Abu al-Tayyib al-Mutanabbi (Ebü't-Tayyib el-Mütenebbî, 303-354/915-965) is counted among the greatest poets of Arabic literature. The nine years he spent at the court of the Hamdanid emir Sayf al-Dawla (Seyfüddevle) in Aleppo are regarded as the summit of his art; his kasides (qasidas) describing the emir's campaigns against Byzantium are valuable both as poetry and as history. His connection with Amasya, however, rests on a single source, Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar's Amasya Tarihi (History of Amasya). Hüsameddin takes the fortress of Harşene (Kharshana) named in Arabic sources to be the castle of Amasya, and the Semendû (Samandu) that al-Mutanabbi mentions in one couplet to be the Ziyâre quarter of Amasya, and from this he concludes that al-Mutanabbi came to Amasya with Sayf al-Dawla and praised the city in two couplets. This conclusion has not been confirmed by any other source; present-day knowledge of Sayf al-Dawla's campaigns and the place names in al-Mutanabbi's own poems call it strongly into question. The Amasya couplets Hüsameddin attributes to al-Mutanabbi appear on a separate page in the Poems on Amasya section of the site; the three passages from his kasides that Hüsameddin links with Amasya are given separately in this category.

Life

The poet, whose real name was Ahmad ibn al-Husayn, was born in 303 (915-16) in the Banu Kinda quarter of Kufa. Because of a Qarmatian raid he migrated with his family to the Samawa desert and, living for two years among the Bedouin, learned the language, poetry and proverbs at their source. At the end of 316 (928) he went to Baghdad and studied with philologists such as Ibn Durayd and Ibn al-Sarraj. In 318 (930) he moved to Syria and, wandering from city to city, wrote panegyrics for small fees. He then launched a rebellion among the Bedouin around Latakia; towards the end of 322 (934) he was captured and imprisoned in Homs, and in 324 (936) he was released after writing a kaside of apology to the governor. The nickname al-Mutanabbi, meaning "the one who claims to be a prophet", is associated with this episode, though other explanations of its origin are also given.

After his imprisonment al-Mutanabbi again lived for a while as a wandering poet, and in 328 (939) he became the poet of Badr ibn Ammar, governor of Damascus. In 336 (947-48) he presented a kaside to Abu al-Asha'ir, Sayf al-Dawla's governor of Antioch; the following year the governor introduced him to Sayf al-Dawla. Al-Mutanabbi entered the court at Aleppo early in 337 (948) on condition that he recite his poems seated in the ruler's presence and not kiss his hand. Sayf al-Dawla showered him with gifts and took him along on his campaigns. At the end of 346 (957), because of enmities at court, he fled Aleppo and placed himself under the protection of Kafur, the Ikhshidid regent of Egypt. When he failed to obtain the governorship he had hoped for, he left Kafur in 350 (961) with a bitter satire and returned to Iraq. In his last years he presented kasides to the Buyid vizier Ibn al-Amid and to Adud al-Dawla. In Ramadan 354 (September 965), on his way back from Shiraz to Baghdad, he was attacked by Bedouin at a place called Dayr al-Aqul and killed together with his son and his slave.

Poetry

Al-Mutanabbi's divan amounts to roughly 5,200 couplets and is divided into sections according to the periods of the poet's life: the poems of his Syrian years (Shamiyyat), those written for Sayf al-Dawla (Sayfiyyat), those written for Kafur (Kafuriyyat), those written for Abu Shuja Fatik (Fatikiyyat) and those written in Shiraz (Shiraziyyat). The 1,540 couplets of the "Sayfiyyat" written for Sayf al-Dawla form a third of his whole work and are regarded as the high point of his art. In these kasides the emir's wars against Byzantium and the Bedouin are told through the eyes of a witness who was present at the events. In the words of İsmail Durmuş, his poems are a historical record of the events concerning Byzantium and the Hamdanids, and the city and place names in them form a rich geographical inventory.

The main themes of his poetry are praise, self-glorification, wisdom, elegy, satire and description. With his hyperbolic images, his proud voice, his pessimistic maxims about life and people and his pithy lines that passed into proverb, he influenced the whole of Arabic poetry, and close to a hundred commentaries were written on his divan. Geographers such as Yaqut al-Hamawi also turned to his couplets when describing place names. Hüsameddin's frequent references to al-Mutanabbi in Amasya Tarihi come from his reading of the Arabic geographical and historical works that follow this tradition.

