A Priest and an Artist: Tracking Down Who Sold Baybars' Qur'an
The frontispiece of the first sub' Sultan Baybars' Qur'an (Ibn al-Waḥīd, Cairo, 705 AH/1304-05 CE). (Add MS 22406 f 2v)
Why don’t you know where this manuscript came from?!? Even if the words don’t exit the lips of some researchers, you can occasionally feel them burning into your soul, transmitted by the frustrated gaze of an inquirer hungry to know who else might have read a book, benefitted from its wisdom, admired its beauty. While we would all love to have such information, sadly, it’s rarely at our fingertips. Once upon a time, record-keeping did not touch on provenance, meaning that creating a fuller picture of the origin of some manuscripts in our holdings requires research elsewhere. Such is the case for a few of our best-known works, the seven volumes of the Sultan Baybars’ Qur’an among them.
The Sultan Baybars’ Qur’an, copied in 704-05 AH (1304-06 CE) by Ibn al-Waḥīd for Baybars Jashankir, has been expertly described by our former Head of Middle East and Central Asia, Dr. Colin Baker, most recently in a post on the Asian and African Studies blog. While the digitized version of the Qur’an will not be accessible through the links he provided because of the cyber attack we suffered in October 2023, you can still view them on Archive.org. Information abounds about the art historical aspects of the work, but very little is known about how it ended up in the British Museum’s collection. A brief note at the back of the volume states that it was purchased from the book dealer T & W Boone on 12 June 1858, but that’s about it.
In May 2024, I had the great opportunity to meet Dr. Noha Abou-Khatwa of the American University in Cairo. She visited the Library to view the asbā’ themselves just after we re-opened access to restricted manuscripts. She shared some of her deep knowledge about the manuscript with me, which is why I returned to her in December to see if she’d learned anything more about the Qur’an’s history. She said that she presumed it had remained in its intended home, the Al-Ḥākim Mosque (مسجد الحاكم), for most of its life. She also pointed me to a recent chapter by Dr. Alison Ohta that mentions an inscription in Add MS 22412, the seventh sub’. (Ohta 2023, page 144 note 45) Ohta was wrong about the location (it’s in Add MS 22406, the first sub’), but right about the content. The brief pencil note says that the manuscript was “stated to have been brought from Cairo by an English Clergyman.” The signature beside it isn’t legible, so I was left stumped.
A letter from Reverend Benjamin Webb to Mountstuart Elphinstone. (Benjamin Webb, Brasted Rectory, 1 February 1854.) (MSS EUR F88/168/20 f 48r)
But I have options other researchers don’t. Namely, I can go into our storage basements, where I decided to see if there were Arabic manuscripts purchased from a named individual immediately around the Sultan Baybars’ Qur’an. I had some luck when I found, almost immediately before the first sub’, nine Arabic and Persian volumes acquired from Rev. Benjamin Webb on 8 May 1858. Webb – described as a “Clergyman” on Wikipedia – was well-connected and active as an academic, but I could find no record of his ever having been to Egypt. When I called up some of his letters held in the India Office Records, I discovered that in 1854, when his father-in-law William Hodge Mill died, Webb was left to sort out his affairs. Mill was the first Principal of Bishop’s College in Kolkata and his library included some 70-odd “Arabic + Persian MSS.” (MSS EUR/F88/168 f. 48r) Here, I thought, was a breakthrough: maybe Mill bought the Qur’an in Egypt on his way back from India?
The answer might lay in Webb’s journals. So off I went to the Bodleian, in Oxford, to consult these. I have often thought myself clever for making personal notes in Turkish or Arabic. Now that I have tortured myself going through Webb’s half-English, half-Latin notes about his daily schedule, I will never do that again. These notebooks had little to offer me, except the brief remark that Webb visited the British Museum on 29 April 1858 to show some of his manuscripts to Sir Frederic Madden, a famed English paleographer and Keeper of Manuscripts at the BM between 1837 and 1866. (Bodleian MS Eng Misc.e.412, f 18r) Madden’s journal was also at the Bodleian, so I placed an order, went for lunch, and came back an hour and a half later with little hope I’d find something useful.
