Ibrahim ibn Yaqub

Ibrāhīm ibn Yaʿqūb ( Arabic إبراهيم بن يعقوب الإسرائيلي الطرطوشي, DMG Ibrāhīm b. Yaʿqūb al-Isrāʾīlī aṭ-Ṭurṭūšī Hebrew:אברהם בן יעקב Abraham ben Jacov ) was an envoy from the Caliph of Córdoba from the Muslim Tortosa (Arabic Ṭurṭūša ), who traveled to Central Europe in the second half of the 10th century .

His travel reports, especially from the East Franconian Empire , including the cities of Mainz ( Magenza ), Speyer and Worms as well as Slavic areas, especially from the cities of Prague and Krakow and the Obodritic capital Mecklenburg , are among the most important narrative sources of this time, despite the problematic tradition .

Life

Ibrāhīm ibn Yaʿqūb was of Jewish origin. Almost nothing is known about his life, so that one can only make assumptions about his background and the function of his travels based on his descriptions. In his reports he pays a great deal of attention to trade and economics, which has led to the popular belief that he was a merchant. On the other hand, he also shows an interest in ethnography, diseases and climatic conditions, which indicates a broader educational background. The historians Leopold von Ranke and Eliyahu Ashtor thought it possible that he was a Sephardic or generally Jewish doctor. Peter Engels indicated in a publication from 1991 that Ibrāhīm ibn Yaʿqūb was probably not Jewish, but rather, as a convert to the Islamic faith, left the name al-Isrāʾīlī in his name out of traditional awareness.

In his reports, Ibrāhīm ibn Yaʿqūb mentions two meetings with Emperor Otto I. However, the dating of the underlying trips and thus their significance for diplomatic relations between Muslim Spain and Central Europe in the 10th century are also controversial. The first meeting took place in the year 350 according to the Islamic calendar , that is between February 20, 961 and February 8, 962, in Rome ( Rūmiya ). On behalf of the Caliph of Cordoba Abd ar-Rahman III. Ibrāhīm met here with Otto I, who was referred to as King of Rome ( malik ar-Rūm ), apparently shortly after his coronation as emperor on February 2, 962. It was sometimes assumed, for example by Abdurrahman Ali el-Hajji, that Ibrāhīms was the interlocutor in Rome not Otto I, but Pope John XII. has been. Helmut G. Walther showed, however, with reference to similar names, that malik ar-Rūm referred to a secular ruler.

Even more controversial in research are the time and place of the second meeting between Ibrāhīm ibn Yaʿqūb and Otto I. This took place either in 965 in Magdeburg or on May 1, 973 at Otto I's court day in Merseburg . This is also the key point for the dating of almost all of Ibrāhīm's other journeys. Tadeusz Jan Kowalski and André Miquel , among others, spoke out in favor of a reading by Mádí Frgh as Magdeburg . The further route Ibrāhīms seems to speak in favor of , along the Elbe and Saale ( S. láwa ) upstream via Calbe (uncertain: Klí.wí ), then (secured) via Nienburg (Saale) ( Núb Gh.rád ) to the Salt pans operated by Jews near Halle (Saale) , and from here eastwards via Wurzen ( Búr.džín ) on the Mulde ( Mldáwá ) to Prague ( Brágha ). The oldest written mention of the city of Prague dates back to him, which brings Ibrāhīm ibn Yaʿqūb a special place in Czech history.

In contrast, Helmut G. Walther stated that no occidental source reports the reception of an Islamic delegation for 965, which is why M. Canard, André Miquel and Abdurrahman Ali el-Hajji regarded Ibrāhīm Ibn Yaʿqūb only as a private traveler. For the year 973, however, both an Arab and Polish and Bulgarian embassies have been handed down, with which Ibrāhīm also met. Ibrahim is the first to report the existence of the Duke of Poland , Mieszko I. Widukind von Corvey reports on a court day in Quedlinburg at Easter 973, when envoys from many different peoples came, for example from Byzantium, Rome, Benevento, Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, the Bulgarian Empire and Denmark. Otto I celebrated the Ascension Day in Merseburg, where he received ambassadors from Africa , to whom he paid royal honors with gifts and whom he invited to linger at his court, and after a while to return them to their homeland with an answer and probably a return embassy to dismiss. Walther could now make it probable that this was not, as is usually assumed, an embassy from the Fatimid Khalif al Muizz (see also Ifrīqiya ). In his opinion, “the modern interpreters [...] are victims of Widukind's particular geographical terminology. For him, as for many contemporaries, Islamic Andalusia was part of Africa. ”At the same time, a Fatimid embassy to Otto I is not mentioned in any other source and, given the unstable political circumstances of the time, is highly improbable. Therefore, Walther assumed that Ibrāhīms second meeting with Otto I. 973 in Merseburg, where the meeting with a Polish and a Bulgarian embassy was possible. According to the custom of the Spanish Umayyads, following the trip to Rome in 961/62 there would have been another embassy on behalf of the caliph al-Hakam II , the son and successor of Abd ar-Rahman III. The fragmentary character of the traditional travelogues does not rule out several trips by Ibrāhīm to the East Frankish Empire. However, when Ibrāhīm made several trips to the embassy, ​​Canard's and el-Hajji's drafts of the itineraries could no longer be maintained.

