36

The Mazyadids

c. 350–c. 545/c. 961–c. 1150

Ḥilla and central Iraq

The Mazyadids belonged to the North Arab Asad tribe, and were strongly Shī‘ī in sympathy. The family acquired a hold on the region between Hīt and Kūfa when lands there were conveyed to them during the reign of the Būyid amīr Mu‘izz al-Dawla at some date between 345/956 and 352/963. The beginnings of ‘Alī b. Mazyad’s reign there must be put back, according to George Makdisi, to well before the date in the early eleventh century usually given in older Western sources. It seems also that the Mazyadid capital Hilla was already in the early eleventh century a permanent settlement and not a mere encampment, and that it gradually merged with and replaced the former Jami‘ayn; under the great Sadaqa I b. Mansūr, the town was enclosed by a strong wall and became the fortified centre of Mazyadid power in Iraq.

Despite their Bedouin origins, the Mazyadids showed themselves skilful organisers and diplomatists, making themselves a significant power in the shifting pattern of alliances in the Iraq of the Seljuq period. Their early rivals were the ‘Uqaylids of Mosul and Jazīra (see below, no. 38), who in the reign of Dubays I b. ‘All I supported Dubays’s brother Muqallad in the latter’s bid for the Mazyadid amirate. When Toghril and the Seljuqs appeared in Iraq, Dubays feared the Turkish invaders and supported the pro-Fātimid, Turkish general Arslan Basāsīrī in Baghdad. During the troubled reign of the Seljuq Berk-yaruq, Sadaqa I, the so-called ‘King of the Arabs’ (Rex Arabum in the Latin Crusader sources), acquired a position of great influence; but once sultan Muhammad b. Malik Shah (see below, no. 91, 1) was firmly on the throne, he moved against his overmighty vassal, and in 501/1108 defeated and killed Sadaqa in battle. The later Mazyadids allied with various Turkish amīrs against sultan Mas‘īd b. Muhammad, and Hilla was occupied on various occasions by Seljuq and caliphal troops. Sadaqa’s son Dubays II achieved great fame in the eyes of the Frankish Crusaders, among others, and was a great patron of the Arabic poets of his time, but was murdered by one of the Assassins (see above, no. 29 and below, no. 101) at the same time as the caliph al-Mustarshid was killed.

‘Alī II b. Dubays II died in 545/1150, and seems to have been succeeded in Hilla by his son Muhalhil. But the latter is a shadowy figure, and nothing is known of his reign in Hilla or of the length of this tenure of power; the town was in 558/1163 definitively incorporated in the territories of the resurgent ‘Abbāsid caliph al-Mustanjid, and the power there of both the Mazyadids and the Banū Asad ended.

The Mazyadids do not appear to have minted coins of their own.

Lane-Poole, 119–20; Zambaur, 137.

El²Asad’ (W. Caskel), ‘Mazyad, Banū’ (C. E. Bosworth).

G. Makdisi, ‘Notes on Hilla and the Mazyadids in medieval Islam’, JAOS, 74 (1954), 249–62.

Abd al-Jabbār Nājī, al-Imāra al-Mazyadiyya, dīrdsa fī wad‘ihā al-siyāsī wa ’l-iqtisādī wa ’l-ijtimā‘ī, Basra 1970.