_Cairo_
THE foundation of Cairo proper, as distinguished from the earlier city
of Misr and its faubourgs, marks a revolution infinitely more profound
than a mere change of dynasty or shifting of site. The Fátimid conquest,
which created the new city, was a revolution in religion, in statecraft,
and in culture. The theological differences that had turned the mosque
of ‘Amr into a bear-garden in the time of the Ikhshíd were hair-
splittings compared with the breach between the old orthodoxy and the
heresy of the newcomers. In its inner essence, Shi‘ism, the religion of
the Fátimids, is not Mohammedanism at all. It merely took advantage of
an old schism in Islám to graft upon it a totally new and largely
political movement. The schism arose out of the succession to the
caliphate, and resolved itself into the old antagonism between the
theories of popular election and divine right. The orthodox party (or
Sunnis) held that the election of the first three caliphs, Abu-Bekr,
‘Omar and ‘Othmán, was constitutional in Islám; the Shí‘a maintained
that the divine right of succession to the Prophet’s mantle rested with
his own family, that is to say with his daughter Fátima’s husband ‘Aly
and their offspring, the only surviving descendants of Mohammad. ‘Aly in
turn became the fourth caliph, but he was bitterly opposed, and in the
end murdered; his children, the Prophet’s grandsons, were ousted from
the succession; one of them, Hoseyn, endeavouring to assert his rights,
was defeated and slain, and the tragedy of the “martyrdom” at Kerbela
has ever since excited the deepest passions of the Shí‘a at the annual
representations of the Persian Passion Play in the month of Moharram.
The ruthless persecution of the “holy family” by the Omayyad caliphs
stimulated an enthusiastic sympathy with their misfortunes, but since
none of their descendants showed any political genius, the occasional
risings in favour of the ‘Alids were scarcely more important than the
last attempts in Scotland to revive the claims of the Pretender. The
movement would probably have died out as an element in politics, and
become a mere tradition or sentiment, but for the new development given
to it in the ninth century by an obscure Persian, half conjurer, half
eye-doctor, named ‘Abdallah, son of Meymún. This man, who abhorred the
Arabs and their caliphs, devised a scheme by which the very religion of
Islám should become the instrument of its own destruction, and the
Persians should recover their power by the unconscious aid of their
conquerors. His doctrine, whilst making use of the ‘Alid sentiment of
divine right, was such that not only the enthusiasts who still wept over
the tragedy of Kerbela, but all shades of dissenters from rigid
Mohammedanism might embrace. He taught that God has always been
incarnate in some spiritual leader or “Imám,” such as Adam, Abraham, and
so on to ‘Aly. The world has never been without an Imám; but—and here
came the stroke of genius—the Imám is not always visible in the flesh.
The series of spiritual leaders descended in apostolic succession from
‘Aly was broken, but not the less was there a hidden Imám, who would
reveal himself to mankind in his own good time. When he appeared all
would recognize “the Mahdy,” and abandon the self-styled caliphs who
usurped his authority. Meanwhile those who awaited his coming must
strive to prepare men for it. Though the Imám be hidden, his doctrine
must be zealously preached, and in the absence of the mysterious being
in whom the secrets of the Most High are deposited, his missionaries
must go forth and call men to the truth.
A widespread and admirably organized propaganda was instituted; a secret
society, skilfully graduated in advancing degrees of initiation, worked
underground throughout the Mohammedan world, but with special success in
Arabia, Mesopotamia, and North Africa. The _dá‘is_ or missionaries were
carefully chosen and trained to teach such doctrines as their converts
could bear. To the rude and uneducated they would preach what seemed the
plain lessons of the Korán, always coupled with the imminent approach of
that mysterious and attractive personality, the Mahdy. To the
philosophic they would use arguments suited to their special views, and
leading them up through the progressive stages of initiation, would
finally land them in a philosophy of complete negation. These
missionaries had nothing in common with Muslims: they were atheists
among themselves, and all things to all men. Their aims were
political—to upset Islám through itself, to dispossess the Muslims, and
to grasp their power. They made use of all forms of religion
indifferently; all were equally false to them, and all were serviceable
tools to their purpose. They cared not what means they used to secure
proselytes, to whom they confided only so much of their system as they
could safely assimilate. They employed the hallowed name of ‘Aly, and
preached the immediate advent of a Messiah, not because they believed in
either or in any caliphate or spiritual incarnation, but because if the
multitude is to be made to dance one must harp on some string, and these
strings happened to twang harmoniously in the ears of the people.
Three signal successes rewarded the brilliant propaganda of the Shí‘a
(or Isma‘ílian) missionaries. The first was the Carmathian domination of
Arabia, Mesopotamia and Syria, in the ninth and tenth centuries; the
second was its offshoot, the Fátimid caliphate of North Africa and
Egypt; the last was the dreaded Wehmgericht of the Isma‘ílians or
“Assassins” in Persia and the Lebanon. Here we have chiefly to do with
the second, though both the Carmathians and the Assassins had their
influence upon Egypt.
The Fátimid caliphate, taking its name from ‘Aly’s wife, the daughter of
the Prophet, was the most powerful and conspicuous result of Shí‘a
proselytism. Among the credulous Berbers the missionary had an easy
field of conquest, and when he produced a reputed descendant of ‘Aly and
Fátima in the person of “the Mahdy” ‘Obeydallah at Kayrawán, the Arab
capital of what is now called Tunisia, in 910, the revolution was
triumphant. The whole of Barbary, from Fez in Morocco to the frontier of
Egypt, which he twice invaded, bowed before the sway of the Mahdy.
Inheriting by conquest the possessions of the Aghlabid dynasty of Tunis,
who for more than a century had been the great naval power of the
central Mediterranean and held Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica and Malta, the
Fátimid fleets ravaged the coasts of France and Italy, plundering,
burning, and kidnapping wherever they went. The fourth caliph of the
Mahdy’s line, el-Mo‘izz, the conqueror of Egypt, was a singularly able,
upright, politic, and intelligent man, an orator, a linguist who knew
Greek as well as Arabic and the Berber tongue, and to all appearance a
just and honest Muslim of the Shí‘a sect.[34] There was so careful a
distinction between esoteric and overt doctrine among the Shí‘a that it
is impossible to be certain, but the probability is that Mo‘izz, like
most of his successors, did not share the extreme views of the advanced
degrees of the initiate, but held Koranic doctrines tempered by ‘Alid
views and allegorical interpretation.
Such was the Fátimid caliph who, after a progress throughout his African
dominions, and carrying his arms even to the shore of the Atlantic
(959), at length resolved to achieve the conquest of Egypt, which his
grandfather had vainly attempted, and which was the goal of his own
ambition. The barren land and unruly tribes of Barbary were not to be
compared with the fertile valley and splendid commerce of Egypt, and his
plans were carefully laid for the invasion. The conquest was an easy
triumph. Gawhar, his Roman slave from the Eastern empire, led his
100,000 men from Kayrawán in February 969. Alexandria capitulated on
liberal terms. The Egyptians, exhausted by a distressing famine followed
by plague (of which more than half a million people died in and around
Misr), led by no competent chief, despoiled by a mutinous soldiery, and
influenced by secret sympathizers with the Fátimids, made scarcely an
effort to resist. There were a few skirmishes at Giza, and then Gawhar
forced the passage of the Nile, the defenders fled, and the women of
Misr implored mercy. A full amnesty rewarded submission, pillage was
interdicted, and the Fátimid army rode into Misr on the 5th of August.
