Yaqut al-Hamawi

Yaqut al-Hamawi (c. 1179-1229 CE / c. 574-626 AH) was one of the great geographers and literary biographers of the medieval Islamic world. He was born to Byzantine-Greek (Rumi) parents — sources do not agree on the exact place, naming Constantinople or somewhere in Anatolia — and as a young child was captured and enslaved, then carried to Baghdad. There he was bought by a merchant from the Syrian city of Hama named Askar al-Hamawi, from whom Yaqut took the byname (nisba) "al-Hamawi." His master had him educated and used him as a commercial agent on trading voyages to the Persian Gulf, Kish island, Oman, and Syria. After he was freed, Yaqut settled in Baghdad as a copyist and bookseller, work that fed a lifelong passion for collecting knowledge. Around 1215 a public dispute in Damascus — reported to have involved remarks favorable to the caliph Muawiya and hostile to Ali, though the details are uncertain — made the city unwelcome to him, and he moved east. He spent productive years among the rich libraries of Marw (Merv) and in Khwarazm. The Mongol invasion of 1219-1220 forced him to flee westward, losing his possessions; he reached safety by way of Mosul. He completed his monumental geographical dictionary, the Mu'jam al-buldan, in the 1220s and died at Aleppo in 1229.