Red Nile: The Biography of the World’s Greatest River (27 page)

Baiburs’ tribe were crushed by the Mongols, but later it was Baiburs who exacted the first defeat on the ever expanding Mongol horde. He commanded the Mamluks under Shajarat al-Durr and then under her killer, Qufuz, and ten years later at the battle of Ain Jalat he faced his Mongol enslavers and beat them. All Baiburs asked for was to be made Governor of Aleppo. But the Caliph Qufuz feared him and denied him any reward. Baiburs then had his ruler killed while out hunting. Two men broke the Caliph’s neck and secured him upon his horse, slapped the horse and sent it home. It was an insult to the intelligent, a transparent deceit – how could a man with a broken neck remount and ride home? A hunting accident, everyone was told.

Now Baiburs was the Sultan of Egypt. He ruled from the saddle or the military encampment and never went hunting with men he couldn’t kill quicker than they could kill him. He was truly paranoid. A sultan in his palace is a sultan waiting to be attacked. At night he slept badly and had nightmares. His stomach was reputedly ‘not strong’ and he preferred soups and palliative dishes over the immense feasts his contemporaries enjoyed. On moonlit evenings, when he couldn’t sleep, like Haroun al-Raschid (an earlier ruler whose behaviour was mythologised in
The Thousand and One Nights
), he would patrol the streets in deep disguise, listening for rumours and conspiracies, unmasking spies.

He was known for the swift despatch of his methods. During a siege he would promise everything to the inhabitants – a full pardon,
freedom, unlimited food and drink – if only they opened the front door to him. They always cracked, sooner rather than later, and then he would renege on all his promises and massacre all of them. Hitler used similar tactics; the end always justifies the means. But Baiburs wasn’t as bloodthirsty as later Circassian Mamluk rulers of the Nile. He might order a crucifixion or even a bisection, but only if no other course was open to him. Though the Mamluks would later excel at siege warfare they were not skilled at first in the use of war engines. Instead, Baiburs anticipated the total war of later centuries and destroyed crops and orchards around fortress towns in order to weaken their defenders economically. If he could get his way without killing, then he preferred that – as long as it was swiftly achieved.

In 1266 he was after the Mongols again, this time their vassal states of Antioch and Tripoli, ruled by the Christian Prince Bohemond VI. When Antioch fell Bohemond, who had not been present, retreated to Tripoli. Baiburs sent an extraordinary letter detailing the massacre at Antioch ‘because their ruler had been absent’. He told Bohemond that the same fate would befall Tripoli. In truth Baiburs knew that his own generals did not want another lengthy campaign north of Egypt. They wanted to return to the Nile and enjoy their plunder. Baiburs hoped this letter would change history, by expelling the last of the crusader kingdoms in the Middle East into the sea:

‘It is a pity when the commander cannot witness the sacrifice his people make on his behalf. And a beaten commander cannot rely on the words of his friends. They seek only to reassure him. Rather he should be strong enough to rely on the words of his enemy; these he can always trust.

‘When our men entered the eastern gate they marked their displeasure at being stoned from above by imaginative use of the hand cannon. [Baiburs’ use of the hand cannon in the turning-point battle of Ain Jalat is the first recorded use of firearms in a battle.] Our men took the Christian defenders and removed each one from his shirt of mail. The hand cannon was loaded with rough projectiles made of granite. These are not good at distance. The captured man was made to repudiate his unbeliever’s religion but refused. The hand cannon was manoeuvred so that it would fire vertically and remove, at a shot, the captive’s manhood. This was achieved on no less than seven occasions. In every case no trace of the captive’s equipment could be found.

‘Many hundreds were treated to a Mongol staghunt. This in honour
of your Mongol lords. For there in their steppe they hunt a deer by not killing it but by wounding it deliberately and allowing it to slow down its family. More deer are shot and wounded with spears and arrows in their legs and hindquarters. The hunt now takes the form of herding the deer sometimes over a cliff, or to a wadi with one end blocked. There all are killed. In the same way our men, using the sword and lance as clubs, broke the legs of those enemies who would fight and allowed them to escape into a street blocked at one end. All were killed by blows to the head as my men complained that the human fat spilled by so much killing had blunted their swords and what is more the blade would stick in the fat making this form of killing too slow.

‘One amusement for our men was to boil duck eggs for half an hour until they were as solid as rock. These fine objects kept their heat well as they were introduced into the fundament of the city’s best defenders. These men, unable to use their bound arms, were burned on the insides by this interesting method of dispatch.

‘Many who were not killed were deprived of their noses and ears, which I believe you received some while ago. Thinking they were now free my men allowed themselves a small joke by capturing again these deformed ones and drowning them in several barrels full of mares’ milk, which turned red with the blood from their burst lungs.

‘Naturally the women and children did not escape. Many were killed together. The women with the most spirit of defiance were herded to the top of high buildings and urged at lance point to jump. None survived except one, whose head was crushed by a watching halberdier. No children survived. They were encouraged at sword point into the latrines of the city and caused to be drowned in excrement.

‘This will be your fate and the fate of all your people if you do not surrender. Your red flags have been replaced everywhere by our yellow flags, your bells are now silenced by the cry of Allah Akhbar! Called from every mosque.’

True or not, the letter had the desired effect and Bohemond decided not to fight. It was a masterful stroke; the letter was so bloodcurdling that Bohemond agreed to a truce, sparing Baiburs the need to commit real bloodshed.

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The heart is where the home is

Something troubling one’s legs is better than something troubling the heart
. Nubian proverb

The Red Nile: it is a river that has turned red with the blood of invading armies, red with the colour of silt, red with the colour of ancient plagues; on this river it is wildly appropriate that the innermost secrets of blood should be discovered.

