Wikipedia
Abū ʿAlī Manṣūr was one of the most interesting and yet controversial figures of his time. He was popularly known even in his day as “the mad caliph” though it is often difficult to separate fact from fiction and what stories about him were actually true. We do know that he rose to power while still a child when his father died. It was written he was up in a sycamore tree when his tutor, vizier and regent came to tel him that he was no caliph. The young caliph refused. His regent and wasīta (vizier) was a Slavic eunuch name Barjawan, whom al-Hakim may have had murdered later in life when Barjawan’s quest for power became too over-reaching. While he does not occupy a very large part of my second book, he cannot be overlooked as he had a part in the Fatimid Byzantine wars that occupied Emperor Basil II’s time when he was not trying to make the lives of the Bulgarians miserable. In spite of what has been written about the young al-Hakim, I had to piece together a picture of him as he might have been when young. I imagined a precocious child, calculating and suspicious, perhaps raised that way out of necessity for a boy brought up in his position. This was how Ahmed saw him when he met him rather unexpectedly in The Plague Casket:
After some time, Ahmed was ushered into an ornate room, decorated rather garishly with much gold plate. His eyes, having been outside in the blazing sun, took some time to adjust to the cool dimness here. He was left alone and the door pulled closed behind him. It was quiet. Too quiet. For a moment all he could hear was his own heart. From the lavishly piled cushions he heard a voice in careful, formal Arabic say, “Come.” Startled, he peered into the cushions and was surprised to see a boy of no more than ten or twelve years.
Looking back at him with an old man’s eyes in a small boy’s face, the child replied, “Why are you stunned to see your caliph, the son of my revered father, al-Hazziz? Did you expect a monkey on a chain? Come, give me your message.”
Ahmed hesitated. Amid the splendor and the gently bubbling fountains, he detected a hum of menace. It made his skin crawl. “I am sent by Damian Dalassenos, himself a representative of the autokrator, Basil Porphyrogenitus in Constantinople. He sends you respectful greetings, but bids that you not seek any of the lands north of Emesa for your own, lest you make him your bitterest enemy.”
The boy’s faced creased as if did not often form in more than one expression and he laughed. “You have been sent by that puppet in Antioch. Yes, he is a representative of an emperor so far away, the leagues I have forgotten. The Emperor does not even reside in the imperial city, but is occupied by his wars with the barbarian khan Samuil in far-off Bulgaria. His influence bothers me not. I am al-hakim bi-Amr Allah, son of al-Hazziz, a descendant of Fatimah, revered daughter of the holy Muhammad. I do not take orders from the Christian barbarian dogs!” His voice had turned to a spittle flecked snarl and the laughter was gone from his face. “And nor should you.”
As the boy grew to be a man, he had a reputation of killing those who displeased him on a whim and making absurd laws that no one could follow. His subjects both hated and feared him. He was said to walk through the streets of Cairo disguised as a commoner and notice which merchants were using illegally weighted scales. He meted out a terrible punishment on them publicly right there in the market.
It was Barjawan who referred to the young caliph as “the gecko” a name he detested. It was said, that when al-Hakim grew displeased with Barjawan, he sent for his vizier saying, “Tell Barjawan that the gecko has grown into a large dragon.”
Whether true or not, one of the most infamous storiess about al-Hakim is the one in which he invite d number of rebels to a feast in his baths (lavish buildings which were used for dining as well as bathing). When all were assembled, he his his personal Berber guards slaughter them all. We don’t know if this story is true or not or merely propaganda promulgated by his enemies. It makes for an interesting story however and one I utilized for my book:
The heavy scent of myrrh was mixed with another scent Ahmed could not immediately identify. As heavy as the myrrh, but with a lingering sickly stench. Ahmed stood in the stone corridor, letting the sun scorch his skin. Columns too big for a man to put his arms around, stretched like an endless line of soldiers. Beyond them gleamed cool marble floors. He hesitated a moment and then set his foot on the floor. Now he heard only his footsteps. They seemed far too loud for the silence. Out of the intense burn of the sun, the shade was refreshing, but the cloying scent of myrrh grew stronger. Almost…almost as if it was being used to cover a stronger scent. One less pleasant. It was a familiar one to him. Even to him, Ahmed, who had once been a merchant of pepper. One to whom scent should have been everything, but which pepper had destroyed much of long ago.
The torches on either side gleamed dully from the black iron curlicues. It was odd even in the dim corridors that they should be lit at this time of day. They seemed to lead the way for him. Under the torches were great shields, hung like beads in a necklace on the walls.
He stopped. He had heard something else. A low hum. The kind of sound that makes horses shake their heads with irritation. The great doors, covered with silver beaten in ornate designs, lay closed before him. In the right circumstances, these opened to the sounds of laughter, the delicately rich scent of food.
He laid a hand on the doors and pushed them open. In this room the torches bloomed like fierce flowers. The light glanced off the gleaming marble, splashed off the copper bowls, danced on the silver, reflected off the still water in center of the great bath. Amid the spilled food and tumbled fruit, the flies droned. They tasted the sweetmeats, rested on the cups. They whined in the blood that caked blackly on the stone floors. They crawled like black clouds over the corpses stretched among the mess of food and wine on the table. His attention was held by men with empty eyes, mouths full of food only barely tasted. The high whine of flies. And the stench of myrrh.
There is too much for the scope of a blog article to write about al-Hakim. His end was fittingly colorful. He went out one night for a ride in the desert and he never returned. He was only thirty-six. All that was found of hm was his horse and his blood stained garments. His most admiring followers said that he had merely been taken up to heaven. Scholar John Esposito writes that the caliph believed that “he was not only the divinely appointed religio-political leader but also the cosmic intellect linking God with creation” He became a central figure in the Druze religious movement of that time. His disappearance only cemented this idea in the minds of the Druze followers, though it was likely that he was assassinated.
Propaganda or a real life Joffrey of House Barathion, Game of Thrones style? Let me know what you think below.
See Paul Earnest Walker’s Caliph of Cairo: Al-Hakim Bi-Amir Allah, 996 -1021 for more about this fascinating historical figure