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Massimiliano Borroni
Researcher in the History of Islamic Countries, Ca' Foscari University of Venice
Massimiliano Borroni is a researcher in the History of Islamic Countries at Ca' Foscari University of Venice, where he teaches in the Master's program in Environmental Humanities. His work initially focused on the Iranian calendar and its New Year during the Abbasid period, examining fiscal and cultural dimensions. He later shifted his research to traditional irrigation techniques and the conceptualization of water, focusing on the history of thought on the water cycle, the role of the sea in creation, and the physical behavior of water. He recently published a monograph titled Connecting Water: Environmental Views in Premodern Arabic Writings, which explores these themes. Massimiliano is also a senior team member of the ERC project Science, Society, and Environment in the First Millennium.
Climate as Catalyst: The Role of a Cold Spell in the Mosul Uprising of 259/873
Arabic sources from the Abbasid era mention episodes of particularly severe or unexpected cold. These textual passages have often been linked with social and political upheavals, sparking robust debates about the impact of climatic fluctuations on human history in general and Islamic polities in particular. In this contribution, I intend to closely examine a specific passage where the author explicitly links adverse climatic events to socio-political unrest: the Mosul rebellion in the spring of 260/873 against the lieutenant of the governor recently appointed by the Caliph. This passage appears in the works of three authors: al-Azdī (d. 334/945-6), Ibn al-Aṯīr (d. 630/1233), and al-Nuwayrī (d. 733/1333), with the earliest two authors being natives of Mosul, while other sources confirm the bad agricultural year in the Mesopotamian region. These simple yet significant accounts illustrate how climatic and environmental factors can intersect with human history, potentially influencing it in conjunction with purely social dynamics. In this specific case, as noted by the Arab authors, there was late and intense cold, or possibly a frost, in 260/873. This report, moreover, may be read in conjunction with available textual and dendrological evidence of significant climatic fluctuations in European regions, the Western Islamic world, and present-day western China, and the possibility of 873 CE as an outlier year should be considered. In Mosul, the environmental factor collided with the social and political setting. There was pre-existing discontent towards increasingly early taxation due to the lack of an intercalation system in the fiscal calendar then in use, which was based on the Iranian calendar, and towards impositions from the capital, which had become increasingly disconnected from the important agricultural region of Jazīra, now northern Iraq. The first of these two elements is particularly interesting, given that the issue of the fiscal year opening increasingly earlier compared to the solar seasons, and thus to the maturation of crops, is found in other sources not directly connected with the event in question. It will be from Mosul itself, ultimately, that the calendar will be reformed to correct this state of affairs and connect it to a well-established understanding of seasonality in relation to agriculture. The second element is the factor that allows this revolt, born of intense but short-lived adversity, to become a key piece in a larger picture of political weakening and instability in the Mesopotamian regions of the empire.
