Al-Umari

Shihab al-Din Ahmad ibn Yahya ibn Fadlallah al-Umari, generally known as al-Umari or Ibn Fadlallah al-Umari, was one of the great encyclopedists and geographers of the Mamluk era. Born in Damascus in 1300, he belonged to a distinguished family of scholars and administrators that traced its descent to the second caliph Umar ibn al-Khattab, from whom the family name al-Umari derives. He lived through the brilliant fourteenth-century flowering of Mamluk learning, an age that produced monumental works of compilation, and he made his own enduring contribution in the form of a vast encyclopedia that gathered, with remarkable breadth and precision, the geographical, historical, administrative, and cultural knowledge of his time. His writings remain among the most valuable sources for the history of the wider medieval world, from West Africa to the steppes of Central Asia.

Al-Umari was born into the Banu Fadlallah al-Umari, a family that served the Mamluk state in its chancery, the diwan al-insha, the bureau responsible for official correspondence and the keeping of state records. His father, Muhyi al-Din Yahya ibn Fadlallah, held the post of head of the chancery, and several members of the family occupied similar high secretarial offices in both Damascus and Cairo. Growing up in this environment, the young al-Umari received an excellent education in the religious and literary sciences and was trained in the demanding art of official prose. The chancery of the Mamluk sultanate was not merely a clerical office; it was a center of learning where the most accomplished stylists of the age worked, and where vast quantities of information about the realm and its neighbors passed through the hands of the secretaries. This gave al-Umari, from an early age, access to a flow of intelligence about distant lands that few scholars could match.

He followed his father into government service and held secretarial positions in both Syria and Egypt, the twin centers of Mamluk power. The work of the chancery exposed him to diplomatic correspondence, reports from envoys, the accounts of merchants and travelers, and the records of the postal and intelligence system that the Mamluks maintained across their territories. He had, in effect, a window onto the entire known world, and he possessed the scholarly discipline to make use of it. Yet his career in government was not without difficulty. He fell into disfavor at various points, suffered periods of imprisonment, and his fortunes rose and fell with the shifting politics of the sultanate. These reversals, however painful, gave him the leisure at times to devote himself to writing, and it was in his scholarly work that his genius found its fullest expression.

Al-Umari's masterwork is the Masalik al-Absar fi Mamalik al-Amsar, which may be rendered as The Routes of Insight into the Realms of the Great Cities, or The Pathways of Vision Concerning the Kingdoms of the Lands. It is a colossal encyclopedia, organized in many volumes, that aimed to bring together the whole of useful human knowledge as it bore upon the lands and peoples of the earth. The work is divided into major sections. One great part is devoted to the earth itself, its geography, its climates, its seas, mountains, and rivers, and the descriptions of the various kingdoms and their rulers, armies, revenues, and customs. Another part deals with human beings, their crafts, sciences, poetry, and notable figures. The scope is breathtaking, and al-Umari handled it with the organizational rigor of a trained administrator, classifying and arranging his material so that the reader could find his way through the vast body of information.

What gives the Masalik its special value to historians is the quality and freshness of al-Umari's sources. Because of his position in the chancery, he did not merely copy from earlier books; he interviewed eyewitnesses and gathered firsthand reports. His account of the empire of Mali in West Africa is the most famous example. Al-Umari collected detailed information about the great Malian ruler Mansa Musa and the legendary pilgrimage that the emperor made to Mecca, passing through Cairo in 1324. Al-Umari spoke with officials in Cairo who had met Mansa Musa and his entourage, and he recorded the astonishment caused by the immense quantities of gold the emperor distributed, an outpouring so great that, according to the reports al-Umari preserved, it depressed the value of gold in Egypt for years afterward. His description of Mali, its government, its wealth, its army, and its conduct of justice, is one of the most important sources we possess for the medieval history of West Africa, and much of what is known about Mansa Musa's empire rests upon it.

Al-Umari's encyclopedia ranges far beyond Mali. It contains valuable material on the Mongol khanates that succeeded the empire of Genghis Khan, including the Golden Horde of the Russian steppes, the Ilkhanate of Persia, and the Chagatai realm of Central Asia, as well as the Yuan dynasty in China. He drew on the reports of envoys and merchants who traveled these routes, and his descriptions of the political organization, military strength, and customs of these states are an important supplement to other sources. He also wrote about India, Byzantium, the Christian kingdoms of Europe, the Arabian Peninsula, and the lands of the Turks. Few works of the medieval period offer so panoramic and so well-informed a survey of the inhabited world.

In addition to the Masalik, al-Umari composed the Al-Tarif bil-Mustalah al-Sharif, a detailed manual of chancery practice. This work is a guide to the administration of the Mamluk state, describing the structure of government, the protocols of official correspondence, the titles and ranks of officials, the workings of the postal and intelligence system, and the conduct of diplomacy. For the study of Mamluk administration it is an indispensable source, a rare insider's account of how one of the most powerful states of the medieval Islamic world actually functioned. Al-Umari's mastery of chancery prose and his intimate knowledge of the bureaucracy make this manual both authoritative and richly detailed.

The fourteenth century in which al-Umari worked was an age of great encyclopedic compilation in the Mamluk lands. It was the era of scholars such as al-Nuwayri, whose own vast encyclopedia preceded al-Umari's, and it was the world that would later produce al-Qalqashandi's celebrated chancery encyclopedia, which drew heavily on al-Umari's work. This impulse toward comprehensive compilation reflected both the maturity of the Islamic scholarly tradition, with its centuries of accumulated learning, and the practical needs of a sophisticated state that required organized knowledge for administration and diplomacy. Al-Umari stands among the foremost representatives of this encyclopedic age, distinguished by the geographical breadth of his vision and the reliability of his information.

Al-Umari died in Damascus in 1349, during the years when the Black Death was sweeping across the Mamluk lands and the wider world, although the precise cause of his death is reported variously. He was not yet fifty. His relatively short life had nonetheless been extraordinarily productive, and the works he left behind secured his lasting reputation. In the centuries that followed, the Masalik al-Absar was mined by later writers and remained a touchstone for geographical and historical knowledge.

The enduring importance of al-Umari rests on several foundations. As a geographer and encyclopedist he assembled one of the most comprehensive surveys of the medieval world ever attempted, organized with the clarity of a master administrator. As a historian he preserved firsthand testimony about peoples and events that would otherwise be lost to us, above all his irreplaceable account of Mali and Mansa Musa, which has made him a central source for the history of medieval Africa. As a chronicler of administration he left, in his chancery manual, a detailed portrait of the inner workings of the Mamluk state. Modern historians, whether they study the gold trade of the Sahara, the politics of the Mongol successor states, or the bureaucracy of medieval Egypt, return again and again to his pages. Al-Umari embodies the spirit of an age that sought to gather and order the whole of human knowledge, and through his diligence a vast store of that knowledge has been preserved for posterity.