21 July 2025
A veterinary text between Mongols, Mamluks and Armenians
Historical background: Mamluk and Mongol military rivalries in the 13th century
The Mongol army’s capture of the ‘Abbasid capital of Baghdad in 1258 was a pivotal moment in Middle Eastern history. After the dust of this battle had settled, the pillaging and destruction of the city’s libraries became a literary trope, amplified in Arab historiography and cultural memory.
One of the lesser-known as aspects of this famous conquest is the participation of the army of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia. Anticipating the Mongols’ dominance, the Kingdom had entered into an unequal political alliance – more accurately a vassalage – with them, against their mutual enemies, the newly-established Mamluk rulers of Egypt. The Armenian king Hethum I (1213-1270) himself travelled to Mongolia to pledge his services and be recognised for his loyalty.
Hethum I (seated) in the Mongol court of Karakorum, 'receiving the homage of the Mongols', from a manuscript copy of La flor des estoires d'Orient (Fleur des histoires de la terre d'Orient), by Hayton/Hethum of Corycus (nephew of King Hethum I of Armenia), composed in 1307 CE (British Library Add MS 17971, f. 23r).
Equine medicine in war and peace
Against this historical backdrop, a text recently catalogued for the British Library-Qatar Foundation Project in two copies (Or. 9823, dating to c. 15th century; and Or. 3133, copied 1854), contains historical perspectives on the looting of Baghdad’s caliphal library and the complex nature of Armenian political relationships in the 13th century. On a more intimate level, it also hints at the tale of a nameless Armenian surgeon; an otherwise anonymous prisoner of war whose linguistic and medical prowess gave him a tiny footnote in the history of equestrian medicine in the Middle East.
This text, elaborately entitled The Matching Pearls Concerning the Knowledge of Precedents (al-Durr al-muṭābiq fī ʻilm al-sawābiq) in Or. 9823 and Formulary of equine medical science (Aqrābādhīn fī ʻilm ṭibb al-khayl) in Or. 3133, is a manual on the characteristics of horses and the treatment of equine diseases and injuries, in 182 or 183 short chapters.
The work’s preamble and the beginning of the first chapter relate piecemeal a convoluted and rather confusing transmission history. This account, which varies in small but important details in different extant copies, explains that the text had originally been encountered in the Armenian language, and contained many pharmacological terms that could not be understood, until ‘a surgeon from among the captives with understanding of the terminology was found, who translated it into Arabic – that man was valued and expert in his craft.’
Introduction and start of first chapter of al-Durr al-muṭābiq fī ʻilm al-sawābiq (British Library Or. 3133, f. 1v).
The text goes on to state that ‘the Armenian king, in the service of the [now-]vanquished enemy [the Mongols], had taken the Arabic book from the library of the caliphal treasury in Baghdad, and translated it into the Armenian pen (‘qalam’, in Or 9823, or ‘took it to the Armenian realm [‘iqlīm’, in Or 3133] […] during the reign of Baybars’ (Mamluk sultan, ruled 1260-77).
(British Library Or. 9823, f. 3r)
The books of horsemanship and characteristics of horses
The importance of horses to the Mongols and Mamluks, as to most medieval societies, and therefore the desirability of having the best possible understanding of their care and breeding, can hardly be understated. The wealth of Arabic manuals on horsemanship, equestrian medicine, and on animal care in general copied over many centuries makes this clear.
According to the version of the Armenian translator-surgeon’s explanation related in the text’s preface, it is a compilation of the tried and tested hippiatric knowledge of a certain wise individual, Muḥammad ibn al-Khalīfah [‘son of the Caliph’] Yaʻqūb. Given the content and structure of the Formulary, this name appears to be a corruption of Muḥammad ibn Yaʻqūb ibn Akhī Ḥizām, a famous horse trainer who, over 350 years earlier in Baghdad, had worked for the ʻAbbasid caliph al-Mu‘taḍid (ruled 892-902), and was the author of a voluminous and highly influential early Arabic hippiatric treatise, The book of horsemanship and characteristics of horses [or: and veterinary science] (Kitāb al-furūsīyah wa-shiyāt al-khayl [wa-al-bayṭarah]).
The horse's good (ff. 22v-23r, left) and bad (ff. 62v-63r, right) points, from a copy of Kitāb al-bayṭarah, an abridgement of Kitāb al-furūsīyah wa-l-bayṭarah by Muḥammad ibn Yaʻqūb Ibn Akhī Ḥizām, attributed to Abū Muḥammad Aḥmad ibn ‘Atīq al-Azdī, dated 1223 CE. (British Library Or. 1523)
Consisting of two main parts subdivided into numerous short bābs, over the centuries Ibn Akhī Ḥizām’s Kitāb al-furūsīyah was abbreviated, edited, and translated under a wide variety of titles, with the name of its author frequently appearing in corrupted forms.i The text in Or. 9823 and Or. 3133 seems to be one of these spin-off works. But how did this Armenian surgeon – it is uncertain whether his expertise was as a horse veterinarian – find himself in the situation of back-translating the text into Arabic?
