Mosul and Skleros

[S.F. Rootenberg]

In "Royal Highness", Sir Iain Moncreiffe mentions a descent of the Great
Princes of Kiev from the Emirs of Mosul through the Skleroi dynasty of
Byzantium. How certain is this descent? Jean-Claude Cheynet makes no
mention thereof in the genealogical tables of his book "Pouvoirs et
contestations à Byzance 963-1210" (Paris, 1990).

If Moncreiffe is correct then the descent of Mary Monomacha, princess of
Byzantium, is as follows (based on Cheynet and ES neue Folge):

1. Mary of Byzantium, +1067; marries 1046: Vsevolod, Great-Prince of Kiev.
2. Constantine IX Monomachus, Emperor of Byzantium 1042-54; married:
3. N.N. Skleraina
6. Basilos Skleros, married:
7. Pulcheria Argyropoulina.
12. Romanos Skleros, married (according to Moncreiffe):
13. N.N., Princess of Mosul, sister of Uddat ud Dawlah Abu Taglib, Emir of
Mosul (according to Moncreiffe he may also have been her father).
24. Bardas Skleros, Anti-Emperor (three times between 976-989).
26. Nasr ed Dawlah Hasan, Emir of Mosul 929-68.
48. Panthetios Skleros, married:
49. Gregoria, descended from a brother of Emperor Basil the Macedonian.
52. Abu'l Haija Abdullah, Emir of Mosul 905-29.
104. Hamdan, Emir of Mosul 892-905, founder of the Hamdanid dynasty.

Criticisms, corrections and confirmations would be appreciated.

[Kennwalrus]

S.F. Rootenberg writes:

"In "Royal Highness", Sir Iain Moncreiffe mentions a descent of the Great
Princes of Kiev from the Emirs of Mosul through the Skleroi dynasty of
Byzantium. How certain is this descent?"

'Tisn't. Apparently, several documentary sources do mention that there was
some sort of marriage between the family of Abu Taglib and that of Romanos
Skleros; but, as these passages were transcribed by -- I think -- Yahya Khalid
Blankinship in -- again, I *think* -- _The Genealogist_, about five years ago,
they don't make it remotely clear just who married whom, or even which side
furnished the girl.

That said, I might note that Blankinship's further assertion, which he utters
as a rather dogmatic dictum, to the effect that a Moslem simply *wouldn't* have
allowed a Christian to marry his daughter or sister, because it was against the
Koran, is excessive and unrealistic. (And also hints of religious chauvinism,
since Christianity, officially, wouldn't have liked the idea any better; but
Blankinship seems to imply that Moslems were more likely than Christians to
obey their scriptures.) In fact, some of the last people who were likely to
have regarded inconvenient Koranic proscriptions as anything more than annoying
chin music were the Moslem rulers, whose history is replete with individuals
who paid very little heed to the call of their ostensible religious duty. Not
all of them, of course, and especially not the early ones; but on the whole, it
seems to me that the stringency of royal Moslem devotion was no greater than
that of the run of Medieval and Renaissance popes and emperors -- which is to
say, many of 'em weren't exactly 'imitations of Christ.'

[Chris Bennett]

This was debated here a couple of years ago. Someone pointed out that
under Islamic law Muslim women were forbidden from marrying non-Muslims,
while Muslim men were not so restricted, and in fact marriages of royal of
noble Muslim women to CHristian men are very rare for this reason. While
there appears to have been a Skleros/Hamdanid marriage, the sources are
vague as to who the actual parties were, and the existence of this taboo is
a strong a priori objection to this particular reconstruction.

This is from memory, if you trawl through DejaNews or the Roots archives
you will be able to find the discussion.

CHris

S.F. Rootenberg <roote...@tip.nl> wrote in article
<01bd9ef5$a3b70a60$cb6012c3@default>...

