9

Local Lords or Rural Notables? Some Remarks on the ra’īs in Twelfth Century Eastern Iran

Jürgen Paul

The term ra’īs is notoriously protean.¹ It can mean a person in any position of leadership, and sometimes the word seems to hold no particular meaning besides ‘leader’ or ‘urban notable’, so that a man can be said to be ‘one of the ru’asā’’ of a given place.² Most noted, however, are the following functions:³

•the ra’īs is the head of the representatives of a given school of law in a given locality (such as the ra’īs of the Shāfi‘īs at Marw⁴ or Sarakhs⁵). This function has been studied to a certain degree (Bulliet for Nishapur⁶; Pritsak for Bukhara where the title ṣadr was used⁷), but in general local ‘ulamalogy’ remains understudied.

•the ra’īs of a larger town or city, sometimes a district or a province, who as a general rule held an appointment deed by the regional or imperial ruler, such as the ra’īs of Balkh, Nishapur or other cities. Such men tended to form regional dynasties of ru’asā’ (e.g. in Bayhaq and Sabzawār). This type of ra’īs has received some scholarly attention in works on urban notables (Havemann for Syria⁸; Lapidus⁹ and Shoshan¹⁰ for Khurasan). In western Iran, dynasties of urban ru’asā’ are well known.¹¹ This type of ra’īs mostly worked as a mediator between the imperial or regional ruler and the town or city where he resided.¹²

•Appointment deeds have also been studied (Horst¹³, Lambton¹⁴, Kurpalidis¹⁵, Beradze¹⁶), and in this context the ‘official’ character of the position was stressed. In this study, no dichotomy between appointed figures and those who did not need an appointment is intended. There is a category of mediators who need both: the appointment by the ruler and the consensus of their community.¹⁷

•the leader of a tribal group or of any group.¹⁸

In this contribution, I have focused on the rural ru’asā’ and their functions, a question which has not been studied before. ‘Rural’ ru’asā’ are men with a leading position in small towns and villages. In the first section, the functions of ru’asā’ in larger cities and in provinces will be presented, to be followed by the ru’asā’ of smaller towns and, finally, villages. One of the questions will be whether they owned the villages where they were ra’īs. I will also try to assess their relation to other locally powerful figures such as the shiḥna, the muqṭa‘ and others. The functions of the rural ru’asā’ could be social, political, fiscal, and military. In the concluding section, I then turn to the question of whether these figures could be seen as local lords or should rather be understood as rural notables.

I came to the rural ru’asā’ when I studied the history of the dihqān stratum.¹⁹ In Nasawī’s Sīrat al-sulṭān Jalāl al-Dīn Mingburnī, we meet three men whom he calls ru’asā’ of a given village. All of them appear in a military function, they lead the men of their village in military matters, defending the village against outward aggression, both of Mongols and of troops under the command of Khwarazmian princes or generals. One of these men had allied himself to the Mongols and tried to use this position for his own ambitions; he wrote to his counterparts in other villages and told them to join him in raids against yet other villages or towns, and if they refused, they were killed and their villages sacked. Another one, also with a Mongol alliance, had promised them to join forces against an ex-Khwarazmian commander, but the Mongols lost that battle, and then the ra’īs did not offer them refuge in his village, as a result of which they were all killed (the ra’īs was later executed). The third man whom Nasawī mentions as a raʾīs had closed the gates of his village before a small force of cavalry, but had then found out that Jalāl al-Dīn, the Khwarazmian prince, was leading that force. He thereupon informed his lord, the lord of Nasā, about what had been going on.²⁰

The three reports in Nasawī first raise the question of the military potential and importance of villages and villagers. In the background, there is one of the central questions in social history of agrarianate societies, the social structure of villages in general, the hierarchy, questions of social, political and military leadership.

A village ra’īs normally would appear as a ‘village headman’ in English translation.²¹ A ‘headman’ would imply a rather egalitarian structure within the village, consisting of the ‘village elders’ who were recognised as such by virtue of their age and the respect they commanded, and the ‘village headman’ as a kind of spokesman representing the village in its dealings with the outside world.²² This seems to be a thoroughly romantic vision of the village. The ru’asā’ in Nasawī clearly are no mere ‘village elders’ or ‘headmen’: they wield real power, and they lead their subordinates to fight, not only in self-defence, but also in aggressive raids. In this respect, the rural ru’asā’ in Nasawī are heirs to the earlier dahāqīn who also led the villagers to war.

Fortified villages (qal‘a)

We shall first turn to the outward structure of villages in pre-Mongol eastern Iran. Not much is known about the outward appearance of villages in general, and fortified villages in particular – archaeology apparently has only started to investigate the subject. There are first tentative studies for modern-era sites, villages which were abandoned in the middle of the twentieth century.²³ Medieval villages of this type are mentioned in passing in archaeological reports, but clearly enough that it is possible to state that the type did exist in pre-Mongol Iran.²⁴ I do not know any description of villages in any written sources from the pre-Mongol period.²⁵ In addition, there are summaries of anthropological reports and travellers’ diaries from the late nineteenth – mid-twentieth century, and studies in social geography from the mid-twentieth century.

Fortified villages in Khurasan (and in many other parts of Iran and the Turco-Iranian world) were of a type that is called qal‘a or kalāt or kalāta in Persian. According to an account by one Soviet anthropologist, the main feature of some fortified villages was that the residential buildings were arranged in a rectangle or square around a central courtyard in such a way that their back walls together formed the outer wall of the village. This wall was made of mud brick and could be up to 6–10 meters high. One gate only led into the village; in such villages dating from the modern period, these gates were made of wood, and they were closed every night. In some cases, such as in the Herat region, boulders were rolled before them from the inside to ensure that they could not be opened from without. Above the gate, there often was a place where bowmen or – later – gunmen could be posted. The walls had turrets on the four corners; in some cases, turrets were added on the wall at certain distances, every 80 or 100 meters.²⁶ This account does not go into details regarding the inner structure of such villages.

The qal‘a villages mentioned by archaeologists and social geographers did not have such long walls. Various authors insist on the social hierarchy within the village. In a description from the twentieth century, a ‘manor’ appears within a fortified village; it is much larger than the other residential buildings and it is the only one to have a garden intra muros.²⁷ The village in question measured about 100x110 meters including the walls, and the garden along with the manor (Herrenhaus) roughly 45 by 30 meters, thus a substantial portion of the living space of the village. The villages, or rather manors, which have been found in the Marw oasis and dated to the twelfth century were a bit smaller still: the report says that built

structures [there] comprised a large number of usad’bas, i.e. fortified estates similar to qal‘as. Most of them were almost square in plan (70x75 m on a side). The estates were surrounded by walls and included complexes of dwellings and domestic areas set at opposite corners. Tower-like parts of the dwellings (dings) can be clearly seen at two of the estates.²⁸

Thus, archaeological as well as geographical and ethnographical studies stress that villages of the qal‘a type showed ‘a clear separation of the space for the landlord and for the farmers, with the landlord occupying a much larger area than any single farmer’, and there could be a wall separating the lord’s space from the rest of the village where the peasants lived.²⁹

Villages of the qal‘a type were of very varying size, in the modern period from two to more than 100 families; villages of up to 3000 inhabitants are on record.³⁰ Single farmsteads also could be of the same architectural type – as, indeed, the usad’ba-type settlements in the Marw oasis may have been.

The fortified villages as Lambton saw them were in many cases hamlets attached to the main village, and they were walled ‘for security both against encroachment by raiders and against the depredation of wild animals’; they ‘often consist merely of a walled homestead or qal‘eh in which are quarters for the peasants and their animals with possibly a part reserved for the owner’.³¹ Again, the clear separation between a ‘lordly’ and a ‘peasant’ space in the village becomes evident.

Ehlers states that villages of this type were very common all over Iran, but he remarks that in particular northern Khurasan was a classic site for these settlements, and adds that to the south and east of Mashhad, villages of the qal‘a-type also dominated. In the early twentieth century, Diez mentions that on the road from Astarābād to Sabzawār and in particular around Bujnūrd, villages are fortified, whereas in the regions of mixed Iranian-Turkmen settlement, they are not. Fortified villages were known then as qal‘adih or dihqal‘a.³² Much of the information we have about fortified villages in Khurasan in the pre-Mongol period comes from the two parts of the province which Ehlers also mentions, the north (including the region around Nasā and also Bayhaq, where we have Nasawī and Ibn Funduq as sources) and the south-east (around Jām, with Ghaznawī).

The fortification was useless in the modern period and was often left to decay. Following demographic pressure, sometimes the inner courtyard was more or less filled with buildings.³³ In the twentieth century, villages had begun to spill over the village walls, and in the late 1970s, most of the qal‘a-type villages were either abandoned or else in advanced stages of decline.³⁴ Lambton also describes qal‘a-type settlements as overcrowded in Khurasan (from her personal observations, probably dating back to the 1930s and 40s).³⁵

In the modern period, such villages did not have moats; in the pre-Mongol period, many of them did: Nasawī explicitly says so. He also says that villages had Friday mosques, so that probably they were larger in the pre-Mongol period than in the nineteenth century.³⁶ This is corroborated by a story in Ghaznawī’s hagiographic account of shaykh Aḥmad-i Jām’s life: when Aḥmad wanted to build a khānaqāh in this village where he was living, the timber which his disciples had brought from the mountain forest had been deposited at the door of the Friday mosque, on the way which led to the village gate.³⁷

As we see from Nasawī, the military strength of such fortified villages should not be underestimated. They were able to defend themselves against small groups of aggressors (not all of them nomads), but of course not against regular armies, and the fortifications will have served them above all in inter-village strife and against small-scale raids.

Taken together, thus, the pre-Mongol sources very rarely refer to the architectural shape of villages, but these rare hints seem to support the thesis that there was a high degree of continuity in the overall shape of villages, with, however, some major changes: at least some medieval villages probably were larger or even much larger than the modern ones³⁸ (until the demographic revolution of the nineteenth and twentieth century); and as just stated, they were better fortified. Probably the internal structure of villages was also different to some degree; whereas most villagers must have been at least part-time tillers of the soil, the sources name people who were craftsmen, such as millers or makers of sickles. In Ibn Funduq at least, we also get the impression that notable families – including families who held important offices in towns and cities – still had their (main) residence in the village.³⁹ It seems, however, that not all villages in twelfth century Khurasan were fortified, at least not in the rectangular or square form described for later periods.⁴⁰ In modern times as well, the fortified village was by no means the only type of rural settlement, another important form (in the mid-twentieth century) being a rather open structure, a ‘clustered village’; these tended to be the larger settlements.⁴¹

Villages evidently were not egalitarian, but rather had an internal hierarchy; as Nasawī shows, the ra’īs led them in military matters, and there was a ra’īs in many such villages (if not in every such village). But Nasawī does not give us a clue, however, as to how a ra’īs came into this office, and there is no way of telling, from Nasawī alone, if the ra’īs owned the village or what he owned there, if anything at all.⁴² Starting from these observations, I shall try to assess the functions of rural ru’asā’.

Small towns

The transition from village to market town or small town in general was fluid; no sharp boundaries can be drawn in their architecture. The feature which divided towns from smaller or less important settlements was the ‘citadel’, ark, which was the seat of the governor if there was one in the town. Smaller villages did not have markets, whereas bigger ones did; and towns always had markets.⁴³ Thus, if markets were held in villages, this was a sign that those villages ‘resembled a town’. The same applies regarding the presence of Friday mosques; they normally were an ‘urban’ feature, but could be found also in larger villages which then ‘resembled a town’.⁴⁴ The small towns which we will examine in this contribution probably all had a citadel (even if, in some cases, it is not mentioned); they all had markets and Friday mosques. Small towns are introduced as a separate category here because of their ru’asā’, not because they are intrinsically different from larger villages or larger towns.

Ru’asā’ in larger cities and provinces

It must be remembered that a ra’īs is not a ra’īs. It will be shown that the functions of men called ra’īs in the sources differed, depending on whether they were active in larger cities or provinces, in small towns or in villages. The presentation of the material starts with the larger cities and provinces. Small towns and villages are dealt with in the following sections. Some digressions and meanderings have been inevitable.

In the inshā’-collections, there are several appointments for ru’asā’, most of them appointed over a province or a larger city. They tell us something about what a ra’īs was and what he did in such a context.

