Daughter of the Wind: a blog on desert arabian horses, past and present

“The Arabs are warriors and no one can reach them due to their fast horses.”
 Plinus,   50 AD
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I introduce myself as a Pure Bedouin horse breeder, with breeding and racing operations located near Damascus.
Talking about travelers and equestrian enthusiasts in greater Syria, is in a way the same as talking about the history of Bilad es Sham: the greater Syria. English Ladies have a played a major role in this history: Lady Hester Stanhope, the ”amie de coeur” of count Rzewuski; Lady Jane Digby, who married Mijuel a Sheikh of the Sbaa tribe; and Gertrude Bell, friend of Ibn Saud  
It happens that I know some of the places visited by the Blunts and the places where Lady Stanhope or Lady Digby, Lady Anne’s friend, lived. In fact, I own a mare with full Anezeh blood tracing back to Lady Jane’s Sbaa tribe.
Ancient Syria was always the destination of successive waves of Arab migration rolling in from the Arabian Peninsula to settle in Bilad es Sham (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine,and Jordan) and Badiat es Sham (The Syrian Desert).
In the middle of the 17th century, a severe drought in the Jabal Shammar, Hejaz and Nejd caused the migration of famous horse-breeding tribes north of the Syrian Desert, searching for pastures that are more fertile.
The result of this migration is that the horses of the Bedouin’s most famous horse-breeding tribe, the Anezeh, suddenly appeared in the neighborhood of the Syrian cities of Aleppo and Damascus, at the reach of British-based merchants, especially those of the Levant Company, great buyers of lamb wool and liquorices roots.
This event—together with another one which happened in England (the fall of Cromwell in 1660, which put an end to the restrictions imposed on the English nobility) – allowed British traders in Syria to buy the best Bedouin horses for owners seeking to outmatch one another in the acquisition of oriental stock. Traditionally, English horsemen used to buy Barb horses, usually imported from Spain or North Africa, precisely for their Arab blood.
                     European imports before the Blunts 
Napoleon
Napoleon was the first to use Arab stallions extensively in State Studs to improve the local European horses and to create an Army Horse with the qualities he so admired in the Arab horse: his stamina, intelligence and versatility. Soon his example was to be followed by most western European kings.
The Egyptian and Syrian campaigns put Bonaparte face-to-face with the Mameluk cavalry, mounted on Arab or half-Arab horses. He learned to respect these riders and their horses.In 1806 the ‘’Haras Imperiaux’’ had 1500 stallions most of them imported from Syria and Egypt .The infusion of Arab blood gave the French cavalry a serious advantage on the battlefields of Europe, despite the fact that constantly raising new armies left no time for extensive training.

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This superiority made Wellington say: “The French cavalry is often more manageable and useful than the English.” Soon other European Armies realized that they too would have to import Arab horses to improve the performance of their cavalry. 
 
