_The City of the Arabian Nights_
IN the preceding chapter we finished the story of Cairo as the capital
of an independent state, and described some of the beautiful buildings
with which the Mamlúk Sultans and nobles adorned the city. But the life
of a town does not consist in the doings of the court, and we should
form a very incomplete picture of mediæval Cairo if we looked no deeper
than the Sultans and their mosques and colleges and tombs. Though
trampled under the hoofs of the dominant troopers, the city had a
vigorous life of its own, a life of prosperous commerce, of social
enjoyment, and of literary culture. Cairo society was no longer the
limited palace coterie cooped up within the high walls of the Fátimid
palaces. It spread on all sides save the east. It had flowed out beyond
the northern gates, and formed the new suburb of the Hoseyníya, where
many mosques and chapels grew up. It had spread to the west over the
space between the old Fátimid wall and the Nile, and the river had
conveniently receded and allowed the new port of Bulák and a whole
colony of houses to be formed on what had been the Nile bed till the
wreck of the good ship _Elephant_ helped to make a sand bank, called the
Elephant’s Isle (Gezírat-el-Fil), which altered the river’s course and
provided an excellent building site. To the south the space between the
Fátimid walls and the Citadel and the mosque of Ibn-Tulún, where only
gardens and summer villas and pools flooded at high Nile had been seen
in Saladin’s day, was now covered with houses, among which rose the
domes and minarets of the mamlúks.
The expansion of the city may readily be traced in the Topographer’s
careful record of the building of mosques, which necessarily implies a
neighbouring population. The mosque of Yúnus (c. A.H. 719) and of Ibn-
et-Tabbákh (“the son of [Násir’s] cook,” 746), in the quarter of el-Luk,
point to the recession of the Nile which formerly ran close by. In the
same way the foundation of the mosques of Ibn-Gházy (741) and et-Tawáshy
(745) on the outside (or west) of the old Bab-el-Bahr, and the Záwiya of
Abu-s-Su‘úd (c. 724) outside the Bab-el-Kantara, point to a westward
extension, though here the land was not formerly under water. The great
expansion to the north, caused by the upheaval of the Elephant’s Isle,
before 1200 A.D., and the emergence of Bulák a century later, may be
fully traced in the annals of the mosques. Makrízy tells us that the
Elephant’s Isle was flooded only at high Nile, and during the rest of
the year it was a links of sandbanks and coarse grass, where the mamlúks
used to practise archery, in their unhappy ignorance of golf. But as the
Nile receded “people began in 1313 to erect houses, in consequence of
the improvements made in that part by en-Násir,” who had dug the new
canal then known as the Khalíg en-Násiry and now as the Isma‘ilíya,
which drained the tract; “and a proclamation was made in Káhira and Misr
inviting every one to build there without delay. So the emírs and
soldiers and merchants and common folk built houses there, and Bulák was
created at this period.”[76] He adds that water was drawn from the Nile
by a sákiya wheel which stood on the spot where the mosque of el-Khatíry
was afterwards built, which shows that the river has not retreated much
since, for it still runs very near this mosque, which was founded by
Aydemir in 737 on a site which was under water thirty years before.
Other mosques at Bulák were those of Ibn-Sárim and el-Básity (817).
Behind or east of Bulák, on what is now called the ‘Abbasíya road, was a
plot of land beside the Elephant’s Isle, known as Ard-et-Tabbála or the
“demesne of the tamburina,” because it was presented by the caliph
Mustansir to a singing girl who celebrated the glories of the Fátimids
to the accompaniment of her drum. There also houses began to be built,
and the mosque of el-Keymakhty was founded there, on the New Canal, in
A.H. 790. Before this another mosque, that of el-Asyúty, had been
erected about 740 on the Elephant’s Isle, as well as that of Sarúga on
the New Canal near the Pool of er-Ratly. Still further to the east we
find a number of mosques rising in the new quarters outside the old city
walls. Such were the gámi‘s of Almelik (732) and Ibn-el-Felek in the
Hoseyníya quarter, those of Akúsh and Ibn-el-Maghraby on the canal
outside; the convents of Yúnus, Algibugha (c. 750) and Ibn-Ghuráb (798),
and the Záwiyas of el-Ga‘bary (c. 687), Nasr (c. 719), el-Kalendaríya
(c. 722), and el-Khiláty (c. 737), outside the Bab-en-Nasr, all of which
testify to the expansion of the city towards the north.
Cairo had in fact attained much the same dimensions as it measured fifty
years ago, before the new European suburbs near the Nile were developed.
There was probably little difference either in outward aspect or in the
life of the middle and lower classes between the Cairo of the fifteenth
century and the city which Europeans such as Wilkinson, Burckhardt,
Lane, John Phillip, and Hay visited and described or painted in the
first half of the nineteenth. Some of Hay’s and his companion’s, O. B.
Carter’s, drawings, sketched about 1830, are here reproduced, and they
may fairly be taken as true representations of a town which still
retained its essential mediæval characteristics.
