The adventures of Ibn Battuta : a Muslim traveler of the 14th century

SVC aC CoCo ca SSCS CESTEECEREESTEESE WSR SSRESEA REDE SLELEEEEERESEEEEEE CESTEEEEECERES N

BE ER a

ES
oy

x
<
S
XQ
8
8
S
S
8
X
&
8
x
:
&
=

\
\
‘
‘
‘
‘
\
\
x
‘
‘
y
x
oy
a
»
xX
\
N
x
‘
an
.
»
a
Be
a
a
g
%,
g,
g
g
g
g
g
4
g
o
go
g
g
g
g
g
g
y,
g
4
g
g,
g
s

Lbe
ADVENTURES of

[BN BATTULA

A MuslimTraveler of the 4tbCentury

ROSS E. DUNN

© 1986 Ross E. Dunn

Croom Helm Ltd, Provident House, Burrell Row,
Beckenham, Kent BR3 1AT

Croom Helm Australia Pty Ltd, Suite 4, 6th Floor,
64-76 Kippax Street, Surry Hills, NSW 2010 Australia

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Dunn, Ross E.
The adventures of Ibn Battuta: a Muslim
traveler of the fourteenth century.
1. Ibn Battuta, Abu ‘Abdallah Muhammad
2. Asia —— Description and travel
3. Africa Description and travel ——
To 1900
I. Title
915'.042’0924 DS6

ISBN 0-7099-081 1-3

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Mackays of Chatham Ltd, Kent

For Jordan and Jocelyn

I met in [Brusa] the pious shaykh ’ Abdallah al-Misri, the traveler,
and a man of saintly life. He journeyed through the earth, but he
never went into China nor the island of Ceylon, nor the Maghrib,
nor al-Andalus, nor the Negrolands, so that I have outdone him by
visiting these regions.

Ibn Battuta

Contents

List of Maps
Preface

Acknowledgements

The Muslim Calendar
A Note on Money
List of Abbreviations Used in Footnotes
Introduction
1. Tangier
2. The Maghrib
3. The Mamluks
4. Mecca
5. Persia and Iraq
6. The Arabian Sea
7. Anatolia
8. The Steppe
9. Delhi
10. Malabar and the Maldives
11. China
12. Home
13. Mali
14. The Rihla
Glossary
Bibliography

Index

XVI

13

27

4]

65

81
106
137
159
183
213
241
266
290
310
321
325
343

Maps

1. Cities of Eurasia and Africa in the Fourteenth Century 2
2. Region of the Strait of Gibraltar 14
3. Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Northern Africa, 1325-26 28
4. Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Egypt, Syria and Arabia,
1325-26 4)
5. Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Persia and Iraq, 1326-27 82
6. Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Arabia and East Africa,
1328-30 (1330-32) 107
7. Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Anatolia and the Black Sea
Region, 1330-32 (1332-34) 138
8. Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Central Asia and Afghanistan,
1332-33 (1334-35) 175
9. Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in India, Ceylon and the Maldive
Islands, 1333-45 184
10. Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Southeast Asia and China,
134546 256
11. Ibn Battuta’s Return Itinerary from China to North
Africa, 1346-49 267
12. Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in North Africa, Spain and West
Africa, 1349-54 277

Vill

Preface

Staring at the wall of my windowless office one day in 1976, |
suddenly got the idea to write this book. I was teaching world
history to undergraduates and trying to give them an idea of Islam
in the medieval age as a civilization whose cultural dominance
extended far beyond the Middle East or the lands inhabited by
Arabs. It. occurred to me that the life of Abu ‘Abdallah ibn
Battuta, the famous Moroccan traveler of the fourteenth century,
wonderfully illustrated the internationalist scope of Islamic civiliz-
ation. He toured not only the central regions of Islam but also its
far frontiers in India, Indonesia, Central Asia, East Africa, and
the West African Sudan. The travel book he produced at the end
of his career is both a tale of high adventure and an expansive
portrait of the eminently cosmopolitan world of Muslim princes,
merchants, scholars, and holy men within which he moved during
29 years on the road.

Since the mid nineteenth century, when translations of his
Arabic narrative began to appear in Western languages, Ibn
Battuta has been well known among specialists in Islamic and
medieval history. But no scholar had attempted to retell his re-
markable story to a general audience. For the non-specialist inter-
ested in medieval Islam and the attitudes and preoccupations of its
intellectual class the narrative can be absorbing. But the modern
reader is also likely to find it puzzlingly organized, archaic, and to
some degree unintelligible. My idea, therefore, has been to bring
Ibn Battuta’s adventure to general readers and to interpret it
within the rich, trans-hemispheric cultural setting of medieval
Islam. My hope is not only that the Moroccan journeyer will
become as well known in the Western world as Marco Polo is but
that readers will also gain a sharper and more panoramic view of
the forces that made the history of Eurasia and Africa in the
fourteenth century an interconnected whole. Ibn Battuta, we shall
see, was a kind of citizen of the Eastern Hemisphere. The global
interdependence of the late twentieth century would be less
startling to him than we might suppose.

Almost everything we know about Ibn Battuta the man is to be

1X

x Preface

found in his own work, called the Rihla, which ts readily available
in printed Arabic editions, as well as translations in English and
several other languages. I have not rummaged about ancient
manuscript collections in Fez, Damascus, or Delhi to piece his life
together since, in so far as anyone knows, no such manuscripts
exist. Indeed, this book, part biography and part cultural history
of the second quarter of the fourteenth century, is a work of
synthesis. In tracing Ibn Battuta’s footsteps through the equivalent
of some 44 modern countries, I have relied on a wide range of
published literature.

I first became interested in Ibn Battuta when I spent the better
part of a year translating portions of the narrative in a graduate
school Arabic class. I have come to this project, however, with a
modest training in that beautiful and intractable language. I have
used printed Arabic editions of the Rihla to clarify various prob-
lems of nomenclature and textual meaning, but I have largely
depended on the major English or French translations in relating
and interpreting Ibn Battuta’s career.

The Rihla is not a daily diary or a collection of notes that Ibn
Battuta jotted in the course of his travels. Rather it is a work of
literature, part autobiography and part descriptive compendium,
that was written at the end of his career. In composing the book,
Ibn Battuta (and Ibn Juzayy, the literary scholar who collaborated
with him) took far less care with details of itinerary, dates, and the
sequence of events than the modern “scientific” mind would con-
sider acceptable practice for a travel writer. Consequently, the
historian attempting to reconstruct the chronology of Ibn Battuta’s
journeys must confront numerous gaps, inconsistencies, and
puzzles, some of them baffling. Fortunately, the textual problems
of the Rihla have sustained the attention of historians, linguists,
philologists, and geographers for more than a century. In trying to
untangle Ibn Battuta’s movements from one end of the Eastern
Hemisphere to the other, I have therefore relied heavily on the
existing corpus of textual commentary. Given the scope and pur-
pose of this book, I could not do otherwise, since any further
progress in solving remaining problems of chronology, itinerary,
authenticity, and place name identification would require
laborious research in fourteenth-century documentary sources. I
have, however, tried to address the major difficulties in using the
Rihla as a biographical record of events. Most of this discussion
has been confined to footnotes in order to avoid digressions into

Preface xi

technicalities that would break annoyingly into the story or tax the
interest of some general readers.

In this age of the “docu-drama” and the “non-fiction novel,” |
should also state explicitly that I have in no deliberate way
fictionalized Ibn Battuta’s life story. The words that he speaks, the
attitudes that he holds, the actions that he takes are either drawn
directly from the Rihla or can be readily inferred from it or other
historical sources.

This book is my interpretation of Ibn Battuta’s life and times
and not a picture of the fourteenth century “through his eyes.” It is
not a commentary on his encyclopedic observations, not, in other
words, a book about his book. Its subject matter does, however,
largely reflect his social experience and cultural perceptions. He
was a literate, urbane gentleman interested for the most part in the
affairs of other literate, urbane gentlemen. Though as a pious
Muslim he by no means despised the poor, he did not often
associate with peasants, herdsmen, or city working folk. Nor does
he have much to say about them in the Rihla. Moreover, he
traveled in the circles of world-minded men for whom the univer-
salist values and cosmopolitan institutions of Islam — the
mosques, the colleges, the palaces — were more important than
the parochial customs and loyalties that constricted the cultural
vision of the great majority. Some readers, therefore, will not fail
to notice two conceptual biases. One is that political and cultural
elites dominate the story at the expense of “the little man,” even
though the social history of ordinary Muslim folk is no less worthy
of the historian’s attention. The other is that the cosmopolitan
tendencies within Islamic civilization are our primary theme rather
than the admittedly great cultural diversity among Muslim
peoples, even though one of the strengths of an expanding Islam
was its successful adaptability to local patterns of culture.

A few technical matters need to be mentioned. In order to
simplify the footnote apparatus, I have not for the most part given
page citations for direct quotes from English translations of the
Rihla. Unless otherwise noted, quotations are taken from the
published translations as follows: Chapters 1-8 and 14, H.A.R.
Gibb, The Travels of Ibn Battuta A.D. 1325-1354, 3 vols.;
Chapters 9-11, Agha Mahdi Husain, The Rehla of Ibn Battuta, and
Chapter 13, N. Levtzion and J.F.P. Hopkins (eds.), Corpus of
Early Arabic Sources for West African History. For the sake of
uniformity I have made a few orthographic changes in quotations

xii Preface

from the RiAla translations. I have “americanized” the spelling of a
number of English words (e.g., “favor” rather than “favour”), and
I have changed the spelling of a few Arabic terms (e.g., “Koran”
rather than “Qur’an” and “vizier” rather than “vizir” or “wazir”).
In transliterating Arabic terms, I have eliminated all diacritical
marks, excepting “’” to indicate the two Arabic letters “hamza”
and “ayn.”

Acknowledgements

Ibn Battuta has led me so far and wide in the Eastern Hemisphere
that in the course of writing this book I have asked for advice and
criticism from an unusually large number of scholars and col-
leagues. I cannot mention them all, but I would like to thank the
following individuals for reading and criticizing, sometimes in
great detail, all or part of the manuscript: Jere Bacharach,
Edmund Burke, P.C. Chu, Julia Clancy-Smith, Michael Dols.
Jeanne Dunn, Richard Eaton, G.S.P. Freeman-Grenville,
Kathryn Green, David Hart, James Kirkman, Howard Kushner,
Ira Lapidus, Michael Meeker, David Morgan, William Phillips,
Charles Smith, Ray Smith, Peter von Sivers, and Robert Wilson. |
am especially grateful for the enduring support of Professor C. F.
Beckingham, a man of learning and urbanity with whom Ibn
Battuta would have found much in common. If I failed to under-
stand or heed good advice these individuals gave me, I alone bear
the responsibility.

I am grateful to the National Endowment for the Humanities for
awarding me a fellowship that funded research and writing in
1980-81. During that year I enjoyed the privilege of affiliation
with the Middle East Centre at Cambridge University, thanks to
Professor R.B. Serjeant and Dr Robin Bidwell. I am also inde-
bted to the Fellows of Clare Hall for extending me membership in
the college as a Visiting Associate. San Diego State University
generously supported this project with a sabbatical leave and
several small grants. For research assistance or typing services |
would like to express my appreciation to Lorin Birch, Veronica
King, Richard Knight, Helen Lavey, and Jill Swalling Harrington.
Finally, I want to thank Barbara Aguado for making the maps.

Xill

The Muslim Calendar

Ibn Battuta reports the dates of his travels according to the Muslim
calendar, which is based on the cycles of the moon. The Muslim
year is divided into twelve lunar months of 29 or 30 days each. The
year is approximately 354 days long, that is, ten or eleven days
shorter than a solar year. Consequently, dates of the Muslim
calendar have no fixed relationship either to dates of the
Gregorian (Western) calendar or to seasons of the year. For
example, Christmas is always celebrated in winter in Europe and
the United States. By contrast, a Muslim religious holiday will,
over time, occur in all four seasons of the year. The base-year of
the Muslim calendar is 622 A.D., when the Prophet Muhammad
and his followers made the Aijra, or “migration,” from Mecca to
Medina. The abbreviation A.H., for anno Hejirae, denotes years
of the Muslim calendar. In this book I have given key dates
according to both calendars. Converting precise dates from one
system to the other requires the use of a formula and a series of
tables. These may be found in G.S.P. Freeman-Grenville, The
Muslim and Christian Calendars (London, 1963).
The Muslim lunar months are as follows:

Muharram Rajab

Safar Sha’ban
Rabi’ al-awwal (Rabi? I) Ramadan
Rabi’ al-thani (Rabi? II) Shawwal
Jumada |-ula (Jumada I) Dhu 1|-Qa’da
Jumada |-akhira (Jumada II) Dhu 1-Hijja

XIV

A Note on Money

In the course of his career Ibn Battuta received numerous gifts and
salary payments in gold or silver coins. He usually refers to these
coins as dinars, though sometimes distinguishing between “gold
dinars” and “silver dinars.” In the early Islamic centuries the
weight of a gold dinar was set at 4.25 grams. In [bn Battuta’s time,
however, the weight and fineness of both gold and silver coins, as
well as the exchange rate between them, varied greatly from one
period or country to the next. It would be futile, therefore, to
express the value of money he received in terms of modern dollars
or pounds sterling. In fourteenth-century India, where he was paid
large sums from the public treasury, a “silver dinar” (or silver
tanka) was valued at about one-tenth of a gold dinar.

Abbreviations Used in Footnotes

D&S C. Défrémery and B.R. Sanguinetti (trans. and eds.),
Voyages d’Ibn Battuta, 4 vols. (Paris 1853-58; reprint

edn., Vincent Monteil (ed.), Paris, 1979)

EI, Encyclopaedia of Islam, ist edn., 4 vols. (Leiden,

1913-38)

EI, Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn., 5 vols. (Leiden, 1954;

~ London, 1956-)

Gb H.A.R. Gibb (trans. and ed.), The Travels of Ibn Battuta
A.D, 1325-1354. Translated with Revisions and Notes
from the Arabic Text Edited by C. Défrémery and B. R.
Sanguinetti, 3 vols. (Cambridge for the Hakluyt Society,

1958, 1961, 1971)

H&K Said Hamdun and Noel King (trans. and eds.), /bn Battuta

in Black Africa (London, 1975)

Hr Ivan Hrbek, “The Chronology of Ibn Battuta’s Travels,”

Archiv Orientalni 30 (1962): 409-86
IB Ibn Battuta

L&H N. Levtzion and J.F.P. Hopkins (trans. and eds.),
Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African History

(New York, 1981)

MH ~~ Agha Mahdi Husain (trans. and ed.), The Rehla of Ibn

Battuta (Baroda, India, 1976)

XV1

Introduction

Westerners have singularly narrowed the history of the
world in grouping the little that they knew about the
expansion of the human race around the peoples of Israel,
Greece and Rome. Thus have they ignored all those
travellers and explorers who in their ships ploughed the
China Sea and the Indian Ocean, or rode across the
immensities of Central Asia to the Persian Gulf. In truth
the larger part of the globe, containing cultures different
from those of the ancient Greeks and Romans but no less
civilized, has remained unknown to those who wrote the
history of their little world under the impression that they
were writing world history. '

Henri Cordier

Abu ‘Abdallah ibn Battuta has been rightly celebrated as the
greatest traveler of premodern times. He was born into a family of
Muslim legal scholars in Tangier, Morocco, in 1304 during the era
of the Marinid dynasty. He studied law as a young man and in 1325
left his native town to make the pilgrimage, or hajj, to the sacred
city of Mecca in Arabia. He took a year and a half to reach his
destination, visiting North Africa, Egypt, Palestine, and Syria
along the way. After completing his first hajj in 1326, he toured
Iraq and Persia, then returned to Mecca. In 1328 (or 1330) he
embarked upon a sea voyage that took him down the eastern coast
of Africa as far south as the region of modern Tanzania. On his
return voyage he visited Oman and the Persian Gulf and returned
to Mecca again by the overland route across central Arabia.

In 1330 (or 1332) he ventured to go to India to seek employment
in the government of the Sultanate of Delhi. Rather than taking
the normal ocean route across the Arabian Sea to the western
coast of India, he traveled north through Egypt and Syria to Asia
Minor. After touring that region, he crossed the Black Sea to the
plains of West Central Asia. He then, owing to fortuitous circum-
stances, made a westward detour to visit Constantinople, capital of

1

Map |: Cities of Eurasia and Africa in the Fourteenth Century

New Saray , 7 Karakorum

O

“Constantinople : ¢ oamarkand
Tabriz
e

. Isfahan Hangchou
Baghdad

Ch’uan-chou

‘ Medina
Chittagong

; Mecca

¢ Fimbuktu

Mogadishu

INDIAN OCEAN

Introduction 3

the Byzantine Empire, in the company of a Turkish princess.
Returning to the Asian steppes, he traveled eastward through
Transoxiana, Khurasan, and Afghanistan, arriving at the banks of
the Indus River in September 1333 (or 1335).

He spent eight years in India, most of that time occupying a post
as a qadi, or judge, in the government of Muhammad Tughlug,
Sultan of Delhi. In 1341 the king appointed him to lead a diploma-
tic mission to the court of the Mongol emperor of China. The
expedition ended disastrously in shipwreck off the southwestern
coast of India, leaving Ibn Battuta without employment or res-
ources. For a little more than two years he traveled about southern
India, Ceylon, and the Maldive Islands, where he served for about
eight months as a qgadi under the local Muslim dynasty. Then,
despite the failure of his ambassadorial mission, he resolved in
1345 to go to China on his own. Traveling by sea, he visited
Bengal, the coast of Burma, and the island of Sumatra, then con-
tinued on to Canton. The extent of his visit to China is uncertain
but was probably limited to the southern coastal region.

In 1346-47 he returned to Mecca by way of South India, the
Persian Gulf, Syria, and Egypt. After performing the ceremonies
of the hajj one last time, he set a course for home. Traveling by
both land and sea, he arrived in Fez, the capital of Morocco, late
in 1349. The following year he made a brief trip across the Strait of
Gibraltar to the Muslim kingdom of Granada. Then, in 1353, he
undertook his final adventure, a journey by camel caravan across
the Sahara Desert to the Kingdom of Mali in the West African
Sudan. In 1355 he returned to Morocco to stay. In the course of a
career on the road spanning almost thirty years, he crossed the
breadth of the Eastern Hemisphere, visited territories equivalent
to about 44 modern countries, and put behind him a total distance
of approximately 73,000 miles.”

Early in 1356 Sultan Abu ’Inan, the Marinid ruler of Morocco,
commissioned Ibn Juzayy, a young literary scholar of Andalusian
origin, to record Ibn Battuta’s experiences, as well as his ob-
servations about the Islamic world of his day, in the form of a
rihla, or book of travels. As a type of Arabic literature, the rihla
attained something of a flowering in North Africa between the
twelfth and fourteenth centuries. The best known examples of the
genre recounted a journey from the Maghrib to Mecca, informing
and entertaining readers with rich descriptions of the pious in-
stitutions, public monuments, and religious personalities of the

4 Introduction

great cities of Islam.° Ibn Battuta and Ibn Juzayy collaborated for
about two years to compose their work, the longest and in terms of its
subject matter the most complex rihla to come out of North Africa in
the medieval age. His royal charge completed, Ibn Battuta retired toa
judicial post in a Moroccan provincial town. He died in 1368.

Written in the conventional literary style of the time, Ibn Battuta’s
Rihla is a comprehensive survey of the personalities, places, gov-
ernments, customs, and curiosities of the Muslim world in the second
quarter of the fourteenth century. It is also the record of a dramatic
personal adventure. In the four centuries after Ibn Battuta’s death, the
Rihla circulated, mostly in copied manuscript abridgments of Ibn
Juzayy’s original text, among people of learning in North Africa, West
Africa, Egypt, and perhaps other Muslim lands where Arabic was
read.

The book was unknown outside Islamic countries until the early
nineteenth century, when two German scholars published separately
translations of portions of the Rihla from manuscripts obtained in the
Middle East. In 1829 Samuel Lee, a British orientalist, published an
English translation based on abridgments of the narrative that John
Burckhardt, the famous Swiss explorer, had acquired in Egypt.’
Around the middle of the century five manuscripts of the Rihla were
found in Algeria following the French occupation of that country.
These documents were subsequently transferred to the Bibliotheque
Nationale in Paris. Two of them represent the most complete versions
of the narrative that have ever come to light. The others are partial
translations, one of which carries the autograph of Ibn Juzayy, Ibn
Battuta’s editor. Working with these five documents, two French
scholars, C. Défrémery and B.R. Sanguinetti, published between
1853 and 1858 a printed edition of the Arabic text, together with a
translation in French and an apparatus of notes and variant textual
readings.>

Since then, translations of the work, prepared in every case from
Défrémery and Sanguinetti’s printed text, have been published in
many languages, including Spanish, Italian, German, Russian, Polish,
Hungarian, Persian, and Japanese. In 1929 Sir Hamilton Gibb pro-
duced an abridged English translation and began work on a complete
edition of the work under the auspices of the Hakluyt Society.” The
last of the four volumes in this series is still in preparation.’ However,
English translations of various portions of the Rihla have appeared in
the past century as books or as articles in anthologies and scholarly
journals.

Introduction §

The numerous translations of the Rihla, together with the ex-
tensive corpus of encyclopedia articles, popular summaries, and
critical commentaries on Ibn Battuta and his career that have
accumulated since the eighteenth century, are a tribute to the
extraordinary value of the narrative as a historical source on much
of the inhabited Eastern Hemisphere in the second quarter of the
fourteenth century. The book has been cited and quoted in
hundreds of historical works, not only those relating to Islamic
countries but to China and the Byzantine empire as well. For the
history of certain regions, Sudanic West Africa, Asia Minor, or the
Malabar coast of India, for example, the Rihla stands as the only
eye-witness report on political events, human geography, and
social or economic conditions for a period of a century or more.
Ibn Battuta had no professional background or experience as a
writer of geography, history, or ethnography, but he was, as Gibb
declares, “the supreme example of le géographe malgré lui,” the
“geographer in spite of himself.”*

The Western world has conventionally celebrated Marco Polo,
who died the year before Ibn Battuta first left home, as the
“Greatest Traveler in History.” Ibn Battuta has inevitably been
compared with him and has usually taken second prize as “the
Marco Polo of the Muslim world” or “the Marco Polo of the
tropics.”? Keeping in mind that neither man actually composed his
own book (Marco’s record was dictated to the French romance
writer Rusticello in a Genoese prison), there is no doubt that the
Venetian’s work is the superior one in terms of the accurate,
precise, practical information it contributes on medieval China
and other Asian lands in the latter part of the thirteenth century,
information of profound value to historians ever since. Yet Ibn
Battuta traveled to, and reports on, a great many more places than
Marco did, and his narrative offers details, sometimes in incidental
bits, sometimes in long disquisitions, on almost every conceivable
aspect of human life in that age, from the royal ceremonial of the
Sultan of Delhi to the sexual customs of women in the Maldive
Islands to the harvesting of coconuts in South Arabia. Moreover
his story is far more personal and humanely engaging than
Marco’s. Some Western writers, especially in an earlier time when
the conviction of Europe’s superiority over Islamic civilization was
a presumption of historical scholarship, have criticized Ibn Battuta
for being excessively eager to tell about the lives and pious
accomplishments of religious savants and Sufi mystics when he

6 Introduction

might have written more about practical politics and prices. The
Rihla, however, was directed to Muslim men of learning of the
fourteenth century for whom such reportage, so recondite to the
modern Western reader, was pertinent and interesting.

As in Marco’s case, we know almost nothing about the life of
Ibn Battuta apart from what the autobiographical dimension of his
own book reveals. Aside from three minor references in Muslim
scholarly works of the fourteenth or fifteenth century that attest
independently to the Moroccan’s existence and to his
achievements as a traveler, no document has ever come to light
from his own age that mentions him.'° To understand his charac-
ter, his aspirations, his social attitudes and prejudices, his personal
relations with other people and, finally, the way he “fits” into
fourteenth-century Muslim society and culture, we must rely
almost exclusively on the Rihla itself. Fortunately, by expressing
here and there in its pages his reactions to events, his annoyances,
his animosities, and the details of his personal intrigues, he reveals
something of his own character.

Western writers have sometimes characterized Ibn Battuta as a
brave explorer like Marco Polo, risking his life to discover terra
incognita and bring knowledge of it to public attention. In fact Ibn
Battuta’s experience was drastically different from that of the
Venetian. Marco traveled as an alien visitor into lands few
Europeans had ever seen and whose people knew little, and cared
to know little, about Europe. He was an oddity, a “stranger in a
strange land,” who was given the opportunity to visit China only
because of the very special political circumstances that prevailed
for a short time in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries:
the existence of the great Mongol states of Asia and their policy of
permitting merchants of all origins and religions to travel and
conduct business in their domains. Marco does indeed herald the
age of European discovery, not because the peoples of Asia
somehow needed discovering to set themselves on a course into
the future, but because his book made an extraordinary and
almost immediate intellectual impact on a young Western civiliz-
ation that until that time had a cramped and faulty vision of what
the wider world of the Eastern Hemisphere was all about.

Ibn Battuta, by contrast, spent most of his traveling career
within the cultural boundaries of what Muslims called the Dar al-
Islam, or Abode of Islam. This expression embraced the lands
where Muslims predominated in the population, or at least where

Introduction 7

Muslim kings or princes ruled over non-Muslim majorities and
where in consequence the shari’a, or Sacred Law, of Islam was
presumably the foundation of the social order. In that sense
Islamic civilization extended from the Atlantic coast of West
Africa to Southeast Asia. Moreover, important minority com-
munities of Muslims inhabited cities and towns in regions such as
China, Spain, and tropical West Africa that were beyond the
frontiers of the Dar al-Islam. Therefore almost everywhere Ibn
Battuta went he lived in the company of other Muslims, men and
women who shared not merely his doctrinal beliefs and religious
rituals, but his moral values, his social ideals, his everyday man-
ners. Although he was introduced in the course of his travels to a
great many Muslim peoples whose local languages, customs, and
aesthetic values were unfamiliar in his own homeland at the far
western edge of the hemisphere, he never strayed far from the
social world of individuals who shared his tastes and sensibilities
and among whom he could always find hospitality, security, and
friendship.

Today, we characterize the cosmopolitan individual in several
ways: the advocate of international cooperation or world gov-
ernment, the sophisticated city-dweller, the jet-setter. The Muslim
cosmopolite of the fourteenth century was likewise urbane, well
traveled, and free of the grosser varieties of parochial bigotry.
But, above all, he possessed a consciousness, more or less acutely
formed, of the entire Dar al-Islam as a social reality. He also
believed, at least implicitly, in the Sacred Law as the proper and
eminently workable foundation of a global community.

To understand the intellectual basis of Ibn Battuta’s
cosmopolitanism, we must re-orient ourselves away from the con-
ventional view of history as primarily the study of individual
nations or discrete “cultures.” In their writings more than twenty
years ago the world historians Marshall Hodgson and William
McNeill introduced and developed the “global” concept of the
Eurasian, or preferably Afro-Eurasian, Ecumene, that is, the belt
of agrarian lands extending west to east from the Mediterranean
basin to China.!’ It was within this region that the major sedentary
civilizations of the Eastern Hemisphere arose, where most cities
sprang up, and where most important cultural and technological
innovations were made.

Beginning in ancient times, according to McNeill, the Ecumene
went through a series of “closures” which involved increasingly

8 Introduction

complex interrelations among the civilizations of the hemisphere.
Thus there evolved a continuous region of intercommunication,
or, as we will call it in this book, the intercommunicating zone,
which joined the sedentary and urbanizing peoples of the
Mediterranean rim, the Middle East, Greater India, and China
into a single field of historical interaction and change. Important
innovations occurring in one part of the zone tended to spread to
the other parts of it through trade, military conquest, human
migration, or gradual diffusion. Moreover, the intercommuni-
cating zone “grew” over the course of time by incorporating
peoples in peripheral areas — sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast
Asia, Central Asia, Europe north of the Alps — into the web of
interrelations. Thus, the history of Africa and Eurasia in premod-
ern times becomes more than the stories of individual,
geographically bounded nations, cultures, or empires. It is also the
history of the “unconsciously inter-regional developments,” to
quote Hodgson, which “converge in their effects to alter the gen-
eral disposition of the Hemisphere.”

One of the most important dimensions of this “hemispheric
history” was the role of pastoral populations who inhabited the
great arid belt which ran diagonally from southwest to northeast
across the intercommunicating zone, that is the chain of steppes
and deserts extending from the Sahara through the Middle East
and Central Asia to the Gobi. Contact between the herding
peoples of the arid zone and sedentary societies tended in normal
times to be mostly beneficial to both, involving the exchange of
goods and elements of culture. However, the pastoralists, owing to
their mobility and ethos of martial strength, were always a
potential threat to the far richer settled civilizations. At periodic
intervals beginning in the eighteenth century B.C. or earlier,
nomadic invaders poured into neighboring agrarian lands,
pillaging cities, terminating dynasties, and generally upsetting pre-
vailing cultural and social patterns over wide areas of Eurasia and
Africa. The last great nomadic movement occurred in the
thirteenth century, when the Mongols and their Turkish-speaking
allies erupted out of Central Asia and conquered China, Russia,
and most of the Middle East, creating the largest territorial empire
the world has ever known.

Islam had come upon the world scene in the seventh century in
connection with the explosion of Arabic-speaking, camel-riding
herdsmen out of the Arabian desert under the leadership of the

Introduction Y

Prophet Muhammad and his successors. Western historical writing
has given a great deal of attention to the early evolution of Islamic
civilization, that is, the “classical” age of the Abbasid Caliphate
(or High Caliphate) centered on Baghdad between the eighth and
tenth centuries. For this period the astonishing contributions of
Muslims to world history in art, science, medicine, philosophy,
and international commerce have been recognized, especially in so
far as they were a major formative influence on the rise of Chris-
tian European civilization in the early Middle Ages. But precisely
because historians of the West have been interested in Islam
mainly in terms of its effects on the development of European
institutions, the subsequent periods of Islamic history up to mod-
ern times have been given less heed. Indeed, the conventional
perspective in European and American textbook writing has been
that Islamic civilization reached its “peak” during the Abbasid age
and thereafter went into a gradual but inexorable “decline.” This
notion that Islam somehow atrophied after the tenth or eleventh
century has largely turned on the Western perception (consider-
ably exaggerated) that Muslims rejected the intellectual heritage
of Hellenistic rationalism about the same time that Europeans
“rediscovered” it. Consequently, so the argument runs, the West,
having adopted a “scientific” and “rational” view of the natural
world, was able to “progress” in the direction of world dominance,
while “traditional” civilizations such as Islam languished and fell
further and further behind.

In fact, the period of hemispheric history from 1000 to 1500
A.D., what we will call the Islamic Middle Period, witnessed a
steady and remarkable expansion of Islam, not simply as a re-
ligious faith but as a coherent, universalist model of civilized life.
To be sure, the intense, concentrated, innovative brilliance of the
Abbasid Caliphate was not to be repeated in the subsequent half
millennium of Islamic history. Yet if Islam did turn intellectually
conservative by the standard of modern scientific rationalism, it
nonetheless pushed outward from its Middle Eastern core as an
attractive, satisfying, cohesive system for explaining the cosmos
and for ordering collective life among ever-larger numbers of
people, both sedentary and pastoral, both urban and rural. all
across the intercommunicating zone.

