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The Mirdāsids

415–72/1024–80

Northern and central Syria

The Mirdāsids were part of the North Arab tribe of Kilāb, who in the early years of the eleventh century migrated from the lands along the Euphrates in northeastern Syria to Aleppo, which their leader Ṣāliḥ b. Mirdās captured in 415/1024, thereby succeeding substantially to the heritage of the Ḥamdānids (see below, no. 35, 2). The Mirdāsid migration formed part of a general movement of Bedouins – many of them (although not the Mirdāsids) at least nominally Shī‘ī in faith into the settled fringes of Iraq and Syria during the tenth and early eleventh centuries; it is possible that the unsettled conditions in the Syrian Desert brought about by the Carmathian risings there were one of the stimuli to this process.

Once established in Aleppo, Sālih and his sons Nasr and Thimāl had to defend themselves on one side against the Fāṭimids, who were attempting to restore their control over northern Syria, and on the other against the resurgent Byzantines under Basil II Bulgaroctonus and Romanus III Argyrus, although, in general, the favourable attitude of the Greeks towards them was one of the factors enabling the Mirdāsids to survive as an independent power for half a century. For four years, 429–33/1038–42, Aleppo was occupied by the Fāṭimid governor of Damascus, Anūshtigin, and on a second occasion Thimāl was obliged to abandon Aleppo and exchange it for towns on the Syro-Palestinian littoral, on account of pressure from undisciplined Kilābl tribesmen on his position within Aleppo. The westward advance of the Seljuqs, and the appearance in northern Syria of bands of Turkmens and various military adventurers, together with the waning of Fāṭimid influence there, confronted the Mirdāsids with a new situation. They found it expedient to transfer allegiance from the Fāṭimids to the SunnI ‘Abbāsids and to submit to the Seljuq sultan Alp Arslan. Latterly, Mirdāsid influence in Aleppo was undermined by disputes between the Turkish mercenaries whom the amīrs had been compelled to recruit and the Kilābī tribesmen, and in 468/1076 a civil war broke out between the two Mirdāsid brothers Sābiq and Waththāb. Pressure on Aleppo from the Seljuq Tutush, who was trying to carve out a principality for himself in Syria (see below, no. 91, 2), drove Sābiq in 472/1080 to offer the city to the ‘Uqaylid Muslim b. Quraysh (see below, no. 38). The surviving members of the Mirdāsid family were compensated by the grant of various towns in Syria, and they played some part in the affairs of the region up to the arrival of the First Crusade.

Lane-Poole, 114–15; Zambaur, 133, 135; Album, 22.

EI² ‘Mirdās, Banū’ (Th. Bianquis).

Suhayl Zakkār, The Emirate of Aleppo 1004–1094, Beirut 1391/1971.

Th. Bianquis, Damas et la Syrie sous la domination fatimide (359–468/969–1076). Essai d’interpretation de chroniques ārabes mediévalés, Damascus 1986–9.