How different Cairo must then have appeared to the newly arrived
visitor, who landed at Bulák after coming through the Mahmudíya Canal
from Alexandria and then ascending the Nile. There was a mile’s ride
from the river bank at Bulák to the Bab-el-Hadíd by which you entered
Cairo at the north-west corner, and instead of the crowded villa suburb
of to-day, there was scarcely a house to be seen. “Two principal roads,”
writes Lane,[77] “of nearly the same length lead from Bulák to Cairo;
the northern, which is somewhat irregular, but is the chief route of
commerce [there were of course no railways then], leads to the Bab-el-
Hadíd; and the southern, after having crossed two canals, enters the
western side of the Ezbekíya. We pass the picturesque mosque of
Abu-l-‘Ola on our right as we enter the latter road. The French, during
their occupation of Egypt, raised this road, intending also to continue
it through the town as far as the Citadel. It is straight and wide, but
very uneven, and wanting a row of trees on its southern side to shade
it. It is raised a few feet above the level of the plain, so as to be
above the reach of the inundation. On either side during the inundation
are marshes and inundated fields. These, as soon as the waters have
subsided, are sown with corn, beans, trefoil, etc. Here and there are
clusters of palm trees, and a few sycamores and acacias. The plain was
formerly bounded on the east by extensive mounds of rubbish [doubtless
the ruins of Maks], behind which the capital was nearly concealed. The
road crosses two canals, over each of which is a stone bridge. . . .
Along the western side of the second canal, on the right of the road, is
a long ridge of rubbish. From the top of this ridge, about a quarter of
a mile from the gate of the Ezbekíya, we obtain a view of Cairo.”
This was how one approached Cairo in the first half of the nineteenth
century. The description reads drearily enough, but it has the merit of
showing what the place was like before the European builder took it in
hand. When the traveller plodded along the uneven road between the bean-
fields in 1835 he was traversing precisely the same scene as had been
trodden by the mamlúk horsemen for centuries, and he was approaching a
city which was still to all intents the city of the Arabian Nights.
There is no manner of doubt, from internal evidence, that it was in
Cairo that these famous tales took their definite shape. Their origins
have of course been traced to a large extent in Persia and India, but
their final form and colour are Egyptian. Though many of the scenes are
laid at Baghdád, where the famous Harún er-Rashíd played so conspicuous
and erratic a part, it is obvious to any student of the topography that
the writers were very imperfectly acquainted with the caliph’s city. It
is Cairo that they know and describe, whatever names they please to give
to their scenes. There are incidental touches that make it probable that
the Arabian Nights assumed their present form, in all essentials, before
the middle of the fourteenth century. The latest historical personage
mentioned is Saladin, and there are many reasons for believing that the
tales were collected and written very nearly in their final shape during
the revival of letters that ennobled the golden age of mamlúk
civilization on the Nile. The society they describe is precisely what we
know of mamlúk times: it is orthodox Muslim society of the Cairene type.
It may be wondered that there should be any speculation at all about the
date of so famous a book; but the explanation is simple. Scholars and
learned men in the East have always looked with contempt upon stories
such as these, which are wholly devoid of the literary preciosity which
was the special pride of the true man of letters. Hence they did not
deign even to mention the Thousand and One Nights, save in two or three
slight references which do not determine the date of the existing
redaction. The Nights were written for the people, for the audiences who
gathered in the coffee-shops to listen to the professional reciter, for
the large uneducated middle class of Cairo. This is what constitutes
their special merit in the eyes of the student of mediæval Egypt. The
doings of kings and emírs we learn from the detailed pages of Makrízy
and many other scholarly writers: it is from the Thousand and One Nights
that we gain our insight into the life of the people—a life divided from
that of the great by a gulf over which the Oriental historian rarely
leaps. The tales are above all the adventures of merchants and shop-
keepers. We are introduced no doubt to caliphs and sultans and vezírs,
as well as to the ginn, ’efrits and márids and other members of the
spirit-world; but the real actors in the stories are traders, men who
keep shop and who have ventures upon the seas, and often make voyages
themselves. Sindibad might easily have heard many of his own adventures
from the lips of the motley crowd that gathered on the quays at Misr
from all parts of the known world. Ibn-Sa‘íd stood and watched the
shipping in 1246 and noticed vessels arriving from all lands: “as for
the merchandise from the Mediterranean and the Red Sea that comes to
Misr it is past describing; here is it bonded, not at Cairo, and hence
it is distributed throughout Egypt.” What was true of Misr and Maks was
also true of their successor, the fourteenth century port at Bulák. It
was from Bulák that ‘Aly of Cairo, after spending all his inheritance
making merry with his wife on the island of Roda, took ship for Damietta
and set forth on his quest of a new fortune. The constantly recurring
references to commercial voyages and great profits are exactly what
would occur to a people whose wealth was made not only by a prodigiously
fertile soil, but by a copious foreign trade.
