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ABSTRACT
In 256 AH/869 CE, the rank-and-file of the Turkic-Central Asian military in Samarra, the Abbasid imperial centre, rose against their commanders and the caliphal court. This is according to al-Ṭabarī's third/ ninth-century Taʾrīkh (History). The present article discusses two related elements of the mutiny: the rise to influence and authority of members of the Samarran military command, and the resentment of the rank-and-file troops. The main topic, however, is collective action on the part of the troops. The issue is social (re)formation and solidarity on the part of enslaved and freed persons brought together by the circumstances of enslavement in a particular time and place, in this case third/ninth-century Abbasid Iraq. In treating the rebellion, the article draws briefly, in a comparative manner, on the work of scholars of imperial Rome, early medieval Europe, and the antebellum U.S. South. Drawing on what al-Ṭabarī tells us of the mutiny, the article also considers the history of enslavement and unfreedom in early Islamic-era society more broadly. The mutiny serves in this sense as a case study in the history of slavery in early Islamic society.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Jelle Bruning, Said Reza Huseini, Alice Rio, Elizabeth Urban, Kristina Richardson, Stephan Conermann, Robert Hoyland, the two anonymous reviewers, and the editors of this journal for their comments on different drafts. I would also thank, for their helpful comments, the organizers and participants in the workshop, ‘Textual Sources and Geographies of Slavery in the Early Islamic Empire, 600–1000 CE’ (Leiden University, 3–4 December 2020), and the SCORE lecture series (The University of Hamburg, 18 October 2022).
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Muḥammad ibn Jarīr al-Ṭabarī, Taʾrīkh al-rusul wa’l-mulūk, ed. M. J. de Goeje, et al. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1879–1901), 3:1796–1806. For an English translation, see David Waines, The History of al-Ṭabarī, vol. 36: The Revolt of the Zanj (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1992), 76–86.
2 It is a point worth stressing that some indeterminable number of enslaved and freed persons in early Abbasid society pursued careers as, in effect, paid professionals in a number of spheres.
3 On one long-held approach to the Abbasid ‘slave military’, see Patricia Crone, Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980) and Daniel Pipes, Slave Soldiers and Islam: The Genesis of a Military System (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981). My study, The Breaking of a Thousand Swords (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2001) treats the social and political history of the Samarran ‘Turkish’ forces tout court. Étienne de la Vaissière, Samarcande et Samarra: Élites d’Asie Centrale dans l’empire abbasside (Paris: Association pour l’avancement des études iraniennes, 2007), challenges central ideas of the book on, specifically, the origins, enslaved standing of the first Samarran forces, and thus the dating of the introduction of the new-style military.
4 See Gordon, Thousand Swords, 124–9 and Helmut Töllner, Die türkischen Garden am Kalifenhof von Samarra, ihre Entstehung und Machtergreifung bis zum Kalifat al-Muʿtadiḍs (Bonn: Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, 1970), 137–49.
5 The bibliography on the Zanj rebellion is extensive. Two discussions provide further readings and raise important questions: Gwyn Campbell, ‘East Africa in the Early Indian Ocean World Slave Trade: The Zanj Revolt Reconsidered’, in Early Exchange between Africa and the Wider Indian Ocean World, ed. Gwyn Campbell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 275–303, and Kurt Frantz, ‘Slavery in Islam: Legal Norms and Social Practice’, in Slavery and the Slave Trade in the Eastern Mediterranean (c. 1000-1500 CE), eds. Reuven Amitai and Christoph Cluse (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 2017), 51–141, at 100–110. For one suggestive reading of the main source on the rebellion, al-Ṭabarī's Taʾrīkh, see Hugh Kennedy, ‘Caliphs and their Chroniclers in the Middle Abbasid Period (Third/Ninth Century)’, in Texts, documents, and artefacts: Islamic studies in honour of D.S. Richards, ed. Chase F. Robinson (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2003), 17–35, esp. 26–34. A recent study is Philip Grant, ‘Entangled Symbols: Silk and the Material Semiosis of the Zanj Rebellion (869-83)’, Al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 30 (2022), 573–602.
6 For useful discussion of rebellion and resistance by enslaved persons and groups, see Craig Perry, ‘Slavery and Agency in the Middle Ages’, in The Cambridge World History of Slavery (CWHS), vol. 2: AD 500-AD 1420, eds. Craig Perry et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 240–67 at 255–64; and, for the case of Rome, Keith Bradley, ‘Resisting Slavery at Rome’, in CWHS, vol. 1: The Ancient Mediterranean World, eds. Keith Bradley and Paul Cartledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 362–84.