The spread of Islam into new areas of the hemisphere during the
Middle Period was given impetus by two major forces. One of
these was the advance of Turkish-speaking Muslim herding

10 Introduction

peoples from Central Asia into the Middle East, a movement that
began on a large scale with the conquests of the Seljuk Turks in the
eleventh century. In the ensuing 300 years Turkish cavalry armies
pushed westward into Asia Minor and southern Russia and east-
ward into India. The second force was the gradual but persistent
movement of Muslim merchants into the lands rimming the Indian
Ocean, that is, East Africa, India, Southeast Asia, and China, as
well as into Central Asia and West Africa south of the Sahara.

Yet the principal contribution of both warriors and merchants,
establishing in some places Muslim military dominance and in
other places only communities of believers under non-Muslim
authority, was to prepare the ground for influxes of Muslim re-
ligious and intellectual cadres. It was they, over the longer term,
who founded the basic institutions of Islamic civilization in these
new areas and who carried on the work of cultural conversion
among non-Muslim peoples.

A close look at the patterns of travel and migration in the post-
Abbasid centuries reveals a quiet but persistent dispersion of legal
scholars, theologians, Sufi divines, belle-lettrists, scribes, archi-
tects, and craftsmen outward from the older centers of Islam to
these new frontiers of Muslim military and commercial activity. At
the same time, the members of this cultural elite who were living
and traveling in the further regions consistently maintained close
ties with the great cities of the central Islamic lands, thereby
creating not merely a scattering of literate and skilled Muslims
across the hemisphere, but an integrated, growing, self-replenish-
ing network of cultural communication.

Moreover, the most fundamental values of Islam tended to
encourage a higher degree of social mobility and freer movement
of individuals from one city and region to another than was the
case in the other civilizations of that time. Islamic culture put great
stress on egalitarian behavior in social relations based on the ideal
of a community of believers (the umma) having a common
allegiance to one God and his Sacred Law. To be sure, a great gulf
separated the rich and powerful from the poor and weak, as was
the case in all civilized societies until very recent times. But Islam
mightily resisted the institutionalizing of ascribed statuses, ethnic
exclusivities, or purely territorial loyalties. The dynamics of social
life centered, not on relations among fixed, rigidly defined groups
as was the case in Hindu India or even, to a lesser degree, the
medieval West, but on what Hodgson calls “egalitarian con-

Introduction 1

tractualism,” the relatively free play of relations among individuals
who tended to size one another up mainly in terms of personal
conformity to Islamic moral standards.'* Consequently, wherever
in the Dar al-Islam an individual traveled, pursued a career, or
bought and sold goods, the same social and moral rules of conduct
largely applied, rules founded on the shari’a.

The Islamic world in Ibn Battuta’s time was divided politically
into numerous kingdoms and principalities. Rulers insisted that
their administrative and penal codes be obeyed, but they made no
claims to divine authority. For the most part, Muslims on the
move — merchants, scholars, and skilled, literate individuals of
all kinds — regarded the jurisdictions of states as a necessary
imposition and gave them as little attention as possible. Their
primary allegiance was to the Dar al-Islam as a whole. The focal
points of their public lives were not countries but cities, where
world-minded Muslims carried on their inter-personal affairs
mainly with reference to the universalist and uniform standards of
the Law.

The terrible Mongol conquests of Persia and Syria that occurred
between 1219 and 1258 appeared to Muslims to threaten the very
existence of Islamic civilization. Yet by the time Ibn Battuta began
his traveling career Mongol political dominance over the greater
part of Eurasia was proving conducive to the further expansion of
Islam and its institutions. The powerful Mongol khans of Persia
and Central Asia were converting to the faith, and the conditions
of order and security that attended the Pax Mongolica of the later
thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries gave freer play than ever
to the movement of Muslims back and forth across Eurasia.

It was in the late decades of the Pax Mongolica that Ibn Battuta
made his remarkable journeys. In a sense he participated,
sometimes simultaneously, in four different streams of travel and
migration. First, he was a pilgrim, joining the march of pious
believers to the spiritual shrines of Mecca and Medina at least four
times in his career. Second, he was a devotee of Sufism, or
mystical Islam, traveling, as thousands did, to the hermitages and
lodges of venerable holy men to receive their blessing and wisdom.
Third, he was a juridical scholar, seeking knowledge and erudite
company in the great cities of the Islamic heartland. And finally,
he was a member of the literate, mobile, world-minded elite, an
educated adventurer as it were, looking for hospitality, honors,
and profitable employment in the more newly established centers

12 Introduction

of Islamic civilization in the further regions of Asia and Africa. In any
of these traveling roles, however, he regarded himself as a citizen, not
of a country called Morocco, but of the Dar al-Islam, to whose
universalist spiritual, moral, and social values he was loyal above any
other allegiance. His life and career exemplify a remarkable fact of
Afro—Eurasian history in the later Middle Period, that, as Marshall
Hodgson writes, Islam “came closer than any other medieval society
to establishing a common world order of social and even cultural
standards.”'4

Notes

1. Henn Cordier, quoted in Joseph Needham, Science and Civilization in China,
vol. 4, part 3: Civil Engineering and Nautics (Cambridge, 1971), p. 486.

2. This figure represents my calculation of the approximate extent of IB’s travels.
Henry Yule estimates that he traveled more than 75,000 miles during his career, not
counting journeys he undertook while living in India. Cathay and the Way Thither, 4
vols. (London, 1913-16), vol. 4, p. 40. Mahdi Husain (MH, p. liii) suggests a total figure
of 77,640 miles.

3. On rihla literature in North Africa see M.B.A. Benchekroun, La Vie in-
tellectuelle marocaine sous les Merinides et les Wattasides (Rabat, 1974), pp. 9-11, 251-
57; André Michel, “Ibn Battuta, trente années de voyages de Pekin au Niger,” Les
Africains 1 (1977): 134-36; A.L. de Prémare, Maghreb et Andalousie au XIVe siécle
(Lyon, 1981), pp. 34, 92-93.

4. Samuel Lee, The Travels of [bn Battuta (London, 1929). On the history of the
European discovery of IB, see D&S, vol. 1, pp. xiti-xxvi.

5. C. Défrémery and B.R. Sanguinetti (trans. and eds.), Voyages d'Ibn Battuta, 4
vols. (Paris, 1853-58; reprint edn., Vincent Monteil (ed.), Paris, 1979).

6. H.A.R. Gibb, /bn Battuta: Travels in Asia and Africa (London, 1929); and The
Travels of Ibn Battuta A.D, 1325-1354, Translated with Revisions and Notes from the
Arabic Text Edited by C. Défrémery and B.R. Sanguinetti, 3 vols. (Cambridge for the
Hakluyt Society, 1958, 1961, 1971).

7. The final volume is being translated and edited by Professor C.F. Beckingham.

8. Gibb, Travels in Asia and Africa, p. 12.

9. The second phrase is used by A.G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Afria
(New York, 1973), p. 78.

10. On the medieval sources that mention IB see Chapter 14.

11. Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in World
Civilization, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1974); William H. McNeill, The Rise of the West: A
History of the Human Community (Chicago, 1963). The concept of trans-regional
“intercommunicating zones” is also important in the wnitings of Philip D. Curtin,
notably Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge, England, 1984).

12. Marshall G.S. Hodgson, “Hemispheric Inter-regional History as an Approach to
World History,” Journal of World History 1 (1954): 717.

13. Marshall G.S. Hodgson, “The Role of Islam in World History,” International
Journal of Middle East Studies | (1970): 116.

14. Marshall G.S. Hodgson, “The Unity of Later Islamic History,” Journal of World
History 5 (1960): 884.

l Tangier

The learned man is esteemed in whatever place or
condition he may be, always meeting people who are
favorably disposed to him, who draw near to him and seek
his company, gratified in being close to him. '

"Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi

The white and windy city of Tangier lies on the coast of Morocco
at the southwestern end of the Strait of Gibraltar where the cold
surface current of the Atlantic flows into the channel, forming a
river to the Mediterranean 45 miles away. According to legend,
Hercules founded the city in honor of his wife, after he split the
continents and built his pillars, the mountain known as Jebel Musa
on the African shore, the Rock of Gibraltar on the European. For
travelers sailing between Morocco and the Iberian Peninsula the
strait was indeed a river, only 16 miles across at its narrowest point
and traversed in as little as three hours in fair weather. To sail east
or west from one sea to the other was a more dangerous and
exacting feat than the crossing, owing to capricious winds and
currents as well as reefs and sandbars along the shores. Yet
merchant ships were making the passage with more and more
frequency in medieval times, and Tangier was growing along with
the other ports of the strait as an entrepdot between the commercial
networks of the Mediterranean and the North Atlantic. Tangier
was a converging point of four geographical worlds — African and
European, Atlantic and Mediterranean. It was an international
town whose character was determined by the shifting flow of
maritime traffic in the strait — merchants and warriors, craftsmen
and scholars shuttling back and forth between the pillars or gliding
under them between the ocean and the sea.

We have only a faint idea of the local history of Tangier (Tanja)
in the first quarter of the fourteenth century when Ibn Battuta was
growing up there, being educated, and moving in the secure circles
of parents, kinsmen, teachers and friends.* But there is no doubt
that life in the town was shaped by the patterns of history in the

13

14 Tangier

Map 2: Region of the Strait of Gibraltar

IBERIAN PENINSULA

ATLANTIC

OCEAN JD
Ceuta

Tangier

wider world of the strait. If the young Ibn Battuta, preoccupie
with his Koranic lessons, was indifferent to the momentous con
ings and goings in the region of the channel, these must have hac
nonetheless, a pervading influence on the daily affairs of the cit
and its people.

The early fourteenth century was a time of transition for all th
towns bordering the strait, as prevailing relationships betwee
Africa and Europe on the one hand and the Atlantic an
Mediterranean on the other were being altered, in some wa)
drastically. Most conspicuous was the retreat of Muslim powe
from Europe in the face of the Christian reconquista. During th
half millennium between the eighth and thirteenth centuries, all «
the Maghrib (North Africa from Morocco to western Libya) an
most of Iberia were under Muslim rule. On both sides of the stra
there developed a sophisticated urban civilization, founded on th
rich irrigated agriculture of Andalusia (al-Andalus), as Musli
Iberia was called, and flourishing amid complex cultural and con
mercial interchange among cities all around the rim of the fz
western Mediterranean. The unity of this civilization reached 1
apogee in the twelfth century when the Almohads, a dynasty ¢

Tangier 15

Moroccan Berbers impelled by a militant ideology of religious
reform, created a vast Mediterranean empire, whose lands
spanned the strait and stretched from the Atlantic coast to Libya.

The Almohad sultans, however, proved incapable of managing
such an enormous territory for long. Early in the thirteenth
century the political edifice began to come apart amid economic
decline, religious quarrels, and countryside rebellions. In northern
Iberia Christian kingdoms, which until then had existed in the
shadow of Muslim civilization, took the offensive. The victory of
the combined forces of Aragon, Castile, and Portugal over an
Almohad army at the Battle of Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 was
the first of a succession of spectacular Christian advances against
Muslim territory. One by one the great Muslim cities fell, Cordova
in 1236, Valencia in 1238, Seville in 1248. By mid century the
Almohads were all but driven from Iberia, and all that remained of
Muslim power on the northern side of the strait was the
mountainous kingdom of Granada. In North Africa the Almohad
state split into three smaller kingdoms, one in the Eastern Maghrib
(Ifriqiya) ruled by the Hafsid dynasty; a second in the Central
Maghrib governed by the ’Abd al-Wadids; and a third in Morocco
under a nomadic warrior tribe of Berber nomads known as the
Banu Marin, or the Marinids.

Rough and ready cavalrymen with no guiding ideology, the
Marinids overthrew the last of the Almohad rulers, established a
new dynastic capital at Fez, and restored a measure of political
stability to Morocco in the last quarter of the thirteenth century.
From the start the new sultans harbored dreams of resurrecting the
Mediterranean empire of their predecessors, and with this in mind
repeatedly waged war against the "Abd al-Wadids and the Hafsids,
their neighbors to the east. Some of the Marinid kings mounted
seaborne campaigns against the Iberian coast, but none of these
invasions seriously threatened the Christian hold on the interior of
the peninsula. In any event the Moroccans were obliged to pursue
an active policy in the region of the strait, which was far too
important strategically to be given up to the Christian states with-
out a struggle.

The contest, however, was no simple matter of Islam versus
Christianity. The battle of faiths that had dominated the decades
of the Almohad retreat was losing some of its emotional ferocity,
and a relatively stable balance of power was emerging among six
successor states. Four of them were Muslim — the Marinids, the

16 Tangier

’Abd al-Wadids, the Hafsids, and the Nasrids, who ruled Granada
after 1230. The other two were Christian — Castile and
Aragon-Catalonia. From the later thirteenth through the
following century these six kingdoms competed in peace and war
with little regard to matters of religion, which served mainly as
ideological cover for utterly pragmatic political or military under-
takings.

War and peace in the Strait of Gibraltar converged on the five
principal towns which faced it — Tarifa, Algeciras, and Gibraltar
on the European side, Ceuta and Tangier on the African. These
ports were the entrepdts of trade between the continents, the
embarkation points for warriors on crusade, and the bases for
galleys which patrolled the channel. In the later thirteenth and the
fourteenth centuries they were the objects of incessant military
rivalry among the kings of the region. Algeciras, for example, was
ceded by Granada to the Marinids in 1275, returned to Granada in
1294, taken again by Morocco in 1333, and finally seized by Castile
in 1344. Indeed, Tangier was the only one of the ports to retain the
same political masters throughout this period, following the
Marinid occupation in 1275. Part of the reason was that in the
politics of the strait, Tangier was, relatively speaking, the least
important of the five cities. The others all fronted the narrow
easterly end of the channel and were vital to the trade and com-
munication of the western Mediterranean. But Tangier, lying far
off to the southwest and almost facing the Atlantic, was a prize of
lesser magnitude. It would be the fortune of Portugal, an Atlantic
power, to wrest the city from Moroccan control, but not until
1471.

Still, Tangier was of considerable strategic value. The lovely
bay, whose white beaches curve off to the northeast of the city,
was the only natural indentation of any size on the entire coast of
Morocco, and it could easily shelter a fleet of warships. Along with
Ceuta (Sabta) and some lesser towns on the strait, Tangier had for
several centuries served as a point of embarkation for naval and
cargo vessels bound for Iberia. In 1279 Sultan Abu Yusuf, founder
of the Marinid dynasty, supervised the massing of a fleet of 72
galleys in the bay in order to send troops to relieve a Castilian
siege of Algeciras.’ Aside from the recurrent movement of
Marinid troops, horses, and matériel through the port, the city
also played host to numerous bands of Muslim pirates, who
harassed shipping in the strait and made raids on the Spanish

Tangier 17

Coast.* The hazardous and uncertain condition of interstate affairs
no doubt stimulated the Tangierian economy and gave the
population ample employment building ships, running cargos,
hiring out as soldiers and seamen, and trafficking in arms and
supplies. Short of a Christian attack, the city had little to lose and
much to gain from the prevailing conditions of war and diplomacy
in the region.

If the continuing prosperity of the city in the aftermath of the
Almohad collapse resulted partly from the vigorous efforts of the
Marinids to check the reconquista, even more important were
developments in trade and seaborne technology. In the course of
the Christian crusades to Palestine between the eleventh and the
end of the thirteenth centuries, European long-distance shipping
took almost full command of the Mediterranean. This was the first
great age of Europe’s economic development, and although trade
between Christian and Muslim states grew by leaps, virtually all of
it was carried in Latin vessels. In the western sea the Genoese took
the lead, signing a commercial treaty with the Almohads in
1137-38 and thereafter opening up trade with a number of
Maghribi ports, including Ceuta, and possibly Tangier. in the
1160s.” Merchants of Catalonia, operating principally from
Barcelona and protected by the rising power of the kings of
Aragon, extended their commercial operations to North Africa by
the early 1200s. Traders from Marseille, Majorca, Venice, and
Pisa also joined in the competition, offering grain, wine,
hardware, spices, and weaponry, plus cotton, woolen, and linen
textiles in return for the wool, hides, leather, wax, alum, grain,
and oil of North Africa and the gold, ivory, and slaves of the lands
beyond the Sahara.

With commercial traffic in the western Mediterranean growing
continually in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, it was only a
matter of time before it would spill through the strait into the
Atlantic. The Genoese, Catalans, Provengals, and Venetians were
all established in the towns of the strait in the 1300s. But there
were strong incentives to go further. To the south lay the Atlantic
ports of Morocco and the prospect not only of expanding the
Maghribi trade but of diverting some of the gold brought up from
West Africa before it reached the Mediterranean outlets. By the
later twelfth century Genoese vessels were already sailing beyond
Tangier, round the northwestern tip of Africa, and down the coast
to Salé, Safi, and other Moroccan ports. In 1291 the intrepid

18 Tangier

Vivaldi brothers of Genoa vanished into terra incognita after
setting sail down the coast of Morocco, bound for India two
centuries too soon.°

It was also after 1275 that Genoese merchants began sailing
northwestward from the strait around the great bulge of Iberia and
into the waters of the North Atlantic. By 1300 both Genoese and
Venetian galleys were making regular trips to ports in England and
Flanders, carrying goods from all the Mediterranean lands and
returning with woolens, timber, and other products of northern
Europe. Here was occurring the great maritime link-up between
the ocean and the sea that would weigh so much in the transfor-
mation of Europe in the later Middle Ages.

The invasion of the Atlantic by Mediterranean shipping made
the Strait of Gibraltar of even greater strategic importance than it
had been earlier and gave the cities along its shore a new surge of
commercial vitality. Ceuta was the busiest and most prosperous of
the towns on either side of the channel in the early fourteenth
century.’ But Tangier, which lay along the southwesterly route
from the strait to the ports of Atlantic Morocco, had its share of
the new shipping traffic. In fair weather months vessels from
Genoa, Catalonia, Pisa, Marseille, and Majorca might all be seen
in Tangier bay — slender galleys which sat low on the surface of
the water and maneuvered close to shore under the power of their
oarsmen; high-sided round ships with their great triangular sails;
and, perhaps occasionally after 1300, tubby-looking, square-rigged
cogs from some port on the Atlantic coast of Portugal or Spain.
And in addition to these, a swarm of Muslim vessels put out from
the harbor to “tramp” the Maghribi coast, shuttle cargo to Iberian
ports, or fish the waters of the strait. The movement of Christian
merchants and sailors in and out of the town must have been a
matter of regular occurrence. And in normal times these visitors
mixed freely with the local Muslim population to exchange news
and haggle over prices.

Tangier was indeed a frontier town in the early fourteenth
century. With rough Berber soldiers tramping through the steep
streets to their warships, Christian and Muslim traders jostling one
another on the wharves and in the warehouses, pirates disposing of
their plunder in the bazaar, the city imaged the roisterous frontier
excitement of the times. Perched on the western edge of the
Muslim world and caught up in the changing patterns of trade and
power in the Mediterranean basin, it was a more restless and

Tangier 19

cosmopolitan city than it had ever been before. It was the sort of
place where a young man might grow up and develop an urge to
travel.

In the narrative of his world adventures Ibn Battuta tells us
virtually nothing of his early life in Tangier. From Ibn Juzayy, the
Andalusian scholar who composed and edited the Rihla, or from
Ibn Battuta himself in the most off-hand way, we learn that he was
born Abu ’Abdallah Muhammad ibn ’Abdallah ibn Muhammad
ibn Ibrahim al-Lawati ibn Battuta on 25 February 1304; that his
family was descended from the Berber tribe known as the Lawata;
that his mother and father were still alive when he left Morocco in
1325; and that some members of his extended family besides
himself were schooled in Islamic law and had pursued careers as
legal scholars (fagihs) or judges (gadis). Beyond these skimpy
facts, we know only what the Rihla reveals to us by implication:
that he received the best education in law and the other Islamic
sciences that Tangier could provide and that during his adolescent
years he acquired an educated man’s values and sensibilities.

His family obviously enjoyed respectable standing as members
of the city’s scholarly elite. Tangier was not a chief center of
learning in fourteenth-century North Africa; it was not a Fez, a
Tlemcen, or a Tunis. When Ibn Battuta was growing up, it did not
yet possess one of the madrasas, or colleges of higher learning,
which the new Marinid rulers had begun founding in their capital.”
But Tangier, like any city of commerce in the Islamic world,
required literate families who specialized in providing a variety of
skills and services: the officers of mosques and other pious found-
ations, administrative and customs officials, scribes, accountants,
notaries, legal counsellors, and judges, as well as teachers and
professors for the sons of the affluent families of merchants and
landowners.

The education Ibn Battuta received was one worthy of a
member of a legal family. It is easy enough to imagine the young
boy, eager and affable as he would be in adult life, marching off to
Koranic school in the neighborhood mosque to have the teacher
beat the Sacred Book into him until, by the age of twelve at least,
he had it all committed to memory. The education of most boys
would go no further than this Koranic training, plus perhaps a
smattering of caligraphy, grammar, and arithmetic. But a lad of
Ibn Battuta’s family status would be encouraged to move on to

20 Tangier

advanced study of the religious sciences: Koranic exegesis, the
traditions of the Prophet Muhammad (hadith), grammar, rhetoric,
theology, logic, and law. The foremost scholar-teachers of the city
offered courses in mosques or their own homes. Students might
normally attend the lectures of a number of different men, sitting ina
semi-circle at the master’s feet as he read from learned texts and
discoursed on their meaning.

The pupil’s task was not simply to grasp the substance of a text but to
learn it by heart. The memorization of standard and classical texts
comprising the corpus of Islamic knowledge was central to all ad-
vanced education. The most respected masters in any field of learning
were the men who had not only committed to memory and thoroughly
understood the greatest number of books, but who could recall and
recite passages from them with ease in scholarly discourse and debate.
According to Ibn Khaldun, the great philosopher and historian of the
later fourteenth century, memory training was even more rigorously
pursued in Moroccan education than in other parts of the Muslim
world.'? The purpose of education in the Islamic Middle Period, it
should be understood, was not to teach students to think critically
about their human or natural environment or to push the frontiers of
knowledge beyond the limits of their elders. Rather it was to transmit
to the coming generation the spiritual truths, moral values, and social
rules of the past which, after all, Muslims had found valid by the
astonishing success of their faith and civilization. Education was in
every sense conservative.

Although the narrow discipline of memorization occupied much of
a student’s time, an Islamic education nonetheless addressed the
whole man. In the course of his advanced studies a boy was expected
to acquire the values and manners of a gentleman. This included his
everyday conversation in Arabic. Despite the Berber-speaking
heritage of North Africa, including Tangier and its environs, Arabic
was the language of civilized speech in every Maghribi city. A man of
learning, unlike the ordinary citizen, was expected to know the subtle
complexities of formal Arabic grammar, syntax, and poetics and to
decorate his conversation with Koranic quotations, classical allusions,
and rhymed phrases."! Ibn Battuta’s family was of Berber origin, but
we may suppose that he grew up speaking Arabic in his own household
as well as in the company of other educated men and boys. The Rihla
gives no evidence that he could speak the Berber language of northern
Morocco at all.

The narrative of his life experience reveals that in his youth he

Tangier 21

mastered the qualities of social polish expected of the urbane
scholar and gentleman.

Politeness, discretion, propriety, decency, cleanliness, ways of
cooking, table manners and rules of dress all formed part of that
extremely refined code of savoir vivre which occupied so pre-
dominant a place in social relations and moral judgements.
Whatever caused shame and could irritate or inconvenience
someone was considered impolite. A courteous and refined
man... evinced in his behavior a combination of attitudes,
gestures and words which made his relations with others
harmonious, amiable and so natural that they seemed
spontaneous. '

This description pertains to learned Moroccans in the
nineteenth century, but it could easily apply to Ibn Battuta and to
the well-bred men of his time. If in the course of his world travels
he would display some less fortunate traits — impatience, pro-
fligacy, impetuousness, pious self-righteousness, and an in-
clination to be unctuous in the presence of wealth or power — he
was nonetheless an eminently civilized individual. As he grew into
adulthood his speech, his manners, his conduct would identify him
as an ’alim, a man of learning, and as a member of the social
category of educated men called the ’ulama.

As his education advanced, he began to specialize in the law, as
other members of his family had done. The study of law (in Arabic
figh) was one of the fundamental religious sciences. In Islam the
Sacred Law, or shari’a, was founded principally on the revealed
Koran and the words and actions of the Prophet. Ideally it was the
basis not merely of religious practice but of the social order in its
broadest expression. Although Muslim kings and princes pro-
mulgated administrative and penal ordinances as occasion de-
manded (and increasingly so in the Middle Period of Islam), the
shari’a addressed the full spectrum of social relations — marriage,
inheritance, slavery, taxation, market relations, moral behavior,
and so on. Unlike the situation in the Christian world, no formal
distinction was made between canon and secular legal systems.
Therefore, Ibn Battuta’s juridical training was entirely integrated
with his theological and literary education.

In Sunni Islam, that is, mainstream or, perhaps less
appropriately, orthodox Islam, the legal systems embraced four

22 Tangier

major “schools” of law, called madhhabs. They were the Hanafi,
the Shafi’i, the Maliki, and the Hanbali. The four schools differed
in matters of juristic detail, not in fundamental legal principles.
The school to which an individual adhered depended largely on
where he happened to have been born, since the madhhabs
evolved during the early centuries of Islam along territorial lines.

The Maliki school, named after its eighth-century founder Malik
ibn ’Anas, has been historically dominant throughout North
Africa. The Almohad rulers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
possessed a distinctive approach to jurisprudence which set them
and the minority of scholars who served them apart from the four
schools and involved vigorous suppression of the Maliki doctors.
The rude Marinid war captains who replaced the Almohads had no
thoughts on the subject of law at all. They were, however, quick to
distance themselves from the ideology of their predecessors by
championing the re-establishment of Malikism. In this way they
gained status and legitimacy in the eyes of Morocco’s educated
majority and enlisted their help in consolidating the new political
order. Therefore, Ibn Battuta grew up and went to school during a
time of renaissance in Maliki legal studies. And partly because
Malikism had been temporarily out of favor and was now back in,
legal education in fourteenth century Morocco tended to stress
uncritical, doctrinaire acceptance of the interpretations of law
contained in the major Maliki texts.!* The law classes he attended
in Tangier would have involved mainly the presentation and
memorizing of sections of the corpus of Maliki figh, the professors
using summaries and abridgments of major legal texts of that
school.

As his introductory legal studies proceeded, he was also
assimilating the specific cultural style of a Muslim lawyer. The
education, as well as the speech and manners, of the juridical class
was largely the same everywhere in the Muslim world. Therefore,
Ibn Battuta’s particular socialization was equipping him to move
easily among men of learning anywhere in the Dar al-Islam. If he
aspired to be a jurisprudent one day, then he was expected to
exemplify the prized qualities of members of his profession —
erudition, dignified comportment, moderation in speech and con-
duct, and absolute incorruptibility. He also adopted the distinctive
dress of the legal scholar: a more or less voluminous turban; a
taylasan, or shawl-like garment draped over the head and
shoulders; and a long, wide-sleeved, immaculately clean gown of

Tangier 23

fine material. Most educated men wore beards. In one passage in
the Rihla Ibn Battuta makes an incidental reference to his own. '4
(That reference, it might be added, is the only clue he offers
anywhere in the narrative as to his own physical appearance. Since
the ancestors of a Tangierian might include dark-eyed, olive-
skinned Arabs, blue-eyed, fair-haired Berbers, and even black
West Africans, nothing can be assumed abolut the traveler’s
physiognomy.)

Another important dimension of his education was his intro-
duction to Sufism, the mystical dimension of Islam. Throughout
the Muslim world in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
Sufism was addressing popular desires for an Islamic faith of
warmth, emotion, and personal hope, needs that outward
performance of Koranic duties could not alone supply. Indeed it
was during the later Middle Period that Sunni orthodoxy
embraced Sufism wholeheartedly and transformed it into a
powerful force for the further expansion of Islam.

Two ideas were at the heart of the Sufi movement. One was that
the individual Muslim ts capable of achieving direct and personal
communion with God. The other was that the path to God could
be found through the intermediary of a saintly master or shaykh.
Such an individual was thought to be a wall, a “friend of God,”
who radiated the quality of divine grace (baraka) and could trans-
mit it to others. With the help of his master, the Sufi initiate
immersed himself in mystical teachings, rituals, and special
prayers and strove to inculcate high spiritual qualities in everyday
life. Sufism was also a social movement because it involved the
formation of congregations of seekers who gathered round a par-
ticular master to hear his teachings and join with him in devotional
exercises. All across the Islamic world in Ibn Battuta’s time these
groups were just beginning to become institutionalized as religious
orders, or brotherhoods, each one organized around common
devotion to the spiritual teachings, or “path,” of the founder of the
order and his successors. These fraternities were also developing
as Civic organizations and mutual aid societies and, by the fifteenth
century in some areas, as loci of considerable political power.

Sufism had a special appeal for rural folk, whose arduous lives
demanded a concrete faith of hope and salvation and who were
isolated to a greater or lesser extent from the literate, juridically
minded Islam of the cities. Sufi lodges, called zawiyas, organized
as centers for worship, mystical education, and charity, were

24 Tangier

springing up all across North Africa in Ibn Battuta’s time,
especially among rural Berber populations to whom they offered a
richer, more accessible religion and a new kind of communal
experience.

In Morocco Sufi preachers were notably active and successful
among the Berber-speaking populations of the Rif Mountains, the
region south and east of Tangier.'” Yet mystical ideas were also
penetrating the towns in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
perhaps rather early in Tangier because of its nearness to the Rif.
Moreover, Tangier, for all its intellectual respectability, was not
one of the great bastions of scriptural orthodoxy like Fez, where
the leading Maliki doctors were still inclined to be suspicious of
Sufism, or any other religious idea not documented in their law
books or theological treatises.

Although we have no idea what Ibn Battuta’s early experience
with Sufism may have been, his behavior during his travels is itself
evidence that he grew up in a social climate rich in mystical beliefs
and that these ideas were tightly interwoven with his formal,
scriptural education. By the time he left Tangier, he was so deeply
influenced by Sufi ideas, especially belief in personal baraka and
the value of ascetic devotionalism, that his traveling career turned
out to be, in a sense, a grand world tour of the lodges and tombs of
famous Sufi mystics and saints. He was never, to be sure, a
committed Sufi disciple. He remained throughout his life a “lay”
Sufi, attending mystical gatherings, seeking the blessing and
wisdom of spiritual luminaries, and retreating on occasion into
brief periods of ascetic contemplation. But he never gave up the
worldly life. He was, rather, a living example of that moral rec-
onciliation between popular Sufism and public orthodoxy that was
working itself out in the Islamic world of his time. Consequently,
he embarked on his travels prepared to show as much equanimity
in the company of holy hermits in mountain caves as in the pre-
sence of the august professors of urban colleges.

Aside from the local teachers and divines of his youth, he is
likely to have had contact with men of letters who passed through
Tangier at one time or another. The scholarly class of the Islamic
world was an extraordinarily mobile group. In the Maghrib of the
later Middle Period the learned, like modern conference-hopping
academics, circulated incessantly from one city and country to
another, studying with renowned professors, leading diplomatic
missions, taking up posts in mosques and royal chanceries.

Tangier 25

Scholars routinely shuttled back and forth across the Strait of
Gibraltar between the cities of Morocco and the Nasrid Sultanate.
Indeed, Ibn Battuta had a cousin (the Rih/a tells us) who served as a
gadi in the Andalusian city of Ronda.

Apart from this normal circulation, there was over the long run of
time a pattern of one-way migration of educated people from
Andalusia to North Africa, a kind of Iberian brain drain which
accelerated in response to each new surge of Christian power and
concomitant loss of security and opportunity for Muslims on the
northern side of the strait.'° Iberia’s loss, however, was North
Africa’s gain, since Andalusian scholars and craftsmen, arriving in
sporadic streams between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, did
much to enliven the cultural life of Maghribi towns. If Tangier took
in few immigrants compared with Fez or other premier cities, the
legacy of the great Andalusian intellectual tradition must have
rubbed off on the city’s educated class to a significant extent.