What the transit trade of Egypt was worth in mamlúk times may be judged
from a few facts. A single vessel clearing cargo at Alexandria paid
£21,000 in customs. The great Italian republics found it necessary to
maintain consular agents in Egypt, and that there was a wealthy colony
of European merchants is shown by their being able, headed by the consul
of Venice, to guarantee the king of Cyprus’s ransom of £100,000. The
Venetians had enjoyed special privileges in Egypt since the time of
el-‘Adil, in 1208, who allowed them to build a mart (funduk) of their
own at Alexandria; the Pisans had a consul there; and the concessions to
Venice were renewed in 1238. On the other side, in the Red Sea, there
were the ports of Suez, Tor, Koseyr, ‘Aydháb, Dehlek and Sawákin, where
the mamlúk sultans levied customs of a tenth _ad valorem_. The Indian
trade had greatly developed under the later mamlúk sultans, and there
was much rivalry and a tariff war between the Arabian and Egyptian ports
in the Red Sea in the effort to secure the heavy customs dues, which
were pressed beyond the customary tenth. In 1426 we read of forty
vessels from India and Persia paying £36,000 in duties at Gidda, the
port of Mekka, which, like Yenbu‘, was then Egyptian. Nor were the
government duties limited to importation. There were certain monopolies:
sugar, pepper, wood, metalwork could be sold only at government
warehouses, at government prices, subject to duty. A consignment of
pepper that was bought at Cairo for fifty dinárs was sold to Europeans
at Alexandria for one hundred and thirty under government regulations.
The Venetians, after vain consular remonstrance, sent a fleet to
Alexandria to bring away all their merchants, and Bars-Bey was obliged
to reduce his exorbitant terms.
How much store the Circassian sultans set by the transit trade between
India and Europe has been seen in the vigorous effort made by el-Ghúry
to crush the Portuguese in the Arabian Sea as soon as he realized the
dangerous rivalry of the Cape route. Indeed the transit trade must have
been a chief source of wealth. As Mr Cameron, our consul at Port Sa‘íd,
has well put it, the mamlúk sultans, “masters of both Egypt and Syria,
held the ports and caravan routes between Europe and her Indian trade,
and levied customs dues on every bale of Oriental produce which arrived
from the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea for transfer to the harbours
between Alexandria and Alexandretta and for transhipment to Venice.
Until the discovery of the Cape route in 1498, and its subsequent
development, they enjoyed the monopoly of the entire volume of Indian
trade with the Levant; and Venice, by her commercial capitulations with
them, was their sole agent on the continent. Let us try and estimate
what this monopoly meant. An Arab merchant like Sindbad the Sailor, . .
. buys £10,000 worth of raw silks, nutmegs, pepper, indigo, cloves, and
mace in Persia or at Calicut and lands them at Basra or Suez. The sea
route up the Persian Gulf would be shorter than the voyage up the Red
Sea; but the caravan road from Basra to Aleppo would be more perilous
than the short journey across Egypt. At landing, the customs would
amount to some £4000 [this is much above the mark], and the goods would
then be worth, say, £20,000. A second Arab merchant on the Mediterranean
coast [or perhaps at the wharves of Bulák] would sell the consignment
for £30,000 to the Venetian, who would have to pay another £5000 customs
dues before he could clear his cargo. Thus, whether in customs or in
tolls, or in presents to local governors and escorts, a quarter of the
£35,000 paid by the Venetian would go to the mamlúk sultan and
aristocracy merely for the privilege of transit.”[78]
It was not the government alone that made the profit. The Cairo merchant
who brought the precious bales from India and the Spice Islands, or at
least bought them from the Indian traders at the Red Sea ports, made his
fortune too. The Thousand and One Nights are full of such successful
ventures. Did not the Second Sheykh, who led the Two Black Hounds,
describe how “we then prepared merchandise and hired a ship and embarked
our goods, and proceeded on our voyage for the space of a whole month,
at the end of which we arrived at a city where we sold our merchandise,
and for every piece of gold we gained ten”? Such fortunate speculations
were no doubt of everyday occurrence, and the trade represented by these
ventures did not all go out of the capital: a large part found its way
into the bazars to be retailed to the good people of Cairo and to
minister to the luxurious tastes of the thousands of hangers-on to the
mamlúk court. We can form but a meagre notion of the mediæval _funduk_
from the present bazars. A _funduk_, or _khan_, or _wekála_—there is
little difference between the three terms—is a great collection of
warehouses and shops, generally surrounding a court, but sometimes more
like a covered arcade, where the merchants keep their reserves of
stores, and where traders find lodgings for themselves and stabling for
their beasts between their journeys. One great mediæval khan is still
familiar to every tourist—the Khan el-Khalíly or “Turkish bazar,” built
by Garkas el-Khalíly, the Master of the Horse of Sultan Barkúk in 1400
on the site once occupied by the graves of the Fátimid caliphs, whose
bones were dug up and carted away on asses to the rubbish-mounds outside
the eastern Gate. Another khan, the Hamzáwy, or cloth market, is also
well known; and two of Káit-Bey’s wekálas, the façades of which are
finely ornamented with arabesque panels and intricate geometrical
designs, and wooden medallions carved with the sultan’s name, still
remain beside the Azhar and in the Surugíya. When Lane described Cairo
in 1835 there were about two hundred wekálas, and even now one can
scarcely pass down a street without finding one of these big courts
surrounded by rooms—the inn of the east—opening out through a tall
gateway.