“That very night Gawhar laid the foundations of a new city, or rather
fortified palace, destined for the reception of his sovereign. He was
encamped on the sandy waste which stretched north-east of Fustát, on the
road to Heliopolis, and there, at a distance of about a mile from the
river, he marked out the boundaries of the new capital. There were no
buildings, save the old ‘Convent of the Bones,’ nor any cultivation
except the beautiful park called ‘Kafúr’s Garden,’ to obstruct his
plans. A square [about 1200 yards each way] was pegged out with poles,
and the Maghraby astrologers, in whom Mo‘izz reposed extravagant faith,
consulted together to determine the auspicious moment for the opening
ceremony. Bells were hung on ropes from pole to pole, and at the signal
of the sages their ringing was to announce the precise moment when the
labourers were to turn the first sod. The calculations of the
astrologers were, however, anticipated by a raven, who perched on one of
the ropes and set the bells jingling, upon which every mattock was
struck into the earth, and the trenches were opened. It was an unlucky
hour: the planet Mars (el-Káhir) was in the ascendant; but it could not
be undone, and the place was accordingly named after the hostile planet,
el-Káhira, ‘the martial’ or ‘triumphant,’ in the hope that the sinister
omen might be turned to a triumphant issue. Cairo, as Káhira has come to
be called, may fairly be said to have outlived all astrological
prejudices. The name of the ‘Abbásid caliph was at once expunged from
the Friday prayers at the old mosque of ‘Amr; the black ‘Abbásid robes
were proscribed, and the preacher, in pure white, recited the _khutba_
for the Imám Mo‘izz, _emír el-muminín_, and invoked blessings on his
ancestors, ‘Aly and Fátima and all their holy family. The call to prayer
from the minarets was adapted to Shí‘a taste. The joyful news was sent
to the Fátimid caliph on swift dromedaries, together with the heads of
the slain. Coins were struck with the special formulas of the Fátimid
creed—‘‘Aly is the noblest of [God’s] delegates, the vezír of the best
of apostles’; ‘the Imám Ma‘add calls men to profess the Unity of the
Eternal’—in addition to the usual dogmas of the Mohammedan faith. For
two centuries the mosques and the mint proclaimed the shibboleth of the
Shí‘a.”[35]
But the change was far more than a substitution of one creed for
another: indeed, thanks no doubt to the politic tolerance of the
conqueror and the discreet avoidance of extreme Shí‘a doctrines, the
people accepted the new régime without any outburst of orthodox
fanaticism, except when the new comers flaunted the Moharram festival in
memory of the Kerbela “martyrs” in their very faces. The majority
remained unconverted to the new formulas; at least they welcomed the
restoration of orthodoxy two centuries later with equal phlegm. The real
change was political. Cairo was no longer the capital of a province of
the old caliphate, or even of a virtually independent principality
connected with that caliphate: it was the capital of a rival Power, and
that power a Mediterranean Empire. It is true the empire soon lost its
outlying African provinces and European islands, and shrank to the
dimensions of the principality of Ibn-Tulún; but the strength and the
wealth and commerce of the Fátimid kingdom were something new. The
rivalry between Cairo and Baghdád, between the vigorous young caliphate
of the Shí‘a and the decaying hierarchy of the Sunnis, had far-reaching
effects in politics and in civilization. The naval power and European
connexions of the Fátimids introduced a new element into foreign policy,
gave a stimulus to trade, and modified in various ways the civilization
of Egypt and Syria.
On the other hand undoubtedly the isolation of Cairo tended to a
development of a separate culture which was not to its advantage. Heresy
cut it off from the great centres of intellectual life in the Arabian
world, from Baghdád, Damascus and Cordova. The old intercourse, which
brought students and professors of all parts of the Muslim empire
together in the mosques of every great city, was impossible in a capital
where the mosques were in the hands of heretics. Hence Cairo was out of
intimate touch with the progress of Muslim studies in the eleventh and
twelfth centuries, and few of the leaders of Arabic thought or
literature were found under Fátimid rule. In some branches, such as
philosophy and physical and medical science, one would expect to find
good results from the influence of Shí‘a free-thinking, and undoubtedly
some progress was made, especially by Jewish and Christian physicians;
but these exceptions do not outweigh the general loss entailed by
isolation from the rest of the intellectual world. A little later the
heretics of Cairo might have profited much by their intercourse with
Europe, but in the tenth and eleventh centuries Europe had little to
teach.
The class that gained most by the change of government was that of the
Christian Copts. Hitherto they had had their ups and downs according to
the disposition and rapacity of different Arab and Turkish governors;
but with the advent of the Fátimid caliphs they entered upon a period of
unusual toleration and even favour. The new rulers, with one notorious
exception, were exceedingly well disposed towards their Christian
subjects, and many churches were built or restored during their reigns.
The caliph el-‘Azíz, son of Mo‘izz, who reigned from 975 to 996, had a
Christian wife, two of his brothers-in-law were Melekite patriarchs, and
the Jacobite patriarch Ephraim and Severus bishop of Ushmuneyn were his
particular friends. The bishop was encouraged to come to the palace and
discuss theology with the chief kády, and the patriarch was allowed to
restore the church of St Mercurius (Abu-s-Seyfeyn, “the two-sworded”)
outside Misr. “In ancient times,” we are told by an Armenian writer,
“there had been a church dedicated to Saint Mercurius, on the bank of
the river, but it was ruined and turned into a storehouse for sugar-
canes. Then, in the time of this patriarch, enquiries were made about
the creed of the Christians, whether they believed in the truth or in a
lie. So the Christians assembled and went out to the mountain, and the
Muslims and Jews went out at the same time on account of a certain
event. Many of the Muslim _sayyids_ came forward, and prayed, and cried
_Allahu akbar_, and implored the assistance of God, but no sign appeared
to them. Then the Jews followed them, and still no result followed. Then
the patriarch came forward, and the tanner, for whom God had performed a
miracle, followed him; and all the orthodox people followed them. They
prayed to the most high God, and burnt incense, and cried _Kyrie
eleison_ three times; and God showed his wonders, and the mountain
moved: namely, that part of the Mukattam hills which is near the hill of
Al-Kabsh, between Cairo and Misr. This miracle took place through the
faith of the tanner, who had plucked out his eye in the presence of
Al-‘Aziz and the chief men of his government and the kadis of the
Muslims. When Al-‘Aziz had witnessed this great miracle, he said: ‘It is
enough, O patriarch; we recognize what God has done for you’; and then
he added: ‘Desire of me what thou choosest, and I will do it for thee.’
The patriarch, however, refused with thanks; but Al-‘Aziz begged him to
ask for something, and did not cease until the patriarch had asked for a
certain church which had fallen into ruin. So Al-‘Aziz commanded that
this church should be restored for the patriarch, and it is said to have
been the church of Saint Mercurius.”[36] The patriarch would not accept
the offer of money for the restoration, but paid for it himself, and the
work was carried out under a guard of the caliph’s troops to protect the
Christians from the “common people of the Muslims,” who had no patience
with such concessions to the “polytheists.”
One of the vezírs or prime-ministers of ‘Azíz was a converted Jew,
another was the Christian Ibn-Nestorius. The Muslims naturally resented
this unusual toleration, and lampooned the caliph, but the harím was on
the side of the Christians, and as usual had its way. Even under the
caliph Hákim, the exception referred to, who certainly at one time
persecuted the Copts cruelly, the great posts of state were still held
by Christians; and though there was much confiscation and extortion
under the vezír Yazúry in the middle of the eleventh century, it seems
to have arisen more from fiscal necessities than from religious
antipathy. The great influence of the Armenian vezírs in the latter part
of that century evidently promoted a good feeling, for in the twelfth we
find the caliph Háfiz receiving lectures in history twice a week from
the Armenian patriarch, and several of the later caliphs would visit the
shaded gardens of Coptic monasteries, where they were hospitably
welcomed by the monks and made suitable returns for their cheer. We read
of handsome contributions for the support of convents and churches. The
far from exemplary caliph Ámir even had a monk for his right-hand man,
and used often to use a pavilion which he had built at a monastery near
Giza as a hunting lodge, paying 1000 dirhems to the monks at every
visit. He took pleasure in standing in the priest’s place in their
church, but scrupulously entered backwards in order to avoid the
appearance of bowing when passing through the low door. The last of the
Fátimid caliphs, el-‘Ádid, had also his favourite monastic retreat in
the convent of the Virgin some miles out of Cairo, where he would take
the air and gaze upon the “blessed Nile.”[37]
If the churches were cared for, the mosques were not neglected; and
though the Fátimid period is not rich in the multitude of mosques
erected by private benefactors which distinguishes the later Mamlúk
period, it boasts at least the two greatest congregational mosques
(_gámi‘_) of Cairo proper, both of which were among the early
preoccupations of the new dynasty. Gawhar’s first step, after beginning
the walls of the palace-city of Káhira, was to lay the foundations of
the mosque which stands to this day, known to all the world as el-Azhar,
“the Resplendent.” The day of its foundation was Sunday the 3rd of
April, 970, and it was finished on the 24th of June, 972. In 988 it was
specially devoted to the use of the learned and became what it has been
ever since, one of the chief Universities of Islám. Here to this day
multitudes of students gather from all parts of the Muslim world, from
the Gold Coast to the Malay States, each nation to the special _riwák_
or portico assigned to its use, and here they receive from learned
sheykhs instruction in the various branches of the old Arabic
curriculum—theology, exegesis, traditions, jurisprudence, grammar,
prosody, logic, rhetoric, algebra, etc. Over nine thousand students
still (1901) attend the lectures of 239 professors in the Azhar, and not
one of them is called upon to pay a piastre in fees. The learned men of
Cairo and many foreign cities willingly impart their knowledge without
reward, and eke out a living by private tuition and copying manuscripts.