No young scholar, however well connected his family might be,
could expect to pursue a religious or public vocation until he had
undertaken advanced studies with at least a few eminent teachers.
The local masters and “visiting scholars” of Tangier could give a boy
a solid foundation in the major disciplines. But any lad with a large
intellectual appetite and personal ambition to match was obliged to
take to the road along with the rest of the scholarly community. Fez
lay only a few days traveling time to the south, and its colleges. just
being built under Maninid sponsorship, were attracting students from
all Morocco’s provincial towns. But though Fez was fast gaining a
reputation as the most important seat of learning west of Tunis, it
lacked the shining prestige of the great cultural centers of the Middle
East, notably Cairo and Damascus. In those cities were to be found
the most illustrious teachers, the most varied curricula, the biggest
colleges, the rarest libraries, and, for a young man with a career
ahead of him, the most respected credentials.

Notes

1. Quoted in George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges (Edinburgh. 1981), p. 91.

2. The limited literary sources on Tangier in the Almohad age and later have been
brought together in Edouard Michaux-Bellaire. Villes et tribus du Maroc. Tanger et sa
zone, vol. 7 (Paris, 1921).

3. Derek Latham, “The Later “Azafids,” Revue de l’Occident Musulman et de la
Méditerranée 15-16 (1973): 112-13.

26 Tangier

4. Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, L’Espagne catalane et le Maghrib aux XII le e
X1Ve siécles (Paris, 1966), p. 575. Dufourcq notes an upsurge of piracy emanating
from Moroccan ports in the early fourteenth century.

5. Hilmar C. Krueger, “Genoese Trade with Northwest Africa in the Twelfth
Century.” Speculum 8 (1933): 377-82. Krueger does not mention Tangier
specifically, but there is no doubt that Europeans were sailing there about this time
since they were also beginning to put in at Atlantic ports southwest of Tangier.

6. J.H. Parry. The Discovery of the Sea (New York, 1974), p. 75.

7. Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, “La Question de Ceuta au XIIle siécle,”
Hespéris 42 (1955): 67-127; Derek Latham, “The Strategic Position and Defence of
Ceuta in the Later Muslim Period,” /slamic Quarterly 15 (1971): 189-204: Anna
Mascarello, “Quelques aspects des activités italiennes dans le Maghreb médiéval,”
Revue d'Histoire et de Civilisation du Maghreb 5 (1968): 74-75.

8. Dufourcq, L’Espagne catalane, p. 159.

9. A madrasa was founded in Tangier some time during the reign of Abu
Hasan (1331-51). Henri Terrasse, Histoire du Maroc, 2 vols. (Casablanca,
1949-50). vol. 2, p. 53.

10. Ibn Khaldun, The Mugaddimah, 2nd edn., trans. F. Rosenthal, 3 vols.
(Princeton, N.J.. 1967), vol. 2, pp. 430-31.

11. On the culture of men of traditional learning in nineteenth- and twentieth-
century Morocco, see Dale F. Eickelman, Knowledge and Power in Morocco: The
Education of a Twentieth Century Notable (Princeton, N.J., 1985).

12. Kenneth Brown, People of Salé: Tradition and Change in a Moroccan City,
1830-1930 (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), p. 103.

13. Alfred Bel, La Religion musulmane en Berbérie (Paris, 1938), pp. 320-22,
327.

14. On the dress of legal scholars in both Granada and Morocco see Rachel
Arié, L’Espagne musulmane au temps des Nasrides (Paris, 1973), pp. 382-91.

15. Bel, La Religion musulmane, pp. 352-53; Terrasse, Histoire de Maroc, vol.
1, p. 81.

16. Mohamed Talbi speaks of Muslim emigration from Spain as a “fuite des
cerveaux” in “Les contacts culturels entre I'Ifriqiya hafside (1230-1569) et le
sultanat nasride d’Espagne (1232-1492)” in Actas del II Coloquis hispano-tunecino
de estudios historicos (Madrid, 1973), pp. 63-90.

Q The Maghrib

A scholar’s education is greatly improved by traveling in
quest of knowledge and meeting the authoritative
teachers (of his time). '

Ibn Khaldun

Tangier would have counted among its inhabitants many indi-
viduals who had traveled to the Middle East, most of them with
the main purpose of carrying out the hajj, or pilgrimage to the
Holy Places of Mecca and Medina in the Hijaz region of Western
Arabia. Islam obliged every Muslim who was not impoverished,
enslaved, insane, or endangered by war or epidemic to go to
Mecca at least once in his lifetime and to perform there the set of
collective ceremonies prescribed by the shari’a. Each year
hundreds and often thousands of North Africans fulfilled their
duty, joining in a great ritual migration that brought together
believers from the far corners of the Afro—Eurasian world. A
traveler bound for the Middle East might have any number of
mundane or purely personal goals in mind — trade, study,
diplomacy, or simply adventure, but the hajj was almost always the
expressed and over-riding motive. The high aim of reaching Mecca
in time for the pilgrimage season in the month of Dhu I-Hijja gave
shape to the traveler’s itinerary and lent a spirit of jubilation to
what was a long, exhausting, and sometimes dangerous journey.
In the fourteenth century an aspiring pilgrim of Tangier had the
choice of traveling by land or sea, or a combination of the two.
European vessels which put in at Maghribi ports, as well as Muslim
coasting ships, commonly took passengers on board and delivered
them to some port further east along the Mediterranean shore.”
Until the age of the steamship and the charter flight, however,
most pilgrims chose the overland route across the Maghrib, Libya,
and Egypt. This route was in fact part of a network of tracks
linking the towns and cities of northern Africa with one another. A
traveler from Morocco might follow a number of slightly varying
itineraries, passing part of the way along the Mediterranean coast

27

MEDITERRANEAN

MAMLUK
SULTANATE

The Maghrib 29

and part of the way across the high steppes which ran west to east
between the coastal mountains and the Atlas ranges of the deep
interior. Or, pilgrims starting out in southern Morocco could go by
way of the oases and river valleys which were strung out at comfor-
table intervals along the northern fringe of the Sahara. Northern
and southern routes alike converged in Ifriqiya. From there to
Egypt pilgrims took the coast road, the lifeline between the
Maghrib and the Middle East, which ran along the narrow ribbon
of settled territory between the Mediterranean and the Libyan
desert.

Whether by land or sea, getting to Mecca was a risky affair. If
seafarers had to brave storms, pirates, and hostile navies, overland
travelers confronted bandits, nomad marauders, or the possibility
of stumbling into a war between one North African state and
another. Consequently, most pilgrims going overland kept. for the
sake of security, to the company of others, often the small
caravans that shuttled routinely between the towns and rural
markets. Travelers who had little money to start with frequently
traded a stock of wares of their own along the way — leather
goods or precious stones for example — or offered their labor
here and there, sometimes taking several months or even years to
finally work or chaffer their way as far as Egypt.

Quite apart from these little bands of pilgrims in the company of
merchants and wayfarers was the great hajj caravan, which ideally
went every year from Morocco to Cairo, and from there to the
Hijaz with the pilgrims from Egypt. Starting usually in Fez or
Tlemcen, the procession picked up groups of pilgrims along the
way like a rolling snowball, some of them walking, others riding
horses, mules, donkeys, or camels. By the time the company
reached Cairo, it might in some years number several thousand.

The flow of pilgrims across the nearly 3,000 miles of steppe,
desert, and mountain separating Morocco from Mecca was one of
the most conspicuous expressions of the extraordinary mobility
and cosmopolitanism within the Dar al-Islam in the Middle
Period. Although North Africa was known as the Island of the
West (Jazirat al-Maghrib), a mountainous realm separated from
the heartland of Islam by sea and desert, the intercommunciation
across the barren gap of Libya, whether by Aaj caravan or
otherwise, was nonetheless continuous — barring times of un-
usual political instability on one side or the other. And while the
commercial aspect of the link was important, its cultural di-

30 The Maghrib

mension was even more so. If few educated Egyptians, Syrians, or
Persians found reason to travel west in the fourteenth century (and
tended to think of the Maghrib as Islam’s back country, its Wild
West), the learned classes of North Africa and Granada were
always setting off on tours to the East in order to draw spiritual
and intellectual sustenance from their scholarly counterparts in
Cairo, Damascus, and the Holy Cities of the Hijaz.

For scholarly North Africans the hajj was almost always more
than a journey to Mecca and home again. Rather it was a rihla, a
grand study tour of the great mosques and madrasas of the heart-
land, an opportunity to acquire books and diplomas, deepen one’s
knowledge of theology and law, and commune with refined and
civilized men.

Literate Moroccans of the fourteenth century owed their
greatest intellectual debt not to the Middle East but to the learned
establishment of Muslim Iberia. Yet Andalusia’s time was fast
running out, and beleaguered little Granada, despite a brave
showing of artistic.energy in its latter days, could no longer pro-
vide much cultural leadership. The Middle East, however, having
somehow survived the dark catastrophes of the Mongol century,
was experiencing a cultural florescence, notably in the Mamluk-
ruled lands of Egypt and Syria. Gentlemen scholars of far western
cities like Tangier could readily look there for civilized models,
higher knowledge, and learned companionship. And though the
road to Mecca was long and perilous, the internationalism of
Islamic culture, continuously reaffirmed, held men of learning in a
bond of unity and shrank the miles between them.

On 14 June 1325 (2 Rajab 725 A.H.) Ibn Battuta rode out of
Tangier and headed southeastward through the highlands of the
Eastern Rif to join the main caravan road that ran from Fez to
Tlemcen. He was 21 years old and eager for more learning, and
more adventure, than his native city could hope to give him. The
parting was bittersweet:

My departure from Tangier, my birthplace, took place . . . with
the object of making the Pilgrimage to the Holy House [at
Mecca] and of visiting the tomb of the Prophet, God’s richest
blessing and peace be on him [at Medina]. I set out alone,
having neither fellow-traveler in whose companionship I might
find cheer, nor caravan whose party I might join, but swayed by

The Maghrib 31

an overmastering impulse within me and a_ desire
long-cherished in my bosom to visit these _ illustrious
sanctuaries. So I braced my resolution to quit all my dear ones,
female and male, and forsook my home as birds forsake their
nests. My parents being yet in the bonds of life, it weighed
sorely upon me to part from them, and both they and I were
afflicted with sorrow at this separation.

He did not, it seems, set out from Tangier with any plan to join
the hajj caravan, if there was one that year. It was not, in any
event, a bad year for a young man to launch forth entirely on his
own, for political conditions in the Western Maghrib were un-
typically calm. Abu Sa’id (1310-31), the reigning Marinid Sultan
of Morocco, was a pious and relatively unenterprising ruler and,
unlike many of the kings of his line, not much interested in
pursuing military adventures either in Iberia or North Africa.
Around the end of the thirteenth century the pilgrimage caravans
from Morocco had had to be suspended for several years owing to
Marinid wars against their eastern neighbor, the "Abd al-Wadid
kingdom. But less intrigued than his predecessors with visions of
a neo-Almohad empire, Abu Sa’id permitted a de facto peace to
prevail on his eastern frontier during most of his reign. Con-
sequently, merchants and pilgrims could expect to pass between
the two realms in relative security.

Riding eastward through Morocco’s mountainous interior and
then onto the high plains that stretched into the Central Maghrib,
Ibn Battuta reached Tlemcen, capital of the "Abd al-Wadid state,
in the space of a few weeks. Although Tlemcen was a busy com-
mercial transit center and intellectually the liveliest city anywhere
between Fez and Tunis, he did not linger there. For upon arriving
he learned that two envoys from the Hafsid Sultanate of Ifriqiya
had been in the city on a diplomatic mission and had just left to
return home. The ’Abd al-Wadids, enjoying an unusual break in
their wars with the Marinids, had turned their full attention to
their eastern marches where they were engaged in a protracted
struggle with the Hafsids, notably over control of Bijaya (Bougie),
a key Mediterranean port 450 miles west of Tunis. At the time Ibn
Battuta arrived in Tlemcen, Abu Tashfin, the “Abd al-Wadid
sultan, was conspiring with a number of Ifriqiyan rebels and pre-
tenders to unseat his Hafsid neighbor and satisfy his own ex-
pansionist ambitions.* It may be that the two envoys had come to

32 The Maghrib

Tlemcen to try to negotiate peace with Abu Tashfin and were now
going home, albeit empty-handed.” In any case, someone advised Ibn
Battuta to catch up with them and their entourage and proceed on to
Tunis in the safety of their company.

The busiest commercial routes out of Tlemcen led northward to the
ports of Oran and Honein. But Ibn Battuta took the lonelier
pilgrimage trail running northeastward through a series of river valleys
and arid plains flanked on one side or the other by the low, fragmented
mountain chains that broke up the Mediterranean hinterland. This
part of the Maghrib was sparsely populated in the fourteenth century.
He might have ridden for several days at a time without encountering
any towns, only Berber hamlets and bands of Arabic-speaking camel
herders who ranged over the broad, green-brown valleys and depress-
ions.

After what must have been two or three weeks on the road, he
caught up with the Ifriqiyans at Miliana, a small commercial center in
the Zaccar hills overlooking the plain of the Chelif River. Eager
scholar that he was, he could hardly have made better choices of his
first traveling companions. One of them was Abu ‘Abdallah al-
Zubaydi, a prominent theologian, the other Abu ‘Abdallah
al-Nafzawi, a gadi of Tunis. Unfortunately, tragedy struck as soon as
Ibn Battuta arrived. Both envoys fell ill owing to the hot weather (it
was mid summer) and were forced to remain in Miliana for ten days.
On the eleventh the little caravan resumed its journey, but just four
miles from the town the gadi grew worse and died. Al-Zubaydi, in the
company of the dead man’s son, whose name was Abu al-Tayyib,
returned to Miliana for mourning and burial, leaving Ibn Battuta to
continue on ahead with a party of Ifriqiyan merchants.

Descending the steep slopes of the Zaccar, the travelers arrived at
the port of Algiers, and Ibn Battuta had his first sight of the
Mediterranean since leaving Tangier. Algiers was a place of minor
importance in the fourteenth century, not the maritime capital it
would come to be in another two hundred years. It had little to
recommend it to a member of the educated class. Abu Muhammad
al-’Abdari, an Andalusian scholar who had traveled from Morocco to
Arabia 36 years earlier and had subsequently returned home to write a
rihla of his experiences, sized up the city’s literate establishment and
quickly wrote the place off:

In setting foot in this town, I wondered whether one would be able
to meet any enlightened people or any persons whose erudition

The Maghrib 33

would offer some attraction; but | had the feeling of one
looking for a horse that wasn’t hungry or the eggs of a camel.”

Ibn Battuta likely shared al-’Abdari’s opinion since he says
nothing in his narrative about what Algiers was like. In any case,
he and his merchant companions camped outside the walls of the
city for several days, waiting for al-Zubaydi and Abu al-Tayyib to
catch up.

As soon as they did, the party set out for the port of Bijaya, the
western frontier city of the Hafsid kingdom. The journey took
them directly eastward through the heart of the Grand Kabylie
Mountains, a region of immense oak and cedar forests, spectacular
gorges, and summits reaching higher than 6,500 feet, rougher
country than Ibn Battuta had seen since leaving home. Bijaya lay
up against the slopes of the mountains near the mouth of the
Souman River, which separates the Grand Kabylie range from the
Little Kabylie to the east. It was a busy international port and the
principal maritime outlet for the dense communities of Berber
farmers who inhabited the highland valleys behind it.

Bijaya was the first real city Ibn Battuta had the opportunity to
explore since leaving Tlemcen. Nonetheless, he was determined to
push on quickly, and this in spite of an attack of fever that left him
badly weakened. Al-Zubaydi advised him to stay in Bijaya until he
recovered, but the young man was adamant: “If God decrees my
death, then my death shall be on the road, with my face set
towards the land of the Hijaz.” Relenting before this high
sentiment, al-Zubaydi offered to lend him an ass and a tent if he
would agree to sell his own donkey and heavy baggage so that they
might all travel at a quicker pace. Ibn Battuta agreed, thanked
God for His beneficence, and prepared for the departure for
Constantine, the next major city on the main pilgrimage route.

Al-Zubaydi’s insistence on traveling fast and light had less to do
with his young friend’s illness than with the dangers that lay on the
road ahead. Ibn Battuta had had the good fortune to cross
Morocco and the ’Abd al-Wadid lands during a period of relative
peace. But the Eastern Maghrib in 1325 was in the midst of one of
the recurring cycles of political and military crisis that charac-
terized the Hafsid age. Sultan Abu Yahya Abu Bakr, who had
acceded to the Hafsid throne in 1318, was yet striving to gain a
reasonable measure of control over his domains in the face of a
Pandora’s box of plots, betrayals, revolts, and invasions. On one

34 The Maghrib

side were rival members of the Hafsid royal family, who from
provincial bases in various parts of the country were organizing
movements either to seize the capital city of Tunis or to set up
petty kingdoms of their own. On the other side were the ‘Abd al-
Wadids, who repeatedly invaded Abu Bakr’s western territories
and tried almost every year, though never successfully, to force the
walls of Bijaya.

As if these enemies were not enough, the sultan had to contend
with the turbulent and unpredictable Arab warrior tribes who for
more than two centuries had been the dominant political force
over large areas of rural Ifriqiya. These nomads were descendants
of the great wave of Arabic-speaking, camel-herding migrants,
known collectively as the Banu Hilal, who had trekked from Egypt
in the eleventh century and then gone on to penetrate the steppes
and coastal lowlands of the Maghrib as far west as the Atlantic
plains. If over the long run the relationship between these com-
panies of herdsmen and the indigenous Berbers of the towns and
villages was described far less by hostility than by mutual com-
mercial and cultural dependence, the migrations were nonetheless
a source of persistent trouble for North African rulers, who tried
time and again to harness the military power of the Arabs to their
own ends, only to find their erstwhile allies putting in with rebels
and pretenders. In 1325 Arab bands were politically teamed up
with at least two Hafsid rebels as well as with Abu Tashfin, the
"Abd al-Wadid. At the same time that Ibn Battuta was making his
way across the Central Maghrib, an ’Abd al-Wadid army was
laying siege to Constantine and had Sultan Abu Bakr himself
bottled up inside the city. In the meantime, a Hafsid pretender and
his Arab cohorts took advantage of the sultan’s helplessness to
occupy Tunis. The kingdom was in a state of civil confusion, the
roads were unsafe, and roving bands of Arab cavalry plagued the
countryside.

Ignoring the tumult, Ibn Battuta and his companions struck out
from Bijaya across the Little Kabylie Mountains and arrived at
Constantine without encountering trouble. By this time (it must
have been August) the approaches to the city were clear. The
"Abd al-Wadid army had precipitously given up its siege some
weeks earlier and returned to Tlemcen in failure, leaving Abu
Bakr free to restore a degree of order in the region and lead his
loyal forces back to Tunis to eject the rebels.’

Although Constantine was the largest city in the interior of the

The Maghrib 35

Eastern Maghrib, Ibn Battuta did not tarry there long. Con-
sequently he has little to recall about it in the Rihla — except the
one notable fact that he was privileged to make the acquaintance
of the governor, a son of Abu Bakr, who came out to the edge of
town to welcome al-Zubaydi. The meeting was a memorable one
for the young pilgrim because the governor presented him with a
gift of alms, the first of many presents he would receive from kings
and governors during the course of his travels. In this instance it
was two gold dinars and a fine woolen mantle to replace his old
one, which by this stage of the journey was in rags. Almsgiving was
one of the five sacred pillars of Islam, the duty of princes and
peasants alike to share one’s material wealth with others and thus
remit it to God. The obligation included voluntary giving (sadaqa)
to specific classes of people: the poor, orphans, prisoners, slaves
(for ransoming), fighters in the holy war, and wayfarers. Falling
eminently into this last category, Ibn Battuta would during the
next several years see his welfare assured, to one degree or
another, by an array of pious individuals who were moved to
perform their Koranic duty, the more readily so since the recipient
was himself an educated gentleman well worthy of such tokens of
God’s beneficence.

Leaving Constantine better dressed and richer, he and his
friends headed northeast across more mountainous country,
reaching the Mediterranean again at the port of Buna (Bone,
today Annaba). After resting here for several days in the security
of the city walls, he bade farewell to the merchants who had
accompanied him half way across the Central Maghrib and con-
tinued on toward Tunis with al-Zubaydi and Abu al-Tayyib. Now
the little party “traveled light with the utmost speed, pushing on
night and day without stopping” for fear of attack by Arab
marauders. Ibn Battuta was once again struck by fever and had to
tie himself to his saddle with a turban cloth to keep from falling
off, since they dared not stop for long. Their route took them
parallel to the coast through high cork and oak forests, then
gradually downward into the open plain and the expansive wheat
lands of central Ifriqiya. From there they had a level road along
the fertile Medjerda River valley to the western environs of Tunis.

Of all the North African cities where art and intellect flourished,
Tunis was premier during most of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. The Almohads had made it their provincial capital in
the Eastern Maghrib, and it was under their patronage that it took

36 The Maghrib

on the physical and demographic dimensions of a major city,
attaining a population of about 100,000 during peak periods of
prosperity.® The Hafsids, who started out as Almohad governors
over Ifriqiya and subsequently represented themselves as the
legitimate dynastic heirs of the empire, continued to rule from
Tunis and to cultivate the city’s corps of scholars and craftsmen,
much as the Marinids, equally driven to identify themselves with
the Almohad model of civilized taste, were doing in Fez.

Like other Maghribi cities of that age, Tunis under the Hafsids
built its splendid mosques and palaces, laid out its public gardens,
and founded its colleges with wealth that came in large measure
from long-distance trade. In the early fourteenth century Tunis
was the busiest of the ports which lay along the economic frontier
between the European seaborne trade of the Mediterranean and
the Muslim caravan network of the African interior. The Ifriqiyan
hinterland plain was narrow but rich enough to export a wide
range of Maghribi products — wool, leather, hides, cloth, wax,
olive oil, and grain. Tunis was also a consumer and transit market
for goods from sub-Saharan Africa — gold, ivory, slaves, ostrich
feathers. What gave the city its special prominence was its strategic
position on the southern rim of the Sicilian Channel, which joined
(and divided) the maritime complexes of the Western and Eastern
Mediterranean. Tunis maintained close commercial ties with
Egypt by way of Muslim coastal and overland trade and was well
placed to serve as a major emporium for Christian merchants of
the Western Mediterranean who found it a convenient place to
buy exotic goods of the East without themselves venturing on the
voyage to Egypt or the Levant.

What Ibn Battuta recalls about his feelings upon arriving in
Tunis is not the elation of a pilgrim who has reached one of the
great centers of religious learning along the hajj route, but the
forlornness of a young man in a strange city: -

The townsfolk came out to welcome the shaykh Abu ’Abdallah
al-Zubaydi and to welcome Abu al-Tayyib, the son of the qadi
Abu ’Abdailah al-Nafzawi. On all sides they came forward with

_ greetings and questions to one another, but not a soul said a
word of greeting to me, since there was none of them that I
knew. IJ felt so sad at heart on account of my loneliness that |
could not restrain the tears that started to my eyes, and wept
bitterly.

The Maghrib 37
In no time at all, however things were looking up:

One of the pilgrims, realizing the cause of my distress, came up
to me with a greeting and friendly welcome, and continued to
comfort me with friendly talk until I entered the city, where I
lodged in the college of the Booksellers.

After dodging tribal marauders all along the road from Bijaya,
Ibn Battuta managed to arrive in Tunis during a period of relative
political calm. The harried Abu Bakr, who had found himself shut
out of the citadel of Tunis by rebels three different times since
1321, returned from Constantine and recaptured the city perhaps
only a few days ahead of Ibn Battuta’s arrival there.” Indeed Abu
Bakr probably resumed authority just in time for the ‘Id al-Fitr,
the feast celebrating the end of Ramadan, the Muslim month of
fasting during daylight hours. Ibn Battuta was on hand to witness
the sultan fulfill his customary duty of leading “a magnificent
procession” of officials, courtiers, and soldiers from the citadel to
a special outdoor praying ground (musalla) that accommodated
the crowds gathered for the prayers marking the Breaking of the
Fast.!°

Ibn Battuta spent about two months in Tunis, arriving some
days before 10 September 1325 and leaving in early November. It
was common for educated travelers or pilgrims to take lodging
temporarily in a college, even though they were not regularly
attending lectures. The madrasa of the Booksellers where he
stayed was one of three colleges in existence in Tunis at that
time.!! His recollections of his first visit to the city are slight, but
we might be sure that he spent most of his time in the company of
the gentlemen-scholars of the city. He may indeed have had ex-
posure to some of the eminent Maliki ’u/ama of the century. Since
the demise of the Almohads, the Maliki school was enjoying as
much of a resurgence in Ifriqiya as it was in Morocco. The Hafsid
rulers were appointing Maliki scholars to high positions of state
and patronizing the madrasas, where Maliki juridical texts were
the heart of the curriculum.

If the Tunis elite held out an estimable model of erudition, they
were also masters of refined taste and that union of piety and
restrained wordliness that Ibn Battuta would exemplify in adult-
hood. During the previous century Tunis had been a distant refuge
for successive waves of Muslims emigrating from Andalusia in the

38 The Maghrib

wake of the reconquista. Of all the North African cities with
populations of Iberian descent, Tunis had the liveliest and most
productive. The Andalusians, coming from a civilized tradition
that was more polished than that of North Africa, were leaders in
the fields of architecture, craftsmanship, horticulture, music, belle-
lettres, and the niceties of diplomatic and courtly protocol. An
Andalusian strain seems evident in Ibn Battuta’s own mannerly
character, and we can wonder what seasoning effect two months in
Tunis among such people may have had.

That he was already showing promise as an intelligent Maliki
scholar was evident in the circumstances of his departure from
Tunis in November 1325. He had left home a lonely journeyer
eager to join up with whoever might tolerate his company. He left
Tunis as the appointed gadi of a caravan of pilgrims. This was his
first official post as an aspiring jurist. Perhaps the honor went to
him because no better qualified lawyer was present in the group or
because, as he tells us in the narrative, most of the people in the
company were Moroccan Berbers. In any case, a hajj caravan was
a sort of community and required formal leadership: a chief (amir)
who had all the powers of the captain of a ship, and a gadi, who
adjudicated disputes and thereby kept peace and order among the
travelers.

The main caravan route led southward along Tunisia’s rich
littoral of olive and fruit groves and through a succession of busy
maritime cities — Sousse, Sfax, Gabés. Some miles south of
Gabés the road turned abruptly eastward with the coast, running
between the island of Djerba on one side, the fringe of the Sahara
on the other. The next major stop was Tripoli, the last urban
outpost of the Hafsid domain.

The province of Tripolitania, today part of Libya, marked
geographically the eastern extremity of the island Maghrib. From
here the coastline ran southeastward for more than 400 miles,
cutting further and further into the climatic zone of the Sahara
until desert and water came together, obliterating entirely the
narrow coastal band of fertility. Further on the land juts suddenly
northward again into latitudes of higher rainfall. Here was the
well-populated region of Cyrenaica with its forests and
pasturelands and fallen Roman towns. If Tripolitania was
historically and culturally the end of the Maghrib, Cyrenaica was
the beginning of the Middle East, the two halves of Libya divided
one from the other by several hundred miles of sand and sea.

The Maghrib 39

Across the breadth of the coastal Libyan countryside Arab herding
tribes ruled supreme, and once again Ibn Battuta and his companions
courted trouble. Between Gabés and Tripoli a company of archers, no
doubt provided by the Hafsid sultan to protect the hajj caravan, kept
rovers at bay. In Tripoli, however, Ibn Battuta decided to leave the
main group, which lingered in the city because of rain and cold, and
push on ahead with a small troop of Moroccans, presumably leaving
his judgeship, at least temporarily, in the hands of a subordinate.
Somewhere near the port town of Surt (Sirte) a band of cameleers
tried to attack the little party. But according to the Rihla, “the Divine
Will diverted them and prevented them from doing us harm that they
had intended.” After reaching Cyrenaica in safety, the travelers
waited for the rest of the caravan to catch up, then continued,
presumably without further incident, toward the Nile.

Crossing Libya, Ibn Battuta had greater reason than ever to be wary
of trouble since he no longer had only himself to consider. While the
caravan was in Sfax, he entered into a contract of marriage with the
daughter of a Tunisian official in the pilgrim company. When they
reached Tripoli, the woman was presented to him. The arrangement
ended in failure, however, for Ibn Battuta fell into a dispute with his
prospective father-in-law while traveling through Cyrenaica and
ended up returning the girl. Undaunted, he then wedded the daughter
of another pilgrim, this time a scholar from Fez. Apparently with
income from his judicial office he put on a marriage feast “at which |
detained the caravan for a whole day, and entertained them all.” The
Rihla tells us nothing whatsoever about the character of either of these
women or Ibn Battuta’s relationship with them. Indeed he would
marry several times in the course of his travels, yet neither his wives,
nor the slave concubines who were frequently in his train dunng later
periods of his travels, would receive anything other than the scantest
mention here and there in the Rihla. Wives vanish as casually and as
inexplicably from the narrative as they enter it. In the Islamic society
of that age a man’s intimate family relations were regarded as no one’s
business but his own, and married Muslim women, at least in the
Arabic-speaking lands, lived out their lives largely in seclusion. Ibn
Battuta’s domestic affairs were not a proper subject for a rihla, nor
would they be for the biography or autobiography of any public man of
that time. Consequently we learn much less than we would like about a
significant dimension of Ibn Battuta’s traveling life.

Sometime in the late winter or spring of 1326 the caravan reached
Alexandria at the western end of the Nile Delta.'* As treks across

40 The Maghrib

northern Africa went, Ibn Battuta managed it in less time than
many travelers did, covering the more than 2,000 miles in the
space of eight or nine months. If at this point he had been in a
hurry to get to the Hijaz, he could have continued across the delta
and the Sinai Peninsula, picking up the Egyptian caravan route to
Mecca. But the next pilgrimage season was still eight months
away, affording him plenty of time to explore the Nile Valley and,
and as any serious scholar-pilgrim did, pay his respects to Cairo,
which in the first half of the fourteenth century was the reigning
intellectual capital of the Arabic-speaking world and the largest
city in the hemisphere anywhere west of China.

Notes

1. Ibn Khaldun, The Mugaddimah, 2nd edn., trans. F. Rosenthal, 3 vols.
(Princeton, N.J., 1967), vol. 3, p. 307.

2. Robert Brunschvig, La Berbérie orientale sous les Hafsides des origines a la
fin du XVe siécle, 2 vols. (Paris, 1940, 1947), vol. 2, p. 97.

3. M. Canard, “Les relations entre les Merinides et les Mamelouks au XIVe
siécle,” Annales de l'Institut d’ Etudes Orientales 5 (1939): 43.

4. Ibn Khaldun, Histoire des Berbéres et des dynasties musulmanes de | Afrique
septentrionale, trans. Baron de Slane, 4 vols. (Paris, 1925-56). vol. 2. pp. 462-66,
vol. 3, pp. 403-05.

5. Brunschvig (Berbérie orientale, vol. 1, p. 148n) suggests this hypothesis.

6. A. Cherbonneau, “Notice et extraits du voyage d’El-Abdary 4 travers
Afrique septentrionale, au VIIe siécle de |'Hegire.” Journal Asiatique, Sth ser., 4
(1854): 158. My translation from the French.

7. The events of this period are described in Ibn Khaldun, Histoire des
Berbéres, vol. 2, pp. 457-66; and Brunschvig, Berbérie orientale, vol. 1, pp. 144-50.

