherds, and their leaders often seem to have maintained fortresses along the migration routes where their valuables were kept and where they could take refuge at the time of danger. There were Kurdish populations in many of the small towns of the mountain area like Shahrazūr and Salmās, and there were also Kurds who lived in villages. The Marwanid rulers of Mayyāfāriqīn came from a family who were headmen of a village near Sī‘ird (modern Siirt).
The Kurdish dynasties which emerged in the second half of the fourth/tenth century, the Hasanuyids and ‘Annazids of the central Zagros, the Rawwadids and Shaddadids of Āzarbayjān and the Marwanids of southeastern Anatolia, based their power on the military prowess of the Kurdish tribesmen. They never needed to employ Turkish ghilmān, as the Buyids did, because they provided mounted soldiers from their own ranks. They also changed the political geography of the area: the ‘Abbasid, Buyid and Hamdanid regimes were all based in cities and their surrounding agricultural land. By contrast, the power of the Kurdish rulers, with the exception of the Shaddadids, was based on their control of the transhumance routes, and it was the valleys of the Zagros and anti-Taurus which formed the nucleus of these states, not because they were rich and fertile and produced high tax yields, but because it was there that the tribesmen passed on their biannual migrations. In the Zagros, the power of the chiefs was based in fortresses which commanded the routes and in which they kept their treasure, not in the major towns. The relationship of the Hasanuyids with the town of Hamadhān, like the relationship of the Marwanids with Āmid or the Shaddadids with Dwin and Ganja, was based on indirect influence rather than direct control; the Shaddadids and the Marwanids especially established close links with local, non-Kurdish urban élites. The administration of the Kurdish states tended to be very basic; the Marwanids employed wazīrs but there is no indication that the other groups employed any bureaucrats at all: the cities paid an agreed tribute and for the rest, the traditional mechanisms of tribal authority were sufficient. The Ḥimāya (protection agreement) was the underlying basis of government.
There were large numbers of Kurds in the province of Fārs, but, perhaps because Fārs was such an important Buyid base, they seem to have played little part in politics before the breakdown of government at the end of Abū Kālījār’s reign. Further north, however, Kurdish principalities came to dominate the most important of all the routes through the Zagros, the road from Hamadhān to Ḥulwān, the great road between Khurāsān and Baghdad which had been so important in ‘Abbasid history. The first of these states to achieve independence was based in the area around Qarmīsīn (Kirmānshāh). From 350/961, the chief of the Barzikānī Kurds of this area was Ḥasanūya b. al-Ḥusayn. He consolidated his position by maintaining close relations with the Buyids of Rayy, helping them against the Samanid threat from the east. Soon, he began to use his position to encroach on the settled areas around Hamadhān and demand protection money from the people of the area, and when the governor tried to prevent him, Ḥasanūya used force to intimidate him. Rukn al-Dawla’s veteran wazīr Ibn al-‘Amīd led an army to crush him, but in 360/970 during the course of the campaign, the wazīr died and his son was prepared to make peace, allowing Ḥasanūya virtual independence in return for a tribute of 50,000 dīnārs a year. Rukn al-Dawla seems to have been reluctant to take strong measures against his ally, and Ḥasanūya’s power in the area was effectively unchallenged until his death in 369/979 in a fortress at Sarmāj, near the celebrated “Gates of Asia” at Bīsitūn on the road from Iraq to Iran as it passed through the mountains.
Ḥasanūya’s numerous sons began to dispute his inheritance, some looking for support from Fakhr al-Dawla in Rayy, others from ‘Aḍud al-Dawla, now firmly in control in Baghdad. ‘Aḍud al-Dawla, pursuing his centralizing policies here as elsewhere, sought to use the dispute to assert his control in the area. He besieged and took the castle at Sarmāj and established his protégé, Badr b. Ḥasanūya, in the inheritance at the expense of his brothers, most of whom were killed. The death of his patron in 372/983 left Badr in authority in the district, and he reigned virtually unchallenged until his death in 405/1014. Like ‘Aḍud al-Dawla, he is held up by the chroniclers as a model ruler, particularly in his defence of the settled cultivators against his own nomad supporters, while he sought to increase the prosperity of his followers by opening a market in Hamadhān, the main regional centre, whose profits, estimated at 1.2 million dirhams per year, would pass to him. Badr was even in a position to finance the Ḥajj from Iraq and pay for its protection on the pilgrimage road, a role which brought him considerable prestige and which was taken over after his death by the great Maḥmūd of Ghazna. In political terms, this power enabled him to play an important part in the politics of the Buyid kingdom of Rayy, especially after the death of Fakhr al-Dawla in 387/997 (see above, p. 244). His power remained firmly based on his tribal following and his mountain castles. He was influential in Hamadhān, where he kept an agent but never ruled the city directly. At Rayy, he could provide valuable support for any of the factions struggling to control the young Buyid prince, Majd al-Dawla, and was able to send 3,000 horsemen to support Ibrāhīm al-Ḍabbī when he sought reinstatement as wazīr in 392/1002, but typically, he exercised his power at a distance, not going to Rayy or playing any part in court life himself. His career illustrates both the opportunities open to an able and astute tribal leader and the limitations on his power. Badr was so successful because he never lost the support of his Kurdish followers or distanced himself from them to live in some urban centre.