The Weil Royal stud of Wurttemberg 
The first ruler to understand that the superiority of the French cavalry was due to the quality of its horses was King Wilhelm I of Wurttemberg, one of Napoleon’s allies who went with him as far as the Moscow walls.
One can admire today in Stuttgart the statue of Wilhelm I mounted on one of his beloved Arab horses
The Babolna Stud, of the Austro Hungarian Empire
In 1815, when the allied armies invaded France, the first task of the invaders was to secure the Arab stallions of the Haras Imperiaux. The Hungarians took the 16 stallions of the La Rosiere stud to the Babolna stud – creating a mix that soon became “The Hungarian Arabia.”
The stallions Saklawi Jedran and Kubeyshan and the mare Jilfe were bought from Von Fechtig in 1816. This was the beginning of the famous Babolna imports. After buying more horses from Von Fechtig, the Era of the Hungarian military missions began.
In 1836 and in 1843, the stud sent a military mission headed by Baron Colonel von Herbert to Bilad es Sham to buy horses. In total, Von Herbert imported 22 stallions and 4 mares. His most famous import was Shagya, the stallion who gave his name to a new breed, the “Shagya Arabians.”
Baron Colonel von Gottschlig was sent to Syria in 1852 and imported seven stallions and three mares.
Austrian Colonel Von Bruderman organized an expedition in 1856. He was able to secure 16 stallions, 50 mares and 15 foals. Two grey stallions and 16 grey mares were sent to Lippiza stud to improve the world-famous Lipizzaners.
All of these missions were military ones organized in accordance with the Ottoman authorities.
Rittmeister General Michael Fadlallah el Haddad, of Lebanese origin, conducted the next military missions. General Haddad was responsible for importing in 1885 the black Obayan and Koheilan, whose lines have been influential in many Europeans countries. In 1902, he imported Siglavy-Bagdadi, another very important stallion.
The Yeguada Militar of Spain:
To improve their native horses, the Spanish Army in 1847 created the Yeguada Militar, which imported and raised Arab horses for Army remount use.  Queen Isabella II made the first imports and the first horse to be registered in the Yeguada Stud Book was Albayoul. Since then, the Yeguada Militar still breed Arab horses in Jerez de la Frontera.
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The French imports
In 1817, Mr. Laine, the French Interior Minister, in an effort to replace the loss of so many Arab stallions stolen by the foreign invaders, sent Monsieur des Portes to Syria to buy 40 Arab stallions.
  Des Portes bought the 40 stallions, and amongst them was the famous Massoud, who was the founder of the Anglo-Arab race in France, and the mare Nichab, bought from Lady Hester Stanhope 
The last French mission was sent to Syria in 1925 by the Ministry of Agriculture and was headed by the #1 authority in horses in France: The Inspecteur General des Haras M.Rieux de Madron
 
The private missions
Polish princes like the Sanguskos and Dzieduszycki financed most of the private missions. In 1803, Prince Jerome Sangusko organized an expedition to the Syrian Desert in order to buy Arab horses. In 1816, his son Eustachy sent his equerry Moszynski to Syria to buy another batch of horses. He went back with ten stallions and one mare. Amongst them was the outstanding Haylan that he bought near Damascus for 3,500 gold francs.
In 1843, following the death of his father, Count Julius Dzieduszycki made a two-year journey to Syria and returned with seven stallions and three mares.
Prince Roman Sangusko followed him in 1844 and bought two stallions, Batran Agha and El Sham. Both stallions went overland from Syria to Poland, a journey that lasted two years.
   
The merchants
Since antiquity, the trade roads near the Mediterranean Sea were a way of introducing Arab horses into Europe. In the 17th and 18th centuries, British merchants joined with the French and Italians in opening offices in the ports and the hinterland of Bilad el Sham. They were mainly interested in lamb’s wool, liquorices roots and later in Hops to make beer (especially from the Homs-Hama region). But all of these merchants also began trading horses.
A new kind of merchant was also interested in horses: those who came from the shores of the Baltic Sea. After the Turkish invasion of Eastern Europe, the Polish-Russian Princes were amazed by the quality of the mounts of the Turkish cavalry, and began asking for Arab stallions.
The merchants were able to bring them this kind of goods. Coming to Istanbul to sell Baltic amber and Russian furs, they headed afterwards to the markets of Aleppo and Damascus, where they would find Arab stallions for sale.   
In the beginning of the 19th century there were famous merchants specialized in bringing Arab horses to both Western and Eastern Europe, Baron Von Fechtig and Count Rzewuski, while Arutin and Glioccho used to sell horses to the Polish-Lithuanian Prince Sangusko.
Arutin was a Syrian. We think that by his name he may have been of Armenian origin. Glioccho was a Levantine of Italian origin. Baron von Fechtig was Hungarian with offices in Damascus, Trieste and Cairo.
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Count Rzewuski was a Polish nobleman, born in 1785, who learned Arabic in Vienna with the well-known Lebanese scholar Antun Arida. He created the periodical “Les Mines d’Orient,” a publication devoted to Eastern questions. He moved to live in Aleppo. In 1810, we find him fighting the Wahabis side-by-side with his Bedouin friends in Mehemet Ali’s army.An admirer of the Arab horse, he used to go deep into the desert to find the better stallions for his breeding farm near Aleppo. 
In 1815, at the Vienna Congress, Rzewuski convinced the great landowners that improved horse breeding was necessary for military superiority, citing Napoleon’s actions as an example. He was entrusted with the purchase of horses for the Tsar Alexander I and his sister Queen Katrina of Wurtemberg. In 1817, a Russian warship brought 13 stallions and 14 mares to Trieste for the Weil stud. In 1819, Rzewuski went back to Aleppo and made three more expeditions to the desert.In 1821, he brought 78 horses back to his estate, not far from Odessa, in the south of Ukraine, part of Poland at that time, and most of them were sold to the Tsar.
Rzewuski died in 1831 during the Polish uprising against the Russians, fighting the
Cossacks at the head of his own cavalry regiment. Upon his death, the Tsar confiscated all of his horses.
During the second part of the 19th century, many merchants traded Arabian horses, the most famous being Amato, Arthur bey Zimmerman and Sefer Pasha Koscielski, a Polish émigré who became a General in the Turkish Army