I was wrong. Where Webb was terse and bilingual, Madden was expansive (and only wrote in English). He didn’t just note absolutely everything, he also imposed a system of internal references between the daily entries in his journal. That’s how I found the entry from May 1858 in which he states that “Boone […?] a volume of a magnificent Koran written A.D. 1306 in letters of gold, in large folio. It is said to belong to a clergyman who purchased it at Cairo. I should much like to buy it at a moderate price.” (Bodleian MS Eng Hist.c.171, p. 195) Just above the word “Cairo” is a note to see page 300, referring to 24 August 1858. In the main text, Madden writes: “Inquired respecting the fine Coran bought of him + was now told that it belonged to an artist, whose name was not known, but that a clerk of Christie’s named Wood had negotiated for him. I shall [request?] more information when Mr. B the […?] returns.*” The asterisk leads us to the bottom of the page, where Madden adds: “It did not belong to an artist, but the Rev. Francis Frith, who purchased it a ruined mosque in Egypt, it is believed, in Cairo. He is now gone to the White Nile.” (Bodleian MS Eng Hist.c.171, p. 300; emphasis Madden’s) Eureka! We have a name!
A self-portrait of Francis Frith in Ottoman costume. (Francis Frith, printed by Paul Pretsch, 1857).
© Public Domain, provided by the Albertina Museum through Europeana.
But now the question is: just who was this Francis Frith? If you’ve followed the link before continuing with my story, you’ll see that he was no Man of the Cloth. In fact, Francis or Frances Junior was born on 7 October 1822 in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, and was an exceptionally successful photographer and businessman. His fame came from the mission he and his wife Mary Ann Rosling set for themselves in 1860: to photograph every town and village in Great Britain. This is largely the reason why Frith’s work can be found in institutions such as the National Portrait Gallery, likely linked in the metadata to the company he founded, Francis Frith & Co. Frith died in 1898, having left his mark on British photography and photographic publishing. The company he founded only closed in 1971, its archive eventually being bought, preserved, and scanned, to become the Francis Frith Collection. Francis’ impact has also been immortalized as part of the BBC documentary Britain’s First Photo Album .
Wait a minute – what about Egypt? Rewind to the mid-1850s, when Frith was just getting on his feet as a photographer. In 1856, the bachelor Frith set out for Egypt and West Asia, making three trips that covered Egypt, Nubia, Ethiopia, Palestine, Lebanon and Syria. His photographs of these travels are clearly identified as being part of the Orientalist movement. Many of them cemented the visual conceptualization – now supposedly made factual through the science of photography – of a decadent, languid, declining Orient. He seems to have been keen to photograph ruins as well as some of the natural wonders of the region, with a heavy dose of sites linked to Biblical narratives. This last part should not be a surprise, as Frith became a Quaker minister (is this what “Reverand Francis Frith” meant?) of a rather unorthodox sort. The first mention of his ministry, according to the Friends’ Quarterly Examiner, is 1872, after which he got into a spot of trouble with the publication of the controversial pamphlet A Reasonable Faith.
"Cairo from the East," one of Frith's photos of the Egyptian capital.
© Public Domain, provided by the Rijksmuseum through Europeana.
Frith, according to Caroline Williams, was an avid reader of published works about Egypt in the early 1850s and particularly motivated by the Orientalist paintings of David Roberts. He did, however, believe he could do better by bringing realistic photographic representations of Egypt back to English viewers. And so, between September 1856 and June 1857, and again between November 1857 and May 1858, he travelled across Egypt, Nubia, Palestine and Syria. He did a third trip in late 1859-1860, this time going down the Nile to Ethiopia and then back up again through Sinai into Gaza. Williams provides a masterful explanation of the Frith’s importance for Orientalist photography and the challenges he faced in enacting it given the technology at his disposal and the specificities of Egyptian buildings and scenery. But perhaps we’ve gone too far. What about the manuscripts?