The end of his life was marred by family strife and the emergence of a rival Kurdish power in the area, the ‘Annazids. The ‘Annazids were the leading clan of the Shādhinjān Kurds. They occupied lands farther down the road to Baghdad than the Barzikānīs who supported Badr, having their territories around Ḥulwān and Shahrazūr. The ‘Annazids were bitter rivals of the Barzikānīs, probably because of disputed grazing rights in the Zagros Mountains. As early as 343/954, we hear of one Abū’l-Shawk and his Shādhinjānī followers kidnapping Buyid government envoys from their base at Ḥulwān. At this time, they were suppressed by Mu‘izz al-Dawla’s general Sabuktakīn but they clearly remained powerful in the Ḥulwān area. Later, weaker Buyid governments were obliged to look to the Kurds for allies, and Bahā’ al-Dawla (in Baghdad from 379/989) favoured the ‘Annazid chief Abū’l-Fath. Muḥammad b. ‘Annāz, who emerged as the ruler of Ḥulwān, which he was given as an iqṭā‘ with government support from 381/991. While Badr and his Barzikānī followers looked to Rayy and Hamadhān, the ‘Annazids and their Shādhinjānī tribesmen were patronized by the Buyid authorities in Baghdad. As so often, local rulers were closely involved, for better or for worse, in rivalries between the various centres of Buyid power. When Bahā’ al-Dawla took up residence in Shīrāz, Abu’l-Fath. remained on good terms with the governor he’d left behind in Baghdad, Abū Ja‘far al-Ḥajjāj, joining him in campaigns against the ‘Uqaylids. On the appointment of Ibn Ustādh-hurmuz to Baghdad in 392/1002, al-Ḥajjāj attempted to rally his friends to resist his successor, and Abū’l-Fath. joined him with both Kurdish and Shaybānī Arab followers. In the battle which ensued against the Mazyadid supporters of Ibn Ustādh-hurmuz, Abū’l-Fath. was deserted by the Shaybān and many Kurds but stood firm with 200 Shādhinjānī horsemen. After this reverse, he was soon won over by the new governor and the traditionally close relations between the ‘Annazids and the Baghdad authorities were resumed. This alliance was to prove especially useful in 397/1006 when Badr dislodged Abū’l-Fath. from Ḥulwān and he was given both shelter and support in Baghdad.
Abū’l-Fath. died in 401/1010 and was succeeded by his son Abū’l-Shawk, under whom the power of the family reached its apogee. The success of the ‘Annazids was largely due to the disasters which affected their main rival, Badr b. Ḥasanūya. Badr had quarrelled with his eldest son Hilāl and was only able to defeat him by calling on the support of the Buyid authorities in Hamadhān. He himself died in 405/1014, but his grandson Ṭāhir b. Hilāl, again with the support of the Hamadhān Buyids, attempted to regain his grandfather’s position against the ‘Annazids, who had taken advantage of the confusion to take the Barzikānī centre at Qarmīsīn. In the end, it was only the treacherous murder of Ṭāhir that saved the ‘Annazid. Shortly afterwards, Shams al-Dawla, the Buyid ruler of Hamadhān, was defeated in person by Abū’l-Shawk. The result of the murder of Ṭāhir and the defeat of Shams al-Dawla was that the ‘Annazids were now supreme in the central Zagros area, members of the ruling clan controlling not only Ḥulwān and Shahrazūr on the edge of the Iraqi plain but upland areas such as Dīnawar and, sometimes, Qarmīsīn. The Buyids of Baghdad were much too feeble to offer any serious challenge, while the Kakuyids who established themselves in Hamadhān were content to remain as neighbours.
As family feuds had been the undoing of Badr b. Ḥasanūya, so they were to be of the ‘Annazids. The expansion of their territories meant that members of the family had acquired their own fortresses and interests. In 431/1040, a bitter dispute broke out between Abū’l-Shawk’s son, called Abū’l-Fath. like his grandfather, and the chief’s brother, Muhalhil. Once again, internal divisions led to outside intervention, Muhalhil turning to the Kakuyid ‘Alā’ al-Dawla, who took Dīnawar and Qarmīsīn, while Abū’l-Shawk appealed without much success to the feeble Jalāl al-Dawla of Baghdad. Some members of the family developed ties with other Kurdish groups, further dividing the clan. The ‘Annazids developed no system of government or central control – no wazīrs are mentioned – and the expansion of the area under their control led inevitably to disintegration. It was thus a divided and weakened Kurdish tribe which faced the onslaught of the Turkmen from 437/1045 onwards, Abū’l-Shawk taking refuge in his fortresses while they ravaged his lands. Some members of the family, like Muhalhil, looked to the Seljuks as allies. The catastrophe of the mid-fifth/eleventh century was more than the fall of a dynasty; the Turkmen soon usurped the position of the Kurds, and never again was there to be an important Kurdish dynasty in the central Zagros area. None of the ‘Annazids had proved as great a ruler as Badr b. ḥasanūya, but they had defended the position of their family and tribe in an uncertain and difficult time.
