Abulfeda
geographer and leader (1273–1331)
Ismāʿīl bin ʿAlī bin Maḥmūd bin Muḥammad bin ʿUmar bin Shāhanshāh bin Ayyūb bin Shādī bin Marwān (Arabic: إسماعيل بن علي بن محمود بن محمد بن عمر بن شاهنشاه بن أيوب بن شادي بن مروان), better known as Abū al-Fidāʾ or Abulfeda (Arabic: أبو الفداء; November 1273 – 27 October 1331), was a Mamluk-era Kurdish geographer, historian, Ayyubid prince and local governor of Hama.
Life
Abu'l-Fida was born in Damascus, where his father al-Malik al-Afdal, brother of Emir Al-Mansur Muhammad II of Hama, had fled from the Mongols. Abu'l-Fida was an Ayyubid prince of Kurdish origin.
In his boyhood he devoted himself to the study of the Qur'an and the sciences, but from his twelfth year onward, he was almost constantly engaged in military expeditions, chiefly against the Crusaders.
In 1285 he was present at the attack on a stronghold of the Knights of St. John, and took part in the sieges of Tripoli, Acre and Qal'at ar-Rum. In 1298 he entered the service of the Mamluk sultan al-Malik al-Nasir and after twelve years was invested by him with the governorship of Hama. In 1312 he became prince with the title al-Malik al-Salih, and in 1320 received the hereditary rank of sultan with the title al-Malik al-Muʾayyad.
He died in 1331.
Works
Geography
Taqwim al-Buldan ("Locating the Lands", written in 1321) is, like much of the history, founded on the works of his predecessors, including the works of Ptolemy and Muhammad al-Idrisi.
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This entry incorporates text from “Abulfeda” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.