Das Falken- und Hundebuch des Kalifen al-Mutawakkil (review)

The history of medicine has tended to focus upon the ailments of humans. The volume under review, however, presents a ninth-century Arabic text concerned with the diagnosis and treatment of ninety-one diseases and afflictions particular to sporting birds. In the Islamic world, hunting with birds—called bayzara ("flying hunt")—was not restricted to falconry and hawking but encompassed a large range of sporting birds, including kites and kestrels. The favorite was the goshawk, while in Europe the falcon was preferred to the goshawk.

The treatise edited and translated in this volume was written in Baghdad for the caliph al-Mutawakkil (reg. 847–61 AD) and hence titled al-Kitāb al-Mutawakkilī (The Book for al-Mutawakkil). The author was Muh.ammad ibn 'Abd Allāh al-Bāzyār, the name al-Bāzyār meaning "the master of the hawking-pack." The manual was one of the earliest on the topic to be composed in the Islamic world, and it concerned not only the sporting birds but also the hounds that were trained for hunting with the raptors.

The history of this particular text, however, is complex and confusing. The treatise is not preserved today in its entirety but is known only through extensive excerpts in a thirteenth-century compilation in which it is cited simply as "al-Mutawakkilī." The thirteenth-century treatise containing the excerpts was titled al-Kitāb al-Mansūrī fī al-bayzara (The Book for Mansūr on the Flying-Hunt) and was compiled for a ruler of the Hafsid dynasty in Tunisia. The earlier book composed for al-Mutawakkil was also translated into Castilian in the thirteenth century, and it formed the basis of the major portion of a Latin compilation on the topic, known as Moamin, that was made for the emperor Frederick II of the Hohenstaufen dynasty.

The Arabic text of al-Kitāb al-Mansūrī, using three manuscripts, was edited in 1965 by Detlef Möller. Two copies were used in 1989 for an edition made by 'Abd al-Hafīz? Mansūr, who was unaware of the previous edition. The 1989 edition by Mansūr then formed the basis of a partial English translation published in 2001 by Terence Clark and Muawiya Derhali. The Castilian text of al-Kitāb al-Mutawakkilī by al-Bāzyār was edited in 1987 by José Manuel Fradejas Rueda and Anthony J. Cardenas, but without comparison with the Arabic, while the Moamin was analyzed by one of the present editors, Stefan Georges, in his dissertation submitted at the Universität Frankfurt am Main.

Pages 16–30 contain a synoptic table displaying the relationship between the quotations of al-Bāzyār's treatise found in the three major traditions: the Latin Moamin, the Castilian Libro de los animales que cazan, and the Arabic al-Kitāb al-Mansūrī. Then follows an Arabic edition and German translation of the long section concerned with the diseases of sporting birds, supplemented by an Arabic German glossary of materia medica, a German-Arabic glossary of the same material, and a bibliography of sources cited. The reviewer found the numbering of the different sections rather confusing and would have liked an additional glossary of anatomical and medical (disease) terms.

A sequel to the study, placing the therapies within the broader context of medical care in general, would also be welcome. While no medical theory is presented in the treatise by al-Bāzyār, and little description of symptoms, the ailments and their recommended therapies would be interesting to compare with those advocated in ninth- and tenth-century Baghdad for similar conditions in humans. For example, the eye condition known today as pterygium (al-zafara), rendered here as Kralle (pp. 62–63), is said to be...