In the fifteenth century the khans of Cairo were busy marts of the
merchants; and the mamlúk emírs, who had clear ideas as to the value of
house property, emulated one another in building handsome wekálas, every
room of which might be expected to bring in a substantial rent. There
was the khan of Mesrúr, one of the most famous. The young man in the
Story of the Humpback “put up” there, and stored his merchandise, and
after a night’s rest took some of his goods and went to the “kaysaríya
of Garkas,” another famous market of mediæval Cairo dating from Fátimid
days, to sell to the merchants. “Do as other merchants,” said the sheykh
of the brokers to the stranger; “sell thy merchandise upon credit for a
certain period, employing a scrivener, a witness, and a moneychanger,
and receive a portion of the profits every Thursday and Monday: so shalt
thou make of every piece of silver two—besides thou wilt have leisure to
enjoy the amusements of Egypt and its Nile.” So the young man followed
his advice and left his goods to be sold for him, whilst he lived
joyously at the khan of Mesrúr, breakfasted on wine and chicken and
mutton and sweetmeats, and perfumed himself elegantly, till he met the
damsel at the shop of Bedr-ed-din, the gardener, and there happened what
fate had decreed, to be a warning to such as would be admonished. That
the young man should have his hand cut off by the executioner at the
Gate of Zuweyla was exactly what might be expected in the days of the
mamlúks. This khan of Mesrúr (or rather two khans, one large and the
other small) was built on a part of the site of the Fátimid Great Palace
where the slaves used to be sold, by Mesrúr, a favourite slave of
Saladin, who left it as a legacy for the benefit of the poor. The larger
building had a hundred rooms, and was the chief resort of merchants from
Syria,—“the most renowned and greatest of the khans,” says the
Topographer, but its prosperity declined after the tribulation of Syria
at the hands of Tamerlane, “its honour departed and many of its
apartments were ruined.”
[Illustration: SLAVE MARKET]
Another famous khan was that of Bilál, a slave of es-Sálih, the grand-
nephew of Saladin, so favoured that the sultan Kalaún used to say, “God
have mercy on our late master es-Sálih! I used to carry the slippers of
this eunuch Bilál whilst he went into the presence!” The slave was very
rich and abounded in good deeds, many poets praised him and were amply
rewarded, and among his worthy acts was the building of the khan, where
the merchants would deposit their chests of great value. “I used to
enter this funduk,” says Makrízy, “and lo! around it were chests piled,
little and great, so that only a small space was left in the middle, and
these chests contained gold and silver enough to amaze one.” Then there
was the “Khan of the Sebíl,” outside the Bab-el-Futúh, founded by
Saladin’s vezír, Karakúsh, for “sons of the road,” poor wayfarers, who
were received without payment; and the Wekála Kusún, built by Násir’s
son-in-law, near the mosque of el-Hákim, where Syrian merchants stored
oil, and sesame, and soap, and preserves, and pistachio-nut, almonds,
syrups, and the like, every store-room being let by the emír’s order at
no more than five dirhems of silver, without extortion, and no one being
turned away. It was a busy place in Makrízy’s time, very popular on
account of its cheapness, full of people and bales of goods, and noisy
with the shouts of the porters. There were 360 lodgings above the store-
rooms, all occupied, and 4000 people lived there. The Tatar devastation
of Syria ruined this khan too. Opposite the Zuweyla Gate stood the
fruit-market where the produce of the gardens round Cairo was sold; it
was roofed over, like most of the bazars in former days, to keep off the
rays of the sun, and the fruit, which smelt like the gardens of
Paradise, was tastefully arranged and decorated with flowers and sweet
herbs.[79]
There were many more great buildings of this kind, the history of which
is related by the laborious Topographer, whose descriptions enable us
almost to reconstruct in imagination the city of the fifteenth century.
Cairo was a sumptuous and beautiful place in those days. The old mamlúk
palaces—of which we have but relics in the huge blank walls of Beshták’s
palace, the fine gateway of Yeshbek’s _dar_ next to Sultan Hasan’s
mosque, and the better preserved mansions of Káit-Bey and of the emír
Mamáy (known as the Beyt-el-kady)—were then in their full glory. The
various quarters were still separated by their strong gates barred at
night. The súks were shaded by matting or wooden roofs, and the lattice-
windows with their delicate tracery overhung the streets. Makrízy
enumerates and describes 37 _Háras_ or quarters, 30 districts (_khutt_),
65 streets (_darb_), 21 by-streets and alleys (_zukák_ and _khawkha_),
49 squares or _places_ (_rahba_), 50 markets (_suk_), 23 great markets
(_kaysaríya_), 11 hostelries (_khan, funduk, wekála_), 55 famous palaces
and mansions (_kasr, dar_), 44 public baths (_hammám_), 28 closes and
gardens (_hakar, bustán_), 11 racecourses (_meydán_), and numerous
pleasure-houses or belvederes (_manzara_).
Many of the streets still run in their old places, and some of their
names survive, such as the Salíba or cross-ways, Beyn-el-Kasreyn, Beyn-
es-Sureyn, Harat Bargawán, Suk-es-Siláh, Khan-el-Khalíly, Darb-el-Asfar,
Habbaníya, Khurunfísh. The old quarters of Cairo have changed much less
than the old parts of London; but the reason is melancholy. London has
changed because it has grown; Cairo remained comparatively unaltered
because it was slowly decaying. The loss of much of the Indian trade,
the dependence upon Turkey, the misrule of pashas and mamlúk beys, all
tended to reduce the prosperity of the city which had flourished
exceedingly under the Turkish and Circassian sultans.