Farther north, the Kurds played an important part in the history of the rich and variegated province of Āzarbayjān. The geography of the area is confused, with towns and fertile plains being separated by areas of high mountains and steppe lands, of great importance since they offer reliable and extensive summer grazing, much sought after in the Middle East. The Islamic conquest seems to have made little impact on the area besides the establishment of a few garrison towns, notably the provincial capital at Ardabīl. In early ‘Abbasid times, there was some Arab immigration and settlement in towns such as Tabrīz and Marand, but the settlers’ numbers seem to have been limited and they were probably absorbed by the local population. By the fourth/tenth century, there is no record of any significant Arab presence. Until the time of the rebellion of Bābak (see above, p. 164), essentially a protest against outsiders coming into the province, most of the area seems to have been inhabited by indigenous cultivators speaking a variety of different languages. The systematic and drawn-out campaigns of al-Afshīn (220–222/835–837) crushed the local resistance. The defeat of Bābak does not seem to have resulted in any large-scale settlement of outsiders, but al-Afshīn probably left some forces in the area, since during the anarchy at Sāmarrā a leader from his home country of Ushrūsana, called Abū’l-Sāj Dīwdād, took over the province. On his death in 279/892, he was succeeded by two of his sons, in turn: Muḥammad, who was appointed by the ‘Abbasid Caliph al-Mu‘tamid to rule Āzarbayjān and took the title of al-Afshīn (the hereditary title of the princes of Ushrūsanā’), and then, from 288/901 Yūsuf. At the beginning of al-Muqtadir’s reign (295/908), the wazīr, Ibn al-Furāt, attempted to regularize the position, offering Yūsuf b. Abī’l-Sāj complete control in Āzarbayjān and Armenia in exchange for a fairly modest tribute of 120,000 dīnārs per year.
Ibn Abī’l-Sāj was, however, an ambitious man, anxious to play a part in the politics of the caliphate. He was a warlord, pure and simple. His polity had no ethnic or ideological foundations. His project was based on securing enough resources to pay a mercenary army to defend it and when Ibn Abī’l-Sāj perished, his enterprise perished with him. The Christian princes of Armenia to the west were the victims of his aggression, and he cast covetous eyes on the province of Rayy to the east as well, claiming (falsely, it would appear) that the wazīr ‘Alī b. ‘Īsā had assigned it to him. He even offered to pay 700,000 dīnārs a year for this expanded dominion, but the caliph refused to accept this and a military expedition was sent under Mu’nis, which led eventually in 307/919 to his capture and removal to Baghdad. There, his followers seem to have been given jobs, since from that time onwards, we find his nephew acting to maintain law and order in Baghdad and a new regiment of Sājī troops being stationed in the capital, while in Āzarbayjān a follower of his called Sabuk took over the administration. At the court of the caliph, pro- and anti-Sajid groups emerged in the administration among those who felt that the service of so powerful a figure should be used to serve the government and those who felt he should be crushed. After three years of detention, he was allowed to return to Āzarbayjān, while the Sajid troops became an integral part of the Baghdad army. Four years later in 314/926, the caliphate was faced by a crisis in the shape of the attacks of the Qarāmiṭa on Iraq, attacks which the existing army seemed quite unable to deal with. In this extremity, the wazīr al-Khaṣībī persuaded Ibn Abī’l-Sāj to come to Iraq, not this time as a prisoner but as a much needed ally. Furthermore, he was given very extensive financial privileges, including the revenues of all the eastern provinces except Iṣfahān and Fārs, which were to be assigned to him to pay his army, a degree of financial control which even the most prominent of the Baghdad generals, Mu’nis, had never been allowed.
In the event, the Sajid troops, used to fighting in the mountainous terrain of their native Āzarbayjān, were unable to face the Qarāmiṭa along the fringes of the desert. Ibn Abī’l-Sāj was captured and, after a short captivity which he endured with calmness and dignity, was executed. His career illustrates a stage in the disintegration of the caliphate. While his power was based on the revenues of Āzarbayjān and the soldiers he could raise there, he was, like the Tahirids, Ibn Ṭūlūn and Nāṣir al-Dawla the Hamdanid, closely involved in the politics of the caliphate. To think of him as an independent ruler is misleading; like many of his contemporaries, he was very much a product of ‘Abbasid administration, rather than a local man with local roots. In the next generation, the people who tried to rule Āzarbayjān were all native to the province and few of them made any effort to play a role beyond its confines.
