Abstract
A growing body of literature on trade and cultural exchange between the Indian Ocean regions has already contributed significantly to our understanding of these processes and the role of language and writing within them. Yet, the question remains how Arabic correspondence played a part in communications between South Asian powers and the rulers in the Red Sea region. In order to begin filling this lacuna, this article studies epistolary writings from the Bahmani Sultanate (748/1347-934/1528) to the Mamluk Sultanate (648/1250-922/1517) during the second half of the ninth/fifteenth century. The contextualisation and discussion of three letters render insight both into the (up to now unstudied) issues at play in Bahmani-Mamluk relations and into the nature of these Arabic texts.
Language use is one of the fundamental aspects for understanding the dynamics of connectivity in the premodern Indian Ocean.1 In scholarship, the transregional structuring and political functions of language in and beyond spaces touching the Indian Ocean are increasingly described through the concept of “the cosmopolis,” be it Sanskrit, Persian, or Arabic.2 This article seeks to deepen this discussion by focussing on a case in which the Persian and Arabic cosmopolises seemed to meet. More specifically, the aim of this article is to pursue the question of the use of Arabic in formal communications from the Persian-oriented dynasty of the Bahmanis (748/1347-934/1528) in the South Asian subcontinent to the Arabic-speaking lands of the Mamluk Sultanate (648/1250-922/1517) in Egypt and the Ḥiǧāz.
The Bahmani Sultanate, like many Islamic courts in South Asia, adopted Persian as the administrative language. Yet, its famous vizier Maḥmūd Gāwān (d. 886/1481) stresses in his inšāʾ manual Manāẓir al-inšāʾ that a munšī (secretary) should be well versed in Arabic.3 Throughout the manual, he also routinely lets examples of good epistolary writing in Arabic precede examples in Persian. Maḥmūd Gāwān’s preoccupation with Arabic has been interpreted as an attempt to systematise the language at the court into an “Arabicised” Persian which would be closer to the language used in the “Persian cosmopolis,” as a remedy for local political factionalism.4 Indeed, almost all letters in Maḥmūd Gāwān’s inšāʾ collection Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ are written in Persian imbued with Arabic. But it also contains one letter written entirely in Arabic, and the inšāʾ collection Kanz al-maʿānī by Maḥmūd Gāwān’s secretary ʿAbd al-Karīm Nīmdihī (d. ca 906/1501) in fact features several Arabic letters.5
Zubaid Ahmad in his The Contribution of India to Arabic Literature lists only one work under the heading “Letters and composition concerning correspondence”: ʿAǧab al-ʿuǧāb fī mā yufīdu l-kuttāb by Aḥmad Yamanī (d. 1256/1840). This can convey the impression that no Arabic letters were composed in South Asia prior to the thirteenth/nineteenth century, which seems to be confirmed by Zubaid Ahmad’s comment that this work was “the first of its kind in India.”6 We know now, however, that it is not uncommon to find Arabic letters to and from premodern South Asian powers in letter collections, most of them belonging to the heritage of non-South Asian dynasties, which were as a consequence of Zubaid Ahmad’s chosen method naturally excluded from his overview.7
That the vestiges of Arabic correspondence with linkages to South Asia are encountered in geographically and linguistically dispersed sources is not remarkable, since Egypt, Arabia, Persia and South Asia have a long history of relations. By the seventh/thirteenth century, as Janet L. Abu-Lughod has argued, they were connected in a “world system” of trade.8 In the ninth/fifteenth century—the period under consideration in this article—, the importance of seaborne trade with the South Asian subcontinent for the Red Sea region can hardly be overestimated: Richard Mortel has shown that India was the main destination for Meccan merchants leaving from their port city Jedda for “international” trade, only then followed by Yemen and Egypt.9 Scholarship has also investigated the connection between the Indian Ocean economy and the political arena (in which inšāʾ was produced).10 South Asian rulers in general, from Sind to Bengal, were often reliant on commodities from overseas for maintaining and expanding their territories. A well-known example is war horses. These horses could not be bred on the Indian peninsula and thus needed to be imported continuously.11 The import of valuable metals also helped strengthen South Asian dynasties.12
In addition, historians are paying attention to the manifold types of movements in the Indian Ocean that the trade routes made possible, such as the transmission of language, texts and cultural ideas.13 As part of this, the question of the role and meanings of Arabic writing in South Asian contexts is beginning to be addressed.14 For example, Ronit Ricci has traced the translation history of an Arabic text in South Asia and South East Asia, introducing the idea of an “Arabic cosmopolis” to describe the shared literary tradition that links these regions.15 Christopher D. Bahl has studied the circulation of Arabic manuscripts in the western part of the Indian Ocean from the ninth/fifteenth to the eleventh/seventeenth century.16 These studies show that the question of the significance of Arabic in the space between Egypt, Arabia and South Asia is especially relevant, since Arabic, like Persian, functioned as a transregional language that forged and sustained connections with the wider Islamic world. Referring specifically to Maḥmūd Gāwān’s Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ, Christopher D. Bahl already noted: “Persian was not an exclusive transregional idiom. Arabic functioned in similar ways with a connection to the Red Sea region. Thus, it seems possible to argue for a transoceanic Arabic connection spanning the Red Sea and Western India that complemented and at times intersected with the Persianate cosmopolis.”17
Even if the historical connectedness of Egypt, Arabia and South Asia is by now an established fact, testimonies of direct communications between political powers on both ends of the Red Sea-Arabian Sea region remain little researched. Most recently, John Meloy used two Arabic letters to investigate relations between the Mamluk Sultanate and the Malwa Sultanate (804/1401-969/1562). As part of his argument regarding the role of Mecca in facilitating and disrupting diplomatic contacts between the two powers, he shows that the Malwa sultan evoked certain Islamic principles to pressure the Mamluk sultan into a change of policy in the Ḥiǧāz.18 In another article in the same edited volume, Stephan Conermann and Anna Kollatz discussed reports by contemporary historians on diplomatic relations between Cairo on the one side and the Delhi Sultanates (607/1210-932/1526) and the Gujarat Sultanate (816/1407-981/1573) on the other.19
Stephan Conermann and Anna Kollatz qualify their conclusions with the fact that there is “only the most sparse information about the relations between Indian rulers and Egyptian caliphs.”20 While information is indeed sparse, in the Bahmani inšāʾ collections three letters to the Mamluk Sultanate are found which reveal new findings about relations between both sides of the Arabian Sea: no 134 in Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ and nos 133 and 134 in Kanz al-maʿānī.21 Moreover, because each letter is written in Arabic, an analysis of these writings is becoming indispensable to underpin future research on the use and roles of Arabic in the Indian Ocean regions.22 Methodologically, this article brings the Bahmani letters, as preserved in several manuscripts, into relation with Mamluk and Meccan historiographical and biographical works.23 This is done to assess the authenticity of the letters, the specific issues addressed in Bahmani-Mamluk communications, and the instrumentality of Arabic to express these. But first, we recapitulate the Bahmani Sultanate’s known stakes in the Indian Ocean trade and connectivity.