> In "Royal Highness", Sir Iain Moncreiffe mentions a descent of the Great
> Princes of Kiev from the Emirs of Mosul through the Skleroi dynasty of

> Byzantium. How certain is this descent? Jean-Claude Cheynet makes no
> mention thereof in the genealogical tables of his book "Pouvoirs et
> contestations à Byzance 963-1210" (Paris, 1990).
>

<snip>

[Todd A. Farmerie]

S.F. Rootenberg wrote:
>
> In "Royal Highness", Sir Iain Moncreiffe mentions a descent of the Great
> Princes of Kiev from the Emirs of Mosul through the Skleroi dynasty of
> Byzantium. How certain is this descent? Jean-Claude Cheynet makes no
> mention thereof in the genealogical tables of his book "Pouvoirs et
> contestations à Byzance 963-1210" (Paris, 1990).
>

> If Moncreiffe is correct then the descent of Mary Monomacha, princess of
> Byzantium, is as follows (based on Cheynet and ES neue Folge):
>
> 1. Mary of Byzantium, +1067; marries 1046: Vsevolod, Great-Prince of Kiev.
> 2. Constantine IX Monomachus, Emperor of Byzantium 1042-54; married:

[break] Even IF the Monomacha (whatever her name was) was daughter of
Constantine, and not just a kinswoman, we certainly cannot say who her
mother was.

> 3. N.N. Skleraina
> 6. Basilos Skleros, married:
> 7. Pulcheria Argyropoulina.
> 12. Romanos Skleros, married (according to Moncreiffe):
> 13. N.N., Princess of Mosul, sister of Uddat ud Dawlah Abu Taglib, Emir of
> Mosul (according to Moncreiffe he may also have been her father).

[break] See below.

> 24. Bardas Skleros, Anti-Emperor (three times between 976-989).
> 26. Nasr ed Dawlah Hasan, Emir of Mosul 929-68.
> 48. Panthetios Skleros, married:
> 49. Gregoria, descended from a brother of Emperor Basil the Macedonian.
> 52. Abu'l Haija Abdullah, Emir of Mosul 905-29.
> 104. Hamdan, Emir of Mosul 892-905, founder of the Hamdanid dynasty.

The only near-contemporary source says, basically, "Emperor Bardas and
Emir Nasr agreed to a marriage between their kin". Out of all of the
possible reconstructions of that statement, that the one selected just
happens to be the only one which would produce large numbers of European
descendants of muslim descent tells you something about how genealogists
tend to throw all the tools of the trade out the window when the
possibility of a really juicy line pops up. I usually apply what I call
the Religious Conversion Test (tm). If the Emir of Mosul was simply a
local christian lord, would this solution still seem the most likely?

taf

[rleutner]

Unless it's so screamingly self-evident that this is a very
stupid question, I'd be interested to hear some thoughts as
to why it's the case, as it surely is, that we're so eager to
establish Lines Outside Christendom, for lack of a better
term--lately we've had Attila, now the Emirs of Mosul,
and there is always the Prophet himself. Partly it's
because of the possibility of ever-longer/older lines,
of course, but it strikes me that this impulse is at
odds historically with other genealogical tendencies
toward "purity" (pre-Conquest AS lines, for instance, or
in another sense "classical," i.e., Roman lines). I'm not
quite sure what I mean; but it's evident that there is a
lot of interest in pushing outside the bounds of the
HRE! Just a philosophical ponder.

Bob Leutner Iowa City IA
robert-...@uiowa.edu

[Chris Bennett]

Bob --

I disagree with your premise. I think that genealogy illustrates that the
concept of "purity" is very questionable. You may find yourself confined
in some ethnic, reigious or social group in some area of your genealogy but
sooner or later you'll discover a link that allows you to jump the barrier
to a different ethnic, religious or social group. Finding such jumps is
part of the thrill. So if you find your link to pre-Conquest AS lines
you have broken into a particular society. If you can then find a link to
(say) the Welsh or to the Merovingian Franks you have broken through it
into a different society. And getting through to Muslim or Classical or
Hunnish or Chinese or Ethiopian lines is just another such breakthrough,
but through a much stronger barrier.

Chris

rleutner <rleu...@blue.weeg.uiowa.edu> wrote in article
<Pine.A41.3.95.980624...@green.weeg.uiowa.edu>...

[Kennwalrus]

rleutner writes:

"it strikes me that this impulse [i.e., to find ancestral lines outside
Christendom] is at odds historically with other genealogical tendencies toward
'purity'"

Not sure to whose impulse you refer. If you're implying that genealogists want
their ancestry to be 'pure,' all I can say is, 'not all of 'em, and/or not all
of it!' Speaking purely for myself, it tickles me to find the possibility of
an unusual descent -- the less 'white-bread,' the better.

