Alodia (Alwa)

Who rules

Name

Not pinned. Mouse (Moses), king of Makuria from 1155, inherited Alodia from his father Paulos; in 1186 Mouse and his co-king Georgios VI wrote to the Coptic patriarch as kings of Makuria and Alodia. Whether Basil of Makuria (reigning there in 1198-1199) or another prince of the Alodian line holds Soba on 1 January 1200 is not known.

Title

King of Alodia (Alwa; Arwa in the Nubian sources)

Since

Not pinned

Family

The Alodian and Makurian royal houses were intermarried: Paulos of Arwa married Mari, sister of Georgios V of Makuria; their son Mouse held both crowns (Godlewski 2019).

Confidence

low

Twelfth-century kings of Alodia known by name: Paulos (Paul), named in an Arabic letter from Qasr Ibrim and ruling at Soba before 1155; Mouse (Moses), from about the 1170s; a Basil named in an Arabic letter from Qasr Ibrim and perhaps in a graffito at Meroe (Welsby 2002, Lajtar 2009, as summarised in Wikipedia). None is dated to 1199-1200.

Overlord

None; possibly joined to Makuria in the person of one king (not pinned).

What the realm holds

• Soba, the capital, a city of about 275 hectares with several churches
• The Gezira (called Kersa in a list of provinces)
• The Blue Nile valley to about Sennar, with Christian sites along it
• The lower White Nile (its Alodian reach is poorly known)
• The Butana between the Nile and the Atbara, a grazing country
• Al-Abwab, the northern province near the mouth of the Atbara, under a royal governor
• Claims or memory of lordship over Taka (the Gash delta), where Ibn Hawqal (tenth century) placed a vassal king, and over the Nuba hills of Kordofan (Ibn Hawqal's al-Ahdin); neither is pinned for 1200

How it was acquired

The kingdom grew out of the Christian conversion of the sixth century (Longinus, 580) and kept its own line, intermarried with Makuria's; Mouse, son of Paulos, joined the crowns in the twelfth century.

Allies and rivals

Makuria: a sister kingdom, joined in Mouse's person (the Fatimid caliph mediated between Georgios V of Makuria and Paulos of Arwa in 1155). The Beja to the east, in the Atbara and Gash country. Ethiopia: the old Aksumite borderlands lay under Alodian influence, though finds of Ethiopian goods are few; al-Idrisi (1154) describes a trading town in the northern Butana where merchants of Nubia, Ethiopia and Egypt met. Arab tribes are not yet in the Gezira or the Butana in 1200 (they arrive in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries).

The peoples of the south and the Nuba hills.

The realm that morning

At peace as far as is known; its king and court are not documented for 1199-1200. To the north lies Makuria from about the Fifth Cataract; to the east, across the Atbara, the Beja; to the south-east the Gumuz and Berta of the Ethiopian borderland and, beyond, the Zagwe kingdom.

Wealth

Sorghum and cattle of the Gezira and the rain-fed plains; the herds of the Butana; trade south and east in ivory, slaves, gold (the Fazughli hills to the south-east were famous for gold in later centuries) and iron; Soba's imports of glass and glazed pottery until the thirteenth century.

Military

Tenth-century writers (Ibn Hawqal, al-Aswani) thought Alodia richer and stronger in troops and horses than Makuria; nothing is known for 1200. No numbers.

Threats

• Decline of Soba already visible in the archaeology
• The Damadim, a people from the south-west, attack Nubia in 1220 according to Ibn Sa'id (later)
• A disputed succession if the personal union with Makuria breaks

What the year holds

What happened next, if nothing in play changes it. Each event carries what it depends on and what would stop it.

1. July to September 1200A weak Nile flood (the same one that fails Egypt) leaves the river-bank and basin fields of the Gezira poorly watered; rain-fed sorghum on the plains depends on the local rains, not the flood.Depends on: The natural course. Stopped by: Nothing in play; effects in Alodia are inferred.

Places of note

• Soba: Capital

Where the sources disagree

• The regional brief says Alodia's king is not named for 1200: confirmed. The joint titles of 1186 suggest the Makurian king may also be king of Alodia in 1200, but no document of 1190-1200 names an Alodian king.
• Abu al-Makarim gives four hundred churches; only a handful of churches have been found, five of them at Soba.

Evidence: Arabic geographers of the tenth to twelfth centuries, Abu al-Makarim about 1200, Godlewski's reading of the Qasr Ibrim material for the 1150s, and the British Institute's excavations at Soba. Nothing names the king or his officers in 1199-1200.

On the map: The southern limits on both Niles and the Gedaref plains between the Rahad and the Atbara are estimates; the border with Makuria near the Fifth Cataract is not exactly known.

