Original Arabic Text

Metre: Basît (mustef‘ilun fâ‘ilun mustef‘ilun fe‘ilun)

حتى أقامَ عَلى أرْباضِ خَرْشَنَةٍ
تَشْقَى بهِ الرّومُ والصّلبانُ والبِيَعُ

Ḥattā eḳāme ‘alā erbāḍi Ḫarşenetin
Teşḳā bihi'r-Rūmu ve'ṣ-ṣulbānu ve'l-biya‘u

In English

1. At last (Sayf al-Dawla) encamped in the suburbs of Kharshana (Harşene); because of him the Byzantines, the crosses and the churches all fell into misery.

Literary and Historical Commentary

Structure of the Poem

The couplet (beyit) comes from the long kaside (qasida) that al-Mutanabbi wrote for Sayf al-Dawla, opening with the line "Ġayrî bi-ekseri hâẕe'n-nâsi yenḫadi‘u" (it is others, not I, who are deceived by most of these people). The kaside is written in the basît metre of Arabic prosody and rhymes on the letter "‘ayn"; for this reason it can be called, after its rhyme letter, the "Ayniyya". The word "hattâ" (at last, until) at the start of the couplet links it to the preceding couplets: after describing how the emir's army advanced without halting at any city, insatiable like death, the poet names the place where this advance arrived. Hüseyin Hüsâmeddîn Yasar quotes the couplet on its own in two places in Amasya Tarihi, when describing Harşene, which he regards as the old name of the castle of Amasya, and when narrating Sayf al-Dawla's campaign of 342. Because the text layer of the e-book is corrupt, the Arabic-script text is given from the common text of the divan; the identification of the metre and the Latin-script reading are ours.

Meaning and Figures of Speech

The power of the couplet comes from the sequence in the second line. The defeat of Byzantium is told in three links: first the people (the Byzantines), then the signs of their faith (the crosses), and last their places of worship (the churches). The verb "teşkâ" expresses suffering misery and hardship and unites the three nouns in a single disaster; Sayf al-Dawla's campaign is thus presented as more than a military success, as the victory of a war of faith. The word "erbâd" describes the quarters outside a city's walls, its suburbs. The poet does not say that the army took the castle; he says that it encamped at its foot. The weight of the praise lies in pitching tents at ease inside enemy territory, under the very eyes of its castle.

Historical Context

Hüsameddin counts this couplet among the most important proofs that Harşene was Amasya. According to him, in 342 Sayf al-Dawla crossed the Kızılırmak in front of Osmancık, encamped at "Rabzu'l-Likân" behind Harşene, and entered Amasya and besieged the castle. In another couplet a few couplets later in the same kaside it is said that "al-Luqan" blew dust into the horses' nostrils and that they swallowed draughts from the "Âlis"; Hüsameddin reads this Âlis as the Kızılırmak. Yet Yaqut al-Hamawi, whom Hüsameddin quotes, defines Harşene as a Byzantine town near Malatya and writes that Sayf al-Dawla raided it and al-Mutanabbi mentioned it in his poetry. Present-day research records that there was a Byzantine fortress called Charsianon in Cappadocia and that Sayf al-Dawla ravaged this region in 950. For this reason it is not certain that the Harşene of the couplet was the castle of Amasya; the texts showing that the name Harşene was used for the castle of Amasya belong to later centuries. The debate is discussed in detail on the poet's biography page.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

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