 Were they foreign power agents?
What was the real purpose of these expeditions? Was it really to buy or study the Arab horse or was it something else? The Turkish authorities put a ban on the export of these horses, arguing that they were strategic goods, but it seems that the real purpose was to stop the Westerners entering to the Badia (the Syrian Desert),   
“Spies were common in the Ottoman Empire, and Abdul Hamid II was known to make frequent use of them, possibly as means of bypassing a bureaucratic system he did not trust.
“One function of Ottoman spies was no doubt to keep track of spies of other countries working in the Ottoman Empire. In Arabian Desert areas, such spies seem to have been everywhere, and they definitely got into sensitive places. Eccentric English ladies like Gertrude Bell, archaeologists like T.E.Lawrence, a German scholar like von Oppenheim, English adventurers like Sir Richard Burton, all apparently had intelligence functions.
“The Arabian horse community probably provided some of them: Carl (Schmidt) Raswan was possibly an German agent in World War I.
Were the Blunts also spies? Lady Anne comments in Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates that they could reasonably have been thought so. Why else a former Foreign Service officer and his wife elude Ottoman supervision and head out across the desert when their water was freezing solid in the buckets” (Charles Craver, The Annotated Quest, 1992)
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Carlo Guarmani
We know for sure that Guarmani, an Italian from Genoa who lived from the age of 12 in Beirut with his family, became Agent of the French Imperial Post in Jerusalem.
In 1862, Napoleon III sent a Jesuit father, William Cohen Palgrave, to report on the Arabian kingdoms of Hail and Riyadh. As an independent source must always verify a spy’s report, the Levantine service of the French Foreign Office sent Guarmani on a mission: to buy Arab stallions for the Royal studs of Paris and Torino, though his real mission being to confirm or deny the Jesuit’s reports. He saw in his political mission a way of financing an expedition into Arabia to find what he considered the most wonderful horses in the world. He bought horses and made an accurate description of the Hejaz and Nejd horses.

Major Roger D. Upton
After serving in India, he went to the Syrian Desert and northern Iraq, spending two years there looking for purebred Arab horses. In his two books, apart from a very good description of the Bedouin tribes’ horses, there is a very accurate history of the Arabs in England since King James I and their influence on the English racehorse.
Major General W. Tweedie
Tweedie was for many years Consul-General and political resident for the government of India in Baghdad and in what was known as “Turkish Arabia.” He wrote The Arabian Horse, His Country and People, Edinburgh, 1894. It is not only a book about the Arabian horse, but about the Arabian horse and its environment. As he says in the preface, “The horse of the Bedouin Arabs holds so unique a place in natural history, and enters so completely into the lives of those who breed him, that it is impossible to describe him while adhering to the beaten track of works on horses.”
Major–General Tweedie’s book describes mainly the Arab horse of Iraq, the Iraqi tribes and the Arab horse in India as a racehorse or as a charger. His description of Arab horse breeding in Iraq, East of the Tigris, and how to buy Arabians from Iraqi towns or procure them through consulates or consuls, makes the book a unique document.
The Blunts as horse breeders
The assertion that the Blunts in their Crabbet stud “changed forever the way of breeding these magnificent horses” is a little bit exaggerated. In fact, as we saw before, other European studs long before them imported Arab horses and bred them with success. However, as they were mostly state-owned Studs, with the exception of those of the Polish Princes, their aim was not selling horses, but rather using them for improving their own stock. On the contrary the Blunts were relying heavily on sales in England and for the export market, it was natural that their horses were more renowned. 
Anyway their breeding really improved after they mixed   the Ali Pasha Sheriff horses  with their remaining stock.  