With decline of trade came decline in the arts. There is still a little
good work made in Cairo in brass chasing, jewellery, and silk weaving,
but it is a poor relic of what once went on there. One has only to visit
the Arab Museum to realize what magnificent work the artists of Cairo
produced in the mamlúk period. The arts were closely related to the
mosques, which attained their greatest perfection of ornament in the
same period, and the chief objects in the museum were once parts of the
decoration or furniture of the mosques. The beautiful inlaid and chased
silver and brass tables, with delicate designs in open tracery, Koran
cases, lamps and chandeliers, bowls, censers, candlesticks, enamelled
glass lamps with inscriptions in blue picked out with carmine and gold,
generally came from mosques and centre round the fourteenth century. The
carved panels inlaid with ivory and ebony and choice woods once enriched
the doors and pulpits of the mosques, and the cast bronze bosses and cut
brass filigree work belong chiefly to the same period. There are many
admirable examples of these arts in the South Kensington Museum, and the
British Museum possesses an unsurpassed collection of Saracenic metal
work. There is unhappily no “Market of the Inlayers” now at Cairo, as
there was in Makrízy’s time. This silver and gold inlay of arabesques
and inscriptions on a brass base was one of the most elaborate and
characteristic of Saracenic arts. It was not Egyptian in origin, but
derived from the old Sasanian silversmiths of Mesopotamia. The oldest
specimens we know came from Mosil on the Tigris, which was a famous home
of metal-workers, within reach of the mines of the Taurus country. No
doubt these Mosil smiths were attracted to Cairo in the flourishing days
of the mamlúk sultans, or even earlier. At least it is certain that some
of their finest work was done for the Egyptian market, and even bears
the names of well-known Cairene rulers and emírs. There is the casket,
for example, engraved with the name and titles of el-‘Adil II, Saladin’s
grand-nephew, who sat on the throne of Egypt from 1238 to 1240, and was
succeeded by es-Sálih, the husband of “Spray of Pearls.” It is in the
Mosil style of the earliest period; the sides are ornamented with dotted
eight-foils (exactly resembling the ornament on the silver coins of the
family of Saladin) containing hunting scenes, a combat with a lion, a
horseman with falcon on wrist (which is covered with the falconer’s
glove), etc.; the intervening ground is decorated with fine arabesques,
and an inscription on the bevel of the lid gives the name and titles of
the sultan. On the top are personifications of the six planets (of
Arabian science) surrounding the sun (the seventh):—the Moon, a seated
figure holding a crescent; Mercury, with his writing materials; Venus, a
woman playing on the lyre; Mars, a warrior brandishing a sword and
holding a bleeding head; Jupiter, a throned judge; and Saturn, patron of
thieves, with his bludgeon and purse. Outside these is a band of the
twelve signs of the Zodiac, represented much in the usual manner. On the
bottom of the box is an inscription stating that it was made “for the
royal wardrobe of el-‘Adil.”
The hunting-scenes and representations of human figures and animals are
characteristic of Mesopotamian silver work, and we see medallions of
two-headed eagles on a splendid inlaid perfume-burner in the British
Museum, “made,” as the silver letters inform us, “by order of his
excellency, the generous, the exalted lord, the great emír, the
honourable master, marshal, warrior for the faith, warden of Islám,
mighty, heaven-supported, victorious, Full Moon of the Faith Beysary,
mamlúk of ez-Záhir (Beybars),” etc. The date must be before 1279, and
the vessel carries us back to the days of Kalaún and the beginning of
mamlúk splendour. Beysary was one of the greatest and most sumptuous of
the early mamlúk emírs, and his perfume burner was typical of the
luxurious refinements of his palace. He valued his comfort more than
ambition, and twice refused the precarious honour of the throne during
the unsettled period succeeding Kalaún’s death, when the sultanate was
open to the strongest emír. Even so he could not escape the consequences
of being wealthy and distinguished, and in spite of his retiring
character he was suspected of pretensions to power, fleeced of his
treasures, and often confined to the dungeons of the Citadel. His
palace, which stood in Beyn-el-Kasreyn, covered four acres, and
possessed the richest mosaics and the handsomest carved doors in Cairo.
Bedr-ed-din Beysary was indeed the most sumptuous man of his time. He
loved to surround himself with beautiful things, and his slave body-
guard was the best appointed of the day. No fortune could support his
lavish extravagance. He not only spent upon himself, but gave prodigally
to all who asked him. Hospitality was his foible, and his gifts to the
poor ran in round sums of five hundred or a thousand dirhems (say
francs) to each applicant. He would daily distribute three thousand
pounds of meat, and a single present consisted of a thousand pieces of
gold, five thousand bushels of corn, and a thousand hundredweight of
honey. One of his mamlúks used every day to draw ninety pounds of meat
and seventy rations of barley, which it is to be presumed neither he nor
his horses could possibly digest. Naturally Beysary was perpetually in
debt. The constant amount of his liabilities is placed at 400,000
dirhems, for as soon as one debt was paid off, the generous soul
hastened to contract another of the same figure. A considerable part of
his expenditure must have gone in table equipage, for it is recorded
that he never drank twice out of the same cup; and as Makrízy mentions
that at one time this thirteenth century epicure was wholly given over
to wine and hazard, the number of cups required must have been
considerable. But a great and cultivated emír needed more than cups for
his comfort: he must have inlaid tables on which to put the broad brass
tray incrusted with chased silver and gold, which carried his service of
the forbidden fruit of the grape; he must have his beautiful hall
lighted by candles placed in elaborate stands, covered with silver
inlay; his very tubs and cooking-pots must be chased with arabesques and
complicated designs, and his palace must be perfumed with incense rising
from perfume-burners on which the artist had engraved representations of
horsemen at the chase, hounds and quarry, falcons and waterfowl, and all
the decorative subjects of the Saracen silversmith.