On the highest level, the ra’īs could be a delegate and representative of the ruler himself, in particular if he was appointed over central parts of the realm.⁴⁵ We know that there was a sarā-yi riyāsat in Marw under Sanjar; the tax officials were told to cooperate closely, and one of the officials involved was the ra’īs.⁴⁶ A ra’īs of Marw, in a probably idealised fashion, is described as one of the largest landholders in Khurasan, incredibly rich and influential.⁴⁷ In Tabrīz as well (the city came to be a significant centre for the Ildegüzids) there was a ra’īs who is told to cooperate with the new head of the tax administration.⁴⁸ These people without doubt were more or less professional bureaucrats and had nothing in common with rural notables or local lords (at least not in their function as ra’īs). This type of ra’īs has led earlier authors such as Horst to believe that a ra’īs – at least in general – was an official, appointed by a government, and earning his salary by serving it.⁴⁹ This is certainly true for this type of ra’īs and also the provincial ra’īs, but not for the local and village ru’asā’, as we will see below.

Provincial ru’asā’ are also mentioned in inshā’-documents. Thus, in Badī‘ Atabak al-Juwaynī’s ‘Atabat al-kataba, there are two appointments for the riyāsat of Māzandarān (possibly two versions of one appointment). This position was hereditary in the family of the appointee. In both texts, the appointee is an important figure in taxation, and his function in this respect involves at least two major features: he is to oppose the introduction of new taxes⁵⁰, and he is responsible for the sessions in which taxes (no information which kind of taxes) are divided up; they are to be held in his office or residence, the sarā-yi riyāsat.⁵¹ This division of taxes is mentioned in several places, on the provincial as well as the local level, and if it is mentioned, it takes place in the sarā-yi riyāsat.⁵² One of the central tasks of a ra’īs, at least of this type, then, was division and in general local management of the tax collection process.⁵³

In general, this kind of ra’īs seems to be close to the mustawfī, the regional tax manager. In one case, in the town and region of Bisṭām, the two offices are held by one person only.⁵⁴ In another source, the riyāsa is close to the ‘imāda, the function of ‘amīd – this also is a person who assesses and extracts taxes. In this case, the source states that in a given district, there was no one to oversee the tax payments (the office of mu‘āmalat was vacant), and therefore, landowners (arbāb-i amlāk) had lodged a number of complaints and now the appointee is sent out to investigate.⁵⁵

Sometimes, the provincial ra’īs is also responsible for appointing local ru’asā’ and zu‘amā’.⁵⁶ In another appointment deed, however, it seems to be the qadi who appoints the local ru’asā’.⁵⁷ We will see yet other persons who could bring a local ra’īs into his office. Therefore, it is no surprise that the inshā’ documents do not include appointment deeds for ru’asā’ in small towns or villages; if such appointments were indeed written, they were not handed out by the central administration, but by a provincial governor or another official or power-holder on the provincial or regional level.

At least on occasion a regional or provincial ra’īs could also be in charge of some types of regional expenditure, privileges and tax reductions or exemptions.⁵⁸ In particular, payments or grants for religious scholars came into the competence of the sarā-yi riyāsat.⁵⁹ This can also be seen in texts which originated farther west, and in one case it is a person who is called a za‘īm who is to hand out a stated sum to a scholar.⁶⁰

So far, the evidence discussed has shown that the level on which a ra’īs was active was either a province (Māzandarān, Gurgān) or the capital of a large realm or another noted town (Marw, Tabrīz, Iṣfahān, Nishapur⁶¹; Sarakhs, Bisṭām). Other towns are also mentioned, some of them smaller: Sāwa in central Iran⁶², Urmiya in the northwest,⁶³ Ashnuh in the same region⁶⁴, and Ṭūs in the east; the Ṭirimāḥī family were hereditary ru’asā’ in Ṭūs or of the Ṭūs region.⁶⁵ Sarakhs in particular is relatively well documented; the position was hereditary there early on, even if the family ties cannot be established over more than a couple of generations.⁶⁶ There apparently was a family in Gurgān that held the position of ra’īs in that city or province on an hereditary basis.⁶⁷ Some of these men may however have held positions in the field of religious sciences and teaching. Alongside their tasks in the process of assessing and collecting taxes, eventually dividing up standard and extra taxes, urban ru’asā’ also could be told to exert control over the market.⁶⁸ Military functions of ru’asā’ are not mentioned in the appointment deeds in the inshā’-collections.

To summarise: urban ru’asā’ of this type seem quite close to the administration, and many of them certainly were appointed from above. Thus, they may have been officials; some of them, however, apparently had deeper roots in the region, and a principle of heredity was accepted in a number of cases. There were, moreover, families of ru’asā’ – this alone makes one question the purely administrative nature of the ra’īs. On the one hand, the riyāsa evidently was an office, but on the other hand, this office could be part of a family’s patrimony, and the ruler was by no means free to appoint whomever he saw fit. In all, it is for the urban ru’asā’ of this type that the ‘mediating’ mode is best attested.

Local ru’asā’: small towns

In narrative sources of different kinds (chronicles, regional histories, hagiography), ru’asā’ of small towns are sometimes mentioned. They are interesting because they seem to express or to negotiate the political alignments of the town in times of need, in particular if the imperial power is absent or a separation from that power is intended. The following small towns are on record with their ru’asā’: Mayhana (in northern Khurasan, close to Sarakhs);⁶⁹ Khusrawjird in the Bayhaq region; Ṭabas⁷⁰ and Turaythīth/Turshīz in Quhistān; and, in less detail, Būzjān, in Nishapur province. As an example from western Iran, a story about Jurbādhaqān will be adduced.

I start with Mayhana. This town and its ra’īs are mentioned in a hagiographic source, Ibn Munawwar’s account of the life, sayings and miraculous deeds of Abū Sa‘īd-i Abū’l-Khayr (357–440/967–1048). The ra’īs was Khwāja Ḥamawayh. Mayhana was the town where Abū Sa‘īd had been born, and he returned there after his long years in Nishapur, towards the end of his life, so that he was there when the Seljuqs conquered Khurasan in the late 1030s. At first, the people in Mayhana were not in favour of Abū Sa‘īd, possibly because he caused some kind of factionalism. Therefore, the ra’īs decided to get rid of him, and he invited a learned scholar from Sarakhs who was to hold a public disputation with Abū Sa‘īd. But the shaykh simply said that he was not competent in those questions.⁷¹

Ghaznawī’s account of the life and miraculous deeds of shaykh Aḥmad-i Jām also shows a ra’īs trying to prevent a Sufi shaykh from settling in his town. The place is Būzjān (in Nishapur province, the main settlement qaṣaba in the district of Jām)⁷². The ra’īs there was called Abū’l-‘Abbās-i Wakīl. This man went to see his superior, the emir of the region (shahr), and complained of shaykh Aḥmad. Thus, if wakīl in that man’s name is in fact related to his social position, he may have been a ‘representative’ of that emir, and he would probably owe his position as ra’īs to this very fact – he then would have been appointed by the emir (who may or may not have been a muqṭa‘ in this district). This ra’īs then made a public speech and incited the people to resist Aḥmad (and eventually to throw him out): This stranger, he claimed, is destroying the town; because of the factionalism (ta‘aṣṣub) he brought, there is nothing but strife. The result of course was that the emir, who at first had seemed to back the ra’īs, turned out to be a follower of Aḥmad’s, and the end was that the ra’īs contracted a mortal illness.⁷³ Both stories show that a ra’īs could be interested above all in keeping the place quiet and not letting factionalism gain too much ground – we should remember that factionalism was rife in Khurasan in the twelfth century, and that many cities and even smaller towns were split into mortally opposed factions, often coming in madhhab garb.⁷⁴ But in trying to keep control of newcomers, they evidently did not dispose of means of coercion.

Other stories about Mayhana belong in the context of the Seljuq invasion. Mayhana had decided early on to join the Seljuqs; the source says this was because the Ghaznavid ruler of the time, Mas‘ūd, spent his life in wanton and illicit amusements. It is therefore the Ghaznavid ruler and not the Seljuqs who laid siege to the town, whither many people had sought refuge. The townspeople fought valiantly, in particular a group of bowmen who shot very precisely and killed a lot of Mas‘ūd’s soldiers. Yet in the end, the ra’īs went out for peace talks, and a kind of truce was concluded; but this involved the extradition of those bowmen, who were punished: the Ghaznavid had their right hands chopped off.⁷⁵ The story then immediately turns to the decisive battle, evidently the battle at Dandānaqān, not far away from Mayhana, where Mas‘ūd definitively lost control of Khurasan.⁷⁶ This defeat is styled as a result of the harsh treatment of the valiant townspeople at Mayhana, who in a way had been under the shaykh’s care and protection.

The following stories are also set in the context of the Seljuq invasion: in two more accounts, the ra’īs is shown criticising Abū Sa‘īd, but without being punished in return; Abū Sa‘īd explained why he had had to act the way he did.⁷⁷ The next stage was reached when the ra’īs became a follower (murīd) of Abū Sa‘īd; he contributed to a big dinner-party that Abū Sa‘īd wanted to organise in honour of a Transoxianan dervish who was passing through Mayhana on his way back from Mecca. The ra’īs gave 100 mann⁷⁸ of bread together with what went with the bread. The main expenses, however, went on things which were unavailable in a provincial town such as Mayhana; these were taken on by a group of merchants who had made a vow to that effect.⁷⁹ In the end, the ra’īs apparently participated regularly in the shaykh’s gatherings, and his daughter came as well.⁸⁰ When a young man came – he said he was from Khotan in Eastern Turkistān – and wanted to see the mihtar-i Mayhana, people directed him to the ra’īs, but the guest then said that he had seen a dream in which he had been told to go to Mayhana in order to learn Islam from the mihīn-i Mayhana – this evidently was not the ra’īs, but the shaykh.⁸¹ In this last anecdote, the shaykh convincingly demonstrated that he was the most important person in town, and the report that he sent his servant Ḥasan to Ḥamawayh to enquire about the latter’s health and about what was going on is not only polite, but serves the same purpose. On a very cold day, Ḥasan came all the same, even if he did not say more than that it was very cold outside – the shaykh did not want Ḥamawayh to get the impression that the shaykh did not think of him on such days.⁸²

In these reports, the ra’īs in Mayhana has a military and political function: it is he who goes out for peace talks; he sees himself as responsible for the inner tranquility of the town and therefore thinks he should prevent trouble-mongers from coming and settling there, including Sufi shaykhs; and he is involved in hospitality. A fiscal function or a position as landowner is not mentioned explicitly, however; that Ḥamawayh was a landowner can only be deduced from the fact that he is able to contribute a substantial amount of bread for a dinner-party. This bread evidently was made from his stocks of grain and baked at his sarā – even if this sarā is never mentioned.

Taken together, the stories make it clear that Ḥamawayh in Mayhana was a really influential and even powerful man; we do not learn who had taken the decision that Mayhana would join the Seljuqs and leave the Ghaznavid empire, but he must have had a hand in that. No local governor is on record for Mayhana, but if indeed there was none, that may be explained by the exceptional situation in the late 1030s. If left alone, a small town like Mayhana still had one authority left, and that was the ra’īs.

Ḥamawayh the ra’īs is seen negotiating and arranging the political allegiance of the town. This was something which in larger cities rested with the urban notables as a group.⁸³ In small towns, it seems to have been the ra’īs – and more or less he alone – who had this power. This is well attested in the ways in which the Ismā‘īlī regional state in Quhistān originated and spread.

The beginnings of the Ismā‘īlī state in Quhistān go back to successful propaganda, but its success finally depended on the support of the locally powerful men. In a place near Qā’in, a local leader (mutaqaddim) had accepted their teachings, and thus they grew strong. From the start, thus, it is a local leader whose decision makes the difference.⁸⁴ The next steps are likewise explained by the initiative of a locally powerful figure. Descendants of the Banū Sīmjūr had remained influential in the region,⁸⁵ in the relevant period a man called Munawwar. This man is styled as ra’īs in or of Ṭabas (the town and/or the region), a man ‘whom the people obeyed, elite as well as commoners’.⁸⁶ The pro-Ismā‘īlī report in Rashīd al-Dīn is more explicit; the descendants of the Sīmjūriyya are presented as lords of the citadel at Ṭabas.⁸⁷ The acting Sīmjūrī then quarrelled with the Seljuq emir who had been sent there, Qïzïl Sarïgh, over personal matters.⁸⁸ For that reason, and not out of religious motives, the ra’īs and lord of Ṭabas joined the Ismā‘īlīs. This was a breakthrough for them in Quhistān.

