Iranian Elites and Turkish Rulers

A History of Isfahan in the Saljuq Period

David Durand-Guedy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781135193287
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

The Saljuq period of the eleventh and twelfth centuries saw the arrival in Iran of Türkmen nomads from Central Asia and the beginning of Turkish rule. Through the example of the city of Isfahan, the book analyses the internal evolution of Iranian society in this period and the interaction of the Iranian elites and Turkish rulers.

Drawing on an analysis of a wide range of sources, including poetic and epistolary material, this study fills an historiographical gap and casts new light on the two centuries prior to the Mongol invasion. This comprehensive analytical study provides a new contribution to the understanding of many crucial issues: the cultural divide between Western and Eastern Iran; the military potential of city-dwellers; the attitude of the Turkish rulers toward cities and city life; the action of the famous vizier Nizam al-Mulk; the meaning of the Ismaili uprising; and above all the structure of the local elite, organized into rival networks and largely autonomous vis-à-vis state powers.

The study is enhanced by a variety of additional features, including extensive genealogical tables, Arabic script and maps. Providing a new understanding of the cultural identity of Iran, this book is an important contribution to the study of the history of Iran and the Medieval period.

Part 1

THE DISPUTED CAPITAL

1
IDENTITY

To understand how Iṣfahāni society was affected by the Saljūq conquest, we must first of all understand its characteristics before that conquest. What was its structure, its resources, its culture, its connections with the outside world, its ambitions? In short, what was its identity? Our object here is not to write the history of the city up to the beginning of the fifth/eleventh century, but rather to sketch out a benchmark against which we can measure and understand later changes.

The great city of western Iran

At the beginning of the fifth/eleventh century, Iṣfahān was the greatest city of the Iranian west. Lying at an altitude of 1,700 metres between the Kurdish-inhabited Zagros mountains and the Great Desert (or Kawīr), it was part of the region that the geographers of the day called Jibāl, the ‘Mountains’. It was equidistant from Rayy (modern Tehran) to the north, Hamadhān to the north-west and Shīrāz, the capital of Fārs, to the south.¹

A full-grown city

Travellers reaching Iṣfahān after crossing vast arid regions saw spread out before them a green valley, rich and densely populated. Like Iran’s other cities, Iṣfahān had grown up between the third/ninth and fourth/tenth centuries, during the period of mass Islamization of the local populations. Its rapid urban development had been possible thanks to its rich hinterland in the valley of the Zāyanda-rūd, especially in the rustāqs (rural district) close to the river (see map 2). The river gave Iṣfahān its ‘capacity to be a city (isti῾ dādi shahriyat)’, to use the phrase of a Ṣafavid chronicler.² Its hydraulic head, the greatest in the entire Iranian plateau, was exploited by means of a sophisticated water distribution system and a network of bypass channels, resulting in considerable agricultural productivity.³ According to Abū Nu῾aym al-Iṣfahānī (d. 430/1038), five hundred villages belonged to Iṣfahān province. They were not evenly distributed. They were numerous near the river, especially in the middle part of its course in the cantons of Lanjān, Mārbīn, Jayy and Barā’ān. Further out, they were quite thinly spread.⁴

1 The classic accounts by Schwartz (1896: vol. V, 582–670), Barthold (1903: 169–79) and Le Strange (1905: 202–9) summarize the principal information available on the historic geography of Iṣfahān in the pre-Mongol period. Several articles in Persian using the information provided by the biographical dictionaries have since enriched our knowledge (see Ṣādiqī 1992: 30–40, based on Abūl-Shaykh and Abū Nu῾aym; Ja fariyān 2000, based on Sam῾ānī).

2 Gunābādī quoted by Blake 1999: 19.

3 This system was studied in detail by Lambton (1938) on the basis of a Ṣafavid-era decree (farmān), but its origin is far older: it is mentioned by Ibn Rusta (155; trans.: 179–80) as far back as the late third/ninth century and by Māfarrūkhī (48; trans.: 47–8) in the fifth/eleventh century.

4 Krawulsky’s map (1978: map 6) brings this contrast out very clearly. This map, based on the geographical work of Ḥamd Allāh al-Mustawfī (eighth/fourteenth century), is, along with Siroux’s (1971), the most complete and reliable. Le Strange’s map (1905) is very rudimentary, and Cornu’s (1985) is quite incomplete and in part incorrect (see, for example, the location given for Khān Lanjān).