Lore

Ibrāhīm Ibn Yaʿqūb probably wrote his travelogues after his return to Spain for the councils of the caliph. However, this report is neither independent nor preserved in its entirety, but only fragmentarily as individual quotations in the works of younger Arab geographers and cosmographers.

Most of it is the work of the Spanish geographer Abū ʿUbayd ʿAbd Allāh al-Bakrī (1014-1094), who wrote it in the chapter on the Slavs in his book Kitābu l-mamāliki wa-l-masāliki (Book of Kingdoms and Ways) inserted. The book was completed in 1068 and is available in two manuscripts in Istanbul and another manuscript , now lost but known in its variants. Thus al-Udhrī (d. 1085) used and preserved other information. The cosmographer Zakarij 'ibn Muhammad al-Qazwīnī (died 1283) in his description of the landscape, Kitab ātāri l-bilādi and also Ibn Abd al-Munim al-Himjarī (14th century ), narrates some fragments, which mainly affect today's France, Germany and Holland . –15th century) in his dictionary Kitābu r-raudi l-mitāri fī chabari l-aktāri .

literature

Editions

• Arist Aristovič Kunik and Baron Viktor Romanovič Rozen (eds.): Izvěstija al-Bekri i drugich avtorov o Rusi i Slavjanach (Zapiski Imperatorskoj Akademii Nauk; 32, Pril. 2). Saint Petersburg 1878.
• Tadeusz Kowalski: Relacja Ibrāhīma Ibn Jakūba z podróży do krajów słowiańskich w przekazie al-Bekrīego (Pomniki dziejowe Polski Ser. 2, T. 1. Wydawnictwa Komisji Historycznej. Polska Akademia Umieje̜tno 84). Skład Główny w Ksie̜garniach Gebethnera i Wolffa, Kraków u. a. 1946.

Translations

• German: Arab reports from envoys to Germanic royal courts from the 9th and 10th centuries . Translated into German and provided with footnotes by Georg Jacob , Berlin, Leipzig 1927. Digitized edition of the University and State Library in Düsseldorf
• Czech: Zpráva o Slovanech Ibráhíma ibn Jakúba. In: Magnae Moraviae fontes historici part 3. Diplomata epistolae textus historici varii . Curaverunt Dagmar Bartoňková, Lubomír Havlík, Ivan Hrbek, Jaroslav Ludvíkovský and Radoslav Večerka. Spisy University JE Purkyně v Brně, Filos. fact. Vol. 134. Státní pedagog. Naklad., Pragae 1969, pp. 410-420.
• Slovak: Ján Pauliny: Arabské správy o Slovanoch (9th-12th storočie). Veda, Bratislava 1999, ISBN 80-224-0593-0 .

