73

The Shaddādids

c. 340–570/c. 951–1174

Arrān and eastern Armenia

1. The main line in Ganja and Dvīn

2. The line in Ānī

The Shaddādids were another of the dynasties which arose in north-western Persia during the ‘Daylami interlude’, and it is probable that they were of Kurdish origin. In such a linguistically and ethnically confused region as north-western Persia and the adjacent Caucasus, onomastic was also varied; the Shaddādids’ need to find a place for themselves between the Daylamīs of Azerbaijan on one side, and the Christian Armenians and Georgians on the other, doubtless explains why Daylamī names like Lashkarī and Armenian ones like Ashūṭ/Ashot are found in the Shaddādids’ genealogy.

In the middle years of the tenth century, the Kurdish adventurer Muḥammad b. Shaddād established himself at Dvīn (near Erivan in the modern Armenian Republic), a town at that time in the possession of the Musāfirids (see above, no. 71). Despite an attempt to secure Byzantine aid, Muḥammad could not prevent the Daylamīs from regaining Dvīn, but in 360/971 his sons successfully ejected the Musāfirids from Ganja in Arrān (the region of Transcaucasia between the Kur and Araxes rivers), and Ganja (the later Imperial Russian Elizavetapol, now in the Azerbaijan Republic) then became the capital of the main line of Shaddādids for a century. They now undertook with vigour the defence of Islam in this region, fighting the Georgian Bagratids, various Armenian princes, the Byzantines, the Alans or Ossetians, and the Rūs from beyond the Caucasus; in particular, Abu ’l-Aswār Shāwur I, most eminent of his house, acquired a great contemporary renown as a fighter for the faith. The Shaddādids submitted to the Seljuq Ṭoghrïl Beg when he first appeared in the Transcaucasian region, but in 468/1075 Alp Arslan’s general Sāwtigin invaded Arrān and forced Faḍl III or Faḍlūn to yield up his ancestral territories. However, another branch was installed in Ānī, capital of the Armenian Bagratids, after its capture by the Seljuqs in 465/1072, and it lasted through many vicissitudes up to the Georgian resurgence in the second half of the twelfth century; a Shaddādid is still mentioned in a Persian inscription from Ānī at the end of the century.

Justi, 443; Sachau, 14 no. 22; Zambaur, 184–5 (all incomplete); Album, 34.

EI² ‘Shaddādids’ (C. E. Bosworth).

Sayyid Aḥmad Kasravī, Shahriyārān-i gum-nām, III, 270–332, with a genealogical table at pp. 328–9.

V. Minorsky, Studies in Caucasian History, with genealogical tables at pp. 6, 106.

C. E. Bosworth, in The Cambridge History of Iran, V, 34–5.

W. Madelung, in ibid., IV, 239–43.