CHAPTER 8
MAMLUK HISTORY AND HISTORIANS
The Mamluk sultan Qānṣūh al-Ghūrī used to preside over twice-weekly soirées. Various topics were discussed, but history was a favourite area of debate. On one occasion at least they discussed al-Rawḍ al-zāhir, a life of Baybars written in the 1260s and 70s by Ibn ‘Abd al-Ẓāhir. Baybars’ foiling of a Mongol expedition against Mecca and the sultan’s investiture of an Abbasid caliph in Cairo were among the subjects debated by the sultan and his courtiers. Historical lore – tales of Alexander, Maḥmūd of Ghazna, Timūr and Qāytbay – provided much of the conversation at the Mamluk court.
Earlier Mamluk sultans and amirs took an active interest in the production of chronicles. Ibn ‘Abd al-Ẓāhir used to read al-Rawḍ al-zāhir to the sultan whose feats the book commemorated and, when completed, it was placed in the royal treasury. Similarly, over a century later, al-‘Aynī used to read to the Sultan Barsbay and the sultan would occasionally correct him on the details. The reading of history was also generally popular, as the profusion of surviving manuscripts testifies. There was an explosion of history-writing in the Mamluk period, though, of course, the writers and readers were not interested in just Mamluk history. A wholly fantastic (perhaps eleventh-century) history of pharaonic Egypt continued to be reproduced in the chronicles of sober historians such as al-Nuwayrī and al-Maqrīzī. Young mamlūks in training in the Cairo Citadel copied out histories of the Prophets. The alleged injustices of the Umayyad caliphs preoccupied historians, while others became obsessively interested in the Fatimids.
Politics and wars were of secondary interest to one influential group of historians who flourished in Syria in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Sibṭ ibn al-Jawzī, al-Birzālī, al-Yūnīnī, al-Dhahabī and al-Jazarī were all religious scholars primarily interested in the transmission and transmitters of ḥadīths. Although they all wrote chronicles, this activity was secondary to their religious preoccupations. H. A. R. Gibb, having noted the interest of Sunni theologians and muḥaddiths in the study and writing of history, went on to remark that ‘[In] the Sunnī doctrine, it was the Islamic community, the ummat Allāh, with which the continuation of the divine plan on earth was bound up; consequently the study of history was a necessary supplement to the study of the divine revelation in Koran and ḥadīth’.1 The preservation of the achievements of one’s teachers and their teachers was not merely an act of piety; it was also a (rather bulky) form of scholarly accreditation.
The Syrian approach to history-writing was an aspect of the Sunni revival, whose antecedents were in Baghdad and most specifically in the historical writing of Ibn al-Jawzī (1116–1201), a Hanbali preacher in that city. Ibn al-Jawzī’s history of the Muslim world up to and including his own times, the Muntaẓam, was the first to append obituaries to the chronicle of events for each year. Those obituaries were weighted in favour of religious scholars. His example was followed by his grandson, Sibṭ ibn al-Jawzī (1186–1257), who came to Damascus in 1204 and made a reputation for himself as a preacher. Sibṭ’s Mir’āt al-zamān fī ta’rīkh al-a‘yān, modelled on the Muntaẓam, begins with the creation of the world and ends in 1257. However, for the thirteenth century the Mir’ātis chiefly concerned with the fortunes of the ‘ulamā’ of Damascus. As in the Muntaẓam, ḥawādith (events) are followed by the wafayāt (obituaries) for each year.
The Mir’āt’s emphasis and organization were copied by later Syrian ‘ulamā’ and also influenced the court chroniclers of Egypt and other historians. The influence of the Mir’āt is most obviously visible in the continuation which was produced by al-Yūnīnī (1242–1325/6) who was born in Baalbek and studied ḥadīth and fiqh in Damascus and Cairo. His Dhayl mir’āt al-zamān, which covers 1256 to 1311, was much consulted by al-Dhahabī and Ibn Kathīr. Like its precursor, the Dhayl is weighted towards ḥadīth transmitters. Al-Yūnīnī included much poetry in the Dhayl and its purely literary material means that it was not only a calendar of past events but also a belletristic compendium, an example of the literarization of history-writing, a feature of the Mamluk period and part of an attempt to reach out to a wider audience, though, as we shall see, there were other ways of making potentially dry-as-dust annals more readable.
