2 - The Fatimid Caliphate

Summary

Fatimid Bilad al-sham

Much like the Byzantine Empire, the Fatimid Caliphate had long-standing territorial interests in bilad al-sham that dated back to the fourth/tenth century. The Mirdasid dynasty had wrested Aleppo from Fatimid control in 416/1025, and although the Egyptians regained the city briefly between 429 and 433/1038 and 1042, dominion over Aleppo for a sustained period proved to be elusive. Instead, Cairo had to settle for intermittent tribute payments and the khutba in Aleppo being made in the name of the Fatimid caliph, which had been common practice in the city since 360/970. The Egypt-based caliphate also maintained control of the coastline settlements in bilad al-sham from Tripoli southwards, in addition to Damascus and Jerusalem further inland.

A thirty-five-year period of crisis from 437/1045 resulted in a sharp decline in Fatimid influence in Syria, in addition to significant territorial losses in Sicily, North Africa, Yemen and Arabia. The main causes of this crisis were a combination of severe drought in Egypt as a result of low water levels in the Nile, the outbreak of civil war in Egypt between rival factions of the military, and the declining influence of the bureaucratic class, known broadly as ‘the men of the pen’, who were replaced by military figures like Badr al-Jamali. Ronnie Ellenblum has pointed to evidence of climate change along the Nile delta and on the Eurasian Steppe as the source of the political turmoil afflicting Egypt and the eastern Mediterranean during this period.

Much of the analysis of events in northern Syria has been framed in the context of this wider Fatimid decline. Michael Brett's comprehensive work on the Fatimid Caliphate, for example, attributed developments in Tyre, Aleppo and the region as a whole to an ongoing ‘growth of municipal autonomy’ throughout the Mediterranean, rather than anything specific to northern Syria.4 There has been some research on Fatimid policy in fifth/eleventh-century Syria and Palestine, though Bramoulléand Bianquis, Mouton and Yared-Riachi focused more on Damascus, the coastal settlements of Tyre, Acre and Tripoli, and the Red Sea. To date, Fatimid activity in the northern parts of the region, and in particular their interactions with the emergent ‘Seljuq’ potentates, has largely been overlooked.