Vesper No. 9 | The Adversary | Fall-Winter 2023
Lamia Hadda, Alberto Pireddu
The Art of War in the Late 12th Century Treatise
by al-Tarsūsī’s for Saladdin
Keywords
Polyorcetic, Mardhī ibn Ali
al-Tarsūsī, Saladin, war, military treaty
In the literary genre on polyorcetics, the Tabsirat arbāb
al-albāb fī kayfiyyat an-najāt fi’l-hurūb min
al-anwā’ wa nashr a’lām al-a’lām fi
al-’udad wa al-’alāt al-mu’īnah ‘ala
liqā’ al-a’dā’ written by Mardhī ibn Ali
al-Tarsūsī in 1187, holds a position of the utmost importance,
placing itself at the dawn of Arab treatises on the subject. The
manuscript, stored within the MS Huntington Collection at the 264 Bodleian
Library in Oxford, having been transcribed and translated only in part, still
remains almost entirely unpublished. This contribution proposes the translation
of an excerpt mainly dedicated to the description of mangles, whose meanings
and different structures and constructions are explored. Therein, the
comparison between the different technologies held by the enemies seemed
significant in guiding the choice of those matter worth to be investigated: in
fact, these pages attempt to define the adversaries’ skills and the more
or less real possibilities to defeat them.
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