[Illustration: IN THE DARB-EL-AHMAR]
The earliest and finest examples of metal work connected with the names
of Cairo kings and nobles are of Mosil origin, though very probably made
in Cairo in the “Market of the Inlayers” by artists who had been
attracted to the court. There was undoubtedly an early Fátimid art of a
similar character, but beyond a very few rare examples, such as the
Bayeux casket at Paris and some specimens of cut crystal at Venice, we
know almost nothing of its style. Under the mamlúk sultans, however,
Cairo soon acquired a school of her own, which seems to have possessed
traditions coming from a different source than that of Mosil. The Cairo
style is what we see on the numerous trays, bowls, cups, censers, and
other vessels of the mamlúks of Egypt of the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, preserved in our museums and private collections. Some points
of resemblance to the Mosil work may be noticed, but the new elements
are very distinct. The figures of horsemen and seated princes have for
the most part disappeared, as it was natural they should when the
Turkish princes became habituated to the puritanical prescriptions of
Islám concerning the treatment of living things in art; but borders
representing beasts of the chase, and a ground covered with wild duck
and other fowl, still remain. The prevalence of the duck, which was
easily explicable in the swamps of Mesopotamia, finds another _raison
d’être_ in Egypt, for the founder of the line of sultans who ruled in
Cairo for nearly a century was a Turk of Kipchak, whose name, Kalaún,
means in his native Mongol tongue “duck.” We may compare Abbot Islip’s
plastic puns on his own name in his chapel in Westminster Abbey. The
ornament of the mamlúk metalwork is essentially different in style from
that of Mosil. The inscriptions are arranged in broad bands, with large
surfaces of silver inlay, divided by medallions filled with the sultan’s
name on a fess, or else by some heraldic coat of arms borne by the
owner, among which the cup and polo-stick (indicating the court offices
of cup-bearer and polo-master), the lozenge, and a curious imitation of
a hieroglyphic inscription common on the ancient monuments of Egypt, but
doubtless unintelligible to the copyists, are the most usual. Round the
medallions are belts of flowers and leaves, reminding one of the designs
of Damascus tiles; and similar leaves and flowers, interspersed with
birds, cover the ground. The execution is no less admirable than the
design. There was no scamped work among these Saracen smiths. They cut
away the whole design in the brass, and undercut the edges to hold the
thin plates of silver or gold, to be hammered and burnished in, which
formed the design; and they chased with the graver every plate of
silver, were it only a pin’s head in size, with wings or eyes or floral
scrolls—a work of infinite labour; and then they covered the
interstices, where the brass showed, with a black bituminous composition
which set off the precious metal to advantage. Much of the silver and
coating has been lost by wear and time, and it is difficult to realize
the beauty of the original state of most of the vessels and trays that
have come down to us; but a careful examination only reveals more fully
the exquisite skill, care, and fine honest workmanship that no time or
injury can destroy.
This art of silver inlay, like architecture and wood and ivory carving
and every other variety of æsthetic expression, culminated in the
wonderful efflorescence of art and culture in the reign of en-Násir,
Kalaún’s son, in the first half of the fourteenth century. Whenever in
any museum we see a fine specimen of metalwork, we may be almost sure to
find the name of a Násiry emír—that is a courtier or mamlúk of en-
Násir—in its inscription, and sometimes even the name of the sultan
himself.
The Topographer tells us that in his day, in the early part of the
fifteenth century, this beautiful art had fallen into disrepute. It
used, he says, to be a favourite taste, and “we have seen inlaid work
(_keft_) in such quantities that it could not be counted; there was
hardly a house in Cairo or Misr that had not many pieces of inlaid
copper,”—he means brass. A stand of inlaid bowls and plates ranged on a
frame of carved wood and ivory was a usual part of a bride’s trousseau,
and cost as much as two hundred dinárs. But, he adds, “the art is now
lacking in Misr; . . . the demand for this inlaid copper-work has fallen
off in our times, and since many years the people have turned away from
buying what was to be sold of it, so that but a small remnant of the
workers of inlay subsists in this market.”[80]
The art was not dead, however; it had merely passed on elsewhere. The
heritage which Cairo received from Mosil was bequeathed to Venice. We
have seen that the Venetians were the European agents of the Egyptian
merchants, and it is not too much to say that Venice was half an
oriental city. Italy was full of Eastern influences. We know that a
twelfth century poet lamented that Pisa was “delivered over to Moors,
Indians and Turks”; that there was a via Sarracena at Ferrara, and
Lucera was deeply tinged with Muslim traditions, dating from Frederick
II’s importation of Saracen archers. But Venice felt this influence most
of all. Her commerce and colonies brought her merchants into relations
with the artistic work of the East; her ambassadors brought home the
splendid gifts of the mamlúk sultans; and she soon began to import the
artists as well as the art. The _opus Salomonis_ or Jews’ work was the
name given to this Saracenic style, often referred to in early romances.
