Rabiʿa al-Basri, 8th-century Sufi saint and poet - (Wikimedia)
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But for one exception, the works of Tāj al-Dīn ‘Alī ibn Anjab ibn al-Sā’ī come down to us only in fragments, in quotes, in fleeting second-hand glimpses, or in one volume where many once existed. And that’s a shame.
Ibn al-Sā’ī, born in the last years of the 12th century and living until the last quarter of the 13th, was an accomplished scholar and historian. He was librarian at two notable colleges of law. He was a poet—it went without saying that he would be, as an educated and accomplished man of his time and place. He moved in the circles of the ruling elite in 13th-century Baghdad and had access to all the materials and people he needed to complete his works, and those works were substantial, later bibliographers numbering them in the 50s.
At the age of 63, ibn al-Sā’ī witnessed first-hand the disastrous fall of Baghdad to the Mongol invasion. He was there for the execution of the last Abbasid caliph of that city, al-Musta’sim, representative of a dynasty had already faded somewhat in power and prestige but traced its origins to a companion and uncle of Muhammad himself. Many of ibn al-Sā’ī’s writings were in tribute to that dynasty, his Brief Lives of the Caliphs, his The Noble Caliphs Recalled, his Getting to Know the History of Caliphs, for Persons of Refinement.
As Julia Bray writes, “After the Mongols arrived … Egypt’s Mamluk rulers—Turkic slave soldiers—became the new Sunni standard-bearers, and Baghdad lost its role as the seat of high courtly culture. Ibn al-Sā’ī wrote Brief Lives in full consciousness of the new world order. The work dwells on the zenith of the caliphate centuries before and tells stirring tales of the great, early Abbasids, underlined by poetry. This is legendary history, cultural memory.”
Brief Lives of the Caliphs was not his only work of legendary history and cultural memory. Indeed, it was not the one exception I referred to a moment ago, the one that has survived in full thanks to a solitary manuscript from the 15th century, the transcription completed March 30th, 1495, by a man named Muhammad ibn Sālim al-Hāni’. Brief Lives of the Caliphs is not the text we’ll be talking about today.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast that covers medieval history through the stories of its travellers, usually, and a history podcast with a Patreon, one where you can listen to episodes earlier and without any advertising, and you’ll get extra mini-episodes too. You can do all of that for as little as a dollar a month, and you can do that patreon.com/humancircus. Thank you very much, all of you who have already done so. I really do appreciate it.
And now, to the story.
Today’s is another standalone episode, another Medieval Lives onesie, and the plural “lives” is appropriate here, as we are not dealing with just one life.
Although the quote/unquote protagonist, ibn al-Sā’ī, may well have done a little travelling in his time, we are also not dealing with a particularly travel-focused episode. Indeed, it will not be particularly concerned with the actions of ibn al-Sā’ī at all. There is a different set of main characters here, for which ibn al-Sā’ī will be our guide with his book Consorts of the Caliphs, published in a new 2015 translation by the Library of Arabic Literature and New York University Press.
In that book, he reaches all the way back to Hammādah bint ‘Īsā—married to al-Mansūr the Abbasid dynastic founder and dying in 780—and all the way up to Shāhān, a contemporary of his and the concubine of al-Mustansir who died in 1242, the penultimate Abbasid caliph in Baghdad. He fills its pages with the women of the Abbasid caliphal court, women who appear there as wives, concubines, and others.
He portrays these people in anecdotes of their deeds, in biographical details, in curious moments around their lives. He highlights virtue, the glorification of such in the woman presumably seen to reflect well on her partner, the caliph. He highlights cleverness with words, wit, and artistic skill, cultural contributions. Of course, as he reaches his own time, he references more immediate sources. As he begins, he is dependent on older ones, but that didn’t necessarily mean he had less to say about those further in the past. They were more often enslaved, and he tended to have more to say about them than those who lived in freedom. As we’ll see, there was quite a bit to say.