1 Bahmani Stakes in the Indian Ocean
Paramount among the Islamic powers of ninth/fifteenth-century South Asia stands the Bahmani Sultanate, or as Richard M. Eaton writes: “Indeed, with Delhi’s last capital, Tughluqabad, largely ruined by Timur’s raids just several decades earlier, fifteenth-century Bidar [the Bahmani capital after 833/1430] could lay claim to being India’s most imposing imperial center.”24 The Sultanate was connected to the Indian Ocean via the ports of Chaul, Dabhol, and Goa on the Konkan coast.25 Éric Vallet has argued that as early as the second half of the eighth/fourteenth century the Bahmanis exchanged trade and embassies across the Arabian Sea with Aden, the gateway to the Arabian peninsula and the Red Sea at the time.26 A century later, the number of ships that departed to and arrived from Dabhol in Jedda, Aden’s greatest rival port, was almost on a par with those of Cambay in Gujarat and Calicut in Malabar.27 One of the most important commodities that merchants shipped to the Bahmani Sultanate were Arabian war horses.28 In the other direction, traders crossed the Arabian Sea in order to market Deccani textile goods in Egypt.29 Legal documents maintained in the records of the qāḍīs (judges) of Bursa, in Ottoman lands, moreover have revealed that some cloth merchants, who were sent by Maḥmūd Gāwān himself and passed through the city on several occasions between 884/1479 and 885/1481, used the routes via Arabia to trade as far as Rumelia (the Balkans).30
There was also another aspect to the links with regions overseas which the Deccan ports allowed for. Pivotal to the functioning of the Bahmani Sultanate was the immigration of skilled men, mostly from the Persian Gulf. The Bahmanis encouraged this immigration in order to populate their administration and army.31 One of those immigrants was Maḥmūd Gāwān. Originally from Gilan, an independent region lying south of the Caspian Sea, he arrived in India around the year 856/1452-1453 and took up service at the Bahmani court.32 He came to be one of the most powerful courtiers in subsequent years. In 862/1458, he obtained the honorific title malik al-tuǧǧār (king of merchants) and around 870/1466 that of ḫwāǧa-i ǧahān (lord of the world).33 During the young age of the Bahmani sultans Niẓām al-Dīn Aḥmad III (r. 865/1461-867/1463) and Muḥammad III (r. 867/1463-887/1482), who both ascended to the throne around the age of eight, he also acted as regent and was the de facto ruler.34 Also Maḥmūd Gāwān’s secretary, and author of the second inšāʾ collection used in this study, ʿAbd al-Karīm Nīmdihī was an Iranian migrant. Born in the village Nīmdih in Lāristān, he studied in Shiraz and tried first to find employment in the Malwa Sultanate before entering the service of Maḥmūd Gāwān around 877/1472-1473.35
A religious-political aspect of the Bahmani Sultanate’s interest in the opportunities created by the Indian Ocean networks comes to the fore in Richard Mortel’s article on madrasas in Mecca. One madrasa was erected after commission by the Bahmani sultan Šihāb al-Dīn Abū l-Maġāzī Aḥmad Šāh (r. 825/1422-839/1436) in 831/1427-1428, in addition to madrasas in Jerusalem and Medina.36 This was possible thanks to the routes connecting Mecca and South Asia and the revenue that interregional trade generated. For the financing of his madrasa, the Bahmani sultan supplied his emissaries with merchandise that could be sold to raise the necessary funds.37 The madrasa-construction of South Asian Muslim rulers in Mecca shows that they sought to establish a visible presence by patronising religious buildings, which served to express their religious identity and their claims to legitimate rule.38
Richard Mortel takes his information on the commission of the Bahmani madrasa from al-Naǧm ʿUmar b. Fahd’s (d. 885/1480) chronicle of Mecca, Itḥāf al-warā bi-aḫbār Umm al-Qurā. Ibn Fahd’s account also indicates that diplomatic contacts between Cairo and the Bahmani Sultanate went back at least to these years (830/1426-1427). Indeed, he writes that the Bahmani representatives carried gifts, cotton cloth and muslin cloth for turbans, to present to the Mamluk sultan al-Malik al-Ašraf Barsbāy (r. 825/1422-841/1438). One of the representatives, Ḍiyāʾ al-Dīn, travelled on to Cairo to deliver them.39
2 Bahmani Correspondence
Regrettably, no letters remain which might have accompanied the Bahmani embassy to Cairo of 830/1426-1427. In fact, the only surviving original Bahmani documents known today are eight farmāns (mandates) in the Andhra Pradesh State Archives and Research Institute in Hyderabad and they are still awaiting a thorough analysis.40 For the second half of the fifteenth-century the inšāʾ collections Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ by Maḥmūd Gāwān and Kanz al-maʿānī by ʿAbd al-Karīm Nīmdihī make up to some extent for the dearth of original documentary sources. In order to employ inšāʾ works as historical sources, however, one has to take into account their purposes and uses. There is a broader scholarly view that inšāʾ works had a place in the education of munšīs in Turko-Persian states.41 In line with this, it has been suggested that Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ served a didactic ambition in combination with Maḥmūd Gāwān’s manual Manāẓir al-inšāʾ. Consequently, their exemplary function could entail that historical veracity was not a requirement in the creation of these collections and that letters might have been polished or invented.42 On the other hand, Haroon Khan Sherwani has argued in favour of Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ ’s historical reliability on the basis that a letter to the Ottoman sultan, no 144, is also found in the collection of the Ottoman kātib Ferīdūn Bey (d. 991/1583), together with a response.43 This suggests that another purpose of Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ was to record and preserve. This article will engage with the question of authenticity via another method: the comparison of the letters’ contents with (near-)contemporary historiographical and biographical sources. It will become clear that the Bahmani letters to the Mamluk Sultanate tally with information in Mamluk and Meccan sources. This endorses Haroon Khan Sherwani’s view and brings to light issues at play in Bahmani-Mamluk relations.
The letters are also authentic in the sense that as part of the inšāʾ collections they had a specific relevance throughout Islamic lands. Indeed, the large number of manuscripts preserved in various locations attests the wide circulation and popularity of Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ. Charles Ambrose Storey identified twenty-seven manuscript copies, but many more are mentioned in library catalogues around the world or remain uncatalogued.44 For this article, I consulted eight manuscripts of Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ: MS 3517, MS 8447, MS 8969, MS 13697, MS 16170, and MS 18653 at the Islamic Consultative Assembly Library (kitābḫāna-i maǧlis-i šūrā-yi islāmī) in Tehran, Iran, MS Cod. Pers. 06 in the Universitätsbibliothek Leipzig, Germany, and MS Or. 14754 at the British Library in London, United Kingdom.45 Concerning Kanz al-maʿānī, only one manuscript copy of the work was previously known to exist. It is preserved in the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul, Turkey, carrying shelf mark Reïsulkuttab 884.46 Dated to the end of the month Ǧumādā l-āḫira in the year 996/May 1588, it was copied in Damascus by the kātib Ḥusayn b. Aḥmad al-Karbalāʾī.47 I have, however, identified a second manuscript: MS 2807 at the Islamic Consultative Assembly Library in Tehran, which is erroneously catalogued as a copy of Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ.48 This manuscript is incomplete at beginning and end, and consequently has no title, author, copyist or date of copying recorded. A closer look at the letters in the collection nevertheless reveals that the work actually is Kanz al-maʿānī. Though copies of Kanz al-maʿānī thus survive in a much more limited number than Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ, the fact that this second manuscript in Iran exists in addition to the first one in Turkey indicates that this collection also found an audience over a large geographical area beyond the Bahmani Sultanate.
As models and manuals for good writing, inšāʾ works thus could transcend borders and periods. In this way, the classifications and structures of letters as expounded in Maḥmūd Gāwān’s Manāẓir al-inšāʾ are considered to be representative of practices within a larger tradition of Persian letter-writing. For example, Colin Mitchell states that “[…] in the Persian mediaeval context […] our best presentation of imperial tarassul [i.e. exchange of correspondence] is offered in Gāvān’s Manāẓir al-inshāʾ.”49 Analyses of Manāẓir al-inšāʾ have indeed proven informative about certain principles of chancery writing such as types of letters, their structure, and the gradations of hierarchy and the requirements of context observed in their composition.50 Consequently, some letter structures as presented in Manāẓir al-inšāʾ have been used in research to analyse official letters from other dynasties, such as the Aq Qoyunlu (798/1396-914/1508).51 Due to the lack of an extant Bahmani state archive (which is typical for premodern Islamic dynasties), however, much in fact remains unknown about the workings of the Bahmani chancery and especially about the extent to which their chancery practices were compatible with those of their “international” correspondents.
An analysis of the letters in the Bahmani inšāʾ collections could partly remedy this lacuna, but they have not yet been extensively studied in relation to interregional contacts. In the 1930s, Haroon Khan Sherwani published a paper on “Deccani diplomacy,” but focussed on the letters in Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ to the Bahmani Sultanate’s immediate neighbours, the Sultanates of Gujarat, Malwa and Jawnpur.52 He only briefly notes elsewhere that the collection also contains material on the Sultanate’s relations with regions outside of the Indian subcontinent.53 Despite the publication of a printed edition of Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ in 1948, it took many decades after Haroon Khan Sherwani before Stephan Popp drew attention to the possibilities for research into the Sultanate’s external contacts on the basis of the letters.54 He did not pursue this in more depth, however. On Nīmdihī and his works, Jean Aubin spearheaded research. He employed Kanz al-maʿānī and Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ in an article on the diplomatic relations between the Aq Qoyunlu and the Bahmanis.55 The publication of a printed edition of Kanz al-maʿānī on the basis of MS Reïsulkuttab 884 in 2015 made the text more accessible, but so far only a few studies on connections between India and Iran have paid attention to it.56
In comparison, more is known about the Mamluk chancery’s view of and engagement with the outside world. For example, Malika Dekkiche has shown how the status of an addressee was accorded based on a hierarchical division of the regions of the known world. Interestingly, in different Mamluk chancery manuals India ranks among the highest category of regions within such hierarchies.57 It has also been observed that the Mamluk chancery occasionally received, translated and dispatched correspondence in languages other than Arabic, such as Latin, Persian, Turkish and Mongol.58 The mere fact that the letters to the Mamluks in the Bahmani collections are in Arabic, in contrast to the majority of the letters which are in Persian, indicates that the Bahmani chancery likewise had the capability to compose letters in different languages. This further illustrates the need to investigate how this command of Arabic was put into operation in interregional relations, and what kind of objectives, messages and addressees were entwined with it in the context of a South Asian chancery.