Another feature of the Dhayl is the inclusion of autobiographical reminiscences, such as al-Yūnīnī’s memory of the Mongol general Kitbugha’s tour of his native Baalbek in 1260. The tendency to add autobiographical fragments finds parallels in other historians’ work such as Abū’l-Fidā and Baybars al-Manṣūrī. This was perhaps the symptom of a turbulent age, when individuals felt that their personal experiences of the Crusader wars, the Mongol invasions or the Black Death were worthy of record. Al-Yunīnī, a Hanbali, was a partisan for Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328), the controversial Hanbali polemicist. More surprisingly, al-Yūnīnī’s fellow historians, such as al-Jazarī and al-Birzālī, were similarly partisan, though not Hanbalis. The support of the Syrian ‘ulamā’ historians for Ibn Taymiyya in his struggles with his enemies among the Mamluk military elite and the Sufi shaykhs suggests some detachment from the values of the Mamluk court and administration. Ibn Taymiyya was little interested in history and wrote none. Nevertheless, during his lifetime and for some decades afterwards his students and admirers dominated history-writing in Syria.
Al-Yūnīnī did not work alone. He and al-Jazarī (1260–1338) exchanged drafts, copied and revised each other’s work, and al-Jazarī was in turn in close contact with al-Birzālī. Al-Jazarī was, like most of the Damascus group of historians, a muḥaddith. His Ḥawādith al-zamān was a necrological chronicle of the worthies of Damascus. The Ḥawādith was burdened with poetry and fragments of adab prose. He perhaps chose for literary reasons to include various instances of al-‘ajā’ib wa’l-gharā’ib (the strange and the wonderful) in his chronicle, even though he was to be mocked by al-Dhahabī and Ṣafadī for this. The Ḥawādith is subtly but unmistakably hostile to the sultans Qalāwūn and al-Ashraf Khalīl.
Al-Birzālī (1267–1340) was a student of Ibn Taymiyya and of many shaykhs besides. His (lost) work, the Mu‘jam al-kabīr, is devoted to the 3,000 shaykhs under whom he studied. Al-Birzālī was a charismatic and influential figure and his unpublished continuation of Abū Shāma’s Kitāb al-Rawḍatayn, al-Muqtafā, was used by al-Yūnīnī and al-Jazarī, as well as by al-Birzālī’s student, al-Dhahabī. The latter (1274–1348), although a Shafii also studied under Ibn Taymiyya and al-Yūnīnī. Al-Dhahabī’s Ta’rīkh al-Islām is top-heavy with obituaries. His main work was not his history but his monumental biographical dictionary, the Ṭabaqāt al-Shāfi‘iyya. Al-Dhahabī was a combative writer and he presented unflattering portraits of Sufi and Hanafi notables. He was also hostile to the Mamluk regime, not accepting the legitimacy of the caliphate which they had established in Cairo. Al-Dhahabī’s biases were exposed and criticized by his student Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī (1327–69/70). Like his former master, al-Subkī also produced a biographical dictionary of Shafiis and wrote about how history should be written and assessed. However, whereas al-Dhahabī’s treatise is lost, al-Subkī’s ideas have survived in his Ṭabaqāt. Al-Subkī held that historians should name their sources and quote rather than summarize them. Imagination and a sense of style were desirable but it was most important to assess the level of scholarship of the man one was writing about. This was evidently a traditionist’s view of history. Al-Subkī’s Mu‘īd al-ni‘am wa-mubīd al-niqam, a treatise on the importance of nīya, or right intention in religion and working life, also touches on historians’ responsibility to guard men’s reputations. Al-Subkī warned that historians stood on the brink of a precarious sand dune. He held that the prejudices of the different law schools led to distortions in history-writing. His treatise on nīya also reveals his detestation of the age that he was living in.