In reaching back into the past, ibn al-Sa'i would, like a good academic, tell his reader who his sources were and how the information came to him.
“I cite the trustee ‘Abd al-Wahhāb ibn ‘Alī,” he begins his entry, “who gave me license to cite ‘Abd al-Rahmān ibn Muhammad al-Shaybāni, who cites master Ahmad ibn ‘Ali, who cites al-Hasan ibn Abī Bakr as saying that Abū Sahl Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Qattān said:
I heard Tha’lab say…”
So it went.
I won’t trouble you with all our scholar’s citations, those chains of transmission that served to establish his information as verifiable and reliable, but as for what this Tha’lab had actually said about Hammādah bint ‘Īsā, it was this.
Quote:
“When the caliph al-Mansūr’s wife, Hammādah daughter of ‘Īsā, died, al-Mansūr and his retinue stood at the edge of the grave that had been dug for her and awaited the arrival of the funeral procession.
The poet Abū Dulāmah was in the procession. Al-Mansūr turned to him and asked, “What have you brought us on this sad occasion, Abū Dulāmah?” [Asking, in effect, what words he had composed for the moment.]
[And Abū Dulāmah, showing off his quick wit and no shortage of confidence that he understood his caliph’s sense of humour, replied] “The body of Hammādah daughter of ‘Īsā, Sire!” … and everyone burst into laughter.”
It was the kind of funereal humour that could go badly awry, but on this occasion did not. It was also not all that much to leave behind as a legacy for Hammādah, just the one jest at your burial, but then that burial had been nearly five centuries earlier and this was all ibn al-Sā’ī had to say. Sometimes, as in the case of al-Mustazhir’s wife Khātūn, though she lived more recently, in the 12th century, he would have even less to say.
“She was one of al-Mustazhir’s favourites,” he wrote. “She passed away in the year [1141]. Her palace was sacrosanct, for she and her retinue were held in great reverence.”
Of Sharaf Khātūn al-Turkiyyah—the name with its honorific meaning Lady “Honour” the Turk—he would provide little more information, just adding that “Funeral prayers were held for her on Wednesday in the Courtyard of Peace” and noting where she was buried. Of a woman named Zubaydah, he would only say that “She was lovely and praised for her beauty,” and give the year of her death. However, there was often much more to it than that. Ibn al-Sā’ī was not always so terse in his work.
Sometimes he would expand on the women and their circumstances, how they entered the life of this caliph or that. What they had done when they got there. Several of the women he portrays came from wealth, as you might expect, cases of nobility joined with nobility.
So it was, for example, with ‘Ismah Khātūn, Khātūn roughly meaning “princess.” The daughter of a Seljuk sultan, she married caliph al-Mustazhir in 1109, a few years after his previous mention a moment ago, and lived in Baghdad’s Caliphal Palace. She was “highly intelligent” and strong, and her “resolve was unswerving.” We learn that she lost her 2-year-old son to smallpox, and then her husband, the caliph, just 4 years after and returned to Isfahan, where she was from, that she eventually died and was buried there at a law college which she had founded. The largest such college in the world, ibn al-Sā’ī says, but he concludes that “nowadays it has become very run-down—it has no door and is uninhabitable.”
So it was also with Māh-i Mulk, also the daughter of a sultan from Isfahan. When her marriage was arranged and the contract concluded, it took a full “one hundred and forty camels and one hundred mules” to transport her belongings to Baghdad, arriving in the spring of 1087. By the next year, her son was born, but the year after that, “the caliph began to ignore her and she asked permission to return home.” In 1089, she left, and “Subsequently,” soon after it seems, “news of her death reached Baghdad.”