7 Recent work on unfreedom and slavery in the early and medieval Islamic period includes Jelle Bruning, ‘Slave Trade Dynamics in Abbasid Egypt: The Papyrological Evidence’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 63, no. 5-6 (2020): 682–742; Frantz, ‘Slavery in Islam’; this author's survey article, ‘Slavery in the Islamic Middle East (c. 600-1000 CE)’, in CWHS, 2:337–361; and Dahlia E. Gubara, ‘Revisiting Race and Slavery through ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Jabarti's ʿAjaʾib al-athar’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 38, no. 2 (2018): 230–45. On the question of terminology, see the editors’ comments in Slaves and Slave Agency in the Ottoman Empire, eds. Stephan Conermann and Gül Şen (Bonn: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage, 2020), 11–17.
8 Cambridge, MA. and London: Harvard University Press, 1999.
9 Slavery After Rome, 500-1100 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 246–7.
10 For a useful recap of her main ideas, see her recent chapter, ‘Slavery in the Carolingian Empire’, in CWHS, 2:431–452. An invaluable earlier study is Susan Mosher Stuard, ‘Ancillary Evidence for the Decline of Medieval Slavery’, Past & Present 149 (1995): 3–28.
11 On what we know of the labour conditions of the Zanj, see Frantz, ‘Slavery in Islam’, 102–4.
12 As pointed out to me by Kristina Richardson (private correspondence), al-Ṭabarī, citing as his source ‘Rayḥān ibn Ṣāliḥ, one of the slaves (ghilmān)’, refers to supplies provided possibly by overseers or owners. Three specific mentions occur in one passage: Taʾrīkh, 3:1747–1748 (Waines, Revolt, 35).
13 See Hugh Kennedy, The Armies of the Caliphs: Military and Society in the Early Islamic State (London: Routledge, 2001), 128–31 (based largely, as Kennedy indicates, on Gordon, Thousand Swords).
14 Robert Hoyland (private correspondence) usefully underscored the significance of the Samarran troops as an armed body. The bearing of arms, in other words, set the Samarran Turkic case apart from all other instances of slavery in the period. Otherwise, we are largely in the dark as to these mundane aspects of the two instances of slave labour. The Turkic slave recruits were armed, clearly, but how and where did they learn to wield these weapons?
15 ‘Slavery in Islam’, esp. 53, 57, 87–90, 124–8.
16 ‘Carolingian Empire’, 432.
17 For brief discussion, see Gordon, Thousand Swords, 95–7; Hugh Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates, 3rd ed. (London: Routledge, 2016), 149–50; and Töllner, Die türkischen Garden, 109–12. The entire section of al-Ṭabarī's history, 3:1535–1644, deserves much further study. A first English translation, unfortunately quite short on annotation, is George Saliba, The History of al-Ṭabarī, vol. 35: The Crisis of the Abbasid Caliphate (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1985), 28–109. A new translation, with full apparatus, is very much in order.
18 The text identifies him as a (former) blacksmith who gained the caliph's trust and thus, apparently, joined his inner circle. See the Taʾrīkh, 3:1815 (Waines, Revolt, 93). He stands, in other words, among those countless number of individuals of lower social rank who appear then immediately disappear in our sources with too little sense of their identity and background: the Arabic sources have much to say of elite Abbasid society, far less on the socio-economic majority.
19 See Gordon, Thousand Swords, 37, and, on the origins of the Maghāribah, 37–40.
20 Taʾrīkh, 3:1816 (twice), 1818 and 1821, with variants of wording each time (= Waines, Revolt, 94, 95, 98).
21 See Kennedy, Prophet, 128–35 and idem, ‘Pity and Defiance in the Poetry of the Siege of Baghdad (197/813)’, in Warfare and Poetry in the Middle East, ed. Hugh Kennedy (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013), 149–65. For a discussion of the civil war of 251/865–866, and the mobilization of the civilian populace of Baghdad, see Chase F. Robinson, ‘Crisis and Caliphate in the Spring of 865’, in Non Sola Scriptura: Essays on the Qur'an and Islam in Honour of William A. Graham, eds. Bruce Fudge et al. (London: Routledge, 2022), 258–80, at 259–63.
22 Again, for one reading, but with limited reference to problems related to slavery, see Gordon, Thousand Swords, 103–4 and 124–9.
