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Early Islamic Caucasus
Alison Vacca: Non-Muslim Provinces under early Islam. Islamic Rule
and Iranian Legitimacy in Armenia and Caucasian Albania. Cambridge
University Press, Cambridge, 2017, 273 pp. ISBN 9781316979853,
online 9781316979853. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781316979853
Miklós Sárközy
Károli Gáspár University of the Reformed Church, Budapest, Hungary
Foreword – Iranian influences in the Caucasus
The Caucasus, especially Transcaucasia has a very unique place in Iranian history both
before and after the emergence of Islam. Deeply divided by geographic, ethnic and religious
diversity, the areas south of Porta Caucasica and the Pass of Darband were frequently
conquered by several major dynasties of the Iranian plateau.
The three major preislamic Iranian empires of the Achaemenids (6-4th centuries BC),
the Parthians (or Arsacids, 2nd century BC – 3rd century CE), and finally the Sasanians
(3-early 7th century CE) characteristically shaped the history of Armenia, Caucasian Albania
and Iberia before the advent of Islam. The only exception was perhaps the region of Colchis
in present-day western Georgia, where Iranian influences appear to have been weaker at
the expense of Graeco-Roman traditions.
This almost uninterrupted Iranian (both western and eastern Iranian) political presence
south of the Pass of Darband and the Darial Pass led to numerous consequences by the late
antiquity (or perhaps earlier): a gradual Iranisation of local elites and cultural attitudes
(and to a lesser extent that of the local ethnic groups). On the other hand, the non-Iranian
character of local people (Armenians, Albanians, Georgians) remained obvious throughout
the antiquity.
These provinces of Armenia/Hayastan, Albania/Arran, Iberia/Kartli represented the
northern fringes of several major Iranian empires until the fall of the Sasanians, elites
were also imported from these major Iranian empires (such as the Arwandids in Armenia,
numerous cadet branches of the Arsacids and Mihrānids). Iranian influences can also be seen
in the religious life of pre-Christian Armenia, Caucasian Albania and Iberia, confirmed by
numerous sources and archaeological findings. Gradually, local variants of Zoroastrianism
and Zurvanism developed in Transcaucasia, being nativist versions of religious movements
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prevalent in the western Iranian empires. Transcaucasia became part of Ērānšahr before
Islam, but linguistically these southern Caucasian provinces maintained their non-Iranian
background, although in the case of Armenian there is a tendency towards repeated
Iranisation of its vocabulary (due to contacts held with several western and eastern Iranian
idioms).
Iranian ethnic and cultural influxes could also have come from the north of the
Caucasus , the presence of Scythians and Cimmerians in north-western Iran and Anatolia
before the formation of the Achaemenid Empire in the 7th century BC could have left its
mark on the political surface of the Caucasus, later the incursions of several Alan tribes,
a group of eastern Iranian people residing mainly north of the Caucasus, also heavily
affected the Transcaucasia from the late Parthian period on (1-2nd centuries CE) until the
early 13th century when Mongol invasions devastated the Alans. The nomadic pressure on
Transcaucasia continued well into the Middle Ages (those of the Huns, Khazars, Pechenegs
and Cumanians), these later nomadic invasions against Transcaucasia were results of major
Eurasian nomadic movements of mainly Turkic speaking tribal confederations.
The arrival and establishment of Christianity in the fourth century CE made a
significant impact on Transcaucasia and partly on North Caucasus, as well and strengthened
tendencies of self-governance in the region. The three major kingdoms of the Caucasus
(Armenia, Iberia and Caucasian Albania) sided with Christianity in the first half of the
fourth century CE. This change in the religious background of Transcaucasia added a
distinctive local character and somewhat weakened but did not completely eliminate the
Iranian political legitimacy of the region. The arrival of Christianity and the creation of a
massive network of Christian religious institutions greatly helped to establish the national
literacy in Armenian, in Georgian and in Caucasian Albanian languages supporting nativist
movements in the Caucasus against the Iranian Sasanians (such as the movements of
Mamikonian family in Armenia or that of Vakhtang Gorgasali in Iberia in the 5th century
CE). Ironically these nativist movements were sometimes led by local dynasties of Iranian
background (such as that of Khosroids in Iberia), whose ancestors had come to the Caucasus
centuries before, mainly during the Parthian period.
