Abstract
Vacca takes a comparative look at Islamic frontiers to identify useful models to inform Armenian history. Descriptions of Syria, Khurāsān, Sind, and Spain as political, geographical, cultural, or legal frontiers depend largely on the types of sources employed; as such, the conclusions of scholars working across the Islamic world can inform the reading of medieval Armenian sources in a new light. Additionally, Vacca calls into question the Mediterranean frontier. Armenia is on the edges of both the Mediterranean world and the Iranian oikoumene. This civilizational divide consistently sets Armenia on the outside instead of being integrated into Near Eastern history. Accordingly, Vacca suggests that the usefulness of Mediterranean Studies is not the result of geographical determinants, but rather in the interdisciplinary approach and questions of Mediterraneanists.
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- 1.
Joseph Laurent & Marius Canard, L’Arménie entre Byzance et l’Islam depuis la conquête arabe jusqu’en 886 (Lisbon: Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, 1919/1980).
- 2.
I am aware of only two articles that discuss caliphal Armenia as a frontier: Aram Ter-Ghevondyan, “Arabakan sahmanayin amrut‘yunneri gotin (sughur),” Patma-banasirakan handes 2 (1981): 134–149; and Johannes Preiser-Kappeller, “Central Peripheries. Empires and Elites across Byzantine and Arab Frontiers in Comparison (700–900 CE)” (currently unpublished; preprint available online). My book also deals with the frontier, specifically Byzantine and Sasanian legacy in Arabic descriptions of the Umayyad and ʿAbbāsid frontier of Armenia and Albania; Alison Vacca, Non-Muslim Provinces under early Islam: Islamic Rule and Iranian Legitimacy in Armenia and Caucasian Albania (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). There are several important studies of the Roman/Byzantine eastern frontier that may serve as an interesting counterpoint, such as Michael Dodgeon & Samuel Lieu, The Roman Eastern Frontier and the Persian Wars (New York: Routledge, 1991); Ralph Mathisen & Hagith Sivan (ed.), Shifting frontiers in Late Antiquity (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996); Honigmann, Die Ostgrenze des Byzantinischen Reiches von 363 bis 1071 nach griechischen, arabischen, syrischen und armenischen Quellen (Bruxelles: Editions de l’Institut de Philologie et d’Histoire Orientales, 1935); C. R. Whittaker, Frontiers of the Roman Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994).
- 3.
Cf: Asa Eger, “Hisn, Ribat, Thaghr or Qasr? The Semantics of Frontier Forts in the Early Islamic Period,” The Lineaments of Islam: Studies in Honor of Fred McGraw Donner, ed. Paul Cobb (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 427.
- 4.
This appears in the study of European frontiers as “frontiers of separation” and “frontiers of contact” or “converging frontiers” (Zusammenwachsgrenzen) and “frontiers of separation” (Trennungsgrenzen); Daniel Power, “Introduction,” Frontiers in Question: Eurasian Borderlands, ed. Daniel Power & Naomi Standen (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 2. In relation to Islamic history, see Walter Kaegi, “The Frontier: Barrier or Bridge?,” The 17th International Byzantine Congress (New Rochelle: Caratzas 1986); Mark Luce, The Frontier as Process: Umayyad Khurasan (University of Chicago, 2009).
- 5.
Linda Darling, “Contested Territory: Ottoman Holy War in Comparative Context,” Studia Islamica 91 (2000): 133–163; Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: the Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley, 1995); Andrew Peacock (ed), The Frontiers of the Ottoman World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); Sara Nur Yildiz, “Reconceptualizing the Seljuk-Cilician Frontier: Armenians, Latins, and Turks in Conflict and Alliance during the early 13th Century,” Borders, Barriers, and Ethnogenesis, ed. Florin Curta (Turnhout: Brepols, 2005).
- 6.
Abū Dulaf Misʿar b. Muhalhil, ed. & trans. Vladimir Minorsky, Abū-Dulaf Misʿar ibn Muhalhil’s Travels in Iran = al-risālat al-thāniyya (Cairo, 1955), 35 and 6.
- 7.
Asa Eger, The Spaces between the Teeth: Environment, Settlement, and Interaction on the Islamic-Byzantine Frontier (University of Chicago, 2008), 419; Asa Eger, Islamic-Byzantine Frontier: Interaction and Exchange among Muslim and Christian Communities (London: I.B. Tauris, 2015), 20; Zayde Antrim, Routes and Realms: the Power of Place in the Early Islamic World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 125.
- 8.