Connection with Amasya

In the introductory part of his work describing Amasya, after the words of Moltke, Hüsameddin mentions al-Mutanabbi as follows:

Şâ'ir-i meşhûr Ebu't-Tayyib el-Mütenebbî, memdûhu olan Haleb hükümdârı Seyfü'd-Devle-i Hamdânî ile 342'de Amasya'yı ziyâret ve etrâf ve riyâzını seyr ü temâşâ etdiği zamân fethinden dolayı müşârün-ileyh Seyfü'd-Devle'yi medh ederken Amasya'yı şöyle medh ve ta'rîf ediyor.

In English: The famous poet Abu al-Tayyib al-Mutanabbi, when he visited Amasya in the year 342 (953) with Sayf al-Dawla al-Hamdani, ruler of Aleppo, whom he praised, and toured its surroundings and gardens, praised and described Amasya in the following way while praising Sayf al-Dawla on account of this conquest. The two Arabic couplets that follow are given with their original text, reading, translation and commentary on the site's page Amasya couplets attributed to al-Mutanabbi. The name of Amasya does not occur in the couplets; they are a general praise of a town beginning "many a town there is", and for this collection their place in al-Mutanabbi's divan could not be found.

Elsewhere in his work Hüsameddin expands this short note into a broad historical narrative. According to him, the castle of Amasya is known in Arabic histories by the name "Harşene", and the region it commands is called "Harşenûn". The old name of the Ziyâre quarter in the east of Amasya, in turn, is "Zemendû" or "Semendû". Hüsameddin also regards the Byzantine Phokas family, whom he names as governors of Pontus and Cappadocia, as natives of Amasya, and relates that Sayf al-Dawla attacked Harşene, which he saw as this family's homeland, for twelve years in order to avenge raids on Muslim lands. According to this narrative, on his second campaign in 338 the emir entered Harşene, that is, Amasya, and stayed two months at Semendû; on his fifth campaign in 342 he crossed the Kızılırmak in front of Osmancık, encamped at "Rabzu'l-Likân" behind Harşene, besieged the castle and took captive Konstantin, son of the Byzantine commander. At every stage Hüsameddin quotes couplets from al-Mutanabbi: five couplets from the kaside "Li-hâẕe'l-yevmi" that mentions Semendû, one couplet describing the encampment in the suburbs of Harşene, and three couplets describing Konstantin's captivity. These three passages are given on separate pages in this category.

The State of the Sources and the Debate

Where Was Harşene

Hüsameddin's construction rests on the assumption that Harşene and Amasya are the same place. The sources of this assumption are texts of the Ottoman period: the note from Tırâzü'l-müzehheb quoted in Âsım Efendi's translation of the Kâmûs, Mustafa Cenâbî's el-Aylemü'z-zâhir, Müneccimbaşı Dervîş Ahmed's Câmiu'd-düvel, Ibn Arabshah's history of Timur and Aziz ibn Ardashir's Bezm ü Rezm refer to the castle of Amasya by the name Harşene. Those of these texts whose dates are known belong to the period after the end of the fourteenth century. They do not show that the place al-Mutanabbi and Sayf al-Dawla spoke of in the tenth century was Amasya; they show only that in a later period this name was used for the castle of Amasya.

The oldest geographical source that Hüsameddin himself quotes points to another place. According to Yaqut al-Hamawi's Mu‘jam al-buldan, Harşene is a town in Byzantine territory near Malatya; Sayf al-Dawla raided it and al-Mutanabbi mentioned it in his poetry. The Ansab of al-Sam'ani, the Marasid al-ittila' and the Lubb al-lubab, which Hüsameddin cites, also place Harşene near Malatya. As the crow flies, the distance between Malatya and Amasya is more than three hundred kilometres. Although Hüsameddin quotes this note, he does not dwell on it.

Present-day research based on Byzantine sources shows that there was in Cappadocia a fortress called Charsianon (Harsianon) and a military province (theme) named after it. The fortress is first mentioned in 638, was taken by the Arabs in 730 and throughout the following century remained a fiercely contested stronghold between the two sides; today it is identified with the ruins of Muşalikalesi in the Akdağmadeni district of Yozgat. It is recorded that on his campaign of 950 Sayf al-Dawla ravaged the themes of Lykandos and Charsianon, that on his return he was ambushed in a pass and lost most of his army, and that in 960 he sacked the fortress of Charsianon. The similarity of the names and the location given by Yaqut suggest that the Harşene of the Arabic sources may be this Cappadocian fortress. This identification is our own inference; no source equating the two names directly was read for this study. The campaign Hüsameddin narrates for the year 339, which advanced as far as Harşene and, while returning with booty, was trapped in a pass and heavily defeated, corresponds in date and in its events to the campaign that present-day histories place in 950 and that is known as "ghazwat al-musiba" (the dreadful expedition); only its location has been interpreted differently.

