Usama ibn Munqidh

Warrior Poet of The Age of Crusades

Paul M. Cobb

• Publisher: Oneworld Academic
• Year: 2012
• eBook ISBN: 9781780741970
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Islamic Theology

Usama Ibn Munqidh (1095-1188) was a Syrian poet and warrior whose life coincided with some of the most dramatic moments in Islamic history: the invasion of the Turks into the Middle East, the collapse of the Shi'ite political power, and above all, the coming of the Crusades. Often at the frontline of such events whilst on military service representing one of his many Lords, including on occasion the legendary Saladin, Usama was nonethless best-known to his contemporaries as a poet.Covering his exquisite anthologies of Arabic poetry, his witty and well- loved memoirs, and his political adventures, this comprehensive biography examines both the literary works of the famous "Arab- Syrian Gentleman" and the tumultuous life which inspired them. With a guide to further reading, a dynastic family tree and a glossary of the principal characters encountered in the book, it offers an indispensable window into Usmama's life, times and world of thought.

THE YOUTH AND THE CASTLE

On July 4, 1095, Usama ibn Munqidh entered his world just as we all did ours: with limited horizons that expanded with each passing hour, day, month, and year. A room in a maze of rooms deep in a castle; a castle perched over a town; a town linked to other towns through roads, hunting paths, and a host of human relationships. These were the settings that defined Usama’s early life and where his earliest formative experiences took place. For all that in later life he was famed as a battle-scarred, road-weary veteran, we do well to remember that, for his first thirty or so years, he never really strayed far from the room where he was born.

THE SETTING OF SHAYZAR

Shayzar lay at the center of Usama’s earlier, smaller world. Shayzar Castle, the home of Usama and his clan, the Banu Munqidh, sits imperiously atop a high and nearly inaccessible promontory of rock that extends from the surrounding plateau; a cragged northward-gesturing spear point that the local population called “The Rooster’s Comb” because of its notched profile. This rock is protected on almost three sides by the Orontes river, which churns along its base to the north and east; to the south, a moat separates the rock from its parent plateau, leaving the castle almost isolated from the country surrounding it, save for its western approach. There, spreading from the western flank of the rock and north toward the river, the lower town of Shayzar stood, and still stands today. For the inhabitants of Shayzar town, the castle high overhead served both as the residence of their lords, the Banu Munqidh, and as a citadel and refuge in war.

Hewn out of the white, grey, and honey-colored stone of the Orontes valley, the remaining ruins of Shayzar Castle are a monument to what we do not know. The castle ruins that visitors see today are the remains of a structure, or structures, built many years after Usama ibn Munqidh and his family passed from history. While it is more than likely that the present ruins closely approximate the castle that Usama lived in, we cannot really be certain. For Usama’s family castle met a sudden and bitter end, and lies largely hidden. The present ruins thus provide a general sense of Usama’s home, but we need the medieval sources to flesh out some of the details.

Just as one enters the ruins in the present day, in Usama’s day one could only approach Shayzar castle from the town, along a ramp that stretched to the castle’s northern (and, apparently, only) gate. From a dark, enclosed, probably dog-legged passageway, one entered a hall and then stepped – blinking, presumably – into the castle grounds. The castle stretched axially from its northern gate straight to the southern tip of the rock, and then, as now, ended in an imposing defensive tower. Sources describe families in the Banu Munqidh household as having individual residences, some with towers, some with winding stairs and windows. These homes were, almost certainly, of standard mud-brick and stone, with rooms grouped around a courtyard where, we are told, arched porticos provided shade. Save for a dungeon, some stables mentioned in passing, and (to judge by the current ruins), some wells or cisterns, these are the main reliable details of what Shayzar looked like in Usama’s day. If, as seems likely, Usama’s Shayzar was built at least partly of the stones in the present ruins, then we can appreciate, in the near-constant breeze, how cool the interiors would have been on a summer afternoon, how positively cold and dank in wet weather, and how, at sunset on clear days, Shayzar Castle would flame brightly as the town below slipped into darkness.