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“In the first decade of breeding at Crabbet, the Blunts culled many of the original mare lines they had imported. By 1891, no lines remained from Burning Bush, Damask Rose, Purple Stock, Francolin, Tamarisk, Canora, or Zefifia. The Wild Thyme, Dahma, Jedrania, Jilfa and Hagar families left Crabbet soon after. Certain of the imported mares did not meet the Blunts’ standards. The Blunts were unable to verify the purity of some to their satisfaction, so these were sold along with any progeny. Other mares were barren. Others did not produce the quality that the Blunts desired. In 1904 Wilfrid Blunt stated, ‘The produce of certain imported mares, however good individually these were, will become eliminated from the stud and it will be idle out of sentiment to retain them. It is better such strains should be lost when after three generations they have failed to produce a sire of the first class.
One odd aspect of the management at Crabbet was that the Blunts sold many of their best foundation stallions just as they were making important contributions to the herd. They regretted the sales of Azrek, Pharaoh, Hadban, Merzuk, and Mahruss at the time of sale and especially later, as their stock matured.” (Robert J. Cardanell Arabian Visions Magazine 1998)
The Blunts had traveled in Spain, then in 1873 through Turkey and Algeria. Next, they went in 1875 to Egypt and Damascus. They longed to go further east. In November of 1877, they set out for Syria to travel in the Syrian deserts and Mesopotamia, with one further end in mind. If possible, they wanted to purchase a horse of the same strain as the famous Thoroughbred foundation sire, the Darley Arabian. On board a ship bound for Alexandretta, they met a person who recommended that they first go to Aleppo to confer with Mr. James Skene, the British Consul since 1856. Mr. Skene was an old Arab hand. 
He educated the Blunts about Arabian horses, helped them buy some of their first and best desert-bred stock, purchased horses as an agent for them and for a while was a partner of sorts in their plans. “We have made a plan … of importing some of the best Anazeh blood to England and breeding it pure there … it would be an interesting and useful thing to do and I should like much to try it.” (Lady Anne Blunt, Journals & Correspondence)  ..
The Blunts returned from their trip to Arabia in 1877-8, bringing with them some horses, which they had purchased in the desert. These horses were supplemented with further purchases made by Mr. Skene and others on their behalf and with horses purchased from an Arab horse dealer in India. The distinctive characteristic of these horses was that they were all desert-bred Arabians.
“Some of these first horses were similar to Thoroughbreds in type, and since one of Blunt’s early aims was to reintroduce Arabian blood into the English Thoroughbred, these were a logical selection.
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One Jockey Club member pronounced the early Crabbet stock ‘thoroughbreds in miniature,’ much to the delight of Mr. Blunt. Skene erroneously informed the Blunts that the Darley Arabian had been a Kuhaylan-Ras-al-Fidawi, so they had imported two animals of this strain. In actuality, he was a Mu’niki.” (Archer, Pearson, Covey: The Crabbet Arabian Stud, Its History and Influence, p35)
The Blunts made two more journeys to Syria, and in 1881, they purchased more horses. Meticulous records of the horses were kept, and, together with photographs dating from 1882, these form a unique source of information. 
The Blunts traveled from Aleppo to Rakka, Deir ez Zor, Ramadi and from there to Baghdad, then to northern Iraq to visit the Shammar tribe and their horses, buying horses in the Syrian Desert, in Deir ez Zor and Aleppo.