The foreign students not only pay no fees but receive rations of food
from certain bequests. One may regret the limited scope and fanatical
tendency of the Azhar lectures, but at least it is a noble example of
free education, open to the poorest, no matter what his race or
language, and given to all without distinction of class. The knots of
students sitting round their master in earnest attention, or swaying to
and fro as they commit his dicta to memory, are a spectacle not easily
forgotten. In every detail they carry us back to the Middle Ages of
Arabic culture, and show us a zeal for learning, neither tainted by
prize-hunting nor cramped by examinations, which may teach even Western
universities something that they lack.
Very little of the Azhar represents the original building. It has been
repeatedly restored, and was largely reconstructed in the eighteenth and
the middle of the nineteenth century, and, though there are some fine
Kufic friezes and keelform (Persian) arches characteristic of the
Fátimid period, its present aspect is modern. The square court, however,
covers the same ground as it did when in 973 the caliph Mo‘izz, after
making his splendid entry, preceded by the coffins of his ancestors,
into the new city built by his faithful general, and totally ignoring
the old metropolis then _en fête_ for his reception, himself conducted
the prayers on the festival following the fasting month, delivered the
_Khutba_ or sermon with his wonted unction, and then headed the
procession of his troops, escorted by his four sons in armour, and
preceded by two elephants, back to the palace which Gawhar had prepared
for him. The fortified enclosure which has given its name to Cairo,
though sometimes called _el-Medína_, “the City,” was never intended to
be an Egyptian metropolis. It was to be the residence of the caliph and
his court, his slaves and officials, and his African troops. The public
of Misr had no access to it; none might pass through the gates without a
permit, and even ambassadors from foreign states were obliged to
dismount and were led into the palace between guards after the Byzantine
custom. Káhira was in fact a royal compound or enclosure, not a public
city. Its high walls and guarded gates symbolized the seclusion and
mystery in which the sacred person of the caliph was wrapped, and its
familiar epithet “the Guarded City” (el-Káhira el-Mahrúsa) illustrates
its privacy.
The original walls were built of large bricks, nearly two feet long and
fifteen inches broad, and the thickness of the walls was such that two
horsemen could ride abreast upon them. The Topographer in 1400 measured
the last fragment of this first wall, and says that none of it
afterwards remained to be seen.[38] The original enclosure was about 100
feet smaller every way than the later enclosure built in 1087, and we
may easily realize the length of the city of Gawhar by remembering that
the present Bab-el-Futúh (with the mosque of el-Hákim) and the Bab-
Zuweyla (with the mosque of el-Muayyad) stand a little outside the
original enclosure; whilst its breadth extended from the Bab-el-
Ghureyyib beyond the Azhar on the east to the Khalíg or canal on the
west. The western boundary running beside the canal is still recorded in
the street called Beyn-es-Sureyn, “Between the walls,” at the top of the
Musky. The enclosure was thus about 1200 yards each way, and formed an
area of less than half a square mile.
About the centre was the square called Beyn-el-Kasreyn, “Between the
Palaces,” a name still preserved in the original site in part of the
street known as the Coppersmiths’ Market (Suk-en-Nahhasín), now flanked
by several noble mosques of much later date. The name explains itself:
the square, which was far broader than the present thoroughfare, and
formed a parade ground on which ten thousand troops could be marshalled,
separated the two palaces which faced it, and served as the meeting
place of the city. The Great Palace of Mo‘izz lay on the east—the Khán-
el-Khalíly stands on a corner of its vast ground, and the Hasaneyn at
another corner—and the Lesser West Palace, built by ‘Azíz a little
later, faced it on the other side (where the Máristán of Kalaún occupies
a portion of its site), and on the back looked upon the spacious “Garden
of Kafúr,” where the Ikhshíd once had his pleasure-house. Makrízy
devotes nearly two hundred pages to the description of these wonderful
palaces. “We read of four thousand chambers;—of the Golden Gate which
opened to the Golden Hall, a gorgeous pavilion where the caliph, seated
on his golden throne, surrounded by his chamberlains and gentlemen-in-
waiting (generally Greeks or Sudánís), surveyed from behind a screen of
golden filigree the festivals of Islám;—of the Emerald Hall with its
beautiful pillars of marble;—the Great Diván, where he sat on Mondays
and Thursdays at a window beneath a cupola;—and the Porch where he
listened every evening while the oppressed and wronged came below and
cried the _credo_ of the Shí‘a till he heard their griefs and gave
redress.”
These various buildings composing the Great Palace were not the work of
a single year or of one ruler. Gawhar began the palace on the same night
that he marked out the foundations of the city, in July 969; two gates
were finished in the following March, and a wall was carried round the
palace in 970-1. Writing of the wall three-quarters of a century later,
Násir-i-Khusrau says that from outside the city the palace of the
caliphs looked like a mountain, by reason of its lofty mass of
buildings; but when one drew near one could see nothing of it on account
of its high wall.[39] This original palace was designed by the caliph
Mo‘izz himself, but it did not comprise half the splendid halls
described by the Topographer. The next caliph ‘Azíz built the “Golden
Hall” and the “Great Diván,” as well as the smaller Western Palace and
the Pearl Pavilion in Kafúr’s Garden. Later caliphs and vezírs added and
altered, and the “Splendid Palaces” (el-Kusúr ez-Záhira), as they were
collectively called, included numerous separate mansions or suites of
rooms of various dates. The Great Palace alone had ten gates, besides a
subterraneous passage by which the caliph could cross on his mule, led
by slave girls, to the Western Palace, which was specially reserved for
the harím. In the eleventh century there were twelve thousand servants
in the Palaces, and including the women the inmates were reckoned at
thirty thousand.
M. Ravaisse has reconstructed the Fátimid palaces, and even drawn plans
of them from the Topographer’s descriptions, in two elaborate
memoirs,[40] and though some of the details must be regarded as
tentative and open to revision, the general results probably represent
the actual arrangement of the Fátimid city. According to these
interesting researches the Great East Palace comprised principally three
large quadrangles of unequal sizes forming three quarters of a square,
the fourth or N.E. quarter being occupied by the Court of the Festival,
an open space between the Great Palace and the Palace of the Vezírs,
where the people could make merry on the ‘Id days. This Great Palace,
flanked by the Vezirate and the Azhar, covered the space from the
present Khan-el-Khalíly and Hasaneyn to the Gemalíya street (where the
monastic mosque of Beybars the Gashnekír stands). The various halls,
apartments, and court offices were arranged about the quadrangles, and
stables and stores formed outbuildings. On the other side of the Beyn-
el-Kasreyn, the West Palace ran from where the Maristán now stands to
the Hárat Bargawán, with two wings jutting forward at each end to
enclose the Beyn-el-Kasreyn; whilst the space between the West Palace
and the west wall was filled by the spacious Garden of Kafúr with its
various kiosques looking on the canal. The rest of the city enclosure,
outside the palaces, was occupied by the quarters (Hára) of the various
divisions of the Fátimid army, such as the Gawdaris, the Deylemis, the
Kitáma, the Barkis, the Utúfis, the Zawíla, and the north and south
Greek quarters (Hárat-er-Rúm), and so forth. The gates of the city were
the (old) Gates of Succour, Bab-en-Nasr, and of Conquests, Bab-el-Futúh,
on the north; the Gate of the Bridge (B.-el-Kántara) leading to Gawhar’s
bridge over the canal, the B.-el-Farag, also called the Gate of the
Sha‘ríya (a Berber tribe), and the Gate of Sa‘áda, named after a general
of el-Mo‘izz, and the Wicket Gate (Bab-el-Khawkha) on the west, opening
to the canal; the old double Gate of Zuweyla[41] on the south; and on
the east the Burnt Gate (B.-el-Mahrúk, so called because burnt down by
some fugitive Mamlúks in the thirteenth century), the New Gate (B.-el-
Gedíd, built by Hákim), and the Gate of the Barka troops (B.-el-
Barkíya), now known as the B.-el-Ghureyyib.