3 Letter no 134 in Kanz al-maʿānī: Qarāǧa Attacks
One of the three Bahmani letters to the Mamluk Sultanate, letter no 134 in the published edition of Kanz al-maʿānī, has a topic remarkably similar to the Malwa-Mamluk correspondence discussed by John Meloy. The Malwa sultan Maḥmūd Šāh Ḫalǧī’s (r. 839/1436-873/1469) letter to the Mamluk sultan al-Ẓāhir Ḫušqadam (r. 865/1461-872/1467) and its response by sultan al-Ašraf Sayf al-Dīn Qāytbāy (r. 872/1468-901/1496), both in Arabic, are concerned with two violent incidents related to the establishment of a madrasa in Mecca. A Malwa emissary had around the year 865/1460-1461 legally bought two buildings in Mecca with funds from the Malwa sultan and converted them into a madrasa. Shortly after, the Mamluk collector of customs duties Ǧānibak al-Ẓāhirī (d. 867/1463) forcefully confiscated the building. When sultan Maḥmūd Šāh Ḫalǧī was informed about the seizure, he sent a second delegation. The Malwa mission was, however, treated with disrespect, beaten and robbed.59
The letter no 134 in Kanz al-maʿānī is similarly concerned with Mamluk violence in the Ḥiǧāz. It describes the harm that befell travellers passing through Jedda.60 After arriving in India, the people on board ships and vessels from the Ḥiǧāz (al-sufun wa-l-marākib al-ḥiǧāziyya) reported of skirmishes which had caused much damage. They further complained about the aggression of a certain Qarāǧa, and how he assaulted and robbed every Muslim he could lay his hands on.61 The mamlūk Qarāǧa al-Ǧānibakī al-Ǧiddāwī was a representative in Jedda of his master (ustāḏ), Ǧānibak al-Ẓāhirī, the same man who confiscated the Malwa madrasa.62 Šams al-Dīn Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Saḫāwī (d. 902/1497) in his biographical dictionary al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ li-ahl al-qarn al-tāsiʿ describes Qarāǧa as a tyrannical murderer, which is congruent with his portrayal in Kanz al-maʿānī no 134.63 The letter concludes with an appeal to the addressee to put an end to this way of treating travellers.
The confrontation with Qarāǧa must be seen in the light of contemporary political circumstances in Jedda. As the intensity and the profits of the Indian Ocean trade grew in the ninth/fifteenth century, commercial and political interests converged in the Red Sea region.64 In 828/1425-830/1427 sultan Barsbāy pursued a novel policy to offset the effects of an economic crisis which had weakened the Mamluk sultans’ power bases.65 This entailed, among other measures, that goods were to be imported via Jedda instead of via the Rasulid-controlled port of Aden in Yemen.66 In Jedda, the Mamluks’ appointed financial supervisor (nāẓir), after a time accompanied by a superintendent (šādd), was responsible for collecting commercial taxes and sending them to Cairo.67 From the beginning, holders of these offices saw in it an opportunity to enrich themselves.68 The situation reached a climax under the aforementioned Ǧānibak al-Ẓāhirī, who was the šādd of Jedda between 849/1445 and his murder in 867/1463 on orders of sultan Ḫušqadam.69 Descriptions portray him as an individual with unseen wealth, political influence, military power, and independence. Between 865/1460-1461 and 867/1462-1463, he amassed more personal profit from the taxes on trade in Jedda than ever before.70
It is exactly in these years that Qarāǧa appears in Meccan sources. According to Ibn Fahd, Qarāǧa first came to Jedda on the 4th of Ramaḍān 865/13 June 1461 and again on the 20th of Ǧumādā l-āḫira 867/11 March 1463.71 This suggests that the motivation behind Qarāǧa’s attack, about which we read in the Bahmani letter, was the particularly high taxes demanded by Ǧānibak in this period. Another possibility is that Qarāǧa took the opportunity of Ǧānibak’s murder only a couple of months later, on 1 Ḏū l-Qaʿda 867/17 August 1463, to violently enrich himself. It is unclear in the sources what happened to Qarāǧa after his master’s death, but al-Saḫāwī mentions that he was “independent.”72
From another account in Ibn Fahd’s history, the sender and addressee of Kanz al-maʿānī no 134 can be identified as Maḥmūd Gāwān and sultan Ḫušqadam respectively. The letter itself lacks names and dates, though the addressee’s position of sultan is reflected in the parts of the text that extend him praise. In addition, the headings to the letter in the two manuscript copies of Kanz al-maʿānī are inconsistent. Both manuscripts agree that Kanz al-maʿānī no 134 was dictated by the ḫwāǧa-i ǧahān (Maḥmūd Gāwān), but the addressee is described in MS Reïsulkuttab 884 as the wālī (person in authority) of al-Miṣr (sic, with the article), while in MS 2807 we find that he is sulṭān Makka, “sultan of Mecca.”73 Wālī Miṣr was an office of the Mamluk administration which can be translated as “prefect of Old Cairo,” but the text of the letter does not seem to refer to this office.74 The designation sulṭān Makka is similarly ambiguous against the background of the complex balance of power that existed between Cairo and Mecca. Mecca was under the control of nobles of the Banū Ḥasan who bore the title šarīf, but the Cairo sultans frequently tried to interfere in local politics.75 There is thus ample room for interpretation of the addressee: was the letter meant for the Mamluk sultan, a Mamluk official or the šarīf of Mecca?
Ibn Fahd’s history sheds decisive light on the matter. It describes that in the night of 17 Šawwāl 872/10 May 1468 a message was read out in Mecca. It had been written a couple of weeks before, on the 4th of Ramaḍān 872/29 March 1468, from the Mamluk sultan to the Meccan šarīf, the sayyid Muḥammad b. Barakāt (r. 859/1455-903/1497). The letter’s recitation was intended for two visitors in particular: the superintendent (mubāšir) of Jedda, Šāhīn al-Ǧamālī, and its financial supervisor (nāẓir), Abū l-Fatḥ. They were informed that messengers had arrived carrying letters from Maḥmūd Gāwān to sultan Ḫušqadam concerning some acts of injustice (maẓālim) in the port of Jedda. Sultan Ḫušqadam had consequently issued them ordinances regarding the incident, followed by ordinances from sultan Yalbāy (r. 872/1467) and sultan Timurbuġā (r. 872/1467-1468).76 The fact that successive sultans handled the Bahmani complaints even during a period of political instability at the Mamluk court in 872/1467-1468 implies that it was an important matter to the court in Cairo. As John Meloy also remarked in relation to the episode with the Malwa emissaries, the lack of Mamluk sultans’ control over their officials in the Ḥiǧāz explains the different treatment South Asian missions received in Egypt versus in the Arabian peninsula.77
Ibn Fahd’s account also allows us an approximation of the date of the Bahmani letter’s arrival in Egypt. It appears that the Bahmani emissaries entered Cairo not long before sultan Ḫušqadam’s death on 10 Rabīʿ al-awwal 872/9 October 1467, since word about it reached Mecca in the spring of 872/1468 and Ḫušqadam’s successors dealt with the message. As to its date of composition, Kanz al-maʿānī no 134 states that the Ḥiǧāzi ships arrived in India “this [month of] Ḥiǧǧa,” making it seem that the letter was written up almost as soon as word arrived of the unfortunate events in Jedda, but without mentioning a year. Taking into account the rhythm of the monsoon by which trade and correspondence travelled across the Indian Ocean, the incident in Jedda could have taken place in 870/1465-1466 and Bahmani emissaries sent to Ḫušqadam in the following trading season of 871/1466-1467, which gave them enough time to reach the sultan before his final hours. But as mentioned, Qarāǧa’s presence in Jedda can only be verified for the years 865/1461 and 867/1463. This makes it possible that events in the port city transpired a couple of years before 870/1465-1466 and that the Bahmani letter was delayed at some point. It is interesting to note that 869/1465-870/1466 is also the timespan that John Meloy established for the assault in Mecca on emissaries from the Malwa Sultanate.78 It seems then that Mamluk officials in the Ḥiǧāz were particularly hostile towards travelling parties from India around this time.
The Mamluks’ seasonal domination in the Ḥiǧāz was in fact a reason for many Muslim powers to communicate with them on the safe-passage of travellers, often pilgrims to Mecca.79 Not unlike the Malwa Sultanate, the Bahmanis might also have been motivated to safeguard their access to the Ḥiǧāz because of their earlier investment in a madrasa in Mecca, though this is not stated in the Bahmani letter.80 Another similarity is that the Malwa letter and Kanz al-maʿānī no 134 both appeal to Islamic principles in order to convince the Mamluk sultan.81 In addition to calling the Mamluk sultan the protector of Islam and the Muslims, which was common but in this case also reflects the purpose of the letter, Kanz al-maʿānī no 134 mentions the principle of religious duty (farḍ). In other words, we can in both South Asian letters observe a correlation between the addressee (the Mamluk sultan), the subject of the letter (an appeal to end violence in the Ḥiǧāz), its rhetoric (centred around the obligations towards fellow Muslims) and the choice to write in Arabic. It is moreover informative of Bahmani chancery practices that the letter was included in this way in a Persian inšāʾ collection, indicating that it was considered to be exemplary. Since the Malwa letter is preserved in a Mamluk collection, MS BnF Ar. 4440, it was hitherto not possible on the basis of this letter alone to assess the use of Arabic at a South Asian chancery (also given the possibility that it is a translation made upon arrival at the Mamluk court). The resemblance to the Bahmani letter no 134 in Kanz al-maʿānī, however, suggests that there was a wider sense in Islamic South Asian polities of the functionality of Arabic in defined interregional situations.