In addition to its fertile hinterland, Iṣfahān’s dynamism owed much to its location. It is true that the city was not on the ‘Khurāsān road’, that section of the Silk Road that linked Baghdad to Nīshāpūr via Hamadhān and Rayy. It was, however, at the junction of two major economic axes that connected the Iranian plateau to the two major ports serving the Persian Gulf (the Muslim world’s main axis of communication at that time): the Sīrāf–Rayy road via Shīrāz, and the Basra–Nīshāpūr road via I¯dhaj (modern I¯dha) (see map 1). Ibn Ḥawqal was in no way mistaken when he said that Iṣfahān was the junction-point (furḍa) of Fārs, Jibāl, Khurāsān and Khūzistān.⁵ Muqaddasī, who visited the city in the fourth/tenth century, remarked for his part that ‘the caravans never cease to arrive from Basra and Khurāsān’.⁶

The city had grown up two kilometres north-west of the Sasanian city of Jayy, on a site occupied by a Jewish community (al-Yahūdiyya).⁷ For long the geographers talked of a twin city (Jayy/Yahūdiyya), but by the beginning of the fifth/eleventh century, Jayy was rapidly losing importance. Tha ῾ālibī (d. 429/1038) still writes that Iṣfahān is one of the cities that have two names (Iṣfahān and Jayy), like Baghdad (also called Madīna al-salām), Medina (also called Yathrib) and Cairo (Misr and Fusṭāṭ).⁸ Indeed ῾Imād al-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī uses the toponym ‘Jayy’ several times to speak of Iṣfahān, but this usage is dictated by stylistic constraints of rimed prose, in which this author was a specialist, and ‘Jayy’ is not used in other Saljūq-era sources.⁹

5 Ibn Ḥawqal: 362 (trans.: 354). The criticisms frequently levelled against this author regarding the derivative nature of his information on the caliphate’s eastern regions are, as far as his passage on Iṣfahān (ibid., 362–8; trans.: 354–9) goes, totally unjustified. His descriptions of the notables’ palaces, the Nawrūz festival and the distribution of the Zāyanda-rūd’s waters are quite unique; furthermore, his account is free from the local patriotism of Ibn Rusta and the normative judgement of Muqaddasī.

6 Muqaddasī: 389 (trans.: 346).

7 For complete references on the beginnings of the Jewish population of Iṣfahān, see Gil 2004: 523, note 298. On the urban genesis of Iṣfahān, see Golombek 1974; Mihryār 2006 (meticulous investigation of the fifteen original villages); Kamaly 2006: esp. 643–4. See also the reference works quoted in note 1 above.

8 See Tha῾ālibī (B): 89 (trans.: 87).

9 See Bundārī: 127, line 18 (‘tawajjaha min al-Rayy ilā Jayy’: ‘he left Rayy for Iṣfahān’) and 295, lines 7–8 (‘jā῾ a ilā Jayy bilālayy’: ‘he came to Iṣfahān without trouble’).

The new city of Iṣfahān had a roughly circular shape which can be retraced thanks to the line of the walls built in the early fifth/eleventh century (see map 3).¹⁰ In the absence of any textual or architectural data, it is not possible to form as clear a picture of the city’s exact topography in the Būyid or Saljūq periods as can be done for Damascus or Baghdad.¹¹ The heart of the urban space was the Friday mosque, which faced on to a square (the maydān-i kuhna). This square no doubt corresponds to the maydān Sulaymān of which Abū Nu῾aym speaks.¹² It was called the ‘old square’ (maydān-i kuhna) from the Ṣafavid period on, to distinguish it from the new royal square (Naqsh-i Jahān) that Shāh ῾Abbās had built in his capital.¹³ The mosque itself had been rebuilt several times in line with the city’s growing population. With a surface of about 11,250 m2, it was one of the largest in the Muslim world.¹⁴

10 See the maps of Golombek 1974 and Bāqir Shīrāzī(in Isfahan (1996), but without mention o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of maps
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Preface
• Notes on dates, transliterations and translations
• Maps
• Introduction
• PART 1 The disputed capital
• PART 2 The reshaping of a local society
• PART 3 Turkish emirs and Iranian elites face to face
• Conclusion: the conditions and nature of political action in the context of Turkish domination
• Appendices
• Synopsis
• Bibliography
• Indexes