Introduction

THE TAʾRIKH al-rusul wa-l-muluk of Muhammad ibn Jarir al-Ṭabarī (d. 310/923) stands as the most important extant source of information on the Turkish community of the third/ninth century ʿAbbāsid capital, Samarra The community included at least several notable Turkish families of eastern Khurāsān; the great majority of the Samarran Turks, however, were apparently of Central Asian steppe origin. The latter group, in turn, was made up of Turks acquired on the steppe frontier by ʿAbbāsid representatives and a smaller number of individuals purchased from prominent families in Baghdad. The policy of acquiring the Turkish slaves was probably initiated by al-Maʾmūn (r. 198–218/813–33) around the year 200/815-16, then pursued by his successor al-Muʿtaṣim (r. 218-27/833-42). Every indication is that the Turks were brought into the Islamic realm for the purpose of stocking a new military unit; much of the evidence suggests it was to be a private guard under al-Muʿtaṣim's command during al-Maʾmūn's reign, a status that evolved to that of field army later in al-Mu'taṣim's own rule. Initially inhabitants of Baghdad, the Turkish soldiers joined the court, the civilian bureaucracy and other elements of the imperial army in settling in Samarra upon its founding by al-Muʿtaṣim around 221/836.4

Elsewhere I have relied on the information provided by al-Ṭabarī and other medieval authors to develop a series of arguments concerning the Turkish community's socio-political history. There I treat only in passing historiographical questions surrounding the historian's material on the Turks. There are a number of such questions; below I briefly consider what I believe to be among the more salient. I do so, however, to set the stage for the principal discussion of this paper. There can be no dispute over the centrality of al-Ṭabarī's information to any treatment of the Samarran Turkish community; what remains to be carried out, however, is an assessment of that information, and, specifically, the extent to which it reveals a response on al- Ṭabarī's part to the Samarran Turks. What of the nature of that response, and what of its origins?