Climatic potential of Islamic chronicles in Iberia: Extreme droughts ( ad 711

Abstract

From ad 711 to 1492, several regions in Iberia were under Muslim ruling. This Al-Andalus civilization generated a large amount of documentation during those centuries. Unfortunately, most of the documents are lost. The surviving Arabic documentary sources have never been studied from a climate perspective. In this paper, we present the first attempt to retrieve climate evidence from them. We studied all the Islamic chronicles (documents written by Islamic historians that narrate the social, political and religious history) available for the period ad 711–1010. It is shown that these sources recorded extreme events with a high temporal and spatial resolution. We identified three severe droughts, ad 748–754, ad 812–823 and ad 867–879, affecting Al-Andalus. We also noticed that the weather in Cordoba during the period ad 971–975 showed a higher frequency of snow and hail than current climate. The possibility of obtaining long continuous series from this type of source seems highly difficult.

Keywords

Arabic chronicles drought early Middle Ages Iberian Peninsula

Introduction

Documentary sources are becoming a basic tool in the study of pre-instrumental climate. They can provide descriptions of weather with a time resolution down to sub-daily scale. In Europe, they have been widely used (see Brázdil et al., 2005, 2010 for review papers).

In Iberia, the first meteorological measurements rescued date from ad 1724 in Lisbon (Domínguez-Castro et al., 2013). Prior to this date, documentary sources provide information mainly about hydrological extreme events (droughts and floods), since Iberian societies were more vulnerable to precipitation extremes than to temperatures. That is the reason why temperature reconstructions are very scarce (Alcoforado et al., 2000; Bullón, 2008).

Historical droughts have been mainly studied from pro-pluvia rogation chronologies. These ceremonies are a typical ritual of the Roman Catholic Church, consisting of praying for precipitation to God during a long drought period. Rogation chronologies have been recorded from different cities (Domínguez-Castro et al., 2010, 2012a and references therein). They were compiled from about the 16th to the 19th centuries, although some series even start in the 15th century (Domínguez-Castro et al., 2010).

The Muslim presence in Iberia from ad 711 to 1492 produced abundant documentation prior to ad 1500. Islamic chronicles have been used in the last few decades, for astronomical and geophysical purposes, to identify and date such astronomical phenomena, such as eclipses, comets (Vernet, 1982) and naked-eye sunspots (Vaquero and Gallego, 2002). Aurora borealis sightings have also been identified (Basurah, 2006; Vaquero and Gallego, 2001). Also, these chronicles have been extensively used in the Seismic Catalogue of the Iberian Peninsula (Martínez and Mezcua, 2002). However, their climate analysis has been very scarce (Bulliet, 2009; De Miguel, 1988; Domínguez-Castro et al., 2012b).

This paper is a first try to systematically analyse Islamic Iberian documentary sources. Their analysis has become a long time-consuming task, and required the involvement of Arabists (historians and philologists) to find and translate the documentary sources.

Fortunately, all the chronicles making reference to the early period of ad 711–1010, from the irruption of the Islamic army in Iberia to the decline of the Caliphate of Cordoba, have been translated. Thus, we have used this period to evaluate the potential of the Islamic sources in Iberia.

The purpose of this work is to examine the usefulness of the Islamic sources in order to provide direct evidence on the Iberian climate during the early Middle Ages. We provide a brief overview of the historical context, describe the documentary sources and, finally present the results.

Historical context

An Islamic army invaded the Iberian Peninsula after crossing the Strait of Gibraltar during April and May ad 711, followed by a rapid expansion of Islam in the territory. Except for some areas in the north, Iberia became the border with Europe of the powerful Umayyad Empire, named Al-Andalus. It became a province of the Umayyad Caliphate from ad 711 to 750.

In ad 750 in Damascus, the Abbasids took over power, assassinating almost all the Umayyad family, and centring the power of the Arab empire in Baghdad. But in ad 756, Abd al-Rahman I (an Umayyad prince saved from the slaughter) found exile in Iberia, separating Al-Andalus from the Baghdad power, and establishing himself as Emir of Cordoba. In ad 929, the emir Abd al-Rahman III, after reducing several rebellions that had arisen in the emirate since the mid-9th century, proclaimed the Caliphate of Cordoba.

The economy of the caliphate was based on trade, a well-developed handicraft industry and agriculture. Some authors speculate that the population of Cordoba exceeded 450,000 in ad 1000 (Tertius, 1987). This may be an exaggeration, but most academics agree that Cordoba was one of the three largest cities in the world at the time.