The death of Ibn Abi’l-Sāj left something of a power vacuum in the province, especially as so many of his supporters had gone to join the Sajid army in Iraq. In these circumstances, two different groups attempted to dominate the province – the Kurds and the Daylamites. The Kurds seem to have predominated in the west of the province, where the Hadhbānī tribe had their summer pastures, while the Daylamites’ strongholds were in the east in the mountains which bordered the southwestern corner of the Caspian Sea. However, there does not seem to have been any hard and fast frontier between the two – it was probably that each group occupied a different environment, the Daylamites farming land and the Kurds (like the transhumant Shahsevan nomads of present-day Āzarbayjān) occupying pastoral lands. There were substantial cities in the province, notably Ardabīl, the capital, and Marāgha, but we know little of their inhabitants, beyond the fact that they usually seem to have preferred Kurdish to Daylamite rule.
To the west of Āzarbayjān lay Armenia. Here, the bulk of the local chiefs were Christian, notably the Bagratids in the north around Ani and the Ardzrouni rulers of Vaspurakan around Lake Van to the south. The Armenians were a settled agricultural people determined to maintain their independence. There were also Muslims in Armenia; these mostly seem to have been of Arab origin, notably from members of the Sulaym tribe, whose members had settled soon after the Islamic conquest and whose leaders had supplied numerous governors for the area. By the fourth/tenth century, they were confined to the amirate of Manzikert, ruled by a Sulamī dynasty, and the districts along the northern shores of Lake Van, an area with a temperate winter climate. Farther north, again in a temperate zone, the Araxes valley, lay the capital of Muslim Armenia, Dabīl or Dwin. This was a town of mostly Christian population but ruled over by Muslim amīrs of Arab or Kurdish extraction.
This ethnic and linguistic diversity made it very difficult for the leader of any one group to establish control over the whole area and the confused politics of the period reflect this problem. The period which followed the death of Ibn Abi’l-Sāj saw a prolonged struggle between the Kurdish leader Daysam and the Daylamite Marzbān b. Musāfir. Daysam had been a follower of Ibn Abi’l-Sāj and had played an active part in the last Khārijī revolts in northern Iraq. These Iraqi connections suggest that he enjoyed the support of the Hadhbānī tribe, which wintered in Iraq. He was also supported by the Hamdanids of Mosul and had contacts in Vaspurakan, where Kurds and Armenians coexisted, providing a place of refuge.
Despite Daylamite challenges, Daysam managed to retain control of the province until he made a common but fatal error: he sought to establish his supremacy over other Kurdish leaders by recruiting Daylamites to his army and favouring them above his own people. The Kurds resented this, while many Daylamites remained unhappy under Kurdish rule. Leadership of the Daylamites’ cause was assumed by Marzbān b. Muḥammad b. Musāfir. He came from the family of the Daylamite princes of Ṭārum, who held castles on the borders between Daylam and Āzarbayjān. The family was unconnected with their more successful fellow-countrymen, the Buyid family, with whom their relations were usually bad. Marzbān was a man of ambition, daring and energy and led a Daylamite army against Daysam. In the crucial battle (330/941), ethnic solidarity prevailed and Daysam’s Daylamite troops suddenly switched sides, forcing him to flee despite the support of the townspeople of Ardabīl and Tabrīz. He went first to the Armenian ruler of Vaspurakan and then to Mosul, where he attempted to find support from the Hamdanids. After this defeat, however, Daysam was effectively finished as a leader of the Kurds. For the next generation, Āzarbayjān was dominated by the Daylamites, and when the Kurds did recover the leadership, it was under a new chief.
Marzbān now consolidated his rule; while the élite of his army were Daylamites, he recruited large numbers of Kurds as well. His newly won position was threatened by outsiders. In 333/945, Russian raiders sailed up the Kūr river from the Caspian and sacked the Muslim city of Bardha’a, where Marzbān’s representative and the garrison of 3,000 Daylamites were killed. As if this were not enough, he was also threatened by the Hadhbānī Kurds, who, with Hamdanid support, attacked the province from the southwest. Despite this war on two fronts, both enemies were driven out, the Russians by dysentery, the Kurds by thick snow, and Marzbān’s authority was restored and enhanced. Even after a temporary reverse following an unsuccessful attack on Rayy in 337/948, Marzbān was stronger than any ruler of Āzarbayjān since Yūsuf b. Abī’l-Sāj and was receiving tribute from numerous princes of the area, both Muslim (like Muḥammad b. Aḥmad, the ruler of Shīrvān and Abū’l-Hayjā’ al-Rawwādī of Āhar) and Christian (like the Bagratids of Armenia and the rulers of Vaspurakan).
Marzbān’s death in 346/957 opened the door to the family disputes which were typical of Daylamite rule. After much confused fighting, the dead ruler’s brother, Vahsūdhān, kept the ancestral lands of the family around Ṭārum in eastern Āzarbayjān, while Marzbān’s son, Ibrāhīm, supported by the Buyid Rukn al-Dawla of Rayy, ruled the rest of the province. He never enjoyed the ascendancy his father had had over the local princes, although he had agreements with the rulers of Shīrvān and Ganja, and his men raided as far as Bāb al-Abwāb. His authority was further weakened after the death of his patron Rukn al-Dawla of Rayy in 366/976. On his death in 373/983, power in Āzarbayjān passed out of Daylamite hands altogether, although Vahsūdhān and his family continued to hold Ṭārum until well into the next century.