8. Brunschvig, Berbérie orientale, vol. 1, pp. 356-57.

9. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 146n.

10. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 301-02; Gb, vol. 1, p. 13n.

11. Robert Brunschvig, “Quelques remarques historiques sur les medersas de
Tunisie,” Revue Tunisienne 6 (1931): 261-85. The college of the Booksellers was
known in Arabic as the Ma'ridiyya.

12. In the Rihla IB remembers arriving in Alexandria on 5 April 1326 (1 Jumada
1 726). Hrbek (Hr. pp. 417-18) argues that the date was more likely mid February
(Rabi’ I 726) on the grounds that the trip from Tripoli to Alexandria should not
have taken the three months Ibn Battuta allots to it, considering that no major
delays are noted. Hrbek suggests that the journey probably took 40 to 45 days and
that acceptance of an earlier arrival date in Alexandria helps to solve chronological
problems that arise later on.

3 The Mamluks

As for the dynasties of our time, the greatest of them is
that of the Turks in Egypt. '
Ibn Khaldun

Of the dozens of international ports Ibn Battuta visited in the
course of his travels, Alexandria impressed him as among the five
most magnificent. There was not one harbor but two, the eastern
reserved for Christian ships, the western for Muslim. They were
divided by Pharos Island and the colossal lighthouse which loomed
over the port and could be seen several miles out to sea.
Alexandria handled a great variety of Egyptian products, in-
cluding the woven silk, cotton, and linen from its own thriving
textile shops. But more important, it was the most westerly situ-
ated of the arc of Middle Eastern cities which funneled trade
between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean.

From the beginning of the Islamic age the flow of goods across
the Middle East had followed a number of different routes, the
relative importance of each depending on the prevailing con-
figurations of political power and social stability. Ibn Battuta had
the good fortune to make his first and lengthiest visit to Egypt at a
time of high prosperity on the spice route running from the Indian
Ocean to the Red Sea and hence down the Nile to the ports of the
delta.

Contributing to Egypt’s affluence was the firm rule of the Bahri
Mamluks, the Turkish-speaking warrior caste who had governed
that country and Syria as a united kingdom since 1260. Over the
second half of the thirteenth century the Mamluks had been
obliged to go to war several times to prevent the Mongol armies of
Persia from overruning Syria and advancing to the Nile. It is to the
credit of Mamluk cavalry that they stopped the Tatars and saved
Egypt from catastrophe by the skin of its teeth. Thus the cities of
the Nile were spared the fate of Baghdad, which the Mongols laid
waste in 1258 and reduced to the status of a provincial market
town.

41

42 The Mamluks

Map 4: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Egypt, Syria and Arabia,
1325-26

7 [° Kiswa
¢ AY w

aN
ablus lun A
ry

erusalgm vr
>Bgthlehem =

Hebron (d >
®

—— Probable Itinerary RS

300 ies
IW] i_ i a Mecca *

The Mamluks 43

Although the Mongol threat to Syria did not end until about
1315, Egypt entered the fourteenth century with a firm gov-
ernment, a generally stable social order, and bright opportunities
to exploit the commercial potential of its geographical position.
Under the meticulous supervision of Mamluk soldiers and customs
officers, the products of Asia were unloaded at the port of
‘Aydhab half way up the Red Sea, moved overland by camel train
to the Nile, then carried down the river on lateen-rigged vessels to
Alexandria and the warehouses of Italian, French, and Catalan
traders. Symon Semeonis, an Irish cleric who visited Alexandria in
1323 on his way to the Holy land, experienced the Mamluk
customs bureaucracy at work:

On our arrival in the port, the [European] vessel, as is the
custom, was immediately boarded by a number of Saracen
[Muslim] harbor officials, who hauled down the sail, and wrote
down the names of everybody on board. Having examined all
the merchandise and goods in the ship, and having made a
careful list of everything, they returned to the city taking the
passengers with them... They quartered us within the first
and second gates, and went off to report what they had done to
the Admiral of the city, without whose presence and permission
no foreigner is allowed either to enter or leave the city, and no
goods can be imported.”

Ibn Battuta spent several weeks in the busy port, seeing the
sights (including the Pharos lighthouse and the third-century
marble column known as Pompey’s Pillar) and fraternizing with
the men of letters in the mosques and colleges. In Egypt the Maliki
school of law was not nearly so widedly used as the Shafi’i code,
but Malikism was dominant in Alexandria owing to the large
representation of North Africans and Andalusian refugees among
the educated population.’ In the Rihla Ibn Battuta recounts the
achievements and miracles of several scholars and mystics of the
city, most of them of Maghribi origin.

At one point during these weeks he spent a few days as the guest
of one Burhan al-Din the Lame, a locally venerated Sufi ascetic.
Among the special talents of more enlightened Muslim divines was
the gift of foretelling the future. It was in the company of Burhan
al-Din that the young pilgrim got a first inkling of his destiny. The
holy man, perceiving that Ibn Battuta had in his heart a passion for

44 The Mamluks

travel, suggested that he visit three of his fellow Sufis, two of them in
India, the thirdin China. Ibn Battuta recalls the incident: “I was amazed
at his prediction, and the idea of going to these countries having been
cast into my mind, my wanderings never ceased until I had met these
three that he named and conveyed his greeting to them.”

For the moment, however, Ibn Battuta was content to wander in
the valley of the Nile. Alexandria was not located on the river but
linked to it by a canal, constructed a few years before his arrival,
which ran eastward to the Rosetta Branch at the town of Fuwwa.
Most commercial traffic to the interior went by river vessel
through the canal and from there upstream to Cairo, which lay
about 140 miles inland at the apex of the delta, a journey of five to
seven days with the usual favorable northerly winds.

Ibn Battuta was in no particular hurry at this point, however,
since the next season of the Aajj was still about seven months off.
Where most young scholars might have made a beeline for Cairo,
the great metropolis, this pilgrim, already displaying his charac-
teristic zeal to see everything, spent about three weeks, probably
during April 1326, wandering through the rich commercial and
textile-producing towns of the delta — Damanhur, Fuwwa, Ibyar,
Damietta, Samannud, and others.* Along the way he sought out
and lodged in the houses of numerous judges, savants, and Sufi
shaykhs, including a celebrated saint of Fuwwa who also pro-
phesied that the young man would one day wind up in India. He
continued to support himself with the gifts and hospitality of the
pious, not the least of his benefactors being the Mamluk governor
of Damietta, who befriended him and sent him several coins. It
might be presumed that Ibn Battuta was traveling in the Delta in
the company of the woman he had married in Libya, except that:
she is never mentioned in the Rihla again.

At Samannud on the Damietta branch of the river he boarded
one of the high-masted ships which thronged the river and sailed
directly upstream toward Cairo. Numerous Christian and Jewish
travelers — merchants, ambassadors, Holy Land pilgrims — sailed
the Nile between the coast and Cairo during the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, and few of them (in the narratives they later
wrote) failed to marvel at the crowded, colorful, ever-blooming life
of the river. Symon Semeonis extolled its natural wonders:

This river is most pleasant for navigating, most beautiful in
aspect, most productive in fishes, abounding in birds, and its

The Mamluks 45

water is most wholesome and pleasant to drink, never harmful
or offensive, but well suited to man’s needs. Many other excel-
lent things might be said about it were it not the retreat of a
highly noxious animal, resembling the dragon, which devours
both horses and men if it catches them in the water or on the
banks.°

Ibn Battuta, a minority among travelers in his failure to mention
the crocodiles, was impressed by the sheer crush of humanity
along the banks, a density of habitation in startling contrast to
what he had seen crossing North Africa:

There is no need for a traveler on the Nile to take any provision
with him, because whenever he wishes to descend on the bank
he may do so, for ablutions, prayers, purchasing provisions, or
any other purpose. There is a continuous series of bazaars from
the city of Alexandria to Cairo . . . Cities and villages succeed
one another along its banks without interruption and have no
equal in the inhabited world, nor is any river known whose
basin is so intensively cultivated as that of the Nile. There is no
river on earth but it which is called a sea.

For all their teeming life, the market towns lining the lower Nile
were but petty reflections of what the wayfarer beheld on reaching
Cairo, the greatest bazaar of them all. Travelers of the time,
whatever their origin, stood bedazzled at the city’s overpowering
size. “This city of Cairo has a population greater than that of all
Tuscany,” wrote the Italian gentleman Frescobaldi of his visit in
1384, “and there is a street which has by itself more people than all
of Florence.”°

Modern scholars suggest the population of Cairo in the first half
of the fourteenth century may have been between 500,000 and
600,000, or six times larger than Tunis and fifteen times larger than
London at the same period.’ A convergence of historical factors
explains the phenomenal growth of the city from the later
thirteenth to the mid fourteenth century. One was its status as
capital of the Mamluk kingdom and chief residence of virtually the
entire Turkish ruling class, around whom Egyptian political and
economic life turned. Another was its position as the intersecting
point of the prosperous Red Sea-to-Nile spice route and the trade
and pilgrimage roads from the Maghrib and sub-Saharan West

46 The Mamluks

Africa. A third was the happy fact that its rulers had repulsed the
Mongol horde and probably saved the population from being
massacred. Indeed Cairo became a permanent refuge in the later
thirteenth century for thousands of people from Iraq and Syria
who fled the approach of the Tatars in panic.

Although Cairo was spreading physically in several directions in
the early fourteenth century, the majority of the population, in-
cluding foreign visitors and refugees, lived packed inside the
walled city, which lay about a mile and a half east of the river. This
was Cairo properly termed, al-Qahirah (The Victorious). It was
founded by the Fatimid dynasty in the tenth century as a royal
residence and garrison and thereafter evolved as the center of
commercial and intellectual life for the greater urban region, even-
tually superseding in this respect the older Islamic city, known as
Fustat or Misr, which was located some distance to the south.

Habitation within walled Cairo was so dense and the surge of
humanity so frantic that the city had the appearance of being
drastically overpopulated. The crush of people, camels, and
donkeys in the central commercial district was so great that Ibn
Battuta might have found a tourist’s stroll down the Bayn al-
Qasrayn, the main avenue, a thoroughly nerve-rending ex-
perience. There were thousands of shops in the vicinity of the
avenue, as well as more than thirty markets, each one a con-
centration of a particular craft or trade — butchers, goldsmiths,
gem dealers, candlemakers, carpenters, ironsmiths, — slave
merchants. Armies of peddlers and food vendors also jammed the
streets, hawking victuals to the Cairene citizens, almost none of
whom had the facilities to cook at home. The centers of inter-
national trade in the city were the caravansaries, called fundugs or
khans. These were sometimes huge and splendidly decorated
structures built around a central courtyard and containing rooms
on the ground floor for storing goods and upstairs for lodging
merchants. Some khans were constructed for particular groups of
foreign traders, such as Maghribis, Persians, or Europeans. A
caravansary for Syrian merchants built in the twelfth century had
360 lodgings above the storerooms and enough space for 4,000
guests at a time.®

The affluence of Cairo in the 1320s was a reflection of the
competence of the Mamluk government, indeed of a system of
political and social organization that was working in the early
fourteenth century about as well as it ever would. When Ibn

The Mamluks 47

Battuta entered the Mamluk domain, he fell under a political
authority whose relationship to the general population was quite
unlike what he had known at home. Whereas the Marinids of
Morocco were of Berber stock, ethnically undifferentiated from
most of the local population, the Mamluks were, in their Central
Asian origins, Turkish language, and military ethos, utterly alien
to their native Egyptian subjects. At the heart of the Mamluk
government was the practice of recruiting the members of the
ruling military and administrative elite from among young men of
Turkish tribes in the steppe lands north of the Black and Caspian
Seas. These youths entered Syria and Egypt as slaves, or in Arabic
“mamluks.” They were then converted to Islam, educated in the
fundamentals of religion, taught the arts of mounted warfare, and
finally given their legal freedom and position of service in the
Mamluk state. It was from among the ranks of these alien-born
cavalrymen that the top government commanders (amirs) were
chosen.

Though the day to day management of the realm required
constant contact and intertwining of interests between Mamluks
and native Eyptians, the ruling minority nonetheless stood as a
caste apart in its monopoly of political power and physical force.
Ordinary folk were not even permitted to ride horses. Indeed, the
purpose of the Mamluk system of recruitment and social insulation
was not only to build and perpetuate an army of rugged Asian
soldiers, unequivocally loyal to the state, but also to preserve the
integrity and esprit de corps of the whole governing establishment
by locking the subject peoples, even the locally born sons of
Mamluks, out of it entirely. The ever-looming symbol of Mamluk
dominance and exclusivity was the Citadel, an awesome complex
of palace, mosques, offices, living quarters, and stables that stood
on a rocky prominence 250 feet above Cairo. Here the sultan
resided with an elaborate court and several regiments of mounted
troops, cut off, to whatever degree he wished, from the com-
moners thronging the streets below.

The origins of this “oligarchy of lost children,” as one historian
has characterized the Mamluks,” are linked to the tumultuous
events of the eleventh century, when Turkish steppe warriors
swarmed over the Middle East, seized power almost everywhere,
and filled the political void left by the collapse of the classical
Abbasid empire centered on Baghdad. Although by the twelfth
century the unity of the Middle East was shattered, Turkish

48 The Mamluks

warlords made accommodations with local Arab and Persian
populations and, with the aid of their comrades-in-arms and a
continuing flow of slave recruits from Central Asia, succeeded in
restoring law and order over fairly extensive areas of the Middle
East and Asia Minor and founding a series of military dynasties,

The Age of the Turk descended on Egypt in 1250 when a corps of
slave-soldiers in the service of the decrepit Ayyubid dynasty staged
a coup d’état and took power. In the course of the following half
century the Bahri Mamluks, so named for the fact that they were
originally quartered on an island in the Nile (Bahr al-Nil), con-
solidated their rule over Egypt, conquered greater Syria, expelled
the Latin Crusaders, and repeatedly beat back Mongol assaults
from Persia. By the time Ibn Battuta arrived in Cairo the Mamluk
empire had expanded to embrace not only Egypt, Syria, and
Palestine, but also southeastern Asia Minor and the Red Sea rim.

Although the Mamluks often lived up to their barbarian origins
in their treatment of the native population (crucifixion and the
severing of limbs were common punishments for crimes against the
state), they nevertheless worked out a routine standard of
cooperation with the ‘ulama and notability, who embodied Arab
civilization. It was, after all, only through the educated elite, as
literate spokesmen for the lower orders of society and as interpre-
ters of the Sacred Law, that the Turks were able to make the social
accommodations necessary to ensure the steady and tranquil flow
of tax revenues from agricultural land and commerce. In turn, the
scholarly class not only accepted the fact of Mamluk power as the
only alternative to chronic instability but willingly stepped forward
to make the government work, serving under Turkish comman-
ders as judges, scribes, tax-collectors, market inspectors, chiefs of
city quarters, hospital administrators, as well as preachers,
teachers, and Sufi shaykhs.

The rise of the Mamluks was also the achievement of the in-
telligent, ruthless, and surprisingly civilized men who wore the
black satin robe of the sultanate during the first century of the
empire. Ibn Battuta had the luck to arrive in Cairo at the
triumphant mid point of the reign of al-Nasir Muhammad ibn
Qala’un, who ruled (with some brief interruptions) from 1293 to
1341, longer than any sultan in the 267 years of the Mamluk
regime. Such longevity was in fact a remarkable achievement,
since the Turkish elite, appearing cohesive and fiercely fraternal
from without, were quarrelsome and faction-ridden within. Power

The Mamluks 49

and position in the hierarchy depended largely on personal ability
and pluck, obliging any officer with ambition to compete viciously
against his fellows for the high offices (including the sultanate
itself) and the stupendous personal grants of agricultural land
revenues that went with them.

The reign of al-Nasir Muhammad was the age of Cairo at its
most resplendent, when the city blossomed into maturity as the
world capital of Arab art and letters. While the Mongol horde
ransacked its way through the Middle East, devastating Baghdad
and plundering Damascus (1299-1300), Cairo offered a secure
haven for scholars, craftsmen, and rich merchants who were
nimble enough to escape across the Sinai Peninsula, taking with
them the knowledge, artistic skills, and wealth that helped make
Cairo the most cosmopolitan center of civilized culture anywhere
in the Dar al-Islam.

Mamluk officers were not granted agricultural estates outright
but only rights to revenue from the land’s productivity. They did
not normally live on their rural holdings and chose, if they could,
to live in Cairo. Consequently, rents and taxes from thousands of
peasant villages poured into the city and were lavishly expended
on religious endowments, as well as on palaces, khans, racetracks,
canals, and mausoleums, producing in all the most energetic surge
of building that Cairo had ever known. Moreover, Mamluk archi-
tects chose increasingly to build in stone rather than the brick and
plaster of earlier generations, and so their monuments have en-
dured. The skyline of domes and minarets which impresses the eye
of the modern tourist in Old Cairo is for the most part the skyline
of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

During his stay of about a month in the city,'® Ibn Battuta
toured the monuments of the Bahri Mamluks, as well as the
mosques and mausoleums of earlier dynasties. Since a disastrous
earthquake in 1303 had destroyed many public buildings,’’ he
must have seen numerous construction projects going on while he
was there. Sultan al-Nasir was not only a generous patron of
religious institutions, building some thirty mosques in the course
of his reign, he also sponsored numerous civic enterprises, in-
cluding a canal which ran between the walled city and the river and
opened an extensive new area to urban settlement.

Among the structures which most impressed Ibn Battuta was the
Maristan, or hospital, built by Qala’un, the father and predecessor
of al-Nasir. Today a sad shell of crumbling walls, it was one of the

50 The Mamluks

finest architectural creations of the age. “As for the Maristan,” Ibn
Battuta reports, “no description is adequate to its beauties.” A
modern historian describes its operation, showing that however
brawling and unhealthy life in the narrow streets of the city might
be, Cairo’s charitable institutions were sanctuaries of civilized
calm:

Cubicles for patients were ranged round two courts, and at the
sides of another quadrangle were wards, lecture rooms, library,
baths, dispensary, and every necessary appliance of those days
of surgical science. There was even music to cheer the sufferers;
while readers of the Koran afforded the consolations of the
faith. Rich and poor were treated alike, without fees, and sixty
orphans were supported and educated in the neighboring
school.

If the credit for such enlightened philanthropy went to the
sultans and amirs who paid for it, the inspiration and management
were the achievement of the educated community of Cairo, among
whom Ibn Battuta would have spent most of his time. He offers in
the Rihla a brief Who’s Who of the city’s leading lights, but he
gives no indication that he pursued systematic study with any of
them, as in fact he would do in Damascus later that same year. It
seems likely, though, that he attended lectures in some of the
madrasas.

The colleges were the vital centers of intellectual and civic life
wherein the religious, social, and cultural norms governing
Egyptian society were taught and exemplified. A madrasa was in
fact a mosque, though one designed primarily for teaching rather
than for congregational prayer. It was Saladin who brought the
madrasa idea from Iraq to Cairo in the twelfth century with the
specific intention of founding Sunni schools to combat and
suppress the Shi’i doctrines of the preceding Fatimid dynasty. As
the city grew and prospered new colleges sprang up one after
another, enough of them by the fourteenth century to elicit Ibn
Battuta’s comment that “as for the madrasas in Cairo, they are too
many for anyone to count.” The colleges of the Mamluk age were
designed on a cruciform plan with a relatively small open
courtyard, in contrast to the vast spaces within the chief con-
gregational, or Friday, mosques. Opening onto the court were
four vaulted halls, or liwans, where classes were normally held.

The Mamluks 51

This was the classic madrasa form of Ibn Battuta’s time, providing
in fact the model for Marinid college building in Morocco.

The college curriculum offered in Cairo would have been
perfectly familiar to Ibn Battuta, as it was largely identical to what
was presented in North African schools, except that the Shafi’i
system of law was dominant rather than the Maliki. As in Tunis,
Fez, or Tangier, education turned on the revealed and linguistic
sciences, especially law. Studies in medicine, astronomy,
mathematics, and philosophy were also available, though the
teaching was usually conducted privately rather than in the
madrasas. Cairo in the Mamluk age did not nurture men of
creative originality (with the notable exception of Ibn Khaldun,
who was a Tunisian but moved permanently to Egypt in 1383), but
it did produce theologians, jurisprudents, historians, en-
cyclopedists, and biographers of spectacular erudition and
nimbleness of mind. It was these men that Ibn Battuta, and
hundreds of scholars like him from throughout the Arabic-,
Persian-, and Turkish-speaking Islamic world, came to the great
city to see and hear.'*

Ibn Battuta might well have remained in Cairo much longer than a
month, since at the end of that time (mid May 1326) there still
remained more than five months before the start of the hajj rituals
in Mecca. The official Egyptian caravan, which traveled to the
Hijaz across Sinai under the protection of the Mamluks, did not
normally leave Cairo until the middle of the month of Shawwal, in
that year mid September. '* But Ibn Battuta had an impetuousness
about him (as he had already demonstrated in his journey across
North Africa), and he was not inclined to wait for caravans or
fellow travelers for very long. In fact he decided to proceed to
Mecca on his own, not by the Sinai route at all, but by way of
Upper Egypt to the Red Sea port of ’Aydhab and from there by
ship to Jidda on the Hijaz coast.

Pilgrims traveled both the northern and southern routes out of
Cairo in the first half of the fourteenth century. The Sinai road was
the shorter of the two, and it was relatively more secure because
the sultans sponsored annual caravans and dispatched army units
to maintain and police the route. The southerly track to ’Aydhab
and Jidda was longer and there was no officially organized
caravan. But this was the route of the spices, in Ibn Battuta’s time
one of the busiest and strategically most important lanes of inter-

52 The Mamluks

national trade in the Afro—Eurasian world. The commercial in-
frastructure of trails, river transport, cameleers, khans, and
markets was extensively developed and elaborately organized,
affording the wayfarer a normally safe journey from Cairo to
"Aydhab.

Moreover, a pilgrim could normally expect to travel all the way
to that town, located near the modern Sudanese border, without
passing beyond the reach of Mamluk law and order. The sultan
posted garrisons in Qus, Idfu, Aswan, and other important towns
on the river and, when the situation called for it, dispatched
punitive expeditions against the Arab or Beja tribes of the desert
and Red Sea Hills. These unruly herdsmen, in normal times
collaborators in the transit trade as guides and camel drivers, were
quick to despoil caravans or defy Mamluk authority whenever the
opportunity was too tempting to resist —a fact of Egyptian
politics not, as we shall see, to be lost on Ibn Battuta.

The young pilgrim’s two- to three-week journey up the Nile
valley to the town of Idfu was accomplished without much
adventure. He traveled by land rather than on the river, and at
several points along the way he lodged in the homes, colleges, or
lodges of scholars and Sufis.!° While passing through the town of
Minya, he became embroiled in a minor incident, interesting for
what it reveals of his high sense of civilized propriety — as well as
a less appealing inclination to sanctimonious meddling:

One day I entered the bath-house in this township, and found
men in it wearing no covering. This appeared a shocking thing
to me, and I went to the governor and informed him of it. He
told me not to leave and ordered the lessees of (all) the bath-
houses to be brought before him. Articles were formally drawn
up (then and there) making them subject to penalties if any
person should enter a bath without a waist-wrapper, and the
governor behaved to them with the greatest severity, after
which I took leave of him.

A grateful governor and an annoyed corps of bath operators
behind him, he continued on to Idfu, one of the principal trans-
shipment centers for the overland haul to the coast. Here he
crossed to the east bank of the river, hired camels, and set out for
“Aydhab in the company of a party of bedouin Arabs. Their trek
southeastward through the desert and then over the bare and

The Mamluks 53

smouldering Red Sea Hills took 15 days, about the normal time for
the trip.'°

Although Ibn Battuta’s brief description of ’Aydhab — its
mosque, its men of learning, some customs of the inhabitants — is
factual and detached, a traveler coming out of the desert would be
likely to react to the town with a discomfiting ambivalence. On the
one hand it was a flourishing port, its warehouses crammed with
pepper, cloves, ivory, pearls, textiles, Chinese procelain, and all
manner of exotic goods from Asia and tropical Africa, as well as
the linen, silk, coral, sugar, and precious metals of Egypt and the
Mediterranean. On the other hand, the fiery climate, the barren
surroundings, and the country crudeness of the local hill folk made
"Aydhab one of the most uninviting transit stops anywhere from
the Mediterranean to China. Thousands passed through, but no
one stayed a moment longer than required. Ibn Jubayr, the
celebrated Andalusian pilgrim and rihla writer of the twelfth
century, despised the place. After noting in his book that the town
was rich and of great commercial importance, he fervently advised
pilgrims to get to Mecca by some other way if they possibly could:

It is enough for you of a place where everything is imported,
even water; and this (because of its bitterness) is less agreeable
than thirst. We had lived between air that melts the body and
water that turns the stomach from appetite for food. He did no
injustice to this town who sang, “Brackish of water and flaming
of air.”!”

Ibn Jubayr also took pains to warn travelers against the avarice of
the ship captains, who loaded their vessels with pilgrims “until
they sit one on top of the other so that they are like chickens
crammed in a coop.” !® Somehow enduring these indignities, not to
mention delays and storms, Ibn Jubayr had managed to reach
Jidda after a week under sail and so continued on to Mecca. Ibn
Battuta, as it happened, was not so lucky. When earlier he had
passed through the town of Hiw (Hu) on the Nile, he paid a visit to
a saintly sharif (descendant of the Prophet), one Abu Muhammad
"Abdallah al-Hasani. Upon hearing of the young man’s intention
to go to Mecca, the sharif warned him to return to Cairo, pro-
phesying that he would not make his first pilgrimage except by the
road through Syria. Ignoring the omen, Ibn Battuta had continued
on his way southward. Reaching ’Aydhab, he discovered much to

54 The Mamluks

his chagrin that the local ruling family, a clan of the Beja people who
inhabited the hills behind the city, were in revolt against the Mamluk
governor.!” The rebels had sunk some ships in the harbor, driven out
the Egyptian garrison, and in this climate of violence no one was
hoisting sail for Jidda. If he were to be assured of reaching the Hijaz
before the start of the hajj, Ibn Battuta had no real choice but to
retrace his steps to Cairo and continue from there by one of the
northern routes.

Fortunately, the trip back did not take long. The Nile was reaching
summer flood stage, and so after crossing the desert again and
rejoining the river at Qus, he boarded a ship and returned to the
capital in eight short days, arriving there, he recalls, in mid July.

Perhaps during his voyage down the river, where he had the leisure
to think out his plans, he came to the conclusion that if he did not linger
in Cairo he could reach Syma in time to catch the hajj caravan which
normally left Damascus on or about 10 Shawwal (10 September of that
year), or about two weeks earlier than the departure of the pilgrims
from Cairo.” It may have been his rather happy-go-lucky impetuosity
that was driving him, or perhaps he thought it prudent to heed the
word of the sharif of Hiw that he was destined to reach Mecca by way
of Syria. In any case he stayed in Cairo, astonishingly enough, only
one night before setting out for Syria, the Asian half of the Mamluk
empire.

The main route from Cairo to Damascus was the royal road of the
kingdom, since Damascus was a kind of second capital, responsible for
the military governance of Greater Syria and for the defense of the
eastern marches against the Mongols of Persia. The sultan himself
frequently traveled to Damascus, usually in the company of an army.
Moreover, Damascus was as great a city as Cairo in the production of
luxury goods. The military lords of Egypt depended heavily on the
caravans from Syria for their fine silks and brocades, their ceramics
and glassware, their magnificent tents and horse-trappings, all of these
articles traded mainly for Egyptian textiles and grain. Damascene
artisans, such as masons, marble workers, and plasterers, frequently
accompanied the caravans to Cairo to work in the construction of
palaces, mausoleums, and mosques. For both commercial and politi-
cal reasons, then, the Mamluks were assiduous in protecting and
provisioning the Cairo-Damascus artery, hemming it with garrison
posts and building bridges and caravansaries to facilitate the passage of
men and goods.

If Ibn Battuta had gone to Mecca with the Egyptian hajj caravan, he

The Mamluks 55

would have traveled due east across the peninsula to Aqaba, then
southward into the Hijaz. Instead, he set a northeastward course
through the farming towns of the eastern delta and from there
along the sandy Mediterranean plain to Gaza, the desert portal to
Palestine. We have no idea with whom he may have been
traveling, though he refers vaguely in the Rihla to “those who were
with me” on this stretch of his journey. All along this trail the
government provided public caravansaries where, according to the
Rihla, “travelers alight with their beasts, and outside each khan is
a public wateringplace and a shop at which the traveler may buy
what he requires for himself and his beast.” At Qatya, a station
located several miles east of the modern day Suez Canal, the state
maintained a customs house where officials examined passports
and merchandise and collected a bonanza in duties from the
mercantile caravans moving between Syria and Egypt. Symon
Semeonis, who passed through Qatya in 1323, describes Mamluk
police techniques:

The village ... is entirely surrounded by the desert and is
furnished with neither fortifications nor natural obstacles of any
kind that might impede the passage of travelers. Every evening
after sunset a straw-mat or carpet is drawn at the tail of a horse,
sometimes near the village, sometimes far from it, now in one
place, now in another, transversely to the route, for a distance
of six or eight miles, more or less, according to the Admiral’s
orders. This renders the sand so smooth that it is impossible for
either man or beast to pass without leaving traces to expose
their passage. Every morning before sunrise the plain is scoured
in all directions by specially appointed horsemen, and whenever
any traces of pedestrians or of horsemen are discovered, the
guards hasten in pursuit and those who have passed are arrested
as transgressors of the Sultan’s regulations and are severely
punished.?!

At Gaza Ibn Battuta turned off the heavily traveled road leading
to the Levantine ports and headed eastward into the high country
of Judaea, having in mind to visit the sacred cities of Hebron (al-
Khalil) and Jerusalem before continuing to Damascus.” The trail
along the hilly backbone of Palestine, from Hebron to the Galilee,
was not an important commercial road, but it was a route of
pilgrimage for all three monotheistic faiths. After the wars of the

56 The Mamluks

Crusades ended in the 1290s, increasing numbers of Latin pilgrims
traveled to the Holy Land in small groups, by way of either Egypt
or the Levant. Although they were frequently harassed and in-
variably overcharged, usually by local Muslims of the meaner sort,
the Mamluk authorities, particularly in the fourteenth century,
generally saw to it that they were protected from bodily harm.

Hebron was special to Muslim, Christian, and Jew alike because
it was the burial place of the fathers of monotheism: Abraham,
Isaac, and Jacob, as well as their wives and Jacob’s son Joesph. In
Mamluk times only Muslims were permitted to enter the mosque,
built originally as a Crusader church, that stood over the tomb
cave that contained cenotaphs of the three Patriarchs. In the Rihla
Ibn Battuta describes the mosque, a massive stone structure “of
striking beauty and imposing height,” as well as the cenotaphs
standing inside, as a traveler of any faith might see them today. He
also offers learned testimony to the truth of the tradition that the
three graves do indeed lie beneath the mosque, a tradition verified
by Frankish knights, who opened the cave in 1119 and discovered
what were presumably the holy bones.”°

The distance from Hebron to Jerusalem through the terraced
Judaean hills was only 17 miles, and Ibn Battuta probably made
the trip, including a brief look around Bethlehem, in a day or two.
Jerusalem plays so solemn a part in the religious and cultural
heritage of Western peoples and commands so much attention in
contemporary world politics that we are inclined to assume it was
always one of the great urban centers of the Middle East. In fact
the Jerusalem of the fourteenth century was a rather sleepy town
of no great commercial or administrative importance. Its
population was only about 10,000,”4 and it was ruled as a sub-unit
of the Province of Damascus. Its defensive walls were in ruins,
part of its water supply had to be carried in from the surrounding
countryside, and it was located on none of the important trade
routes running through Greater Syria. From the point of view of a
Mamluk official or an international merchant, it was a city of
eminently provincial mediocrity. What kept it alive and sustained
its permanent population of scholars, clerics, shopkeepers, and
guides was the endless stream of pilgrims that passed through its
gates. Jerusalem was a place of countless shrines and sanctuaries.
For Christians the spiritual focus of the city was the Church of the
Holy Sepulchre, for Jews it was the Western Wall of the temple
(the Wailing Wall), and for Muslims it was the Haram al-Sharif,

The Mamluks 57

the Noble Sanctuary, revered as the third most blessed spot in the
Dar al-Islam, after the Ka’ba in Mecca and the tomb of the
Prophet in Medina.