Al-Kutubī (1287–1362) and Ibn Kathīr (1300–73) were the last prominent representatives of the Syrian ‘ulamā’ school of historiography. Both wrote compendia which began as histories of the Islamic world but shrank to a record of the fortunes of the religious elite in Damascus. It is difficult to establish the relationship between al-Kutubī’s ‘Uyūn al-tawārīkh and Ibn Kathīr’s al-Bidāya wa’l-nihāya. Al-Ṣafadī (1297–1362/3) believed in history as a vehicle for moral uplift, yet he wrote no chronicle. Instead he produced the largest Arabic biographical dictionary ever written, the Wāfī bi’l-wafayāt, containing over 140,000 lives. He also produced two smaller biographical compendia, on blind persons and on contemporaries. Clearly, like many of his fellows, he was often working on the obituaries before their subjects’ deaths. Despite the impression made on him by Ibn Taymiyya and despite his commitment to biography as an instrument of moral uplift, there was another side to al-Ṣafadī’s character. He was committed to literature in a way that other Damascan historians were not and he produced, among other things, a maqāma on wine, a quantity of pederastic verse and a famous poem on the beauty spot (khāl). He also interested himself in occult matters and wrote on alchemy as well as on malāḥim (disasters prefiguring the end of the world).
Although the Hanbali revivalist movement certainly had its admirers among the ‘ulamā’ of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Egypt, none of them aspired to emulate the chronicles of Ibn al-Jawzī or al-Jazarī. Rather, history-writing was at first dominated by courtiers and chancery men. Ibn ‘Abd al-Ẓāhir (1223–92) served the sultans Baybars and Qalāwūn as kātib al-sirr (head of the chancery) and as a diplomat. None of his successors as kātib al-sirr was to enjoy his prestige, based partly on his prose which was consciously modelled on that of a famous precursor, al-Qāḍī᾽l-Fāḍil, Saladin’s head of chancery. (See the contributions of Musawi and Hämeen-Anttila in this volume, Chapters 5 and 6.) Ibn ‘Abd al-Ẓāhir wrote histories of the sultans Baybars, Qalāwūn and al-Ashraf Khalīl, respectively al-Rawḍ al-zāhir, Tashrīf al-ayyām wa’l-‘uṣūr and al-Alṭāf al-khafiyya. Each work is strikingly different from the others. The Rawḍ is only in part an annals, for the first part is really a court-presentation volume in which Ibn ‘Abd al-Ẓāhir sought to legitimize Baybars’ usurpation of power and to celebrate his merits. The sultan’s conquests from the Franks are presented as a re-enactment of the Futūḥ al-Shām (as Saladin’s victories had been). The Rawḍ contains a lot of poetry, dramatized episodes and boastful rhymed prose, as well as many documents, such as the caliph’s oath and khuṭba sermon and announcements of military victories (kutub al-bashā’ir) which Ibn ‘Abd al-Ẓāhir himself had composed in bombastic rhymed prose.
The Tashrīf, is not much more than a collection of Ibn ‘Abd al-Ẓāhir’s choice pieces of chancery draftsmanship joined to one another with linking narrative. (In the fifteenth century, the chancery encyclopedist al-Qalqashandī judged that Ibn ‘Abd al-Ẓāhir’s draftsmanship was overrated; on the other hand al-Ghuzūlī included his prose in his anthology, Maṭāli’ al-budūr.) The unfinished Alṭāf, is a straightforward annals. All three of Ibn ‘Abd al-Ẓāhir’s histories were produced under royal patronage and supervision. He was criticized by his nephew Shāfi῾ ibn ‘Alī (1252–1330) for servilely writing exactly what the sultan wished to hear. Shāfi῾’s own account of the reign of Baybars, the Ḥusn al-manāqib, is an abridgement and commentary on his uncle’s work. At various points in his narrative, Shāfi‘ goes out of his way to suggest the superiority of the amir Qalāwūn to Baybars. Shāfi‘ worked in Qalāwūn’s chancery and his life of Qalāwūn, al-Faḍl al-ma’thūr, is an effusive court chronicle in rhymed prose. Like Ibn ‘Abd al-Ẓāhir’s Rawḍ, the Faḍl, though written in Arabic, reads as a legitimacy treatise aimed primarily at an audience of Turkish amirs. Divine providence elevated Qalāwūn to the throne and his furūsiyya, firāsa, justice and other qualities are stressed. Although ‘Izz al-Din ibn Shaddād (1216–85) came from Aleppo, he worked as scribe to Baybars’ vizier, Bahā’ al-Dīn ibn Ḥannā. His topography of Syria and Iraq, the A‘lāq al-khaṭīra, was commissioned by Baybars. Ibn Shaddād’s panegyrical but less florid life of Baybars, al-Rawḍa al-zāhira, did not enjoy the official status of Ibn ‘Abd al-Ẓāhir’s Rawḍ.