Kurdish dominance in the area was reestablished under the leadership of the Rawwādī family. The origins of this clan are something of a mystery and the period of their rise to power, the later fourth/tenth century in Āzarbayjān, is extremely badly recorded. In the early ‘Abbasid period, an Azdī Arab family called the Banū Rawwād is found among the colonists who settled the towns of Āzarbayjān, but it is not clear that there was any connection between them and the later Kurdish dynasty of the same name. It has been plausibly suggested that the Rawwadids were in fact the leading family of the Hadhbānī Kurds and that they are to be identified with the Rawwādīs after whom was named the town of Rawanduz (fortress of the Rawand), which dominates the route between upland Āzarbayjān and the plains of northern Iraq, where the Hadhbānīs wintered. Like the Hasanuyids farther south, their power was based on the leadership of a Kurdish tribal group and the control of the transhumance routes. The Rawwādīs are first heard of in the Tabrīz–Marāgha area, where the Hadhbānīs had their summer pastures, but by the time of Marzbān’s death in 346/957, we find Abu’l-Hayjā’ al-Rawwādī among his vassals in the area of Āhar to the west of the provincial capital at Ardabīl. Taking advantage of the weakening of Ibrāhīm b. Marzbān’s power and his death in 373/983, the Rawwādīs took over central Āzarbayjān. The heyday of the dynasty seems to have been in the fifth/eleventh century under the rule of Vahsūdhān b. Mamlān (416–451/1025–1059), but the source material is very scanty and we know little of the details.
This Kurdish ascendancy was soon threatened, as elsewhere in the Zagros and southern Anatolia, by the arrival of the Ghuzz Turkmen tribes. As early as 420/1029, these pasture-hungry nomads had reached Marāgha and killed a number of Kurds. Thereafter, the pressure from Turkish tribes was almost continuous. The Turks were much more of a threat to the Kurds than were the Kurds’ traditional rivals, the Daylamites and Armenians, who, being settled farmers, could coexist with transhumant pastoralists like the Kurds; clearly, there were sometimes clashes of interests, but these could be settled. The Turks, however, were sheep-rearing nomads, in direct competition for the rich summer grazing of upland Āzarbayjān, and the days of Kurdish dominance in the Zagros were numbered.
Just as the Kurds were threatened by the Turks, so the Christian Armenian principalities were threatened in the first half of the eleventh century by the expansionist policies of the Byzantine emperors. Gradually, the little principalities which had formed a buffer between Christian and Muslim empires since the eighth century were absorbed, and in some cases, the population was moved farther west in Anatolia. In 1021, Vaspurakan had lost its independence, and in 1045, Ani, ancient seat of the great Bagratid family, was also taken over. In the fourth/tenth century, Āzarbayjān and Armenia were divided into a mosaic of small dominions, each ruled by groups of local origin, Armenian, Daylamite or Kurdish. The fifth/eleventh century saw the end of this period of local autonomy and the whole area became a battleground between two outside powers, the Turks and the Byzantines, with the unfortunate local inhabitants, caught in the middle, being the main sufferers.
To the north of Āzarbayjān proper, across the Kūr river, there was a group of small principalities which maintained their independence. In the low-lying areas along the Caspian coasts, like Shīrvān and Bāb al-Abwāb, these were ruled by Muslim dynasties but farther into the mountains the people were either Christian, like the Georgians, or pagan, like the rulers of a number of small states in the northern Caucasus, whose mythical wealth the Arab geographers liked to describe. Sometimes faced with strong rulers of Āzarbayjān like Yūsuf b. Abī’l-Sāj and Marzbān, they were obliged to pay tribute, but these powers always proved ephemeral, and the principalities soon recovered their autonomy. Among these principalities was the town of Ganja, ruled for many years by a Kurdish dynasty called the Shaddadids. Thanks to the lucky survival of sources and the work of Minorsky, we know more about this state than most others, and it is worth discussing its history in some detail, for it is a microcosm of the history of the whole area and provides insight into the political society of the time, the competing claims and interests of nomad, peasant and city dweller, Christian and Muslim, Kurd and Armenian.
Muḥammad b. Shaddād emerged as a tribal leader of consequence in c. 340/951, during a disturbed period of Marzbān’s reign. He, his family and his clan were welcomed by the people of the city of Dwin to protect them – in the absence of any central authority – from the depredations of the Daylamite soldiery and the Armenians of the highlands, who almost surrounded the town; once again, the city people seem to have preferred Kurdish protectors to any others. In the absence of his father, Ibrāhīm b. Marzbān tried to subdue the town, first by encouraging the Armenians and others to attack it and then by coming from the capital at Ardabīl in person. But all this was to no avail and Muḥammad established himself in the role not so much of ruler, but of guardian of the city. He built quarters for himself and his tribesmen outside the city walls. In 343/954, this period of prosperity came to an end when Marzbān himself was able to turn his attention to Dwin. Muḥammad was now betrayed by the Daylamī garrison of the citadel, who went over to the attacker, and then by the townspeople anxious for peace. He and his family retired to the Armenian principality of Vaspurakan around Lake Van, where Kurds and Armenians seem to have coexisted quite happily. From here, he tried to gain support from the Byzantine authorities but without effect, and he died shortly afterwards in 344/955.