Shayzar Castle, view from the north

The sounds of Shayzar would have been telling. Usama grew up amidst the rhythms of a medieval town; the hammering and pounding of myriad tasks and arts, the crunch of gravel, and the crackle of hearths. Animals, and their calls, were everywhere: bleating herds of sheep and goats being driven to pasture, discernible far away, braying donkeys objecting to their labors, whickering horses, dogs snoring, a hunting falcon screeching its challenge to its prey, and, just maybe, a lion roaring in the distant hills. And always, ever-present, the river. The Orontes lapped at the foot of Shayzar and gurgled past on its northward course; in the dry summer months exposed rocky patches could serve as fords for those who knew the river, and after rains and the spring thaw, the river slowly churned at full crest, making crossing impossible save by the town’s sole bridge, and leaving marshy areas, where waterfowl congregated, just outside the town. As long as the river obliged, it also added one last sonic dimension to life at Shayzar: the measured, incessant groaning of mills located on the river’s banks and islands up and down the valley. Some of these milled grain; others propelled water into the town and across the fields. Today, in the nearby city of Hama, grander, much noisier descendants of these traditional Syrian mills can still be seen, and heard.

By proving itself an obstacle, the river also proved a boon to Shayzar. Local knowledge notwithstanding, a person could generally only cross the river by a nearby bridge. Moreover, only one road served this bridge, and it ran right through Shayzar and under the watchful gaze of the Banu Munqidh. The ford at Shayzar was one of the few crossing points in the region, and it was guarded jealously. Control of the ford meant control of Shayzar. Even before they had come into possession of Shayzar, the Banu Munqidh had built a fortress at the bridge, and, after moving to Shayzar, stationed a small body of soldiers there to prevent enemies from crossing unopposed. From the bridge, the Banu Munqidh could travel to other lands of their small principality: scattered fields and outlying villages, but also, at times, fortresses and towns as far away as Latakia on the coast, or Kafartab on the road to Aleppo.

By 1095, the year Usama was born, the Banu Munqidh had been lords of Shayzar for fifteen years, having captured it from the Byzantines in 1080. But the family had been moderately influential in northern Syrian affairs for generations, particularly in the courts of Tripoli and Aleppo. By the time they captured Shayzar, the Banu Munqidh were a recognized family of power, with a reputation, even in distant Cairo, for honor, courtliness, and soldiering. At Usama’s birth, his uncle Nasr was the head of the household, but his other uncle, Sultan, and his father, Murshid, played increasingly important roles in maintaining the affairs of the principality. Indeed, in the months prior to Usama’s birth, Murshid was away on a mission in Iran, petitioning the Saljuq sultan for the return of some of the family lands. His business in the court completed, Murshid arrived back in Shayzar just in time for the birth of the second of his four sons. He named him Usama, “lion,” a prescient gesture, given that the boy would become famous as a hunter of his leonine namesake.

Upon Usama’s uncle Nasr’s death in 1098, the succession to the lordship of Shayzar became a matter of family controversy. In the end, unexpectedly, Usama’s uncle Sultan, not his father Murshid, became the new lord of Shayzar in 1098. Murshid was certainly the elder of the two brothers, but he appears to have had serious misgivings about becoming a full-time politician. He was noted for his piety, and this, according to the sources, was the reason behind his singular decision upon Nasr’s death: he refused the succession as a worldly distraction and let it pass to Sultan. “No, by God,” some sources have him swearing, “I will not enter into the affairs of this world!” Murshid remained by his brother Sultan’s side, but henceforth Sultan was lord of Shayzar. From that position, he would have a decisive impact on Usama’s future (Ibn ‘Asakir, Ta’rikh, 1998, 57: 216).

CHILDHOOD

Usama had no formal education, in the sense that we would recognize it today. For a son of the rural aristocracy like Usama, education more commonly came through tutors and kinsmen. Usama’s father had been tutored to memorize the Qur’an, and he considered the study of scripture to be an act of pious merit that went beyond the common day-to-day gestures of Muslim religiosity. Indeed, Usama tells us that, alongside hunting, the study of the Qur’an was Murshid’s chief occupation in life. By the time he died, he had personally produced over forty copies of the Qur’an, many lavishly decorated, as well as an immense commentary on it and its style, grammar, and various readings. It is no surprise that he encouraged all his children to be on intimate terms with the Qur’an, its lessons, its languages, and its rhythms. And, given Usama’s social context, it was perfectly natural that this learning should go on in the midst of his other daily activities, on the hunt if necessary (KI, 201/230):

On the day on which [my father] would start for the mountain to hunt partridges, while he was en route towards the mountain but still at some distance from it, he would say to us, “Disperse. Every one of you who has not yet recited his assignment in the Qur’an will do it now.” We, his children, knew the Qur’an by heart. We would then disperse and recite our assignments until we got to the hunting field. He would thereupon order someone to summon us and would question each one of us as to how much we had read.