Despite the short-lived successes of these families, the Sasanians eventually managed
to re-establish their rule in the Caucasus in the course of the 6th century CE. Until the
Islamic conquest, much of Transcaucasia with all of its ethnic complexities remained in
the hands of the Sasanians, who used the region as a battlefield with the Eastern Romans
and the Khazars. The Sasanian military outposts were strong enough to control even parts
of North Caucasus. Zémarchos, the Byzantine envoy around 568 CE, on his way to Central
Asia was warned to avoid the valley of the Kuban river due to the alleged Sasanian military
presence well beyond the Darial Pass.
Islamic armies reached Transcaucasia as early as 640 CE when we hear of the earliest
Arabic attacks against Armenia; soon armies of the caliphate quickly occupied Dvin, the
centre of Armenia in 640 and then continued their expansions against the Khazars well
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beyond the Pass of Darband/Bāb al-Abwāb. One has the impression that the early Arab
armies hastily wanted to reach the peaks of the Greater Caucasus in order to minimize
the possible cooperation between the Byzantines, the Sasanians and the Khazars. Indeed,
the armies of the caliphate were fairly successful in conquering the south Caucasus before
650. These early Arabic wars, waged against the Kūst-i Ādurbādagān military district of
the Sasanian Empire, completely eliminated the Sasanian rule in Transcaucasia and also
significantly weakened Byzantine expansionist tendencies.
A new and important volume dedicated to the early
Islamic period and doctrinal history of the Caucasus –
Alison Vacca’s book
But what happened then? How did the early caliphate consolidate its power in Transcaucasia?
How did Islamic rule come to dominate these provinces? Did pre-Islamic Iranian legitimacy
in the Caucasus survived into the 8th–9th centuries? The book of Alison Vacca is a purely
fascinating and insightful read which successfully addresses these questions by mapping
primary sources often neglected in modern scholarship on the Umayyad and Abbasid North.
Undoubtedly, studies on the early Islamic narratives of Transcaucasia (as well as of North
Caucasus) are rather neglected in modern scholarship. It seems that nobody addressed
aspects of early Islamic perceptions on Transcaucasia in their entirety before Vacca’s book.
Indeed, this book explores the expressions of the surviving Iranian political legitimacy in
the region as reflected in Arabic and Armenian sources of the early Islamic period.
As far as the studies on the early Islamic period of Transcaucasia are concerned, the
first major steps in European scholarship were made by the Armenologists, such as Laurent
with his L’Arménie entre Byzance et l’Islam published in 1919, which book was reprinted
and reedited several times in the second half of the 20th century. Later, in Soviet Armenia
Ter-Levondyan and Melik-Bakhshyan wrote seminal works on early Islamic Armenia. It is
perhaps Ter-Levondyan’s main work (The Arab Emirates of Bagratid Armenia, 1976) that has
gained more recognition due to its English and Arabic translations, while Melik-Bakhshyan
published mainly in Armenian. In Azerbaijani scholarship, attempts have been made to
elevate Caucasian Albania to the level of Armenia and Iberia, especially by Bunyadov and
his pupils.
Besides these regional studies, which focus almost exclusively on Armenian and
Caucasian Albanian history (based partly on modern political ideas of Armenia and
Azerbaijan), the number of works with a more holistic attitude towards early Islamic
Transcaucasia is very limited in modern European scholarship. In the early 20th century,
works of Markwart and Minorsky are worth mentioning, since both great scholars wrote
extensively on late Sasanian and early Islamic geography and political history. Recently
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works of Patricia Crone (The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran published in 2012) and
of Parvaneh Pourshariati (Decline and Fall of the Sasanian Empire published in 2008) offer
a detailed description on political and religious history of late Sasanian and early Islamic
Ērānšahr including parts of the Transcaucasia. Therefore Vacca’s new book is a laudable
and excellent work which tries to shed light on hitherto overshadowed aspects of early
Islamic Transcaucasia.
Vacca’s book has seven main chapters, two of them focus on administrative geography,
concepts, ideas of Abbasid-era Arabic geographers on Caliphate-ruled Caucasus, whereas
four other chapters address the history of caliphal administration before the disintegration
of the Caliphate in the 10th century and the emergence of local dynasties (both Islamic and
Christian). The last chapter tries to shed light on the multi-layered character of the Iranian
traditions in Transcaucasia.