Some of the modern superstitions connected with the Gate of Zuweyla have
been mentioned before, but it has always been a haunted spot, and the
fact that executions took place just outside did not improve its
reputation. The Topographer records that the original gate, which stood
beside the “oratory of Shem, the son of Noah,” consisted of two arches,
one of which was known as the “Gate of the Arch.” This was the gate
through which el-Mo‘izz entered when he made his state progress into the
new city of Káhira, and all the people followed his example: but the
other arch was considered unlucky and no one cared to go under it. “This
[second] gate no longer remains,” says Makrízy, “nor is there any trace
of it, but the place where it stood is called el-Haggarín, where musical
instruments, as drums, lutes, and such-like are sold; and it is still
notorious among the people that whoever passes that way will not
accomplish his wishes. Some say that the reason of this saying is
because it is the place of sale for musical instruments, which are held
in disrepute, and the abode of musicians and male and female singers;
but the case is not as they pretend, for the saying was current among
the people of el-Káhira from the time when el-Mo‘izz entered, before
this place was a market for musical instruments and the haunt of the
disorderly.”[42]
Such topographical details are chiefly interesting to the antiquary. We
must search the records of travellers for more graphic descriptions.
Strangers unfortunately were rare in so jealously secluded a sanctum as
the Fátimid palace, and there are consequently few travellers’ pictures
to add to the researches of the Topographer. The Persian Násir-i-Khusrau
was indeed admitted in 1047, but he is disappointingly discreet in his
account, and we gain only a confused but gorgeous impression of the
great throne-room with hunting-scenes carved on the gold throne, which
was screened by gold lattice and approached by silver steps. The best
description occurs in William of Tyre’s account of the mission of the
Crusaders in 1167, when Amalric was posing as the protector of the
caliph, though it may well be that the palace had greatly changed in the
two centuries that had passed since its foundation. “The introduction of
Christian ambassadors to the sacred presence, where few even of the most
exalted Muslims were admitted, was unprecedented; but Amalric was in a
position to dictate his own terms. Permission was granted, and Hugh of
Cæsarea with Geoffrey Fulcher the Templar were selected for the unique
embassy. The vezír himself conducted them with every detail of oriental
ceremony and display to the Great Palace of the Fátimids. They were led
by mysterious corridors and through guarded doors, where stalwart
Sudánis saluted with naked swords. They reached a spacious court, open
to the sky, and surrounded by arcades resting on marble pillars; the
panelled ceilings were carved and inlaid in gold and colours; the
pavement was rich mosaic. The unaccustomed eyes of the rude knights
opened wide with wonder at the taste and refinement that met them at
every step;—here they saw marble fountains, birds of many notes and
wondrous plumage, strangers to the western world; there, in a further
hall, more exquisite even than the first, ‘a variety of animals such as
the ingenious hand of the painter might depict, or the license of the
poet invent, or the mind of the sleeper conjure up in the visions of the
night,—such, indeed, as the regions of the East and the South bring
forth, but the West sees never, and scarcely hears of.’
“At last, after many turns and windings, they reached the throne room,
where the multitude of the pages and their sumptuous dress proclaimed
the splendour of their lord. Thrice did the vezír, ungirding his sword,
prostrate himself to the ground, as though in humble supplication to his
god; then, with a sudden rapid sweep, the heavy curtains broidered with
gold and pearls were drawn aside, and on a golden throne, robed in more
than regal state, the caliph sat revealed.
“The vezír humbly presented the foreign knights, and set forth in lowly
words the urgent danger from without, and the great friendship of the
king of Jerusalem. The caliph, a swarthy youth emerging from
boyhood,—_fuscus, procerus corpore, facie venusta,_—replied with suave
dignity. He was willing, he said, to confirm in the amplest way the
engagements made with his beloved ally. But when asked to give his hand
in pledge of faithfulness, he hesitated, and a thrill of indignation at
the stranger’s presumption ran through the listening court. After a
pause, however, the caliph offered his hand—gloved as it was—to Sir
Hugh. The blunt knight spoke him straight: ‘My lord, troth has no
covering: in the good faith of princes, all is naked and open.’ Then at
last, very unwillingly, as though derogating from his dignity, the
caliph, forcing a smile, drew off the glove and put his hand in Hugh’s,
swearing word by word to keep the covenant truly and in all good
faith.”[43]
There is no doubt that the Fátimid caliphs were the most sumptuous
monarchs that ever ruled in Egypt. Mo‘izz himself was no sybarite. He
attended personally and assiduously to the details of administration,
looked to the justice of the law courts, managed the army upon which his
power depended, and built a new dock at Maks, lower down the river than
the former dockyards of Roda and Misr, and near the present Ezbekíya.
Maks remained the dock and port of Cairo until the shifting of the Nile
bed brought Bulák to the surface. Six hundred ships were soon afterwards
built there, and some of Mo‘izz’s vessels were seen in 1047 by Násir-i-
Khusrau beached at Maks, and were found to measure about 275 feet in
length by 110 feet in the beam.[44] But hard-working and prudent as he
was, he loved display. He would go in state to cut the dam of the canal,
and spent large sums on the brocaded covering for the Kaaba at Mekka—the
holy city now acknowledged his supremacy—which was exhibited to the
people at the annual Feast of Sacrifice. The palace buildings were all
planned by his own hands; Gawhar had only been his clerk of the works;
and the profusion of the new city argued the luxurious taste and the
prodigious resources of the caliph. The wealth of the Fátimids recorded
by the historians seems almost incredible. We read of two daughters of
Mo‘izz, one of whom left about a million and a half in gold (2,700,000
dinárs), whilst the other’s numerous jewel-rooms and coffers,
containing, among others, five sacks of emeralds, 3000 silver vessels,
and 30,000 Sicilian embroideries, exhausted forty pounds of wax in
sealing them up for her executors. Mo‘izz himself bought a silk curtain
from Persia for nearly £12,000, on which the countries of the world were
depicted and their cities; and his wife spent much treasure in 966 on
her mosque in the Karáfa, designed by el-Hasan the Persian and decorated
by Basra painters.
One advantage of heresy was the toleration of artistic ideas that were
abhorrent to the orthodox, and the Fátimids encouraged, if not portrait
painting, at least the representation of human beings in art, which was
held to be distinctly forbidden by the Prophet.[45] The mosque of the
cemetery called the Karáfa, however, transcended anything ever attempted
before in Egypt, if we except the stories of Khumáraweyh’s palace in
“the Wards.” Its plan was the ordinary square quadrangle surrounded by
cloisters, like the Azhar, but the decoration was remarkable. The
fourteen square doors leading into the _liwán_ or sanctuary were
surmounted by arches resting on triple marble columns, painted blue,
red, and green; the ceilings were also painted in various colours by
artists from Basra. Opposite the middle door was an arch on which a
bridge was painted, with steps of various colours, which looked real.
Painters used to come to see it, but they could not copy it. We read of
two rival artists, el-Kasír and Ibn-‘Azíz of Chaldæa, protégés of the
vezír el-Yazúry, who painted figures, the first of a dancing girl in a
white dress, standing against the black background of an arch, seeming
as though she stood inside it, and the second a similar girl in red who
appeared to be standing out in front of a yellow arch. There was in a
house in the Karáfa a picture by el-Kettámy, one of the decorators of
this mosque, which represented Joseph in the pit so that he seemed to
stand out in relief.[46]
The money to pay for the outgoings of the palace, with its twenty to
thirty thousand inmates, and all the luxury it implied, was partly
obtained by a more rigorous collection of the taxes and arrears than
heretofore, and by the substitution of a central tax office in the old
emírate house next to the mosque of Ibn-Tulún in place of the wasteful
and corrupt system of local collectors and tax-farmers. In a single day
the city of Misr (still in its prime) contributed from £26,000 to
£62,000 in taxes, according to the season. All taxes had to be paid in
the new Fátimid coinage, and the ‘Abbásid money was put out of currency.