In ad 1031, as a consequence of the civil war, the Cordoba Caliphate was divided into independent states called ‘Taifas’. In ad 1236, the Christian ‘Reconquista’ led to the recovery of the last Islamic stronghold of Granada under Mohammed ibn Alhamar by Ferdinand III of Castile. From then on, Granada became a vassal state to the Christian kingdom, for the next 250 years, until ad 1492, when the last Muslim king Boabdil of Granada surrendered. The time evolution of the Islamic territory in Iberia is shown in Figure 1. During the three first centuries of Islamic occupation (8th to 10th), practically all Iberia was dominated by the Arabs.

Figure 1.

Time evolution of the Al-Andalus territory and geographical names cited in the text (modified from Pérez, 1978).

Consulted sources

Only 11 Islamic sources have been preserved from the period ad 711–1010. All of them are chronicles written by Islamic historians. Their purpose was to describe the political and social events that occurred at that time, all written in Arabic. At present, there have been translations into other languages (Spanish, French, English, among others). We have used editions translated by prestigious Arabists (see References). There are Arabic chronicles written later on, but the information for this period is always based on the chronicles studied in this work. Figure 2 shows the historical periods covered by these sources, which are described below.

Ajbār Maŷmūa. This is an anonymous chronicle probably written by several authors in different time periods, but its final version dates from the early 11th century (Anonymous, 1867). This chronicle covers the period from the Islamic invasion (ad 711) to the Abd al-Rahman III caliphate (ad 912–961), but only records meteorological events of the 8th century, especially during its first half.

The history of the Mohammedan dynasties in Spain. The first part of the chronicle Nafh at-tib min gusn Al-Andalus ar-ratib written by Ahmad ibn Muhammad al-Maqqari (ad 1578–1632) was reorganized and summarized by Pascual de Gayangos (Al-Maqqari, 1840). This source deals with the geography, literature and history of Al-Andalus. The second part is a biography of the Cordoban vizier Ibn al-Jatib. Al-Maqqari was critical with the sources analysing and comparing the description of the different authors for the same events.

Annals of Cordoba. This was written by Antonio Arjona Castro (Priego de Cordoba ad 1938–2013; Arjona, 1982). This source is a special case since, strictly, it is not an Islamic chronicle but a modern compilation of news about Cordoba for the period ad 711–1008.

History of Al-Andalus. This was written by Ibn Idari, who was born in Marrakech and lived in the late 13th and the early 14th centuries (Ibn Idari, 1999). We only know that he was judge of Fez. He used more than 50 different sources in his work, some of them currently lost. Frequently, he was more concerned about compiling a great number of news items than about their historical importance.

Rawd al-Qirtas. This is the chronicle of the kings of Maghreb and Fez. It covers the history of the kings Idrisid, Maghrawa, Almoravid, Almohad and Marinid, from ad 788 to 1326 (Ibn Abi Zar, 1964). The chronicle was commissioned by the sultan Abi Said Uthman II (ad 1310–1331) and was written in Fez by Ibn Abi Zar’ al-Fasi during the first half of the 14th century. Although the chronicle is about the Maghreb, it has numerous references to Al-Andalus.

Almuqtabis II-1. This was written by Ibn Hayyan (Cordoba ad 987–1075), an important government official (Ibn Hayyan, 1999). It lacks in meteorological news. We have rescued only four references from more than the 50 years covered by the chronicle.

History of the Spanish and African Muslims. Written by the Egyptian historian Abu-l-‘Abbas Ahmad b. ‘Abd Wahhab Sihhab al-Din al Nuwayri Al-Nuwayri (ad 1278–1332), called Al-Nuwairi (En-Nuguairí, 1917). He was one of the authors of Arabic encyclopaedic literature during the Mameluk period. He had an important position in the court of the Mameluk sultan of Egypt Nasir-al-Din Muhammad ibn Qalawun Al-Nuwari.

Almuqtabis III. This was also written by Ibn Hayyan, and this chronicle includes the end of the Muhammad I kingdom (ad 880) to the ‘Abdallah kingdom (ad 912; Ibn Hayyan, 1960). The number of events recovered from this chronicle is limited.

Almuqtabis V. This is another volume of the Ibn Hayyan work. We extracted 27 different reports of meteorological character (Ibn Hayyan, 1981). All the referred phenomena are dated between ad 912 and 943. This source is dedicated to a period in which Cordoba was flourishing. It is not surprising, therefore, that most of the items about the weather are related to that city, which was also the common residence of the caliph. Al-Andalus is mentioned by the author in a large number of items. We can assume that the observed phenomena (drought in most cases) occurred over a wide area of southern Iberia.