Mansoura is a town on the Nile. It is north of Cairo in the delta, where the Nile forks to run its last miles into the Mediterranean. Formed by several million years of silt, the delta is the most prosperous part of Egypt. It is also, as we have heard, the place where Baiburs stopped the crusader advance into Egypt and imprisoned Louis IX. And it is where Baiburs’ most trusted friend, the physician Ibn al-Nafis, started the Al-Nassri hospital and wrote many of his medical works.

Not that he did much anatomy – Al-Nafis said he loved animals too much to dissect them for the sake of science, an unusually enlightened approach. What he learnt about the body must have come from studying humans rather than animals. But what he did discover was extraordinary – he wrote over eighty volumes on medical topics alone. He wrote just as much on theological, legal and general subjects. His philosophical novel
Theologicus Autodidacticus
is credited with being the first sci-fi novel. And 400 years before William Harvey, he discovered how the blood circulated in the body.

Until Al-Nafis, it was the second-century
BC
Greek, Galen, who was the accepted authority on the mechanisms of the human body. Galen’s theory, which had been accepted by the great polymath Avicenna (on whom Al-Nafis would write a commentary dealing with the function of the heart and lungs), was that a plethora of invisible pores perforated the cardiac septum allowing air somehow to enter the bloodstream. He postulated that the venous and the arterial blood systems were entirely separate. Until recently it has been a medical orthodoxy, playing to the Western sense of self-importance when it comes to scientific discovery, that the world was ignorant of the way the blood circulated until Harvey, anatomy lecturer and physician extraordinary to James I. It seems an odd sort of historical symmetry that both of these discoverers of the secrets of blood circulation should have been favoured
physicians of their particular monarch. Harvey, though, was a cutter. In his anatomy lectures he made it a rule ‘to cut up as much as may be in the sight of the audience’. But we now know that he was not the first. In 1924, while rootling through the vast archives of the Prussian State Library in Berlin, an Egyptian doctor named Muhyi al-Din al-Tatawi came across Al-Nafis’
Commentary on Anatomy in Avicenna’s Canon
(1242). Al-Nafis had been twenty-nine when he wrote it. Towards the end of the fifteenth century the Venetian scholar and diplomat Andrea Alpago had translated another of Al-Nafis’ works – a compendium of drugs used in the Arab world – and in a side-note mentioned Al-Nafis’ disagreement with Galen about the circulation of the blood. Alpago’s nephew published this book in 1547 – and it was reprinted in 1556, 1562, 1582 and 1595. Harvey studied medicine in Padua from 1599 to 1602 when he graduated as a doctor. Almost certainly he read or heard mention of Al-Nafis’ ideas at that time.

Al-Nafis wrote:

Perhaps Al-Nafis, who was born in Damascus and came to Cairo in 1236, was inspired by the ebb and flood of the Nile in his description of how the heart worked. Galen could not see how the vastly dissimilar-seeming venous and arterial systems could be the same. But the Nile in flood is vastly different from the Nile in ebb, as different as the extravagant bounty of arterial blood compared to the thin offerings of a vein.

Al-Nafis states his position unequivocally:

The flood of the Nile brings nourishment to the land in the form of waterborne silt. Al-Nafis might have had this in mind when writing:

That one of the most bloodcurdling of rulers should have the discoverer of the circulation of the blood as his personal physician seems appropriate. Yet I like to think it was the Nile that provided him with the answers, not the vast numbers of corpses his ruler made available to the world.

It is reported that Al-Nafis, when not working, loved the spectacle of fireworks (which must have arrived from China along with Baiburs’ hand cannon), great bonfires, jugglers, tumblers and conjurors of every stripe.

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The poison taster’s wife

When a woman is pregnant she is equal to all other pregnant women
.
Ethiopian proverb

Many of the roles of modern government originated in apparently menial servant chores, chores which, however, required great loyalty. And all regimes are built on loyalty ahead of intelligence, competence and flair, for without loyalty the enemy assassin could strike at any time – as Saladin knew. The chamberlain was originally the master
of the bedchamber. The chancellor was the doorkeeper to the ruler’s quarters, but doorkeeper can be a very powerful job when government becomes established and bureaucratic. Men who occupied these posts could expect promotion, perhaps to the key position of sultan. However, in the case of Ayyub it was none of the more prominent Mamluks who became sultan. Shajarat al-Durr, fully intending to keep her position as ruler, required someone connected to the former ruler, acceptable to Bahri Mamluks but not one of them – because that would grant them too much power. Such a person was Aybak, Ayyub’s former poison taster.

In a culture as paranoid and unhealthy as that of the Mamluk court, poison taster was a key job. Not only absolute loyalty was required, but also courage, and competence – since the key requirement was managing the kitchens in such a way that poison could not be introduced at any stage in the proceedings from kitchen to dining room. And even employing only chefs from the village of Manial Shiha, which Aybak did, as this was a place not only where good cooking could be found but where all were related and bound by a similar bond of loyalty – and all knew that if the ruler was poisoned they too would be killed (bisection with a razor-sharp sabre being the usual death a poisoner could expect). Still, even with a spotless and systemised kitchen secure from interlopers and with a loyal staff, there was the possibility of a rogue element entering the equation. For this the poison taster needed to be able to spot a poisoned dish – even when he was half asleep, last thing at night or first thing in the morning. Such know ledge also, naturally, made him expert in the art of poisoning and therefore not wholly trusted by the paranoid Mamluk court. It was not an easy job.