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Reviews 255
with whom he strongly, expressly disagrees are David Ayalon, Daniel Pipes, and
Patricia Crone. Against them, he maintains that there was no system of importing
youthful slaves and training them up as soldiers, the Mamluk system most familiar
from Egypt in the Later Middle Ages, until the last quarter of the ninth century.
For most of the century, rather, the Turks were in Iraq (especially the garrison
city of Samarra) as a mercenary corps. Some were commanded by nobles on
the basis of customary authority. Military captives, hence slaves, might be turned
around as soldiers for their captors. De la Vaissière points for comparison to a
corps of maghariba evidently made up of captives from the Egyptian rebellion
of 829–32. But they were already capable soldiers when captured, not trained de
novo in Iraq. “The Samarra of Mu^tasim does not constitute the beginning of the
Mamluk era but the apogee of the Sogdo-Turkish nobility and Central Asian mercenaries.
The caliph’s policy is entirely explicable by resort to pre-existing noble
networks of Central Asia and to recruitment completed by Central Asian captives
of war integrated into structures of nobility” (237).
On the basis of archaeological and literary evidence from Iraq and patterns of
mortality from pre-modern Western Europe, de la Vaissière reckons that there
were around 8,000 Turks in Samarra at the end of al-Mu^tasim’s caliphate in
227/842, rising to a peak of almost 12,000 at the assassination of al-Mutawakkil
in 247/861, declining to a little under 10,000 at the end of the ensuing decade of
troubles. The 50-percent increase from the early ’forties to the early ’sixties he
attributes entirely to natural increase, the Samarra Turks having been provided
with wives, partly to avoid trouble between them and the civilian populace. (Presumably
some system of training youths, the sons of existing soldiers, was developed
at this time.)
There is definite evidence of Turkish slave soldiers, not freedmen, hence a
Mamluk system, under al-Mu^tadid (r. 279–89/892–901). De la Vaissière guesses
that such a system was established under his father, the shadow-caliph al-Muwaffaq,
in the previous decade. Distance from Central Asia and the corrupting influence
of riches had made it difficult to maintain the Transoxanian social hierarchy
on which the old system had depended. The new troops were evidently
supplied by independent slave traders, not a system of tribute.
De la Vaissière cites an impressive range of evidence – Chinese, Persian, and
Arabic texts, art history, and archaeology – to compensate for its paucity. On the
whole, I find his case impressive. Perhaps he is open to criticism on the ground of
developing Central Asian influence on the Iraqi centre but never Iraqi influence on
Central Asia. A proper refutation of the Crone thesis would at least take into account
the culture and movements of Transoxanian civilian élites (I think of al-Bukhar\).
There is also nothing here on the apparent fecklessness of al-Muwaffaq’s
Turks, who did not manage to defeat the Zanj for a decade. There is only a little