23 Al-Ṭabarī, 3:1809–1810, and see Gordon, Thousand Swords, 103 and 140.
24 See Gordon, ibid., 141.
25 Al-Balawī, Sīrat Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn, ed. Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī (Damascus: Maṭbaʿat al-Taraqqī, 1358/1939), 85–7.
26 See Gordon, Thousand Swords, 21–46.
27 See Matthew S. Gordon, ‘Preliminary Remarks on Slaves and Slave Labor in the Third/Ninth Century ʿAbbāsid Empire’, in Slaves and Households in the Near East, ed. Laura Culbertson (The University of Chicago: The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2011), 77–80. A full study of the third/ninth-century Eurasian slave trade remains to be written. Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: Communications and Commerce, AD 300-900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Youval Rotman, Byzantine Slavery and the Mediterranean World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); and idem, ‘The Medieval Mediterranean Slave Trade’, in Trade in Byzantium: Papers from the Third International Sevgi Gönül Byzantine Studies Symposium, eds. Paul Magdalino and Nevra Necipoğlu (Istanbul: Koç University Press, 2016), 129–42, model how such a history might be written combining material and literary sources, from both within and outside the Islamic realm.
28 See, specifically on female poets and singers, Gordon, ‘Slavery in the Islamic Middle East’, 357–9.
29 Thousand Swords, 23.
30 Gordon, Thousand Swords, 19, 90, 92–4, and 136–40 (with further references in the index). Bughā's career in the service of court and empire, which appears to have been distinct both in duration and achievement, deserves its own close study. Armenian sources provide valuable if highly stylized references on a significant chapter of his career. See Alison Vacca, ‘Conflict and Community in the Medieval Caucasus’, al-ʿUṣūr al-Wusṭā 25 (2017): 66–112.
31 One anonymous reviewer pointed to the likelihood of internecine warfare, in territories of the Toghuz-Oguz in western Central Asia, as a source of captives which, in turn, suggests the possibility that some of the Samarran Turkic troops had once been on opposing sides of such conflicts.
32 See Abbès Zouache, review of de la Vaissière's Samarcande et Samarra in Bulletin Critique des Annales islamologiques 27 (2012): 68–71. He cites the study by Shihab al-Sarraf, ‘Mamluk Fūrūsiyah Literature and its Antecedents’, Mamluk Studies Review 8, no. 1 (2004): 141–200, especially 144–8. Al-Sarraf leaves it unclear as to how directly the early Abbasid-era training manuals that he discusses shed light on the formation of the Samarran military.
33 The topic deserves a full discussion in its own right. Franz, ‘Slavery in Islam’, 110–20 is a starting point although he mostly considers the later Mamluks of Egypt.
34 On the rise to prominence by a very different contemporary grouping, the courtesans of Abbasid fine society, see my ‘Abbasid Courtesans and the Question of Social Mobility’, in Concubines and Courtesans: Women and Slavery in Islamic History, ed. Matthew S. Gordon and Kathryn A. Hain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 27–51.
35 See my ‘The Turkish Officers of Samarra: Revenue and the Exercise of Authority’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 42, no. 4 (1999): 466–93.
36 ‘Ibn Ṭūlūn's Pacification Campaign: Sedition and Authority in Abbasid Egypt’, in Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean World: From Constantinople to Baghdad, 500-1000 CE, eds. Jelle Bruning, Janneke H. M. de Jong, and Petra M. Sijpesteijn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), 169–201.
37 One question left untreated here: on what information were the rank and file acting? See Gordon, Thousand Swords, 127–8.
38 Soul by Soul, 65.
39 Keith Bradley, Slavery and Society at Rome (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 4–5; Kyle Harper, Slavery in the Late Roman World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 274–6; Johnson, Soul by Soul, 63–77.
40 Slavery in the Late Roman World, 278–9. I am grateful to Jelle Bruning for pressing me to think more closely about Harper's comments.
41 Relevant here, of course, is Orlando Patterson's much-discussed notion of ‘social death’, which, in the Middle Eastern context is problematic. Joseph Miller, The Problem of Slavery as History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012), 20–4, is useful here although his comments do not speak to the Middle East per se and focus more on enslavers than the enslaved.
42 A further consideration concerns the shaping of families and thus subsequent generations by these men. See Gordon, Thousand Swords, 58–60, 69–74, 111–2.