Chronicle of Abderrahman III. This is an anonymous chronicle, probably written by an author contemporaneous to Abd al-Rahman III (ad 912–961; Anonymous, 1950).

Palatine Annals. It was written by the historian Isa ben Ahmed ab Razi. Barely anything is known about this author, although it is clear that he had access to the archives of Al Hakam II’s court (Al-Razi, 1967). The annals narrate the most outstanding events of the caliphate in the period ad 971–975 in great detail. The surviving version was edited by Ibn Hayyan, so it is also called Muqtabis VI. The chronicles report numerous meteorological events. The most important are directly related to agriculture, such as heavy rains, storms, hail and frost.

Figure 2.

Time periods covered by consulted sources.

Methods: How to work with these sources

All the documents have been carefully read. Once an item of meteorological interest has been identified, all the useful information related to dating or quantifying it in terms of duration or impact was also extracted. Due to the atypical nature of these sources, special attention was paid to analyse the context of each report.

All the chronicles contain meteorological information, but none of them can be considered as primary sources. It must be emphasized that most of the Arabic manuscripts that have survived to date are copies and edited versions, not original ones. Moreover, only the Palatine Annals are contemporary to the events described. Unfortunately, the manuscript is not the original, but an edited version by Ibn Hayyan. So, these sources do not exactly meet the criteria proposed by Alexandre (1977, 1987) to select documentary sources in historical climatology. In fact, for the studied period (ad 711–1010), there are no sources meeting these criteria in Iberia. This introduces an uncertainty factor, which is difficult to quantify due to possible errors of transcription or dating. Consequently, the analysis of these sources has been done carefully.

Since the usual criteria to select documentary sources do not apply to the Arabic documentary sources in Iberia for the studied period, we needed to use a different approach in order to assess the reliability of the different authors and/or sources. It must be emphasized that the Muslims have a very early tradition on historiography, in order to retrieve and keep records of Muhammad’s life. Thus, the historians’ work was widely recognized by that society, which encouraged them to keep detailed and accurate records. With that in mind, we used two main criteria to evaluate these sources: (1) the amount of documentation consulted by the authors (those in administrative positions, with access to a large amount of documents, are more reliable) and (2) the gap between the author’s life and the date of the recorded events. Taking into account these considerations, we concluded that Al-Razi, followed by Ibn Hayyan are the most reliable authors.

To estimate the severity of the events, we used their impact reflected in economic and social issues. In the case of drought, those references about famine were very useful.

The main topics of the chronicles had to do with political and social facts, not climate events. Therefore, this has the advantage that the authors of the chronicles had no interest in changing the severity of the meteorological events recorded. However, this disinterest about climate led to inhomogeneous records, preventing us from the possibility of obtaining continuous series of climatic value from the records for this period. Thus, any attempts of indexation would be considered too risky. For that reason, we have centred our study on identifying periods with clustering of extreme events, as carried out in previous works using Arabic chronicles (Domínguez-Castro et al., 2012b). Those clusters must be the first documented climate anomalies for that period in Iberia, and we hope that they could be useful to validate future reconstructions.

Results

Drought information

All the records of meteorological events retrieved (floods, rainfalls, cold waves and others) are available on the Salvà-Sinobas web page (http://salva-sinobas.uvigo.es/index.php/eng/base-de-datos/).

In this work, we mainly focus on the extreme droughts. Floods have also been analysed, but the chronicles provide only very sparse data (14 floods only), with no detectable pattern. The temporal distribution of drought and famines during the period ad 711–1010 is shown in Figure 3. Keeping in mind that we have been working mainly with discontinuous secondary sources, we can only highlight those periods where the concentration of events is anomalously high. The references to drought in Al-Andalus are concentrated in three periods:

ad 748–754. References to drought have been found for each year. The chronicles call them the ‘years of Barbate’ because many people emigrated from Barbate (Spanish coast in the Strait of Gibraltar) to Tangier, Asilah or the Berber Rif to escape famine.

ad 812–823. During this short period, references to droughts mention long famines. En-Nuguairí (1917) and Al-Maqqari (1840) make reference to people (mainly lower classes) dying by thousands. Ibn Hayyan (1999) points out that many people emigrated from Al-Andalus to northern Africa due to these famines.

ad 867–879. In all, 13 years of drought are described, making references about famine. In one case, ad 873–874, Mohamed I removed the Cordoba governor due to his refusal to collect the tithe (al-’Ashwar), claiming that his servants had neither sown nor reaped the harvest. This drought affected Al-Andalus drastically. Other regions along the southern Mediterranean are also mentioned in the chronicles, that is, the north of Africa (Maghreb and Egypt) and the surrounding area of the Red Sea, that is, Hedjaz (the west of present-time Saudi Arabia) and Adua (in the north of Ethiopia). This severe drought and famine was considered at that time as the worst ever recorded to date, and this event has been sometimes used as a reference.