Ralph Brauer, Boundaries and Frontiers in Medieval Muslim Geography (Philadelphia: American Oriental Society, 1995); see also Michael Bonner, “The Naming of the frontier: ʿawāṣim, thughūr, and the Arab geographers,” BSOAS 57 (1994): 17–24.
- 9.
On ribāt, see Antoine Borrut & Christophe Picard, “Rābata, ribāt, rābita: une institution à reconsidérer,” Chrétiens et musulmans en Méditerranée médiévale, ed. Nicolas Prouteau & Philippe Sénac (Poitiers: Centre d’études supérieures de civilisation médiévale, 2003). The study of the ribāt is not relevant here, since there are no ribātāt in Armenia. On ḥuṣūn: The ḥuṣūn are “mainly eighth to tenth century sites with very little pre-Islamic occupation but were sites near Byzantine sites” and may have been associated with agricultural land along trade routes; cf: Asa Eger, “Hisn, Ribat, Thaghr or Qasr?” (2012), 433. Ḥuṣūn in Armenia include Dabīl/Duin and Ḥiṣn Ziyād. On the quṣūr, see Lawrence Conrad, “The quṣūr of medieval Islam: some implications for the social history of the Near East,” Al-Abḥāth 29 (1981): 7–23. The qalʿāt appear more frequently in Armenia, such as qalʿat Ibn Kandamān, the Artsruni-held qalʿat Yūnus, or qalʿat al-kilāb.
- 10.
The Balkhī school of geographical literature gets its name from Abū Zayd Aḥmad b. Sahl al-Balkhī (d. 322AH/934 CE). A native of Balkh in Khurāsān, he wrote a geographical treatise in Arabic that is no longer extant. Later geographers follow his lead by producing maps to accompany their texts and by omitting discussion of the non-Islamic world. The famous geographers of the Balkhī school include al-Iṣṭakhrī, Ibn Ḥawqal, and al-Muqaddasī.
- 11.
The Bagratunik‘ and the Artsrunik‘ were two of the main noble families in medieval Armenia. The Bagratunik‘ controlled the western region of Ṭārūn/Tarōn and built their capital at Ani, in what is now eastern Turkey. They also controlled several other Armenian provinces such as al-Sīsajān/Siwnik‘ and Ṭayr/Tayk‘. While many of the Bagratunik‘ served as “Prince of Armenia” (ishkhan Hayots‘), they gained more power when Ashot Bagratuni was crowned king in 886 CE. The Artsrunik‘ controlled the southern region of al-Basfurrajān/Vaspurakan, including al-Zawazān/Andzewatsik‘ and their famous church at Aght‘amar on Lake Van. They came to the forefront of Armenian politics in the ninth century, at least according to the tenth-century family historian T‘ovma Artsruni, and Gagik Artsruni was crowned king of Vaspurakan in 908 CE. Both of these Armenian kingdoms fell to Byzantine expansion in the eleventh century.
- 12.
ḥudūd al-ʿālam min al-mashriq ilā l-maghrib, ed. Manūchihr Sutūdah (Tehran, [1962]), 157.
- 13.
Muḥammad Ibn Ḥawqal, kitāb ṣūrat al-ʿarḍ, ed. M. J. de Goeje & J. H. Kramers (Leiden: Brill, 1939) refers to the Artsrunik‘ (banū l-dayrānī) and complains about the sale of Armenian slaves who should have been protected as “People of the Book” under Islamic law. He complains that these are the result of “the pleurisy of our times,” locating his description of Armenia squarely in the tenth century instead of a timeless constant.
- 14.
Shams al-Dīn Abū ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad al-Muqaddasī, kitāb aḥsan al-taqāsim fī maʿrifat al-aqālim, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden: Brill, 1906), 381; Abū Bakr Aḥmad b Muḥammad Ibn al-Faqīh, kitāb al-buldān, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden, 1885), 295; on ʿajāʾib near mosques in the area, see Zakariyyā b. Muḥammad al-Qazwīnī, athār al-bilād wa-akhbār al-ʿibar (Beirut: Dār Ṣādr, 1960), 508–509.
- 15.
See also Travis Zadeh, Mapping Frontiers across Medieval Islam: Geography, Translation, and the ʿAbbāsid Empire (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 34: “Anecdotes of marvels and monsters offer a means of engaging with the foreign and liminal spaces of the frontier.”
- 16.