43 For one reading, as literary drama, of al-Ṭabarī's account of the Samarra period, and, especially, the presence and conduct of the Turkic forces, see Tayeb El-Hibri, Reinterpreting Islamic Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially 208–15 (his index contains no obvious entries on the Turkic military). El-Hibri eschews all reference to slavery in the Samarra period – save a passing mention of ‘those inferior in social status’ (191) – and says very little about the internal organization and dynamics of the Turkic-Central Asian military, which I argue here was a key ingredient of this long section of al-Ṭabarī's text. A virtue of El-Hibri's discussion lies in identifying a likely cultural reaction in third/ninth-century urban Iraq to the presence of the ‘Turk’, effectively the Other, with its menu of traits of the rough and untutored outsider. But, in reading the long account, do we not miss a valuable perspective on the Samarran period if the only view we adopt is that of a broadly conceived ‘Persian’ lens? Surely al-Ṭabarī was as much a Baghdadi (denizen of the one dynamic city), Arabo-Persophile (at home in a cosmopolitan Middle Eastern milieu), and Muslim scholar (deeply invested in Islamic practice, law, and education) as he was the offspring of Iranian parents. Put differently, why did he bother to include such close – and, if we accept his stated reliance on eyewitnesses, closely observed – detail if his sole aim was to bemoan the conduct of ‘the Turk’?
44 For one biography, see Franz Rosenthal, The History of al-Ṭabarī, vol. 1: General Introduction and From the Creation to the Flood (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1989), 5–154. Rosenthal, 33–6, notes a reference to al-Ṭabarī's son (Jaʿfar?) and, parenthetically, asks whether the historian bore the child with a concubine (‘a slave girl’). If so, al-Ṭabarī would have been one among many third/ninth-century Baghdadi jurists whose households employed enslaved and freed persons. Discussion among the jurists and legal scholars on the myriad topics surrounding slavery was wide-ranging: see Rainer Oßwald, Das islamische Sklavenrecht (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2017). The indications that they were slave-owners themselves suggests a level of personal investment in these discussions.
45 Taʾrīkh, 3:1736 (Waines, Revolt, 24), and see Gordon, Thousand Swords, 102.
46 So, for example, Taʾrīkh, 3:1805–1806 (Waines, 84–85: ‘they were quarreling again, some saying they were satisfied, other claiming they were not’).
47 Taʾrīkh, 3:1809–1810 (Waines, 88–89).
48 Taʾrīkh, 3:1800 (Waines, 81).
49 Taʾrīkh, 3:1803 (Waines, 83).
50 De la Vaissière draws on information from Central Asian and Middle Eastern (read Abbasid-era Arabic) sources alike in challenging key ideas on my part. A first point is that he does not reject the central ‘fact’ of enslavement of the Samarran soldiers. Our disagreements lie elsewhere. First, in his view, contrary to the assertion of the ‘Mamluk’ model, the enslaved recruits were not children or adolescents who were then subjected to forms of training, conversion, and so on. Rather, these were adults and, for the main part, captives of war, acquired precisely because of their perceived martial skills. We do have the reference to Bughā the Elder's capture (with his sons, so presumably as an adult), but, otherwise, I do not see in the sources sufficient support for this argument. Second, that the enslavement of the Turkic recruits was temporary, ‘a transitory stage, a mode of entry to the Islamic world’ (Samarcande, 235). It is this assertion, in effect, that I am arguing with here. One point I do not pursue concerns the extent to which stigma attached to the Turkic recruits, even following manumission and a record of loyal service. In any cultural setting, including in the modern day, does enslavement, regardless of its form and even if ‘initial’, ever cease to matter in this sense?
51 The two key works by Crone and Pipes are cited above (note 3). David Ayalon's writings on the Abbasid case include a draft study, ‘The Military Reforms of Caliph al-Muʿtasim: Their Background and Consequences’, now available in one volume of his collected papers, Islam and the Abode of War: Military Slaves and Islamic adversaries (London: Routledge, 2016).
52 M. A. Shaban's willy-nilly arguments regarding the Samarran soldiers, Islamic History, a New Interpretation, vol. 2: AD 750-1055 (AH 132-448) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 61–7, speaks it seems to a wider effort to downplay, if not ignore, the history of slavery in the first periods of the Islamic era (in contrast with a more vigorous scholarship on slavery in later periods, particularly the Mamluk and Ottoman eras). Slavery in the nascent Islamic society, as a taboo subject in modern Islamic and Middle Eastern studies, is due for discussion, although much recent scholarship, many examples of which are cited here, points to a falling-away of this taboo.
53 Crone, Slaves on Horses, 74–5 and Yaacov Lev, ‘David Ayalon (1914-1998) and the History of Black Military Slavery in Medieval Islam’, Der Islam 90, no. 1 (2013): 21–34.