“It is unfortunate that the two major reference works that the Blunts authored, The Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates (1879) and A Pilgrimage to Nejd (1881), were written while they themselves had just begun to familiarize themselves with the Arabian horse. While both are valuable books filled with solid material, they could not possibly contain the experience and insights                                                   
that the Blunts later gained through forty years of breeding and studying
the Arabian. Lady Anne did, however, finish an authoritative work on the Arabian horse near the end of her life. This “Book of Fragments,” as she referred to it, she willed to her daughter Judith” (Robert J. Cardanell. Arabian visions magazine 1998)
“Euphrates Valley Railway” 
Questions: The Blunts spent months in the desert unharmed by the Bedouins, despite the fact that they were traveling alone without any military escort and the desert was the most unsafe place in the Ottoman Empire. Why did the writer of anti-Turkish articles in 1880 permit them to enter the Empire in 1881 and 1882 and go to the desert, buy horses and export them?
Answer: Lady Anne provides an answer, when writing about their visit to Ibn Rashid in Hail: “Our quality of English people was a sufficient passport for us in his eyes”
Furthermore, the British influence on both the Ottomans and the Bedouins was great.
The British consuls in Aleppo and Damascus sent monthly reports to their embassy in Istanbul during the 19th century. Douglas Carruthers’ book, The Desert Route to India (1745-1751) helps to explain the strength of the relations between the British Consuls and the Bedouins. Nevertheless, what was the mission of Major Upton and Wilfrid and Lady Anne Blunt, if there was a mission? 
After the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, the British were afraid that someone might close it. Therefore, they were thinking seriously about starting a Railway between Tripoli and Basra. General Francis Rawdon Chesney (1789-1872), an explorer of the Euphrates who is considered the founder of the overland route to India, first raised this idea. Since 1856, he was associated to Mr. (Later Sir) William Andrew in a Euphrates railroad project (The Narrative of the Euphrates Expedition, 1868).
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Many British firms made offers to the Sultan for the building of such a railway.
-In 1882 Sir Edward Cazalet (The Eastern Question: with map showing the projected line (Edward Stanford 1878), and Sir Thomas Selby, a railway engineer, presented to the Sultan a project proposal for a railway from Aleppo to Deir ez Zor to Baghdad. The Sultan rejected this proposal because the promoters wanted one mile from each side of the railway in order to install Russian Jews. (Originally appearing in Volume V28, Page 989 of the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica. under Zionism or http://encyclopedia.jrank.org/YAK_ZYM/ZIONISM.html)
-Then Sir William Andrew, known as “The Lesseps of the Euphrates” presented “The Euphrates Valley Railway” proposal. The Ottomans preferred the German proposal for the Baghdad railway.
-The famous Sykes-Picot agreements mention the “Euphrates Valley Railway” proposal in point six of the agreements. (Letter from Sir Edward Grey to Paul Cambon, 16 May 1916)
Maybe this was the secret mission of Upton and the Blunts : to make contact with the tribes and conduct a geographical survey of the region for a future Railway between the Mediterranean Sea and the Gulf.                                                      