Besides summarizing elements of methodology, Vacca’ first chapter (Non-Persian
Provinces of Iran, Non-Muslim Provinces on Islam, An Introduction to the Umayyad and
c
Abbāsid North) already suggests her main argument that can be detected in her entire
book: it is the Iranian legacy, the Iranian-influenced local traditions that play the key role
in shaping Islamic concepts on the region of the Caucasus (according to Vacca, Byzantine
and Armenian traditions exerted much lesser influence on later Islamic authors). Later,
as Vacca notes, these Iranised Islamic (mainly Abbasid) concepts laid the ideological
foundations of local dynasts in the 9-10th centuries. Not only local Muslim rulers such as
the Širwānšāhs (themselves of Arabic origin) became Iranised claiming the Iranian title
’šāhānšāh’ and naming their male members as Ānūširwān and Qubād, but also mighty
Christian Armenian families such as the Bagratunis (along with their Georgianised cadet
branch of the Bagrationis) and the Artsrunis relied on the Islamized Iranian concepts
of kingship. The sculptural depiction of Smbat Bagratuni on the facade of the Haghpat
monastery suggests elements of Iranisation in his royal ideology. On Smbat’s turban we
can decipher the Islamized Iranian title ’šāhānšāh’ with Arabic letters, similar Sasanian
symbols appear on the surface of the Akhtamar church of the Artsruni dynasty. Even Sarir,
the tiny Christian kingdom of the Caucasian Avars in North Caucasus received its own
Sasanian foundation legend.
In the second chapter of the book (Whence the Umayyad North? Byzantine, Sasanian and
Caliphal Administrative Geography of the North), the author traces the origins of Caucasusrelated Islamic maps. It appears that it is the Sasanian geographical unit called Kūst-i
Ādurbādagān, which stands behind the concept of Jarbī, a Marwānid-created administrative
unit around (after 685 CE) according to Vacca. This idea is further supported by textual
and numismatic evidences. This chapter once again proves that Byzantine and Armenian
traditions were rather marginal in shaping the Umayyad administrative innovations in the
Marwānid period (after 685 CE) as it was suggested by descriptions of Transcaucasia in the
so-called Balkhī geographies. Instead, Sasanian traditions mainly ruled the narrative of
Arabic geographers. In this regard, Vacca primarily questions the idea of Super Armenia,
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arguing that the caliphal representatives did not organize Armenia, Georgia and Albania
into a single province in Islamic Transcaucasia in the 7-8th centuries.
Chapter 3 (Lost Greek kings and Hoodwinked Khazars, Sasanian and Byzantine Legacy in
the Construction of Caliphal Frontiers in the North) is perhaps the most important part of
the book. Here Vacca discusses the borderlands of Transcaucasia and their representation
in Arabic geographical traditions. From her analysis it becomes clear that Arabic and
Armenian sources on caliphal geographical units do not seem to emphasize the religious
values of ribāṭs, ḥudūd, thuġūr as in the case of other borderlands of the Caliphate (as in
Syria or in Central Asia) and generally are less enthusiastic in promoting Islam among local
‘infidels’ north of the Pass of Darband or west of Erzurum. Here again, Sasanian traditions
and legends dominate the narrative almost completely, and the Islamic borderland
descriptions of the 9-10th centuries tend to focus on miraculous deeds of Sasanian kings and
the alleged foundation of cities attributed to Sasanian rulers. These anecdotes enjoy greater
prestige in the eyes of these Arabic authors than any anecdote about the spread of Islam
in Transcaucasia and beyond. The popularity of certain Sasanian-related legends seems to
have persisted in these local Arab and Armenian sources composed even centuries after
the fall of the Sasanians. However, these ’Sasanian’ legends on the foundations of Darband/
Bāb al-Abwāb and other places recorded in the 9-10th centuries by Islamic authors hardly
contain any historical accuracy, therefore they should be treated with great caution. Thus,
the legends preserved in the Darbandnāma (an important and still largely unprocessed
source on the history of the Caucasus, rich in early Islamic material) on the foundation of
two Hungarian cities in present-day Azerbaijan by the legendary Sasanian king Khusraw
Ānūširwān (531-579) require more textual criticism in the light of Vacca’s new researches.
Chapter 4 (The So-Called Marzbāns and the Northern Freemen, Local Leadership in the
North from Sasanian to Caliphal Rule) continues the narrative of the previous chapter. Here
we can see similarities and parallels between Sasanian and post-Sasanian/early Islamic
administrative methods preserved in the accounts of 9-10th century Arabic and Armenian
authors. Here Vacca employs the method of comparative analysis to demonstrate the
similar character of these pre-Islamic and Islamic accounts.