This was not the only case in which locally powerful persons whom the sources call ra’īs decided to go over to the Ismā‘īlīs (and carried the allegiance of their constituencies); they could expand their rule to Ṭuraythīth (Turshīz) because the ‘amīd (probably a man involved in the assessment and extraction of taxes) there, who had held the position of ra’īs in this district on a hereditary basis, finally chose to ally himself with them.⁸⁹

A particularly rich source for rural ru’asā’ is Ibn Funduq. This is because his book is in large part a list of noble and notable families, and Ibn Funduq does not omit the offices and positions they held, often as part of the family heritage or patrimony. There was a noble family, the Fulādwand, of Dailamī origins, who had come to the region under the early Ghaznavids (that is, probably around 1000). Since then, they had been ra’īs of the entire region until the days of the author (mid-twelfth century). One of the functions which the source shows is military – to protect the region against Ismā‘īlī raids.⁹⁰ One of their descendants (who died in 527/1132–3) is therefore known under the title amīr isfahsālār. Another one (who was killed in 497/1103–4 during an Ismā‘īlī raid) bears the title al-ḥākim al-ra’īs; it is not altogether clear whether ḥākim could be synonymous with ra’īs, but in this case at least, both titles seem close enough to go with one person.⁹¹ This family had a sarā, where also their ‘office’ was, the dār al-riyāsa; this was situated in Khusrawjird, one of the more important settlements in the district.⁹² Ibn al-Athīr mentions an old castle in Khusrawjird for the mid-twelfth century – thus in Ibn Funduq’s lifetime – which did not want to surrender to the post-Seljuq lord of Nishapur, Ay Aba.⁹³ There is no information as to the relationship between the Fulādwand family and this castle.

Another family served as hereditary ḥukkām of a district called Mazīnān.⁹⁴ Their ancestor also had come to the region under Maḥmūd the Ghaznavid, thus in the late tenth or early eleventh century, and had been given the riyāsa of Mazīnān as a delegate for the governor of Khurasan province, the Khwāja ra’īs ṣāḥib-dīwān Sūrī.⁹⁵ Apparently, the family had managed to keep the post into the times of the author.

Thus, the ru’asā’ of such small towns had important political functions. They were responsible for keeping the internal peace in their town, and that meant that they tried to control who settled there, even if they did not dispose of any means of coercion. Moreover, they decided, more or less on their own, about the political allegiance of the place, in particular in times of crisis, when the imperial government had become shaky, or when they came to the conclusion, for whatever reason, that a change would be better for them. Such ru’asā’ sometimes hailed from older families; in some cases, their pedigree can be followed over a number of generations. Even if an ancestor had first been appointed to the post, no such appointments are on record for later generations; the Fulādwand ru’asā’ at Khusrawjird, the ru’asā’ of Mazīnān, and the Sīmjūrī descendants, lords of Ṭabas, are examples of families who had struck roots in the region; in Turaythīth likewise, the position was hereditary as it was also in some bigger cities. For Ḥamawayh, the ra’īs of Mayhana, no such information is available. This political function also carried military implications – the ru’asā’ of small towns could also be responsible for protection and defence.

Jurbādhaqān was a small town, a bulayda, between Iṣfahān and Hamadān; it was fortified with walls and a citadel. The ra’īs there (from the context, in the early thirteenth century) was a man called Jamāl Bādih. The story reports that he had made a rule of never going to see the governor or ruler of the province. The governors tolerated this, saying that it would not be a good idea to molest him. But when the Khwarazmshah Muḥammad conquered the region, he sent one of his sons there together with a governor called ‘Imād al-Mulk. This man was told about the ra’īs at Jurbādhaqān and his habit of not coming to see the governor. ‘Imād al-Mulk was furious and bade the ra’īs come immediately. The ra’īs did not comply, however, and therefore the Khwarazmian governor had to take military action against him. He took the town quite easily, but the ra’īs continued to resist from the citadel; after some days of fighting, he fled. The governor had the citadel destroyed and a lot of inhabitants killed in revenge for the casualties his troops had sustained. Shortly after, the Mongols came, and ‘Imād al-Mulk was killed fleeing; the Khwarazmian prince was killed as well. And then, the ra’īs came back, and assumed his position as before.⁹⁶

This is an extreme example, and the author makes it clear that this was not the rule: in general, small town ru’asā’ probably did not behave that way. But it shows how far the ra’īs of a small town could go if circumstances allowed and all the regional and imperial powers were weak. Jurbādhaqān may be extreme, but it shares all the significant features with other small towns: the real authority locally is the ra’īs; this man does not necessarily rely on appointment deeds from a sultan; he commands the military potential of the town. In the late twelfth and early thirteenth century, regional and imperial powers had to come to terms with these local figures, not only in western Iran.

Village ru’asā’: material from central and western Iran. Fiscal function

As stated above, local ru’asā’ are mentioned very rarely in the inshā’-collections stemming from the central Seljuq or Khwarazmian administration, possibly because the local figures, and in particular the rural ones, were not appointed by royal decree but by provincial figures – or did not have an appointment deed altogether.

The following cases come from the inshā’ collection known as the Mukhtārāt min al-rasā’il. Many pieces in it deal with the Iṣfahān region and other regions in western and north-western Iran. It is not self-evident that the social structure in the western Iranian countryside was in every respect comparable to the situation in Khurasan.⁹⁷ Therefore, I present the material from this source separately. The documents in this collection go down to the local level to an extent not found in the Khurasanian and Khwarazmian sources with their imperial perspective, but at the same time, with the caveat just stated – conclusions should be drawn from this material only if supported by Khurasanian evidence.

In the Mukhtārāt, some documents show that local ru’asā’ were involved in the process of tax assessment and tax collection, and therefore they had to know about tax privileges, and in particular they had to respect exemptions from taxes; properties could enjoy fiscal privileges by royal decree or by tradition.⁹⁸ Local ru’asā’ had to cooperate with local iqṭā‘-holders and to hand over the taxes which previously had gone to the diwan, to a freshly appointed man’s representatives.⁹⁹ In one case, a dihkhudā and ra’īs is told that his village has now (the document is dated to 587/1191) been allotted to a tax farmer, and that he has to hand over the tax emoluments to that person, and moreover to cooperate with him in rebuilding the infrastructure and especially the irrigation system (kārīz).¹⁰⁰ In this particular case, we can assume that the dihkhudā and ra’īs was a large landowner and probably the owner of the village in question. In another case from the same source, the ra’īs probably is not the owner, but the diwan: the village is allotted to the diwan of a princess or the queen (khātūn), and the ra’īs is in charge of collecting the taxes; he is told not to introduce new taxes, but there is a promise of – probably military – support if the peasants do not understand reason and resist.¹⁰¹

In another text from the same source, the writer tells his addressee that in the village of Wādhanān, the ru’asā’ and important people (buzurgān) have decided to profit from the opportunity and to complain that they have been ill treated by the peasants (no details given, but shares which the landlords claimed and the peasants were unwilling to give come to mind immediately), and the addressee is reminded that it is one of the main tasks of the regime to protect and support the old families.¹⁰²

In yet another document, the ru’asā’ of an unnamed village are informed that the rent (irtifā‘) of a given hamlet or group of fields (mazra‘a) belongs to the diwan, and that the diwan has taken a decision regarding the parts of the harvest to which the diwan has a claim. They are to bring the peasants (ra‘āyā) together, make the decision or decree (qarār) known to them, and then help the ustuwār (apparently another title for a village notable, not found in Khurasanian sources) to bring it to where it belongs.¹⁰³

The two last quoted documents are remarkable because they presuppose a plurality of ru’asā’ in one village. This could not be the case if the ra’īs were just an official in charge of helping the tax administration – there would be no need to have more than one in a village, and indeed it would not serve administrative purposes to multiply the office-holders. Therefore, it is very unlikely that the people called ru’asā’ in these two documents held any ‘official’ position. The ru’asā’ in these documents, particularly if the term goes together with buzurgān or another generic term used for notables, probably were just that: rural notables, important land-owners coming from respected families. Thus, it seems probable that the villages in question were rather large, and that there was room in them for more than one well-to-do landowner, and thus probably not of the qal‘a type. Yet, the ru’asā’ still serve as mediators between the diwan and the peasants, and they are in contact – directly or indirectly – with the state administration.

Apart from that, the local ru’asā’ in this set of documents are to help the tax administration by putting their local knowledge (including the customary rules, the traditional exemptions and so forth) to good use. It is this local knowledge that enables them to oppose the introduction of new taxes and rules.

In the Khurasani material, fiscal functions of village ru’asā’ are mentioned much less frequently. Yet, we have some instances in the pre-Mongol sources where a local official was instrumental in dividing up taxes in his district. He was called a pīshwā, and the district was Juwayn. In a letter he wrote to the central administration, he reported that the people there were quite happy with their mustawfī. Now an additional tax had been levied, and thanks to the good cooperation between the pīshwā and the mustawfī, it had been paid in full; but any other taxation would now be ruinous and the peasants would then leave the villages.¹⁰⁴ In another letter, the same writer asked for tax exemption for the year because of crop failure.¹⁰⁵ It is uncertain what kind of position this man held in Juwayn; the term pīshwā is close enough to ra’īs; and in other cases as well, the ra’īs has been seen to cooperate closely with the mustawfī. In all, thus, there seem to be no essential differences in this regard between western and central Iran on the one hand and Khurasan on the other.

Village ru’asā’: social functions. Hospitality

In other sources, we see the rural ru’asā’ as well-to-do people who have a residence which the sources call a sarā or the dār al-ra’īs. When the early Seljuq vizier Kundurī feared for his life, he fled, and came to Marwarrūdh where he ‘stayed at the dār ra’īsihā’.¹⁰⁶ Thus, important people as well sometimes had to rely on a ra’īs for hospitality; Marw al-Rūdh is a small town rather than a village, and thus, again, the transition between small town and large village is seen to be fluid. If no hostel is available for travellers in a given village, or if the travellers do not want to stay in the hostel, they go to the dār al-ra’īs. Yāqūt transmits a verse on a village in Khwarazm (which is otherwise completely unknown): ‘We came to Timurtāsh on Thursday * and we spent the night there at the dār al-ra’īs’.¹⁰⁷

Other instances come from hagiography. When the famous Sufi shaykh Abū Sa‘īd once travelled to Ṭūs, he approached a village called Rafīqān (also unknown from other sources). He sent some of his companions to find out where the group could spend the night, possibly at a hostel (a khānaqāh), but they discovered that the village did not have such an institution. Moreover, the inhabitants were all bad people, robbers and evildoers, and probably no licit food could be obtained there. The only exception seemed to be a teacher who consequently offered his home. But the shaykh insisted on staying with the ra’īs.¹⁰⁸ The point of the story is that the ra’īs was very much intrigued and also flattered to have such a guest and subsequently repented; for us, however, it is more important to see that indeed rural ru’asā’ had larger houses than the rest of the villagers, and that probably travellers used to stop there for the night and the ra’īs had to feed them. Here again, we are reminded of the earlier dahāqīn, and in particular the story of a dihqān in the Ṭūs region lodging and feeding Hārūn al-Rashīd and his cortège for months.¹⁰⁹

In another case, shaykh Abū Sa‘īd travelled back home from an attempt to make it to Mecca (he had not left Khurasan in fact), and the whole group spent one night at a mihtar’s place (another synonym for ra’īs). This man not only offered his sarā for the night, but also arranged an opulent dinner party.¹¹⁰ The next day, the dervishes needed an agreeable place to spend the morning in mystical exercises, and the mihtar offered his garden (bāgh).¹¹¹

A well-to-do ra’īs who presided over the village of Bushkhān (probably in the region of Nasā) was cured from a sickness by some bread crumbs which the shaykh had given the disciple whom he had sent there. The ra’īs then asked to buy one of the crumbs, and paid 30 dinars for it; for that sum, the Sufi group built a khānaqāh there.¹¹²

The house of the ra’īs as a hospitable place is also mentioned in other sources. It is possibly Niẓām al-Mulk who best describes the ra’īs in this capacity: somebody came to see the vizier and said that he was the ra’īs in a given district (nāḥiyat), that the door of his house (khāna) had always been open for guests, travellers, and scholars, and that he [thus] had served men and God. This apparently was how rural ru’asā’ saw themselves in the Seljuq period or how the central administration thought they should work.¹¹³

Thus, these people, rural notables or local lords, were richer – even much richer – than ordinary villagers. It was a privilege and an honour to house many guests – in these cases, the Khurasanian ra’īs is not unlike a bedouin shaykh who also has a guest-house (or tent) and is the only one in a given location to have one. It is tempting to look at modern times again, see above (at notes 23–26) about the outward form of these villages: in many cases, a ‘lordly’ space was separated from the ‘peasant’ space. This is not to claim that twentieth-century villages resembled twelfth-century ones, and no statement is made about a ‘lordly’ space in the usad’ba-type structures in the northern Marw oasis. As stated above, the question of the size, make-up, and inner structure of eastern Iranian fortified or open villages in the immediate pre-Mongol period must be left to future archaeological research.

