An Incident of Dynastic Succession in Sixteenth-Century Sinnār

An Incident ofDynastic Succession in Sixteenth-Century Sinnär Jay Spaulding Kean College On 11 December 1582 Mustafa Pasha received his second appointment as governor of the new Ottoman Red Sea Province of Ethiopia.1 The pasha's original tenure as Hohes beylerbey had begun almost a decade before, but his career trajectory had been rudely interrupted. In 1577 Mustafa, apparently a prudent man, had been elbowed aside by a series of ambitious officers eager to undertake the conquest of highland Ethiopia proper.2 But the Ottomans enjoyed no greater success at this perennially ill-advised venture thanhave many othersbefore or since; by 1582 the pushfull invaders were no more, and cautious governor Mustafa was reinstated. During the next six years he concerned himself primarily with preserving the small Ottoman garrisons that the Ethiopians allowed to survive at several points along the coast. One of Mustafa's reports, dated CemäziyülewÜ 994/15 May 1586, reflects particularly well die governor's defensive preoccupation witìi gathering intelligence out of what had just proven to be an unexpectedly dangerous African interior. Among other dungs, it contains one ofthe very few sixteenth-century Ottoman references to die Nile valley Funj kingdom ofSinnâr. "The Funj kinghasjustdied," Mustafa Pasha reported to his superiors, "his eldest son has been made king in his place" (Funç meliki dahi vefat ediip büyük oglu yerine melik olmusdur).3So limited are primary historical sources concerning the sixteenth-century®Northeast African Studies (ISSN 0740-9133) Vol. 4, No. 3 (New Series) 1997, pp. 23-28 23 24 Jay Spaulding Sudan tìiat even tìiis anonymous comment, preserved as it was by one of die most competent bureaucratic machines of the early Modern world, represents a significant contribution. It offers a sound and comparatively fixed date relevant to die lives of two Sudanese monarchs of tìiat dimly-seen age. But who were they? Which Funj king died, and which succeeded to die throne ofSinnar, early in 1586? The present study will propose an identification. The names of the sixteenüi-century kings of Sinnär are known primarily dirough die work of Sudanese chroniclers who wrote in Arabic. Sudanese Arabic history-writingbegan only toward the close of die eighteenth century, and it naturally reflected the prevailing cultural conceptions of tiiat age.4 The chroniclers accepted die linear interpretation of time and die division of its flow of days into units of lunar months and years demarcated by the Islamic calendar. Within the world of local Islamic scholarship, some dates were recorded with precision, notably the death dates of prominent holy men but sometimes also years of low Nile flood or other dramatic occurrences. But when the attention of die pioneering eighteendi-century chroniclers turned to the political events of secular history, dates fixed with certainty were few. The chroniclers therefore found themselves obliged to appeal to a much broader and orally grounded view of history which fliey shared with their unlettered countrymen. In this vernacular tradition, historical information preserved orally over die years normally took the form of anecdotes about personalities or events, and diese anecdotes were pegged chronologically to the respective reigns of one or another ruler.5 The result was a variegated oral national historiography, existing in many versions of greater or lesser complexity, but always organized around the stem of a putatively orderly and unbroken dynastic sequence. Not surprisingly, people tended to recall numerous events of comparatively recent times, while only a few anecdotes about the more remote past seemed wortìiy of retention. Inevitably, when die oral historiography of the late eighteentii century was reduced to writing, it had litfle to say about die sixteendi. This bias is perhaps best exemplified in the work of the chronicler Ahmad wad Tsä, who compressed the bulk of his country's history into a few brieflines before embarking upon a meaty discussion ofhis own times: An Incident ofDynastic Succession 25 The first who reigned in Sinnâr was Sultan "Amara b. NäyÜ, whom one approachedbowing down. There were tiiirteen kings in die interval of two hundred years, and after the two hundred were complete there reigned Sultan Ùnsà b. Nâsir in the...