Arabic and Armenian sources speak of a tripartite governmental system run by both the
Sasanians and the Caliphate: foreign governors (ostikān/marzbān), local rulers (Armenian,
Caucasian Albanian and Iberian) and the local aristocracy (often called in Arabic as abnā’
al-mulūk or aḥrār). In many cases these sources put a strong emphasis on the idea of
administrative continuity before and after the Arabic conquest. Vacca reminds us, however,
that nearly all of these Arabic and Armenian sources were penned in the 9-10th centuries in
the period of the emergence of new local families, during the so-called Iranian intermezzo,
where a neo-Sasanian cult began in the Persianate world and this fact might have affected
our sources on the status of early Islamic administration practices in the Caucasus. In other
words, the emphasis put on the concept of an almost uninterrupted continuity with the
Sasanian past may reflect the new political realities of the 9-10th centuries following the
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decline of the Abbasid caliphate, when old-new local elites came to power in Transcaucasia
promoting nativist traditions contrary to the ideology the Abbasid Caliphate.
Similar parallelisms can be drawn in Chapter 5 (Caliphs, Commanders and Catholicoi:
Mechanisms to Control the North under Byzantine, Sasanian, and Caliphal Rule), where
cases of administrative practices both from the Sasanian era and from the early Islamic
period are discussed. Here, local hierarchism and imperial approaches are confronted in
our Arabic and Armenian sources, where the highly decentralized imperial North faced
numerous challenges from the Sasanian/Caliphal courts. Similar trends and behaviours are
recorded in our sources in both cases: local elites resisting attempts of forced conversion
to Zoroastrianism/Islam, carefully defending their mostly non-Chalcedonian Christian
social institutions. Apparently, this resistant attitude also seems to have been instrumental
in protecting the integrity of local societies. Here, however, the same question arises as
before: are these stories in our sources based entirely on real episodes, or are they merely
popular expressions intended to meet the expectations of the 9-10th century readers?
Vacca poses the same question when she delves into the analysis of the taxation system
of the early Islamic period (Chapter 6: Taxing the Dead and Sealing the Necks of the Living:
Sasanian and Caliphal Treaties and Taxation in the North). Here, she finds evidence of a
sharp discontinuity with the Sasanian past due to the taxation reforms introduced by the
Marwānid caliphs of the Umayyad period after 683 CE. She once again argues that it is
the description of our sources and their pro-Sasanian attitude that makes Sasanian and
caliphal fiscal practices largely similar ’by a sustained engagement with Iranian social mores.’
After these fascinating and well-written chapters on the Iranian legitimacy in the
Caucasus in the early Islamic period, Vacca – with a sudden twist – aims at deconstructing
the Iranian legitimacy itself (chapter 7 Collective Historical Amnesia – The Case for a Parthian
Intermezzo). She argues that the origins of this frequently mentioned Iranian political
legitimacy in the case of Armenia, Caucasian Albania and Georgia are rooted rather in the
Parthian (Arsacid) period than in the Sasanian one. Vacca thinks that the expressions of
this surviving Iranian legitimacy are linked to local elites, families of Parthian background
or to a Parthian-related local idea of kingship (such as those of the Arsacids, Mihrānids and
other cadet branches of the Parthian aristocracy still present in early Islamic Caucasus).
Vacca thus believes in a multi-layered Iranian legitimacy in the Caucasus, where Parthian
traditions are primarily reflected in the traditions of the Iranian (Parthian) locality, while
the Sasanian legitimacy is represented by the conquerors from Sasanian Iran and later by
the armies of the Caliphate.
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Conclusion
Alison Vacca’s book is a seminal and very useful work for scholars of various fields
interested in Caucasian studies, Iranian history as well as early Islamic intellectual history.
It is also important to stress that this book can contribute significantly to early Hungarian
history as well. The well-known Hungarian ties to the Caucasus, the presence of early
Hungarian groups in certain parts of the Caucasus requires a more thorough knowledge of
Islamic sources relating to the Caucasus in early Hungarian historical studies in the light
of Vacca’s new results. Last but not least, Vacca’s textual criticism, the comparison drawn
between Armenian and Arabic sources, the contextualisation of these written materials,
the assessment of doctrinal aspects operating behind these sources are also of great help
for those involved and interested in Hungarian aspects of the Caucasian history.
Fig. 1. Smbat Bagratuni’s portrait, Monastery of Haghpat, Armenia. Photo by the author
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