In other matters of the spirit, Murshid was less successful in guiding his son. Like many Muslims of his day, Usama’s father knew that he lived as part of some unknowable divine plan, and that some of the possible vectors of that plan could be observed in the movements of the stars and planets. Medieval Islamic study of the heavens combined astronomy and astrology in the modern sense, in that, while based upon “scientific” observation of the night skies and their denizens, its purpose was, for Usama’s father and many others like him, directed at plumbing even deeper mysteries. But for every devotee of the stars, there was a skeptic. Despite his urging, Usama never really took to this aspect of his father’s world, seeing in it a strange contradiction to his other pious pursuits. However, at Shayzar, on clear summer nights, it would be surprising if he did not turn heavenward and wonder quietly about the ineffable; later, Usama would fondly remember how the old man would point out the stars and tell him their names (KI, 56/85).

For areas requiring more technical guidance, Murshid, like many other men of his standing, employed professional tutors to educate his children. Tutoring in medieval Syria was rather like the practice known to the ancient Greeks and Romans. Tutors were not professional teachers, but scholars who, in order to make a living, sought residence and patronage in a suitable household as a tutor or copyist. Physicians were in much the same situation. For them, attachment to a household provided the means (and the media) for their work. This being so, there could be significant difficulty in attracting decent tutors in smaller households like Shayzar, for the best scholars were attracted to wealthy urban courts. However, in Usama’s childhood, thanks to the disruptions and dislocations of the Turkish invasions and the Crusades, it was essentially a buyer’s market for tutors, and one gets the sense that a flurry of scholars, poets, and physicians, most of them unnamed, made their way through Shayzar.

For example, a locally renowned Syrian poet and man of letters, Ibn Munira, appears as Usama’s tutor, and it is surely relevant that he was from Kafartab, a town that the Banu Munqidh had once controlled but which, after 1098, found itself in Frankish hands. Ibn Munira was a retiring character, and although Usama once impishly suggested that even he should don armor and fight the Franks, the scholar replied that he was a man of reason and, since all reason left a man in combat, he would certainly do no such thing. Another tutor was in a similar situation: Abu ‘Abdallah al-Tulaytuli, born in Toledo in Spain, was hailed by Usama as one of the greatest grammarians of his age. He had once worked as the chief scholar in the academy of the Syrian port of Tripoli, a city that attracted scholars, copyists, and books from diverse regions. When the Franks captured it in 1109, Usama’s father and uncle rescued Abu ‘Abdallah, and took him into their service at Shayzar. Usama studied grammar with him for nearly a decade in his late teens and early twenties. He later recounted an anecdote about this teacher, describing a situation familiar to any academic visited by students. One day, Usama went to his tutor’s chamber to study grammar with him and found him sitting with all the principal books on the subject lying before him. Impressed by this material manifestation of his tutor’s learning, the young student asked him, “Shaykh Abu ‘Abdallah, have you read all these books?” “Read them?” the tutor replied coolly, “No, by God, I have rather inscribed them on the tablet [of my heart] and memorized them all.” He then went on to prove it by having Usama select a line at random, from which point he finished the page by heart (KI, 208–209/238).

Despite this exposure to high-quality book-learning, the young Usama acquired most of his education in the school of hard knocks, that is, from the everyday examples, guidance, and chastisement of family members. At Shayzar, he was surrounded by family (see figure 1). His father Murshid and his uncle Sultan dominate his memories of his younger years. But he also had his mother, three brothers, and at least one sister and one grandmother, not to mention several uncles, a horde of cousins, the wives of his male kin, and the servants of the various households, many of whom he loved and respected deeply. In all these people, he saw, as he grew older, life’s lessons displayed in three areas in particular: the hunt, warfare, and that universal human pastime, observing others.

