Problematising the Shifting Capitals of Medieval Arran: From Bardhaʿa to Janza in the 10th–12th Centuries

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe dominant historical narrative for early Islamic frontier zones such as Arran, in the Caucasus, tends to focus on the administrative centres, the capital cities. As this story of development becomes synthesised and simplified, there has been a tendency to understand this process as the decline of one major centre and the rise of another, almost in the sense of city-states. This paper reconsiders the case of the changing capitals of Arran, to understand how urbanism developed in the Caucasus in the early Islamic period and how this gave rise to the situation as observed in the tenth–twelfth century when the region is essentially independent from the core Islamic lands, albeit regularly a vassal state. In doing so, new archaeological evidence is combined with that from existing historical sources, to propose a new model for the urban settlement patterns of the medieval period in the southeastern Caucasus.