Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik: the caliph of Rusafa, desert palaces and an orderly treasury

One of the longest and relatively calmer reigns in Umayyad history was that of Hisham ibn Abd al-Malik, who was caliph for 19 years, from 724 to 743. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, he was the tenth Umayyad caliph, and his reign was the last period of Umayyad prosperity and splendour. He is remembered for two things: strict accounting of state revenue and spending, and the palaces, gardens and irrigation works built at the edge of the Syrian desert.

Early life

According to Britannica, Hisham was born in Damascus in 691. He was a son of Caliph Abd al-Malik ibn Marwan and a brother of the former caliphs Walid, Sulaiman and Yazid II. According to the German historian Julius Wellhausen, he was named after his maternal grandfather, Hisham ibn Ismail, of the Banu Makhzum, a family of the Quraysh. Britannica writes that before becoming caliph, Hisham led a quiet life at the Umayyad court and held no important official post.

Accession

According to Wellhausen, his brother Yazid II had named him as his successor, and Hisham became caliph after Yazid’s death in January 724.

Rusafa: the favourite residence

According to Wellhausen, Hisham received the symbols of the caliphate, the staff and the ring, at Rusafa, although an account by the early historian Tabari names Homs. Rusafa was a Roman-era settlement on the edge of the Syrian desert, some distance from Raqqa, which Hisham resettled. Wellhausen writes that he considered the climate of Damascus unhealthy. He therefore kept preferring to live at Rusafa even after becoming caliph, though he took the oath of allegiance in the capital, Damascus. According to Wellhausen, Hisham shunned public display and often worked in the seclusion of Rusafa.

Administration and treasury

According to Britannica, Hisham was a cautious and thrifty administrator who paid close attention to state revenue and expenditure. Some sources credit him with reforming and reorganising the entire system of agricultural taxes. His main concern was to tighten administrative control over the vast empire he had inherited.

According to Wellhausen, Hisham’s diwan, the treasury office, was so well organised that the Abbasid caliph Mansur later praised it. Hisham ended the practice under which influential people received military pay merely as a favour. In his reign, the pay went only to those who had themselves performed military service or had sent someone in their place, and the rule applied to Umayyad princes too. According to Wellhausen, Hisham gave his own share to his freedman Yaqut, who went on campaign in his place.

According to the World History Encyclopedia, Hisham also reinstated several of the financial reforms of Umar ibn Abd al-Aziz, which his predecessor Yazid II had abandoned.

Agriculture and irrigation

Much work was done in Hisham’s reign on settling agricultural land. Citing the Byzantine historian Theophanes, Wellhausen writes that Hisham began building palaces in villages and towns, laying out gardens and developing water sources. In Wellhausen’s words, in that period “the canal was the estate, and the palace was part of it”, meaning that the value of land was determined by the water that reached it.

According to Wellhausen, the reclamation of the marshlands of the lower Tigris and Euphrates, which had been ruined when embankments broke at the end of the Sasanian period, advanced under the Umayyads, especially in the times of Walid I and Hisham. According to Wellhausen, Hisham himself was, like Walid, a large landowner, and his agricultural estates lay around Rusafa and Raqqa and in northern Syria and the Jazira region.

Desert palaces

According to Britannica, Hisham adopted a vigorous building policy and had a whole series of forts and palaces built in Syria. Britannica’s list of Umayyad “desert palaces” of about 710 to 750 includes Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi and Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi, along with Rusafa.

Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi lies in the Syrian desert. According to an inscription at its entrance, Hisham had it built in 727. Besides the palace, the complex had a bathhouse, probably an inn, olive-oil presses and an irrigated garden, which received water from a distant dam. The palace’s richly decorated stucco gateway was removed in the 20th century and taken to Damascus, where it is now the main entrance of the National Museum of Damascus.

Qasr al-Hayr al-Sharqi lies further east, deep in the desert, and its construction is dated to 728-729. The American historian of Islamic art Oleg Grabar excavated the site from 1964 to 1971. Its ruins consist of three parts, a small enclosure, a large enclosure and an outer enclosure, surrounded by thick walls and towers. There were a reception hall, a bathhouse, gardens and olive groves. Water was brought there through a canal about 5.7 kilometres long.

According to UNESCO, very little of the decoration remains in place today in the ruins of the two Qasr al-Hayr palaces.

Death

According to Wellhausen, Hisham died at Rusafa on Wednesday, 6 Rabi al-Thani 125 AH, which is 6 February 743, while Britannica gives Damascus as the place of his death. He was around 50 years old. According to Britannica, Hisham wanted his own son to become crown prince but had to accept the heir named by Yazid II. After him, his nephew Walid ibn Yazid became caliph.

Legacy

The Umayyad caliphate lasted only seven more years after Hisham. His well-organised diwan continued to be cited as an example in the Abbasid period too. His most visible physical legacies are the ruins of the two Qasr al-Hayr palaces in the Syrian desert and the water systems built alongside them. They show how farming was carried out at the desert’s edge in the eighth century with the help of rainwater, dams and canals. The stucco gateway of Qasr al-Hayr al-Gharbi greets every visitor in Damascus today.