4 Letter no 134 in Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ: ʿUbayd Allāh Fosters Friendship
Following the heading that letter no 134 in Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ carries, which is similar in all consulted manuscripts, it contains the words of the [Bahmani] sultan to the sultan of Egypt.82 By want of concrete indications of context in the letter itself and in the Mamluk and Meccan sources, the letter can only roughly be dated between Maḥmūd Gāwān’s rise at the Bahmani court in the late 850s/1450s and Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ’s composition around 880/1475.83
The central message of the letter is the sending of an envoy, ʿUbayd Allāh al-Ḥāfiẓ, “in order to be the firmly established edifice of unity and the lofty fundament of concurrence and reciprocal sincerity.”84 Al-Saḫāwī recorded his biography: ʿUbayd Allāh b. ʿAbd Allāh al-Abīwardī, who was also called al-Ḥāfiẓ, came to Cairo with his master and teacher al-ʿAlāʾ b. al-Sayyid ʿAfīf al-Dīn, after which he entered the service of the malik al-tuǧǧār (Maḥmūd Gāwān).85 ʿUbayd Allāh’s journey to Cairo thus initiated his employment at the distant Bahmani court. Al-Saḫāwī goes on that ʿUbayd Allāh returned to Cairo more than once (ġayr marra) with presents. After Maḥmūd Gāwān’s death in 886/1481, ʿUbayd Allāh resided again in Cairo and got a position from sultan Qāytbāy overseeing the kiswa. Al-Saḫāwī met him in Mecca in 894/1488-1489 and ʿUbayd Allāh is said to have died shortly after that. He was buried in the holy city.86
We also find ʿUbayd Allāh travelling the India-Egypt route in the biography of a certain ʿAlī b. Aḥmad b. ʿAlī l-Tāǧir Nūr al-Dīn al-Šīrāzī in al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ. This self-made business man is said to have entered the company of ʿUbayd Allāh in 887/1482-1483, perhaps while the latter was journeying out of the Deccan after Maḥmūd Gāwān’s murder the year before. Interestingly, ʿAlī carried a present from the ruler (ṣāḥib) of Dabhol (Dābūl), the Bahmani port city, to the king of Egypt (malik Miṣr).87 It is unclear who exactly the sender and receiver of the gift were. Nevertheless, the account confirms ʿUbayd Allāh’s position as an established agent who facilitated connections between both regions.
ʿUbayd Allāh’s biography is a window into some dynamics that accompanied Bahmani-Mamluk exchanges in the second half of the ninth/fifteenth century. The high degree of professional mobility that ʿUbayd Allāh enjoyed is evidence of the fact that the Bahmani Sultanate was recognised as an adequate cultural-political environment in which one could gain occupational experience. The credits that ʿUbayd Allāh earned in the service of Maḥmūd Gāwān enabled him to find respectable employment back in Cairo and vice versa. The fact that ʿUbayd Allāh delivered presents to Cairo on more than one occasion moreover suggests that Bahmani-Mamluk diplomatic relations were continual, underscored by the travelling back and forth of a distinguished individual.
In addition, letter no 134 in Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ abounds with utterances of friendly relations and good intentions. The author spends a great deal of effort emphasising his eagerness to be in touch and the hardships suffered as a consequence of the distance separating him from the addressee. The metaphorical use of “pigeons” and “ships” in this letter also serves to evoke a sense of the addressee as a distant friend. As Emma Flatt has shown for a range of other (Persian) letters, such images bring to mind the physical distance that the letter needed to bridge between sender and addressee (via pigeon post and sea transport) and the leisurely activities friends undertake together (pigeon flying and boat trips):88
Praise to God, who set in motion the ships of friendship with the sail of (sheets of) paper and the pillar of the pen, and made the pigeons of the souls in the sky of success of meeting, birds with wings, two or three or four.
Kor 35, 189
The prominence given to the theme of friendship in letter no 134 in Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ could signal that relations were amicable. However, this must also be viewed in relation to inšāʾ writing practices. Friendship, in a broad sense, was a central and even structuring idea to the composers of Arabic letters and inšāʾ manuals. For the first centuries of Islamic history, scholars today generally divide correspondence in two major types of letters: dīwāniyyāt and iḫwāniyyāt. The dīwāniyyāt are “official” prose, while iḫwāniyyāt are letters to friends, with friendship as the major theme.90 These categories do not appear to have been fixed, however, and they inevitably came to denote different things over time. For the Mamluk period, Frédéric Bauden has argued that iḫwāniyyāt were letters between officeholders ranked lower than the sultan. The subject matter of these iḫwāniyyāt could thus also be “official” and did not necessarily have to touch upon friendship.91 Maḥmūd Gāwān must certainly have been knowledgeable about these categories and related themes laid down by composers of Arabic letters that had gone before him in the wider Islamic world. In his Manāẓir al-inšāʾ he refers frequently to famous epistolographers, such as ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Kātib (d. ca 132/750, secretary to the Umayyads),92 al-Tuġrāʾī (d. 515/1121, secretary to the Seljuks),93 al-Qāḍī l-Fāḍil (d. 596/1200, secretary to Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn),94 and Ibn Hiǧǧa l-Ḥamawī (secretary to the Mamluks).95
In sum, the use of Arabic in Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ no 134 was not just a courtesy towards a power in the Arabic-speaking world with which the Bahmanis were on friendly terms, but worked in tandem with a framework of friendship-related idioms which was recognisable to the Mamluks. Or in other words, in this letter the Bahmanis did not simply display the mastery of a foreign language, but also of a tradition and the application of this tradition in a meaningful way to express political relationships. Indeed, that is what in essence defines a “cosmopolis” as theorised in the scholarship referred to above. This is not to say that the letter aimed at representing the Bahmani sultan as being equal to the Mamluk sultan, or that this letter was considered to be a iḫwāniyya. In fact, in Maḥmūd Gāwān’s correspondence no rigid connection can be drawn between the type of letter and the expression of friendship. For example, as Emma Flatt has argued, reflections on the absent other and the sender’s desperateness are also a characteristic element of Maḥmūd Gāwān’s Persian letters to friends.96 This underlines the mixed Arabic and Persian foundations of Bahmani chancery activities, and the crisscrossing of “cosmopolises” in South Asia.97
5 Letter no 133 in Kanz al-maʿānī: News is Sent to Yašbak
Letter no 133 in Kanz al-maʿānī is addressed to one of the most important officials during the reign of the Mamluk sultan Qāytbāy, the amīr Yašbak min Mahdī (d. 885/1481).98 We can make this identification of the addressee despite some inconsistencies in the two manuscripts in which the letter is preserved. In MS Reïsulkuttab 884 located in the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul, the heading indicates that the letter was sent by the amīr (commander, prince, emir) of Mecca and Medina to the wazīr (vizier, minister), most likely Maḥmūd Gāwān.99 In MS 2807 in the Islamic Consultative Assembly Library in Tehran the heading is different, stating: “From the late ḫwāǧa-i ǧahān [i.e. Maḥmūd Gāwān] to the supreme sultan, sultan of the Arabs and non-Arabs, the sultan of Egypt.”100 In other words, the direction of the correspondence is reversed and the non-Bahmani correspondent is in one instance said to be a sultan ruling over Egypt and in the other an amīr in Mecca and Medina.
The letter itself addresses its recipient by name. In MS Reïsulkuttab 884 this is the name Pašank (
This is consistent with more subtle indications about the addressee’s identity in the letter. The text hints several times at the addressee’s offices. In a rather direct manner, he is said to hold an imāra, and thus to be an amīr, and further on also a wizāra, and thus to be a wazīr. Yašbak was an amīr ʿašara (emir with the rank of ten) in 871/1466 and was made wazīr in 873/1468. Possibly, the word kāšif (revealer, but also: inspector) in a line of poetry is another reference to Yašbak’s offices of kāšif al-Saʿīd (inspector of Saʿīd), kāšif al-waǧh al-baḥrī (inspector of Lower Egypt), and kāšif al-kuššāf (inspector general).103 More subtle is the mentioning of the planet Mercury, which is the star of the scribes, in combination with the inkwell (dawāt).104 This could refer to Yašbak’s function as dawādār, or the bearer and keeper of the royal inkwell. The position of dawādār was one of the highest attainable at the Mamluk court and Yašbak acquired it in 872/1467, after a long service as dawādār saġīr (adjoint secretary).105 The dawādār was in charge of dispatching the sultanic correspondence. Another of his tasks was to collect taxes in the regions of al-Šarqiyya and al-Ġarbiyya, lying east and west of the Nile Delta.106 Perhaps the letter’s statement that the addressee is the regulator of the places of the east and the west is a clever acknowledgement of this. If we accept, then, the identification of the addressee as Yašbak min Mahdī, the letter can be dated between 873/1468, the last year in which Yašbak was promoted to an office mentioned in the letter (that of wazīr), and his death in 885/1481.107
The letter’s central message recounts that a messenger from Yašbak had inquired eloquently about a certain amīr Tīmūr Bīk.108 The letter continues with a response to the inquiry, informing the addressee that the person in question had passed away “in the regions of Gilan.”109 Maḥmūd Gāwān himself hailed from Gilan and maintained relations with the region, as is evident from some other letters in Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ. It is thus logical that he was consulted on the fate of people there. Further information on this letter’s context seems not to be preserved in the main historiographical and biographical sources. This is perhaps due to the fact that Kanz al-maʿānī no 133 is clearly no sultanic correspondence. Thanks to the inclusion of the letter in Nīmdihī’s collection, however, it allows us a valuable insight into the range of Arabic correspondence produced in the Bahmani chancery: Arabic was not only used for communications with the Mamluk sultan, but also with Mamluk officeholders. This also corroborates some smaller evidence in Manāẓir al-inšāʾ on the use of Arabic for non-sultanic letters. At one point, Maḥmūd Gāwān reproduces an Arabic sentence which he asserts he wrote himself to a wazīr.110 Though this sentence could have been part of a Persian letter, especially since the first half of it quotes the Quran, the analysis of letter no 133 in Kanz al-maʿānī shows that we should consider the possibility that Arabic letters between state officials were part and parcel of the Bahmani chancery’s production.