Another famous drought, probably short but very severe, occurred in ad 898. Ibn Abi Zar (1964) reports that people in Al-Andalus even practised cannibalism to survive.

Figure 3.

Time distribution of famines and droughts in Al-Andalus (ad 700–1000).

The special case of the Palatine Annals

The Al-Razi chronicle (Palatine Annals) is a peculiar source because it provides a detailed description of Cordoba’s weather over a 4-year period (from October 971 to September 975). It describes common meteorological events without dramatic consequences, such as ‘it rained in Cordoba from the 31st of January to the 5th of February 972’ or ‘the 28th of March 972 a copious rain fell’, together with extreme ones. Figure 4 summarizes the meteorological phenomena cited in the chronicle.

Figure 4.

Meteorological phenomena cited in the Palatine Annals. The upper panel shows the monthly mean rainfall in Cordoba from ad 1959 to 2010 (data from Spanish Meteorological Agency, AEMET).

In general terms, rainfall was concentrated between October and February, the same as today. The scarcity of rain references from October 972 to February 973 must be noted. This deficit did not recover with the precipitations in March, because it was necessary to practise rogation ceremonies for rainfalls from the month of April until mid May, when rainfall resumed again.

It is remarkable that two snowfalls occurred during the 4 years analysed (4 January 975 and February 972), considering that snowfall in Cordoba is an infrequent event. Only 7 snowfalls were recorded at the Cordoba airport station (37°50′39′′N, 4°50′46′′ W) during the period 1959–2010 (three in 1971, two in 2002 and one in 2003 and 2006).

Hail is also uncommon in Cordoba, but the Palatine Annals record hails in March, November and December 973. The instrumental series of Cordoba airport only registered one hail event in November (2002), one in December (1987) and three in March (1979, 1988, and 1979).

Another recorded event is the strong winds on 5 April 974. Al-Razi describes it as a wind storm that ‘uprooted this day a great number of olive trees’. This description suggests a level 10 on the Beaufort scale, corresponding to a wind velocity of around 89–102 km/h (supposing that those olive trees were well rooted). Only for 6 days in 21 years of the modern period (1989–2010) did the wind exceed 90 km/h in Cordoba.

Final comments

This paper has shown that Arabic sources in Iberia are very useful to detect and date (with a high temporal and spatial resolution) some meteorological extreme events that represented a high impact on those societies. It was difficult to obtain a continuous series of events because most of the available sources were secondary and discontinuous. The three periods of intense droughts (ad 748–754, ad 812–823 and ad 867–879) are the most noticeable events.

However, the Palatine Annals are an exception: They record meteorological extremes with major impacts, and also common meteorological events without dramatic consequences. The author of these Annals is contemporary with the events described, and we cannot find any temporal gap during the short period recorded ad 971–975. They show anomalous frequency of snowfall and hail events.

To the best of our knowledge, all the chronicles with information about Iberia during the studied period have been translated and no further original documentation has survived. For the study of the post–Umayyad period (from ad 1031), some important sources remain untranslated. These include chronicles of the Almohad and Nasrid period (ad 1147–1492) such as those written by Ibn Al-Qattan (Kitab Nazm al-yuman), Ibn Sa’id Al-Magribí (Kitab Al-Mugrib fi hula-l-Magrib) and Ibn Al-Jatib (Al-Ihata fi ta′rij Garnata, Kitab al-A’mal al-Al’alam). However, their full study could only be possible with the involvement of Arabists due to the difficulties in analysing these original sources.

In any case, the results of this paper make us consider that obtaining long homogeneous series from these sources is highly unlikely, especially for those periods where only chronologies or geographical manuscript have survived.

Footnotes

Funding

This study was funded by Junta de Extremadura (Research Group Grant No. GR10131) and Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad of the Spanish Government (AYA2011-25945). Fernando Domínguez-Castro was partially supported by the Prometeo Project, Secretariat of Higher Learning, Science, Technology and Innovation (Ecuador Government).

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Climatic potential of Islamic chronicles in Iberia: Extreme droughts ( ad 711–1010)

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Historical context

Consulted sources

Methods: How to work with these sources

Results

Drought information

The special case of the Palatine Annals

Final comments

Footnotes

Funding

References