And so it was too with Saljūqī Khātūn, daughter of the Seljuk sultan of Anatolia. Like the others, she was not from Baghdad. She passed through that city twice in the 1180s while performing the hajj, and maybe the caliph al-Nāsir saw her then. Eighteen months later he was seeking marriage and sending an escort to bring her back. “She met with extraordinary favour on his part,” wrote ibn al-Sā’ī, “but only lived with him in the most comfortable and agreeable circumstances for a short time before death struck its sudden and untimely blow. She was plucked from a life of luxury and joined the ranks of the departed.”
At her death, the caliph was stricken with grief. For days, he would neither eat or drink. For years, he would leave her home as it had been, untouched, “with all of its draperies and furnishings intact; it was never opened, nor was anything taken from it.” He arranged for the hajj to be performed each year on her behalf and for donations to be made.
Her death seems to have been sudden, unexpected, but she had already planned her mausoleum, the construction already begun but unfinished. The caliph built a Sufi lodge next to it and an orchard in front, its water drawn by wheel from the Tigris just below. In a rather charming touch, her mausoleum featured a valuable library of books that could be borrowed with a deposit.
Maybe it’s just my present mood, the weather, etc, but there is something a little depressing about lives so compressed, events distilled by time and memory until little more than a birth and death reach us in an inescapable reminder of how the story ends. But I will try not to bring you down too much when we pick things back up after this quick break.
…
The stories of women like ‘Ismah Khātūn, Māh-i Mulk, and Saljūqī Khātūn where not entirely representative of those in the book in that they came from the aristocracy, the daughters of lords and sultans, Seljuks. But one of the things you notice in reading these entries, one of the themes, is definitely slavery. Many of these people came from slavery—they were in slavery. Some became or would become free women—by the will of the living, of the deceased, or having given birth to the deceased’s child, the law then requiring that they be freed—but not all.
One example of a woman who entered the caliphal palace via slavery rather than nobility was Shāhān, a name evoking royalty for which the translators here offer “Regina” as a rough equivalent.
Shāhān was of Byzantine origin. She’d been held, and educated, by the daughter of a commander, raised, in the estimation of ibn al-Sā’ī or his sources, for great things, and presented, as one of a group of the enslaved, as a gift to caliph al-Mustansir. She alone, we read, “became his concubine and achieved a level of favour and intimacy that no one else could attain.” But what, you might be wondering, did “favour” look like in such circumstances.
In Shāhān’s case, favour meant having her own court, having “a fiscal office, agents, functionaries, servants, and splendid retinue.” It seems to have meant immense independence, financial and otherwise. “She spent liberally from her funds just as she pleased,” the historian recorded, “and her authority on all matters was unquestioned.” Her monthly budget, for “the tinsmiths, the weavers of embroidered cloth, the goldsmiths, the general merchants, the cloth merchants, the jewellers, and the craftsmen of various types,” was more than 105,000 dinars.
In ibn al-Sā’ī’s depiction, she is celebrated for what she did with that independence, for her charity, and for her “attention to widows, orphans, and the poor.” As he summarizes, “She was good, sought the good, and loved those who did good.”
Even with the death of the caliph, she lived on in undiminished comfort. She was simply moved out from the caliphal palace to another one nearby, one set among beautiful gardens, flowers and fruit trees, and a fine view of the Tigris. And she did not move out alone. She went with an official notary and a retinue of attendants, doormen, footmen, servants, and also her own enslaved women—it’s unclear in this text exactly what her own status was at this point.
It all adds up to a picture of significant wealth, luxury, and maybe more freedom than you might expect, but not total freedom of course. When you are presented to another human in a gift-giving transaction, you don’t have that.
For all their access to wealth, I don’t want to leave you with the impression that these enslaved women otherwise lived in an absence of stress or suffering. There are other examples of slavery in the book which remind us of that aspect of their situation.
One is shown singing the wrong song, at the wrong time, and for the wrong audience. Only the timely intervention of a benefactor means she is not put to death. Another angers her caliph and must call upon his eunuch to help her in dampening his anger. Another weeps because she has been whipped and then again later because she has been struck in the cheek.