Ibn ‘Abd al-Ẓāhir, Shāfi‘ ibn ‘Alī and Ibn Shaddād produced court chronicles which do not follow the annals and obituary pattern favoured by the Syrian school. Other cases however are not so clear cut. Baybars al-Manṣūrī (d. 1325), a senior Mamluk amir, wrote as a partisan of the Qalāwūnid house and most specifically as the encomiast of his master, the sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad ibn Qalāwūn. His Tuḥfa al-mulūkiyya, mostly in rhymed prose, belongs to the genre of histories which were composed for presentation at court. The Tuḥfa deals with al-Nāṣir Muḥammad’s royal qualities and his special destiny and covers his career up to the year 1311/12. Despite military and court service, Baybars al-Manṣūrī was intensely pious and he produced a Koranic commentary with Sufi sympathies. Besides a (lost) history of the Caliphs, he also compiled Zubdat al-fikra fī ta’rīkh al-hijra, a universal history of Islam up to 1324. Like al-Yūnīnī, he garnished his narrative with much poetry.
In the Zubdat al-fikra, al-Manṣūrī often recounted his own experiences. The same was true of Abū’l-Fidā (1273–1331), another participant in the politics and warfare of the age as the nominal ruler of Hama from 1310 onwards, who was the friend and client of the sultan al-Nāṣir Muḥammad. As an author, Abū’l-Fidā was carrying on an Ayyubid family tradition. Besides history he attempted other genres, for he wrote a topography and poetry. His Mukhtaṣar fī akhbār al-bashar is a universal history up to 1329, heavily reliant on Ibn al-Athīr for early centuries, as was Baybars’ Zubda. In its later sections Abū’l-Fidā draws upon his own experiences but reveals little or nothing about his thoughts or feelings, nor does he reveal anything about decision-making in the palace and army. Despite his ‘amateur’ status as a historian, the Mukhtaṣar followed the conventions of the age and it reads perfectly professionally.
However, there were other autodidacts and eccentrics who wrote history and sometimes produced more interesting, if less reliable historical narratives. Qirṭāy al-‘Izzī al-Khāzindārī’s name indicates that he was a mamlūk. He was not a major figure in the world of high politics and warfare nor had he received the standard education of an ‘ālim. His history, the Ta’rīkh al-nawādir, is an Egyptocentric chronicle, of which two sections survive. One covers the origins of Islam and the other the years 1229–90 (overlapping in part with the author’s own lifetime). The second section is indeed full of nawādir in the sense of curious or rare anecdotes. When Qirṭāy was bored or short of information, he made things up and his chronicle contains the most fantastic misinformation, especially concerning Muslim–Christian diplomatic relations in the period.
The historical works of Ibn al-Dawādārī (c. 1288–1336), though much more reliable, betray a similar taste for ‘the strange and wonderful’. Ibn al-Dawādārī, like several other historians, such as al-Ṣafadī, Ibn Taghrībirdī and Ibn Iyās, was of mamlūk descent. His universal chronicle, the Durar al-tījān, and its abridgement, the Kanz al-durar, are to some extent modelled on the chronicle of Sibṭ ibn al-Jawzī. However, Ibn al-Dawādārī’s chronicles lack the obituaries at the end of each year, and his sober annals of political and religious affairs are broken up by records of mirabilia and by excursus on Turkish legend and folklore. Although he had absorbed many of the prejudices and techniques of the Syrian school, he still wrote as a Turk. He defended the Turks against accusations of superstition and he presented Baybars as a ruler in the tradition of the Saljuq sultans. Ibn al-Dawādārī’s taste for Arabian Nights stories, freak meteorological incidents and amazing coincidences was shared by numerous other Muslim and Christian chroniclers writing in the Mamluk period, culminating with Ibn Iyās in the early sixteenth century. Reports of dreams were often inserted in historical narratives. Reports of predictive dreams served as a kind of narrative prolepsis. Other dreams legitimized or even sanctified the deeds of sultans, while others again implicitly commented on and explained the motivations of the decision-makers.
