Bashmurian revolts

Bashmurian[lower-alpha 1] revolts (Coptic: ⲡⲓⲧⲱⲟⲩⲛ ⲙ̀ⲡⲓϣⲁⲙⲏⲣ, Arabic: ثورة البشموريين‎) were a series of revolts by the Copts of the Bashmur region in the north of the Nile Delta against the Umayyad and Abbasid Caliphates in the eighth and ninth centuries. Exactly how many revolts there were cannot be determined, but the major military conflicts took place in 749, 767 and 831–832.

Bashmurian revolt
Part of the persecution of Copts
Date c. 720 – 832 Location Bashmur, Egypt Result Coptic rebels defeated
Belligerents
Umayyad Caliphate Abbasid Caliphate	Coptic rebels
Commanders and leaders
749: Ḥawthara ibn Suhayl 767: Yazīd ibn Ḥātim 831–832: al-Afshīn	749: Mina, son of Apacyrus

The Bashmurian revolts are known from Coptic and Arabic sources. They did not become known in Europe until the early nineteenth century.[1] Both Coptic and Arabic sources attribute them to oppressive taxation and the unjust treatment of Christians by the Arab governors.[1][2] The tax benefits of conversion to Islam were a major factor in the Islamization of Egypt.[3]

Location

Map of an area comprising Bashmur on the map of Piri Reis

The exact boundaries of Bashmur varied over time depending on where the Bashmurians were settled. At the time of the revolts, it seems to have lain across the northern Delta just south of the Mediterranean from Fuwwa in the west to Ashmun al-Rumman in the east. By the thirteenth century, the Bashmurians seem to have been confined to the eastern Delta.[1] In the eighth century, they were perhaps concentrated in the west, around the lake of Edku.[2]

Bashmur was a region of marshland with sand banks and dense cover of reeds. Nowhere else in Egypt was more propitious for armed rebellion. Access to inhabited places was provided through narrow sandy banks and the reeds provided cover for soldiers. Moreover, Arabs did not settle in the Bashmur, leaving the population religiously unmixed. The economy of the region also favoured the Bashmurians, who relied on limited agriculture, fishing and hunting birds for food. Less dependent on irrigation works than the fellahin, they were capable of resisting long sieges.[2] The Bashmurians also sold papyrus and possibly raised cattle.[4]

Military actions

It is impossible to say when the first Bashmurian revolt in the region broke out. Although there had been Coptic revolts in Egypt as early as the seventh century, most were quickly crushed. Only the Bashmurians were able to resist for long periods, inflict heavy losses on the Arabs and endure long sieges.[2] Of the nine recorded Egyptian revolts between 693/694 and 832, only the Bashmurian revolts required the personal intervention of the caliphs.[1]

715 and 720

In 712, there was an uprising in the Delta known as the revolt of the boukoloi (cattle herders).[4]

In 720, the Byzantine navy made landings in the northern Delta. This area does not appear to have been under Umayyad control at the time.[2][1]

749

By 749, the Bashmurians were in open revolt. The leader of the rebels is called Abū Mina by al-Kindī and Mina ibn Bāqīra (Menas, son of Apacyrus) in the History of the Patriarchs of Alexandria. It is not unusual for a Coptic name beginning with apa- to be interpreted as a kunya with Abū in Arabic.[5] This revolt began in Shubra near Samannūd.[4]

According to Sāwīrus ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, multiple land and sea campaigns by Governor Ḥawthara ibn Suhayl had failed to subdue them. The failure of the governor to crush the revolt prompted the Caliph Marwān II to come in person with an army from Damascus. Although he proposed an armistice, the Bashmurians rejected it and the army from Damascus was sent against them.[2]

At this juncture, Ḥawthara took the Coptic patriarch, Michael I, hostage to Rosetta, and threatened to have him killed if the Bashmurians did not lay down their arms. The Bashmurians attacked Rosetta and sacked it, massacring its Muslim inhabitants.[2][6] There was an offensive as far as Pelusium against an Umayyad army.[7] In response, Marwān ordered the pillaging and razing of Coptic villages and monasteries throughout the Delta. His campaign was a failure and in 750 he was overthrown in the Abbasid Revolution. The Abbasids granted an amnesty to the Bashmurians and exempted them from taxes for their first two fiscal years.[1] Abū Mina was killed during the revolt.[8]

767

A general revolt of the Delta took place in 767. The Bashmurians (called Bashruds in the Arabic sources) joined with Arab settlers against the Abbasid government. Local officials were killed. Governor Yazīd ibn Ḥātim sent a force against them, but it was defeated and forced to retreat to al-Fusṭāṭ.[2]

831–832

The rebellion of 767 had never been brought properly under control when the Caliph al-Maʾmūn sent his Turkish general al-Afshīn to the Delta in 830, 831 or 832.[lower-alpha 2] The rebels in the eastern Delta and in Alexandria were crushed, but the Bashmurians successfully resisted al-Ashfīn's efforts. They manufactured their own weapons. The Turk induced the patriarch Joseph I to send letters and bishops entreating the Bashmurians to come to terms, but the Bashmurians abused the bishops. When this failed, al-Ashfīn urged the caliph to come in person. The caliph brought with him Dionysius of Tel Mahre, patriarch of Antioch, to negotiate with the rebels.[2][9] The offer of a general amnesty in return for surrender and resettlement was rejected, an indication of the importance the rebels attached to geography.[9]

The negotiations failed, al-Maʾmūn launched a large attack from Shubra near Samannūd,[4] guided by natives from Shubra and Tandah,[9] resulting in high losses on both sides. When al-Maʾmūn offered an armistice, the rebels accepted. Their success was short-lived. Many armed men were executed, women and children end up deported to Iraq or sold as slaves in the slave markets of Damascus. The region of Bashmur was burned and systematically destroyed to prevent further uprisings.[2][1]