During his stay in the city of perhaps a week, Ibn Battuta
probably spent a good deal of his time in the Haram, an expansive
trapezoid-shaped area bounded by buildings and city walls and
dominating the southeastern quarter of the city. The entire Haram
was itself an enormous mosque open to the sky, though within it
stood several sanctuaries having specific religious significance for
Muslims. The most venerated of these was the Kubbat al-Skhra,
the Dome of the Rock, a wondrously beautiful building set in the
center of the Haram on the site of the ancient Temple of Solomon.
This shrine, dating from the seventh century, is in the shape of a
regular octagon, sumptuously ornamented with interwoven Arabic
scriptural quotations and geometric designs and surmounted by a
massive dome. Inside the sanctuary and directly beneath the dome
lies embedded in the earth the blessed Rock of Zion. It was from
here, it is told, that the Prophet Muhammad, transported at light-
ning speed from Mecca to Jerusalem in the company of the Angel
Gabriel, was carried on the back of a great winged steed up to the
Seventh Heaven of Paradise, where he stood in the presence of
God. It is in commemoration of Muhammad’s Night Journey that
Muslims enter the Dome, make a circuit of the Rock, and descend
to the little grotto beneath it.

Ibn Battuta mentions in the Rih/a a number of the scholars and
divines resident in Jerusalem. One of these, a Sufi master of the
Rifa’i brotherhood named ‘Abd al-Rahman ibn Mustafa, took a
special interest in the young man and was apparently impressed
enough by his sincerity and learning to give him a khirga, the
woolen, patch-covered cloak worn by Sufi disciples as a sign of
their allegiance to a life of God-searching and self-denial. In the
few days that Ibn Battuta stayed in Jerusalem he obviously could
not have gone through any of the rigorous spiritual training re-
quired of initiates prior to receiving their khirgas. A master could,
however, bestow a lower form of investiture upon a person whom
he wished to encourage in the mystical path.*° The incident seems
to be one more bit of evidence that Ibn Battuta’s piety and
knowledge of Sufism were conspicuous enough, even in his youth,
to place him on occasion in the graces of the most august saints and
wise men, even though he had no plans to give himself
wholeheartedly to the mystical life.

58 The Mamluks

In his time Sufism was becoming intricately melded into the
everyday religious life of Muslims. Although there were those who
adopted asceticism or celibacy as methods personally suitable for
drawing closer to God, Sufism was in no general way “monkish” or
confined to a spiritually militant minority. Rather it was the in-
timate, inward-turning, God-adoring dimension of Muslim faith,
complementing outward, public conformity to the ritual and moral
duties of the Sacred Law. It could take expression, depending on
the individual's personal inclination, in everything from a life of
mendicant wandering to occasional attendance at brotherhood
meetings where mystical litanies were recited. Sufi masters, such
as Ibn Battuta’s friend in Jerusalem, rarely limited their patronage
to their formal disciples, but rather gave freely of their spiritual
guidance and baraka to ordinary men and women who needed the
solace or healing that only a surer feeling of God’s presence could
provide. Although Ibn Battuta’s life of worldly adventure had
little in common with that of a cloistered dervish, he associated
with mystics whenever he could, as if to fortify himself with a
deeper calming grace before taking to the road again.

Jerusalem, however, was not to be the place for a devotional
retreat, for the hajj season was drawing nearer and Damascus
beckoned. Ibn Battuta’s exact route northward is uncertain, but he
very likely traveled through Nablus, Ajlun, and the Galilee and
from there across the Golan Heights to the Syrian capital.”° This
journey was probably accomplished in a few days’ time since the
entire trip from Cairo to Damascus, if the dates he gives us are
correct, took no more than 23 days. By his own reckoning he
arrived in Damascus on 9 August 1326 (9 Ramadan 726).

[Damascus] stands on the place where Cain killed his brother
Abel, and is an exceeding noble, glorious, and beauteous city,
rich in all manner of merchandise, and everywhere
delightful, .. . abounding in foods, spices, precious stones,
silk, pearls, cloth-of-gold, perfumes from India, Tartary,
Egypt, Syria, and places on our side of the Mediterranean, and
in all precious things that the heart of man can conceive. It is
begirt with gardens and orchards, is watered both within and
without by waters, rivers, brooks, and fountains, cunningly
arranged, to minister to men’s luxury, and is incredibly
populous, being inhabited by divers trades of most cunning and

The Mamluks 59

noble workmen, mechanics, and merchants, while within the
walls it is adorned beyond belief by baths, by birds that sing all
the year round, and by pleasures, refreshments, and
amusements of all kinds.

Thus wrote Ludolph von Suchem,”’ a German priest who visited
the city on his way home from the Holy Land in 1340-41. Muslims
honored Damascus as the earthly equivalent of Paradise, and so it
must have seemed to any haggard pilgrim tramping out of the
Syrian waste. Quite unlike Jerusalem, bone dry on its craggy hill,
Damascus lay in an oasis of extravagant greenness, a garden, in
the gushy phrases of Ibn Jubayr, “bedecked in the brocaded
vestments of flowers.””® Although bordered by desert on three
sides and by the Mountains of Lebanon on the west, which all but
blocked rain-bearing clouds from the Mediterranean, the city drew
life from the river that flowed down the slopes of the
Anti-Lebanon and onto the plain, where Damascene farmers dis-
tributed its waters to the channels that fed thousands of orchards
and gardens. Because the mountains prevented easy communi-
cation with the coast, Damascus was not in a choice geographical
position to handle long-distance trade between East and West. But
it prospered as an international emporium in spite of this, owing to
the profuse fertility of its oasis (al-Ghuta), which supported a
population of about 100,000.”

Indeed Ibn Battuta saw Damascus in the flush of a new pros-
perity. During most of the preceding half century, hostilities be-
tween the Mamluks and the Mongol Ilkhans of Persia had
weakened Syrian trade links to India. But the Mongol threat had
dissipated by 1315. Diplomatic relations between the two states
improved and trade routes from Damascus to Iraq and the Persian
Gulf were opened once again. Furthermore, the city had de-
veloped a thriving trade with Asia Minor and the Black Sea
region, specially in horses, furs, metals, and slaves, including, of
course, Mamluk recruits.

The visible splendor of Damascus, however, was a reflection not
so much of international trade as of the city’s status as the Mamluk
capital-in-Asia with its enormous garrison and the magnificent
households of the high commanders. The royal armies, passing
continually in and out of the city, required the production of huge
quantities of provisions and weapons, while the ruling elite,
together with their counterparts in Cairo, kept Damascene

60 The Mamluks

craftsmen busy day and night turning out exquisite wares and
finery.

Saif al-Din Tankiz, viceroy of Damascus from 1313 to 1340, was not
only a man of exceptional administrative ability (Ibn Battuta refers to
him as “‘a governor of the good and upnght kind”), but a builder and
city planner whose imagination and energy rivalled that of his
sovereign lord al-Nasir Muhammad. Mirroring the sultan’s work in
Cairo, Saif al-Din undertook a vast program to beautify and improve
his city, endowing numerous mosques, madrasas, and other pious
institutions, widening streets and squares, directing the expansion of
residential areas outside the walls, and even waging an obsessive war
against the surplus population of stray dogs.*” The Damascus that Ibn
Battuta saw in 1326 was, like Cairo, a city in the process of transfor-
ming itself under the stimulus of a political regime that, at least for the
time being, had struck a congenial balance between harsh, swaggering
authoritarianism and a love of civilized taste and comfort.

The guardians of Damascene high culture were of course the
Arabic-speaking scholars, who, like their colleagues in Cairo,
affiliated with numerous religious, educational, and philanthropic
foundations scattered throughout the city. Whereas Cairo had no
pre-eminent center of learning in the fourteenth century, Damascus
had its Great Mosque, called the Mosque of the Umayyads after its
eighth-century builders. Around it all the other pious institutions
revolved as satellites.

During part of his stay in the city, Ibn Battuta boarded in one of the
three Maliki madrasas there. (Malikism was the least important of the
four legal schools in Syria and was represented by fewer colleges than
the others.) But he may have fairly well lived in the Great Mosque,
sitting beneath the marble columns of the golden-domed sanctuary, all
around him the murmuring voices of lecturers and Koranic readers
and children in circles reciting their sacred lessons. The prayer hall, a
three-aisled nave more than 400 feet long, was open on its northern
side and joined to a spacious court rimmed by arcades where,
according to the Rihla, “the people of the city gather . . . in the
evenings, some reading, some conversing, and some walking up and
down.” The staff of officials attached to the mosque was huge,
including, Ibn Battuta tells us, 70 muezzins (prayer callers), 13 imams
(prayer leaders), and about 600 Koranic reciters. He describes the
sanctuary as a place of continuous religious and educational activity, a
never-ending celebration of God’s glory and beneficence:

The Mamluks 61

The townspeople assemble in it daily, immediately after the
dawn prayer, to read a seventh part of the Koran . . . In this
mosque also there are a great many “sojourners” who never
leave it, occupying themselves unremittingly in prayer and re-
citation of the Koran and liturgies . . . The townsfolk supply
their needs of food and clothing, although sojourners never beg
for anything of the kind from them.

Ibn Battuta was one among this throng of wandering seekers,
and it was during his 24 days in Damascus waiting for the hajj
caravan to depart that he undertook his first formal studies
abroad. Next to Cairo, Damascus possessed the greatest con-
centration of eminent theologians and jurists in the Arabic-
speaking world, many of them refugees from Baghdad and other
Mesopotamian or Persian cities who had fled the Mongol tide. So
the young scholar had before him a galaxy of luminaries from
which he might choose his teachers.

In the advanced curriculum the professor usually read and
offered commentary on a classical book, then tested his students’
ability to recite it as well as understand its meaning. He awarded
those who performed competently an iaza, or certificate, which
entitled them to teach the same text to others. In the Rihla Ibn
Battuta claims to have taken instruction and received ijazas from
no less than 14 different teachers. He mentions in particular his
“hearing” one of the most venerated texts in Islam, the Book of
Sound Tradition of the Prophet (the Sahih) by the great ninth-
century scholar al-Bukhari. He also details the essential infor-
mation written on his ijaza: the chain of pedagogical authority
linking his own teacher through numerous generations of sages
back to al-Bukhari himself. This particular course of study, he tells
us, took place in the Great Mosque and was completed in 14 daily
sessions.

Nothwithstanding the young man’s appetite for knowledge, it
strains the imagination to see how he could have carried to com-
pletion 14 different courses in the space of 24 days.*' He could not
have devoted his every waking moment to his studies since he was
by no means free of more mundane concerns. For one thing, his
entire stay in Damascus took place during the month of Ramadan,
when Muslims are required to fast during daylight hours, a
strenuous obligation that upset the normal routines of daily life.
He also admits in the Rih/a that he was down with fever during a

62 The Mamluks

good part of his stay and living as a house guest with one of the
Maliki professors, who put him under a physician’s care. On top of
that, he found time during this fleeting three and a half weeks to
get married again, this time to the daughter of a Moroccan residing
in Damascus. Given these preoccupations, we can surmise that he
exaggerated the extent of his studies, that he undertook them
during subsequent visits to Damascus without making that fact
clear in the narrative,** or that some of the ijazas were awarded
him, as was often done, in recognition of the piety and scholarly
potential he demonstrated rather than as diplomas for books
mastered.** But there is still no reason to doubt that despite illness
and nuptial cares, he spent long August hours in the cool of the
ancient mosque, absorbing as much learning as he could and
gathering credentials that would contribute several years later to
his appointment as a qgadi to the Sultan of India.

Notes

1. Ibn Khaldun, The Mugaddimah, 2nd edn., trans. F. Rosenthal, 3 vols.
(Princeton, N.J., 1967), vol. 1, p. 366.

2. Symon Semeonis, The Journey of Symon Semeonis from Ireland to the Holy
Land, trans. and ed. Mario Esposito (Dublin, 1960), p. 67.

3. “Al-Iskandariyya,” El), vol. 4, p. 134.

4. Gibb (Gb, vol. 1, p. 33n) states that IB probably did not visit all the towns of
the Nile Delta that he claims to have seen during his first trip through the area.
Although he passed through the delta at least three more times over the course of
his travels, the Rihla bunches descriptions of places and persons into the narrative
of the first visit and presents almost no new details in connection with subsequent
trips. This method of organizing the story was in fact a literary device used in a
number of points in the Rihia. It makes for several knotty problems of itinerary and
chronology at various stages of the narrative. In the case at hand, Gibb’s argument
rests on the fact that IB mentions a date (29 Sha’ban, 31 July 1326) in association
with his visit to the town of Ibyar (Abyar) that cannot possibly be correct, since by
the end of July he was presumably on his way to Damascus. Hrbek (Hr, pp. 418-
20) disagrees, pointing out that despite the discrepancy of the date pertaining to
Ibyar, other evidence (dates connected with named personages in various delta
towns) tends to confirm IB’s statement that he visited the places he says he did
during his first journey. Gibb and Hrbek do agree that he could not have been in
the delta on 31 July.

5. Symon Semeonis, Journey, p. 67. :

6. P.H. Dopp, “Le Caire vu par les voyageurs occidentaux du Moyen Age,”
Bulletin de la Société Royal de Géographie Weevil 23 (1950): 135.

7. Several scholars have suggested this general estimate of the population,
though more recently André Raymond argues for a much lower fourteenth-century
(pre-Black Death) population of about 250,000. “La population du Caire, de
Maqrizi 4 la Description de I'Egypte,” Bulletin d’Etudes Orientales 28 (1975): 214.

8. Stanley Lane-Poole, The Story of Cairo (London, 1902), p. 270.

The Mamluks 63

9. Gaston Wiet, Cairo: City of Art and Commerce (Norman, Okla., 1964), p.
68.

10. An estimate in accord with Hrbek’s overall chronological reconstruction of
IB’s first visit to Egypt. Hr, pp. 420-21.

11. K. A.C. Creswell, The Muslim Architecture of Egypt, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1952,
1959), vol. 1, pp. 66, 78, vol. 2, p. 195.

12. Lane-Poole, Story of Cairo p. 212.

13. On the cosmopolitanism of the leading colleges of Cairo in the fifteenth
century, see Carl F. Petry, The Civilian Elite of Cairo in the Later Middle Ages
(Princeton, N.J., 1981).

14. ’Abdullah ’Ankawi, “The Pilgrimage to Mecca in Mamluk Times,” Arabian
Studies 1 (1974): 147.

15. In his travels on the Nile [bn Battuta has very little to say about the ruins of
ancient Egypt (called in Arabic barbas). His brief description of the Pyramids,
located just across the river from Cairo, is vague and partially inaccurate, leading
Gibb to the conclusion that he never bothered to visit them personally (Gb, vol. 1,
p. 51n). It must be remembered that the purpose of the Rihla was to edify literate
Muslims on the places, personalities, and marvels of the Islamic world of their day
and not on the architecture of pagan temples.

16. Hr, p. 421.

17. Ibn Jubayr, The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, trans. R. J.C. Broadhurst (London,
1952), p. 67.

18. Ibn Jubayr, Travels, p. 65.

19. The Mamluk government had a policy of sharing the commercial duties of
the port with the local powers-that-be out of strategic necessity, but it frequently
fell into altercations with them over the just distribution of the revenue. See Yusf
Fadl Hasan, The Arabs and the Sudan from the Seventh to the Early Sixteenth
Centuries (Edinburgh, 1967), pp. 73-79.

20. ’Ankawi, “Pilgrimage to Mecca,” p. 149.

21. Symon Semeonis, Journey, p. 103.

22. He may have traveled from Gaza to Asqalon, a ruined port several more
miles up the coast, before turning inland to Hebron. Hr, p. 425.

23. Guy Le Strange, Palestine under the Moslems (Beirut, 1965), pp. 316-17.

24. Nicola A. Ziadeh, Urban Life in Syria under the Early Mamluks (Beirut,
1953), p. 97.

25. “Khirka,” EI,, vol. 5, pp. 17-18; Gb, vol. 1, p. 80n.

26. It is at this point in the narrative that the reader encounters the first major
discrepancy between itinerary and chronology. According to the Rihila, IB traveled
extensively in Greater Syria following his departure from Jerusalem, visiting more
than twenty towns and cities before reaching Damascus. Since he could not possibly
have made such a complicated trip within the 23 days he allots for the entire
journey from Cairo to Damascus, both Gibb and Hrbek have concluded that the
itinerary after Jerusalem is largely artificial. Hrbek offers various bits of internal
evidence to show that visits to particular places in Syria must have taken place
during subsequent trips. He further suggests (and Gibb agrees) that IB took a
direct route northward from Jerusalem to Damascus (Hr, pp. 421-25; Gb, vol. 1, p.
81n). I have accepted the probable route Hrbek suggests, though it is conjectural.
And I have reconstructed IB's Syrian itinerary on the premise that he did not travel
extensively in the region in 1326.

27. Ludolph von Suchem, Ludolph von Suchem's Description of the Holy Land,
and of the Way Thither, trans. Aubrey Stewart (London, 1895), p. 129.

28. Ibn Jubayr, Travels, p. 271. Large blocks of IB’s description of Damascus
were taken from the rihla of Ibn Jubayr, who was there in 1184. However IB
updates the material and adds various observations of his own.

29. Ziadeh, Urban Life in Syria, p. 97.

64 The Mamluks

30. Ira Lapidus, Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, Mass.
1967), pp. 22, 70, 72, 75.

31. He may have stayed 34 days, depending on whether the hAajj caravan left
Damascus on the Ist or the 10th of Shawwal. See Chapter 4, note 3.

32. Though IB makes no explicit mention of it, some evidence suggests that he
spent time in Damascus in the late months of 1330. If so, his marriage and some of
his studies might have occurred then. On this chronological problem see Chapter 6,
note 2.

33. See Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1974)
vol. 2, p. 444.

A Mecca

The first House established for the people was that at
[Mecca], a place holy, and a guidance to all beings. Therein
are clear signs — the station of Abraham, and whosoever
enters it isin security. It is the duty of all men towards God
to come to the House a pilgrim, if he is able to make his way
there.’

The Koran, Sura III

Ibn Battuta gives no indication of how many people like himself were
gathering in Damascus in 1326 to join the hay caravan to Mecca, but it
was very likely several thousand. Frescobaldi, the Florentine
nobleman who was in Damascus in 1384 at the start of the pilgrimage,
estimated the company at 20,000.” In fact the size of the caravan varied
greatly from year to year depending on a whole range of factors
affecting individual decisions whether to attempt the trip — political
and economic conditions at home, weather, prospects for trouble
along the route. For most pilgrims the journey was a spiritually
gladdening adventure, but it was also an extremely arduous one,
requiring a sound body and careful advance preparations. Every
participant was obliged to secure provisions for the round trp, as well
as a mount, though Mamluk authonities did set up charitable funds to
provide food and animals for the poorest among the travelers. Unless
a pilgrim carried most of his supplies along with him, the journey could
turn out to be extremely expensive, especially since the citizens of
Medina and Mecca, desert-bound as they were and heavily dependent
on the hajj trade for their survival, cheerfully exacted the highest
prices they could get for food, lodging, and various services. Ibn
Battuta himself was in bad financial straits toward the end of his stay in
Damascus and might not have been able to set out that year had it not
been for the generosity of the Maliki jurist with whom he stayed while
he was sick. This gentleman, he tells us in the Rihla, “hired camels for
me and gave me traveling provisions, etc., and money in addition,
saying to me, ‘It will come in useful for anything of importance that
you may be in need of — may God reward him.”

65

66 Mecca

The gathering of the pilgrims at Damascus was a decidedly
political event. Both the Cairo and Damascus caravans set forth
under the flag of the Mamluk state. Their safety en route and their
timely arrival in Mecca in advance of the dates of the appointed
rituals reflected on the capacity of the regime to maintain law and
order in the realm. Moreover, in the latter half of the thirteenth
century the Mamluks had imposed their political suzerainty over
the rulers of Mecca and Medina. The former were a dynasty of
Arabian Hasanid sharifs, that is, descendants of Hasan, son of ’Ali
and grandson of the Prophet. The latter were also sharifs but the
progeny of Husayn, ’Ali’s other son. The annual arrival of the hajj
caravans at Mecca was an occasion for the ruling Sharif, called the
Amir, to reaffirm, through an exchange of gifts and tribute, his
fealty to the sultan and his recognition of Mamluk protectorship of
the Holy Places, a responsibility carrying great prestige in the
Muslim world.

In the political pecking order of hajj groups, the Cairo caravan
was pre-eminent. Each year the sultan appointed an amir al-hajj
from among his favorite officers to lead the caravan and to act as
his representative in Mecca. At the head of the procession went
the mahmal, a green, richly decorated palenquin, which
symbolized the sultan’s formal authority, though no one rode
inside it. The amir al-hajj was also placed in charge of the kiswa,
the huge black cloth that was woven and inscribed each year in
Cairo and carried to Mecca to be draped over the Ka’ba. Though
the Syrian caravan also had its amir al-hajj appointed either by the
sultan or his viceroy, he stood down from the Cairene leader
during ceremonies at the Holy Places. He was expected either to
remain neutral or to follow the lead of his Egyptian colleague in
negotiations or disputes with the sharifs or with the caravans from
Iraq or the Yemen.

A number of other officials accompanied the Cairo and
Damascus caravans to keep order among the pilgrims and see to
their special needs. Some of these principals were Mamluks,
others were educated Arabs. They included a gadi, an imam, a
muezzin, an intendant of intestate affairs (to take charge of and
record the property of pilgrims who died along the route), a
secretary to the amir al-hajj, medical officers, Arab guides, and a
muhtasib, who policed business transactions and public morality.

On 1 September 1326 (or it may have been the 10th)* Ibn
Battuta set out, now for the second time in four months, to fulfill

Mecca 67

that “desire long-cherished” in his heart. (As later events would
show, he left behind, and presumably divorced, the woman he had
married in Damascus a short time earlier.) The staging ground for
the caravan was the village of al-Kiswa a few miles south of the
city. Here the main body of pilgrims from the city waited a few
days for stragglers to catch up, while the amir al-hajj completed
the job of organizing the various groups of travelers in a fixed
order of march.

The distance from Damascus to Medina was about 820 miles,
and the caravan normally covered it in 45 to 50 days. The itinerary
varied somewhat from year to year, but it coincided generally with
the route of the now abandonned Hijaz Railway, which the
Ottoman Turks built as far as Medina before World War I. From
Damascus the trail ran southward along the fringe of the Syrian
Desert to the oasis of Ma’an, located on about the same latitude as
Cairo. From there the route turned slightly southeastward, veering
away from the Gulf of Aqaba and running through the interior
highlands along the eastern flank of the Hijaz mountains. At
Tabuk, the northern gateway to Arabia, the caravan stopped for a
few days while the pilgrims rested and watered their camels before
venturing into the fierce land of nude mountains and vast, black
lava fields that lay between there and Medina.

Ibn Battuta thought the northern Hijaz a “fearsome
wilderness,” and indeed it was at any season of the year. The trek
through it was a physical trial for the stoutest of pilgrims, and the
odds against calamity in one devilish form or another were not
encouraging. Some pilgrims invariably perished along the way
every year from exposure, thirst, flash flood, epidemic, or even
attack by local nomads, who seldom hesitated to disrupt the
Sacred Journey for what it might bring them in plunder. In 1361
100 Syrian pilgrims died of extreme winter cold; in 1430 3,000
Egyptians perished of heat and thirst.* Ibn Battuta recounts in the
Rihla that a certain year the pilgrims were overcome south of
Tabuk by the violent desert wind known as the samum: “Their
water suplies dried up, and the price of a drink of water rose to a
thousand dinars, but both buyer and seller perished.”

He does not report that any unusual tragedies befell his own
caravan, and we may suppose that the company kept to the normal
schedule. He traveled, he tells us, in the company of a corps of
Syrian Arab tribesmen, who may have been serving as guides. He
also made the acquaintance of a number of educated travelers like

68 Mecca

himself, among them a Maliki jurist from Damascus and a Sufi from
Granada whom he would meet again several years later in India. He
also struck up a friendship with a gentleman of Medina, who made him
his guest during the caravan’s four-day visit to that city.

Medina, City of the Apostle of God, was the most bountiful of the
little islands of fertility scattered along the interior slopes of the Hijaz
mountains, a green spot of habitation existing in uneasy symbiosis with
the bedouin of the desert. Before Islam, it was but one of several
commercial stopovers on the camel route linking the Yemen with the
Middle East. In 622 A.D. Muhammad and his tiny band of converts,
retreating from a hostile and uncomprehending Mecca, moved north
to Medina, which in the ensuing 34 years enjoyed its bnef moment of
political glory as the capital of the rapidly expanding Arab empire.
After the center of Muslim power shifted to Kufa, and then
Damascus, Medina lost its political and military importance and would
have been relegated once again to the back ridges of history were it not
that the grave of the Prophet, who died there in 632, became an object
of veneration second only to the Ka’ba.

The Mosque of the Prophet, which sheltered the sacred tomb as
well as those of his daughter Fatima and the Caliphs Abu Bakr and
"Umar, became “al-Haram,” a place of inviolability. In the Middle
Period Medina was as much a city of pilgrims as Mecca was; even the
native townsmen were largely of non-Arabian origin. A journey to the
Mosque of the Prophet was not obligatory for Muslims as part of the
hajj duties. Nonetheless, few pilgrims failed to visit Medina, even
though they may have reached the Hijaz from the west or south and
would not pass through the city except as a special diversion from
Mecca.

On the evening of the same day that the caravan made camp outside
the walls of the city, Ibn Battuta and his companions went to the
mosque, “rejoicing at this most signal favor, . . . praising God Most
High for our safe arrival at the sacred abodes of His Apostle.” The
sanctuary was in the form of an open court, surrounded on all sides by
colonnades. At the southeast corner amidst rows of marble pillars
stood the pentagonal tomb of Muhammad, and here Ibn Battuta
repaired to pray and give thanks. During the following four days, he
tells us in the Rihla,

we spent each night in the holy mosque, where everyone [engaged
in pious exercises]; some, having formed circles in the court and lit a
quantity of candles, and with book-rests in their midst [on which

Mecca 69

were placed volumes] of the Holy Koran were reciting from it;
some were intoning hymns of praise to God; others were
occupied in contemplation of the Immaculate Tomb (God in-
crease it in sweetness); while on every side were singers
chanting in eulogy of the Apostle of God.

During the days, he undoubtedly found time to visit other
mosques and venerated sites in and around the city, including the
cemetery (al-Baqi’) east of the walls that contained the graves of
numerous kinsmen and Companions of the Prophet. He is also
likely to have made a point of seeing the little domed tomb of
Malik ibn ’Anas, the great eighth-century jurist and founder of the
Maliki school of law.

In the modern age charter buses whisk pilgrims along the paved
highway connecting Medina with Mecca, but Ibn Battuta and his
fellows faced 200 more miles of fiery desolation before reaching
the goal of their hopes. Yet this final stage of the journey was
different: haggard wayfarers became celebrants, uplifted and ren-
ewed, and the whole dusty company was transformed into a
joyous, white-robed procession. The change took place at Dhu I-
Hulaifa, a tiny settlement just five miles along the southbound
road out of Medina. This was one of the five stations (mikats) on
the five principal trails leading to Mecca where pilgrims were
required to enter into the state of consecration, called ihram.
Here male pilgrims took off their traveling clothes, washed them-
selves, prayed, and finally donned the special garment, also called
ihram, which they would continue to wear until after they entered
the Holy City and, if it were the time of the Greater Pilgrimage,
performed the rites of hajj. The garment consisted of two large,
plain, unstitched sheets of white cloth, one of which was wrapped
around the waist, reaching to the ankles, the other gathered
around the upper part of the body and draped over the left
shoulder. Nothing was worn over or beneath the thram, and feet
were left bare or shod only in sandals without heels. Women did
not put on these garments, but dressed modestly and plainly,
covering their heads but leaving their faces unveiled. Once the
pilgrim assumed the thram, symbolizing the equality of all men
before God, he was required to behave in a manner consistent
with the state of sanctity into which he had voluntarily entered.
The Prophet warned: “The Pilgrimage is in months well-known;
whoso undertakes the duty of Pilgrimage in them shall not go in to

70 Mecca

his womenfolk nor indulge in ungodliness and disputing in the
Pilgrimage. Whatsoever good you do, God knows it.”°

After fulfilling the ceremonies of thram, the caravan set forth
once again, the pilgrims walking straighter now and shouting
God’s praises into the great Arabian void. The route followed a
southwesterly course across low ridges of the Hijaz hills and then
down to the plain bordering the Red Sea. The company reached
the coast at Rabigh, a station about 95 miles north of Jidda, where
the routes from Syria and Egypt finally converged and where the
Egyptian pilgrims took the ihram. From here the caravan turned
into the desert again, marching now southwestward along the
coastal plain. Probably seven days after leaving Rabigh® they
arrived in the morning hours at the gates of Mecca, the Mother of
Cities.

It was mid October 1326. Twenty-two years old and a year and
four months the pilgrim-adventurer, Ibn Battuta rode
triumphantly into Mecca’s narrow, brown valley and proceeded at
once to the “illustrious Holy House,” reciting with his companions
the prayer of submission to the Divine will.

What is Thy Command? I am here, O God!
What is Thy Command? I am here!

What is Thy Command? I am here!

Thou art without companion!

What is Thy Command? I am here!’

Among the cosmopolitan cities of Ibn Battuta’s time, Mecca was
in one sense pre-eminent. From the end of Ramadan and
throughout the months of Shawwal and Dhu 1-Qa’da, pilgrims
from every Islamic land gathered in the city to pray in the Sacred
Mosque, and, on the ninth day of the month Dhu 1-Hijja, to stand
in fellowship on the plain of “Arafat before the Mount of Mercy.
As Islam expanded into more distant parts of Asia and Africa
during the Middle Period, the call to the hajj embraced an ever-
larger and more diverse range of peoples. In the rites of the
perambulations around the Ka’ba, the great stone cube that stood
in the center of the mosque, Turks of Azerbaijan walked with
Malinke of the Western Sudan, Berbers of the Atlas with Indians
of Gujerat. The grand mosque, called the Haram, or Sanctuary,
was the one place in the world where the adherents of the four

Mecca 7}

main legal schools, plus Shi’is, Zaydis, “Ibadis, and other
sectarians, prayed together in one place according to their slightly
varying ritual forms. Though there was a fixed order of prayer in
the mosque for the four schools, reports Ibn Battuta,

at the sunset prayer they pray all at the same time, each imam
leading his own congregation. In consequence of this the people
are invaded by some wandering of attention and confusion; the
Malikite [worshipper] often bows in time with the bowing of the
Shafi’ite, and the Hanafite prostrates himself at the prostration
of the Hanbalite, and you see them listening attentively each
one to the voice of the muessin who is chanting to the con-
gregation of his rite, so that he does not fall victim to his
inattention.