Historians used invented dialogues in order to explain policy-making and conflict among the elite. Some chroniclers represented the Mamluks as speaking flawless Arabic, while others put deliberately incorrect Arabic into their mouths. Qirṭāy was unusual in declining on aesthetic grounds to reproduce the speech of Mamluk officers. More generally, some chronicles, for example those of Ibn al-Dawādārī and Ibn Ṣaṣrā, were written in an Arabic that was often grammatically incorrect and stylistically poor. A colloquial idiom may have been employed in order to reach a wider audience, but it is more likely that some historians were unable to write otherwise. Ibn Ṣaṣrā (fl. 1390) wrote in the colloquial. His al-Durra al-muḍī’a fī’l-dawla al-ẓāhiriyya is an account of events in Damascus during the reign of the sultan Barqūq. It is didactic, moralizing and laden with fables and proverbs, history as a morality play. This sort of history was supposed to be ethically improving and one studied history in order to take warning (‘ibra) from the fates of others. Remember that A Thousand and One Nights presented itself as a serious work, which used the past in order to teach by example.
The Ilmām bi’l-i‘lām, written by al-Nuwayrī al-Iskandarānī (fl. 1360s) is, if anything, even more curious. This purports to be a history of the Crusader attack on the port of Alexandria in 1365. However, al-Nuwayrī al-Iskandarānī, a manuscript copyist who worked in Alexandria, was easily diverted from his main theme and his book contains lengthy digressions about the marvels of the ancient city, Arab nautical science, fanciful dialogues between Alexander and Aristotle, and much else. History was crowded out by legends, reports of predictive dreams and anti-Christian polemic. It is really a work of adab and as such it was heavily criticized by more serious historians, such as Ibn Ḥajar and al-Sakhāwī. The marvellous also mingled with the factual in the writings of the Maghribi author Ibn Abī Ḥajala (1325–75). His Sukkardān al-sulṭān, a life of the sultan al-Nāṣir Ḥasan, was written to be presented to that sultan. It dwells lengthily on the symbolic significance of seven for the people, the rulers and the land of Egypt. Ibn Abī Ḥajala also wrote an account of the rising of the julbān (mamlūks purchased by the ruling sultan) against al-Nāṣir Ḥasan, as well as a historical account of plagues. Furthermore he wrote poetry, as well as treatises on famous lovers, chess, numerology and other matters. In the case of Ibn Abī Ḥajala and in that of many other authors the production of historical and quasi-historical works has to be seen in a much wider literary context. Some of the chroniclers discussed drew on folkloric themes. Others made use of poetry, saj‘ and the ornate conventions of rhymed prose. Nevertheless, the degree of literarization to be found in chroniclers of the period should not be exaggerated. Most chronicles provided a rather dull annals of political events, battles and religious and academic appointments. The restricted nature of the literarization of history-writing becomes clear if one compares histories written in this period with those of al-Mas‘ūdī or Miskawayh.
In Syria the writing of history declined in both quantity and quality during the fourteenth century. The leading historians were now Egyptian compilers, who drew both on Syrian annals and on Egyptian court chronicles. Al-Nuwayrī (1279–1332) (not to be confused with the Alexandrian Nuwayrī) served as a bureaucrat in al-Nāṣir Muḥammad’s reign. His great work, the Nihāyat al-arab fī funūn al-adab, was designed as an encyclopedia, to contain all the knowledge a state scribe needed. However, the historical section, covering the creation till 1331, dwarfed the rest, for it constituted two-thirds of the whole. Although he was strongly influenced by his Syrian predecessors, his history was not ‘one damn thing after another’. He struggled to produce an integrated account of historical development and, partially, broke away from an annalistic approach in favour of an interpretative account.