Muḥammad’s sons, ‘Alī Lashkarī and Marzbān (not to be confused with the Daylamī leader of the same name), were content to remain as leaders of their small tribe in Vaspurakan, but the third son, al-Faḍl, set off with a small band of followers to fight the infidels on the Caucasus frontier. On his way, he passed by the city of Ganja, then ruled by the Daylamīs; here, he was invited to stay, as his father had been at Dwin, to protect the city from brigands in return for a share of the revenues (359/969). From here, he wrote to his elder brother, encouraging him to come and share in the good fortune. ‘Alī was reluctant, remembering how the townspeople of Dwin had betrayed his father, but al-Faḍl was insistent, saying that ‘Alī should not spend all his life serving people (the Armenian rulers of Vaspurakan) who were not only Christian unbelievers but, even worse, settled farmers, an interesting insight into the nomad scale of values. Eventually, ‘Alī, Marzbān and the rest of the tribe were induced to come to Ganja. Here in 360/970, they made a formal agreement with the ra’īs of the town, Yūsuf al-Qazzāz, a silk merchant judging from his name. This agreement established the terms under which the Shaddadid Kurds would become guardians of the city. ‘Alī and his family fulfilled their side of the bargain, resisting the attempts of Ibrāhīm b. Marzbān to reconquer the city and driving the hated Daylamīs out of the area for good. From then onwards, the family was well established in the city, especially during the long and peaceful reign of al-Faḍl b. Muḥammad, who succeeded his brother in 375/985 and ruled until his death in 422/1031. He defended Ganja against the Georgians and other attackers and agreed to submit peacefully to the Seljuks when they arrived in the area.
What emerges from the story of the Shaddadids is a clear picture of the interaction of urban and nomad groups that must have characterized other areas we know less about. In the absence of a respected central power, the townspeople did not attempt to set up their own militias, as happened, for example, in northern Italy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, but turned to the local nomads who were employed as a standing defence force, their leaders being essentially condottieri. Perhaps the nearest equivalent is the relationship in medieval Russia between the urban leaders of Novgorod and the princes whom they employed to guard the city. The system suited both parties; the townspeople were protected and enjoyed a wide measure of urban autonomy without having to do military duties, for which they were both untrained and unwilling, while the nomads were given a secure income and status without abandoning their military traditions. It was a political arrangement which could work very well, as it seems to have done at Ganja, where for a century, townspeople and nomads worked together in harmony.
Farther west, in southern Anatolia, the Kurds were also increasingly politically active. After the breakdown of the Hamdanid regime in the later fourth/tenth century, the Kurds of this area too began to establish their own principalities. The founder of the main dynasty (known rather confusingly as the Marwanids, having nothing to do with the branch of the Umayyad family of the same name) was a chieftain called Bādh, who is described as a huge, ugly brigand and chief of the Ḥumaydī Kurds. Under Hamdanid rule, the Kurds of the mountains to the north of the Jazīra had been fairly peaceful, but the attempts of ‘Aḍud al-Dawla to establish firm central authority meant that they were bound to resist, probably because the government tried to control their access to winter pastures in the northern Jazīra; the Hamdanids had had a working relationship with the Kurds of this area, the Buyids had not. Bādh and his tribesmen began to defy the Buyids from 372/982 onwards. Like the Hamdanids before them, the Kurds were always able to retreat to their mountain fastnesses if the Turkish cavalry threatened to overwhelm them on the plains. In 374/984, the government of Ṣamṣām al-Dawla agreed that Bādh should control Diyār Bakr and the western part of the Ṭūr ‘Abdīn. His ambitions did not stop there, however, and in 379/990 he gathered an army of 5,000 Kurds to march on Mosul itself. This time, he was opposed by two surviving members of the Hamdanid family, Ibrāhīm and al-Ḥusayn, and they proceeded to recruit soldiers from one group whose livelihood was directly threatened by the activities of Bādh, the ‘Uqaylī and Numayrī Arab tribesmen of the Jazīra, whose pastures might be taken over by the Kurds. They were fewer in number than the Kurds but their horsemen were said to have been more mobile than their opponents and they were able to drive them from the open plains of the northern Jazīra. Bādh was killed during the flight but his sister’s son, al-Ḥasan b. Marwān, escaped to the mountains with 500 horsemen, where he was able to establish himself in the small city of Mayyāfāriqīn (modern Silvan).