The next caliph el-‘Azíz was noted for his judgment in gems, and set a
number of new fashions in gold-thread turbans, jewelled harness scented
with ambergris, and gold-inlaid armour for his horses, and luxuries for
the table, such as truffles from Mukattam and fish fresh from the sea.
Like Khumáraweyh he was fond of strange beasts, and imported birds and
animals from the Sudán. But he shared with his father the statesmanlike
qualities that no luxury could enfeeble. He built a fleet to fight the
emperor Basil; personally waged a successful campaign in orthodox Syria,
which never became reconciled to the Fátimid supremacy; and he gave
Egypt an interval of unbroken peace. His name was commemorated in the
Friday prayer in the mosques from Arabia to the Atlantic, and he never
failed to stand before the people in the Azhar and conduct the service
as their spiritual as well as temporal head.
[Illustration: RUINED MOSQUE OF EL-HAKIM]
The mosque known as el-Hákim’s owed its foundation at the close of 990
to el-‘Azíz and his vezír Ibn-Killis, who completed it sufficiently to
hold the Friday prayers there a year later. The decoration, minarets,
and other accessories were not finished till the reign of his son el-
Hákim, who set the work in hand in 1003, and placed the final
inscription on the pulpit in March 1013. Hence this second
congregational mosque of Káhira, originally known as the “New Mosque” or
“The Brilliant” (el-Anwar, in obvious imitation of the name of el-
Azhar), took its most usual title from el-Hákim. In the course of its
history it has suffered even worse indignities than the Old Mosque of
‘Amr. When the Crusaders occupied Cairo in 1167 they turned part of the
mosque of el-Hákim into a church. Under the Ayyúbid restoration of
orthodox Islam, the Azhar was disused for a time, as being the chief
seat of heresy, and the mosque of el-Hákim became the official place of
worship. Afterwards it seems to have been used for stables, and in the
summer of 1303 it was terribly shattered by a great earthquake, and
restored in the following year by Beybars the Taster. By the time that
the Topographer wrote his account of it about 1420, the mosque was again
in ruins, by fire and neglect, and its roof was crumbling piece by
piece. Since then it has fallen on still more evil days. Its court has
served in turn as a rope-walk, a drying ground, a common throughfare, a
playground, which you entered through a café, a brewery, or a bead
factory. The only honourable use it has been turned to is that of a
Museum of Arab Art, which for the past twenty years has occupied part of
the arcades of the east end, where the noble arches and Kufic
inscriptions still preserve something of their ancient grandeur, and
formed a fit shrine for many beautiful and curious works of Saracenic
art.
Melancholy as this vast empty court surrounded by decayed walls and
ruined arches appears in the present day, there are points of great
interest in the mosque of el-Hákim. The arches are the only exceptions
to the Persian shape (“keelform”—two arcs terminating in tangential
lines _at each end_) which is otherwise universal in the architecture of
the Fátimid period. This is doubtless due to its early date and obvious
imitation of the mosque of Ibn-Tulún. Still more remarkable are its
minarets, commonly called _mibkharas_ or censers from their peculiar
shape. The heavy square bases, however, have nothing to do with the
original minarets, the lower parts of which, built of carefully dressed
stone, with traces of Fátimid inscriptions, may still be traced inside
these ugly buttresses. A minute examination made by Herz Bey and M. van
Berchem established beyond a doubt the fact that the brick minarets
belong to the hasty restoration of 1304, after the earthquake. Beybars
did not trouble to rebuild the minarets in their former style, but put
brick tops, and probably shored up the old bases with the clumsy cubical
casings which have puzzled so many archæologists and suggested strange
theories of the early forms of minarets. The cubes may be later,
however, and may have had some connexion with the military defences of
the neighbouring city gate. The remains of the original stone minarets
inside these casings are specially interesting since they are the only
definite evidence we possess (save the small brick minaret of the mosque
el-Guyúshy) as to the construction of minarets of the Fátimid epoch, of
which Makrízy was evidently unaware when he wrote that no stone minarets
were erected previously to that of Kalaún in 1284. They are precisely
similar in construction to the later Mamlúk minarets, starting from a
square base, changing to an octagon, resolved into a cylinder. A spiral
staircase within led up to windows whence the muezzins chanted the call
to prayer.[47]
The caliph Hákim is one of the best known characters in Egyptian
history, yet a character so contradictory and bizarre that his
biographers are inevitably reduced to the weak conclusion of explaining
his conduct by the unsatisfactory solution of mania. He was the only son
of the exemplary ‘Azíz and his Christian wife,—the sister of two
patriarchs,—and is another witness to the truth of the saying that
clergymen’s relations are no better than other folk. Emerging from the
upper branches of a fig tree at the age of eleven to enter upon the
dazzling lustre of the throne, the boy had an unfortunate training. His
governor, the Slavonian eunuch Bargawán,—whose name is still to be read
in one of the lanes off the Beyn-el-Kasreyn—amused himself in the Pearl
Palace in the Garden of Kafúr, whilst the Berber and Turkish troops
fought each other in the streets. One of Hákim’s early experiences was
the presentation of the Berber general’s head by the victorious Turkish
guard. It was but a short step to the murder of the regent, and after
four years of very lax tutelage the youth of fifteen assumed full
powers.
“As the young caliph came more before the public, the eccentricities of
his character began to appear. His strange face, with its terrible blue
eyes, made people shrink; his big voice made them tremble. His tutor had
called him ‘a lizard,’ and he had a creepy slippery way of gliding among
his subjects that explained the nickname. He had a passion for darkness,
would summon his council to meet at night, and would ride about the
streets on his grey ass night after night, spying into the ways and
opinions of the people under pretence of inspecting the market weights
and measures. Night was turned into day by his command. All business and
catering was ordered to take place after sunset. The shops had to be
opened and the houses illuminated to serve his whim, and when the poor
people overdid the thing and began to frolic in the unwonted hours,
repressive orders were issued; women forbidden to leave their homes, and
men to sit in the booths. Shoemakers were ordered to make no outdoor
boots for women, so that they might not have the wherewithal to stir
abroad, and the ladies of Cairo were not only enjoined on no account to
allow themselves to be seen at the lattice-windows, but might not even
take the air on the flat roofs of their houses. Stringent regulations
were issued about food and drink. Hákim was a zealous teetotaller, as
all Muslims are expected to be. Beer was forbidden, wine was
confiscated, vines cut down, even dried raisins were contraband;
malukhíya (Jews’ mallow) was not to be eaten, and honey was seized and
poured into the Nile. Games, such as the Egyptian chess, were
prohibited, and the chessboards burnt. Dogs were to be killed wherever
found in the streets, but the finest cattle could not be slaughtered
save at the Feast of Sacrifice. Those who ventured to disobey these
decrees were scourged and beheaded, or put to death by some of the novel
forms of torture which the ingenious caliph delighted in inventing. A
good many of these strange regulations were no doubt inspired by a
genuine reforming spirit, but it was the spirit of a mad reformer. The
lively ladies of Cairo have always needed a tight hand over them, but
who could expect to restrain a woman by confiscating her boots? The
prohibition of intoxicating liquors, gambling, and public amusements,
was in keeping with the character of a sour and bitter puritan, and was
doubtless intended as much to improve the morals as to vex the souls of
his subjects. But the nightly wanderings, the needless restrictions and
harassing regulations concerning immaterial details, were signs of an
unbalanced mind. Hákim may have meant well according to his lights, but
his lights were strangely prismatic.”
