Calid

Calid

Khālid ibn Yazīd (full name Abū Hāshim Khālid ibn Yazīd ibn Muʿāwiya ibn Abī Sufyān, Arabic: أبو هاشم خالد بن يزيد بن معاوية بن أبي سفيان), c. 668–704 or 709, was an Umayyad prince and purported alchemist. As a son of the Umayyad caliph Yazid I, Khalid was supposed to become caliph after his elder brother Mu'awiya II died in 684. However, Marwan I, a senior Umayyad from another branch of the clan, was chosen over the much younger Khalid. Despite having lost the caliphate to Marwan, Khalid forged close ties with Marwan's son and successor, the caliph Abd al-Malik, who appointed him to successive administrative and military roles. He participated in a number of successful military campaigns in 691, but then chose to retire to his Homs estate, where he lived out the rest of his life. He may have engaged in some level of poetry and hadith scholarship. A large number of alchemical writings were attributed to Khalid, including also many alchemical poems. Khalid's purported alchemical activity was probably part of a legend that evolved in 9th-century Arabic literary circles, which also falsely credited him with sponsoring the first translations of Greek philosophical and scientific works into Arabic (in reality, caliphal sponsorship of translations started during the reign of al-Mansur, 754–775). Some of the Arabic alchemical works attributed to Khalid were later translated into Latin under the Latinized name Calid. One of these works, the Liber de compositione alchemiae ("Book on the Composition of Alchemy"), was the first Arabic work on alchemy to be translated into Latin, by Robert of Chester in 1144.

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