Black Muslims and white Muslims, Sunnis and Shi’is all came to
Mecca with the single declared purpose to fulfill a holy duty and to
worship the One God. But they also came, incidentally, to trade.
Pilgrims almost always brought goods with them to sell, sometimes
whole caravan loads. The bedouin and oasis-dwellers of the Hijaz
and the Yemen hauled in huge quantities of foodstuffs to feed the
multitude. Ibn Jubayr wrote of his visit in 1183:

Although there is no commerce save in the pilgrim period,
nevertheless, since people gather in it from east and west, there
will be sold in one day... precious objects such as pearls,
sapphires, and other stones, various kinds of perfume such as
musk, camphor, amber and aloes, Indian drugs and other
articles brought from India and Ethiopia, the products of the
industries of Iraq and the Yemen, as well as the merchandise of
Khurasan, the goods of the Maghrib, and other wares such as it
is impossible to enumerate or correctly assess.°

Though Mecca’s own hinterland was a stony desert, Ibn Jubayr
found the market street “overflowing” with “figs, grapes,
pomegranates, quinces, peaches, lemons, walnuts, palm-fruit,
water-melons, cucumbers and all the vegetables.”

If Mecca at the season of the hajj was a microcosm of all the
peoples and all the wares of a good part of Africa and Eurasia, its
cosmopolitanism was in other respects shallow. It was a
cosmopolitanism derived from a unique annual event and not from

72 Mecca

the existence of mighty, urbane educational or philanthropic in-
stitutuions as was the case with Cairo or Damascus. When the
pilgrims rolled up their prayer mats and headed back to their
homelands in the latter part of Dhu !-Hijja, the city reverted to the
more prosaic activities of a dusty western Arabian town. Though
foreign traders, scholars, and stranded poor folk were to be seen in
the city all through the year, the population dwindled quickly
when the feast days were over. Mecca had no substantial
agricultural base of its own and was almost completely dependent
on neighboring oases and countries for its sustenance. In those
conditions Mecca could never have grown into a metropolis or
supported majestic colleges, khans, and palaces of the sort that
distinguished the mature urban centers of Islam. Though the city
had its colleges, most of them were modest, and teaching was
largely conducted in the Haram.'®

If privation and remoteness finally doomed Mecca to second-
rate city-hood, those very conditions suited it perfectly as a place
for spiritual retreat and ascetic exercise. Simply to live there for a
short time was an act of self-denial — at least 1t was before the age
of automobiles, public toilets, and air conditioners. The city lies,
not like Medina, in the midst of an oasis, but at the bottom of an
arid depression surrounded by a double range of treeless
mountains. From the north, the south, and the southwest, three
ravines lead the visitor down into “this breathless pit enclosed by
walls of rock,”'' where summer temperatures soar to 126 degrees
Fahrenheit. Before modern technology revolutionized the
logistical aspects of the hajj, water and housing ran chronically
short, epidemics broke out among the pilgrims, and flash floods
raged suddenly down the central streets of the town, on several
occasions flooding the Haram and severely damaging the Ka’ba.
Yet like all deserts, the Meccan wilderness possessed a pure and
terrifying beauty, an immensity of light and shadow that hinted at
the workings of the Infinite. And though the land was unyieldingly
grim, it inflicted its dangers and discomforts on all equally. re-
ducing to triviality differences of race and class and driving the
pilgrims together in the knowledge that only God is great.

Whatever a pilgrim may have suffered on the road to Mecca, his
personal cares were quickly enough forgotten as he entered the
court of the Haram and stood before the great granite block
enveloped in its black veil. “The contemplation of... the
venerable House,” wrote Ibn Jubayr, “is an awful sight which

Mecca 73

distracts the senses in amazement, and ravishes the heart and mind.” !2
Even the infidel Englishman Richard Burton, who visited the mosque
in disguise in 1853, declared that “the view was strange, unique” and
“that of all the worshippers who clung weeping to the curtain, or who
pressed their beating hearts to the stone, none felt for the moment a
deeper emotion than did [I].”"*

Generations of rulers have made numerous alterations to the Haram
and the Ka’ba, so that the structures look substantially different today
from the way they did when Ibn Battuta saw them. In its modern form
the Ka’ba is in the shape of a slightly irregular cube, set almost in the
center of the court and rising toa height of SO feet. The walls of blue- grey
Meccan stone are draped year round with the kiswa, made of black
brocade and embellished with an encircling band of Koranic inscription
in gold. A single door, set about seven feet above the ground and
concealed by its own richly decorated covering, gives entry to the
windowless interior of the sanctuary. There are no relics inside, simply
three wooden pillars supporting the roof, ornamental drapes along the
walls, lamps of silver and gold hanging from the ceiling, and acopy of the
Koran. At the eastern corner of the exterior of the Ka’ba is embedded
the revered Black Stone. which measures about twelve inches across
and is set in a nm of silver. The surface of the stone is worn smooth and
no one can be certain of its composition. In Koranic tradition Abraham
built the Ka’ba, a wooden structure as it originally stood, to com-
memorate the One God. Thoughin pre- Islamic times the sanctuary was
a home of idols and its precinct a place of pagan rites, Muhammad
restored it to its onginal purpose as a temple consecrated to the
pnmordial monotheism of Abraham.

When a visitor arrives in Mecca, whether or not he intends to
undertake the hajj, he must as his very first act perform the tawaf, the
circumambulation. He walks around the Ka’ba seven times
counterclockwise, stepping quickly the first three times, then walking
more slowly, all the while reciting prayers special to the occasion. Each
time he passes the eastern corner he strives to kiss or touch the Black
Stone, not because some wondrous power is invested in it but because
the Prophet kissed it. During the less congested months of the year.
the pious visitor may perform the tawaf and kiss the stone at his leisure
several times a day. But in the hajj season the mosque becomes a
revolving mass of humanity, giving the illusion that the very floor of
the courtyard is turning round the Ka’ba.

Facing the northeast facade of the shrine is a small structure (today
in the shape of a little cage surmounted with a golden dome) called the

74 Mecca

Magam Ibrahim. Inside lies the stone said to bear the footprints of
the Patriarch, who used the rock as a platform when he con-
structed the upper portions of the House. When the pilgrim has
completed his tawaf, he goes to the Maqam where he prays a
prayer of two prostrations. Near the Maqam is the blessed well of
Zamzam. Here the Angel Gabriel (according to one tradition)
miraculously brought forth a spring to quench the thirst of Hagar
and her little son Isma’il after her husband Abraham had gone off
into the desert. From the Magam the pilgrim moves to the well to
drink, which in Ibn Battuta’s time was enclosed in a building of
beautiful marble. The sacred water is sold in the cloisters of the
mosque and in the streets of the city. During their sojourn the
pilgrims perform their ritual ablutions with it and some, despite
the heavily saline taste, drink profuse amounts for its reputed
healing qualities.

When the pilgrim has drunk from the well, he may leave the
mosque by the southeastern gate and proceed several yards to a
little elevation, called al-Safa, which lies at one end of a Meccan
street. From the steps of al-Safa he walks or jogs about a quarter
of a mile along the street to another small eminence called al-
Marwa. He repeats this promenade seven times, reciting prayers
along the way, to commemorate Hagar’s frantic search for water
along the ground lying between the two hills. This rite is called the
sa’y, that is, the Running. With the performing of it the pilgrim has
completed the preliminary rites of the hajj and may at last find his
lodgings and begin to introduce himself to the city.

The Syrian caravan of the year 1326 (726 A.H.) arrived at the
western gate of Mecca sometime before dawn. Though probably
exhausted from a night’s march, Ibn Battuta and his companions
made their way at once to the center of the city and entered the
Haram by the gate called al-Salem. Praising God who “hath re-
joiced our eyes by the vision of the illustrious Ka’ba,” they per-
formed the tawaf of arrival:

We kissed the holy Stone; we performed a prayer of two bowings
at the Maqam Ibrahim and clung to the curtains of the Ka’ba at
the Multazam between the door and the black Stone, where
prayer is answered; we drank of the water of Zamzam . . .; then,
having run between al-Safa and al-Marwa, we took up our lodging
there in a house near the Gate of Ibrahim.

Mecca 75

The “house” Ibn Battuta repaired to was in fact a Sufi hospice
(he uses the term ribat) called al-Muwaffaq, located near the
southwestern side of the mosque. In his usual fashion he quickly
struck up acquaintances with the pious residents of the lodge,
some of them Maghribis. We may suppose that he put to good
advantage the three weeks he had to himself before the start of the
hajj festival, exploring the secondary shrines and historic sites of
the Prophet’s birthplace, rummaging through the wares in the
market street, and perhaps climbing to the top of one of the holy
mountains whose barren slopes roughed out the contours of the
town. He also formed an opinion of the local citizenry, judging
them generous, kindly, and proper.

The Meccans are elegant and clean in their dress, and as they
mostly wear white their garments always appear spotless and
snowy. They use perfume freely, paint their eyes with kuhl, and
are constantly picking their teeth with slips of green arak-wood.
The Meccan women are of rare and surpassing beauty, pious
and chaste.

The use of perfumes, oils, and makeup would of course have
been out of fashion for everyone during the days preceding the
hajj, when personal frippery was forbidden. Ibn Battuta himself,
keeping to his ritual declaration of intention to complete the rites
of the pilgrimage in a state of consecration, continued to wear his
white ihram garb from the time he assumed it on the road from
Medina until his hajj was fulfilled a month later. He also, we may
presume, obeyed with precision the special taboos that attended
the state of ihram. In all certainty he did not get into arguments or
fights, kill plants or animals, engage in sexual relations, cut his hair
or nails, wear sewn garments, or adorn himself with jewelry.“

We can also be sure that during these three weeks he spent the
better part of his days and probably some of his nights in the
Haram, where he performed additional tawafs (always meritorious
in the sight of God), drank from the well, and made conversation
with new acquaintances. The great mosque was indeed the center
of all public life in Mecca. The streets of the town, winding
through the canyons and down the slopes of the encircling hills, all
converged on the Haram, whose court formed the very bottom of
the alluvial depression. The mosque was in the shape of an
irregular parallelogram, the roofed-over portion of the structure

76 Mecca

between the outer walls and the court being suported by a forest of
marble columns (471 of them by Ibn Jubayr’s count). Nineteen
gates on all four sides gave access to the colonnades and court, and
five minarets surmounted the mosque, four of them at the
corners. '°

The Haram was not only the place of the pilgrim stations but
also the center for daily prayers, Koranic reading, and education.
In the shade of the cloisters, or in the court when the sun was low,
sat rings of learners and listeners, while copyists, Koran readers,
and even tailors occupied benches set up beneath the arches of the
colonnades.'® When prayers were not in session or the crush of
pilgrims not too great, Meccan children played in the court, and
the people of the city streamed back and forth through the gates,
routinely using the sacred precinct as a short cut between one part
of town and another. For poorer pilgrims the mosque was home.
“Here,” wrote John Burckhardt, another nineteenth-century
Christian who penetrated the Haram incognito, “many poor In-
dians, or negroes, spread their mats, and passed the whole period
of their residence at Mecca. Here they both eat and sleep; but
cooking is not allowed.”'’ There was not a single moment day or
night throughout the year, so says the tradition, when at least a
few of the faithful were not circling the Ka’ba. In the evening the
square was lighted with dozens of torches and candles, bathing the
worshippers and the great cube in a flickering orange glow.

When a pilgrim reached Mecca and circuited the Ka’ba, he still
had, in an important religious sense, twelve miles to go before he
would terminate his sacred journey. No Muslim was privileged to
claim the title “al-Hajj” until he had traveled through the desert
ravines east of the city to the plain of ’Arafat and, on the ninth day
of Dhu I-Hijja, stood before the Mount of Mercy, the place where
Adam prayed and where in 632 Muhammad preached his farewell
sermon to his pristine congregation of believers. This annual re-
treat into the Meccan wilderness embraces the complex of cere-
monies that makes up the hajj proper, or Greater Pilgrimage,
which Muslims regard as separate from (though also including) the
rituals of the tawaf and the sa’y. The Meccan rites, performed
alone and at any time of the year, are called the ’umra, that is, the
Visit or Lesser Pilgrimage.

Before Islam, Mecca was the center for a yearly pilgrimage of
Arabian tribes that was purely pagan. The Prophet retained some
of those rites but utterly transformed their purpose into a

Mecca 77

celebration of Abraham’s unyielding monotheism. The cere-
monies rested on the authority of the Koran and on the
traditionally accepted practices of the Prophet. Although minor
details of the procedures vary according to the different juridical
schools (such as that male Shafi’is have their heads shaved at a
different point in the sequence of rites than do members of the
other madhhabs), the hajj is the supreme expression of the unity of
all believers. Indeed, when on the tenth of Dhu I-Hijja each
pilgrim kills a goat or sheep in remembrance of God’s last-minute
instruction to Abraham to sacrifice a ram rather than his own son,
Muslims the world over do the same, thus uniting themselves
symbolically with their brothers and sisters in the Arabian desert.

Today, a million and a half Muslims commonly arrive in Mecca
each year and set out for "Arafat in a white-robed horde on the
eighth and ninth days of the sacred month. Many walk, but others
travel in buses and cars along the multilane highway which winds
out from the city. Saudi government helicopters circle overhead
and crowd control experts monitor the proceedings from closed
circuit television centers. First aid stations line the route,
cropdusters spray the plain against disease, and an army of
vendors greets the tired pilgrims at their destination with soft
drinks and barbecued chicken. In Ibn Battuta’s time the journey
was of course far less agreeable, even dangerous if the local
bedouin took the occasion to plunder the procession. Those who
could afford the price rode in enclosed camel-litters. But most of
the pilgrims walked the hot stony trail: the pious did it barefoot.

By tradition the pilgrims spend the night of the eighth day at
Mina, a settlement in a narrow valley four miles east of the city.
On the following morning they go on to the ‘Arafat plain and
range themselves in a great circle around the jagged little hill
called the Mount of Mercy. A city of tents and prayer mats is
quickly unfurled. At noon begins the Standing, the central and
absolutely essential event of the hajj. Throughout the afternoon
and until the sun sets the pilgrims keep vigil round the Mount. or
on its slopes if they can find room, reciting the prayer of obeisance
to God (“What is Thy Command? I am Here!”) and hearing
sermons preached from the summit.

Precisely at sunset the Standing formally concludes and the
throng immediately packs up and starts back in the direction of
Mecca. By tradition the pilgrim must not perform his sunset prayer
at "Arafat but at Muzdalifah, a point three miles back along the

78 Mecca

road to Mina. And equally by tradition everyone who is physically
able races to get there as fast as he can. In Ibn Battuta’s time the
“rushing” to Muzdalifah might have brought to mind the
millennial charge of some gigantic army of white-clad dervishes.
Today it has more the character of a titanic California commuter
rush, meticulously orchestrated by the Saudi authorities to prevent
hopeless traffic jams. Once arrived at Muzdalifah most of the
pilgrims bed down for the night, though women, children, and the
infirm may continue immediately on to Mina ahead of the crowd.

On the morning of the tenth the pilgrims assemble at Mina for
the start of the Feast of the Sacrifice (Id al-Adha), four days of
celebration and desacralizing rites that bring the hajj to con-
clusion. Mina’s sacred landmarks are three modest stone pillars,
which stand at intervals from the eastern to the western end of the
valley. As his first act the pilgrim must take a handful of pebbles
(which he usually picks up along the road from ’Arafat) and cast
seven of them at the western pillar. Just as the faithful Abraham
threw stones at the devil to repulse his mesmeric suggestions that
the little Isma’il need not after all be sacrificed, so the pilgrim
must take aim at the devil-pillar as witness to his personal war
against evil in general. When he has completed the lapidation, he
buys a sheep or goat (or even a camel if he is rich) from any of the
vendors who have collected thousands of animals for the occasion.
He sets the face of the creature in the direction of the Ka’ba and
kills it by cutting its throat as Abraham did after God mercifully
reprieved his son. This act brings to an end the period of thram.
The pilgrim must find a barber (dozens are on hand) and have his
head shaved, or at least some locks cut, and then he is free to
exchange his ritual garb for his everyday clothing. As soon as the
rites of Mina are accomplished he returns to Mecca to perform the
tawaf once again, now released from all prohibitions save for
sexual intercourse.

From the tenth to the thirteenth the solemnities of the Standing
give way to jubilation and fellowship. The pilgrims return to Mina
for two or sometimes three nights. They throw pebbles at all three
of the devil-pillars each day, sacrifice additional animals, and
socialize with countrymen and new-found friends. On the twelfth
the first groups of hajjis begin leaving for home, taking care to
perform the tawaf of farewell as their final ritual act.

From the fourteenth century to today the fundamental cere-
monies of the hajj have been altered only in the merest details. Ibn

Mecca 79

Battuta’s own brief and matter-of-fact recounting of these events
in the Rihla might be startlingly familiar to some young civil
servant of Tangier, making the sacred journey by Royal Air

Maroc.

The great majority of pilgrims who streamed out through the
Meccan gullies in mid November 1326 were heading back to the
prosaic lives they had temporarily abandoned to make the holy
journey. Some of them would take many months to reach home,
working their way along, getting stranded here or there, or taking
time to see the great mosque and college cities of the Middle East.
Ibn Battuta does not tell us in the Rihla just when he decided that
he would not, for the time being, return to Morocco. When he left
Tangier his only purpose had been to reach the Holy House. Once
there, did the Meccan bazaar, the exotic faces, the stories of
strange sights and customs set his mind to some master plan for
exploring the hemisphere? Was it there that he made his imposs-
ible vow to roam the world without ever retracing his steps? Had
he begun to realize the possibilities of traveling thousands of miles
in every direction from Mecca without ever going beyond the
limits of the familiar society of men who shared his values, his
habits, and his language? Whatever soul-stirring effects his first
hajj may have had on him, he was certainly no longer the boy who
stood forlornly in the center of Tunis with nowhere to go and no
one to talk to. After a year and a half away from home, he had
already seen more of the world than most people ever would, he
was cultivating a circle of learned and internationally minded
friends, and he had won the title of “al-Hajj,” itself an entrée to
respect among influential and well-traveled men. When he set off
for Baghdad with the Iraqi pilgrims on 20 Dhu I-Hijja, one fact
was apparent. He was no longer traveling to fulfill a religious
mission or even to reach a particular destination. He was going to
Iraq simply for the adventure of it. It is at this point that his
globetrotting career really began.

Notes

1. Arthur J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted (New York. 1955), p. 86.

2. Theophilus Bellorini and Eugene Hoade. eds. and trans., Visit to the Holy
Places of Egypt, Sinai, Palestine and Syria in 1384 by Frescobaldi, Gucci and Sigoli
(Jerusalem, 1948), p. 23.

80 Mecca

3. The Syrian caravan normally left Damascus on 10 Shawwal, or 10 September
in 1326. "Abdullah ’Ankawi, “The Pilgrimage to Mecca in Mamluk Times,”
Arabian Studies 1 (1974): 149. Since the Rihla is sometimes given to rounding off
significant dates at the first day of the month, Ibn Battuta may well have left on or
about 10 Shawwal rather than the Ist.

4. ’Ankawi, “The Pilgrimage to Mecca,” pp. 160-61.

5. Arberry, Koran, pp. 54 SS.

6. IB gives the traveling time from Rabigh to Khulais (a palm grove on the
route) as three nights. Ibn Jubayr made the trip from Mecca to Khulais in four
days. The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, trans. R.J.C. Broadhurst (London, 1952), pp.
188-91.

7. A pilgrimage prayer translated in Ahmad Kamal, The Sacred Journey
(London, 1961), p. 35.

8. Ibn Jubayr, Travels, pp. 116-17.

9. Ibid., p. 117.

10. C. Snouk Hurgronje, Mecca in the Latter Part of the Nineteenth Century
(Leiden, 1931), pp. 171-72.

11. Eldon Rutter, The Holy Cities of Arabia, 2 vols. (London, 1928), vol. 1, p.
117.

12. Ibn Jubayr, Travels, p. 80.

13. Richard Burton, Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and
Meccah, 2 vols. (New York, 1964), vol. 2, p. 161.

14. IB states in the Rihla that when he assumed the ihram garments he declared
his intention of performing the rites of the Greater Pilgrimage (hajj) without the
Lesser Pilgrimage (‘umra, or visit). The latter, comprised essentially of the tawaf
and the sa’y, could be performed at any time of the year. When a Muslim entered
Mecca at a time other than the hajj season, he could deconsecrate himself following
the tawaf and the sa’y of arrival. He would then be in a state called tamattu’,
meaning that he could enjoy a normal life and wear everyday clothes until the start
of the Aajj, if in fact he planned to remain in the town until then. IB, however,
vowed to perform the hajj, which included the tawaf and sa’y plus the rites of the
walk to Arafat, without interrupting the state of ihram. Therefore, he was required
to wear his white clothes and obey the attendant prohibitions until his hajj was
completed. See “Hadjdj,” EI, vol. 3, p. 35.

15. Gb, vol. 1, p. 203 n. IB counts five minarets, but Ibn Jubayr (Travels, p. 87)
says there were seven, which agrees with nineteenth-century observers. There are
seven today, though the precise locations of the towers have varied over the
centuries.

16. Ibn Jubayr, Travels, p. 86.

17. Burckhardt, Travels, vol. 1, p. 273.

5 Persia and Iraq

He also said: “After us the descendants of our clan will
wear gold embroidered garments, eat rich and sweet food,
ride fine horses, and embrace beautiful women but they
will not say that they owe all this to their fathers and elder
brothers, and they will forget us and those great times.”
The Yasa of Genghis Kahn

When Ibn Battuta made his first excursion to Iraq and western
Persia, more than a century had passed since the birth of the
Mongol world empire. For a Moroccan lad born in 1304 the story
of Genghis Khan and the holocaust he brought down on civilized
Eurasia was something to be read about in the Arabic version of
Rashid al-Din’s History of the Mongols. The Tatar storm blew
closer to England than it did to Morocco and had no repercussions
on life in the Islamic Far West that Ibn Battuta’s great grandfather
was likely to have noticed. For the inhabitants of Egypt and the
Levant the Mongol explosion had been a brush with catastrophe,
mercifully averted by Mamluk victories but imagined in the dark
tales told by fugitives from the dead and flattened cities that were
once Bukhara, Merv, and Nishapur. For the Arab and Persian
peoples of the lands east of the Euphrates the terrible events of
1220-60 had been a nightmare of violence from which they were
still struggling to recover in the fourteenth century.

“With one stroke,” wrote the Persian historian Juvaini of the
Mongol invasion of Khurasan, ‘a world which billowed with
fertility was laid desolate, and the regions thereof became a desert,
and the greater part of the living dead, and their skin and bones
crumbling dust; and the mighty were humbled and immersed in
the calamities of perdition.”? The Mongols wreaked death and
devastation wherever they rode from China to the plains of
Hungary but nowhere more so than in Persia, where most of the
great cities of the northern region of Khurasan were demolished
and their inhabitants annihilated. A modern historian estimates
that the total population of Khurasan, Iraq, and Azerbaijan may

81

82 Persia and Iraq

Map 5: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Persia and Iraq, 1326-27

CASPIAN

Me Np,
Hamadan

: oe ~
Se

Baghdad | LOK us 8 ee
Ace

Wasit

aN Shushtar

Medina

Persia and Iraq 83

have dropped temporarily from 2,500,000 to 250,000 as a result of
mass extermination and famine.” The thirteenth-century
chronicler Ibn al-Athir estimated that the Mongols killed 700,000
people in Merv alone.* That figure is probably a wild ex-
ageeration, but it suggests the contemporary perception of those
calamitous events.

The Mongol terror did not proceed from some Nazi-like
ideological design to perpetrate genocide. Nor was it a
spontaneous barbarian rampage. Rather it was one of the cooly
devised elements of the greater Genghis Khanid strategy for world
conquest, a fiendishly efficient combination of military field tactics
and psychological warfare designed to crush even the possibility of
resistance to Mongol rule and to demoralize whole cities into
surrendering without a fight. Once the armies had overrun Persia
and set up garrison governments, wholesale carnage on the whole
came to an end. Even the most rapacious Tatar general under-
stood that the country could not be systematically bled over the
long term if there were no more people left. After about 1260, and
in some regions much earlier, trade resumed, fields were planted,
towns dug themselves out, and remnants of the educated and
artisan classes plodded back to their homes. Some cities, such as
Tabriz, opened their gates to the invaders, and so were spared
destruction. Others, Kerman and Shiraz for example, were in
regions far enough to the south to be out of the path of the storm;
they later acquiesced to Mongol overlordship while preserving a
degree of political autonomy.

And yet for the mass of Arabic- or Persian-speaking farmers, on
whose productive labor the civilization of Mesopotamia and the
Iranian plateau had always rested, the disaster was chronic. Over
the long run the military crisis was not so much an invasion of
Mongol armies at it was the last great trek of Turkish steppe
nomads from Central Asia into the Islamic heartland, a
re-enactment and indeed a continuation of the eleventh-century
migrations that had populated parts of the Middle East with
Turkish tribes and put their captains in political control of almost
all of it. Genghis Khan could never have done more than found
some unremarkable tribal state in Inner Asia were it not for his
success at incorporating into his war machine numerous Turkish
clans inhabiting the grasslands between Mongolia and the Caspian
Sea. Turkish warriors trooped to the flag of Genghis by the tens of
thousands, partly because the Mongols had defeated them, partly

84 Persia and Iraq

for the military adventure, partly because rain fell more often and
grass grew taller progressively as one moved west and south. Turks
far outnumbered ethnic Mongols in the mounted armies that
attacked Persia, and they brought with them their wagons, their
families, and their enormous herds of horses and sheep, which fed
their way through Khurasan and westward along the flanks of the
Alburz Mountains to the thick pastures of Azerbaijan.

Although many of the Turkish invaders had themselves been
converted to Sunni Islam in the preceding centuries as a result of
contact with urban merchants and missionaries from Khurasan,
they joined eagerly in the violent dismembering of Persian society,
ridding the land of the farms, crops, irrigation works, and cities
that obstructed the free movement of their herds. Over several
decades thousands of Iranian peasants were killed, enslaved, and
chased off their land. To make matters worse, the early Mongol
rulers, beginning with Genghis Khan’s grandson Hulegu in 1256,
could not quite make up their minds whether to carry through
policies designed to reconstruct the country and revive agriculture
or to treat the land as permanent enemy territory by taxing the
peasants unbearably and permitting commanders, tribal chiefs,
and state “messengers” to devour the countryside at the slightest
sign of agrarian health.

Ghazan (1295-1304), the seventh Ilkhan (or “deputy” of the
Great Khan, as the Mongol rulers of Persia were called), made a
determined effort to improve the administrative and fiscal system
in ways that would lighten the peasants’ tax load, relieve them of
indiscriminate extortion on the part of state officials, and restore
their will to produce. The reforms had modest success, but they
did not drive the economy decisively upward, owing to the
petulant resistance of officials and war lords and the failure of
Ghazan’s successors to persevere with sufficient energy. The
strength and well-being of any civilized society depended on the
prosperity of its agriculture, and in this respect Persia and Iraq
entered the fourteenth century still dragging the chains of the
Mongol invasion. “There can be no doubt,” wrote the Persian
historian Mustawfi in 1340, “that even if for a thousand years to
come no evil befalls the country, yet will it not be possible com-
pletely to repair the damage, and bring back the land to the state
in which it was formerly.”°

Yet if the understructure of the Persian economy was weak, the
Mongols succeeded remarkably well at paving over their own work

Persia and Iraq 85

of mass contamination with a new urban culture shiny enough to
make an educated visitor forget all about the horrors of Merv. Like
the Marinids, the Mamluks, and other crude conquerors fresh from
the steppe, the Ilkhans were quick to surrender to the sophisticated
civilization that enveloped them. Indeed the mind of the Mongol
warrior was so culturally deprived that it presented a vast blank on
which all sorts of refined and humane influences could be wnitten. In
the earlier phase of the conquest the Tatar leaders turned for
guidance to their Turkish subordinates, some of whom were Muslims
with literate skills gained as a result of two or three centuries of
contact with the cities of Khurasan on the fringe of the steppe. These
allies supplied the Mongol language with a wnitten script (Uigur
Turkish) and a corps of clerks and officials who did much of the
initial work of installing Tatar government throughout the Genghis
Khanid empire. Even as the invasion of Persia was still going for-
ward, the people of distinctly Mongol origin in the forces, a minority
group almost from the beginning, were intermarrying with Turks,
taking up their language and ways, and rapidly disappearing into the
great migrating crowd. By the end of the thirteenth century, purely
Mongol cultural influences on Persia, excepting in matters of warfare
and military pomp, had all but vanished.

The Turkish model, however, was only half-way civilized and in
the end no match for the Persian one at the elevated levels of literate
culture. The Mongol invaders inherited proprietorship of an edifice
of civilization far more complex and luxurious than anything they had
ever experienced. The cultural Persianization of the IIkhanid regime
was getting under way even while the smoke still hung over Baghdad.
Hulegu (1256-65) was in theory subordinate to the Great Khan of
the Mongols (Kublai Khan in China after 1260), but in fact he was
the founder of an Iraqo—Persian kingdom, one of the four major
successor states to the monolithic empire of Genghis. Orderly gov-
ernment and efficient taxation of the population in a realm that
extended from the Oxus to Anatolia absolutely required, as in
Mongol China, the help of the native elite. Though thousands of
educated people had been killed in the invasions, the remnants soon
emerged from the wreckage and presented themselves for public
service. Even the early Ilkhans, who favored Buddhism or Chnris-
tianity rather than Islam, had no choice but to put administration and
finance in the hands of the same families of native Muslim scribes
and officials who had been running Persia before the invasion.

In fact the Mongol leaders were transformed into Persians, or at

86 Persia and Iraq

least Turco—Persians, to a degree that the Mamluks never were in
their relation to literate Egypt. The explanation is that the Mongol
governing class was not a permanently alien elite continuously
recruited fresh from the steppe. And it did not maintain itself by
erecting a political system that depended on the maintenance of
sharp cultural separations between rulers and subjects. Rather,
the Turco—Mongol soldiery came to Persia to stay and became
progressively identified with Persian ways. The dynasty,
moreover, was founded on conventional principles of hereditary
kingship over the Persian and Iraqi people, a relationship which
gradually splintered the connections of sentiment and culture be-
tween the Ilkhans and their kinsmen of Inner Asia.°

The Mongols‘ accommodation to the native Irano—Muslim
bureaucracy spurred their conversion to Islam, itself an inevitable
step in their Persianization. Genghis had set a policy of toleration
for all religions within the empire, and ultimately the formless
tribal shamanism to which he remained loyal withered under a
barrage of divine truths which missionaries of all the world-univer-
salist faiths fired at his various successors. In Persia the pros-
elytizers of several varieties of Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam
competed for the attention of the Ilkhans like so many peddlers
determined to make a sale. The Mongols at first swung erratically
from one religious preference to another, depending upon which
rite could muster the most influence at court.

Ghazan was the first ruler to proclaim Islam the state religion.
He required the entire court to convert, put up mosques
throughout the country, and endowed numerous pious institutions
in the cities. With Mongol military power and Persian popular
sentiment behind him, he wiped out Buddhism in that land. He
also pulled down Nestorian Christian churches and put an end
once and for all to naive European hopes that the Tatars could be
brought over to Rome. Oljeitu (1304-16), Ghazan’s successor and
the most spiritually erratic of all the IIkhans, was born a Nestorian,
took up Buddhism, then converted to Islam. He first adopted
Hanafi Sunnism, then Shafi’i; in 1310 he became a militant Shri
and started a violent campaign to persecute Sunnis in general. His
young son Abu Sa’id (1316-35), however, brought the court
quickly back to Sunnism. What is more, he kept it that way. Most
of his subjects were relieved and satisfied. Though Shi’ism has
been the state religion of Iran since the sixteenth century, the great
majority of Persians and Iraqis were still Sunnis (mostly Hanafi or

Persia and Iraq 87

Shafi’i) in the fourteenth. Ibn Battuta, dyed-in-the-wool Sunni
that he was, could not have picked a more felicitous time to visit
the IJkhanid state than in the reign of Abu Sa’id.