To continue the presentation of the historical evidence, we now turn to more indirect forms, stories, most of which should not be taken as ‘historically true’, in which rural ru’asā’ make an appearance. Thus, in Ibn al-Athīr, there is an anecdote which shows the za‘īm of a village in the region of Khabūshān (northern Khurasan) in a similar function. Ay Aba (the lord of Nishapur after Sanjar’s death, ruled there 1157–1174) was once taken prisoner by a Ghuzz warrior, who however did not recognise him. Ay Aba then tried to fool the Ghuzz and told him that he would give him much gold if he let him free. The Ghuzz, however, wanted to see the gold, and Ay Aba led him to a village where he said he had hidden his treasure. When they came to the walls of the village (jidār), Ay Aba quickly climbed it (he was a hero, remember that village walls could be up to six and even ten meters high in the nineteenth century) and the Ghuzz evidently could not follow him. In the village, Ay Aba found a miller whom he knew and bade him lead him to the za‘īm. The miller did as he was told, and then Ay Aba asked the za‘īm to give him a horse with which he would be able to reach Nishapur.¹¹⁴ This narration is not to be taken as a factual report. What is important for us here is the function of the za‘īm as the rural notable or local lord – he is the one whom you ask for a favour, to house you or to help you with a mount if hard pressed.

Village ru’asā’. How to become a ra’īs

It is again in a hagiographic source that we find the most complex and probably most realistic picture of how rural ru’asā’ worked. Sadīd al-Dīn Ghaznawī’s account of the life and deeds of shaykh Aḥmad-i Jām is one of the very rare sources where rural realities come to light at all, among them the rural ra’īs.

The first anecdote is about getting appointed as a ra’īs. The scene is set in the village where Aḥmad was living, Nāmaq in the district of Jām, Nishapur province. A man called Bū l-Ḥasan ‘Īsā, a khwāja and son of khwājas (in the context of the source, a khwāja is a learned man, but most of the time also a landowner) wanted to get appointed as ra’īs of the village. For that purpose, he had been to see the ‘Amīd-i Khurasan (this must be the head of the tax administration of the province, a really highly placed person, and possibly not of easy access) several times, and he had also spent much money (on the trips, but probably in bribes as well), but to no avail: he had not succeeded in getting the diploma. In the meantime, he was in fact doing the work of the ra’īs and this had been going on for quite a while. He then asked the shaykh to appoint him as ra’īs and offered a public repentance (tawba) in return. The shaykh accepted and had him summon all the villagers to his sarā. There the shaykh announced to the assembly that Bū l-Ḥasan had been made ra’īs and that they therefore had to obey him. This in itself would be interesting enough (if only because no one asked to see the written diploma), but the surprise comes at the end: the shaykh went to see another man, the other ra’īs, and told him not to worry because he had asked Bū l-Ḥasan to let him and his family alone.¹¹⁵ Thus, after this event, there were two men in the village who could call themselves ra’īs, and we do not learn of any difficulties this may have occasioned.

Village ru’asā’. Dealing with the outside world

We meet Bū l-Ḥasan the ra’īs another time, when the village had decided to send a delegation to the Ismā‘īlīs at Ṭabas. The Ismā‘īlīs were asking the khums (literally, one fifth; this was the Ismā‘īlī land tax), and at the same time, Sanjar’s tax collectors also were taking in the kharāj (the regular ‘Sunni’ land tax, possibly around one-fifth of the harvest). The village could not pay twice, and the villagers thought they could come to an agreement with the Ismā‘īlīs (apparently, they had no hope of negotiating their tax burdens with the Seljuq authorities) and sent a delegation to the Ismā‘īlī headquarters at Ṭabas. But then they learned that Sanjar had come to Nishapur (much closer to them than Marw), and they were very much afraid; it was Bū l-Ḥasan in particular who lamented that Sanjar would have them all killed. The shaykh therefore was asked to send the delegation a supernatural message so that they turned back.¹¹⁶ Interestingly, in the village in question (Nāmaq) it apparently was another person who was in charge of collecting the kharāj, a man called Khwāja ‘Amīd Ibrāhīm-i Sāwardī.¹¹⁷

The point here is that a village, under the leadership of its ra’īs, could try to find its way between two contesting powers of which one, the Seljuq empire, was rather distant whereas the other one, the Quhistānī Ismā‘īlīs, was close enough; they evidently were to be taken seriously as a regional power. It is the ra’īs, again, who is the spokesman of the village in matters of taxation, but in this case, it is not taxation alone: it was a kind of submission delegation which the villagers sent to Ṭabas, and in doing so they knew full well that they were leaving the imperial polity, Sanjar’s empire, for the regional power of Quhistān, and therefore had to fear the sultan’s wrath. The ra’īs acted with the consent of his constituency (at least the other notables but not shaykh Aḥmad). In this case, the village ra’īs behaved in very much the same way as the ru’asā’ of small towns: he represented the village, and this included changing allegiances in very particular cases. The village ra’īs in this story, though, does not decide alone: there appear to have been deliberations about which course of action to take.

‘Going Ismā‘īlī’ apparently was an option also in the border region between the territories controlled by Alamūt and the Seljuq empire. In a village called Shayzar (next to Rayy) the ra’īs and a number of other people had adopted the Ismā‘iī teaching. They were harassed because of that, so they went to Alamūt, and were given a castle (a diz called Manṣūrābād).¹¹⁸ It also happened the other way round: in Qaṣrān, another village in the region of Rayy, the ra’īs and his son were killed in an Ismā‘īlī raid because they had opposed the Ismā‘īlīs.¹¹⁹ As stated above, the success of the Quhistānī Ismā‘īlīs may at least partly be due to this freedom of local power-holders to choose and change their allies and even masters; and taken together, in territories close enough to the border to make this an option, even villages could change sides, and it was the ra’īs who decided.

Village ru’asā’: keeping the peace

Village ru’asā’ are not seen distributing land among villagers in the pre-Mongol sources. This does not mean that they were not in fact doing just that, the sources simply do not give any information about redistribution of lands. But there is one account of a ra’īs who tried, together with the provincial fiscal administration, to deny somebody access to his village: In a hagiographic source from Fārs, one of the transmitters relates that he was originally from a village called Juftaq, but because of the taxes he had left and gone to another village, Dawān. One day the mihtar of that village caught him and brought him to the ḥākim (here probably: governor) of the district at Kāzarūn who was a Zoroastrian, and there the mihtar offered to pay one third out of that man’s tax arrears on condition that he go back to Juftaq.¹²⁰ We can only speculate on the background (maybe there were no shares to be distributed in Dawān and therefore the newcomer was unwelcome), but we see the mihtar in a powerful position which possibly is also linked to the distribution of shares. At the end, however, the man stayed on in Dawān.

This story is very similar to the ones told about ru’asā’ in small towns. In all these stories, the ra’īs tries to control who settles down in his town or village; in all the stories, he cannot use violent means or threat to do so; in some of the stories, he then turns to superior authorities to arrange things according to his ideas. It does not matter that he fails; it is the social function of keeping the peace which is evident in all the stories, and also the limits of the ra’īs’s power.

The local ra’īs or mihtar also was responsible for not letting inter-village strife get out of control. When the two villages of Ma‘dābād and Kārīz (again in the district of Jām) clashed and one man had been killed in the fighting (we do not learn from which side the victim was), the authorities (here: lashkargāh) appointed shaykh Aḥmad-i Jām as arbitrator. The Ma‘dābādīs however did not comply, and therefore they had to find out that a group of twenty military slaves under command of a sālār were on their way to kill the mihtar of that village and to exact 7000 dinars as fine.¹²¹ This did not happen because the shaykh then intervened, but still it is remarkable that the story takes it for granted that the authorities held the mihtar responsible for keeping the peace, and that it was he who would suffer first if he failed to do so.

Rural ru’asā’ – landowners?

As stated in the introduction, one of the most important points is whether village ru’asā’ were landowners, and more precisely whether they owned the villages where they lived. In general, it is clear that nobody could claim and maintain a leading position in a village without being a landowner, and an important one, so that all the men whom the sources introduce as ru’asā’ probably were landowners. But there is also direct evidence: Yāqūt says so without hesitation in his explication for the Persian ‘Sāmānkhudāt’ (the title under which the ancestors of the Sāmānids were known): ‘the ru’asā’ of villages are called dihkhudā because dih is the term for a village and khudā is the owner as if someone says owner of a village’.¹²² But if one looks for explicit support for that statement, the record is not overwhelming. In the preceding paragraphs, only a relatively small number of rural ru’asā’ could be identified as owners with any degree of certitude, among them a man who is called a dihkhudā and a ra’īs at the same time (above at note 100); the Fulādwand family in the Bayhaq region (above at note 90).

The following examples can be added to the record, all of them from Sam‘ānī’s Ansāb; the point is that landowners appear in this source only in their qualities of transmitters of ḥadīth and not in their own right. There also is a certain overlap with dihqān,¹²³ and it seems that some of the older dahāqīn are also termed ra’īs in this source. The first example is Abū l-Qāsim ‘Alī b. Abī Naṣr Aḥmad al-Shābarābādī, one of the villages in the Marw oasis, and he was ‘one of the ru’asā’ of this village and its leaders’.¹²⁴ He died after 530/1135–6, but he is not explicitly called a landowner. Another one was Abū l-Fatḥ Mas‘ūd b. Sahl b. Ḥamak al-Ḥamakī of Nishapur (the nisba refers to an ancestor, not to a place). He was ‘one of the noted ru’asā’, a very rich man’, and in his youth led a life in debauchery, but finally repented and spent much of his money in charity. He died after 478/1085–6.¹²⁵ With another one, one suspects that he was a landowner, but he is a ra’īs because he was a high-ranking member of the royal (Qarakhanid) bureaucracy: Abū Bakr Muḥammad b. al-Qāsim al-‘Imrānī was from the village of Kasaba in the region of Nasaf in Transoxiana, held important positions in the administration in Samarqand, but retired when he was old and spent the rest of his life transmitting ḥadīth; he died at age 83 in 513/1119–20.¹²⁶ A parallel between dahāqīn and ru’asā’ is explicitly made in the last example: Muḥammad b. Aḥmad […] al-Kāraznī (who died earlier than 370/980–1) was ‘one of the dahāqīn of Kārazn and one of the ru’asā’ there’.¹²⁷

More examples come from Ibn Funduq. The ‘sons of the Turk’ (awlād al-Turk) family has a short entry. One of their representatives is the za‘īm in or of a village called Abārī.¹²⁸ The Mujāhidiyān family, descended from the famous commentator of the Qur’an,¹²⁹ came to be ḥukkām in or of a village called Bāshtīn, and they still held that position when the book was written.¹³⁰ Thus, in Ibn Funduq the position of ra’īs or za‘īm or ḥākim (if they refer to the same kinds of activity) of a small town, a rural district, or a village, is often hereditary within well-known families, who hold this position over many generations. It is nowhere stated, however, that a given ra’īs was at the same time a large landowner and that he owned the particular place where he was ra’īs. This is not improbable, but the source does not offer any clear evidence on this question. Ibn Funduq does show one ra’īs who did acquire vast landholdings, but unfortunately he does not tell us whether he held the position of ra’īs in the village(s) which was/were his property.¹³¹ The notable families in Ibn Funduq are all more or less great landowners; some of them are said to have owned vast stretches of land, sometimes an entire district (rub‘). But these people are not automatically termed ra’īs, and therefore it is improbable that Ibn Funduq used ra’īs for any large landowner. Thus, in Ibn Funduq, the title is linked to a set of activities, in fiscal and in military matters, and is not generally used for rich landowners who do not hold such an ‘office’.

To conclude the presentation of the evidence, another direct statement that ru’asā’ were landowners comes from a rather unexpected source, Najm al-Dīn Rāzī’s religious treatise Mirṣād al-‘ibād. In a section called ‘On the spiritual progress of leaders, landowners and crop-sharing peasants’, he deals with the spiritual merits of agriculture as a licit trade. He distinguishes three groups: the first are ‘leaders (ru’asā’) and landowners who own wealth and property and need crop-sharing peasants, helpers, bailiffs and hired labourers who may engage on their behalf in agriculture’.¹³² The situation which Rāzī apparently took for typical thus involved (absentee) landlords for whom he uses ru’asā’ and dahāqīn; they cultivated their land-holdings with either sharecroppers or with hired labourers; for control of the production (and probably also for taking in the rent) they used overseers whom Rāzī calls mubāshirān (‘bailiffs’ in the quoted translation).

Altogether, the evidence for the rural ru’asā’ being landowners, and in particular owners of the villages where they lived and were ra’īs, is strong enough. Some rural ru’asā’ surely were heirs of the dahāqīn in this respect, too, and they perhaps were the only landowners in their village or even owned more than one village. But in other villages, in particular where we have a plurality of ru’asā’, things cannot have been so simple. Patterns of landownership probably varied locally. It is not possible so far to link any pattern of landholding to the ‘fortified village’ and another one to the ‘clustered’ village. These questions, however, are far beyond the scope of this contribution; the evidence quoted here, however, makes it clear that private ownership of land was not really exceptional, and that a stratum of private landowners can be said to have existed (at least) down to the Mongol invasion. Last but not least, of course, many of the ru’asā’ who appear as heads of local madhhab groups or as officials in larger towns or in provinces, also could have been landowners even if this is not made so explicit. These people then would have been absentee landlords quite in keeping with what Rāzī wrote.