Other names are also mentioned, further confusing the picture: a ‘philosopher’ named Saʻd al-Dīn ibn al-Ẓāhir al-ʻAjamī (‘the foreigner’ or ‘the Persian’) who participated in the composition of the text, and two individuals, Maḥbūb and his companion Abū al-Faraj, who translated it into Armenian (although the BL copies describe them working ‘from’ Armenian, this does not make sense, and another more detailed copy (Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, Ms. Orient. A 2087, f. 8v), has them working ‘into’ Armenian).
Translating on the battlefield
After repelling the Mongols in 1260 at the battle of ʻAyn Jalūt, the Mamluks retaliated against the Mongols’ Armenian allies with a punitive campaign culminating in August 1266 at the Battle of Meri, where the Armenian army was defeated, the land pillaged, and many civilians subsequently enslaved. Could this have been the occasion of the text’s and/or the surgeon’s capture? Someone with medical skill and linguistic aptitude would have been a useful captive for the triumphant Mamluks, and a useful manual on horse care carried by a soldier or by the army’s veterinary retinue could have been part of the booty.
However, the introduction to Forschungsbibliothek Gotha, Ms. Orient. A 2087 additionally mentions the second battle of Homs of 19 Rajab 680 AH/ 3 November 1281 CE, when Mamluk forces under Sultan Qālāwūn (ruled 1279-90) again defeated the Mongols along with their Armenian military supporters. The Gotha copy describes how the Mamluk commander (and later, sultan) Lājīn assembled a group of Armenian prisoners to translate the book, but they could not understand all its pharmaceutical terminology, whereupon the surgeon was found (f. 2r).
The Battle of Homs of 1281 in La flor des estoires d'Orient (Fleur des histoires de la terre d'Orient). (Paris, Bibliotheque Nationale MS 886, f. 27v [detail]).
Prisoner of history: the captured surgeon
Either way, this text conjures a melancholy picture of the unfortunate surgeon, imprisoned in an encampment on the plains of Syria. forcibly thrust into the spotlight and obliged to transmit to his captors the secrets of this text on horses. However, probably unbeknown to them all at that moment, it had originally been composed in the same language it was now being translated into.
And despite the inevitable realisation that the text was not a source of new knowledge but belonged to an already well-established tradition, the story of its transmission was clearly considered remarkable enough, even at the time, to have been preserved throughout its subsequent scribal history, right down to 1854, when Or 3133 was transcribed.
Amuletic squares in British Library Or. 3133, f. 33r (left) and in British Library Or. 1523, f. 110v (right).
Jenny Norton-Wright
Arabic Scientific Manuscripts Curator, British Library / Qatar Foundation Partnership
Bibliography
Dum-Tragut, Jasmine, Kilikische Heilkunst für Pferde – Das Vermächtnis der Armenier (Hildesheim: Editorial Olms Verlag, 2005)
Hayton/Hethum of Corycus, La Flor des estoires de la terre d’Orient, esp Book III: 'On the Tatar nation', in Recueil des historiens des Croisades, Documents Armeniens, vol. 2, edited by Jean Dardel (1906; Paris: Imprimerie royale, 1841-1906), pp. 147-219. English translation available at: https://www.attalus.org/armenian/hetum3.htm#26.
al-Sarraf, Shihab, 'Mamluk Furūsīyah Literature and Its Antecedents', Mamluk Studies Review 8 (2004), pp. 141-200 (esp. pp. 148-52)
Sbath, Paul, 'Manuscrit arabe sur la pharmacopée hippiatrique', Bulletin de l'Institut d'Egypte 14 (1931-2), pp. 79-81 and plates i-iii
Shehada, Housni Alkhateeb, Mamluks and Animals: Veterinary Medicine in Medieval Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 118-20 and 169-70
See also the research project Encounter in the Corpus of the Horse: Cultural Transfer and Knowledge Transfer between the Christian West and the Muslim East in Late Mediaeval Armenian Equine Manuals (Begegnung im Körper des Pferdes. Kulturtransfer und Wissensvermittlung zwischen christlichem Westen und muslimischem Osten in spätmittelalterlichen armenischen Pferdebüchern), at the University of Salzburg (2022-25).