Researches

• Ali el-Hajji, Abdurrahman: Ibrāhīm ibn Yaqūb at-Turtūshi and his diplomatic activity . In: The Islamic quarterly. A review of Islamic culture. 14, 1970, ISSN  0021-1842 , pp. 22-40.
• Ali el-Hajji, Abdurrahman: Andalusian diplomatic relations with western Europe during the Umayyad period (AH 138-366 / AD 755-976). An historical survey . Dar al-Irshad, Beirut 1970, pp. 228-271.
• Böhm, Adolf: The journey of the Jewish trader Ibrahim ibn Jakub in 973 from Magdeburg to Prague - The attempt to reconstruct an old trade route. In: Erzgebirgische Heimatblätter . 5/1980, pp. 106-109, ISSN  0232-6078
• Canard, Marius: Ibrahim ibn Ya'qub et sa relation de voyage en Europa, in: Études d'Orientalisme dédiées à Levi-Provençal, Vol. 2, Paris 1962, pp. 503-508.
• Charvát, Petr / Prosecký, Jiří (eds.): Ibrahim ibn Yaʿqub at-Turtushi. Christianity, Islam and Judaism meet in East-Central Europe, c. 800-1300 AD Proceedings of the International Colloquy April 25-29 , 1994. Praha 1996, ISBN 80-85425-20-3 .
• Engels, Peter: The travel report of Ibrahim ibn Ya'qub (961/966). In: Anton von Euw , Peter Schreiner (ed.): Kaiserin Theophanu. Meeting of the East and West at the turn of the first millennium. Commemorative publication of the Cologne Schnütgen Museum for the 1000th year of death of the Empress . Schnütgen-Museum, Cologne 1991, pp. 413-422.
• Haag, Georg: About the report of Ibrahim Ibn Jakûb. In: Baltic Studies 31 (1881), pp. 71–80.
• Ibrahim Ibn Jakub i Tadeusz Kowalski w sześćcdziesiątą rocznicę edydji. Materiały z konferencji naukowej [Ibrahim Ibn Jaqub and Tadeusz Kowalski on the 60th anniversary of the edition. Materials for a scientific conference], ed. by Andrzej Zaborski, Krakow 2008.
• Labuda, Gerard: Ibrahim ibn Jakub o stosunkach polsko-nemieckich w latach 963-966 [Ibrahim ibn Jakub on German-Polish relations in the years 963-966]. In: Studia Źródłoznawcze 45 (2007), pp. 59–63.
• Maas, W., La 'Relación eslava' del judío español Ibrahim b. Ya'qub al-Turtui. In: Al-Andalus 18 (1953), p. 212 f.
• Miquel, André: L'Europe occidentale dans la relation arabe d'Ibrahim b. Ya'qub (Xe siècle) . In: Annales. Economies, sociétés, civilizations. 21, 1966 ISSN  0003-441X ISSN  0395-2649 , pp. 1048-1064
• Mishin, Dimitrij: Ibrahim Ibn-Ya'qub At-Turtuhi's Account of the Slavs from the Middle of the Tenth Century. In: Annual of Medieval Studies at Central European University Budapest (1994/95), pp. 184-199.
• Richter-Bernburg, Lutz: Ibrāhīm ibn Ya‛qūb al-Isrā'īlī al-Ṭurṭūshī , in: The Oxford Companion to World Exploration , David Buisseret, editor-in-chief, 2 vols., Oxford UP 2007, I: 402b- 403b
• Sezgin, Fuat in collaboration with Mazen Amawi: Studies on Ibrāhīm ibn Yaʿqūb (2nd half 10th century) and on his account of Eastern Europe. (Publications of the Institute for the History of Arabic-Islamic Science. Islamic Geography Vol. 159). Inst. For the History of Arabic-Islamic Science at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe Univ., Frankfurt am Main 1994.
• Tameanko, Marvin: Ibrahīm Ibn Ya'qūb, Spanish Traveler, and the Jews of Prague, AD 966. In: The Shekel 39/6 (2006), pp. 12-15.
• Walther, Helmut G .: The failed dialogue. The Ottonian Empire and Islam . In: Albert Zimmermann (Ed.): Oriental culture and European Middle Ages. (Miscellanea mediaevalia 17). de Gruyter, Berlin, New York et al. 1985, ISBN 3-11-010531-4 , pp. 20-44. Online at google books
• Warnke, Charlotte: Comments on Ibrahim Ibn Jakub's journey through the Slavic lands in the 10th century. In: Agricultural, Economic and Social Problems of Central and Eastern Europe , ed. by Herbert Ludat, Wiesbaden 1965, pp. 393-416.
• Wigger, Friedrich Report by Ibrahîm ibn Jakûb on the Slavs from the year 973 published in: Yearbooks of the Association for Mecklenburg History and Antiquity, Vol. 45 (1880), pp. 3–20 http://mvdok.lbmv.de/resolve / id / mvdok_document_00002822 / fulltext
• Widajewicz, Józef: Studies on the slav report of Ibrahim-ibn-Jakub (Johann Gottfried Herder Institute. Translations 7), Marburg 1951.
• Zaborski, Andrzej: Tadeusz Kowalski's Edition of Ibrahim ibn Ya'qub and the Fragment concerning Poland. In: Oriental Studies in Language and Literature. Ceremony for the 65th birthday of Werner Diem , ed. by Ulrich Marzolph, Wiesbaden 2011, pp. 383–388.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Eliyahu Ashtor: The Jews of Moslem Spain. Vol. 1 . The Jewish Publ. Soc. of America, Philadelphia 1973, 344 ff.