Village ru’asā’ among other village notables

Ghaznawī’s hagiography also allows some insight into the rural ‘elite’ in general. In a village called Bīzad, ‘Uthmān was ra’īs, but of dubious mores; he was reported to break the fast in Ramadan with wine. He did not want to repent, and as we might expect, he had an accident shortly after, a serious one, so that people were afraid that he would die. The shaykh learned about that when he was dining with sipahsālār ‘Umar (whom we will meet again) at the latter’s home. The ra’īs was the son-in-law or brother-in-law (dāmād) of another local notable, the katkhudā, and this man had married his wife’s sister to the shaykh, so that there were marital ties amongst the three of them, the ra’īs, the katkhudā and the shaykh. It was the katkhudā who asked for his in-law’s life, and the shaykh agreed to forgive him on condition that the ra’īs repented.¹³³

There is no clue about the relative position of the katkhudā and the ra’īs in this village or in general. The story shows, however, that in such villages there could be a small number of notable families who intermarried and who held all positions of influence and prestige among them. Marital ties with ra’īs families were important for Aḥmad (who had become a big landowner, and his sons likewise had acquired large landholdings). One of the last stories in the book is about a young girl, aged only fourteen, whom Aḥmad – who was past eighty at that point – wanted to marry because, as he said, he had been promised a son by this girl. The father of that girl, the ra’īs of Ṣāghū (the qaṣaba or central settlement in the district), soon gave in to the request, but the mother’s consent was harder to come by. A miracle was needed: the house (again, sarā) broke down (possibly in an earthquake), and Aḥmad – who was waiting nearby – said that he would save the girl if the marriage contract was signed there and then. That was done, people fetched the girl from where Aḥmad had said they would find her, and the same night, the marriage was consummated, sixty times, in order to put an end to all the rumours that Aḥmad was too old to marry a young girl.¹³⁴

Rural ru’asā’ and local officials

In many appointment deeds in the inshā’-collections, ru’asā’ are mentioned alongside other officials in the sabīl, the part where they all are admonished to behave in a certain way. Most of the time, they are simply told to cooperate with the man who is appointed in the document. Not much can be gained from these documents as far as the real interaction between local ru’asā’ and other local officials or local notables is concerned: the documents do not state how local officials and notables should cooperate (they only postulate that they should), and moreover, the texts are normative and do not describe what happened on the ground.

Therefore, again, we have to turn to other types of sources, and not surprisingly, the hagiographies, and in particular Ghaznawī, offer at least a glimpse of the interaction among local notables, ru’asā’ and local officials. Regarding taxation, the ru’asā’ in Ghaznawī are not involved. We have seen one example where besides a ra’īs, there also is an ‘amīd in a village who is taking in the kharāj (see above at note 117). In another story, we meet a man who is otherwise a scholar, who has the ‘amal of three villages; one could suppose that he was some sort of tax-farmer there.¹³⁵ In yet another report, which is set at the village of Kārīz, where one of Aḥmad’s sons was living at that point, a man who is called amīr, wālī and ḥākim was in charge of the kharāj; perhaps he also was the recipient.¹³⁶ Whereas the first two men do not seem to belong to the provincial administration, the amīr and wālī most probably does; he is not called a muqṭa‘, however, and it is not certain whether he was a military man.

A muqṭa‘ appears once in Ghaznawī; it is the muqṭa‘ of Jām, and probably many of the villages where the stories are set belonged to his iqṭā‘. His centre (which the source calls his dār al-mulk, perhaps something like ‘the official place where the mulk is present’) was at the small town of Ṣāghū (later, the shaykh wanted to marry the ra’īs’s daughter, see above at note 134). This man, Ṭughril-tegin-i Sanjarī (we do not learn whether he was a military slave, but this is probable) came into conflict with the shaykh over some timber that he wanted for building a bārgāh (a place where he could receive visitors, not necessarily a palace; a more open construction is also possible). The conflict shows two different ideas about the land: whereas the muqṭa‘ and his men thought that forests and mountains were the sultan’s property, the villagers did not think so. Either the forest where the wood comes from was communal property like the village pastures, or else it was the property of all Muslims.¹³⁷ The muqṭa‘, also called a wālī, is a completely hostile figure and linked to local conditions only through violence, but he seems to reside in his district. No cooperation between the local officials and rural notables and this man is shown at all.¹³⁸

Another position in the fiscal and/or military administration was the shiḥna.¹³⁹ These men were perceived in very much the same way the muqṭa‘ was. Food from the shiḥna was illicit beyond doubt,¹⁴⁰ and so were his gifts;¹⁴¹ a shiḥna is shown debauching the rural youth with wine,¹⁴² a shiḥna beats a man in the marketplace to extort money;¹⁴³ and the most oppressive of all Seljuq princes, Ibrāhīm b. Yinal, once was shiḥna in Nishapur.¹⁴⁴ It is however not evident what the shiḥna is there for, another sign that the workings of the Seljuq administration perhaps were none too clear to the local population.

To conclude this section: the local ru’asā’ were not the only local officials or notables. At least in some places, there was a man in charge of the military activities which elsewhere came within the competence of the ra’īs; the role of the village ra’īs in matters of taxation may have been less prominent than could be assumed with their urban counterparts because other men were involved in this business. Cooperation with the men sent from the imperial or provincial level, the muqṭa‘ in the first place, was no option, and people seem to have avoided contact with them as far as possible. The Turkish soldiery (not necessarily the Turkmen nomads) were feared and hated, and in the countryside, their links to local notables were tenuous at best.

Village ru’asā’: military function

The military function of village ru’asā’ was where this whole study started: the three men in Nasawī are most noted for their military activities, as allies or subordinates of the Mongols or as loyal fighters for the Khwarazmians – or rather, their regional lord, the lord of Nasā. But these people are no exceptions. In the emergency of the Mongol invasion, the village ru’asā’ may have been much more active militarily than in more regular circumstances, but the sources show that even in such circumstances, military leadership in the village devolved on the ra’īs, and sometimes also to another village notable.

One of the examples is the story about ‘Uthmān, the ra’īs in Bīzad, who used to break the fast with wine (see above at note 133). Two more local notables appeared in that story, a katkhudā¹⁴⁵ and a sipahsālār, and of course the shaykh also is a prestigious figure. These men were linked together through marriage, and they formed a small group of elite persons in their village. Out of the three, the sipahsālār reappears in two more reports. One of them is quite telling: People from a neighbouring village were coming, and sipahsālār ‘Umar and other men met at the mosque and agreed that it would be a shame to let them enter the village. They were about to take up arms – probably sticks rather than ironware – when they learnt that the strangers had come as friends of the shaykh; the point is that sipahsālār ‘Umar immediately felt a pain in the hand.¹⁴⁶

This sipahsālār came from a wealthy family; he had an elder brother who fell ill and was close to death. The shaykh asked the father for how much he would buy his son’s life; at first the father offered one thousand dinars (an enormous sum), and the shaykh said ‘He isn’t worth that much’; in the end he ‘bought’ him for seven dinars in coin and five pieces of cotton cloth (karbās) worth something close to three dinars.¹⁴⁷ The relationship between the shaykh and the sipahsālār and his family is not entirely friendly, but that is not the point. This village had a sipahsālār, certainly not a professional soldier, but a member of one of the notable local families. The village also was fortified, otherwise one could not hope to prevent strangers from entering. And the ‘office’ of sipahsālār co-existed with the position of ra’īs; in this case, thus, the ra’īs was not himself the military leader of the village. There is no information about how ‘Umar could have obtained this position.

It should be noted that this is exactly the region where the famous ‘sālār-i Būzjān’ came from: one hundred years before, he had sided with the Seljuqs together with his force of three to four thousand men. The sipahsālār ‘Umar in Ghaznawī looks like a distant small-scale descendant.¹⁴⁸ Like his better-known predecessor, he led the rural population in their military activities, most of the time probably in intervillage strife. We are solidly within the autonomous organisation and activities of the village, the sipahsālār very clearly is not a state official.

A military function of the village ra’īs is mentioned also by Ibn Funduq, even if it is reported from earlier periods. The narration is dated to the times of Ḥamza b. Ādharak the Khārijite¹⁴⁹ and his raid into Khurasan in 213/828–9. When he came to a certain village (called Nawrandagān or something like that), the za‘īm of that village came out and offered submission, declaring that he was of the same sect (madhhab). The Khārijites came into the village and were apparently divided up amongst the inhabitants for the night; but the za‘īm had ordered the village people to kill the Khārijite they had in their house.¹⁵⁰ It is not important whether this really happened¹⁵¹ – it is enough that the za‘īm here again has a kind of political and military function, and that the village was fortified. It should also be recalled that the Fulādwand family was active in defending their home town Khusrawjird against Ismā‘īlī raiders (see above at note 91).

In all, men from ru’asā’ or zu‘amā’ families led the peasants in their fights against aggressors; for such purposes, the rural population evidently did not rely on the ruler’s army or garrisons. Safety on a local level had to be ensured locally, and it was the ru’asā’ (or the local notable families who also held the riyāsa) who were the natural candidates for leadership in this respect.

Summary of results

There is no single meaning for the term ra’īs in the sources under study, not even if the ru’asā’ who were local leaders of their school of law and other ulema are excluded. The urban and provincial ru’asā’ were part of the administration: they held appointment deeds, and these were transmitted in inshā’-collections. Their office involved cooperation with the mustawfī and other officials, they had to see to it that no taxes were levied without government approval, and they were the ones who made complaints and grievances of the taxpayers known to the central administration. They also had to divide up taxes levied on their constituencies or to organise the process of division. Probably they were also landowners, but this is mentioned only rarely. Not infrequently, this position was hereditary, and there seems to be no objection to a principle of heredity in the sources, so that the position often became part of a family’s patrimony. In all, the urban and provincial ru’asā’ are in a mediating position between the taxpayers and the tax administration.

In small towns, the ra’īs likewise tends to be a hereditary position, and some ra’īs families can be traced over a number of generations, up to roughly two centuries. No appointment deeds are extant on this level, but this does not mean that there were none; appointments are mentioned as the primary reason why the families held the position which they later were able to appropriate as their patrimony. Fiscal functions are reported much less frequently on this level. In a number of cases, however, the ra’īs of a small town negotiates the political and military allegiance of the place: surrender to a besieging army, and even transition to another polity (in the reported cases, the Ismā‘īlī regional state of Quhistān). The ra’īs in a small town by himself acts like the community of notables in larger cities in this respect. Another important feature was that ru’asā’ in small towns strove to maintain the internal peace of the town; that meant that they tried to control who settled there. Behind that, one senses the very real danger of (religious or other) factionalism. On the big city level, there also are examples in this direction.

The third category of ru’asā’ are the rural and village leaders, the ‘village headmen’. Other terms also were in use for this position, such as za‘īm and mihtar, possibly ḥākim and pīshwā; a katkhudā who also is mentioned appears alongside a ra’īs and therefore it is not evident that the term is synonymous with ra’īs. Two independent early thirteenth century sources both state that ra’īs is a term for landowners, absentee or not, and a parallel to the earlier dihqān is visible in a number of cases. And certainly, the village ra’īs belonged to a different social group than the ordinary peasant, and his residence was larger, so that it often is called a sarā in Persian; in the Arabic sources, the term dār al-ra’īs or dār al-riyāsa appears frequently, not only for the place where the ra’īs sits in office, but also for his personal residence. Evidence from later periods shows a clear division in villages between a ‘lordly’ and a ‘peasant’ space, and it seems altogether possible that this was the case already in the pre-Mongol period. These village ru’asā’ would be the ones whom their urban and provincial namesakes had the right to appoint, and such appointments, even if they are not reported frequently, clearly took place and carried weight, above all when the position was contested. In many cases, though, the ra’īs could get along very well without an appointment deed. The position probably was hereditary.

Rural ru’asā’ are said to have held an important position in taxation in their villages. This is supported by evidence from the Mukhtārāt, but the Khurasanian sources are not so clear: a number of other officials appear in that way, so that the position of the Khurasanī village ra’īs may have differed in this respect.