 There were two possible routes for a railway and the Blunts visited both of them: one from Aleppo along the Euphrates to Baghdad and Basra, passing into “Badu-land.” (The word comes from Major–General Tweedie.) The other passed further north to Mossul (avoiding the turbulent Bedouin tribes) and then by boat on the Tigris to Baghdad, where two companies, one Turkish and one British, began operating riverboats in 1890. 
John Louis Sabunji and his Influence on the Blunts
Sabunji, a former priest of the Syrian Catholic Rite, entered a turbulent career in journalism, publishing several Arabic newspapers in London and openly calling into question the Ottoman Sultan’s right to the caliphate. Sabunji’s first employment in Blunt’s service was not as a journalist, but as a tutor in Arabic to his wife, Lady Anne Blunt, in 1880. In this capacity, Sabunji did more than instruct Lady Anne in the intricacies of the language. Her husband had just published a series of anti-Turkish articles in The Fortnightly Review                                        
 
 The articles, which were later published together under the title The Future of Islam, proposed the severing of the Arabs from Turkish rule and the establishment of an Arab caliphate. Blunt was the first to challenge the traditional British support for Ottoman territorial integrity in Asia, and he prompted a spirited debate in London.
“For the next Forty years the Blunts devoted themselves to the cause of Arab independence, to which they later added Indian independence, Egyptian independence and lastly Irish independence. The two dividing their time between their estate in Egypt where they bred horses and their estate in Sussex where they bred dreams. As the dreams manifestly failed to turn into reality, so Wilfrid became more bitter, his anti-imperialist ideal degenerating into crude self-aggrandizement and anti-semitism.
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By 1906 it had all became too much for Lady Anne. The couple separated, he living in Sussex and she in Egypt where she died in 1917, the year of the Arab revolt.
Wilfrid, lonely and cantankerous to the end, continued until 1922The free Arab state he had dreamed of was a reality …
“For a hundred years we did good to the world; for a hundred we shall done evil, and the world will hear of us no more”
They were word of prophecy, but only one man recognized the 82 year old semi-recluse as a prophet, T.E Lawrence.To him Blunt and Doughty were the “ master Arabians” while to Blunt Lawrence was the man who had made his dream of a free Arab state a reality.
The two met in Blunt’s drawing room on his estate in Sussex. The old man was sitting in a monumental arm-chair, dressed in Bedouin robes,” a fire yet flickering over the ashes of an old fury”.they talked for a while but not too long. The terrifying patriarch in the armchair was very tired. Lawrence rose to go. The old man presented his visitor with a copy of his poems, inscribing it, with a withered shaky hand:”To T.E. Lawrence in admiration of his courage and honesty in public and much else, from Wilfrid Scawen Blunt”
  ” Arabian travelers’’ Richard Trench, Papermac 1986

Lady Anne became a renowned horse breeder especially in her Sheikh Obeyd stud while Wilfrid were more oriented in political struggles, after their death the purity of the horses they breed was to be ruined by the use by they daughter of the Polish stallion Skworonek, who, according to the World Arab Horse Organization WAHO has 9 non-Arab ancestors
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                                            Documents
British consuls   reports to their Istanbul embassy.
Foreign Office 195 Vol. No. 170 –
 Reports from 1835 to 1841 about the necessity of having good relations   with the tribal sheiks in orderto protect the desert commercial roads, between Basra and Aleppo.
Consul Werry, Foreign Office 195 Vol. 416 (1853-1857)
On 04-16-1854, N.W. Werry, Consul in Aleppo, wrote that he sent Captain Nolan to buy 300 horses on behalf of the British Army, some of them purebred, the price to pay was 30 to 40£ for the purebred. On 08/27/1855, Werry wrote that the mission has bought 657 horses; nothing was said about how many were purebred.
Consul Skene –
In Aleppo since 1856, he was the key man in the Blunt imports, very well informed of the desert tribes and problems. He sent to Constantinople Colonel Namik Sankeys’ report on how to make the desert peaceful and to fight the Bedouins. He became an admirer and a connoisseur of the pure Arab horse. In Foreign Office 195 Vol. No. 1067, on 01/12/1875 he asked for an export permit from the Ottomans to ship seven purebred Arab horses that he had bought.
Consul E.T Rogers, Foreign Office 195 No. 806
  On 05-10-1864, Rogers wrote that a Mr. Blunt (Was It Wilfrid?) was robbed near Damascus, but that the government caught the thieves and the money (7,000 piastres) was sent back to Mr. Blunt in Beirut.
 
Bibliography
• Lieutenant Loffler: Report on the Austrian horse-purchasing commission of 1856-5.
• Colonel von Brudermann: Report about the purchase of horses in Syria in 1856-1857
• Major R.D. Upton: Newmarket and Arabia, 1873, and Gleanings from the Desert of Arabia, 1881
• Carlo Guarmani: Northern Najd, Bologna 1865 
• Lady Anne Blunt: Bedouin Tribes of the Euphrates, 1879, and A Pilgrimage to Nejd, 1881, London
• Major-General W. Tweedie: The Arabian Horse, London, 1894
• Homer Davenport: My Quest of the Arabian Horse, New York, 1909