2. ↑ Engels, travel report 1991, p. 416.
3. ↑ To summarize the older research history A. Miquel sv Ibrāhīm b. Yaʿqūb. In: EI (F) III (1971), pp. 1015-1017. The bibliographical information there is to be supplemented by B. Spuler: Ibrāhīm ibn Yaʿqūb. Orientalist remarks. In: Yearbooks for the History of Eastern Europe 3, 1938 ISSN  0021-4019 , pp. 1–10. See also Bernard Lewis: The Muslim Discovery of Europe . Norton New York et al. a. 1982, ISBN 0-393-01529-7 and Bernard Lewis: The world of the unbelievers. How Islam discovered Europe . Propylaea, Frankfurt / M. 1983, ISBN 3-549-07637-1 , p. 95 with annotation.
4. ↑ So the name in a manuscript with parts of the work of al-Udhrīs; edited by Abd al-Aziz al-Ahwani. Madrid 1965.
5. ↑ English translation of the text in el-Hajji, Ibrāhīm ibn Yaqūb 1970, p. 26 and the other, Andalusian diplomatic relations 1970.
6. ↑ Walther, Dialog 1985, p. 38 note 5 with reference to the designation sāhib Rūma for Hugo von Arles in al-Masudi's book of annotations and revisions , edited by Aleksandr Aleksandrovič Vasilev: Byzance et les Arabes 2. La dynastie macédonienne (867 -959) (Corpus Bruxellense historiae Byzantinae). Fondation Byzantine, Bruxelles 1968.
7. ↑ So already Jacob, Arabischeberichte 1927, and Spuler, Orientalistische Comments 1938, p. 9.
8. ↑ Kowalski: Relacja Ibrāhīma Ibn Jakūba 1946 , pp. 27, 64, 86; M. Canard: Ibrahim ibn Yacqub et sa relation de voyage en Europe . In: Études d'orientalisme dédiées à la mémoire de Lévi-Provençal part 2. Maisonneuve & Larose, Paris 1962, pp. 503–508 (after Kowalski); Miquel, L'Europe occidentale 1966; Miquel 1971.
9. ↑ The Saxon history of the Widukind of Korvei. Widukindus Corbeiensis . In connection with Hans-Eberhard Lohmann, reworked by Paul Hirsch (Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Scriptores rerum Germanicarum in usum scholarum separatim editi vol. 60. Hannover 1935. Unchanged reprint Hahn, Hannover 1977, ISBN 3-7752-5294-0 . III, 75: “ ubi diversarum gentium multitudo conveniens ” (152). Detailed lists of the individual embassies in other annals and chronicles, cf. Regesta Imperii (as note 76) No. 562a, 247 and Rudolf Köpke and Ernst Dümmler: Kaiser Otto the Great (Yearbooks of German History, Vol. 9) Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1876, pp. 501–505.
10. ↑ Widukind III, 75: "... descendit inde ascensionem Domini apud Merseberg celebraturus ... Post susceptus from Africa legatos eum regio et munere visiantes secum fecit manere." (P. 152)
11. ↑ For example Köpke / Dümmer, p. 509; Harald Zimmermann: The Dark Century. A historical portrait . Styria, Graz a. a. 1971, p. 187, and K. Reindel in: Handbuch der Europäische Geschichte 1, 1976, p. 695.
12. ↑ Walther, Dialog 1985, p. 40. He referred above all to Rodulfus Glaber , who had the Saracens from Fraxinetum come from Africanis partibus , but the North African Fatimid dynasty from Spain. As the origin of the devastating campaigns of the Andalusians against the Christian empires of northern Spain under al-Mansūr , Rodulfus Glaber again indicated Africa: Raoul Glaber. Les cinq livres de ses histoires (900-1044). Publ. Par Maurice Prou ​​(Historiarum libri 5th Collection des textes pour servir à l'étude et à l'enseignement de l'histoire 1). Picard, Paris 1886, I, 4: “Sarraceni ab Affricanis partibus occupavere tutiora Alpium montium loca” (10); I, 5: "egressus from Hispania rex Sarracenorum Agalif, veniensque cum exercitu maximo in Italiam" (17) - but what is meant are the kelbite raids since 986 in southern Italy - "reversi cum suo principe ad Affricam Sarraceni ..." (18); II, 9: "gens Sarracenorum cum rege suo Almuzor nomine egressus est ex Affricanis partibus, occupans pene universam Hispanie regionem usque in australes Galliarum fines." (44); IV, 7: "consurgens rediviva Sarracenorum in Affrica partibus adversus Christianorum populum perfidia." (109).
13. ↑ In August 972, for example, the capital was moved to the newly founded Egyptian al-Qāhira (today's Cairo ) by the 4th Fatimid Khalif al-Muizz . The way north was complicated, because Sicily was in the hands of the Kelbitic Emir Ahmad ibn Hasan , while the rule of the Ṣanhāǧa - Berber dynasty of the Zirids began in North Africa . A possible interpretation of an anti-Byzantine alliance attempt by al-Muizz, which was considered by Zimmermann among others, was considered by Walther to have little likelihood in view of the Ottonian-Byzantine relations that were then good.