When the Mongols converted to Islam, they also became both
the disciples and the patrons of Persian art and culture. The
decades of the holocaust had snuffed out intellectual and artistic
life over much of the land, but it came to life so quicky after 1260
that the brief eighty years of the IIkhanid age turned out to be an
era of impressive cultural achievement, especially near the end
when Ibn Battuta was there to bear witness to it. Like their steppe
cousins in Cairo, the Mongol rulers did not hesitate to commit
unspeakable barbarisms with one hand while with the other paying
out large sums to promote refined craft and learning. Just a year
after setting fire to Baghdad and a fair part of the stored up
knowledge of the Abbasid Caliphate, Hulegu founded an ob-
servatory at Maragheh in which Persian and Chinese scholars
collaborated to work out astronomical tables that would be of
immense importance to later generations. Ghazan executed his
enemies by having them cloven in half, but he took an avid
personal interest in the natural sciences and medicine.

It was notably under Ghazan and his two successors that urban
culture in Persia got back much of its old energy. To be sure, no
single Persian city rivaled Cairo. But in Tabriz, the premier
Mongol center, a great deal of monumental building was under-
taken, even the construction of whole new suburbs. Oljeitu Khan
founded a new capital at Sultaniya. The world of letters throve
again too. The Mongols never had much time for love poetry or
advanced theology, but they did appreciate practical science,
geography, and history. The master historian of the age was
Rashid al-Din, a Jewish convert to Islam who served as minister of
state (vizier) under three Ilkhans. During the reign of Oljeitu, he
completed his massive Collection of Histories, the first truly uni-
versal history of mankind ever written, or even imagined. The
work embraced not only the whole of the Islamic world but also
China, Byzantium, and even the recently civilized kingdoms of
western Europe.’

Rashid al-Din’s global vision was a reflection of an inter-
nationalist spirit at the Mongol court that reached even beyond the
Dar al-Islam. Taking a remarkably large-minded view of the
boundaries of civilization, the monarchs reigned over an
astonishing transmigration of ideas and technology that made

88 Persia and Iraq

Iikhanid culture an eclectic synthesis of Persian, Arabic, Turkish,
Chinese, and even Tibetan elements. Over the political bridge that
Genghis threw across the Asian grassland-sea marched hundreds of
Chinese engineers, scientists, doctors, artists, and propagators of
Buddhism seeking service and opportunity in Persia. A smaller
number of Persians visited China. Though direct communciation
between the two regions died down in the late thirteenth century when
the Ilkhans converted to Islam and their diplomatic relations with the
Peking Mongols deteriorated, Chinese cultural influences left en-
during marks on Persian miniature painting, calligraphy, and textile
and pottery design. In 1294 Gaykhatu Khan (1291-95) even intro-
duced block-printed paper money on Chinese inspiration, though the
Persians rejected this newfangled idea out of hand, resulting in a
temporary collapse of the commercial economy.®

The cosmopolitanism of the Ilkhanids, coupled with their enthusias-
tic adoption of everything Persian, also did much to restore circulation
on the routes of scholarship and craft linking Persian and Iraqi cities
with the rest of the Islamic world. Indeed the Mongol period witnessed
an important expansion of the Persian language as well as Irano
—Islamic styles in art and humane letters into both Turkish Anatolia
and India, where they increasingly set the standard of what polished
culture should be.

When the Mongol—Mamluk military struggle for Syria finally ended
about 1315, intellectual links were quicky restored between Cairo, the
new capital of Arab letters, and both the Arabic-speaking towns of
Iraq and the Persian cities of the Iranian plateau. In the central Islamic
lands Arabic and Persian continued to share the status of intellectual
linguae francae. Many important writers, such as the historian Rashid
al-Din, saw to it that their works were made available in both
languages.” Thus, when Ibn Battuta entered Iran, his first excursion
beyond the Arabic-speaking world, his inability to speak the native
tongue was no particular disadvantage as long as he kept to the
network of the learned, where bilingualism was common and where,
at the very least, the symbolic language of religious observance,
civilized manners, and Sunni erudition could always see him through.
Indeed, for an educated Muslim traveler with good urban con-
nections, it was almost as if the assault of the pagan Mongols had never
even happened.

Ibn Battuta left Mecca on 17 November 1326 (20 Dhu Il’Hijja 726) in
the company of the pilgrims returning to Iraq and the wider region of

Persia and Iraq 8&9

eastern Islam. This was the official caravan of the Ilkhanid state,
similar in organization to the Mamluk caravans sent from Damascus
and Cairo. He had the good fortune to travel under the formal
protection of the amir al-hajj, one Pehlewan Muhammad al-Hawih,
who paid out of his own purse the cost of hiring half a double camel
litter for the young man. Why should the amir, a favored official at
the court of the Ilkhan of Persia, take an interest in this 22-year-old
nonentity from Morocco? Part of the reason is that the caravan
commander commonly patronized scholarly personages in the
pilgrim company, especially if they were needy. Beyond that, Ibn
Battuta did develop something of a personal acquaintanceship with
the amir, as would be demonstrated in the following year. There
may be a further hint here of the lad’s natural flair for disarming
important people with his earnest piety and gregarious personality.
In any case the enclosed camel litter was a godsend of comfort, far
preferable to crossing the Arabian Peninsula on foot.

By Ibn Battuta’s reckoning the pilgrim train was enormous:
“Anyone who left the caravan for a natural want and had no mark
by which to guide himself to his place could not find it again for the
vast number of people.” But the enterprise was also as efficiently
organized as the Mamluk caravan from Syria had been. “Great
supplies of luxuries” were readily available, and the poorer hajjis
were entitled to free food, water, and medicine. “They used to
march during the night and light torches in front of the file of camels
and litters,” Ibn Battuta recalls, “so that you saw the countryside
gleaming with light and the darkness turned into radiant day.”

The route north was more or less the one that pilgrims had
followed ever since the early days of the Caliphate, when Zubayda,
wife of the illustrious Harun al-Rashid, endowed the construction
of a chain of water tanks and wells along the trail to keep the
caravans safely supplied. From Medina, where the company laid
over for six days, the track ran northeastward across the Nejd
plateau, through the oasis of Faid. then along the eastern edge of
the great Nafud sand desert. At a place called Wagqisa on the desert
edge of the Mesopotamian basin, greeting parties from the Iraqi city
of Kufa met the caravan with fresh provisions of flour, bread. dates.
and fruit. About six days later the column reached the Kufa region,
halting at al-Najaf (Mashhad ’Ali) just a few miles south of the
Euphrates. The entire journey from Mecca to Mesopotamia took
approximately 44 days.'”

Ibn Battuta rested at al-Najaf for a few days since it was the burial

90 Persia and Iraq

place of ‘Ali ibn Abi Talib, the fourth Caliph and son-in-law of the
Prophet. ’Ali’s grand mausoleum in the heart of the town was a
place venerated by all Muslims, but for the Twelver Shi'a, the
largest of the Shi'i sects in Islam, it was a center of holy
pilgrimage second only to Mecca. Though most of the population
of greater Iraq and Persia were still Sunni in the fourteenth
century, important Shi'i communities were scattered throughout
the Ilkhanid realm, with the largest concentrations in lower
Mesopotamia. '!

The theological breach between the two groups centered on the
Shi'i doctrine of the Imam, the leader-messiah descended from
"Ali, who would one day reveal himself and fill the earth with truth
and righteousness until the time appointed for the Last Judgement.
Twelve Imams in the hereditary line of ’Ali through his sons Hasan
and Husayn had ruled the early Shi’i community, which started out
as a dissident political “party” (the general meaning of the term
Shi'a) opposed to the majority leadership. The ’Alid Imams were
regarded by their followers as possessing infallible and esoteric
knowledge of the prophetic Revelation and as divine-right rulers
whose temporal supremacy had been usurped by the Umayyad
and Abbasid Caliphs. The twelfth Imam in the line, according to
the teachings of the “Twelver” variety of Shi’ism, disappeared in
the ninth century but did not die. One day he would return.
Sunnis, by contrast, believed that the meaning of the Koranic
revelation in relation to all apsects of both spiritual and mundane
experience was to be interpreted by the consensus of the com-
munity of believers, a unity collectively described in the four
schools of jurisprudence. Sunnis gave ’Ali a hallowed place in
Islamic history, but as a Caliph and a Companion of the Prophet,
not as the progenitor of a dynasty of theocrats. Shi’i law was not in
most respects significantly different from Sunni, and most of the
time the two groups managed to live in peace. Except during
surges of fanaticism on one side or the other, they treated one
another with simple suspicion and the common varieties of re-
ligious prejudice.

Ibn Battuta makes it abundantly clear that he had little time for
Shi'is, Twelver or otherwise. At several points in the Rihla he
takes righteous potshots at their beliefs or recounts disparaging
little anecdotes about their fanatical and misguided observances.
He invariably refers to them as “Rafidis,” or “Turncoats,” a term
of deprecation Sunnis commonly used. His intolerance may have

Persia and Iraq 91

been stiffened by the fact that the Maliki intellectual class in Morocco
was inclined to juristic and theological dogmatism, largely in reaction
to the anti-Maliki policies of the Almohads. In any case he did not
mix much with Shi’i scholars and deliberately avoided visiting certain
towns having predominantly Shi'l populations. He probably spent
only a few days in al-Najaf (just where he does not say), though in
the Rihla he gives a thorough and objective description of Ali’s
beautiful domed mausoleum. '*

From al-Najaf the pilgrim caravan continued on northward to
Baghdad, its terminus. But Ibn Battuta, apparently not in the mood
to see that city just yet, decided to make for Basra at the far southern
end of the Tigris-Euphrates delta. A troop of local Arabs was going
that way, so he hired a camel and joined them. Rather than taking a
direct route to Basra by following the course of the Euphrates, the
party first traveled due east along the northern fringe of the Great
Swamp, a region of marshland, creeks, and lakes that covered the
delta from the latitude of Kufa almost to the Persian Gulf.'?

In five days the caravan reached the city of Wasit. Ibn Battuta’s
companions remained there for three days in order to trade, so he
took the opportunity to make an overnight excursion to the village of
Umm ’Ubaida to visit the tomb of Shaykh Ahmad ibn al-Rifa’i, the
twelfth-century founder of the Sufi order with which he had become
affiliated during his stay in Jerusalem. At the zawiya of Umm
’"Ubaida he had the luck to meet one of the Shaykh’s descendants,
who was also visiting, and to be treated to a display of ecstatic
exercises for which the Rifa’i disciples were well known:

When the afternoon prayers had been said, drums and kettle-
drums were beaten and the [Sufi] brethren began to dance. After
this they prayed the sunset prayer and brought in the repast,
consisting of rice-bread, fish, milk, and dates. When all had eaten
and prayed the first night prayer, they began to recite their dhikr
[mystical litany] . . . They had prepared loads of firewood which
they kindled into flame, and went into the midst of it dancing;
some of them rolled in the fire, and others ate it in their mouths,
until finally they extinguished it entirely . . . Some of them will
take a large snake and bite its head with their teeth until they bite
it clean through.!*

Ibn Battuta was too much the sober urban scholar to go in for that
sort of religious frenzy, so a one-night sojourn at the lodge may have

92 Persia and Iraq

been quite enough for him. In any case he returned to Wasit to
find that his caravan had already departed. He set off on his own in
pursuit, perhaps a foolish thing to do in the Great Swamp, since a
group of Sufi brethren who had straggled behind the caravan on its
way to Wasit had been attacked and robbed by a band of Shi’i
marsh-dwellers. In a day or two, however, he safely caught up with
his party, which was now moving southward along a route gener-
ally parallel to the Tigris. Some time in the latter part of January
1327 the caravan reached Basra.'°

It is easy enough to understand why Ibn Battuta made a point of
seeing Basra. Any literate young man, even from the Far West,
would have known what this city had been six centuries earlier: the
veritable Athens of Islam where the classical civilization of the
Arabs had first been conceived and cast. It had been the home of
numerous early Muslim luminaries: theologians, philosophers,
poets, scientists, and historians. It had also been the laboratory
where the rules of classical Arabic grammar were worked out, the
rules by which educated men conversed and wrote and distin-
guished themselves from common folk. Though Baghdad super-
seded it in the ninth century as the intellectual capital of the
Arabs, Basra continued to prosper for several hundred years
owing to its status as chief port of the Caliphate on the Persian
Gulf.

The Mongols left the city alone when they conquered Lower
Iraq, but their assault on Baghdad and other Mesopotamian
towns, which produced a severe decline in agricultural and indus-
trial productivity, afflicted the economy of Basra as well. By the
time Ibn Battuta visited the town, it had shrunk to such an extent
that its beautiful grand mosque stood alone two miles outside the
inhabited area. For a scholar who knew his history there was an
even sadder testimony to decline than the deterioration of the
architecture. When he attended Friday worship in the mosque, he
was appalled to hear the preacher committing dreadful errors of
grammar in his sermon. “I was astonished at his conduct,” he
recalls, “and spoke of it to the gadi Hujjat al-Din, who said to me
‘In this town there is not a man left who knows anything of the
science of grammar.’”

Except for its thick forests of date-palms, the city had little to
recommend it that was not past and gone. Ibn Battuta must have
devoted most of his time there to visiting the mosque and the
graves of several of the early immortals of Arab letters, as well as

Persia and Iraq 93

some of the Companions of the Prophet. As usual the local Sunni
worthies, a small and undistinguished group, favored him with money,
clothes, and food. The IIkhanid governor also received him and gave
him presents. He probably stayed not more than a week or two. ip

From Basra he took passage on a sambuq, a small, lateen-rigged
boat common in the Mesopotamian niver trade, and sailed for ten
miles along the Ubulla canal, passing “through an uninterrupted
succession of fruit gardens and overshadowing palmgroves both to
right and left, with traders sitting in the shade of the trees, selling
bread, fish, dates, milk, and fruit.” The canal emptied into the Tigris
estuary, called the Shatt al-’Arab, which linked the region of Basra
with the gulf.’” Here, he transferred to a second vessel and sailed
overnight to Abadan, which in that century was a few miles from the
coast, though today it is more than twenty miles owing to the gradual
build-up of the alluvial delta. '*

While stopping at a small hospice in Abadan, he learned of a local
Sufi anchorite, who lived year round in the marsh and sustained
himself entirely on fish. He immediately went looking for this hermit
and found him seated in the shell of a ruined mosque. The shaykh gave
the young man the blessing he sought and even offered him a large fish
for his supper. Ibn Battuta recalls in the Rihla that he was deeply
moved by this meeting, to the point that “for a moment I entertained
the idea of spending the rest of my life in the service of this shaykh.”
Indeed, he seems to have had a recurring fascination for this sort of
uncompromising asceticism, probably a tug of the heart that many
gregarious, worldly men feel from time to time. At a number of
junctures in his career he experienced little crises of the soul, when he
thought of throwing up his life of adventure for the self-denying and
rapturous existence of a true Sufi disciple. In the end, however, what
he calls “the pertinacity of my spirit” won out, and he was back on the
road and into the world of affairs.

In this case he was back on the road in no time. Under the urging of
an acquaintance from Basra, he contrived to get to Baghdad, not by
turning around and heading back up the Tigris, but by making for the
mountains of Persian Luristan, which was decidedly in the wrong
direction. His plan was to make a long looping tour east of
Mesopotamia through the Persian region of Jibal, or what he calls Iraq
al-Ajami. Indeed it is at this point in the narrative that he speaks of his
“habit” of shunning any road he had already traveled by.

As it worked out, his next important destination was to be the city of
Isfahan in the Jibal province on the far side of the lofty Zagros

94 Persia and Iraq

Mountains. Apparently in the company of his Basran friend, he
went by ship from Abadan eastward along the delta coastline to
the port of Machul, now Bandar-e-Ma’shur, in the Iranian part of
Mesopotamia. There he hired a horse from some merchants and
headed northward across the plain of Khuzistan, a province of
marshes and sugar-cane fields. He followed a generally northward
route through the agricultural towns of Ramhormoz (Ramiz) and
Shushtar (Tustar), then turned westward to meet the Zagros,
which rose suddenly as a barricade of rock along the eastern rim of
the plain.

The mountain crags and pinnacles, which formed the natural
frontier between Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau, were in-
habited by fierce herding peoples called the Lurs. The Mongols
had subdued this country perfunctorily in Hulegu’s time, but
owing to its wild isolation from the centers of administration, they
left law and order in the hands of a client dynasty of tribal barons,
called atabegs. Ibn Battuta regarded some of the Lurs customs that
came to his attention as thoroughly brutish and heterodox, but the
atabeg and the little groups of literate men of the villages and
hospices treated him well and gave him the usual presents owing to
wayfarers.'? From Idhaj (or Malamir, and now Izeh), the
mountain capital of the atabegs, he advanced northeastward
through the frigid high passes of the Zagros (it was probably
March) and thence to the orchard city of Isfahan, which lay at the
western edge of the central plateau at an altitude of 4,690 feet. He
was now in the heart of Persia.

He found lodging in what seems to have been a Sufi center of
abundant proportions, possessing not only a mosque, a kitchen,
and rooms for disciples and travelers, but also a fine marble-paved
hammam, or bath. The local head of the zawiya, a Persian named
Qutb al-Din Husain, was also a shaykh of the Suhrawardiyya, one
of the largest mystical orders of the later Middle Period with
widespread affiliations in the eastern Islamic lands, including
India. One day the young visitor was looking out the window of his
room in the lodge and noticed a white khirqga, or patched Sufi’s
robe, spread out in the garden to dry. He recalls thinking to
himself that he would like to have one of them, just as he had
collected one from the Rifa’i shaykh in Jerusalem, as a symbol of
honorific connection with the Suhrawardiyya. In the next moment
Qutb al-Din abruptly entered his room and ordered a servant to
bring the robe, which he threw over his guest’s shoulders. Aston-

Persia and Iraq 95

ished, Ibn Battuta fell to kissing the shaykh’s feet, then, in his
impetuous way, begged if he might not have his blessed skull cap
as well. The request was granted forthwith. In the Rihla Ibn
Battuta takes pains to list the chain of authority (isnad) linking him
by virtue of this investiture with the twelfth-century founder of the
brotherhood. But as in the Jerusalem episode, he assumed no
obligation to pursue the Sufi way simply by accepting the shaykh’s
casual blessing on a God-fearing traveler.

He spent two weeks with Qutb al-Din in Isfahan, enjoying the
preserved watermelon and other fruits of the Isfahan plain laid out
at the zawiya’s table. At this point in history the city was not the
noble capital it had been under the Seljuk Turks and would be
again two centuries later under the Shi’i Safavids. Because of a sad
inclination among the inhabitants to engage in violent factional
rows, coupled with the turmoil of the early Mongol years, the city
was only beginning to recover some of its earlier vigor.*° Perhaps
dissatisfied with what the town had to show him of Persian culture,
Ibn Battuta decided to travel another 300 miles south to Shiraz,
chief city of the province of Fars.

This journey, accomplished in ten days, took him along one of
the historic trade routes of central Iran and through the central
region of the ancient Persian empire. Since it was probably about
mid April,” he followd the so-called summer road through the
Zagros foothills rather than the winter road which ran nearer the
high desert to the east.*? During the final days of the trip he
climbed through a series of blooming mountain valleys and thence
into the fertile, mile-high basin that sheltered Shiraz, the “Garden
City.”

The luck of Shiraz in the Middle Period was that the Mongol
monster had not been inclined to devour Fars province, the region
being too hot for steppe herdsmen and too far away from the main
Tatar centers in Azerbaijan. The city not only survived but opened
its gates to refugees from the north, and so, as with Cairo, its
intellectual life received a fillip from the arrival of well-educated
fugitives. Ibn Battuta was attracted to Shiraz partly because of its
reputation as the greatest center of Persian letters and partly
because it was a city where, according to his contemporary
Mustawfi, “most of the people strive after good works, and in
piety and obedience to the Almighty have attained a high degree
of godliness.”*? The city was sometimes called the Tower of Saints
(Burj-i-Awliya) because of the profusion of holy tombs. It was also

96 Persia and Iraq

one of the loveliest towns in all Islam, and still is. Ibn Battuta
remembers that “its inhabitants are handsome in figure and clean
in their dress. In the whole East there is no city except Shiraz
which approached Damascus in the beauty of its bazaars, fruit-
gardens and rivers.”

The young jurist wanted above all to meet the chief gadi of the
city, Majd al-Din, a famous Persian scholar especially admired
among Sunnis for having brilliantly defied the Shi’i IIkhan Oljeitu.
When this ruler converted to Shi’ism, according to the version of
the story recounted in the Rihla, he ordered that the khutba, the
praise formulas recited at the beginning of the Friday mosque
sermon, be changed throughout the land to exalt the name of ’Ali.
When the people of Shiraz refused to cooperate, he commanded
that Majd al-Din be executed by being thrown to a pack of
ferocious dogs trained to eat humans. But when the dogs were let
loose, Ibn Battuta relates, “they fawned on him and wagged their
tails before him without attacking him in any way.” The Ilkhan
was so astounded at the deliverance of this Muslim Daniel that he
played out the Darius role perfectly, prostrating himself at the
qadi’s feet, showering him with honors, and renouncing his errant
doctrine for the Sunni faith. Ibn Battuta’s ending to the story is a
bit artful, since we know from other sources that the most Oljeitu
did was to call off persecutions of Sunnis while remaining a loyal
Twelver until his death in 1316. Majd al-Din meanwhile held his
post throughout the reign of Abu Sa’id and for twenty years after
the collapse of the Mongol state.?*

Soon after arriving in Shiraz in the company of three unnamed
traveling companions, Ibn Battuta went to salute Majd al-Din, who
questioned him about his homeland and his travels. The shaykh
also offered him a small room in his college. Ibn Battuta does not
say how long he stayed in the city, but the general chronological
framework of the Persian tour would suggest that he remained
something less than two weeks, visiting the mosques and the tombs
of numerous Shirazi lights, including Abu ’Abdallah ibn Khafif,
one of the forefathers of Persian Sufism, and the renowned poet
Sa’di, who was buried in a lovely garden outside the city.7”

Since there were no more specially interesting towns to visit
between Shiraz and the seaports of the gulf, Ibn Battuta resolved
to turn west and head once again in the general direction of
Baghdad. His route took him through two high passes of the
southern Zagros and the little town of Kazarun, then northwest-

Persia and Iraq 97

ward into the Khuzistan plain. Somewhere north of the port of
Machul he crossed his outbound trail of some three months
earlier. Advancing once again into the Mesopotamian marshlands,
he forded the Tigris at an unidentified point perhaps about
midway between Wasit and Basra. He finally arrived at Kufa on
the Euphrates five or six weeks after leaving Shiraz.?° He was now
back on the main pilgrimage road. From Kufa, he continued
upriver past the ruins of ancient Babylon and the Shi’i towns of al-
Hilla and Karbala. About the first week of June 1327 he reached
the Tigris and the city of the Caliphs.*’

He gives the definite impression in the Rihla that he was
traveling to Iraq primarily to see Baghdad. But he was under no
illusions about the sad state of the city in his own time. He went
there to honor its past and perhaps to walk among the ruins along
the west bank of the river, imagining the ghosts of the divines and
jurisprudents who had lived there five centuries earlier, founding
the moral and intellectual code of civilization by which his own
generation still lived. In the Rihla he introduces his description of
the city with a set of perfunctory praise formulas (“of illustrious
rank and supreme pre-eminence”) but then goes on to reiterate
the mournful admission of his twelfth-century predecessor Ibn
Jubayr that “her outward lineaments have departed and nothing
remains of her but the name . . . There is no beauty in her that
arrests the eye, or summons the busy passer-by to forget his
business and to gaze.”

It was not in fact as bad as all that. As with the buildup of silt in
the irrigation canals, the city’s waning had been gradual. in most
periods almost imperceptible. Despite Turkish military coups,
sectarian violence, urban gang warfare, and the menace of floods
pouring over neglected dykes, Baghdad retained a good share of
both its international commercial prosperity and its residual pre-
Stige as capital of the Caliphs long after the glorious eighth and
ninth centuries. Even the rampaging Mongols left many of its
public buildings standing and quite a few of its people alive. In fact
Hulegu’s army had barely finished the sacking when he ordered, in
typical fashion, that a vigorous restoration program should begin.
Under an administration of local Arab and Persian officials, the
city quickly pulled itself up to the status of provincial capital of
Mesopotamia.

Baghdad was no longer an important stop on a Middle Eastern
study tour and Ibn Battuta found most of its numerous colleges in

98 Persia and Iraq

ruins. But teaching continued, notably in the Nizamiya, the
eleventh-century prototype of the four-sided madrasa, and in the
Mustansiriya, a college built in 1234 to provide professorial chairs
and lecture rooms for all four of the major juridical schools.7* The
Mosque of the Caliphs, one of the great congregational mosques
located on the east bank of the river, had been burned down in the
Mongol assault, but Ibn Battuta found it fully rebuilt and offering
advanced studies. Although he stayed only two or three weeks in
the city, he found time to go to the mosque to hear a set of lectures
on one of the important compilations of Prophetic Traditions.

If Baghdad’s intellectual life had had more to offer, he might
have been content to remain there throughout the summer,
awaiting the departure of the Aajj caravan in mid-September. Any
traveler less obdurate than he would probably have been thankful
for a long rest at this point before starting another trek across the
Arabian waste. But unexpectedly, a new adventure suddenly came
his way, and it would have been entirely out of character for him to
pass it up.

He arrived in Baghdad to learn that the Ilkhan himself was
currently in residence, perhaps having wintered there as the rulers
sometimes did to escape the cold of Azerbaijan. Abu Sa’id was
then making preparations to return to the north, most likely to
Sultaniya, the capital founded by his father Oljeitu. The Ilkhan
always traveled in the company of a huge retinue, called in Arabic
the mahalla, or “camp,” which was in effect the entire royal court
in motion: several amirs and their mounted troops, myriad re-
ligious and administrative personnel, and a small army of servants
and slaves. In addition, the ruler’s wives and favorites, called the
khatuns, all had their own suites of bodyguards and functionaries.
Ibn Battuta jumped at the chance to tag along with the royal
procession, “on purpose,” he explains, “to see the ceremonial
observed by the king of al-’Iraq in his journeying and encamping,
and the manner of his transportation and travel.” Either before
leaving Baghdad or en route with the mahalla, he managed to
secure the patronage of ’Ala al-Din Muhammad, one of the
Iikhan’s leading generals.

Abu Sa’id, the last of the Mongols of Persia, ascended the
throne in 1316 at the age of twelve. He was in fact about a year
younger than Ibn Battuta, who describes him as being “the most
beautiful of God’s creatures in features, and without any growth
on his cheeks.” The traveler also admired him for his civilized

Persia and Iraq 99

qualities. He was not only a committed Sunni, but a generous,
pious, and tolerant one. According to the fifteenth-century
Egyptian writer Taghribirdi, he was “an illustrious and brave
prince, with an imposing aspect, generous and gay.”’” He wrote
both Arabic and Persian with a beautiful hand, played the lute,
composed songs and poems, and, in the latter part of his reign, even
lightened some of the tax load on the peasantry. Whereas several of
his Mongol predecessors were confirmed alcholics and some of
them died of the consequences, he prohibited the use of spirits in
the kingdom in accord with the Sacred Law — though with what
success we do not know. There seems to have been little in his
character that recalled his ancestor Genghis Khan. He represents
rather the definitive conversion of the Ilkhanid state to polished
Persian culture. Perhaps if he had reigned longer, he would have
been a great builder like his contemporary al-Nasir Muhammad of
Egypt. As it was, the political foundations he laid during his last
eight years were not strong enough to ensure the survival of the
regime, which utterly collapsed at his death in 1335, leaving Persia
to face the remainder of the century in fragmentation and war.”

In the summer of 1327, however, the dynasty looked vigorous
enough to the Moroccan traveler, when he witnessed the nosiy,
fearsome extravaganza of a Mongol Khan on the march:

Each of the amirs comes up with his troops, his drums, and his
standards, and halts in a position that has been assigned to him,
not a step further, either on the right wing or on the left wing.
When they have all taken up their positions and their ranks are
set in perfect order, the king mounts, and the drums, trumpets
and fifes are sounded for the departure. Each of the amirs
advances, salutes the king, and returns to his place; then the
chamberlains and the marshals move forward ahead of the king,
and are followed by the musicians. These number about a
hundred men, wearing handsome robes, and behind them comes
the sultan’s cavalcade. Ahead of the musicians there are ten
horsemen, with ten drums carried on slings round their necks,
and five [other] horsemen carrying five reed-pipes . . . On the
sultan’s right and left during his march are the great amirs, who
number about fifty.

Ibn Battuta may have had only a general notion of where he
might be going when he left Baghdad with this mahalla in the latter

100 Persia and Iraq

part of June.*' In his description of the journey, he does not name
any of the stations but states only that he traveled in the company
of the Ilkhan for ten days. The king was almost certainly heading
for the new capital of Sultaniya (172 miles northwest of Tehran),
probably following the trans-Persian “Khurasan Road” by way of
Kermanshah, the central Zagros, and Hamadan.** Somewhere
near Hamadan the amir ’Ala al-Din Muhammad, Ibn Battuta’s
patron, was suddenly ordered to leave the mahalla and proceed
northward to Tabriz, apparently on urgent business of state.*? He
almost certainly traveled with a lean, fast-riding detachment, and
Ibn Battuta was given leave to go along. Again, his route to Tabriz
is a mystery, but the party may have taken the old Abbasid high
road from Hamadan northwestward through the mountains, pass-
ing east of Lake Urmiya.** Meanwhile, Abu Sa’id and his suite
lumbered on toward Sultaniya.

Ibn Battuta could count it a stroke of good fortune to have this
unexpected visit to Tabriz, for it was the premier city of the
Persian Mongols and, at just this moment in history, one of the
key commercial centers of the Eurasian world. Located in a grassy
plain dominated to the south by the 12,000 foot pinnacle of Mount
Sahand, Tabriz had been nothing more than the main town of the
region until the Turco—Mongol herdsmen flooded into Azerbaijan.
This migration produced a dramatic shift of both military power
and population growth away from Mesopotamia to the high
northwestern rim of Persia. The local notability had been wise
enough to greet the Mongol invaders with the keys to the city, thus
offering the Ilkhans the convenience of establishing their first
capital in a town that their fellow Tatars had not first demolished.