It is difficult to discover the method in this madness. At first
Christians were tolerated; then, about 1005, began a course of
contemptible persecution, petty annoyances, foolish badges and liveries,
and other humiliations, followed by wholesale confiscations and
destruction of churches. But the Muslims fared almost as ill. Vezírs,
whether Christians or Muslims, were indiscriminately assassinated or
executed. The great Gawhar’s son was treacherously murdered in the
palace. Officials of all grades and all creeds were barbarously tortured
and wantonly killed. A distinguished general, after putting down a
rebellion which kept Egypt in a tumult for two years, happened to
disturb Hákim when he was cutting up a murdered child, and paid for his
indiscretion with his life. Yet at the very time when these horrors were
being enacted, the young caliph was busily superintending the decoration
of the mosque that bears his name,[48] and also founding the remarkable
institution called the “Hall of Science” (Dar-el-‘Ilm), in the precincts
of the Great Palace, where learned men of all shades of opinion met
together and discussed everything under the sun with the resources of a
well-appointed library. These meetings of a parliament of religions
recall the debates of Akbar’s later “Hall of Worship” at Agra, nor is
this the only point of resemblance between the two sovereigns,
contrasted as they are in most respects. Akbar allowed himself to be
worshipped as a deity, and Hákim came at last to a similar result, and
both were led to it by Shí‘a influences.
No doubt those long lonely rides on his grey ass about the desolate
Mukattam hills, those nights in the observatory on the slopes where he
worked out his astrological chimeras, ministered to a mind deeply imbued
with the mystical teaching of the Shí‘a. He was the Imám, through whom
God revealed Himself to the ignorant world; he was the only possessor of
the divine secrets; it was an easy step, and a logical, to argue that he
was the incarnation of the deity—that he was God. It took more than
twenty years to bring him to this point, but aided by the preaching of
some Persian mystics he arrived there about 1018. It is true his
preachers had poor success in their mission of proclaiming the divinity
of Hákim. One was set upon and murdered to the joy of the orthodox;
others desecrated the Old Mosque of ‘Amr with their blasphemy, and the
people rose and slew them; Darazy, who afterwards gave his name to the
strange sect of the Druzes in the Lebanon, was hunted to the palace and
with difficulty saved by the caliph’s personal interposition and ready
lie. Nobody accepted the new doctrine, monstrous to orthodox ears; and
probably the bulk of the people were not even moderate Shí‘a but really
Sunnis of the old school. Misr was in an uproar, and within an ace of a
revolution; but the negro troops did their savage work, the old capital
was looted, houses were burst open, young girls dragged away, and a
reign of terror silenced the outcry. The tortured people gathered in the
mosques and prayed for help.
Help came, but from an unexpected quarter. The black troops had gone too
far, and their rivals, the Berbers and Turks, less out of humanity than
mere jealousy of power, joined together in suppressing the common enemy.
Even Hákim lost his control over the army. He also set a powerful
influence against him in the harím. He slandered his sister’s chastity.
The Princess Royal refused after this to stand between her brother and
his fate. A conspiracy was formed and when, on the 13th of February
1021, Hákim took one of his accustomed rides to the hills, dauntless and
unconcerned as ever, he never returned. His ass and his coat, slashed
with dagger cuts, were found, but his body had disappeared. For a long
time people fearfully expected his return, as the Druzes in the Lebanon
do to this day.
After so horrible a nightmare Cairo stood in sore need of rest. It came,
but not at once. Military tyranny was succeeded by the corrupt rule of a
court clique; a terrible famine in 1025 drove the starving people to
highway robbery; the treasury was exhausted, the very slaves of the
palace mutinied, and Syria was in open revolt, whilst the new caliph,
Hákim’s son, amused himself with singers and dancers and bricked up
young girls to starve to death in the mosque. The luck of the Fátimids
was not yet exhausted, however; and good Niles, a vigorous suppression
of the Syrian rebellion by an energetic viceroy, and a temporary
quieting down of the soldiers’ jealousies, gave Egypt a quarter of a
century of comparative tranquillity. The valley of the Nile was now
almost all that was left to the Fátimids. Their great Barbary dominions
had completely fallen away by 1046, and the old Mediterranean supremacy
had departed for ever. Syria was held with difficulty by force of arms,
and though Arabia, from Medina to the Yemen and Hadramawt, yielded
homage to the Egyptian caliphs, its Shí‘a emír was nothing less than an
independent sovereign. The extraordinary fact that for forty weeks in
1058-9 the Fátimid caliph was prayed for in the mosques of orthodox
Baghdád[49] testifies to political intrigues in the eastern caliphate
rather than to any real access of power to the Fátimids.
In Egypt, however, they were still undisturbed. A new caliph, el-
Mustánsir, a baby of eight months, succeeded to the throne in 1036, and
kept it, by no special virtue or effort of his own, until 1094, and his
long occupation—it can hardly be called reign—comprised alternations of
surprising prosperity and desperate distress. In spite of the evil
influence of his mother, a Sudány black, who imported many of her savage
compatriots to overawe the capital, the country enjoyed exceptional
tranquillity in the middle of the eleventh century. We have the evidence
of Násir-i-Khusrau, in 1047-9, who states unconditionally that Egypt was
then in affluence, and that he had never known such tranquillity and
security as he saw there. The caliph Mustansir was exceedingly popular,
and no one went in fear of violence or rapacity from his government.
Order reigned supreme, and the very jewellers and moneychangers did not
trouble to shut the doors of their shops against thieves. The shops in
Cairo itself were reckoned at over twenty thousand, and all were the
property of the caliph, and paid him from two to ten dinárs a month. He
owned, it was said, 20,000 houses, five or six storeys high, let out in
lodgings, at monthly rents averaging eleven dinárs (or £70 a year). The
houses were well built of good stone, not brick, and were separated by
delightful gardens. There were then no city walls (the first walls
having fallen to ruin, and the second not built till forty years later),
but the lofty houses themselves, says the traveller, were almost like
fortifications, and each palace or mansion was a castle by itself.[50]
There was a space of a mile between Cairo and Misr, covered with gardens
and country-houses, but flooded at the time of the inundation so that it
looked like a sea.
The Persian saw one of the great ceremonies of the Cairo year, the
cutting of the dam of the canal at Misr by Mustansir in person. The
caliph rode at the head of ten thousand horsemen, whose saddles and
harness and horse-armour were adorned with gold and precious stones,
with silken housings embroidered with the caliph’s name. Led camels bore
litters richly decorated, and even the mules had their share of jewelled
harness. Regiment after regiment the army defiled towards the mouth of
the canal: Berbers of the Kitáma tribe, 20,000 strong, descended from
the veterans of Mo‘izz; Maghrabis, 15,000; Masmúda, 20,000; Turks and
Persians, called “the Easterns,” though born in Egypt, 10,000; Bedawis
from the Higáz, 15,000; Sudány blacks, 30,000; slaves, chamberlains,
officials of all ranks, poets and doctors, princes from Morocco, from
the Yemen, from Nubia, Abyssinia, Asia Minor, Georgia, Turkistan, and
even the sons of a sultan of Delhi, whose mother had settled at Cairo.
The caliph himself, a handsome and amiable-looking young man, clean
shaved, and dressed in a long robe of pure white, rode a mule without
any ornaments. Three hundred Persians of Deylem on foot, dressed in
Greek brocade, formed his escort, carrying axes and pikes. A great
dignitary bore the parasol of state beside him, and eunuchs burned
incense on either hand. All the people fell on their faces as the caliph
passed to the silken tent at the mouth of the canal, and as soon as he
cast a javelin at the dam they fell to with pick and shovel, and the
Nile flowed in. Then all the world went sailing on the river in great
joy, headed by a boatful of deaf and dumb for the sake of luck.