The social functions of rural ru’asā’ are quite evident. First, they had to cater to guests and travellers, lodging and feeding them. Their position thus was one of prestige (‘social capital’ earned by entertaining guests and having a guest-house or guest apartments in his sarā). Another function was to see to it that factionalism and intra-village strife did not get out of control; in order to ensure that, village as well as small town ru’asā’ evidently sometimes tried to get rid of newcomers; but for that, they needed support from the state administration. It is important to note that the village ra’īs did not dispose of any means of coercion in this respect. Another function may have been the regular re-distribution of land (among the members of the village community); this is however never mentioned directly in the sources under study, and only rarely can we guess that something like that in fact took place.

The political and military functions of rural ru’asā’ are prominent as well. The reports in Nasawī certainly relate to a very exceptional situation, but the way villages and their ru’asā’ behaved during the Mongol invasion is in keeping with what we learn from earlier and less exceptional times. References to fortifications of villages appear every now and then, even if we cannot tell how many villages indeed were fortified. Sometimes villages tried to come to an agreement with regional powers, such as the Quhistānī Ismā‘īlīs, even if that meant that they were leaving the imperial polity. Village ru’asā’ are also shown negotiating the surrender of their village to aggressors. In this respect, they work just as their namesakes in small towns. In one case, we have a village ‘official’ in charge of military affairs, the rural sipahsālār.

Whereas urban and provincial ru’asā’ were told to cooperate closely with the other officials in the tax administration and very probably did so on a day-to-day basis, such cooperation is rarely even hinted at in the sources under study for the local and small-town level. The representatives of the imperial power, Sanjar’s empire for much of the evidence quoted, were not loved but rather feared by the rural population.

Local lords or rural notables?

The difference between lords and notables is in the degree of coercive power they have over their dependents or constituencies. ‘“Lordship” […] refers diversely to personal commands over dependent people who might be peasants in quasiservile status or knights or vassals having or seeking elite standing’.¹⁵² A lord commands, a notable has to convince. ‘The landlord [in Iranian villages in the twentieth century] had considerable power over the lives of the people in his domain’.¹⁵³ But we seldom see the rural ru’asā’ giving orders. They must have, if there was anything like a domainal economy in these villages, but that is exactly what we do not know. We do know that the owner of a village was entitled to a part of the harvest; how large a part, again, is unknown and may have differed from village to village. Practically nowhere is a ra’īs seen interfering in agricultural production itself.

We do not see the local ra’īs as a judge, either, punishing crimes and enforcing the law. What we see of his social and political function is more or less directed towards the outside – he is hospitable; he is in contact with state officials and other locally powerful people; he sometimes seems to decide who can settle down in the village and who cannot – but in the latter case in particular, without coercive power. This makes him a representative of the village more than a lord over the village.

On the other hand, the signs that the ra’īs was not a primus inter pares are much too clear to be ignored. The villages in twelfth century Khurasan were not egalitarian, the ra’īs was not a senior peasant – he was a landlord, and he derived his income out of the fields that the peasants tilled. This is not to say that the peasants had ‘quasi-servile status’, that they were tied to the soil in the manner of glebi adscripti. There is reason to believe that they were not – there are many reports about peasants leaving their village, and in the pre-Mongol sources, this does not seem to be a crime. So even in this respect, the coercive power of the ra’īs as landlord seems limited.

In their dealings with the outside, as a general rule, ru’asā’ of villages as well as small towns seem to have been able to dispose of the allegiance of their communities. How this was organised is not known; we have no reports about assemblies or anything of the sort where a consensus of the village or small town could have been reached. Sometimes, in particular if the ra’īs or else a part of the village population wanted to go over to the Ismā‘īlīs and the others were opposed, the ensuing conflict could be resolved only by separation: one of the parties had to leave the village.

It was the military function of the rural ra’īs which brought him closest to lordship. Peasant levies became less important after the coming of the Turks to Khurasan, and imperial armies tended to rely more heavily on cavalry. But in some contexts, the military potential of villagers was still important. Villages could not and did not rely on regional armies for protection; security was a nearly entirely local question. Security was threatened by small-scale as well as largescale enemies, from neighbouring villagers to the Mongols.

The military careers of the three ru’asā’ in Nasawī that stood at the outset of the present study perhaps were exceptional – certainly they belong to an exceptional situation. In other cases, military leadership of the village men apparently involved collective decisions to a high degree. What happened if the responsible persons in the village decided to take military action is nowhere stated; it seems likely, though, that all able-bodied (young) males were called to participate, and that non-compliance with such a summons was next to unthinkable.

In all fields, thus, there are virtually no traces of the village or small town ra’īs wielding coercive power to any significant degree. Coercive power rested with the representatives of the imperial state, above all the muqṭa‘ and the shiḥna. Village and small town ru’asā’ did not need coercion to be effective, and as long as the concept of ‘lordship’ remains linked to coercive power, evidently they were rural notables, not local lords; but this does not diminish their importance in any way, nor does it take away anything of the social cleavage in the village.

Notes

1Lambton changed her mind concerning the ru’asā’ in the pre-Mongol period: whereas she translated the term as ‘heads (of districts, i.e. ru’asā)’, she came back to that in the ‘Errata’: ‘should be “heads of religious rites (mazhabs)”’; Ann K.S. Lambton, Landlord and Peasant in Persia. A Study of Land Tenure and Land Revenue Administration (London, 1991) (first published Oxford, 1953), pp. 67, 438. In the glossary, she states: ‘ra’īs, chief, leader, head of a village, quarter etc. in Seljūq times, the ra’īs was an important local official’ (Ibid, p. 459). All of the translations and explanations are justified.

2Muḥammad ‘Awfī, Lubāb al-albāb , ed. Sa‘īd Nafīsī (Tehran, 1335/1956), pp. 128, 133, and Abū ‘Abdallāh Yāqūt al-Ḥamawī, Mu‘jam al-Buldān, 5 Vols, (Beirut 1955–7), s.v. Bīshak, a small town in Nīshāpūr province; he quotes a person there as min ahl al-riyāsa wal-jalāla wal-‘uẓma wal-tharwa, ‘one of the leading figures, prominent, powerful, and rich’.

3Ann K. S. Lambton, ‘The internal structure of the Saljuq empire’, in J.A. Boyle (ed.) Cambridge History of Iran, Vol. V: The Saljuq and Mongol Period (Cambridge, 1993), pp. 205–82 (279–81) on the ra’īs: ‘This term, like various others, is used in a variety of senses and not always with precision. In some instances, as stated above, it is broadly synonymous with a provincial governor; it is also used to designate the head of a religious corporation. But in its most common use the term ra’īs designated a local official representing the local people vis-à-vis the government in general and the tax administration in particular.[…] normally he was one of the leaders of local society, for only a man of local influence and standing could carry out his duties’ (p. 279). In what follows, Lambton however does not distinguish between ru’asā’ in capital cities, provinces, smaller towns; and she does not address the question of rural – village – ru’asā’.

4This was the position of the Sam‘ānī family, e.g. Ibn al-Athīr, al-Kāmil fī l-Tārīkh, ed. C. Tornberg (reprinted: Beirut, 1982), x, p. 524. The Ḥanafīs at Marw had their own ra’īs, see Abū Sa‘d ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Sam‘ānī, al-Ansāb, 13 Vols, ed. Yamānī (Hyderabad/D. 1962–82), i, p. 166 s.v. Arsāband. Also in Muḥammad Ibn Munawwar, Asrār al-Tawḥīd fī maqāmāt al-shaykh Abī Sa‘īd, ed. Dhabīḥallāh Ṣafā (Tehran, 1332/1953), p. 77, where the ra’īs of the aṣḥāb al-ra’y (the Ḥanafites) at Nīshāpūr is mentioned alongside the head of the Karrāmīs and the Twelvers. There was a ra’īs al-‘ulamā’ – or a man whom people used to call thus – in the village of Afrakhsh in the Bukharan oasis, he died in 384/994–5; Yāqūt, Mu‘jam s.v.

5The Dāghūlī family held this post at Sarakhs; Sam‘ānī, Ansāb, v, p. 359 where he also states that they were ‘a major family at Sarakhs’ bayt kabīr bi-Sarakhs. Sam‘ānī mentions three generations of them (fourth century A.H.). More examples from Sam‘ānī are listed in J. Paul, Herrscher, Gemeinwesen, Vermittler: Ostiran und Transoxanien in vormongolischer Zeit (Beirut, 1996), p. 188, n.12.

6Richard Bulliet, The Patricians of Nishapur (Cambridge MA, 1972).

7Omeljan Pritsak, ‘Āl-i Burhān’, Der Islam xxx (1952), pp. 81–96.

8Axel Havemann, Ri’āsa und qaḍā. Institutionen als Ausdruck wechselnder Kräfteverhältnisse in syrischen Städten vom 10. bis zum 12. Jahrhundert (Freiburg, 1975).

9Ira M. Lapidus, ‘The evolution of Muslim urban society’, Comparative Studies in Society and History xv (1973), pp. 21–50.

10Boaz Shoshan, ‘The “politics of notables” in medieval Islam’, Asian and African Studies xx (1986), pp. 179–215.

11David Durand-Guédy for Iṣfahān: Iranian Elites and Turkish Rulers. A history of Iṣfahān in the Saljūq period (London, 2010); Bert Fragner for Hamadān: Geschichte der Stadt Hamadān und ihrer Umgebung in den ersten sechs Jahrhunderten nach der Hijra (Vienna, 1972); Roy Mottahedeh for Qazwīn, ‘Administration in Buyid Qazwīn’, in D.S. Richards (ed.), Islamic Civilization, 950–1150 (Oxford, 1973), pp. 33–45.

12Paul, Herrscher, in particular pp. 212–4.

13Heribert Horst, Die Staatsverwaltung der Großselǧūqen und Ḫōrazmšāhs (1038–1231) (Wiesbaden, 1964).

14Ann K.S. Lambton, ‘The administration of Sanjar’s empire as illustrated in the ‘Atabat al-kataba’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental Studies xii (1957), pp. 367–88.

15G.M. Kurpalidis, ‘Institut gorodskikh raisov pri Seldzhukidakh (po “‘Atabat al-kataba”)’, in: Tovarno-denezhnye otnosheniia na Srednem i Blizhnem Vostoke v ėpokhu srednevekov’ia (Moscow, 1979), pp. 154–9.

16Grigol Beradze, ‘K voprosu ob institute “gorodskikh raisov” v Irane XI-XII vv.’, Iran. Sbornik stat’ei (Moscow, 1971), pp. 62–71.

17Paul, Herrscher, p. 143. They are ‘mediators of the second type’ in the terminology of that study. The third type of mediators does not need an appointment deed, whereas the first type is closely linked to the ruler.

18Yāqūt, Mu‘jam, s. v. Albān in the mountains between Kābul and Ghazna, where he remarks that all the ru’asā’ there have an Arabic (Muslim) and an Indian name. – Afḍal al-Dīn Abū Ḥāmid Kirmānī, Saljūqiyān wa Ghuzz dar Kirmān. Recension of Mīrzā Muḥammad Ibrāhīm Kirmānī, ed. Muḥammad Ibrāhīm Bastānī Pārīzī (Tehran, 1373/1994), p. 584, where the chiefs ru’asā’ of the group forbid their people qawm to pay any taxes, they all flee to their respective qal‘a, but are soon driven to waterless mountain tops where they then pitch their tents. – In a report about the early Seljuqs, Mīrkhwānd speaks of the riyāsat-i tarākima as the leading position in the Seljuq ruling family and therefore among the Turkmen. Mīrkhwānd, Rawḍat al-ṣafā (Tehran, 1339/1960), iv, p. 243.

19J. Paul, ‘Where did the dihqāns go?’, Eurasian Studies xi (2013), pp. 1–34.

20Shihāb al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Nasawī: Sīrat al-sulṭān Jalāl al-Dīn Mankburnī, ed. and Russian translation Z. Buniiatov, (Moscow, 1996), text pp. 65–6, 74–5, 81–3; translation pp. 93, 100, 105–7; French translation Houdas pp. 90–1, 102, 111. The Turkish name of this prince is given in various forms; it does not serve the purpose of this contribution to insist on a given spelling and/or meaning.

21Petrushevskii has starosta and starshina (inspired by the terminology for ‘village elders’ in use in the Russian village community); Ilya P. Petrushevskii, Zemledelie i agrarnye otnosheniia v Irane XIII-XIV vekov (Moscow, 1960). Houdas translates préfet and commandant as well as chef; Nesawi/Houdas, pp. 90–1, 102, 111. Buniiatov leaves ra’īs untranslated; he gives the following explanation: ‘The office of ra’īs existed in every town and district, and as a general rule, local inhabitants were appointed to the position. The ra’īs was subject to the district walī’, Buniiatov, Zhizneopisanie, p. 294 n.5; my translation, JP. He has no explanation for village ru’asā’ in particular – evidently he thinks that there is only one type of ra’īs and that this is a well-defined position.

