Dr. Bogdan Smarandache
By the late seventh century AH/thirteenth century AD, the Mamluk sultans Baybars (658–676 AH/1260–1277 AD) and Qalawun (678–689 AH/1279–1290 AD) had significantly diminished the remaining territories of the “crusader states”, established by the first crusaders (1096–1099) along the Eastern Mediterranean coast. Only Acre, Athlit, Beirut, Haifa, Tortosa, Tyre, and a handful of rural estates remained under Frankish control. These remaining territories were protected by a truce renewed in 682/1283 between Qalawun and Frankish leaders: Odo Poilechien, the bailiff of Charles I of Anjou (1266–1285), and the Masters of the Hospitaller and Templar military orders. However, the validity of this truce was called into question in 689/1290, when a party of Muslims were attacked in Acre.
Upon hearing of the incident, Qalawun convened a war council to deliberate whether the Franks had indeed broken the truce. A chancery official known as Shafi‘ ibn ‘Ali (d. 730/1330) was present at the council. He included two short recollections of the conversation that took place between the sultan and his advisors in his two regnal biographies of the sultans Qalawun and Baybars, produced about twenty years apart. However, Shafi‘ ibn ‘Ali’s two accounts exhibit significant discrepancies. In addition, Arabic, Latin, and Old French also diverge on how events unfolded in the city. This presentation will revisit these accounts, focusing on Shafi‘ ibn ‘Ali’s recollection (or reconstruction) of events, arguing that Shafi‘ ibn ‘Ali’s earlier biography of Qalawun presents a more accurate version, while his later version reflects a recalibration intended to reinforce the legal basis for the agreement’s termination and highlight the author’s supporting role. This presentation will also attempt to offer a new perspective on the factors contributing to the sultan’s decision, taking into consideration new scholarship on the Mamluk chancery, archival practices, and Mediterranean diplomacy.
Dr. Fadi Ragheb
Mujīr al-Dīn al-ʿUlaymī (d. 928 A.H./1522 C.E.) is unanimously considered as the most important chronicler of medieval Islamic Jerusalem. During his lifetime, Mujīr al-Dīn served as qāḍī al-quḍā (chief judge) of late Mamlūk Jerusalem, where he also embarked upon a stellar scholarly career. He composed diverse works on universal history, tafsīr, ḥadīth, and Ḥanbalī ṭabaqāt (biographical dictionaries). Yet Mujīr al-Dīn’s magnum opus remains al-Uns al-jalīl bi-taʾrīkh al-Quds wa-al-Khalīl (The Sublime Companion to the History of Jerusalem and Hebron).
A faḍāʾil-cum-chronicle on Jerusalem, al-Uns al-jalīl is the authoritative literary source on the history of Bayt al-Maqdis. Used extensively by modern scholars, it serves as a rich reservoir of reports on Jerusalem, a detailed literary “archive” on the history, topography, architecture, and human geography of the city, especially during the Mamlūk period. Furthermore, al-Uns al-jalīl contains prosopographical entries on eminent Muslims who visited, resided, taught, and passed away in Jerusalem, including Companions, caliphs, sultans, ʿulamāʾ, and Sufis. Importantly, al-Uns al-jalīl is replete with autobiographical reports that enable the reconstruction of Mujīr al-Dīn’s life.
However, despite the impact of Mujīr al-Dīn’s career and writings, so far scholarship on Mujīr al-Dīn remains scarce. Currently, there are only a few short studies that have investigated some aspects of Mujīr al-Dīn’s writings, along with cursory historiographical analyses of his chronicle. Similarly, a survey of the reception of al-Uns al-jalīl in modern scholarship remains a desideratum. Most significantly, however, there exists no comprehensive study that investigates Mujīr al-Dīn’s life, career, and overall writings.
This paper will thus serve as a preliminary contribution towards fulfilling the current lacunae in scholarship on Mujīr al-Dīn. The paper will, first, introduce the complete corpus of Mujīr al-Dīn’s writings. Second, it will survey the reception, editing, and translation of al-Uns al-jalīl in modern scholarship. Third, using al-Uns al-jalīl, the study will reconstruct a biography of Mujīr al-Dīn. It will begin with Mujīr al-Dīn’s father, a leading Ḥanbalī judge of Jerusalem and an influential figure in the early life of Mujīr al-Dīn. It will then examine Mujīr al-Dīn’s early education and his many renowned teachers, before tracing his travels. The investigation will conclude with Mujīr al-Dīn’s rise to chief judge and his influential role in the politics, society, and history of late Mamlūk Jerusalem. Overall, the analysis will reveal how Mujīr al-Dīn interweaved his life and career as qāḍī al-quḍā into his chronicles of Mamlūk Jerusalem, thus transforming himself into an author as actor.
Dr. Christian Mauder
While the reign of the penultimate Mamluk ruler Qāniṣawh al-Ghawrī (r. 1501-1516) is relatively well documented in Mamluk and Ottoman historiographical literature and has received ample scholarly attention, the early biography of this influential figure in Mamluk history is largely unknown. Building primarily on unpublished sources that describe the sultan’s birth and childhood in Circassia, his transport to Egypt, his education as a mamlūk and his early military career, this paper examines by means of a case study why and how authors of Mamluk biographical works engaged in discussions of the childhood and early youth of rulers. The paper argues that biographical writings on this topic fulfilled central functions in contemporary political culture, integrated the biographies of rulers into broader and at times decidedly religious frameworks of reference, and expressed notions of what constituted good governance and political failures in the Mamluk context. Moreover, the paper shows that the study of sections on the early lives in the biographies of Mamluk rulers can provide new insights into how biographers worked, where they got their source material from, and in what ways they engaged with other forms of textual production.
