Ibn Ṭūlūn’s Pacification Campaign: Sedition, Authority, and Empire in Abbasid Egypt

doi:10.1017/9781009170031.007

Chapter 6 - Ibn Ṭūlūn’s Pacification Campaign: Sedition, Authority, and Empire in Abbasid Egypt

from Part I - Political and Administrative Connections

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2022

Matthew S. Gordon

Edited by

Jelle Bruning ,

Janneke H. M. de Jong and

Petra M. Sijpesteijn

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Summary

Developments in third/ninth-century Egypt relate to the wider history of the Abbasid imperial realm in a number of ways. These had to do, in one sense or another, with the fraying of the Arab Islamic empire, governed, at this point, by the Abbasid house.1 This chapter considers one such development: the turn to control over Egypt by the Turkic–Central Asian military command in Samarra. My argument is that, at a moment in which the Abbasid state was struggling to sustain its hold over a once far-flung but now shrinking domain, it ceded authority over Egypt to those same military/political circles. Egypt, in this scenario, was a key interest of the Samarran commanders and in defense of which they devoted considerable energy and resources. It was a matter of consolidating authority over the province’s considerable public wealth, to be sure, but the sources point to apparent private interests – specifically, landholdings – on the part of the commanders as well.

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Type: Chapter
Information: Egypt and the Eastern Mediterranean World
From Constantinople to Baghdad, 500-1000 CE
, pp. 169 - 202

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009170031.007 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2022

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