Abstract

It is generally believed that few archival documents have survived from the pre-Ottoman Middle East. But the Cairo Geniza preserved hundreds of Arabic decrees and petitions emanating from the Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk bureaucracies or addressed to them, and is therefore an excellent, if unexpected, source for the inner workings of the medieval Islamic state. Some of these texts are published, while others still await identification; the vast majority are now housed in Cambridge. This lecture will explain what new information the Arabic state documents from the Geniza offer about how the medieval Islamic state governed its subject populations, and how subjects used the bureaucracy to negotiate privileges and get what they wanted.