J. H. Kramers, “L’influence de la tradition iranienne dans la géographie arabe,” Analecta orientalia (Leiden, 1954): 147–156; cf: Andrew Peacock, “Early Persian Historians and the Heritage of pre-Islamic Iran,” The Idea of Iran: Early Islamic Iran, ed. Edmund Herzig & Sarah Stewart (London: I.B. Tauris, 2011), 68–69.
- 17.
Aḥmad b. Yaḥyā al-Balādhurī, kitāb al-futūḥ, ed. M. J. de Goeje (Leiden, 1886), 194–195 on the Sasanians and 205 on the Arabs. Ibn al-Faqīh (1885), 288 identifies Qubādh as the Sasanian emperor who fortified Dabīl/Duin.
- 18.
See Vacca, Non-Muslim Provinces, Chapter 3 on the comparison between the Armenian and Khurāsānī frontiers and Chapter 5 on settlement.
- 19.
On al-Rāsht, see Robert Haug, The Gate of Iron: the Making of the Eastern Frontier (Ph.D. Diss., University of Michigan, 2010). On the comparison of Sasanian walls in the North and the East, see James Howard-Johnston, “State and Society in Late Antique Iran,” The Idea of Iran: the Sasanian Era, ed. Vesta Curtis & Sarah Stewart (London: I.B. Tauris, 2008), 125; Eberhard Sauer et al., Persia’s Imperial Power in Late Antiquity: the Great Wall at Gorgon and the frontier landscapes of Sasanian Iran (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2013); Richard Payne, “The Reinvention of Iran: the Sasanian Empire and the Huns,” The Cambridge Companion to the Age of Attila, ed. Michael Maas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 294.
- 20.
Abū l-Ḥasan ʿAlī b. al-Ḥusayn al-Masʿūdī, trans. Vladimir Minorsky, A History of Sharvān and Darband in the 10th–11th centuries (Cambridge: Heffer, 1958), 144. On Sasanian settlement of Persians in Armenia, see J. H. Kramers, “The Military Colonization of the Caucasus and Armenia under the Sassanids,” BSOAS 8, no. 2/3 (1936): 613–618; on Arab settlement in Armenia, see Aram Ter-Ghevondyan, Arab Emirates of Bagratid Armenia (Lisbon, 1976). Many scholars interested in frontier studies highlight the significance of settling populations along the frontiers. See Eduardo Manzano Moreno, “The Creation of a Medieval Frontier: Islam and Christianity in the Iberian Peninsula, eighth to eleventh centuries,” Frontiers in Question: Eurasian Borderlands, 700–1700, ed. Daniel Power & Naomi Standen (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1999), 35.
- 21.
Michael Bonner, Aristocratic Violence and Holy War: Studies in the jihad and the Arab-Byzantine Frontier (New Haven: American Oriental Society, 1996), 69.
- 22.
Bonner, Aristocratic Violence and Holy War, 57.
- 23.
Bonner, Aristocratic Violence and Holy War.
- 24.
Alison Vacca, “Nisbas of the North: Muslims from Armenia, Caucasian Armenia, and Azerbaijan in Arabic Biographical Dictionaries,” Arabica 62 (2015): 521–550. ʿAlī’s title is listed in Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn Khalīl b. Aybek al-Ṣafadī, al-wāfī bi-l-wafayāt (Beirut: Dār iḥyāʾ, 2000), XXII 190.
- 25.
John Haldon & Hugh Kennedy, “The Arab-Byzantine Frontier in the eighth and ninth centuries: military organisation and society in the borderlands,” Zbornik Radova 19 (1980), 82 and 114. On this same issue in Spain, see Moreno, “The Creation of a Medieval Frontier,” 40.
- 26.
Vacca, “Nisbas of the North,” 548. The khānqāh at Arjīsh/Archēsh is mentioned in Shihāb al-Dīn Abū ʿAbd Allāh Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī, muʿjam al-buldān (Beirut, 1995), I 144.
- 27.
Bonner, Aristocratic Violence and Holy War, 139.
- 28.
Lake Van sits in the eastern reaches of the modern state of Turkey in formerly Arcruni territory. The Church of the Holy Cross at Aght‘amar, in Turkish: Akdamar, is the only building remaining on the island. It is surrounded by khach‘k‘ars (literally: cross stones), steles engraved with a cross. The church itself is famous for its imagery and high-relief designs depicting biblical and royal imagery.
- 29.
Sirarpie Der Nersessian, Aght‘amar, Church of the Holy Cross (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1965), 31.
- 30.