The Persian was fortunate in the time of his sojourn in Egypt. Very evil
days were in store for it, in which Cairo suffered its first spoliation
since its foundation a century before. For nine years (1050-8) an able
vezír, el-Yazúry, kept the upper hand over the various factions. He did
his best to deal with the ever-recurring menace of famine, and it is
possible that the ruins of “Joseph’s granaries” near Masr-el-‘Atíka,
which Benjamin of Tudela mentions as early as 1170, represent the
storehouses for corn which he laid up against years of scarcity. In
those days there was no Willcocks or Scott Moncrieff to plan barrages
and dams, and make the great river the servant of the poorest felláh. If
the Nile at the season of inundation did not rise above the lines on the
Nilometer at Roda known by the ominous names of the degrees of Munkir
and Nakír, the two angels of the grave, a famine inevitably ensued, and
with the famine came too often plague, and misery and hunger led to
disorder and crime. The cause and effect recurred with the regularity of
a machine. Yazúry’s granaries staved off the danger for a while at the
capital; but after he was poisoned in 1058, there was no one to control
the warring factions. Forty changes of vezírs in nine years show the
instability of the government. The caliph listened to the advice of
anybody, and men of straw formed his council. The real rulers were the
Turkish troops, who united with the Berbers and drove the hated Sudánis
out of Cairo. The blacks established themselves in Upper Egypt, where
their license terrified the people and prevented cultivation; the
Berbers, expelled in turn, overran the Delta and deliberately destroyed
the irrigation system in order to starve the fellahín. Meanwhile the
Turks looted the capital, despoiled the beautiful palaces of the
caliphs, dispersed their priceless collections[51] of works of art,
precious stones and jewellery, and worst of all broke up their
incomparable library of 100,000 manuscripts—some of them books which
orientalists still search for in vain—and used these treasures of
learning to mend their boots, to light their fires, or even threw them
wantonly out on the rubbish heaps.
Upper and Lower Egypt being held by predatory bands of Sudánis and
Berbers, the capital was cut off from supplies when the great famine
began in 1066. Seven years it lasted without a sign of relief, and Egypt
was nearly ruined. Terror of the disbanded troops in the provinces
paralysed the fellahín, and nothing was done to mitigate the effects of
the low Niles or to sow for the next season. Cairo and Misr, deprived of
their usual supplies from the provinces, felt the scarcity most
severely. We read of £8 being paid for a loaf of bread, of a house
bartered for a quarter of flour, of ladies of quality throwing away
their useless jewellery which no one would take in exchange for food,
and of horses, asses, and even dogs and cats, bought at high prices and
hungrily devoured. Soon there was not a beast to be killed, and the
caliph’s stable was brought so low that his starved grooms could only
muster three sorry nags. The people began to kidnap and eat each other.
Human flesh was sold by the butchers. Then came the plague and mowed
down every soul in house after house with its sudden secret scythe.
Famine and plague are no respecters of persons. The great suffered alike
with the poor. Proud noblemen tried to earn a crust of bread by serving
in the public baths. The caliph himself, despoiled by the Turks and
deserted by his household—even his wife and daughters fled to Baghdád to
escape the pest—owed his daily rations of two loaves to the charity of a
scholar’s daughter.
Those seven lean years of indescribable misery and crime had never
before been approached in Egypt. At last they came to an end. The
harvest of 1073 was bountiful, the leader of the Turks was “cut in
pieces small,” and a great vezír came to the rescue of the tottering
State (1074). This was Bedr el Gemály, for whom the caliph sent in his
distress. Bedr was an Armenian, but not a Christian, and began his
career as a slave. His marked ability had raised him to such high
offices as the governorship of Damascus and afterwards of ‘Akka (Acre).
He was the man for the crisis, and by a fortunate omen a Korán reader
was actually reciting to the caliph the verse, “And God has helped you
with Bedr——”[52] when Bedr entered the presence. “Had you read any
more,” cried the delighted caliph, “your head would have been cut off.”
The famous general made short work of the Turkish oligarchy. The leaders
were all killed, by a treacherous but salutary trick, in a single night.
The reign of terror in Cairo was over. Bedr was appointed commander-in-
chief, vezír of the sword and pen, chief kády, and director of the Shí‘a
propaganda—generalissimo, prime minister, cardinal, and lord chancellor
in one. He first brought back order in the capital, and then marched
through the provinces, defeating, slaughtering and subduing Berbers,
Sudánis, and Arabs, till law reigned supreme from Alexandria to Aswán.
The peasantry, restored to peace and security, laboured their lands
again, the revenue rose by leaps and bounds, and for twenty years the
country enjoyed plenteous prosperity.
Cairo benefited incalculably by the large and noble policy of the great
Armenian. For a century since the days when ‘Azíz built the West Palace
and the Pavilion of the Pearl, there had been few important additions to
its architecture. Hákim, indeed, had finished his father’s mosque, and
built the Hall of Science. Mustansir’s favourite residence was his
country palace at Heliopolis, where he had a kiosk modelled after the
holy but distinctly ugly Kaaba of Mekka, with a pool of wine to
represent the well of Zemzem; and there he made merry, with exceedingly
unorthodox sarcasms upon the black stone and bad water of the Arabian
original. With the rule of Bedr, Cairo once more heard the sound of the
trowel. In view of the recent invasion and spoliation of the city by
insurgent troops the first necessity was to fortify it for defence. The
old wall of sun-burnt brick had practically disappeared in the growth of
the town which now spread outside the three gates built by Gawhar. These
gates were now taken down and rebuilt of stone (1187-91) so as to
enclose a larger area—the Greek Quarter at the south, for example, was
now taken within the wall—and a new wall of brick was carried round the
city. It was afterwards enlarged by Saladin, but some of the wall of
Bedr still remains. On the north it still connects the Bab-en-Nasr with
the Bab-el-Futúh, and extends to a bastion about 330 feet west of the
latter, and to a re-entering angle some 200 feet east of the Bab-en-
Nasr. There is also a piece of the wall among the houses near the Bab-
Zuweyla on the south face of the enclosure, and as late as 1842 a
portion of the west wall was still to be seen at the west side of the
Ezbekíya.
[Illustration: GATE OF SUCCOUR: BAB-EN-NASR]
The three great gates stand practically unchanged, though the towers of
the Zuweyla gate were shortened to receive the minarets of the mosque of
el-Muayyad in the fifteenth century. These gates are the most impressive
monuments of the Fátimid period, but they are Byzantine, not Saracenic.
According to the Armenian chronicler Abu-Sálih, a Copt, “John the Monk,”
planned the walls and gates for the Armenian vezír; but whatever share
he had in designing the lie of the walls, he could never have been the
architect of these Norman-looking gates.[53] The Topographer is
evidently right in stating that they were built by three brothers from
Edessa—a city full of Armenians where Bedr, with his Syrian experience,
would naturally seek his architects—each of whom built one gate. The
statement is amply confirmed, not only by the style, which clearly
belongs to the Syrian-Byzantine school, but also by various mason’s
marks in Greek letters, Ζ̲, Η, Η’, etc. In short, as M. van Berchem has
pointed out, the gates and enceinte of Cairo belong to what is called
the Templars’ (as distinguished from the French) style of military
architecture,—“the great Byzantine and Saracenic school of which the
chief characteristics may be traced in various countries and at divers
epochs, at Constantinople, Nicæa, Brusa, Adalia, and the Pamphylian
cities, in the old Arab fortresses of northern Syria, in the style of
the Templars and the military buildings of the post-crusade Saracens,
such as the enceinte of Jerusalem,” etc. The leading features of the
style are square bastions and square or round headed openings,
contrasting with the Persian arches of the Fátimid mosques and the round
bastions of Saladin’s wall. The curtains run to a thickness of eleven to
thirteen feet, and contain archers’ chambers and other apparatus for
defence. The gates consist of a vaulted passage, with round arch,
between towers containing an ingenious arrangement of shooting floors
and connected by a cross-passage above the arch, with a place for
launching stones or grenades upon the enemy. A fine spiral staircase,
admirable cornices, some sculptured shields, and a magnificent Kufic
inscription[54] adorn the Bab-en-Nasr. The inscription (like another on
the Bab-el-Futúh) expresses the Shí‘a creed, but has nevertheless
sustained eight centuries of orthodox rule in Egypt unchanged. The three
great gates are noble monuments of one of the greatest vezírs of
mediæval Cairo.