Ibn al-Furāt (1334/5–1405) outstripped even al-Nuwayrī in his mastery of source materials. He was the most professional of his contemporaries and the most dedicated to his chosen subject. He earned his living not as a historian but as a court notary and a preacher. There was of course no full-time academic historian in medieval Egypt or Syria. His Ta’rīkh al-duwal wa’l-mulūk is a partially completed universal history. The early sections are missing, for he worked backwards. Al-Sakhāwī judged that Ibn al-Furāt ‘did not know Arabic grammar well and he therefore used awful solecisms and very colloquial expressions’. Nevertheless, Ibn al-Furāt was a highly efficient collator of earlier sources, especially those of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and he became a favourite (and often unacknowledged) source for the chroniclers who came after him.
Ibn Khaldūn (1332–1406) was born in North Africa and a full discussion of his universal history (Kitāb al-‘Ibar) and its more theoretical introduction (al-Muqaddima) belongs in the context of a discussion of the literature of Spain and North Africa. Nevertheless, it is only partially correct to see him as a Merinid historian. After migrating to Egypt in 1382, he continued to revise and add to his history. Moreover, his intellectual heirs are mostly to be found among the Egyptians who studied under him. Ibn Khaldūn, who found patronage under the sultan Barqūq, was an admirer of the Mamluks. He praised them as the defenders of Islam and he thought that the continuous recruitment of white slaves from the steppe lands and the Caucasus might allow the regime to avoid the cycle of dynastic rise, decay and fall, while he believed that Islamic civilization in the Maghrib was doomed. He wrote in the shadow of the Black Death and subsequent pestilences. In later years he became increasingly religious and pessimistic.
None of Ibn Khaldūn’s students seems to have understood his theories about the cyclical rise and fall of dynasties. However, he did succeed in passing on his pessimism and his speculative interest in an apocalyptic future to one of his students, al-Maqrīzī (1364–1441), who sought to find broad socio-economic causes for historical phenomena, though less successfully than his teacher. He wrote reverently of the Muqaddima that it ‘reveals the truth of things, events and news; it explains the state of the universe and reveals the origin of all beings in an admirable plain style’. Al-Maqrīzī started out as a court scribe and later rose to become market inspector of Cairo in the reign of Barqūq. Thereafter, he lost court patronage and became an enemy of the regime, though inevitably a cautious one. In his writings he accused the Mamluks of setting aside the Sharia in favour of the pagan law code of the Mongols. He reported Mamluk violations of the provisions of waqf bequests and wrote at length about their monetary maladministration.
By contrast, al-Maqrīzī had a passionate and somewhat antiquarian interest in the Fatimids. This particularly emerges in Kitāb itti‘āẓ al-ḥunafā’ bi-akhbār al-khulafā’ which is devoted to the history of the Qarmatians and the Fatimids and in al-Mawā‘iẓ wa’l-i‘tibār fī dhikr al-khiṭaṭ wa’l-āthār, a wide-ranging historical topography of Cairo, in which the main focus is on the lost palaces of the Fatimids. The topographical genre to which al-Maqrīzī was a distinguished contributor, was inevitably a literature of nostalgia. (See Musawi’s contribution, Chapter 5.) An earlier topography by Ibn ‘Abd al-Ẓāhir similarly harked back to Fatimid grandeur. Although al-Maqrīzī, like Ibn Khaldūn, accepted the legitimacy of Fatimid genealogical claims, neither historian was a Shia. Perhaps al-Maqrīzī loved the Fatimids because they built Cairo. His topography also betrays a certain animus towards the pretensions of Damascus, and he wrote a separate treatise attacking the Sufi followers of Ibn al-‘Arabī in Damascus.