22Lambton, Landlord and Peasant. The quoted vision of the village is linked to the question of the village community. See Jürgen Paul, ‘Le village en Asie centrale aux XVe et XVIe siècles’, Cahiers du Monde russe et soviétique xxxii/1 (1991), pp. 9–16.

23Things are a bit different for Soviet Central Asia, but there the interpretative framework was so massively ideological that the reports can only with great difficulty be used. – Hassan Fazeli, Minoo Salimi, Ruth Young, ‘Landlord villages of the Tehran plain, Iran and historical archeology in Iran’, Iran 47 (2009), pp. 149–64; this is an investigation into a small number of villages of the qal‘a type. Another publication about the same group of villages: Hassan Fazeli, Ruth Young: ‘Revolutionary archaeology or the archaeology of revolution? Landlord villages in the Tehran plain’, in Sarah May, Hilary Orange, Sefryn Penrose (eds), The Good, the Bad and the Unbuilt: Handling the Heritage of the Recent Past. BAR International Series 2362 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 85–96.

24A. Bader, V. Gaibov, G. Koshelenko, ‘Materials for an archaeological map of the Merv Oasis: The Durnali region’, Bulletin of the Asia Institute viii (1994), pp. 117–28. This is the only archaeological publication known to me where medieval fortified villages in Iran are mentioned at all. Durnali is a bit downstream from Marw.

25This is not the place to investigate travellers’ reports from the early modern period, in particular to Safavid Iran.

26See A.Z. Rozenfel’d, ‘Qal‘a (kala) – tip ukreplënnogo iranskogo poseleniya’, Sovetskaya Ėtnografiya i (1951), pp. 22–38, and the literature he quotes.

27Eckart Ehlers, Iran. Grundzüge einer geographischen Landeskunde (Darmstadt, 1980), p. 404 fig.72. The villages studied by Fazeli and Young also have such mansion-like dwellings of the landlord; Fazeli/Young, ‘Revolutionary archaeology’. Their size is in keeping with the observations in Ehlers.

28Bader, Gaibov, Koshelenko, ‘Materials’, p. 127. In the Russian literature, the term qal‘a is used frequently for a fortified village.

29Fazeli/Young, ‘Revolutionary archaeology’, p. 88.

30Ibid, p. 89 (quoting a report from Fārs province).

31Lambton, Landlord and Peasant, p. 8.

32Ernst Diez, Churasanische Baudenkmäler (Berlin 1918), p. 14.

33Ehlers, Iran, p. 404 fig.72 for plans of a village of the qal‘a-type (‘Qalehdorf ’) and of a farm within it. Some of the ground plans in Fazeli/Young, ‘Revolutionary archaeology’, also show buildings in the inner space of the village (houses not abutting the outer wall).

34Ehlers, Iran, pp. 360, 362. – Ehlers takes it for granted that the fortified village as a type of settlement originated as a response to the nomad incursions which began in the eleventh century. He claims that villages of that type were more widely known in areas on the margins where nomad threats were more real. This is not the place to discuss this thesis; I believe that only thorough archaeological research can lead to any form of answer. At any rate, by the twelfth century, according to Ehlers, the villages should have been fortified and this should have become a habitual feature of Iranian and particularly Khurāsānian villages. Balland and Bazin are not so specific, but they also state that ‘[i]n Persia, all qal‘a villages are located in easily invaded plains and broad valleys […] that is, wherever villagers have been threatened by nomads of invaders of whatever origin’, Daniel Balland, Marcel Bazin, ‘Deh’, EIr, vii, pp. 204–9. This statement apparently goes back to Lambton, Landlord and Peasant.

35Lambton, Landlord and Peasant, p. 388.

36The demographic decline of Iran over much of the Islamic period until the nineteenth century is well known.

37Sadīd al-Dīn Muḥammad Ghaznawī, Maqāmāt-i Zhinda-pīl, ed. Ḥishmatullāh Mu’ayyad, (Tehran, 1340/1961–2), p. 47.

38Petrushevskii, Zemledelie, tries to estimate the size of villages, and comes to the conclusion that their population often was in the thousands, p. 302.

39Ibn Funduq not infrequently informs us about where a given man was born, and in many cases, this place is the village where the family properties are; Ibn Funduq, Tārīkh-i Bayhaq, ed. A. Bahmanyār (Tehran, 1317/1938).

40It is, for instance, difficult to see how a place like Sinj in the Marw oasis could have been fortified: Yāqūt, Mu‘jam, describes it as a village, very long (one farsakh, ca. 6 km) and very narrow, with the residential buildings lined up along the main canal. He adds though that the place then came to be a madīna, more like a town.

41Balland/Bazin, ‘Deh’.

42Paul, ‘Dihqāns’.

43Rozenfel’d, ‘Qal‘a (kala)’. Rozenfel’d also quotes reports from the late nineteenth century. See also Balland/Bazin, ‘Deh’. Balland/Bazin confirm the geographical repartition of this village type, but do not make a statement about its origins and age. In (Soviet) Central Asia, the fortified village of this type was said to be very old. – Xavier de Planhol, ‘Les villages fortifiés en Iran et en Asie centrale’, Annales de Géographie lxvii (1958), pp. 256–8, is a response to Rozenfel’d and Lambton’s Landlord and Peasant; de Planhol thinks that the qal‘a-type of settlement is very old and links it to the emergence of horse pastoralism in the steppe.

44Yāqūt, Mu‘jam, s.v. Shīraz. This is ‘one of the villages of Sarakhs’ min qurā Sarakhs, but it resembles a town (madīna) because it has a market and a Friday mosque. – The sharp distinction between urban and rural settlements which Max Weber stressed so much is not helpful in Iranian medieval contexts. For an assessment of Weber’s writings on the ‘Islamic city’, see J. Paul, ‘Max Weber und die “Islamische Stadt”’, in Hartmut Lehmann, Jean Martin Ouédraogo (eds), Max Webers Religionssoziologie in interkultureller Perspektive (Göttingen, 2003), pp. 109–37.

45al-Mukhtārāt min al-rasā’il, ed. Ghulām-Riḍā Ṭāhir and Īraj Afshār (Tehran, 1378/1999). Indices Maryam Mīr-Shams, no.378, p. 404; an amīr ra’īs is appointed over the dār al-mulk.

46Muntajab al-Dīn Badī‘ Atabik Juwaynī, ‘Atabat al-Kataba, ed. Muḥammad Qazwīnī (Tehran, 1329/1950), no.15, p. 48.

47Niẓām al-Mulk, Siyāsat-nāma, ed. Muḥammad Qazwīnī (Tehran 1334/1955), p. 156.

48Mukhtārāt, no.388, p. 410.

49Horst, Staatsverwaltung. Horst sees the local administration as a smaller and in many cases simplified version of the provincial administration, which in turn is a smaller and simplified version of the central administration. People with important social functions within their communities not appointed by any government do not come into his purview. This is not surprising because he used only the inshā’-collections in his study.

50This is a standard point in the admonitions which are an obligatory part of the documents (corresponding to the adhortatio in medieval Latin documents; the Arabic term could have been wiṣāya). Opposing the introduction of new taxes is also mentioned in an appointment for a ra’īs in Sarakhs, Juwaynī, ‘Atabat, no.12, p. 41.

51Juwaynī, ‘Atabat, no.5, pp. 21–6, in particular p. 26; no.6, pp. 26–30, in particular pp. 29, 30. See also Muḥammad b. ‘Abd al-Khāliq Mayhanī, Dastūr-i Dabīrī, ed. Adnan Erzi, (Ankara, 1962) (Selçukiler Devrine Âid İnşâ Eserleri; 1), pp. 108–9, 111. See also Paul, Herrscher, pp. 77–87.

52Aḥkām-i Salāṭīn-i Māḍī. MS St Petersburg, Institute for Oriental Manuscripts, C-816, fol. 10b, appointment deed for a mushrif in Gurgān, who has to write down the results of these divisions and inform the dīwān-i ishrāf accordingly; Juwaynī, ‘Atabat, no.15, p. 48; appointment for a mustawfī in Marw. In the inshā’ collections made by Rashīd al-Dīn Waṭwāṭ, there are no details on ru’asā’, but in one case at least the ra’īs is also close to the mustawfī: Rashīd al-Dīn Waṭwāṭ, Nāmahā-yi Rashīd al-Dīn-i Waṭwāṭ, ed. Qāsim Tūysirkānī (Tehran, 1338/1959), p. 80.

53For further sources and a discussion of the function of the ra’īs in the process of levying the taxes, see Paul, Herrscher, pp. 81–5.

54Juwaynī, ‘Atabat, no.20, pp. 55–6; again one of the tasks seems to be to abolish or amend extraordinary taxes.

55Mukhtārāt, no 377, p. 404.

56There are many synonyms or near-synonoms for local ru’asā’ – za‘īm is just one of them. See above pp. 174–5.

57Aḥkām, fol.14b-15a; the text is an appointment deed for a qadi, but does not give the region over which this man is appointed.

58Bahā’ al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Mu’ayyid Baghdādī, Al-Tawassul ilā l-Tarassul, ed. Aḥmad Bahmanyār, (Tehran, 1385) (recte 1315/1936–7), p. 123.

59Aḥkām, fol.138b. A preacher had come to court, and he is granted the right to preach in Herat in the Friday mosque.

60Mukhtārāt, no. 325, p. 377 for a payment, and no. 409, p. 432 for the za‘īm in this function.

61Ru’asā’ of Nīshāpūr also mentioned in Ghaznawī, Zhinda-pīl, pp. 115, 120, in both cases, the title refers to a vizier.

62al-Bundārī, Zubdat al-Nuṣra wa nukhbat al-‘uṣra, ed. M.Th. Houtsma in Recueil de textes relatifs à l’histoire des Seldjoucides, Vol. II: Histoire des Seldjoucides de l’Irâq. (Leiden 1889), p. 151, no particular function described.

63Mukhtārāt, no. 231, p. 225.

64Ibid, no. 389 p 411; this is an appointment for a tax collector ‘āmil, and the ra’īs and the military man at that place, the shiḥna, are told to support him.

65Sam‘ānī, Ansāb, ix, p. 71 s.v. Ṭirimāḥī. Abū l-Muḥammad ‘Abdallāh b. Muḥammad […] b. Ṭirimāḥ al-Ṭūsī; thus, the nisba refers to an ancestor, not to a place. Four generations are on record. The grandson and the great-grandson both died in 387/997. The great-grandfather is wajh al-nāḥiya wa-ra’īsuhā, the grandson likewise held the title ra’īs, the greatgrandson is called a muzakkī, someone who gave testimony for the notarial witnesses.

66Beradze, ‘K voprosu’, p. 63. See also Sam‘ānī, Ansāb, Vol. ix, p. 369: ‘This is a well-known old family in Sarakhs’; the person whom Sam‘ānī had seen personally, al-ra’īs Abū l-Ḥasan ‘Alī b. Muḥammad al-‘Imrānī, had made a career under Sanjar, but was later imprisoned and executed; Sanjar’s views on him changed in 545/1150–1. The text does not say, however, that this man was ra’īs at Sarakhs; he could have held the title also on account of his position in the central administration as his namesake and possibly relation.

67Sam‘ānī, Ansāb, Vol. i, p. 240 s.v. Ismā‘īlī mentions three generations of them (fourth century A.H.).

68Juwaynī, ‘Atabat, p. 30.

69Today Miana or Meana in Turkmenistan.

70Ṭabas-i Gīlakī or Ṭabas-i Tamr, see C. Edmund Bosworth, ‘Ṭabas’, EI², x, pp. 22b-23a.

71Ibn Munawwar, Asrār, p. 234.

72Yāqūt s.v.

73Ghaznawī, Zhinda-pīl, p. 96.

74An early example of that way of understanding the position of ra’īs comes from Ghaznavid Nīshāpūr: the ra’īs there had had a madrasa built for each of the relevant four madhāhib in the city; Paul, Herrscher, p. 135; Ibn Funduq, Bayhaq, p. 194f.

75The shaykh had foreseen that: he had arranged for boiling oil to be ready to cauterise the wounds, but there is no trace of a military intervention on his part.

76Ibn Munawwar, Asrār, p. 171. The battle at Dandānaqān was fought in May 1040. The anti-Ghaznavid bias of the source might be linked to the fact that the book was written for the Ghurid Ghiyāth al-Dīn Muḥammad; the Ghurids were inveterate enemies of the later Ghaznavids. The Seljuqs are styled as God’s instruments in a number of places in Ibn Munawwar.