6 Conclusion
The reading and contextualisation of these three Bahmani letters to the Mamluk Sultanate have pointed out several things. First, the letters have at least an authentic core, since (often fragmentary) information in the letters can effectively be linked to data in Mamluk and Meccan sources. Second, the analysis of the letters in combination with historiographical sources has for the first time shed light on the concrete issues at play in Bahmani-Mamluk correspondence and on the people involved in them. As such, the content of the letters is shown to be in line with and contribute to findings in previous scholarship, such as on Maḥmūd Gāwān’s connections to Gilan (Kanz al-maʿānī no 133) and on Islamic South Asian powers’ interests in the Ḥiǧāz (Kanz al-maʿānī no 134). These letters also contribute to our knowledge of the workings of long-distance communications in the ninth/fifteenth-century Indian Ocean world. It became clear that Maḥmūd Gāwān was dependent upon agents moving along the Indian Ocean networks for his relations with the Mamluk Sultanate (Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ no 134), was consulted for his knowledge of developments in the wider Islamic world (Kanz al-maʿānī no 133), and actively tried to influence conditions in the Red Sea to ensure safe travels to and from the Bahmani Sultanate (Kanz al-maʿānī no 134).
Finally, the letters elucidate the use of Arabic in official correspondence across the Red Sea-Arabian Sea region in the second half of the ninth/fifteenth century. The picture that emerges depicts an array of situations in which Arabic letter-writing was the preferred method of communication at the Bahmani chancery. There is the quite typical request to the Mamluks to curtail the abuse of power in the Ḥiǧāz (Kanz al-maʿānī no 134), as well as a laudation of friendship that fits in Arabic chancery traditions (Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ no 134). More unexpectedly, officials also used Arabic for letters between themselves (Kanz al-maʿānī no 133). In conclusion, Arabic functioned as a versatile transregional medium of written communication between the Mamluk Sultanate and the Bahmani Sultanate in the period under consideration. In fact, for the production of letters “to Egypt” it was the only language used: it was not bound to a certain type of letter or to a particular addressee within the Mamluk Sultanate. At the same time, its use was not random, but in line with the themes and topics of the letters.
For future research, it would be worthwhile to investigate further aspects of the Bahmani’s adoption of Arabic as primary (and unique) language of communication to the Mamluk Sultanate, specifically how much it was built upon a more widely existing view in the ninth/fifteenth-century Islamic world of letters to Egypt having to be written in Arabic. Put differently, there is still the need to establish more accurately if Arabic’s use as a transoceanic language for correspondence was perhaps regulated by (unwritten) rules about the requirements of contexts, such as the geographical location of the recipients. This is indeed suggested by the nature of the Bahmani corpus. In a way much similar to Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ and Kanz al-maʿānī, the early-ninth/fifteenth century Timurid inšāʾ collection Farāʾid-i ġiyāṯī by Yūsuf Ahl, for example, also contains three letters in Arabic to and from Egypt among the otherwise Persian letters.111 A comparison with (near-)contemporary regions and dynasties where Persian was the language of the administration might thus inform us about if and how far the role of Arabic in Bahmani interregional correspondence extended to or built upon the traditions of these powers in the wider Islamic world, illustrating once again the intersecting of the Persian and Arabic cosmopolises.
Appendix: Overview of the Bahmani Letters to the Mamluk Sultanate
This article is part of my doctoral research project, supported by the University Research Fund (BOF) of the University of Antwerp (grant number 33150); and by the Research Foundation—Flanders (FWO) under a PhD Fellowship (grant number 1130119N). I thank Malika Dekkiche, Suzanne Duff and Jo Van Steenbergen for commenting upon different versions of this article in the course of my writing, and Chirine Sunderland for translating the abstract into French.
Because of the “major economic and cultural exchanges across its waters and around its coasts that date back at least seven thousand years” (Edward A. Alpers, The Indian Ocean in World History, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 1), research into a variety of historical developments conceives the Indian Ocean and its surrounding lands as a connected “system,” “world,” or “world region.”
Echoing Sheldon Pollock’s “Sanskrit cosmopolis” (see “The Sanskrit Cosmopolis, 300-1300: Transculturation, Vernacularization, and the Question of Ideology,” in Ideology and Status of Sanskrit: Contributions to the History of the Sanskrit Language, ed. Jan E.M. Houben, Leiden-New York, E.J. Brill [“Brill’s Indological Library,” 13], 1996, p. 197-247), “Persian cosmopolis” is becoming a commonly used phrase in scholarly writings to denote a whole of political, cultural and social phenomena that were rooted in the language practices and literary heritage associated with Persian, and that had a trans-local reach and validity. Examples include: Owen Timothy Cornwall, Alexander and the Persian Cosmopolis, 1000-1500, PhD thesis, Columbia University, 2016; Richard M. Eaton, “The Persian Cosmopolis (900-1900) and the Sanskrit Cosmopolis (400-1400),” in The Persianate World: Rethinking a Shared Sphere, eds Abbas Amanat and Assef Ashraf, Leiden-Boston, Brill (“Iran Studies,” 18), 2019, p. 63-83; Emma J. Flatt, The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates: Living Well in the Persian Cosmopolis, Cambridge-New York, Cambridge University Press, 2019. The phrase “Arabic cosmopolis” was coined by Ronit Ricci in Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia, Chicago-London, The University of Chicago Press (“South Asia Across the Disciplines”), 2011.
Ḫwāǧa ʿImād al-Dīn Maḥmūd Gāwān, Manāẓir al-inšāʾ, ed. Maʿṣūma Maʿdan-Kan, Tehran, Iranian Academy of Persian Language and Literature (“Farhangistān-i zabān wa-adab-i fārsī”), 1381 Š./2002, p. 183-184.
Flatt, The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates, p. 188-197.
In the published editions of these works, the Arabic writings carry the numbers 134 in Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ (Ḫwāǧa ʿImād al-Dīn Maḥmūd Gāwān, Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ, ed. Čānd b. Ḥusayn, Hyderabad, Dār al-ṭabʿ sarkār-i ʿālī, 1948, p. 376-377) and 131 to 137 in Kanz al-maʿānī (ʿAbd al-Karīm Nīmdihī, Kanz al-maʿānī (Munšaʾāt-i Nīmdihī), eds Muḥammad-Riḍā Naṣīrī and Muḥammad-Bāqir Wuṯūqī, Tehran, The Academy of Persian Language and Literature [“Farhangistān-i zabān wa-adab-i fārsī”], 1394 Š./2015, p. 370-399). Note that no 132 in Kanz al-maʿānī is an example of a literary introduction in Arabic. The exact date of Nīmdihī’s death is unknown and is probably sometime after 906/1501, according to Jean Aubin in “Indo-Islamica I: La vie et l’œuvre de Nīmdihī,” Revue des études islamiques, 34 (1966), p. 72.
M.G. Zubaid Ahmad, The Contribution of India to Arabic Literature: From Ancient Times to 1857, Lahore, Sh. Muhammad Ashraf, 1946, p. 221-222.
For example, the collection Qahwat al-inšāʾ by the munšī at the Mamluk chancery Ibn Ḥiǧǧa l-Ḥamawī (d. 837/1434) contains an Arabic diploma sent to Delhi in 813/1410 and John L. Meloy has recently discussed two Arabic letters between the Mamluk Sultanate and the Malwa Sultanate (804/1401-969/1562) preserved in MS Arabe 4440 in the Bibliothèque national de France. See Ibn Ḥiǧǧa, Das Rauschgetränk der Stilkunst, oder, Qahwat al-inšāʾ, ed. Rudolf Veselý, Beirut-Berlin, Klaus Schwarz Verlag (“Bibliotheca Islamica,” 36), 2005, p. 428-434 and John L. Meloy, “‘Aggression in the Best of Lands’: Mecca in Egyptian-Indian Diplomacy in the Ninth/Fifteenth Century,” in Mamluk Cairo, a Crossroads of Embassies: Studies on Diplomacy and Diplomatics, eds Frédéric Bauden and Malika Dekkiche, Leiden-Boston, Brill (“Islamic History and Civilization,” 161), 2019, p. 604-620.
Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250-1350, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1989.
Richard T. Mortel, “The Mercantile Community of Mecca during the Late Mamlūk Period,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 4/1 (1994), p. 27.
E.g. Sebastian R. Prange’s chapter on ‘The Palace’ in Monsoon Islam: Trade and Faith on the Medieval Malabar Coast, Cambridge-New York, Cambridge University Press (“Cambridge Oceanic Histories”), 2018, p. 158-206; Samira Sheikh, Forging a Region: Sultans, Traders, and Pilgrims in Gujarat, 1200-1500, New Delhi, Oxford University Press (“SOAS Studies on South Asia”), 2010, p. 61-100; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Of Imarat and Tijarat: Asian Merchants and State Power in the Western Indian Ocean, 1400 to 1750,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, 37/4 (1995), p. 750-780.
See, for example, Ranabir Chakravarti, “Horse Trade and Piracy at Tana (Thana, Maharashtra, India): Gleanings from Marco Polo,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 34/3 (1991), p. 159-182; Syed Ejaz Hussain, “Silver Flow and Horse Supply to Sultanate Bengal with Special Reference to Trans-Himalayan Trade (13th-16th Centuries),” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 56/2 (2013), p. 264-308; Hussain Khan, “Sea-Borne Horse Trade to ‘Al-Sind waʾl-Hind’ Before the Coming of the Portuguese,” Journal of the Pakistan Historical Society, 39/4 (1991), p. 311-314. It should be noted that of course the Red Sea region was not the only region on the supplying side to India, one of the most important ports being Hormuz in the Persian Gulf.
Simon Digby, “The Broach Coin-hoard as Evidence of the Import of Valuta Across the Arabian Sea During the 13th and 14th Centuries,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society, 112/2 (1980), p. 129-138; Hussain, “Silver Flow and Horse Supply.”
See on the elementary role of trade for seaborne connections Prange’s Monsoon Islam, in which the author conceives the Indian Ocean trade as fundamental to other kinds of interregional relations and exchanges: “It was this trade [= the pepper trade] that instituted and sustained most other connections and exchanges that made up the world of Monsoon Islam. Commerce truly was the backbone of all other types of long-distance networks in the Indian Ocean” (p. 207).
The panel “Arabic in South Asia: A language in/of the margins?” at the 25th European Conference on South Asian Studies (ECSAS) in Paris on 25 July 2018 also sought to contribute to filling this lacuna. I am grateful to the panel’s organisers, participants, and audience for their comments and questions on a paper about some preliminary findings for this article which I presented.
Ricci, Islam Translated.
Christopher D. Bahl, Histories of Circulation: Sharing Arabic Manuscripts across the Western Indian Ocean, 1400-1700, PhD thesis, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 2018.
Ibid., p. 54-55.
Meloy, “‘Aggression in the Best of Lands’,” p. 604-620.
Stephan Conermann and Anna Kollatz, “Some Remarks on the Diplomatic Relations between Cairo, Delhi/Dawlatābād, and Aḥmadābād during the Eighth/Fourteenth and Ninth/Fifteenth Centuries,” in Mamluk Cairo, eds Bauden and Dekkiche, p. 621-637.
Ibid., p. 635.
The letters’ numbers refer to their place in the order of the published editions, which can be and most often is different in the manuscripts.
A discussion of the four remaining Arabic letters to non-Mamluk addressees will be part of my PhD thesis (forthcoming 2022).
For the identification of persons named in the letters and the contextualisation of events, I have consulted the following 22 works: al-Biqāʿī, ʿUnwān al-zamān bi-tarāǧim al-šuyūḫ wa-l-aqrān; al-Biqāʿī, ʿUnwān al-ʿunwān; al-Biqāʿī, Taʾrīḫ al-Biqāʿī; Ibn Aǧā, Taʾrīḫ al-amīr Yašbak; Ibn Fahd, Itḥāf al-warā bi-aḫbār Umm al-Qurā; Ibn Iyās, Badāʾiʿ al-zuhūr fī waqāʾiʿ al-duhūr; ʿAbd al-Bāsiṭ b. Ḫalīl, Kitāb al-Rawḍ al-bāsim; ʿAbd al-Bāsiṭ b. Ḫalīl, Nayl al-amal fī ḏayl al-duwal; Ibn al-Šiḥna, al-Durr al-muntaḫab; Ibn Sibāṭ, Taʾrīḫ; Ibn Taġrībirdī, Ḥawādiṯ al-duhūr fī madā l-ayyām wa-l-šuhūr; Ibn Taġrībirdī, al-Nuǧūm al-zāhira fī mulūk Miṣr wa-l-Qāhira; Ibn Ṭūlūn, Mufākaha; Qubād al-Ḥusaynī, Tārīḫ-i īlčī-yi Niẓām Šāh; al-Saḫāwī, al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ li-ahl al-qarn al-tāsiʿ; al-Saḫāwī, Waǧīz al-kalām; al-Saḫāwī, al-Ḏayl al-tāmm ʿalā duwal al-islām; al-Suyūṭī, Badāʾiʿ al-zuhūr; al-Suyūṭī, Ḥusn al-muḥāḍara; al-Suyūṭī, Naẓm al-ʿiqyān; Ṭabāṭabā, Burhān-i maʾāṯir; al-Ẓāhirī, Zubdat kašf al-mamālik. Only the works referred to further in this article rendered some useful information.
Richard M. Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, 1300-1761: Eight Indian Lives, Cambridge-New York, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 64.
The Bahmanis did not control, however, all surrounding lands and access to Goa frequently needed to be reconquered. See Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, p. 59; Haroon Khan Sherwani, The Bahmanis of the Deccan, Delhi, Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers Pvt. Ltd., 19852, p. 6, 8.
Éric Vallet, L’Arabie marchande : État et commerce sous les sultans rasūlides du Yémen (626-858/1229-1454), Paris, Éditions de la Sorbonne (“Bibliothèque Historique des Pays d’Islam,” 1), 2010, p. 727.
Consider Meloy’s table on “Maritime Traffic between Jedda and Indian Ocean and Red Sea Ports, 876-944/1471-1537” (Appendix C in John Lash Meloy, Imperial Power and Maritime Trade: Mecca and Cairo in the Later Middle Ages, Chicago, Middle East Documentation Center, University of Chicago [“Chicago Studies on the Middle East,” 6], 2010, p. 249-254) in which the place “Daybul” figures prominently. This should be identified as Dabhol on the Konkan coast, according to Muzaffar Alam and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “A View from Mecca: Notes on Gujarat, the Red Sea, and the Ottomans, 1517-39/923-946H.,” Modern Asian Studies, 51/2 (2017), p. 272.
Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, p. 59-60.
Ibid., p. 75.
Ibid., p. 76; Flatt, The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates, p. 135-136; Halil İnalcık, “Bursa and the Commerce of the Levant,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 3/2 (1960), p. 141; Gilles Veinstein, “Commercial Relations between India and the Ottoman Empire (Late Fifteenth to Late Eighteenth Centuries): A Few Notes and Hypotheses,” in Merchants, Companies and Trade: Europe and Asia in the Early Modern Era, eds Sushil Chaudhury and Michel Morineau, Paris-Cambridge, Maison des sciences de l’homme-Cambridge University Press (“Studies in Modern Capitalism”), 1999, p. 95-96.
Eaton, A Social History of the Deccan, p. 60-61; Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Iranians Abroad: Intra-Asian Elite Migration and Early Modern State Formation,” The Journal of Asian Studies, 51/2 (1992), p. 342-343.
Haroon Khan Sherwani based this date on a remark in Muḥammad Qāsim Hindū Šāh Firišta’s Taʾrīḫ that Maḥmūd Gāwān was 43 years old when he came to India. Haroon Khan Sherwani, Maḥmūd Gāwāṇ: The Great Bahmani Wazir, Allahabad, Kitabistan, 1942, p. 26. For Maḥmūd Gāwān’s date of birth, Haroon Khan Sherwani relies on al-Saḫāwī (Sherwani, Maḥmūd Gāwāṇ, p. 22), who indeed mentions the year 813/1410-1411. Šams al-Dīn Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Saḫāwī, al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ li-ahl al-qarn al-tāsiʿ, Beirut, Dār al-ǧīl, 1992, X, p. 144. However, al-Saḫāwī adds the word taqrīban, “approximately,” and based on Firišta Maḥmūd Gāwān must have been born in 808/1405-1406 (Sherwani, Maḥmūd Gāwāṇ, p. 22). In other words, there is very little certainty about the exact years of Maḥmūd Gāwān’s birth and travel to India.
Sherwani, Maḥmūd Gāwāṇ, p. 81, 119. In the Bahmani context, ḫwāǧa-i ǧahān was a title for high dignitaries and several bore it from 747/1346 onwards (J. Burton-Page, “K̲h̲wād̲j̲a-i D̲j̲ahān,” EI2). Throughout Islamic lands, however, the term ḫwāǧa carried different meanings. The secretary in the Mamluk chancery al-Qalqašandī (d. 821/1418) in his inšāʾ manual Ṣubḥ al-aʿšā fī ṣināʿat al-inšāʾ mentions it as a title for Persian and other foreign merchants (P. Bearman et al., “K̲h̲wād̲j̲a,” EI2). There could thus be a certain ambiguity of the term in diplomatic relations.