Al-Ḥasan b. Marwān ruled from Mayyāfāriqīn for seven years, from 380 to 387 (990–997) and consolidated the hold of the dynasty over a considerable area of southeastern Anatolia. He took measures in 382/992–993 to defend Akhlāṭ and Manzikert from Byzantine attacks and thus extended his influence in the area to the north of Lake Van. He made a twenty-year truce with the Byzantines which effectively safeguarded the northern frontier of the state. But the centre of the principality remained Mayyāfāriqīn and Āmid, together with Arzan, a sort of family shrine where al-Ḥasan’s blind father Marwān lived on in retirement. He also had to come to terms with the people of the main town. The amīr suspected the inhabitants of Mayyāfāriqīn of favouring the Hamdanids and he took brutal measures against some of the leading citizens. The people of Āmid, however, were a more difficult proposition and they had an ally in Sharwa b. Mamma, the son of al-Ḥasan’s wazīr. When the amīr attempted to assert his authority in Āmid as he had done at the capital, a conspiracy of the leading citizens, headed by the qāḍī, succeeded in murdering him. Sharwa then secured the succession of al-Ḥasan’s brother Sa‘īd, who was granted the honorific tide of Mumahhid al-Dawla by the ‘Abbasid caliphate, the first member of the family to be so honoured. His authority was generally accepted except in Āmid. Here, the qāḍī Yūsuf b. Damna held out with the support of the leading citizens, and the amīr was forced to come to terms; Ibn Damna would rule the town in return for a payment of 200,000 dirhams to the amīr and the mention of his name in the khuṭba and on the coinage. As at Ganja, the power of the urban patriciate to negotiate on equal terms with would-be amīrs and organize their own affairs becomes apparent. Ibn Damna carried on independent correspondence with the Buyids, the Fatimids and even the Byzantine emperor, Basil II. The town also had its own ‘askar, or military force. Ibn Damna ruled Āmid for twenty-eight years, effectively independent from the Marwanid amīr in Mayyāfāriqīn, and it was remembered as a period of great prosperity in the history of the city.
In 401/1011, Sharwa was persuaded by a ghulām of his to arrange the assassination of the amīr and to assume power in his own name. This time, he was not as successful as before. Mayyāfāriqīn was taken over, but the governor of Arzan, where old, blind Marwān still lived, resisted. The leaders of the Kurdish tribes refused to accept the usurpation and turned to the dead ruler’s brother, Abū Naṣr, living in semi-exile in Sī‘ird in the extreme east of the Marwanid domains. Sharwa fortified himself in Mayyāfāriqīn, supported by the Georgian ghilmān he had recruited but opposed by many of the townspeople, who suspected him of wanting to turn the city over to the Byzantines. It was the shaykhs of the city who obliged him to surrender to Abū Naṣr, who had him executed.
The fall of Sharwa marked the beginning of the reign of the greatest ruler of the dynasty. For half a century (401–453/1011–1061), Abū Naṣr, who took the title of Naṣr al-Dawla, remained amīr. It was a golden age for Mayyāfāriqīn and the surrounding area. The Marwanid state extended as far as Akhlāt. and the Muslim areas to the north of Lake Van in the northeast, but the centre of their power lay on the routes from the Anatolian plateau to the plains of the Jazīra, at Mayyāfāriqīn in the centre, Arzan and Sī‘ird (which commanded the route to the Van area via Badlīs) to the east and the semi-independent city of Āmid to the west. Until the coming of the Ghuzz Turks in 433/1041–1042, there were no serious external threats to the state. The Byzantines were cautious and seem to have accepted the Marwanids, like the Hamdanids and the Mirdasids of Aleppo, as a buffer state between them and the wider Muslim world. Neither the Mirdasids nor the ‘Uqaylids of Mosul, both dynasties based on the bedouin Arab tribes of northern Syria and al-Jazīra, had any reason to invade the mountains to the north. The Marwanids usually acknowledged the sovereignty of the ‘Abbasid caliphate but maintained correspondence with the Fatimids as well, and neither of the rival caliphates sought to exert pressure on them.
The failure of Sharwa’s attempted coup and the accession of Naṣr al-Dawla had shown that the real power of the dynasty still lay with the Kurdish tribesmen, and apart from the Georgians recruited by Sharwa, there seems to have been no significant body of ghilmān. As usual in tribal states, the ruling kin remained very important, and Naṣr al-Dawla, like his brothers before him, took care to provide for members of his own family. The administration of the Marwanid domains was more developed than that of some other Kurdish principalities. As in the Buyid amirates, relations between the ruler and the local people were conducted by the wazīr. After the death of Sharwa, Naṣr al-Dawla attempted to do without a wazīr for two years, but his affairs became so disorganized that he had to recruit a new one. He turned not to one of his own subjects, but to an outsider from a family of professional bureaucrats, al-Ḥusayn b. ‘Alī al-Maghribī. His grandfather and father had been wazīrs to Sayf al-Dawla the Hamdanid, but his father ‘Alī abandoned Sa‘d al-Dawla, Sayf’s successor, for the lusher pastures of the Fatimid court. Here, his son, al-Ḥusayn, was educated in the bureaucratic tradition and rose high in the administration of the Caliph al-Ḥākim. Unlike so many of that monarch’s servants, he escaped from Cairo with his life and took service with the Buyids of Iraq, then with Qirwāsh, the ‘Uqaylid ruler of Mosul, before he was recruited in 415/1024–1025 by Naṣr al-Dawla, whose wazīr he remained until his death in 418/1027. After this, Naṣr was again forced to scout around and picked another professional, Ibn Jahīr, then at Mosul but unemployed and out of favour with the ruling ‘Uqaylids. Ibn Jahīr became wazīr for the rest of the reign. The history of the wazirate is interesting, since it shows how important such freelance administrators had become. Talented and experienced men could leave the service of one dynasty and find employment with another, their education and abilities always being sought after. Both as authors and as patrons, this class of freelance bureaucrats was important for the literary culture of the day. We also know that the Marwanids had an official called the ‘ārid al-jaysh to administer the army, but we know little of the military organization; most unusually for the period, the chronicler of the Marwanids, Ibn al-Fāriqī, has more to say of peaceful developments than of military campaigns.