Al-Maqrīzī’s Kitāb ighāthat al-umma bi-kashf al-ghumma is a history of high prices and famines and an examination of their causes running from pharaonic times to al-Maqrīzī’s own lifetime. Although he had inherited Ibn Khaldūn’s enthusiasm for economic theorizing, al-Maqrīzī kept getting his sums and his morality mixed up. As a homiletic historian, he claimed that the economic crisis in Egypt in 1403 was no worse than earlier ones. Therefore he exaggerated past catastrophes. The current catastrophes were due to moral failings. Famine was caused by luxury, corrupt government, overtaxation and copper money. Since copper coins were not sanctioned by the Koran or the Sunna, their circulation was particularly reprehensible. Consequently, in all his writings, al-Maqrīzī’s information on money and prices is unreliable and inconsistent. He was a polygraph, writing on matters historical and non-historical, including bees and honey, artists and music. Although he is best known for Kitāb al-sulūk li-ma‘rifat duwal al-mulūk, an Egyptian annals (covering the years 1169–1441), this book’s undeserved celebrity is chiefly due to the accident of early translating and editing. The Sulūk recycles, abridges and distorts earlier and better chronicles such as that of Ibn al-Furāt and was criticized by his contemporaries, including al-‘Aynī, Ibn Taghrībirdī and al-Sakhāwī.
Al-‘Aynī (1361–1451) was a Turk and, perhaps because of his knowledge of Turkish, was (until his final disgrace) more successful than al-Maqrīzī in attracting the friendship and favour of the Mamluk sultans. Certainly his chronicle, the ‘Iqd al-jumān fī ta’rīkh ahl al-zamān, took a more favourable view of the Mamluk regime than did the Sulūk. It was also a more coherently organized work. The same cannot be said of his two court-presentation chronicles, al-Sayf al-muhannad fī ta’rīkh al-Malik al-Mu’ayyad and al-Rawḍ al-ẓāhir fī sīrat al-Malik al-Ẓāhir Ṭaṭar. The former treatise, which al-‘Aynī read to the sultan al-Mu’ayyad Shaykh, checking its facts as he did so, celebrates the sultan’s heroic qualities, as well as providing a desperately miscellaneous range of justifications for his rule (numerological, physiognomic, genealogical, etc.). In the Sayf, al-‘Aynī claimed that Mu’ayyad would be the last of the virtuous sultans but subsequently wrote a similarly fawning life of al-Ẓāhir Ṭaṭar, presenting him as the last Turkish ruler and one of eschatological significance.
Al-‘Ayni’s influence led another Turk, Ibn Taghrībirdī (1409/10?–69/70?), to consider becoming a historian. Ibn Taghrībirdī was the son of a leading Mamluk amir and, in effect, he succeeded al-‘Ayni as court historian. Despite Ibn Taghrībirdī’s criticisms of al-Maqrīzī, the early sections of his own chronicle, al-Nujūm al-ẓāhira fī mulūk Miṣr wa’l-Qāhira depend quite heavily on the Sulūk. The Nujūm was written initially for Muḥammad, son of the reigning sultan Jaqmaq. This prince, particularly expert on poetry, presided over a literary salon. ‘It was on his account that I composed this work, without any command from him to write it’, but he ‘almost flew for joy’ when he heard what Ibn Taghrībirdī was doing. This chronicle was fiercely hostile to astrologers and delights in recording their failed predictions. Ibn Taghrībirdī’s other main historical work, the Ḥawādith al-duhūr, is a continuation of al-Maqrīzī’s Sulūk and, although much of its content is common to the Nujūm, the Ḥawādith is more detailed. Even before beginning work on his chronicles, Ibn Taghrībirdī had produced the Manhal al-ṣāfī, an enormous biographical dictionary containing 2,822 biographies.
Although several contemporaries condemned Ibn Taghrībirdī’s writings for partiality to the Mamluks, the Nujūm was at times ferocious in its criticism of Mamluk corruption and factionalism and, in the Ḥawādith, Ibn Taghrībirdī was so critical of Qāytbay and Yashbak al-Sūdūnī that he was bastinadoed for criticism of the latter. Ibn Taghrībirdī and other historians writing in the fifteenth century were fiercely critical of their own times, while they looked back on the early decades of the Mamluk regime through a haze of nostalgia. Thus Ibn Taghrībirdī could write of Baybars’ mamlūks that ‘they were well endowed with courtesy, humility and obedience to their superiors, and good manners and courtesy towards their inferiors’, in defiance of the facts.