According to some historians, the crushing of the rebellion in 832 began a second wave of major persecution of Copts, which had not been seen since the entry of Islam to Egypt in 642.[3][10] The Copts were heavily pressured to convert to Islam.[1]

Legacy

Al-Kindī writes that "from then on God made the Copts small throughout the country of Egypt and destroyed their power and no one was able to outrage and oppose the sultan".[11] Carl Heinrich Becker and Gawdat Gabra both consider the defeat of the final Bashmurian revolt a pivotal event that sapped the Copts' vitality and broke their spirit of resistance.[11] It was "the last rebellion of the Copts and perhaps the last armed resistance of Egyptian people—not as an organized army—against the oppression of foreign occupation."[6]

Medieval Coptic historiography has a generally negative attitude towards the Bashmurians. It lays stress on the general obedience of the Coptic church to the caliphs. The History of the Patriarchs[lower-alpha 3] portrays the rebels of 831 as rebels against both legitimate secular authority and legitimate ecclesiastical authority for refusing to obey the patriarch. Their defeat is the due penalty for their disobedience.[12] Later Coptic writers who mentioned the Bashmurians include Abu ʾl-Makārim (13th century), who called them "ignorant"; Ibn al-Rāhib (1257), who knew of the revolts of 749 and the 830s; and Athanasius of Qus (14th century), who wrote of the region of Bashmur and the Bashmuric dialect, which he called extinct. This dialect remains a phantom to linguists and its mention may only attest to the already legendary character of the Bashmurian revolts by the late medieval period.[13]

Syriac historiography,[lower-alpha 4] which depends on the eyewitness account of Dionysius of Tel Mahre, is slightly more sympathetic to the Bashmurians. Dionysius views them as having a legitimate grievance and seeking redress. He also describes episodes of Abbasid cruelty, such as the attempted rape of a Coptic woman.[12]

Notes

1. Also Bashmuric, Bashmurite, Bushmuric or Peshmurian.
2. Megally 1991 gives 831; Feder 2017, pp. 33–35, and Gabra 2003, p. 116, give 832; Wissa 2020, cites al-Kindī, who dates the uprising to June–July 831 (that is, the month of Jumādā I in year 216 AH).
3. This section of the History was written by John the Writer, sometimes called John II to distinguish him from the early contributor John the Deacon.[12]
4. Such as Michael the Syrian and the Chronicle of 1234.

References

1. Feder 2017, pp. 33–35.
2. Megally 1991.
3. Goddard 2000, p. 71.
4. Gabra 2003, p. 114.
5. Mikhail 2014, p. 324 n102.
6. Gabra 2003, p. 116.
7. Gabra 2003, p. 115.
8. Dunn 1975, p. 20.
9. Gabra 2003, p. 117.
10. Lapidus 1972, p. 257.
11. Gabra 2003, pp. 111–112.
12. Wissa 2020.
13. Gabra 2003, pp. 118–119.

Bibliography

• Dunn, Michael Collins (1975). The Struggle for ʿAbbāsid Egypt (PhD diss.). Georgetown University.
• Feder, Frank (2017). "The Bashmurite Revolts in the Delta and the 'Bashmuric Dialect'". In Gawdat Gabra; Hany N. Takla (eds.). Christianity and Monasticism in Northern Egypt: Beni Suef, Giza, Cairo, and the Nile Delta. American University in Cairo Press. pp. 33–36.
• Gabra, Gawdat (2003). "The Revolts of the Bashmuric Copts in the Eighth and Ninth Centuries". In W. Beltz (ed.). Die koptische Kirche in den ersten drei islamischen Jahrhunderten. Institut für Orientalistik, Martin-Luther-Universität. pp. 111–119.
• Goddard, Hugh (2000). A History of Christian–Muslim Relations. Rowman & Littlefield. ISBN 1566633400. Retrieved 20 January 2016.
• Lapidus, Ira M. (1972). "The Conversion of Egypt to Islam". Israel Oriental Studies. 2.
• Mikhail, Maged S. A. (2014). From Byzantine to Islamic Egypt: Religion, Identity and Politics after the Arab Conquest. I. B. Tauris.
• Megally, Mounir (1991). "Bashmuric Revolts". In Aziz Suryal Atiya (ed.). The Coptic Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. New York: Macmillan Publishers. cols. 349b–351b.
• Ohta, Keiko (2004). "The Coptic Church and Coptic Communities in the Reign of al-Maʾmūn: A Study of the Social Context of the Bashmūric Revolt". Annals of the Japan Association for Middle East Studies. 19 (2): 87–116.
• Wissa, Myriam (2016). "Yusab of Alexandria, Dionysius of Tel-Mahre, Al-Maʾmun of Baghdad, the Bashmurites and the Narrative of the Last Rebellion in ʿAbbasid Egypt: Re-considering Coptic and Syriac Historiography". In P. Buzi; A. Camplani; F. Contardi (eds.). Coptic Society, Literature and Religion from Late Antiquity to Modern Times: Proceedings of the Tenth International Congress of Coptic Studies, Rome, September 17th–22th, 2012. Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta, 247. Louvain. pp. 1045–1062.
• Wissa, Myriam (2020). "The Last Revolt of Bashmūr (831 A.D.) in Coptic and Syriac Historiography". In Johannes Preiser-Kapeller; Lucian Reinfandt; Yannis Stouraitis (eds.). Migration Histories of the Medieval Afroeurasian Transition Zone: Aspects of mobility between Africa, Asia and Europe, 300–1500 C.E. Brill. pp. 247–260.