Some of these women who entered the palace enslaved seem to have enjoyed more liberty than others, and indeed that is very much what you’d expect. The text is not a snapshot of a decade, a reign, or even a century, within all of which one might expect to find change or divergent outcomes. It’s actually nearly 40 snapshots scattered across the roughly 500 years of the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad, making it, to use the country I’m recording in for reference, about 3.3 Canadas old at the time ibn al-Sā’ī concluded his project. You’re going to expect to find some variety in there.
One of the elements in these stories that I find most interesting, particularly earlier in the book, is the degree to which many of these people seem to have constantly needed to prove themselves, to sing for their summer, to show off their skills to retain that favour we talked about. In this, the skill in question was generally poetry.
The ability to speak or sing in verse, to compose or to produce something magical and clever off the cuff, is highly valued in these anecdotes. There is celebration of those able to perform, of one enslaved woman, for example, described as “the most beautiful and best singer of her time and … well regarded for the light verse she composed.” Of another of whom it is said:
“I never saw a more beautiful or refined woman than ‘Arib, nor one who sang, played music, wrote poetry, or played chess so well. She possessed every quality of elegance and skill one could wish for in a woman.”
But with this high esteem, this premium placed on skill with words, went a considerable amount of pressure to perform and often on demand, not when you had prepared yourself to do so, but now, right now.
One of the poets of this collection is a woman named ‘Inān. We read, in ibn al-Sā’ī’s inclusion of a passage from an earlier historian, that ‘Inān was trained in present-day Morocco, that she was a woman of blonde hair and mixed parentage, and what exactly that mix was is not clear, but the name given for her father indicates he was likely a convert to Islam. We read that she was purchased by one man, that the caliph, the legendary al-Rashid of 1,001 Nights fame, was infatuated with her, wanted to purchase her, that he was put off by her notoriety, the way the poets all satirized her—evidently, she was a very well-known character—but that he eventually did for 100,000 dirhams, a price that would later be doubled when the original slaveholder, who she later returned to, died. When that purchaser also died, she was finally freed.
As you’ll have picked up from that mention of her notoriety, there was much more to her story than being bought and sold. There was the poetry.
Ibn al-Sā’ī’ describes her as “the first poet to become famous under the Abbasids and the most gifted poet of her generation,” and says that “The major male poets of the time would seek her out in her master’s house where they would recite their verses to her and have her pass judgement.”
One gets the sense that it could be a little tiresome to constantly have the leading poets coming by and asking you to pass judgement.
In one anecdote demonstrating her prowess, a man reads a verse and searches everywhere to find someone who can follow and top it, but no one can, no one until his friend advises him, “You should go see ‘Inān, al-Nātifī’s slave.” This, the man did.
“He complained of love so long
that his whole body sighed and spoke!” he read to her.
And without hesitation, she replied:
“He weeps, and pitying him I weep—
he weeps tears, but on tears of blood I choke.”
It can be hard to assess these things for ourselves across that time, culture, and translation divide, but the reply was evidently considered more than adequate to a task that all others had failed at.
In another anecdote, a man visits and, finding her crying after being hit, is signalled to draw her out with some poetry.
“‘Inān,” he opens, “won’t you treat an old man with kindness?
I’m at ‘The Emissary believes and sets store…’”
With that last line, he quoted the end of a surah from the Qur’an, indicating that he was coming to his own end, and ‘Inān responded with this.
“If you persist in severing all bonds with me—
please don’t—then I’m ‘done’ for.”
It was not immediately impressive as a response, perhaps, but if we go to the footnotes we see that she actually continued his lines in the same rhyme and meter and also, with that “done for,” used a word which meant finishing a recitation of the Qur’an in its entirety.
So it went, with her visitor saying,
“Ruthless, the one I love would destroy
the quick and the dead with no regret."
And ‘Inān responding,
“On granite trained, his languid eye
would sickness in the stone beget.”