Aḥmad ibn ‘Arabshāh (1392–1450), who spent his youth in Mongol and Turkish lands, wrote in a different literary tradition. His hostile life of Timur, the Ajā’ib al-maqdūr, is written in a Persian-inspired elaborately rhetorical style. In his al-Ta’līf al-ṭāhir fī shiyam al-Ẓāhir Jaqmaq is presented as a leader of the jihād and a moral exemplar, and the Fākihāt al-khulafā’ is a work in the mirror-for-princes genre with a substantial amount of historical material. All deserve more attention than they have received.
Al-‘Aynī, Ibn Taghrībirdī and Ibn ‘Arabshāh sought court patronage and were familiar with the ways of the Turkish military elite. Ibn Ḥajar (1372–1449) similarly sought court patronage but hated the Turkish dominion. He was primarily a ḥadīth scholar and was acclaimed as the greatest scholar of his age. For Ibn Ḥajar, history was primarily the record of ḥadīth transmission. His Durar al-kāmina contains 5,204 (mostly ‘ulamā’) biographies from the eighth/fourteenth century. Among some 250 other books, he also produced Inbā’ al-ghumr, covering the years 1372–1446, which provided a vehicle for attacking al-‘Aynī for partiality to the Mamluks. Al-Sakhāwī (1428–97) was Ibn Ḥajar’s leading pupil and, similarly, a ḥadīth specialist. The driving force behind al-Sakhāwī’s authorship was his conviction that ḥadīth scholarship had declined in his own time. He was a good hater and a fierce critic. He criticized Ibn Khaldūn, al-Maqrīzī and Ibn Taghrībirdī and attacked the arrogance and privileges of the Mamluks. Despite his reservations about al-Maqrīzī, he too wrote a continuation of the Sulūk, entitled al-Tibr al-masbūk. His I‘lān bi’l-tawbīkh li-man dhamma ahl al-ta’rīkh is a defence of the study of history considered as a handmaid of the religious sciences, echoing Ibn Ḥajar’s views.
The polygraph al-Suyūṭī (1445–1505) enjoyed a status comparable to Ibn Ḥajar’s earlier in the century. Al-Suyūṭī’s cast of mind was gloomy and adversarial. His various writings, including a history of the caliphs and a fairly short biographical dictionary of fifteenth-century personalities reveal his pessimism. He looked on the late fifteenth century as an age of intellectual decline and military catastrophes. He also produced al-Taḥadduth bi-ni‘mat Allāh, a rancorous kind of extended curriculum vitae. Al-Sakhāwī was his bitter rival, but competition for teaching posts and issues in ḥadīth studies caused more conflict than historical matters as such.
The relationship between al-Suyūṭī’s historical writing and that of Ibn Iyās (1448–c. 1524) is not at all clear. Al-Suyūṭī may well have written some of what has been attributed to Ibn Iyās. The latter’s chronicle, the Baḍā’i‘ al-zuhūr fī waqā’i‘ al-duhūr, starts as a world history but the narrative is very condensed until it reaches Ibn Iyās’ own lifetime, whereupon it becomes both more copious and more focused on events in Cairo. He took little trouble to interpret or organize the pell-mell rush of detail. Although he was the grandson of a Mamluk officer, Ibn Iyās’ chronicle is fiercely anti-Mamluk and his obituaries of sultans are often laced with sarcasm. There are at least two drafts of his chronicle which he never collated or completed. His history was only a part of his literary production and he should be considered as primarily a belletrist and poet. His rather dry chronicle is enlivened by reports of marvels and the relation of tales which might have come from A Thousand and One Nights. It is noteworthy that many derived their notion of the past not from the conscientious annals of an al-Jazarī or an Ibn Ḥajar but from the fantastic versions of early Islamic history produced by pseudo-al-Bakrī and romantic epics about Antar, the sultan Baybars and the Assassins. The Mamluk age was obsessed by the past and we cannot mention here all who ventured to write history.
1 Gibb,‘Ta’rīkh’, p. 236b.