The main centres of Marwanid power lay on the transhumance routes from the Anatolian plateau to the plains, and there is no doubt that the Marwanids used this position to maintain contact and influence with the Kurdish tribes. Unlike the ‘Uqaylids, however, the rulers did not, on the whole, live in tribal encampments but exercised power from their palaces in Mayyāfāriqīn. They were heavily dependent on the townspeople, and nothing contributed more to Naṣr al-Dawla’s success than the partnership between the dynasty and the urban élites. Āmid remained more or less autonomous.
In 415/1024–1025, Ibn Damna was killed in a domestic intrigue and Naṣr al-Dawla took over the town. The city was obliged to share a qāḍī with Mayyāfāriqīn, but the amīr appointed his own son as his deputy and allowed him his own wazīr, suggesting some administrative independence. Later in 429/1037–1038, a new qāḍī, Ibn Baghl, was appointed from among the leading citizens and became an effective ruler of the town under the amīr’s son. In the capital, Mayyāfāriqīn, civic autonomy never developed as it did in Āmid, although the leading merchants were influential and wealthy. Naṣr al-Dawla lived something of a transhumant life himself. In the spring, the court would abandon the capital and migrate up the valley of the Batman Su. In an almost lyrical passage, Ibn al-Fāriqī explains how they would enjoy the meadows and the flowers of the spring until they returned to Mayyāfāriqīn in the summer.
The result of this peace and the large measure of civic autonomy was a period of great urban prosperity. Public works were undertaken, notably the building of city walls, bridges (important for the transhumant Kurds) and the city water supplies. Until the time of the Hamdanids, the people of Mayyāfāriqīn had been dependent on wells for their drinking water. Sayf al-Dawla had brought a canal of fresh water to the Hamdanid palace on the city walls, but under the Marwanids, two more canals were brought, not by the ruler, but by leading citizens of the town. The position of the towns on the north–south routes clearly encouraged trade, and the leading citizens of both Āmid and Mayyāfāriqīn had their wealth and influence firmly based on the sūqs. However, this wealth does not seem to have been entirely confined to the Muslim urban élite; in the 1030s, the Jacobite patriarch of Antioch, Dionysius IV, came to live in Marwanid territory at Āmid to escape Byzantine persecution.
The history of the Marwanid state is only a small fragment of the mosaic of the Muslim commonwealth, but it is an extremely interesting one. Because of the excellence of the main source, we know much more about the nature of government and society than in other parallel states, like ‘Uqaylid Mosul or Kakuyid Iṣfahān. The picture that emerges is essentially a favourable one of a society where tribal and urban elements coexist to their mutual benefit. Far from being a disaster for Āmid and Mayyāfāriqīn, the break-up of the ‘Abbasid caliphate brought prosperity and local autonomy there. In Mayyāfāriqīn, it even brought a vastly improved water supply. The broad annals of the Muslim world seem to show a pattern of violence and chaos and it is only through vignettes like this that we can arrive at a corrective picture. The later years of Naṣr al-Dawla’s rule were darkened by the increasing threat of the Ghuzz Turkmen, although it was not until after his death that they seriously threatened the state. The vast transformation they effected in the population of the area meant that a new balance had to be worked out between the pastoral and settled communities.
Minorsky has written of the Iranian intermezzo in Persian history between the coming of the Arabs in the first/seventh century and the Turks in the fifth/eleventh. In the Near East as a whole, we can also talk of a Kurdish interlude. In the century 950–1050, a number of different Kurdish states were set up in different areas, but they had much in common. All were set up in mountainous regions, the natural pasture grounds of the Kurdish tribes, and many were based on the great transhumance routes between summer and winter pastures. On the whole, their administrations were primitive. Some, like the ‘Annazids, seem to have lacked any bureaucracy at all, and the ruling kin remained influential as a group in a way they did not in more centralized and bureaucratic states. But the picture is not one of chaos and anarchy, as might at first appear. Some of the Kurdish rulers, notably Badr b. Ḥasanūya and Naṣr al-Dawla the Marwanid, left reputations for good government which few of their contemporaries could match. Equally telling are the good relations Kurdish leaders frequently developed with leading citizens with whom they frequently worked in partnership. The collapse of ‘Abbasid rule allowed local élites to emerge, and it is fascinating to see how the people of each area developed their own political solutions, a pattern of variety and local autonomy soon to be extinguished by the coming of the Turks.