77Ibn Munawwar, Asrār, pp. 173, 174. The first story is about an old craftsman who towards the end of his life turned to Abū Sa‘īd; instead of treating the old man with respect, the shaykh had him sweep the mosque floor and courtyard, and Ḥamawayh asked why. – The second story is about the same old man; Abū Sa‘īd had sent him to the mill with some other dervishes, and when the Turkmens (Seljuq warriors) attacked the mill, this old man crept out of the door and was nailed to it by a Turkmen arrow. The ra’īs then asked why the shaykh had killed the old man. – In both stories, thus, the ra’īs argues in favour of ‘ordinary’ good manners in a thoroughly ‘secular’ way; he has to learn everything about the more spiritually refined ways of living and thinking.

78There is no clear information about the mann in this time and region. The most probable version would be the northern Iranian mann, 1920g. See Walter Hinz, Islamische Maße und Gewichte umgerechnet ins metrische System (Leiden, 1970), p. 17. 100 mann of this weight would therefore yield roughly 192 kg.

79Ibn Munawwar, Asrār, p. 166.

80Ibid, pp. 201, 202. The daughter is introduced as the kadbānū.

81Ibid, p. 202.

82Ibid, p. 235.

83For some examples, see Paul, Herrscher, pp. 118–21. During the Seljuq conquest of Khurāsān, we have detailed reports about Herat and Nīshāpūr; in both cases, the notables, and in particular the religious authorities led by the qadi, decided what course to take; Paul, ‘The Seljuq conquest(s) of Nishapur. A reappraisal’, Iranian Studies xxxviii (2005), pp. 575–85; Paul, ‘The Histories of Herat’, Iranian Studies xxxiii (2000), pp. 93–115.

84Ibn al-Athīr, al-Kāmil fi l-Ta’rīkh, x, p. 314.

85For the Banū Sīmjūr, see Erdoğan Merçil, ‘Simcûrîler’, Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslâm Ansiklopedisi Vol. 37 (2009), pp. 210–11. The origins of the family go back to the early tenth century, the Sāmānid period; they had been influential in southern Khurāsān all along, with property in the Herat region and a kind of family tomb in Qā’in. See also Sam‘ānī, Ansāb s.v. Sīmjūrī, vii, pp. 351–5; and ‘Abd al-Raḥmān Fāmī Harawī (attr.), Tārīkh-i Harāt, facsimile edition, (Tehran, 1387/2008), pp. 93, 95.

86Ibn al-Athīr, Kāmil, x, p. 317; kāna ra’īsan muṭā‘an ‘inda l-khāṣṣa wal-‘āmma.

87Rashīd al-Dīn Faḍlallāh, Faṣlī az Jāmi‘ al-tawārīkh: Sar-gudhasht-i Ḥasan-i Ṣabbāḥ wa-jā-nishīnān-i ū, ed. Muḥammad Dabirsiyāqī, (Tehran, 1385/2006–7), p. 50.

88The Turkish emir wanted to marry one of Munawwar’s sisters without taking the shariatic preconditions into account. See also Rashīd al-Dīn, Sar-gudhasht, p. 30.

89Yāqūt s. v. Ṭuraythīth, Mu‘jam, iv, p. 33a.

90Ibn Funduq, Bayhaq, pp. 90ff; military functions: pp. 96–7.

91Ibid, p. 97. – The term ḥākim sometimes denotes a person who is in charge of keeping track of water rights and tax shares, he has a qānūn-i āb wa kharāj. Juwaynī, ‘Atabat, pp. 96–7. The function is close enough to what we can assume was the job of a ra’īs. In irrigated agriculture, it would make sense to divide the tax burden of the village up according to the allocation of water shares, and indeed that was the case in many instances, see Paul, Herrscher, pp. 81, 91–2.

92Ibn Funduq, Bayhaq, p. 79; the context is an anecdote about Niẓām al-Mulk’s father and how he was treated by the top people in the Ghaznavid administration.

93Ibn al-Athīr, Kāmil, xi, p. 259.

94Ibn Funduq, Bayhaq, p. 169. Bayhaq was divided into a number of districts called rub‘ ,‘quarters’; there were seven of them, and one of these was Mazīnān.

95Sūrī was ‘amīd of Khurāsān under Mas‘ūd (in the 1030s), see C. Edmund Bosworth, The Ghaznavids (Edinburgh, 1963; reprinted: Beirut, 1973), pp. 87–9.

96Zakaryā b. Muḥammad b. Maḥmūd Qazwīnī, Āthār al-Bilād wa-akhbār al-‘ibād. (Editor not quoted). Beirut n.d. (1960?). The Khwārazmian prince probably was Rukn al-Dīn Gūrsanjtī, and the governor, his vizier, was ‘Imād al-Mulk al-Sāwī. Both were killed in 1220 in the fighting which surrounded the Khwārazmshāh Muḥammad’s flight across Iran, Nasawī, Sīrat, p. 56; translation Buniiatov, p. 86; İbrahim Kafesoğlu, Harezmşahlar Devleti Tarihi (485–617/1092–1229) (Ankara, 1956), p. 281.

97Durand-Guédy, Iranian Elites, has shown that the differences between western and eastern Iran were important, and therefore it would be rash to draw conclusions from western material for eastern questions.

98Mukhtārāt, no. 450, p. 452.

99Ibid, no. 384, p. 409.

100Ibid, no. 460, p. 457.

101Ibid, no. 397, p. 420.

102Ibid, no. 52, p. 147.

103Ibid, no. 478, p. 470.

104Juwaynī, ‘Atabat, p. 144; also in Lambton, Landlord and Peasant, p. 75.

105Juwaynī, ‘Atabat, p. 166.

106Sibṭ b. al-Jawzī, Mir’āt al-Zamān fī tārīkh al-a‘yān, ed. Ali Sevim (Ankara, 1968), p. 127 s.a. 457 (1064–5).

107Yāqūt, Mu‘jam, s.v. Timurtāsh. ḥalalnā Timurtāsh yawm al-khamīs * wa-bitnā hunāka bi-dār al-ra’īs.

108Ibn Munawwar, Asrār, p. 191. Sometime after the narrated events, Niẓām al-Mulk bought the village and made it waqf for the descendants of ustād Abū Aḥmad, who in turn was descended from Abū Sa‘īd on his mother’s side. The village Rafīqān is mentioned in another story, and in that one, there is a khānaqāh there. Abū Sa‘īd had grown old (and probably also had put on weight), and had to be transported to Mayhana in a litter when he left Nīshāpūr. In Rafīqān, next to Ṭūs, the ustād Abū Bakr organised the transportation. He told a group of the inmates or dependants of the khānaqāh that this year he would not take their kharāj but he wanted them to carry Abū Sa‘īd’s litter (Ibn Munawwar, Asrār, pp. 162–3; jamā‘atī az khānaqāh-i dīh […] rāst kard ki imsāl kharāj-i shumā na-khwāham). – The ustād Abū Bakr probably is a descendant of Abū Aḥmad, apparently he was the mutawallī of the waqf, and by the same token the head of the khānaqāh, which evidently had been founded together with the waqf. The kharāj in this story therefore should be the income of the waqf, and the inmates of the khānaqāh (or their families) were peasants in the village: kharāj is used here not for the part of the harvest which goes to the state (‘tax’), but for that part which goes to the landowner (‘rent’) – or both, if Niẓām al-Mulk had exempted the village from taxes.

109Paul, ‘Dihqāns’.

110Abū Sa‘īd was notorious for his parties, which earned him the accusation of being a spendthrift; the term is bā takalluf, ‘with all extras’, which included candles, choice fruits and sweets together with entertainment (singing boys or the like) besides the usual meat, bread and sauce.

111Ibn Munawwar, Asrār, pp. 152–3. The trip continues via Jājarm and a number of villages; in some places, there apparently was a khānaqāh, and we do not learn where the group spent the night in the other places – but we can assume that, again, it was at the sarā of a ra’īs, mihtar or za‘īm.

112Ibn Munawwar, Asrār, pp. 68–9. The sum apparently means ‘a large sum’ (far beyond ordinary villagers), as is evidenced by the fact that a whole building could be erected from it.

113Niẓām al-Mulk, Siyāsat-nāma, p. 28.

114Ibn al-Athīr, al-Kāmil, xi, p. 233.

115Ghaznawī, Zhinda-pīl, p. 112.

116Ibid, p. 103. The source of course is violently anti-Ismā‘īlī even if only moderately pro-Seljuq.

117Ibid, p. 110.

118Rashīd al-Dīn, Sar-gudhasht, p. 76, dated ca. 530/1135–6.

119Ibid, p. 83.

120Maḥmūd b. ‘Uthmān, al-Firdaus al-murshidīya; Die Vita des Scheich Abū Isḥāq al-Kāzarūnī, ed. Fritz Meier (Istanbul, 1948), p. 356.

121Ghaznawī, Zhinda-pīl, p. 126.

122Yāqūt s.v. Sāmān. qīla li-ru’asā’ al-qurā dihkhudā li-anna dih ism al-qarya wa-khudā mālik ka-annahu qāla mālik al-qarya aw rabb al-qarya.

123Paul, ‘Dihqāns’.

124Sam‘ānī, Ansāb, viii, p. 2 s.v. Shābarābādī. min ru’asā’ hadhihi l-qarya wal-muqaddimīn bihā.

125Ibid, iv, p. 253 s.v. Ḥamakī.

126Ibid, ix, p. 369 s.v. ‘Imrānī. It is noteworthy that one of his authorities in ḥadīth was a man called al-Dihqān al-‘ālim Abū Ismā‘īl Ibrāhīm b. Muḥammad al-Ḥāǧǧī al-Ḥilmī (no entry in the Ansāb), the region was one where dahāqīn could be shown to have been active until the eleventh century CE; see Paul, ‘Dihqāns’.

127Yāqūt, Mu‘jam, iv, p. 428 s.v. Kārazn, taken from Sam‘ānī, Ansāb, x, p. 315.

128Ibn Funduq, Bayhaq, p. 126.

129Probably Mujāhid b. Jabr. – Many of the old and notable families in Ibn Funduq boasted descent from early companions of the Prophet rather than pre-Islamic Iranian nobles; Mujāhid was a Successor, but a very prominent one, and one certainly could take pride in being his descendant. On Mujāhid, see Andrew Rippin, ‘Mudjāhid b. Djabr’, EI², vii, p. 293a-b.

130Ibn Funduq, Bayhaq, p. 243. There is no way of knowing at which point this family had settled down in Bayhaq.

131Ibid, p. 186, property is amlāk.

132Quoted after Lambton, Landlord and Peasant, p. xxvii. The author died in 1256; he is thus roughly contemporary with Yāqūt. ‘Landowners’ is dahāqīn, ‘crop-sharing peasants’ is muzāri‘ān.

133Ghaznawī, Zhinda-pīl, p. 126.

134Ibid, p. 173.

135Ibid, p. 102.

136Ibid, p. 76; at least he can decide on what to spend even larger sums.

137Ibid, p. 48. Petrushevskii has a short discussion of communal property, including forests and village pastures, Zemledelie, p. 276.

138The general note of hostility towards the muqṭa‘-level of Seljuq rule is well attested also in Ibn Munawwar. Jürgen Paul, ‘Histoires de Turcs dans l’hagiographie persane pré-mongole’, Véronique Schiltz (ed.), De Samarcande à Istanbul: étapes orientales. Hommages à Pierre Chuvin, ii (Paris 2015), pp 195-204.

139David Durand-Guédy, ‘The Türkmen-Saljūq relationship in twelfth-century Iran: New elements based on a contrastive analysis of three inšā’-documents’, Eurasian Studies ix (2011), pp. 11–66.

140Ghaznawī, Zhinda-pīl, p. 130.

141Ibn Munawwar, Asrār, p. 120.

142Ghaznawī, Zhinda-pīl, p. 28.

143Ibn Munawwar, Asrār, p. 121.

144Ibid, p. 126.

145The katkhudā reappears once more; his son dies because the villagers have passed before the shaykh’s khānaqāh in a procession with music (and possibly with wine). There seems to be no inner link between the punishment and the person of the katkhudā who is called ‘one of the most important persons’ in the village; Ghaznawī, Zhinda-pīl, p. 93.

146Ghaznawī, Zhinda-pīl, p. 127.

147Ibid, p. 128.

148Paul, ‘Nīshāpūr’, p. 581.

149On him, see C. Edmund Bosworth, ‘Ḥamza b. Ādharak’, EIr, xi, p. 648a-b.

150Ibn Funduq, Bayhaq, p. 267.

151The motif of the inhabitants of a settlement conspiring (or, in this case, being told) to kill all the enemies who had rashly taken up night quarters in the homes of the seemingly vanquished inhabitants recurs several times in different settings.

152Thomas Bisson, The Crisis of the Twelfth Century. Power, Lordship, and the Origins of European Government (Princeton and Oxford, 2009), p. 3.

153Fazeli/Young, ‘Revolutionary archaeology’, p. 86.

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