See Munajjim Bāshī, ṣaḥāʾif al-akhbār, ed. & trans. Vladimir Minorsky, Studies in Caucasian History (London: Taylor’s Foreign Press, 1953), 5. On the use of the title shāhanshāh in Armenia, see Aram Ter-Ghevondyan, “L’Arménie et la conquête arabe,” Études arméniennes in Memoriam Haïg Berbérian (Lisbon, 1986), 790; Aram Ter-Ghevondyan, “Haghbati araberen ardzanagrut‘yunĕ ev Bagratuni t‘agavorneri titghosnerĕ,” Lraber Hasarakakan gitut‘yunneri 1 (1979): 73–80.
- 31.
Particularly interesting is the discussion of Gagik Artsruni’s portrait in comparison to other examples in the Islamic world: Lynn Jones, Between Byzantium and Islam: Aghtamar and the Visual Construction of Medieval Armenian Rulership (Burlington: Routledge, 2007); Finbarr Barry Flood, Objects of Translation: Material Culture and Medieval “Hindu-Muslim” Encounter (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 73–74.
- 32.
Christina Maranci, “Building Churches in Armenia: Art at the Borders of Empire and the Edge of the Canon,” The Art Bulletin 88 no. 4 (2006), 657. See also Christina Maranci, Vigilant Powers: Three Churches of Early medieval Armenia (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), for further discussion on Mren, as well as Ptghni and Zuart‘nots‘.
- 33.
Flood, Objects of Translation, 46–47.
- 34.
On the appearance of Daybul in Arabic, see Josef Markwart, Ērānšahr nach der Geographie des Ps. Moses Xorenac‘i (Frankfurt am Main: Institut für Geschichte der Arabisch-Islamischen Wissenschaften, 1901); Monik Kervran, “Le port multiple des bouches de l’Indus: Barbariké, Deb, Daybul, Lahori Bandar, Diul Sinde,” Res Orientales 8 (1996): 45–92; S. Qudratullah Fatimi, “The Twin Ports of Daybul,” Sind through the Centuries, ed. Hamida Khuhro (Karachi/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981), 99–100. The studies of Sind refer instead to Movsēs Khorenats‘i, since the Ashkharhats‘oyts‘ was once attributed to him.
- 35.
The Muʿtazila is a school of rationalist theology in medieval Iraq. The ʿAbbāsid caliphs supported Muʿtazilī doctrine by insisting that scholars recognize the createdness of the Qurʾān (i.e., by arguing that the Qurʾān cannot have been eternal, as that would place it as a co-eternal with God). This instigated the inquisition, which demonstrated that religious scholars were not beholden to caliphal determination of Islamic doctrine.
- 36.
Flood, Objects in Translation, 19; Muhammad Abdul Ghafur, “Fourteen Kufic Inscriptions of Banbhore, the site of Daybul,” Pakistan Archaeology 3 (1966); 86 and 88.
- 37.
Derryl Maclean, Religion and Society in Arab Sind (Leiden: Brill, 1989), 49–50; Flood, Objects of Translation, 38.
- 38.
S. M. Ashfaque, “The Grand Mosque of Banbhore,” Pakistan Archaeology 6 (1969), 198–199.
- 39.
Ghewond, Arshawank‘ Arabats‘ i Hays, ed. Chahnazarian (Paris, 1857), 125–126.
- 40.
Ghewond, Arshawank‘ Arabats‘ i Hays, 85–86. On the ḥadīth, see Roy Mottahedeh, “Pluralism and Islamic Traditions of Sectarian Divisions,” Svensk Teologisk Kvartalskrift 82 (2006): 155–161.
- 41.
Seta Dadoyan, “Grigor of Taṫev” Treatise against the Tajiks,” Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations 7, no. 2 (1996): 193–204.
- 42.
Denise Cardaillac, La polémique anti-chrétienne du manuscrit aljamiado No 4944 de la Bibliothèque Nationale de Madrid (Université Paul Valery de Montpellier, 1972); J. M. Gaudel, “The Correspondence between Leo and ʿUmar: ʿUmar’s letter rediscovered?” Islamochristiana 10 (1984); Stephen Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm during the reign of Leo III, with particular attention to the Oriental Sources (Louvain: Secrétariat du Corpus SCO, 1973), 153–171; Robert Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw It: a Survey and Evaluation of Christian, Jewish, and Zoroastrian Writings on Early Islam (Princeton: Darwin Press, 2007), 490–501; Arthur Jeffery, “Ghevond’s text of the correspondence between Umar II and Leo III,” The Harvard Theological Review 37, no. 4 (1944): 269–332; Dominique Sourdel, “Un pamphlet musulman anonyme d’époque ʿabbāside contre les chrétiens,” Revue des études islamiques 34 (1966): 1–33; Cecilia Palombo, “The ‘correspondence’ of Leo III and ʿUmar II: traces of an early Christian Arabic apologetic work,” Millennium 12, no. 1 (2015): 231–264; Seonyoung Kim, The Arabic Letters of the Byzantine Emperor Leo III to the Caliph ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (Ph.D. Diss., Catholic University of America, 2017).