There are other such anecdotes of witty responses and demonstrations of poetic prowess, but I’ll just share one more here, and I’ll read it in full because I think it really captures something about her situation. The speaker is the poet Marwān.
Quote:
One day I ran into al-Nātifī, who invited me to come and meet ‘Inān. We went to his house and he entered her room ahead of me saying, “Look, I’ve brought you the greatest poet of all—Marwān ibn Abī Hafsah!”
‘Inān was not feeling well and said, “I have other things than Marwān to worry about right now!”
Al-Nātifī struck her with his whip and called out to me, “Come on in!”
I entered and found her weeping. Seeing her tears, I extemporized:
“‘Inān weeps tears that scatter like a broken string of pearls.”
She immediately responded with:
“May the tyrant’s right arm wither
as his cruel whip unfurls!”
“If any man or jinn alive is a greater poet than she, I’ll free every single slave I own!” I said to al-Nātifī.
‘Inān seems to have impressed everyone who encountered her, and she was admired and honoured for her skills, but it was not up to her when she used them. She was ever needing to be sharp, to ready to demonstrate that cleverness with words upon which her standing depended.
It is recorded that later in life, after she had been freed, ‘Inān travelled to Egypt, and in the year 226, 840-1 by the Gregorian calendar, she died there.
‘Inān exemplifies a figure of the early-Abbasid caliphate that F. M. Caswell discusses in his book The Slave Girls of Baghdad. They are taken from their families and culture of birth at a very young age, transported great distances, and educated in the art and culture of their new home. They might win their holder’s favour but are just as likely to be sold during his lifetime, or after his death. They need, to quote Caswell, “to please all the time and [their] stock in trade is [their] amiability and the praise that [they] shower on [their] master and on those in a position to bestow largesse on [them]. Yet in praising some,” Caswell continues, “[they] ha[ve] to be guarded in satirising others, since the times are uncertain and the fortunes of men could be turned upside down overnight.” He on whose back you earned laughter and admiration today, might well remember that moment later on, when the wheel of fortune carried him to the top and he felt the temptation to stomp downward. The person you mocked one moment might well be in position to purchase and possess you in the next. There were narrow, difficult lines to be walked for these women.
Julia Bray writes about this type of culture heroine in her introduction to our text, women who competed with fellow qiyan—often translated a little reductively as “singing girls”—and with the free men who performed at court, the latter risking their standing and livelihood, the former even more, but with a great deal to be won. They sought to match and one-up one another in verse, sometimes with more aggressive, direct insults included. They could be ruthlessly personal or highly sexual, though no such examples are included in this text. Their judges were often the caliphs themselves, men who, as part of the educated elite of their time, would have felt themselves also to be capable poets and more than competent assessors of wit and skill.
Regarding the peculiar cultural position of someone like ‘Inān, Bray writes this.
Quote:
“Medieval contemporaries were alive to the social paradox of the woman slave performer as a leader of fashion but also a commodity, an extravagance but also an investment for her owners, able to some extent to turn her status as chattel to her own profit by manipulating her clients—and they satirized it unsympathetically.”
That last bit probably explains the notoriety-driven hesitation which al-Rashid was said to have felt, despite his infatuation, that uncertainty in attaching his name to another who was so publicly talked of in perhaps tawdry terms. Kind of like a present-day celebrity whose private life gets spread around online and in the press, and not always in the best light.
As for ibn al-Sā’ī’, his tone seems to be that of celebration. He finds, to quote Bray again, “the poetry of the slave consorts [to be] an act of personal daring and moral agency, which finds its reward in the love of the caliph and sometimes even in marriage.” With the book of ibn al-Sā’ī’, we get the stories of those who in that sense succeeded.
I hope you enjoyed this episode. If you are listening on the Patreon, I’ll be back with some bonus listening soon. If not, I’ll be back everywhere else with the next full episode soon after, probably starting in on a new series. Thank you for listening. I’ll talk to you then.