Chaucer had heard of it, for he writes in Sir Thopas:—
“And over that a fyn hawberk
Was all i-wrought of jewes work.”
Especially did Venice excel in the chasing of great salvers in the
Saracenic manner, though with considerable differences both in design
and in technique. The silver is applied chiefly in narrow threads
instead of broad plates, and the designs are chiefly arabesque, whilst
the forms of the vessels show marked improvement upon the somewhat crude
outlines of the Cairo silversmith. Native Italian artists began to copy
the art introduced by Mahmúd the Kurd and his Saracen comrades. They
called themselves Azzimine, _i.e._ workers in the Persian style _all’
Agemina_—for it has long been the fashion to miscall every form of
Saracenic art Persian—and we read of Italian artists, such as Giorgio
Ghisi Azzimina of Mantua, and Paulus Ageminius, who excelled in the art
which had been imported from Egypt.
We have singled out the silver-inlay from among the arts of mediæval
Cairo because it is a branch in which the development can be traced with
certainty by a series of dated examples. But the chief decorative arts
of the mosque builders were wood-carving and marble mosaic. The
beautiful panelled work of mosque pulpits and doors, originally
suggested, no doubt, by the necessity of small surfaces in a hot climate
where warping had to be prevented, are among the most characteristic
forms of Cairo ornament; and the use of variegated marbles in the
mihrábs of the mosques produces a rich (if sometimes rather glaring)
effect, which was imitated in the dados of the houses of the nobles, now
unhappily for the most part destroyed. The extensive use of wood in
Cairo architecture is the more remarkable when it is considered how
little suitable wood grows in Egypt. On the other hand the dry climate,
though it warps, preserves timber for centuries. The original wooden
ties of the pillars of Ibn-Tulún’s mosque have stood for more than a
thousand years and are still sound, and a portion even of the ceiling of
the arcades has been preserved. This wooden ceiling shows that in the
ninth century the same method was used as is seen in all periods of
Saracenic art previous to the introduction of European styles. It
consists of joists of palm trunks sawn in two, with the three exposed
sides faced with planks to square the outline. The hollows between the
squared joists were divided by cross pieces into shallow compartments or
“coffers.” In private houses the joists were often left uncovered in
their natural half-round shape. Whether planked or left in the round,
the joists and the coffers between were coated with plaster, generally
laid on canvas, and the plaster was painted with arabesques in deep
blue, carmine, and gold. These coffered ceilings, which may still be
seen in many houses, have a wonderfully rich effect with their deep
tones of red and blue, lighted up by gold outlines; and the transition
from the ceiling to the walls is skilfully masked by arching and
stalactite pendentives, richly painted with similar designs. Inferior to
the coffered ceilings, but still very effective, are those composed of
boards nailed flat across the joists and covered with a thin coating of
stucco, worked into arabesque and floral patterns, and then painted and
gilt; or with a geometrical design formed by appliqué strips of wood,
gilt shaded with red, the interstices being filled with arabesques in
painted stucco.
Wood-carving had ample opportunities for display in the pulpits, Korán
desks, interior doors and cupboards of mosques. Some of the oldest
examples, from the mosques of Ibn-Tulún and el-Hákim, may be seen in the
Arab Museum at Cairo, and the deep volutes carved in the panels are
clearly of Byzantine origin, resembling the still earlier but undated
panels found in the tract of ‘Ayn-es-Síra, south of Cairo. In the
thirteenth century the style alters. Instead of the bold foliate designs
we find more intricate and delicate ornament distributed in much smaller
geometrical panels. A peculiarly beautiful example is the Sheykh’s tomb-
casing of 1216, of which one side is in the Museum at South Kensington,
and the other three in the Arab Museum. Another is the carved casing of
the tomb of es-Sálih Ayyúb (1249):—“the little panels are formed into
hexagonal stars and delicately carved, and here appears the
representation of fruit-stalks, which is a common feature in thirteenth
century wood-carving. The mihráb or prayer niche from the chapel of
Seyyida Rukeyya, which belongs probably to the same century, deserves
special notice for its characteristic ornamentation of stems branching
out of a vase.”[81] But it was under the Mamlúk Sultans, and especially
in the great period of en-Násir that wood-carving attained its most
exquisite development. Woods of different colours were employed to
produce the effect of relief, and inlay was largely adopted in place of
carving in the solid block. Sometimes each little carved panel was set
in a frame of ebony beading, which was itself carved, and often
consisted of two or three distinct frames, one outside the other; whilst
the central design was hardly ever the same in two panels out of many
hundreds. The amount of careful work demanded in carving and putting
together a large surface of this intricate panelling must have been
immense. Many beautiful examples may be seen in the mosques, and even
finer are the carved doors in wood and ivory panelling in the Coptic
churches of Babylon, from which there can be little doubt that the
Muslims learnt the art; but to see Mamlúk carving at its best one need
not leave London. A large number of the very finest specimens were taken
away from their lawful guardians during the reign of the Khedive
Isma‘íl, and even earlier, and have found their way to the Museum at
South Kensington. There we may study at leisure some of the rich yet not