54 Crone, Slaves on Horses, 78–81.
55 Ibid., 81.
56 See, for example, the brief reference in al-Balawī, Sīrat Aḥmad ibn Ṭūlūn, 50 (in his account of the short-lived rebellion of ʿĪsā ibn al-Shaykh al-Shaybanī in Syria in 253/866–867). Treating the Samarra period, al-Yaʿqūbī, Al-Taʾrīkh, ed. M. Th. Houtsma, Ibn Wādhih qui dicitur al-Jaʿqūbī Historiae, 2 vols. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1883), 2:591–620, refers frequently to the political interventions of the Turkic-Central Asian military. For an English translation, see The Works of Ibn Wāḍiḥ al-Yaʿqūbī: An English Translation, trans. and ed. Matthew S. Gordon et al., 3 vols. (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2018), 3:1257–87, esp. 1287.
57 See Gordon, Thousand Swords, 118–29 (on reforms to land use and distribution).
58 See Gordon, Thousand Swords, 68, 108, 125–6, and 203.
59 Taʾrīkh, 3:1627 (Saliba, 95–6).
60 Taʾrīkh, 3:1790 (Waines, 71) and 1806 (Waines, 86).
61 Which fits with El-Hibri's approach: see my earlier note.
62 See Dominique Sourdel et al., The Encyclopaedia of Islam, Second Edition [EI2], eds. P. Bearman, et al. (Leiden: Brill, 1960–2007), s.v. ‘Ghulām.’ Sourdel says nothing of the occurrence of the term in the Qur’an and, thus, Islamic exegetical literature; see Paul Forand, ‘The Relation of the Slave and the Client to the Master or Patron in Medieval Islam’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 2, no. 1 (1971): 59–66 at 62, where he notes that most often it is used there as ‘son.’
63 Kitāb al-buldān, ed. M.J. de Goeje (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1892), 255–6.
64 Kennedy, Prophet, 177–9 and Sourdel, ‘Ghulām.’ Kennedy speaks of a ‘new army’, where Sourdel refers to regiments made up of descendants of the Samarran forces.
65 The literature on walāʾ is extensive; see Frantz, ‘Slavery in Islam’, 68, 70–3. The most recent treatment is Elizabeth Urban, Conquered Populations in Early Islam: Non-Arabs, Slaves and the Sons of Slave Mothers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021). Daniel Pipes, ‘Mawlas: Freed Slaves and Converts in Early Islam’, in Slaves and Slavery in Muslim Africa, vol. 1: Islam and the Ideology of Enslavement, ed. John Ralph Willis (London: Frank Cass, 1985), 199–247, if thoroughly researched, rests on a strikingly static view of Islamic society: one comes away with too shallow a sense of, to borrow Frantz's term, ‘social practice’.
66 Patricia Crone, EI2, s.v. ‘Mawlā,’ and John A. Nawas, ‘Client’, Encyclopedia of Islam, Third Edition, eds. Kate Fleet et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2017-). For further, if now dated, discussion of the Abbasid case, see Forand, ‘Relation of the Slave’, and Jacob Lassner, The Shaping of ʿAbbāsid Rule (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 94–102.
67 On whether al-Ṭabarī visited Samarra, see Gordon, Thousand Swords, 11 and note 60.
68 The troops were also provided with other forms of support: housing, alongside shops, bathhouses, and mosques, as well as, according to al-Yaʿqūbī's Buldān, 258, in his description of the initial settlement at Samarra, slave women (with whom the troops were to produce families: the troops and the women alike were thus subject to a project of social engineering).
69 For one summary of the context and sequence of revolts, see Maged Mikhail, From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 118–27.
70 See Gordon, ‘Ibn Ṭūlūn's Pacification Campaign’.
71 Two useful surveys are Michael Bonner, ‘The Waning of Empire, 861-945’, in The New Cambridge History of Islam, vol. 1: The Formation of the Islamic World, Sixth to Eleventh Centuries, ed. Chase F. Robinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 305–59, and Hugh Kennedy, ‘The Decline and Fall of the First Muslim Empire’, Der Islam 81, no. 1 (2004): 3–30. Neither author takes up the question of fiscal reform as an imperial response to local and regional resistance, despite clear indications in our sources of efforts by the central regime to enhance its access to provincial wealth in this manner. There is good reason to tie reform efforts, both in Iraq and Egypt, the two wealthiest Abbasid provinces, to the accommodation of and demands by the Samarran military.
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Matthew S. Gordon
Matthew S. Gordon is a professor of Middle East and Islamic history at Miami University, Oxford, Ohio. USA.