- 43.
Gero, Byzantine Iconoclasm, suggests that the ʿUmar-Leo correspondence was added to Ghewond’s History much later than the eighth century. As a separate issue, Timothy Greenwood, “A Reassessment of the History of Łewond,” Le Muséon 125, no. 1/2 (2012) argues that Ghewond’s History as a whole was later.
- 44.
Lucy Pick, Conflict and Coexistence: Archbishop Rodrigo and the Muslims and Jews in medieval Spain (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), 17–18.
- 45.
Janina Safran, Defining Boundaries in al-Andalus: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Islamic Iberia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013), 17; on the use of legal texts in circumscribing religious boundaries through Mālikī law in Spain in the later period, see Alan Verskin, Islamic Law and the Crisis of the Reconquista: the Debate on the Status of Muslim Communities in Christendom (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
- 46.
Hovhannēs Odznets‘i, trans. Manuel Jinbashian, Church-State Relations in Armenia during the Arab Dominion: from the first invasion to the time of the early ʿAbbāsids (Lisbon: Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, 2000), 173; for the Armenian, see Hovhannēs Odznets‘i, Kanonagirk‘ Hayots‘, ed. Vazgen Hakobyan (Yerevan: Haykakan SSH gitut‘yunneri Akademiayi hratarakch‘ut‘yun, 1964), 519.
- 47.
Steven Runciman, The Medieval Manichee: a Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1947), 32; Jinbashian, Church-State Relations, 174; Nina Garsoïan, The Paulician Heresy: a Study of the Origin and Development of Paulicianism in Armenia and the eastern Provinces of the Byzantine Empire (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967), 135.
- 48.
Hovhannēs Odznets‘i, trans. Jinbashian, Church-State Relations, 174; for the Armenian, see Hovhannēs Odznets‘i, Kanonagirk‘ Hayots‘, 533.
- 49.
Nina Garsoïan, “Reality and Myth in Armenian History,” The East and the Meaning of History (Rome: Bardi, 1994), 118; see also Nina Garsoïan, Interregnum: Introduction to a Study on the Formation of Armenian Identity (Lovanii: Peeters, 2012), X for an elaboration of this idea.
- 50.
Shams al-Dīn Abū l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. Muḥammad Ibn Khallikān, wafayāt al-aʿyān wa-anba abnāʾ al-zamān (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1978), II 448–449. For the comparison between Badr al-Jamālī and Niẓām al-Mulk, see Carole Hillenbrand, “Nizām al-Mulk: a Maverick Vizier?” The Idea of Iran: the Age of the Seljuks, ed. Sarah Stewart (New York: I.B. Tauris, 2014).
- 51.
The example of Badr al-Jamālī fits with Horden & Purcell’s “history in the Mediterranean,” to be distinguished from “history of the Mediterranean” (emphasis added). Their point underscores that history of the Mediterranean is integrated across the expanse of the Mediterranean, as opposed history in the Mediterranean, which is made up of discret events that happen to occur in the vicinity of the Mediterranean. See Peregrine Horden & Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: a Study of Mediterranean History (Malden: Blackwell, 2000), 43–45.
- 52.
Reuven Amitai, “Jews at the Mongol Court in Iran: Cultural Brokers or Minor Actors in a Cultural Boom,” Cultural Brokers between Religions: Border Crossers and Experts at Mediterranean Courts (Paderborn: Fink, 2013), 39–41; Moshe Gil, Jews in Islamic Countries in the Middle Ages, trans. David Strassler (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 483–484. I would like to thank Yoni Brack for bringing these works to my attention.
- 53.
David Abulafia, “Mediterraneans,” Rethinking the Mediterranean, ed. William Harris (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), gets at this when he suggests that the Baltic and North Seas are a “Mediterranean of the North” or that the Sea of Japan and the East China Sea are a “Japanese Mediterranean.”
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Vacca, A. (2018). Past the Mediterranean and Iran: A Comparative Study of Armenia as an Islamic Frontier, First/Seventh to Fifth/Eleventh Centuries. In: Babayan, K., Pifer, M. (eds) An Armenian Mediterranean. Mediterranean Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72865-0_3
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