over-elaborate arabesque carvings abstracted from the pulpit set up in
the mosque of Ibn-Tulún by Lagín in 1296; others of extraordinary beauty
from the mosque of el-Maridány, 1339, absurdly set in the top of a
French table; others, probably from the pulpit of the mosque of Kusún,
also set in coarse modern framework, but preserving all the delicate
grace of the arabesque carvings absolutely intact; and finally the
complete pulpit bearing the inscription of Káit-Bey, but from what
mosque is not known. The whole forms a singularly rich and beautiful
exhibition of Saracenic wood-carving of the best period.[82]
There are differences and even decadence in the series, however, and a
careful study of the designs will show that the art reached its highest
point in the carvings of el-Maridány, _i.e._ immediately after the reign
of en-Násir. Sheykhú’s pulpit of 1358 is not so good; Sultan Hasan’s is
of stone; el-Muáyyad’s of 1420 is distinctly inferior; and even Káit-
Bey’s, prince though he was of Cairo builders, is not to be compared
with the work of the middle of the fourteenth century. The designs have
become less spontaneous, the lines are harder and more mechanical, and
(as in stone carving) there is a tendency to repetition utterly foreign
to the earlier work. Part of this may be explained by the introduction
of ivory as the material for the inlaid panels, for ivory, though
capable of even more delicate carving, is less easy to work in flowing
lines. But the main cause was probably the preponderating attention
given to carving in stone. No sooner does stone become the predominant
material for decoration than wood-carving, like stucco-tooling, falls
into comparative neglect. The middle of the fourteenth century was the
parting of the ways. Stone became the favourite material, and the
carvers of wood, if they did not lay aside the graver for the stone-
chisel, at least moulded their style upon the harder outlines of the
sculptors, and the result was deterioration.
If wood-carving decayed after the middle of the fourteenth century,
another branch of woodwork was notably developed. One charming feature
of the exterior of a Cairo house is the _meshrebíya_ of delicate turned
tracery. There is no reason to doubt that this kind of work is very old,
but whether by reason of its fragility or the frequent conflagrations
that afflicted the city, no ancient examples have been preserved. The
few wooden lattices that still remain in the older mosques are of quite
a different style: they are made of stout clumsy quarterings, divided
into compartments filled by square or round upright balusters, such as
are seen in the tomb of Kalaún. Others are mere grilles of large open
squares, with no pretension to artistic design. A finer kind is seen in
Lagín’s pulpit in the mosque of Ibn-Tulún (1296), where the mesh is
close and the knobs are inlaid and carved. It is curious that the true
meshrebíya, with its varied designs and lace-like effect, first appears
in the screen of the sanctuary in the mosque of el-Maridány, which also
shows the highest development of wood-carving. As the one art decayed,
the other improved. There are fine examples of meshrebíya work of the
early part of the fifteenth century, as in the pulpit of el-Muáyyad, but
it attained its greatest perfection in the age of Káit-Bey, of which a
fine specimen is preserved in the pulpit of Abu-Bekr ibn Muzhir. Most of
the house meshrebíyas are comparatively modern, though it is impossible
to fix their precise date. Their inevitable disappearance is an æsthetic
loss that nothing can replace; but it must be admitted that they formed
the most dangerous conductors of fire from house to house and street to
street that the ingenuity of man could well devise.
There is this to be said about every branch of artistic work of mediæval
Cairo, whether it be architecture, carving in wood or stone, metal
chasing, or glass—it is always distinctively original. The Saracens
brought no art with them; indeed they appear to have been singularly
lacking in the æsthetic sense. They learned their arts from their
foreign subjects, yet they invariably introduced an element of
differentiation which marks their work as characteristically Saracenic.
They learned their metal chasing from Persia, but they soon made it
their own; they copied Byzantine and Coptic wood-carving, and added the
essential personal equation which constitutes a distinct art; they found
glass making and blowing in Egypt, acquired the secrets of enamelling
and gilding from Constantinople, and then produced a style of enamelled
lamps totally unlike any other in the world. It is not only a variation
in design or shape that makes the difference: the whole character of the
work, in every branch of Saracenic art, is distinct and absolutely _sui
generis_. They were not only wonderful assimilators, they also had the
genius of development on original lines. Perhaps the strangest part of
the matter is that the highest development was achieved in the troubled
times of singularly uncultivated and sanguinary foreign masters. Yet the
age of the Mamlúk Sultans was the Saturnian age of Mohammedan Egypt in
art and also in literature. For it must not be forgotten that some of
the greatest names in Muslim theology, jurisprudence, criticism, and
history were associated as kádis or professors with the mosques and
medresas of Cairo, and that the mamlúk period produced or encouraged
such writers as Ibn-Khaldún, Nuweyry, Ibn-Dukmák, Makrízy, Ibn-Hagar,
el-‘Ayny, Ibn-‘Arab-shah, Abu-l-Mahásin, es-Suyúty, and Ibn-Iyás, who
either were born in Egypt, or, like Abu-l-Fida, spent many years in
Cairo. The fifteenth century was perhaps the most prolific period in
Egyptian literature, and this activity was more than rivalled in the
neighbouring province of Syria under the same sultans.