The answer lies in a beautiful publication of the Frith Foundation marrying Frith’s own photographs and texts, with those of his contemporaries editors Sophia Lane Poole and her son Reginald Poole, and Egyptologist Richard Lunn, who provided his own modern photographs of Egypt. Here, on pages 40-41, as if hiding in plain sight, comes the clearest statement yet about Frith’s initial transaction for Sultan Baybars’ Qur’an:
“I spent a summer in Cairo, and its neighbourhood… spent intervals of six weeks, in alternate fits of storm and calm, bargaining with a mysterious priest who visited me by night, and at length accepted one sixth part of what he first asked, for a splendid, illuminated copy of the Koran, seven hundred years old, in seven huge volumes, written in gold letters an inch high (now in the British Museum; perhaps the finest copy in Europe).” (Lunn 2005, pp. 40-41)
There can be no doubt that this was, and is, Sultan Baybars’ Qur’an. We therefore know, given the description, that Frith likely acquired it in 1857.
"The Mosque of El-Hakim" as found in the Lane and Poole's mammoth collection of Frith photographs taken across North-East Africa and West Asia. (Lane and Poole, Cairo, Sinai, Jerusalem and the Pyramids of Egypt) (London: James S. Virtue, 1860).
And the priest? We now have so many versions of who bought what where from whom as to make the truth seem ever elusive. I think Frith’s account is possible, but excessively improbable. To paraphrase Noir fiction: of all the Europeans in all the tents in Cairo, he had to pick Frith? Surely, Umm al-Dunya had no shortage of art-hungry, rich Europeans who might pay more than a 35-year old, relatively novice photographer. To be serious, however, let’s return to Abou-Khatwa’s supposition that the Qur’an remained in the Mosque of al-Ḥākim. We know that Frith was at the Mosque in 1857 because Sophia Lane Poole and Reginald Poole’s Cairo, Sinai, Jerusalem, and the pyramids of Egypt : a series of sixty photographic views, published in 1860, contains not one but two of Frith’s photographs of the mosque. And Frith’s Egypt and Palestine Photographed and Described by Francis Frith contains one of these views of the Mosque, along with the same text found in Lane and Poole’s publication. I think it most likely that, if the manuscript was indeed kept there, Frith began his negotiations at the Mosque and they continued until he successfully acquired the seven volumes. The story of the furtive visits might be based on some nugget of truth, but I suspect that it was intended as an embellishment to increase the romanticism of Frith’s account, a surefire way to improve the appeal of any Orientalist text.
But who was this mysterious priest, or, more appropriately, counterparty? How did they have access to the manuscript and why were they willing to sell it at a bargain price? The answers to these questions, sadly, aren’t found in any of the sources I’ve mentioned here. They likely lie elsewhere, either in Frith’s personal papers, possibly at the Francis Frith Collection, or in Cairo, at the Mosque itself. Perhaps this short foray into the provenance of the Sultan Baybars’ Qur’an will spur some other curious soul to follow up on those threads.
Dr. Michael Erdman, Head, Middle East and Central Asia
I would like to extend my sincere thanks to Dr. Noha Abou-Khatwa for her guidance and immense knowledge on the Sultan Baybars’ Qur’an and all matters Mamluk.
Works Consulted
Frith, Francis, Egypt and Palestine photographed and described (London: James S. Virtue, 1858-59).
Lane Poole, Sophia and Poole, Reginald, Egypt, Sinai and Jerusalem: a series of twenty photographic views by Francis Frith with descriptions by Mrs. Poole and Reginald Stuart Poole (London: James S. Virtue, 1860).
Lunn, Richard, Francis Frith’s Egypt and the Holyland: The Pioneering Photographic Expeditions to the Middle East (London: The Francis Frith Collection, 2005).
Madden, Frederick. Journal, 1858. Bodleian Library, MS. Eng. hist. c. 171.
Ohta, Alison Aplin, ‘Mamluk Qurʾans: Splendor and Opulence of the Islamic Book,’ in Rettig, Simon and Sana Mirza (ed.), The word illuminated: form and function of Qur'anic manuscripts from the seventh to seventeenth centuries (Washington D.C.: The Smithsonian Scholarly Press, 2023), pp. 123-146.
Webb, Benjamin. Journal, 1858. MS. Eng. misc. e. 412.
Webb, Benjamin, Letter from Reverend Benjamin Webb at Brasted Rectory, to Mountstuart Elphinstone , 1 February 1854. British Library, Mss Eur F88/168/20.
Williams, Caroline, ‘A Nineteenth-Century Photographer: Francis Frith’ in Janet Starkey and Paul Starkey (ed.), Travellers in Egypt (London: I.B. Tauris, 1998), pp. 168-178.