Haroon Khan Sherwani, “Deccani Diplomacy and Diplomatic Usage in the Middle of the Fifteenth Century,” in Proceedings and Transactions of the Eighth All-India Oriental Conference Mysore: December 1935, Bangalore, Government Press, 1937, p. 542-543.
Aubin, “Indo-Islamica I,” p. 61-63.
Richard T. Mortel, “Madrasas in Mecca during the Medieval Period: A Descriptive Study Based on Literary Sources,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 60/2 (1997), p. 245-246.
Ibid., p. 246.
Meloy, “‘Aggression in the Best of Lands’,” p. 605.
Al-Naǧm ʿUmar b. Fahd, Itḥāf al-warā bi-aḫbār Umm al-Qurā, Mecca, Ǧāmiʿat Umm al-Qurā, Maʿhad al-buḥūṯ al-ʿilmiyya wa-iḥyāʾ al-turāṯ al-islāmī, Markaz iḥyāʾ al-turāṯ al-islāmī, 1983-1990, III, ed. Fahīm Muḥammad Šaltūt, p. 643.
Yusuf Husain Khan, P. Sitapati, and M.A. Nayeem (eds), Farmans and Sanads of the Deccan Sultans (1408-1687 A.D.), Hyderabad, State Archives, Government of Andhra Pradesh, 1980. It seems, however, that the summaries of two farmāns were lost in the printing of the book, since the numbering of the summaries goes from 7 to 10, and the sentence started at the end of page 3 does not continue on page 4. This would bring the total number of extant Bahmani documents on ten.
Colin Mitchell, “Safavid Imperial Tarassul and the Persian Inshāʾ Tradition,” Studia Iranica, 26 (1997), p. 188.
Emma J. Flatt, “Practicing Friendship: Epistolary Constructions of Social Intimacy in the Bahmani Sultanate,” Studies in History, 33/1 (2017), p. 62, n. 5.
Sherwani, Maḥmūd Gāwāṇ, p. 22, n. 2; p. 222-226; for a printed version of this letter and its Ottoman response, see Ferīdūn Bey, Mecmua-yı münşeat-ı Ferīdūn Bey, Istanbul, Takvimhane-yi āmire, 1265/1848-1274/1858, p. 258-262.
Emma Flatt, “Maḥmūd Gāvān,” EI3; Charles Ambrose Storey, Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey, Oxford, The Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, 1990, III/2 [Rhetoric, Riddles and Chronograms, Ornate Prose], p. 259-260.
Three of these (MS 8447, MS 13697, and MS 16170) do not contain the letter to the Mamluk Sultanate.
Aubin references it as “‘Abd al-Karīm Nīmdihī, Kanz al-māʿānī, ms. Esad Efendi, Istanbul, no 884” (“Indo-Islamica I,” p. 81), Mortel as “‘Abd al-Karīm b. Muḥammad al-Nīmdahī, Kanz al-maʿanī fī’l-inshāʾ, MS Istanbul: Reïs ül-Kuttap, no. 884” (“The Mercantile Community of Mecca,” p. 22). There are some problems with the foliation of this manuscript: there is a leap from 53 to 64, but since the catchword on f. 53b is consistent with the first word on f. 64a, no folios seem to be missing. Subsequently, the foliation continues 65-66-67-etc., but the tens throughout the rest of the manuscript follow the original, correct counting, for example in this manner: 68-69-60-71-72-etc. The last folio (197) also has the correct foliation in the same way as the tens, resulting in a sequence at the end as follows: 204-205-206-197. For the sake of clarity, I refer to the foliation as it is written on the manuscript.
Istanbul, Süleymaniye Library, MS Reïsulkuttab 884, f. 197a; Nīmdihī, Kanz al-maʿānī, p. 397 (on p. 399 the editors incorrectly render the nisba of the scribe as al-Gīlānī instead of al-Karbalāʾī).
https://dlib.ical.ir/faces/search/bibliographic/biblioFullView.jspx?_afPfm=2abua2vg3, last accessed 17 May 2020. The online catalogue of the Islamic Consultative Assembly Library often mentions three different numbers to identify manuscripts. In this article, I always refer to what is translated on their English website as the “Class NO,” which is most of the time also the number most clearly indicated on the manuscript copy itself.
Mitchell, “Safavid Imperial Tarassul,” p. 183.
Flatt, The Courts of the Deccan Sultanates, p. 183-188; Riazul Islam, A Calendar of Documents on Indo-Persian Relations (1500-1750), Tehran-Karachi, Iranian Culture Foundation-Institute of Central & West Asian Studies, 1979, I, p. 10-30; Momin Mohiuddin, The Chancellery and Persian Epistolography under the Mug̱ẖals: From Bábur to S̱ẖáh Jahán, 1526-1658: A Study on Ins̱ẖáʾ, Dár al-Ins̱ẖáʾ, and Muns̱ẖīs, Based on Original Documents, Calcutta, Iran Society, 1971, p. 17-18.
E.g. Matthew Melvin-Koushki, “The Delicate Art of Aggression: Uzun Hasan’s Fathnama to Qaytbay of 1469,” Iranian Studies, 44/2 (2011), p. 193-214.
Sherwani, “Deccani Diplomacy and Diplomatic Usage,” p. 541-557. The two manuscripts of Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ that he used moreover seem to contain only the letters to the Ottoman Empire and Gilan, as far as letters to non-Indian rulers are concerned: “[…] the only two States outside India which find a place in the collection [= in two manuscripts of Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ in Hyderabad] […] are the land of his [= Maḥmūd Gāwān’s] birth, Gīlān, and the greatest Muslim Empire of those days, Turkey” (p. 546).
Sherwani, Maḥmūd Gāwāṇ, p. 219-220; id., The Bahmanis of the Deccan, p. 315.
Stephan Popp, “Persische diplomatische Korrespondenz im Südindien des 15. Jahrhunderts,” Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft, 162/1 (2012), p. 95-125.
Jean Aubin, “Les relations diplomatiques entre les Aq-qoyunlu et les Bahmanides,” in Iran and Islam: In Memory of the Late Vladimir Minorsky, ed. Clifford Edmund Bosworth, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1971. Aubin also used Kanz al-maʿānī as a source in other publications, such as in “The Secretary of Mahmud Gawan and his Lost Chronicle,” Journal of the Research Society of Pakistan, 1/2 (1964), p. 9-13; id., “Indo-Islamica I,” p. 61-81; id., “Le royaume d’Ormuz au début du XVIe siècle,” in Mare Luso-Indicum: Études et documents sur l’histoire de l’océan indien et des pays riverains à l’époque de la domination portugaise, eds Geneviève Bouchon, Michael N. Pearson and Jean Aubin, Genève-Paris, Librairie Droz-Librairie Minard, 1971-1980, 4 vols, II (1973), p. 77-179.
E.g. Ǧamšīd Nūrūzī and Ṣafūrā Burūmand, “Naqš-i dīplumāsī-i Šāhruḫ-i Tīmūrī dar šibhqāra-i Hind,” Faṣlnāma-i ʿIlmī-Pazhūhišī Tārīḫ-i Islām wa-Irān, 26/30 (1395 Š./2016), p. 268. On the use of MS Reïsulkuttab 884 as the source for the printed edition: Nīmdihī, Kanz al-maʿānī, p.
Malika Dekkiche, “Diplomatics, or Another Way to See the World,” in Mamluk Cairo, eds Bauden and Dekkiche, p. 185-213.
Frédéric Bauden, “Mamluk Diplomatics: the Present State of Research,” in Mamluk Cairo, eds Bauden and Dekkiche, p. 52.
Meloy, “‘Aggression in the Best of Lands’,” p. 606-613.
Mortel has briefly discussed this letter before (“The Mercantile Community of Mecca,” p. 22), but I found that his assertions that the letter was written to sultan Qāytbāy in 882/1477-1478, that it complained of high duties levied, and that it warned that Indian ships would sail to Aden instead of Jedda, are unsupported by the source. This necessitates a re-examination of the letter.
Tehran, Islamic Consultative Assembly Library, MS 2807, f. 38b has Farāǧa.
Ibn Fahd, Itḥāf al-warā, IV, ed. ʿAbd al-Karīm ʿAlī Bāz, p. 419; al-Saḫāwī, al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ, VI, p. 215; Richard T. Mortel, “Grand Dawādār and Governor of Jedda: The Career of the Fifteenth Century Mamlūk Magnate Ǧānibak al-Ẓāhirī,” Arabica, 53/3 (1996), p. 453.
Al-Saḫāwī, al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ, VI, p. 215.
On the increase in trade passing through the Red Sea, see for example: Archibald Lewis, “Maritime Skills in the Indian Ocean, 1368-1500,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 16/1 (1973), p. 260; John L. Meloy, “Imperial Strategy and Political Exigency: The Red Sea Spice Trade and the Mamluk Sultanate in the Fifteenth Century,” Journal of the American Oriental Society, 123/1 (2003), p. 2.