Semendû and Konstantin

The situation is similar for Semendû. Relying on Badr al-Din al-Ayni's note that "Zemendû is also called Ziyâre" and on Ibn Bibi's report that Kır Han, emir of Sivas, was exiled to the castle of Zemendû, Hüsameddin shows that there was a castle of this name near Amasya; these records belong to the Seljuk period. Whether the place of which al-Mutanabbi says "we visited Samandu" was the same castle, however, is a separate question. Hüsameddin himself is aware of other interpretations: he records that the commentator of the Kâmûs took Samandu to be Belgrade or Smederevo (Semendire), and rejects this; he likewise rejects the possibility of the castle of Zamantı in the sanjak of Kayseri on the grounds that its name is not recorded as "Ziyâre". This reasoning for rejection rests on an argument that has already accepted Semendû as the Ziyâre of Amasya.

The captivity of Konstantin is the clearest example. Hüsameddin connects al-Mutanabbi's couplet "in Konstantin's heart there is wonder at him, though the fetters on his legs are of his making" with the siege of Harşene. Present-day histories record that Constantine, youngest son of the Byzantine commander-in-chief Bardas Phokas, fell captive to the Hamdanids in 953 in the battle near Marash. The date agrees with the year 342 given by Hüsameddin; the place does not. The places listed in the kaside "Leyâlî ba‘de'z-zâ‘inîn", from which the couplet is taken, are Malatya, the river Qubaqib, the Euphrates, Hanzit, Simnin, Hisn al-Ran, Sumaysat (Samosata) and Marash; the names Harşene and Semendû do not occur in the kaside.

The Attributed Couplets

The two couplets Hüsameddin gives as the praise of Amasya are not in the same position as the Sayfiyyat kasides, whose authorship by al-Mutanabbi is certain. During this compilation the couplets' place in al-Mutanabbi's divan could not be found, and searches made on their opening lines produced no result. It is possible that the couplets belong to another poet, that they were wrongly attributed to al-Mutanabbi in an anthology, or that they appear in an edition of the divan we have not been able to see. Which of these possibilities is correct cannot be said without a comparison with the critical editions of the divan.

Assessment

It is certain that between 337 (948) and 346 (957) al-Mutanabbi took part in Sayf al-Dawla's campaigns and mentioned in his poetry places named Harşene and Semendû in Byzantine territory. That these places were Amasya and Ziyâre, however, is Hüsameddin's interpretation alone. The entry on Sayf al-Dawla in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi records that the emir continued his summer campaigns against Byzantium until 343 (954) and that in 940 he advanced as far as Şebinkarahisar, but it does not mention Amasya; the same encyclopedia's entry on Amasya likewise makes no mention of Sayf al-Dawla in the city's Byzantine history. On the information available there is no evidence that al-Mutanabbi came to Amasya. Hüsameddin's construction should be read as the product of a wish to show that Amasya had been praised since ancient times, and of the name Harşene found in late Ottoman texts. This does not alter the fact that Hüsameddin searched his sources widely and read the Arabic historical and geographical works with care; the problem lies in the attaching of different places bearing the same name to a single city.

Chronology

303 (915-16): Al-Mutanabbi is born in Kufa.

322-324 (934-936): He is imprisoned in Homs and released after a kaside of apology.

337 (948): He enters the court of Sayf al-Dawla in Aleppo.

338 (949-50): According to Hüsameddin, Sayf al-Dawla enters Harşene and stays two months at Semendû.

339 (950): Sayf al-Dawla's campaign against Lykandos and Charsianon; on the return, the defeat of the "ghazwat al-musiba".

342 (953): According to Hüsameddin, al-Mutanabbi visits Amasya with Sayf al-Dawla; according to present-day histories, Constantine, son of Bardas Phokas, is captured near Marash.

346 (957): Al-Mutanabbi leaves Aleppo.

354 (965): He is killed at Dayr al-Aqul.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Other sources

Online sources