Primary sources for this realm

Chronicles, registers, sagas and inscriptions written in or near 1200 that cover this entry. Each has its own page with editions, translations and where to read it.

• Exhortations and Reflections on the Quarters and Monuments: the chapters on Nubia and the Beja, al-Maqrizi (about 1417 to 1442, at Cairo). Two centuries late, but al-Maqrizi copied earlier books that are now lost, above all the account of Nubia by Ibn Salim al-Aswani, who went as Fatimid envoy to Dongola about 970 and described the Nubian king, his court, the eparch, the church and the land, which is the fullest description of Makuria ever written and still broadly valid in 1200; he also gives the Beja tribes, the oases, the baqt treaty and the Ayyubid campaigns against Nubia of 1173. Read online
• History of the Patriarchs of the Coptic Church of Alexandria, Mawhub ibn Mansur ibn Mufarrij and continuators (Various) (compiled in Arabic 1088 to 1094 from Coptic lives; continued for the patriarchs of 1102 to 1243 and later). The Coptic church's own record. Read online
• Old Nubian and Greek documents from Qasr Ibrim and the Nubian royal documents (the dated Qasr Ibrim land sales and letters run from the 1150s to the 1460s; the royal documents of the 1180s and 1190s are the nearest to 1200). The only documents from inside Nubia: land sales, letters and legal texts from Qasr Ibrim in Old Nubian, dated by the reigning king, his eparch and the local officials, which give the names and titles of the court of Dotawo (the Nubians' own name for the kingdom) in the generation around 1200. Read online
• The History of the Churches and Monasteries of Egypt and some Neighbouring Countries, Abu al-Makarim (formerly attributed to Abu Salih the Armenian) (about 1177 to 1208; the core about 1200). The one Christian text written in Egypt around 1200 that looks south: it describes the kingdom of the Nubians with its king at Dongola, his churches, the eparch of Nobadia, the churches of Qasr Ibrim and the raid of Shams al-Dawla Turanshah in 1173, the kingdom of Alwa (Alodia) with its 400 churches and its capital Soba, and the Abyssinians with their king, their metropolitan sent from Alexandria, the church of Aksum and the Ark, as a Coptic churchman heard of them through the patriarchate. Read online
• Dictionary of Countries: the entries on Africa, Yaqut al-Hamawi (1224 to 1228, at Mosul and Aleppo). Entries written within a generation of 1200 from earlier books and from informants: Maqdishu (Mogadishu), described as a town of the Barbar (Somali) on the edge of the Zanj country with no single ruler but elders for each group, the earliest notice of the town; Manbasa (Mombasa), Lanjuya (Zanzibar) and the Zanj coast; Zayla, Barbara and the Dahlak islands; Dunqula (Dongola) and the Nubians; the Beja; Kanem, Zaghawa, Ghana, Kawkaw and the Sudan, mostly from al-Bakri and al-Idrisi; and the towns of Ifriqiya and the Maghreb. Read online
• The Picture of the Earth, Ibn Hawqal (about 977, revised to about 988). Two centuries old by 1200 but the only early geographer who had crossed the Sahara himself: he was at Sijilmasa and Awdaghust in 951, saw the gold trade and the famous cheque for 42,000 dinars, and described the king of Ghana as the richest on earth, with notes on the veiled Sanhaja, the Ibadi towns, the Fezzan, Nubia and Alodia, and the Zanj. Read online
• The Pleasure of One who Longs to Cross the Horizons (the Book of Roger), al-Idrisi (Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Sharif al-Idrisi) (completed in 1154 at Palermo, for Roger II of Sicily). The fullest geography of Africa a generation before 1200: the Maghreb and Ifriqiya town by town with distances and products; the Sahara routes through Sijilmasa, Awdaghust, Ghadames and Zawila; the Sudan with Ghana, Takrur, Sila, Barisa, Kawkaw (Gao) and Kugha, and Kanem with its towns Manan and Njimi; Nubia and Dongola, the Beja and the Red Sea ports; Zeila and Berbera; and the Zanj coast with Malindi, Mombasa, Qanbalu and Sofala with its gold, the earliest systematic notice of the Swahili towns. Read online
• Oriental Sources concerning Nubia, Various (collected and translated by Giovanni Vantini) (the collection published 1975). The standard collection, in English, of every eastern passage on Christian Nubia, and so the quickest way to all that was written about Makuria and Alodia near 1200: Abu al-Makarim, Ibn al-Athir on Turanshah's campaign of 1173, Ibn Jubayr and Yaqut, the History of the Patriarchs, Abu Shama, and the later Ibn Said, Abu'l-Fida, al-Nuwayri, Ibn Khaldun and al-Maqrizi (who preserves the tenth-century Ibn Salim al-Aswani).