Al-ʿUsur al-Wusta

Ibn Khaldūn’s Muqaddima and the Maps of al-Idrīsī

Alfred Hiatt — 2025-01-13

It has long been noted that in compiling a geographical preface to his famous Muqaddima, Ibn Khaldūn relied on the maps contained in the twelfth-century geographer al-Idrīsī’s Nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq. Yet Ibn Khaldūn’s reading of nearly seventy regional maps of al-Idrīsī has not to date been the subject of a detailed examination. This article seeks, first, to establish patterns in Ibn Khaldūn’s map reading as recorded in the Muqaddima, noting the focus and direction of his reading as well as its omissions. In addition to his descriptions of the maps, it considers Ibn Khaldūn’s use of the text of the Nuzhat al-mushtāq and occasional examples of his updating and addition of information. Second, this analysis leads to a discussion of the significance—or lack thereof—of al-Idrīsī’s maps for the larger project of the Muqaddima: what role, in the end, did geography play within Ibn Khaldūn’s theory of history?

A Neglected Armenian Source of the Late Umayyad Era

Tim Greenwood — 2025-01-15

The Armenian Martyrdom of Vahan of Gołt‘n, composed in 744 CE, offers a fresh perspective from which to study the Umayyad caliphate. A sophisticated literary composition assembled in a monastic context, the Martyrdom traces contemporary networks of power, communication, and knowledge within and beyond Armenia. As a product of the late Umayyad world, it constitutes a work of major significance for the study of the Umayyad caliphate at large and the caliphal North in particular during the first half of the eighth century. The Martyrdom reveals contemporary Armenian perceptions of Umayyad hegemony, including ʿaṭā (stipend) payments, public executions, conversions, apostasy, contemporary apologetics, and the nature of Caliph Hishām’s court at Ruṣāfa. At the same time, it portrays members of the Armenian elite, lay and clerical, reacting in different ways to new political circumstances. The present article provides the first annotated English translation and extensive thematic introduction to the Martyrdom of Vahan of Gołt‘n, with the aim of making the text accessible to Islamicists and thereby integrating this rich source into discussions of the late Umayyad era.

Mkrtičʻ Nałaš: An Armenian Bishop as Pillar of the Aqquyunlu State?

Georg Leube — 2025-01-21

Although the fifteenth century CE has commonly been recognized as a crucial saddle period in both the history of the Armenian church and the administrative history of the Middle East, which is largely focused on Muslim rulers before the Ottoman-Safavid confrontation, the two topics are usually approached separately. To bridge this gap, the present contribution examines three pivotal moments in the tenure of the Armenian bishop, painter, and poet Mkrtičʻ Nałaš (d. after 1469 CE) in Diyarbakır to argue that his career was inextricably entangled with the trajectory of the Aqquyunlu “Turkmen” rulers who were establishing Diyarbakır as a regional center at the time. Accordingly, I suggest that we should see the processes of Aqquyunlu state formation as including members of the Armenian clerical elite such as Mkrtičʻ Nałaš.

I propose to use the concept of synchronisms to reflect the joint and entangled agency of multiple individuals and interpersonal networks of mobilization and patronage. This concept enables the description of entanglements and linkages without attributing primacy to any of the involved parties. I argue that the synchronisms linking Mkrtičʻ Nałaš and early Aqquyunlu rulers of Diyarbakır demonstrate that the histories of Christian clerical elites and the histories of the Muslim etatist and administrative configurations they inhabited must be told together.