For nearly sixty years Egypt enjoyed the inestimable benefits of
Armenian rule. Bedr died in 1094, the year also of the caliph
Mustánsir’s death, but the vezír’s son el-Afdal succeeded to his
father’s power, and governed Egypt till 1121, when he was assassinated
by order of the caliph Amir. Afdal’s son Abu-‘Aly held supreme power in
1131 in the name of “the expected Mahdy,”—thus reverting to the old
Shí‘a theory of the hidden Imám and ignoring all claims of the Fátimid
dynasty. When he in turn was murdered on his way to the polo field,
Yanis, an Armenian slave of Afdal’s, became vezír, and after him Bahrám,
an Armenian Christian, retained the office until 1137. By this time the
growing influence of the Armenians had led to their holding every post
worth having in all the government departments, and their excessive
assumption of authority led to a natural reaction. Bahrám and 2000 of
his fellow-countrymen were expelled, and the heyday of the Armenians was
over. They deserved well of the country, and had ruled, on a whole, both
wisely and large-mindedly. Firm and yet mild, the virtual sovereignty of
Bedr and his son had rendered immense services to Egypt. If they
accumulated vast wealth—Afdal is said to have left over £3,000,000 in
gold, and the milk of his herds of cows was farmed in one year for
£15,750—they earned their fortunes by hard and intelligent work; they
were just and generous, and the Copts had much to thank them for. Even
Abu-‘Aly, with his eccentric revival of the doctrine of the concealed
Imám, who actually figured on the coinage, inherited the wise tradition
of his father and grandfather, and showed himself tolerant and mild, a
good friend to the Christians, and a patron of learning.
[Illustration: MINARETS OVER GATE OF ZUWEYLA]
From the time of Bedr, Egypt, it will be realized, had become a country
ruled no longer by caliphs but by vezírs. It was the old story of the
Merovingian _major domo_ translated into Arabic. Indeed, since the
terrible despotism of Hákim no caliph had exercised personal authority
in the great affairs of state, except el-Amir, who tried for a few years
to be his own prime-minister, with the help, however, of the monk Ibn-
Kenna, but the experiment was not a success. The monk became too
inflated, and was scourged to death. El-Ámir’s cruelty made him
detested, and one day as he was riding back from the Hawdag, or
“Litter,” the country-house on the island of Roda in which he consulted
the desert tastes of his Bedawy bride, he was assassinated by some
Isma‘ílian Assassins (1130). He had at least the virtue to found a
mosque, the Gámi‘ el-Akmar (Grey Mosque), in Beyn-el-Kasreyn. After this
the caliphs resigned themselves to a succession of vezírs, who were
themselves the instruments of military factions. The spiritual sanctity
and seclusion of the Fátimid pontiffs were still observed, as we have
seen in the description of the embassy of the two knights, but one must
believe that this reverence had degenerated into something like a farce.
The murders of Ámir and Záfir; the early imprisonment of Háfiz, and his
later thraldom to his drunken negro guards, who killed the gallant
Rudwán, vezír, soldier, and poet, in front of the Grey Mosque, and who
made the caliph poison his own son by the hands of his Christian
physician; the awful scene of bloodshed in the very palace, amid which
the baby Fáïz was exhibited to the trembling court as their spiritual
Imám[55]—these do not point to any real reverence for the mystical
caliphate of the Shí‘a. Fainéant caliphs had long been known at Baghdád,
and their rivals on the Nile were equally shadows of a mighty name.
The last horror was too much even for the long-suffering people of
Cairo. The murder of the caliph Záfir shortly after the murder of the
Kurd vezír Ibn-es-Salár; the massacre in the palace; the peculiar
unnaturalness of the crimes on the part of a kinsman and boonfellow; the
atrocious brutality of exposing the child-caliph of four years to the
terror of such a scene of blood and anguish, roused a storm of
vengeance. The new vezír, ‘Abbás, the instigator, fled from a hail of
stones, and was killed near the Dead Sea; the actual assassin, Nasr, was
delivered up by the Templars of Palestine, for a blood-money of £30,000,
to the women of the palace, who tortured him, and sent him through the
streets of Cairo, maimed and blinded, to be crucified alive at the Bab-
Zuweyla. In their desperate straits the women had sent locks of their
hair to the governor of Ushmuneyn in Upper Egypt, and the emír Talái‘,
son of Ruzzík, responded gallantly to the appeal (1154). Waving the
eloquent tresses he rode into Cairo, followed by an Arab guard, and when
he had assumed the vezirate in the Dar-el-Mamún,[56] the capital
recovered its confidence. Talái‘, who followed the custom of recent
vezírs and styled himself “king,” el-Melik es-Sálih, was the last
buttress of the falling dynasty. He was a man of culture, a poet,
accessible, generous, and politic. His mosque, still to be seen near the
Bab-Zuweyla, bears witness to his pious munificence. He tried his best
to turn aside from Egypt the storm that was threatening from the
political complications in Syria and Palestine; but the palace women
found that they had called to their rescue an austere moralist, and
ungratefully put him to death. “His last words were a regret that he had
not conquered Jerusalem and exterminated the Franks, and a warning to
his son to beware of Sháwar, the Arab governor of Upper Egypt. The
regret and the warning were well founded. Sháwar deposed and executed
the vezír’s son Ruzzík at the beginning of 1163, and within the year the
Christian king of Jerusalem was in Egypt.”
Before turning to the invasion of Cairo by the Crusaders, the conquest
by Saladin, and the end of the Fátimids in the death of the last caliph
el-‘Adid, a few words must be said on the remains of the city which the
falling dynasty had created and maintained in exceptional splendour. Of
all their buildings only the three great gates, part of the walls, and
the remains of four[57] mosques, bear witness to the Fátimids. The
palaces have utterly gone: they were not used by their successors, and
gradually fell to ruin. “O censurer of my love for the sons of Fatima,”
wrote Omára, the poet, before 1174, “join in my tears over the desolate
halls of the twin Palaces.” The Hall of Science, the Dar-el-Mamún, the
Palace of the Vezírs, and all the other mansions and pleasure houses of
the Shí‘a caliphs and their court have disappeared. There was no wanton
or general destruction: the buildings were simply deserted and neglected
under the new orthodox régime, and neglected houses soon fall to ruin.
Of the few remaining monuments, the oldest that can be regarded as
authentic is the mosque of el-Hákim—for the Azhar retains little of its
original architecture or decoration. The Akmar mosque in Beyn-el-Kasreyn
built by the caliph Ámir is remarkable as the first mosque built of
stone: the earlier mosques were all of brick. Only the façade, however,
is of stone, well-shaped and joined, and finely sculptured. The interior
arches are of brick on marble pillars. “Small and ruined as it is, it
has the feature, unique among Fátimid mosques, of a fine façade
(unfortunately hidden by a formless erection which the Monuments
Commission has vainly sought to obtain power to remove), very unlike the
ordinary plain exterior of the early mosques, and deserving special
notice for the shell ornament of its fluted niche, the rosette of open
tracery composed of inscriptions and ornaments, and the side niches,
surmounted by a Kufic frieze.”[58] Two inscriptions giving the name of
el-Amir and the date 519 A.H. (1125) belong to the foundation, and two
others record the restoration of the mosque by the emír Yelbugha es-
Sálimy in 799 (1396), but this restoration fortunately made but slight
alterations in this interesting building. The mosque of the vezír Talái‘
ibn Ruzzík, near the Bab-Zuweyla (1160), though much dilapidated, shows
a notable advance in decorative skill, and the rich detail of its
arabesques is scarcely surpassed by any later work. Fátimid decoration
is well illustrated by several important examples in the Museum of Arab
Art. Especially to be studied are the panelled doors with fine foliate
carving and inscriptions (of el-Hákim) from the Azhar mosque; and the
three _mihrabs_ or prayer niches, two of which came from the Azhar (one
bears an inscription recording its erection there by el-Ámir in 1125),
and the third from the chapel of Seyyida Rukeyya of about 1135. The last
is a marvel of intricate geometrical panel-work and arabesque and Kufic
ornament.
[Illustration: MOSQUE OF EL-GUYUSHY]
Unhappily, if heterodox opinions encouraged artistic development, they
also led to the destruction of its achievements. Had the Fátimids not
been heretics, their beautiful palaces with their thousands of exquisite
works of art might have been preserved by their successors. As it was,
they all bore “the mark of the Beast,” and the pious folk of later times
were only too eager to efface all memories of the schismatic caliphs who
had lavished their fabulous wealth with admirable taste upon the
embellishment of their city.