HUNTING AT SHAYZAR

Hunting in medieval Syria, or at least the kind of hunting practiced at Shayzar, was very much like its medieval European counterpart. Although people from the lower strata of society pursued game as a matter of course and indeed as a matter of survival, the chase was, above all, a pastime of the elite and of men. For avid hunters like Usama’s kin, game was pursued by land and air. On land, nets and traps were common, but proud hunters preferred to kill their game with bows and spears. From the air, hunters had allies in trained raptors such as falcons, sakers, and hawks and the like that might snatch small game like partridges on the run, scout out bigger game from on high or blind and harass them while waiting for the horsemen to arrive to finish the job. Men considered the chase on horseback through wild terrain the finest diversion. To assist them, medieval Syrian hunters made use of domesticated carnivores, usually hounds (such as the famous saluki), or, in one notable case at Shayzar, a tamed cheetah; lynxes are also recorded. Noble hunters pursued noble beasts: gazelles, antelopes, and panthers. But, whenever possible, the Banu Munqidh hunted lions – in marshes, caves, and forests, mounted, on foot, alone or in groups.

The visitor at Shayzar today may well find such pursuits impossible to fathom, the local ecosystem is so drastically changed. There are no antelopes at Shayzar today; still less would one expect cheetahs or lions. But nine hundred years ago northern Syria was a different place. Usama’s Shayzar was lush, green and forested, more like the flanks of the nearby Jabal Ansariya than the nearly barren hills that stand today. If one combines the fauna of the east African savannah with the flora of Lebanon, then one is not too far from an image of medieval Shayzar’s setting. And in Usama’s time humans, for all their strutting about, were thin on the ground, a decided minority. The human population of Shayzar lived in close contact with serpents, lions, leopards, cheetahs, hyenas, songbirds, wild poultry, waterfowl, birds of prey, cats, dogs, gazelles, wild asses, wild boar, and hares – to name only a few of the species mentioned by Usama in his tales of hunting escapades.

In such a setting, running such game to ground, Usama learned youthful lessons about the world and the humans in it. The hunt was not just about showing an artful mastery over nature, it was also a venue in which to prove one’s quality and skill in the controlled violence that was also brought to bear in war. For example, in the midst of a section devoted to exemplary behavior in battle, Usama includes an anecdote about a Shayzari soldier who, startled in the midst of a hunt, had the presence of mind to keep an attacking lion occupied with his well-padded leg until help arrived (KI, 86–87/116). As a child, Usama displayed his own courage, in the presence of his father, by killing a serpent with a knife even as it wound itself around his arm (KI, 103–104/134). He was also a keen observer of lions, noting their persistence in attack (KI, 104/135), their danger when injured, and their set ways. On the hunt, his uncle and father were constant presences, guiding and haranguing him on his technique.

Usama and his clan had two favored hunting grounds. One, for partridges and hares, was in the mountainous land south of town. Typically, when the hunters arrived there, Usama’s father (KI, 201–202/230–31):

…would order his attendants to disperse and some of them to join the falconers. In whatever direction the partridge took the air, there was sure to be in that spot a falcon ready to be flown at it. His accompanying mamluks and comrades, forty mounted men in all … were sure to get any bird that rose or any hare or gazelle that was started. We would reach the top of the mountain in our chase, remaining there until the late afternoon. Then we would return, after we had fed the falcons and allowed them to drink and bathe themselves in the mountain pools, arriving in town at dusk.

The other grounds, for waterfowl, francolins, hares, and gazelles, were located along the banks of the river in the marshy reedbeds west of town. Usama considered these grounds the finest of all, calling the days when they hunted in them “carefree.” Typically, they would mount horses and start from the gate of Shayzar town, bringing cheetahs to help them track from the ground, and sakers and falcons from the air (KI, 202/231):

The cheetahs and sakers would be kept outside the field while we would go into the canebrakes with the falcons … If a hare jumped, we would throw off a falcon upon it. If the falcon seized it, well and good; otherwise as soon as the hare got beyond the canebrakes, the cheetahs would be loosed upon it. If a gazelle was started, it was allowed to run until it got beyond the brake, when a cheetah would be loosed upon it; if the cheetah seized it, well and good; otherwise the sakers would be thrown off upon it. Thus hardly a single specimen of game could escape us unless by a special dispensation of fate.

While the young Usama was thus engaged in testing the fate of the local population of game animals, he was also gaining knowledge of, and an aesthetic appreciation for, nature. Usama had his favorite haunts along the river, where he often retired after the hunt to quietly watch the local fishermen catch fish with long reed sp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 THE YOUTH AND THE CASTLE
• 2 THE OUTCAST AND THE KINGS
• 3 THE POET AND THE TOMB
• 4 ORDER AND CHAOS
• 5 FRANKS AND MUSLIMS
• Afterword
• Further reading
• Works cited
• Principal people encountered in this book
• Simplified lists of principal dynasties and rulers in Usama’s lifetime
• Index