On sultan Barsbāy’s imperial motives, see: Meloy, “Imperial Strategy,” p. 1-19.
Jean-Claude Garcin, “The Regime of the Circassian Mamluks,” in The Cambridge History of Egypt, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1998, I [Islamic Egypt, 640-1517, ed. Carl F. Petry], p. 294; Patrick Wing, “Indian Ocean Trade and Sultanic Authority: The Nāẓir of Jedda and the Mamluk Political Economy,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 57/1 (2014), p. 56-60. On Aden’s important role in the Indian Ocean trade under the Rasulids and conflicts with the Mamluks, see Vallet, L’Arabie marchande.
Wing, “Indian Ocean Trade,” p. 56, 71.
Ibid., p. 68.
Mortel, “Grand Dawādār and Governor of Jedda,” p. 440, 455.
Ibid., p. 455.
Ibn Fahd, Itḥāf al-warā, IV, p. 419, 440.
Al-Saḫāwī, al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ, VI, p. 215.
MS Reïsulkuttab 884, f. 202a (or Nīmdihī, Kanz al-maʿānī, p. 385); MS 2807, f. 38a.
André Raymond, Cairo, transl. Willard Wood, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 2000, p. 162. Wālī Miṣr became, after 922/1517, the title of the Ottoman governor of Egypt. See Peri Bearman et al., “Wālī,” EI2.
John Lash Meloy, “Mecca, 1000-1500,” EI3.
Ibn Fahd, Itḥāf al-warā, IV, p. 483.
Meloy, “‘Aggression in the Best of Lands’,” p. 613.
Ibid.
Meloy, Imperial Power, p. 81-112 (coining the concept of the Mamluks’ “seasonal domination” in the Ḥiǧāz); Malika Dekkiche, “Mamluk Diplomacy: the Present State of Research,” in Mamluk Cairo, eds Bauden and Dekkiche, p. 122-123.
Mortel, “Madrasas in Mecca during the Medieval Period,” p. 245-246.
For an explanation of the religious rhetoric in the Malwa letter, see Meloy, “‘Aggression in the Best of Lands’,” p. 614-615.
London, British Library, MS Or. 14754 (f. 218b) has al-sulṭān Miṣr; Tehran, Islamic Consultative Assembly Library, MS 18653 has al-sulṭān al-Miṣr (not foliated, f. 278a according to my count); Tehran, Islamic Consultative Assembly Library, MS 3517 (not foliated, f. 183a according to my count) and MS 8969 (f. 203b) have sulṭān al-Miṣr; in Leipzig, Universitätsbibliothek, MS Cod. Pers. 06 (f. 210a) the title is omitted. The use of the definite article al- is in all three cases rather odd, the grammatically correct form being sulṭān Miṣr, but does not alter the meaning, i.e. that the letter was written to the sultan of Egypt. We can observe the same peculiar use of the article before Miṣr in the term wālī l-Miṣr in MS Reïsulkuttab 884, f. 202a (or Nīmdihī, Kanz al-maʿānī, p. 385), as mentioned above.
The exact date of Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ ’s composition is contested. Sherwani and Flatt believe that the work was written before 880/1475 (Sherwani, Maḥmūd Gāwāṇ, p. 187; Flatt, “Maḥmūd Gāvān,” EI3), but Aubin established on the basis of internal evidence 881-882/1477 as the earliest possible year of writing (Aubin, “Indo-Islamica I,” p. 64).
Gāwān, Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ, p. 377. My translation.
Since ʿUbayd Allāh is said specifically to have entered the service of Maḥmūd Gāwān (and not of the Bahmani sultan), this probes us to be careful when ascribing letter no 134 in Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ to the Bahmani sultan, echoing the letter’s heading in the collection. Moreover, the letter itself is silent on the sender. This issue of exact identification of the sender is, however, less problematic if one considers that Maḥmūd Gāwān for a long time acted as the two successive child sultans’ regent (Sherwani, “Deccani Diplomacy and Diplomatic Usage,” p. 542-543). It is thus likely that he composed the sultanic letters (ibid., p. 547-548).
Al-Saḫāwī, al-Ḍawʾ al-lāmiʿ, V, p. 116.
Ibid., p. 177.
Flatt, “Practicing Friendship,” p. 75-77.
Gāwān, Riyāḍ al-inšāʾ, p. 376. My translation.
Albert Arazi et al., “Risāla,” EI2; Maurice A. Pomerantz, Licit Magic: The Life and Letters of al-Ṣāḥib b. ʿAbbād (d. 385/995), Leiden-Boston, Brill (“Islamic History and Civilization,” 146), 2018, p. 130-175 (for the Buyid period).
Frédéric Bauden, “Like Father, Like Son: The Chancery Manual (Qalāʾid al-jumān) of al-Qalqašandī’s Son and Its Value for the Study of Mamluk Diplomatics (Ninth/Fifteenth Century) (Studia diplomatica islamica, I),” Eurasian Studies, 11 (2013), p. 207-209; Frédéric Bauden, “Ikhwāniyyāt Letters in the Mamluk period: A Document (Muṭālaʿa) Issued by al-Muʾayyad Shaykh’s Chancery and a Contribution to Mamluk Diplomatics,” in Egypt and Syria under Mamluk Rule: Political, Social, and Cultural Aspects, ed. Amalia Levanoni (forthcoming).
Gāwān, Manāẓir al-inšāʾ, p. 153.
Ibid., p. 165. The Seljuks were a Persianized dynasty, but Maḥmūd Gāwān quotes in Manāẓir al-inšāʾ specifically from al-Tuġrāʾī’s Arabic dīwān. Al-Tuġrāʾī’s official letters have not survived (François C. de Blois, “al-Ṭug̲h̲rāʾī,” EI2), making it impossible to establish if these were written mainly in Arabic or Persian.
Ibid., p. 159, 179-180.
Ibid., p. 155.
Flatt, “Practicing Friendship,” p. 72.
Moreover, it is in general artificial to draw stark lines between Persian and Arabic chancery styles, because since the earliest Islamic writings, there has been cross-fertilisation between the two.
On Yašbak min Mahdī, see Ibn Aǧā, Taʾrīḫ al-amīr Yašbak al-Ẓāhirī, ed. ʿAbd al-Qādir Aḥmad Ṭulaymāt, Cairo, Dār al-fikr al-ʿarabī, 1973; Benjamin Arbel, “Levantine Power Struggles in an Unpublished Mamluk Letter of 877 AH/1473 CE,” Mediterranean Historical Review, 7 (1992), p. 92-100; Bernadette Martel-Thoumian, “Les dernières batailles du grand émir Yašbak min Mahdī,” in War and Society in the Eastern Mediterranean, 7th-15th Centuries, ed. Yaacov Lev, Leiden, E.J. Brill (“The Medieval Mediterranean,” 9), 1997, p. 301-341; Carl F. Petry, Twilight of Majesty: The Reigns of the Mamlūk Sultans al-Ashraf Qāytbāy and Qānṣūh al-Ghawrī in Egypt, Seattle-London, University of Washington Press (“Occasional Papers,” 4), 1993, p. 43-46.
MS Reïsulkuttab 884, f. 190b (because of the erroneous foliation, this is to be found right before f. 201); Nīmdihī, Kanz al-maʿānī, p. 381.
MS 2807, f. 109b.
The editors of the published edition of Kanz al-maʿānī have turned the last letter of the name, the letter kāf [k], into the letter gāf [g], in order to make it into the more common Persian name Pašang (
MS 2807, f. 110a.
On Yašbak holding these offices: Martel-Thoumian, “Les dernières batailles du grand émir Yašbak min Mahdī,” p. 311.
MS 2807, f. 109b has dirāya (“knowledge”) instead of dawāt, which I presume is a misspelling of the alternative diwāya, which also means “inkwell.” On Mercury as star of the scribes: Edward William Lane, An Arabic-English Lexicon, Beirut, Librairie du Liban, 1968, p. 2078.
Martel-Thoumian, “Les dernières batailles du grand émir Yašbak min Mahdī,” p. 310-311.
On the dawādār’s tasks: ibid., p. 310, n. 59; David Ayalon, “Dawādār,” EI2.
In 1473, Yašbak resigned as wazīr, which would be significantly earlier as the terminus ante quem, but we cannot be sure that the Bahmanis were aware of Mamluk court matters in so much detail.
MS Reïsulkuttab 884, f. 201b (or Nīmdihī, Kanz al-maʿānī, p. 382); MS 2807, f. 110b. I have not been able to identify this person.
The exact identification of this place might be open to discussion: MS Reïsulkuttab 884, f. 201b has Ǧīlān; MS 2807, f. 110b has Ǧalīlān.
Gāwān, Manāẓir al-inšāʾ, p. 160.
Ǧalāl al-Dīn Yūsuf Ahl, Farāʾid-i ġiyāṯī, ed. Ḥišmat Muʾayyad, Tehran, The Foundation for Iranian Culture, 1356 Š./1977-1358 Š./1979, I, p. 171-172, 221-226. I thank Said Reza Huseini for mentioning this work to me and providing me with a copy of it.