If, OTOH, you imply that, historically, 'pure ancestry' has been valued by our
ancestors themselves -- especially our royal ancestors -- I'd point out that
although that's true to an extent (and sometimes rabidly so), such an ideal has
very often (I would go so far as to say, 'usually') been at loggerheads with
the desire to forge stable political alliances _via_ interdynastic marriages
across racial-ethnic lines.

Put another way, it simply appears to be a historical truth that the ruling
classes of any two contiguous peoples seem occasionally to intermarry, almost
regardless of national, linguistic, cultural, or religious 'boundaries.' This
is especially true of the ruling dynasties -- when our documentation is good,
we usually find evidence that dynasties A and B occasionally found it a
lubricating and emollient thing to arrange a marriage among their children. It
seems logical to assume, until proven otherwise, that the same dynamic operated
to a more or less equal extent where our documentation *isn't* good. (If I
shine a flashlight into a pitch-black abandoned warehouse and illuminate five
small patches, and find that all five are crisscrossed by spiderwebs, it seems
reasonable to suppose that the unbroken darkness of the rest of that warehouse
is full of spiders, and their webs, too.) I'd call this one of the default
assumptions in assessing the genealogical potentialities of any historical
situation.

Such a phenomenon also has considerable relevance for the historian's
understanding of how social and ruling classes evolve over very long periods of
time. To pick an example that's bound to get me in trouble with some people --
if you were to read older histories of Gaul for the period from 400 to 800, you
might get the distinct, but oversimplified and misleading, impression (whether
the historians in question *meant* to convey this impression is another
question) that the fall of the Roman empire in the west looked rather like
this: between 407 and 486, the Germans moved in, killed or expropriated all
the Gallo-Roman aristocrats, and took over; with the upshot, put simply, that
the Carolingian nobility was of Germanic stock, and consisted largely of 'new
men,' recently 'jumped up' by virtue of ability and brutality. In reality, it
is pretty clear that many of the aristocratic Gallo-Roman families maintained
their identities well into the seventh century, and occasionally married off
their daughters to Germanic magnates, with the probable conclusion that,
although *some* of the Carolingian nobility presumably *were* simply 'the
biggest thugs on the block,' others almost certainly had roots, on the distaff
side, in the old Gallo-Roman nobility, as well. (None of which means to say
that such lines can be demonstrated in such detail as to satisfy the
evidentiary standards of all.)

Power, in short, tends to perpetuate itself, simply because it starts with an
advantage; and it requires a certain collective genius for an entire elite to
lose *all* its power. If the full truth could be known, I think that we'd find
at least a few continuous lines of descent from Etruscan royalty to the old
Roman Republican patriciate to the consular class of the Principate and the
High Empire to that of the Lower Empire to the provincial senatorial class
(including that of Gaul) to the Carolingian nobility to the Plantagenets to the
Elizabethan English gentry to certain colonial New England settlers to the
Boston Brahminate to some 20th-century American Episcopalian Republican
politicians.

[cont.]

[Kennwalrus]

[cont. from above]

Obviously, both continuously, and at each major 'transition,' there was
infusion of new blood from outside the power elite, which, cumulatively, swamps
the 'old' bloodlines; but this power elite is, nevertheless, in a meaningful
sense, a continuous phenomenon from 500 B.C. to 1998 A.D -- think of it as a
continuous, self-
perpetuating vortex, like a tornado -- and its continuity was maintained, IMO,
at least partially by hereditary transmission of money, land, and political
control. Equally obviously, it would be a gross exaggeration to say that some
20th-century Republicans have power precisely because they're the testamentary
beneficiaries of the power of Republicans now 25 centuries dead, but ... there
is, I think, a kernel, a germ, a *scintilla* of truth to the proposition, which
is worth pondering.

Well, I've used up my bandwidth for the week ...

[KHF...@aol.com]

In a message dated 6/23/98 11:37:59 PM, you wrote:

<<I'd be interested to hear some thoughts as to why it's the case, as it
surely is, that we're so eager to establish Lines Outside Christendom, >>

The very 'purity' of the lines that you suggest make divisions between peoples
that are still very much with us today. Not only would a link to Mohammed to
the ancient rulers of Europe be very interesting historically, it may also
help to put to sleep some of the political 'racial purity' nonsense that still
plagues us in relations between the Arab worlds and the west.

- Ken

Kenneth Harper Finton
Editor/ Publisher
THE PLANTAGENET CONNECTION

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