The anchoring of the Mongol state and the revival of trade
found Tabriz rather than Baghdad the main junction of trans-
Persian routes linking the Mediterranean, Central Asia, and the
Indian Ocean. The city also attracted colonies of Genoese,
Venetians, and other south Europeans, who responded fast to
Mongol tolerance and internationalism by advancing in from their
bases on the Eastern Mediterranean and Black Sea coasts. Even
the Ilkhans who had converted to Islam observed the Pax
Mongolica tradition of open trade and travel. Abu Sa’id, for
example, signed a commercial treaty with Venice in 1320, and
though Ibn Battuta does not mention the presence of Europeans in
Tabriz in connection with his visit, we know some were there.*>

The Ilkhan Ghazan made Tabriz worthy of the cultivated

Persia and Iraq 101

Persian gentlemen who staffed his secretariat by beautifying the
town and ordering the construction of an entirely new suburb of
grand buildings, including a mosque, a madrasa, a hospice, a
library, a hospital, a residence for religious and state officials, and
his own mausoleum — none of which has survived to the
present.°° Around the end of the fourteenth century Tabriz had a
population of 200,000 to 300,000 people.*’ Oljeitu established his
own new capital at Sultaniya, and Abu Sa’id honored the change.
But Sultaniya was the Ilkhanids’ Brazilia. The court and bureau-
cratic elite resisted mightily the notion of leaving comfortable
Tabriz, which remained the far greater city of the two.*8

Ibn Battuta, unfortunately, had little time to take in the sights of
the town. On the very morning after he arrived there with the
Mongol envoys, ’Ala al-Din received orders to rejoin the Ilkhan’s
mahalla. The Moroccan apparently decided there was nothing for
it but to stick with his benefactor if he were to be assured of getting
back to Baghdad in time for the hajj departure. And so off he went
after a single night and without meeting any of the city’s scholars.
He did, however, manage to squeeze in a look around. He lodged
in a magnificent hospice, where he dined, he tells us, on meat,
bread, rice, and sweets. In the morning he toured the great bazaar
(“One of the finest bazaars I have seen the world over”) where the
international merchantry displayed the wares of all Eurasia.

He undoubtedly chafed at having to leave Tabriz so pre-
cipitately. Yet he was to be unexpectedly compensated soon
enough. For when he returned to the mahalla several days later,
"Ala al-Din arranged for him to meet the IIkhan himself. The
audience in the royal tent was probably brief, but Abu Sa’id
questioned the visitor about his country, gave him a robe and a
horse, and even ordered that a letter of introduction be sent to the
governor of Baghdad with instructions to supply the young faqih
with camels and provisions for the journey to the Hijaz. There was
nothing very special about a pious ruler giving charity to a scholar
on his way to the hajj. And Ibn Battuta, for his part, has relatively
little to say in the Rihla about Abu Sa’id and his court compared,
for example, to the dozens of pages he devotes to the Sultan of
Delhi. But, at the time, the experience was significant if only as
more evidence of those combined qualities of good breeding,
piety, and charm which smoothed the young traveler’s way into
the presence of the high and powerful.

The Rihla is silent on the itinerary and schedule back to

102 Persia and Iraq

Baghdad, including his traveling companions. The entire round
trip could have taken as little as 35 days, since he journeyed a good
part of the way with a fast-moving royal envoy. He might then
have been back in Baghdad as early as about mid-July.*”

He still had two months to wait for the hajj caravan, which
traditionally left Baghdad on 1 Dhu I-Qa’da, or in that year 18
September. Since he had come back from his Tabriz expedition so
quickly he “thought it a good plan” to squeeze in a tour, a rather
uneventful one as it turned out, of the upper Mesopotamian reg-
ion, known as the Jazira. He traveled northward along the Tigris
to the important Kurdish city of Mosul, then on to Cizre (Jazirat
ibn "Umar) in modern Turkey near the Iraqi border. This stretch
generally replicated the route taken by Marco Polo 5S years earlier
on his outbound journey from the Levant to China and by Ibn
Jubayr in 1184, from whose book the Rihla lifts most of its des-
criptive material on the Tigris towns. From Cizre, Ibn Battuta
made a loop of about 360 miles through the plateau country west
of the river. He got as far as the fortress city of Mardin (which is in
modern Turkey), then doubled back by way of Sinjar (and a
corner of modern Syria) to Mosul. His hosts along the way in-
cluded the IIkhanid governor at Mosul (who lodged him and
footed his expenses), the chief gadi at Mardin, and a Kurdish
mystic whom he met in a mountain-top hermitage near Sinjar and
who gave him some silver coins which he kept in his possession
until he lost them to bandits in India several years later.

When he returned to Mosul he found one of the regional
“feeder” caravans ready to depart for Baghdad to join the main
assembly of pilgrims. He also had the fortune to meet an aged holy
woman named Sitt Zahida, whom he describes as a descendant of
the Caliphs. She had made the hajj numerous times and had in her
service a group of Sufi disciples. Ibn Battuta joined her little
company and enjoyed her protection while traveling back along
the Tigris. The acquaintance was sadly brief, for she died later
during the Arabian journey and was buried in the desert.

In Baghdad again, Ibn Battuta sought out the governor and
received from him, as ordered by Abu Sa‘id, a camel litter and
sufficient food and water for four people. Luckily, the amir al-hay
was the same Pehlewan Muhammad al-Hawih who had looked
after him on the previous year’s journey. “Our friendship was
strengthened by this,” he recalls, “and I remained under his pro-
tection and favored by his bounty, for he gave me even more than

Persia and Iraq 103

had been ordered for me.” Ibn Battuta might then have expected
to return to Mecca in style except that at Kufa he fell sick with
diarrhea, the illness persisting until after he reached his des-
tination. During the long journey he had to be dismounted from
his litter many times a day, though the amir gave instructions that
he be cared for as well as possible. By the time he arrived in Mecca
he was so weak that he had to make the tawaf and the sa’y
mounted on one of the amir’s horses. On the tenth of Dhu I-Hijja,
however, while camped at Mina for the sacrifice, he began to feel
better.

Perhaps after this punishing experience he deduced that he
needed a rest. In a year’s time he had traveled more than 4,000
miles, crossed the Zagros Mountains four times and the Arabian
desert twice, visited most of the great cities of Iraq and western
Persia, and met scholars, saints, gadis, governors, an atabeg, and
even a Mongol king. At this point he might have sat against a pillar
of the Haram and written a respectable rihla about nothing more
than his travels of 1325-27. The trip to Persia, however, would
appear in retrospect as little more than a trial run for the heroic
marches that were to follow. What he needed in the fall of 1327 was
an interval for rest, prayer, and study. Then, spiritually refreshed,
he would be off again.

Notes

1. V.A. Riasonovsky, Fundamental Principles of Mongol Law (Tientsin,
1937), p. 88.

2. Juvaini, The History of the World Conqueror, trans. J. A. Boyle, 2 vols.
(Cambridge. Mass.. 1958), vol. 1, p. 152.

3. John M. Smith, “Mongol Manpower and Persian Population,” Journal of the
Economic and Social History of the Orient (1975): 291.

4. Edward G. Browne, A Literary History of Persia, 4 vols. (Cambridge,
England, 1929-30), vol. 2, p. 439.

5. Hamd-Allah Mustawfi, The Geographical Part of the Nuzhat al-Qulub,
trans. G. Le Strange (Leiden, 1919), p. 34.

6. D.O. Morgan argues that by the early fourteenth century a significant
number of Turco-Mongols were giving up nomadism for proprietorship of
agricultural estates acquired in the form of land grants (iqtas) from the Ilkhan,
thereby planting their social roots in Persian soil. “The Mongol Armies in Persia,”
Der Islam 56 (1979): 81-96.

7. See Rashid al-Din, The Successors of Genghis Khan, trans. John A. Boyle
(New York, 1971); and John A. Boyle, “Rashid al-Din: The First World
Historian,” in The Mongol World Empire 1206-1370 (London, 1977), pp. 19-26.

8. E. Ashtor, A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle
Ages (Berkeley, 1976), p. 257.

104 Persia and Iraq

9. Rashid al-Din, Successors of Genghis Khan, p. 6.

10. Since IB gives all the stations on his trip from Mecca to al-Najaf, no apparent
problems arise with Hrbek’s estimate of 44 days (Hr, p. 427). For this section of the
narrative IB once again draws heavily on Ibn Jubayr’s descriptions of the route and
halting places.

11. A. Bausani, “Religion under the Mongols,” in J.A. Boyle (ed.), The
Cambridge History of Iran (Cambridge, England, 1968), vol. 5, pp. 538-47.

12. IB does not mention the length of this stay in al-Najaf. Hrbek (Hr, p. 428)
suggests three to five days on the speculative grounds that he would not have
tarried long in a Shi’i town.

13. G. Le Strange, The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate (Cambridge, England,
1905), pp. 24-85. The author describes the complex topography of the Tigris -
Euphrates basin in Abbasid times and later, stressing the fact that the course of the
rivers and tributary streams and canals have changed repeatedly over the centuries.

14. For clarity of meaning I have changed Gibb’s translation of the Arabic
al-fugara’ (D&S, vol. 2, p. 5) from “poor brethren” (Gb, vol. 2, p. 273) to “Sufi
brethren.”

15. Hrbek’s estimate of the chronology (Hr, pp. 428-29) is based on com-
putations of distances and traveling times from other Islamic sources.

16. This is Hrbek’s guess (Hr, p. 429) based on the idea that when IB sojourned
in a spot for a substantial length of time, he always noted it.

17. Le Strange (Lands, pp. 46-49) describes the canal system as it existed about
that time. Also W. Barthold, An Historical Geography of Iran, trans. Svat Soucek,
ed. with an introduction by C. E. Bosworth (Princeton, N.J., 1984), pp. 203-05.

18. Ibid., pp. 48-49.

19. IB’s description of the trip through the Zagros presents serious chronological
difficulties. He passed through this region a second time in 1347 on his way back to
North Africa. His remarks on the season, on the identity of the atabeg, and on
certain events at the princely court make it reasonably clear that almost all of the
descriptive information he associates with the 1327 trip actually pertains to the later
one. The same is likely true concerning his personal experiences, notably a bout
with fever. Both Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, p. 288n, 290n) and Hrbek (Hr, pp. 429-31)
agree that in the Rihla the two trips are confused.

20. “Isfahan,” EI,, vol. 4, p. 102.

21. Hrbek (Hr, pp. 431-33) rejects the Rihla’s statement that IB got his khirga
from Qutb al-Din at Shiraz on 7 May 1327, since he could not possibly have reached
Baghdad during the month Rajab (23 May-21 June 1327), a period when he himself
asserts he was in that city. Hrbek suggests that owing to a lapse of memory or a
copyist’s mistake, the date of the investiture should perhaps read 14 Jumada I
rather that 14 Jumada II, that is, 7 April rather than 7 May. If he left Isfahan in the
earlier part of April, he would have had time to reach Baghdad during Rajab.

22. Edward G. Browne, A Year amongst the Persians (London, 1893), pp. 220-
62; Le Strange, Lands, p. 297.

23. Mustawfi, Nuzhat al-Qulub, pp. 113-14.

24. Gb, vol. 2, pp. 300n, 304n.

25. IB also visited Majd al-Din in 1347 while en route from India to Syria. Hrbek
suggests ten days for the visit in 1327, though the Rihla presents a good deal of
confusion between the first and second stays. Hr, pp. 433-34; Gb, vol. 2, p. 301n.

26. Hrbek’s calculations of the Persian chronology are speculative since IB
provides only three fixed dates for the entire period of travel from Mecca to
Baghdad. The long journey from Shiraz to Baghdad is especially troublesome as
routes and stations are extremely vague. Hrbek suggests 35-40 days for this
itinerary (Hr, p. 434).

27. Hrbek’s estimate (Hr, p. 434), is in accord with IB’s statement that he was in
the city during the month of Rajab.

Persia and Iraq 105

28. “Masdjid,” EI,, vol. 3, p. 354.

29. Quoted in Henry M. Howorth, History of the Mongols, 3 vols. (London,
1876-88), vol. 3, p. 624.

30. At the time IB was visiting Persia, the young IIkhan was under the political
domination of the Amir Choban, who held a position at court tantamount to mayor
of the palace. Shortly after IB left Persia, however, Abu Sa’id abruptly and
ruthlessly eliminated Choban and two of the commander’s sons and took full
charge of his kingdom. IB’s account of the fall of the Choban family is one of the
few historical sources on these events. See J. A. Boyle, “Dynastic and Political
History of the Il-Khans” in Boyle, Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 5, pp. 406-13.

31. Hrbek (Hr, p. 437) suggests a June departure.

32. Mustawfi, the fourteenth-century geographer and historian, names the
stations on the Baghdad-to-Khurasan high road in Mongol times. Le Strange,
Lands, pp. 61, 227-28.

33. Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, p. 344n) suggests that “Ala al-Din probably got the order to
go to Tabriz near Hamadan, calculated on the ten days already traveled from
Baghdad.

34. Le Strange, Lands, pp. 229-30.

35. W. Heyd, Histoire du commerce du Levant au Moyen-Age, 2 vols. (Leipzig.
1936), vol. 2, pp. 124-25.

36. “Tabriz,” EI,, vol. 4, p. 586.

37. I. P. Petrushevskey, “The Socio-Economic Condition of Iran under the Il-
Khans” in Boyle, Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 5, p. 507.

38. “Tabriz,”, EI,, vol. 4, p. 586.

39. IB states that when he got back to Baghdad he still had more than two
months to go before the departure of the Aajj caravan. If it left at the normal time,
about 1 Dhu I-Qa’da (18 September 1327), we can infer in general when the Tabriz
excursion ended. Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, p. 346n) suggests it was before the end of June.
Hrbek (Hr, pp. 436-37) offers 1 July or later. He also argues for a fast trip to Tabriz
and back on the grounds that he was traveling part of the way with a royal official in
a hurry.

6 The Arabian Sea

God is He who has subjected to you the sea, that the ships
may run on it at His commandment, and that you may
seek His bounty; haply so you will be thankful. !

The Koran, Sura XLV

In the Rihla Ibn Battuta briefly describes a residence in Mecca of
about three years, from September 1327 to the autumn of 1330. In
fact, the overall chronological pattern of his travels from 1327 to
1333 suggests that he lived in the city only about one year, taking
the road again in 1328.” In either case he spent an extended period
in the sacred city, living as a mujawir, or scholar-sojourner. “I led
a most agreeable existence,” he recalls in the Rihla, “giving myself
up to circuits, pious exercises and frequent performances of the
Lesser Pilgrimage.” During this period, or at least the first year, he
lodged at the Muzaffariya madrasa, an endowment of a late sultan
of the Yemen located near the western corner of the Haram.’ Asa
pilgrim-in-residence he had no trouble making ends meet on the
charity of alms-givers and learned patrons. The imam of the
Hanafi community, he reports, was “the most generous of the
jurists of Mecca,” running up an annual debt of forty or fifty
thousand dirhams dispensing alms to mujawirs and indigent
travelers. The young Moroccan’s special benefactor appears to
have been an esteemed North African jurist known as Khalil. This
sage was the Maliki gadi of Mecca at the time and the imam of the
pilgrimage rites. While Ibn Battuta was living at the Muzaffariya,
the shaykh had bread and other comestibles sent to him every day
following the afternoon prayer.

The Rihla condenses Ibn Battuta’s residence into a few brief
paragraphs and has much less to say about his own experiences
than about the identities of various personages arriving in the haj
caravans. Muslim readers of the narrative would not of course
have to be given an elaborate account of how a sojourner passed
his time in the Holy City. It was taken for granted that a pious man
would lead a placid life of prayer, devotion, fellowship, and

106

The Arabian Sea 107

Map 6: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Arabia and East Africa,
1328-30 (1330-32)

co 7

" Sstanan

acorn aneweeee Probable itinerary
@vateneepaausen duble—Sen’‘a (doubtful pa

108 The Arabian Sea

learning. It is curious nevertheless that Ibn Battuta makes no
mention of having undertaken courses of study with any of the
important professors. He says nothing of books learned or ijazas
collected as he does in connection with his earlier and briefer stay
in Damascus. But we may assume that he attended lectures on law
and other subjects in the Haram or the colleges round about it.4

The Haram was the central teaching institution in Mecca, that is
to say, the place where the greatest number of classes gathered
each day.” The leading ‘ulama of the city controlled the right to
teach there, preventing any literate stranger from simply walking
in and setting up a class. Only after a scholar’s knowledge and
reputation had been adequately examined could he set down his
carpet or cushion in an assigned place in the colonnades, a spot he
might then have the right to occupy for the entire teaching year, if
not his lifetime. The professor always lectured facing the Ka’ba,
the students ranged in a circle around him, those behind sitting in
very close so they might catch every word. The size of classes
varied considerably, as they do in any modern university, de-
pending on the subject being studied and the master’s fame.
Anyone was free to listen in, and around the outer fringes of the
circle people came and went as they pleased. A class usually lasted
about two hours, including reading of a text, commentary on it,
and questions.

The teaching day started early, and if Ibn Battuta planned to
attend the first lecture of the morning he would be in the Haram
right after the prayer of first light when the lesson circles began to
assemble. In the hours of the dawn, classes met in the open court
around the Ka’ba, but when the Arabian sun loomed over the east
wall of the mosque they quickly retreated into the shadow of the
colonnades. The most important teaching went on during the cool
hours of the morning and late afternoon. But circles might be seen
in the mosque at any time of day, applying themselves to the
religious sciences or the auxiliary subjects of grammar, elocution,
calligraphy, logic, or poetics. Even in the late evening between the
sunset and night prayers a professor might squeeze in an additional
dictation or commentary. On Fridays most classes recessed, the
community devoting itself to prayer and the hearing of the con-
gregational sermon.

Ibn Battuta’s serious academic work would have taken place
during the first seven months of the year, beginning in mid
Muharram when the pilgrim throng had departed. These were the

The Arabian Sea 109

tranquil, slow-paced months in the life of the town, when a young
scholar might study in leisure, extending his knowledge of the
shari’a, learning some fine points of grammar, or perhaps
penetrating more deeply the spiritual mysteries of Sufism. In the
eighth month (Sha’ban) the curriculum shifted to inspirational and
didactic talks on the approaching month of fasting. With the
arrival of Ramadan the regular teaching year came to an end. In
the tenth and eleventh months (Shawwal and Dhu 1’Qa’da)
lectures were given on the subject of the hajj and how to perform it
properly. But as the Day of Standing approached, the influx of
pilgrims, chanting and chattering, made public lecturing pro-
gressively impractical. Only when the crowds drifted away in the
first weeks of the new year would the academic cycle begin once
again.

As little as Ibn Battuta reveals about his months of con-
templative immobility, there is little doubt that he became better
educated, mainly, one supposes, in the corpus of Maliki
jurisprudence. The depth of his education should not of course be
overstated. He never became a jurist of first rank, and his
judgeship in the Sultanate of Delhi was, as we shall see, a type of
sinecure. But he also benefited from his sojourn by the fact that
any individual who was known to have lived in the Holy City for an
extended period commanded a degree of prestige not accorded the
ordinary pilgrim who simply came and went. A veteran mujawir
was credited with exemplary devotion to God and to His House.
In a more practical light, a season or more in Mecca gave him the
chance to make friends with all sorts of literate and influential
people from distant countries, associations on which he might
draw for hospitality over the ensuing two decades.

When Ibn Battuta left Mecca after the hajj of 1328 (1330), his
expressed intention was to vist the Yemen. He says nothing in the
Rihla about plans to cross the equator into tropical Africa, or
climb the mountains of Oman, or visit the pearl fisheries of the
Persian Gulf. Yet he was already accustomed to finding himself in
places he never intended to go. It is just possible that in Mecca he
had heard reports of well-paying opportunities for foreign scholars
at the royal court of Delhi and that he was already thinking of
making his way to India in order to offer his services. The obvious
way to get there was to go to the Yemen first, then take ship for
Gujarat on the northwest coast of India. As it turned out, he went

110 The Arabian Sea

no further east than the Gulf of Oman on this adventure, delaying
his journey to India another two years.

Whatever his long-range plans may have been in 1328 (1330), he
left Mecca and headed west to the coast following the pilgrimage
events. He took two days getting to Jidda, the port of Mecca, where
a motley fleet of Red Sea craft waited to ferry pilgrims across to
’Aydhab or transport them down to Aden in the Yemen from where
they would board bigger ships bound for the Persian Gulf, Africa,
and India. Experienced caravaner though he was, this was to be his
first real sea voyage. He could hardly have been cheered by that
prospect when, reaching Jidda harbor, he found the profit-minded
captains loading passengers, to use Ibn Jubayr’s phrase, “like
chickens crammed in a coop.” In fact, a Meccan sharif, a brother of
the two ruling princes and a man certainly worth knowing, invited
the young faqgih to accompany him to the Yemen. But upon
discovering that space on the sharif’s vessel would be shared with a
number of camels, Ibn Battuta promptly declined the proposal and
went looking elsewhere. He finally found passage on a jalba,
probably a standard two-masted ship of modest proportions used
commonly in the Red Sea trade.°

Ibn Battuta’s refusal to set sail in the company of a small herd of
dromedaries was none too cautious. The Red Sea was the most
relentlessly dangerous of the waters on which the Mediterranean-
to-China connection depended. Coral reefs lined both shores,
shoals lay lurking in unknown places, and currents were irregular.
Added to these hazards were the perils of the Saharan—Arabian
desert which the Red Sea bisected: sandstorms, unendurable heat,
and an absence of fresh water along most of the shore. If a ship went
aground and the passengers managed to struggle ashore, they then
faced the likelihood of perishing of thirst or being robbed and killed
by pirate-bedouins, who waited patiently for just such accidents to
occur.

The ships that braved this unfriendly sea could not have inspired
much confidence in a landlubber like Ibn Battuta. Not only were
Red Sea vessels usually small and overcrowded: like all Indian
Ocean ships in that age, their hulls were constructed of wooden
planks (usually of teak) laid end to end and stitched together with
cords of coconut or palm fiber. Iron nails or bolts, which held
together ships of the Mediterranean in the fourteenth century, were
not used at all, and no ribbing or framework was installed to give the
hull additional strength. Though stitched hulls may have proven

The Arabian Sea 111

more pliant in surf or in sudden contact with submerged rocks,
Red Sea craft were fair weather vessels. Their pilots cast anchor at
night, and when the weather looked bad they ran for port. “Their
parts are conformable weak and unsound in structure,” remarks
Ibn Jubayr on the jalbas of ’Aydhab. “Glory to God who contrives
them in this fashion and who entrusts men to them.”’ On the other
hand, experienced pilots had the measure of their ships, they knew
every inch of the coast, and they could smell a storm coming long
before it hit. “We observed the art of these captains and the
mariners in the handling of their ships through the reefs,” con-
tinues Ibn Jubayr. “It was truly marvelous. They would enter the
narrow channels and manage their way through them as a cavalier
manages a horse that is light on the bridle and tractable.”®

Though Ibn Battuta’s pilot, a Yemeni of Ethiopian origin, was
probably one of these old salts, no display of good seamanship
could reverse the fact that it was the wrong time of year to be
sailing south from Jidda with any expectation of making a quick
run to a Yemeni port. In the northern half of the Red Sea the
winds are northerly or northwesterly the year round, and between
May and September they blow as far south as the Strait of Bab al-
Mandeb. In those months commercial shippers normally planned
to embark from Jidda or ’Aydhab in order to catch a favoring wind
all the way to Aden. During the rest of the year, however, the
winds were southeasterly from the strait to a latitude not far south
of Jidda. If, as we suggest, Ibn Battuta left Mecca shortly after the
hajj of 1328, the southwesterlies had already blown up south of
Jidda. And sure enough: “We traveled on this sea with a favoring
wind for two days, but thereafter the wind changed and drove us
off the course which we had intended. The waves of the sea
entered in amongst us in the vessel, and the passengers fell
grievously sick.”

Sailing on the tack across the open sea but falling away to
leeward, the pilot finally landed at a promontory on the African
coast called Ras Abu Shagara (Ras Dawa’ir) whose location is not
far south of Jidda.” It was a common occurrence for ships crossing
the Red Sea to miss their intended port either north or south and
be forced to put in at roadsteads along the desert shore. Here, the
Beja nomads of the Red Sea Hills made it their business to hire out
camels and guides to lead travelers to a port, or, if it suited their
fancy, to seize their possessions, plunder their ship, and leave
them to die in the wilderness.'° It seems likely that Ibn Battuta’s

112 The Arabian Sea

captain was blown into shore by the storm and could not get out
again with any hope of beating southward. In the event, the Beja
were right on hand, and fortunately for the Moroccan and his
seasick mates their intentions were honorable. Camels were ren-
ted and the company proceeded southward along the coast to the
small Beja port of Suakin.

There, Ibn Battuta found another ship, which managed to get
out of port and make for Arabia. After sailing to windward for six
days, he finally reached the coast at a latitude barely south of
Suakin’s. Leaving his ship behind once again, he traveled 30 miles
inland to the agricultural district of Hali (Haly), located in the
coastal region known as Asir. He had already made acquaintance
with the tribal ruler of Hali when they traveled together to Jidda
after the hajj. He spent several days as the chieftain’s guest, taking
time also to visit a noted ascetic and joining the local Sufi brethren
in prayers and recitation of litanies.

Back on the coast again, he boarded one of his host’s own
vessels, which took him southward to a little port along the
Yemeni coast.'' From there he proceeded overland across the arid
coastal plain to Zabid, chief city of lowland Yemen.'”

After enduring the steaming cheerlessness of a Red Sea voyage
for several weeks, his journey into the interior of Yemen must
have seemed a happy relief, almost a reminder of home. Like
Morocco, the Yemen was a land of geographical extremes.
Terrain, soil, altitude, and temperature were to be experienced in
profuse variety; almost any sort of vegetable or fruit could be
grown in one subregion or another. The coastal strip fronting the
Red Sea was dry and grim, but the highlands were temperate and
green, utterly contradicting the usual stereotype of Arabia deserta.
The summer monsoon winds, blowing out of Africa and brushing
across the southwestern corner of the peninsula, drop their rains
on the high mountain valleys, nourishing a dense population of
sturdy farmers. These Arabic-speaking hill folk had strong
traditions of tribal independence. But the agrarian economy en-
couraged, as it always did everywhere, the ambitions of state-
builders. As in Morocco in the Middle Period, the politics of the
Yemen turned on the persistent tensions between centralizing
sultans with their governors and tax-collectors, and the fissiparous
tribesmen of the valleys, who much preferred to be left alone.

Ibn Battuta visited the country when the cycle of dynastic
centralization was at a peak. The Yemen had not been far enough

The Arabian Sea 113

removed from the Middle East heartland to escape the ubiquitous
Turk. Kurdo—Turkish invaders from Egypt had seized the region
in the twelfth century and later proclaimed an independent
dynasty known as the Rasulid.

The heart of this realm was formed by a triangle of three major
cities: Zabid, the lowland winter headquarters of the sultans;
San’a, the bastion of the mountains; and Ta’izz, the dynastic
capital and highland city of the south. The San’a region was the
most difficult to hold, for it was the home of tribes adhering to the
Shi’i sect known as the Zaydi, whose doctrines included a pre-
ference for choosing their own ’Alid imams as rulers. Zaydi im-
amism was thus an ever-present ideology of potential revolt
against the sultans of Ta’izz, who, like the population of the
greater part of the country, were Sunni Muslims of the Shafi’
school.

At the time of Ibn Battuta’s passage, Malik Mujahid Nur al-Din
’Ali, fifth sultan in the Rasulid line (1321-62), had only just
managed to pull the realm more or less together after spending the
first six years of his reign squashing myriad plots and rebellions. In
1327 he seized Aden, the great port at the Strait of Bab al-
Mandeb. Since Aden was the key transit center for virtually all the
trade passing between the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea, the
customs revenue was immense. When the sultan had his governors
collecting it and pumping it directly into the treasury at Ta’1zz, the
investment in high urban culture rose accordingly.

Despite the wild mountains and ferocious hill folk, Yemen’s
cities drew freely on the cosmopolitan influences passing back and
forth through the strait of Bab al-Mandab. Indian, Ceylonese, and
Chinese ambassadors visited the Rasulid court, and the sultans,
vigorous promoters of trade, enjoyed considerable prestige in the
mercantile circles of the Indian Ocean.'? They competed furiously
with the Mamluks for domination of the Red Sea and the spice
trade, but the two states generally enjoyed peaceful relations. The
Rasulids, not surprisingly, looked to Cairo for ideas as to what
civilized government should be like. Court ritual and military
regalia followed Mamluk models fairly closely, and the sultans had
their own corps of slave soldiers in partial imitation of the mamluk
system. !4

When Ibn Battuta stepped into this diminutive civilization
tucked into the corner of the Arabian waste, he had no trouble
connecting with the scholarly establishment. In Zabid, a date-palm

114. The Arabian Sea

city located about 27 miles in from the coast, they gave him
lodgings and promenaded him through their cool groves on the
outskirts of town. In their company he listened to tales of the life
of one of their most famous saints, a thirteenth-century scholar
and miracle-worker named Ahmad ibn al-‘Ujayl. In the Rihla Ibn
Battuta could not pass up the opportunity to recount how the
shaykh had once demolished the rationalist doctrines of the local
Zaydi Shi’a. One day, the story goes, a group of Zaydi doctors
paid a visit to the master outside his hospice and enjoined him to
debate the subject of predestination.

The maintained that there is no predestined decree and that the
[creature who is made] responsible for carrying out the
ordinances of God creates his own actions, whereupon the
shaykh said to them, “Well, if the matter is as you say, rise up
from this place where you are.” They tried to rise up but could
not, and the shaykh left them as they were and went into the
hospice. They remained thus until when the heat afflicted them
sorely and the blaze of the sun smote them, they complained
loudly of what had befallen them, then the shaykh’s associates
went in to him and said to him “These men have repented to
God and recanted their false doctrine.” The shaykh then went
out to them and, taking them by their hand, he exacted a pledge
from them to return to the truth and abandon their evil
doctrine.

After probably a brief sojourn in Zabid, Ibn Battuta decided to
visit the tomb of this celebrated saint in the village of Bayt al-Fagih
(Ghassana) about 25 miles north along the coastal plain. While he
was there, he made friends with a son of the shaykh, who invited
him to travel to the mountain town of Jubla (Jibla) southwest of
Zabid to visit another scholar. He remained there for three days,
then continued southward in the company of a Sufi brother
assigned to lead him along the mountain trails to Ta’izz, the
Rasulid capital. If Ibn Battuta remembers his route through the
Yemen accurately, he was behaving in his characteristic way of
meandering first in one direction, then in another, relying on
serendipitous discoveries of good companionship to determine his
itinerary.'>

Ta’izz lay at an altitude of 4,500 feet on the northern slope of the
mountain called Jabal Sabr. Ibn Battuta describes the town as

The Arabian Sea 115

having three quarters, one for the sultan’s residence and his slave
guards, high officials, and courtiers; a second for the amirs and
soldiers; and a third for the common folk and the main bazaar.
Though he does not mention it, he must have prayed in the
beautiful three-domed mosque called the Muzaffariya, which still
serves as the Friday mosque of the city.'®

Finding the citizenry of Ta‘izz on the whole “overbearing, in-
solent and rude, as is generally the case in towns where kings have
their seats,” Ibn Battuta nevertheless got the usual warm welcome
from the scholars. He was even given the privilege of meeting the
king himself at one of the public audiences held every Thursday.
Just as the IIkhan Abu Sa’id had done, Malik Mujahid questioned
the visitor about Morocco, Egypt, and Persia, then gave in-
structions for his lodging. Ibn Battuta has left in the Rihla a
precious eye-witness description of the ceremonial of the Rasulid
sovereign:

He takes his seat on a platform carpeted and decorated with
silken fabrics; to right and left of him are the men-at-arms,
those nearest him holding swords and shields, and next to them
the bowmen; in front of them to the right and left are the
chamberlain and the officers of government and the private
secretary .. . When the sultan takes his seat they cry with one
voice Bismillah, and when he rises they do the same. so that all
those in the audience-hall know the moment of his rising and
the moment of his sitting . . . The food is then brought, and it is
of two sorts, the food of the commons and the food of the high
officers. The superior food is partaken of by the sultan, the
grand qadi, the principal sharifs and jurists and the guests; the
common food eaten by the rest of the sharifs, jurists and gadis,
the shaykhs, the amirs and the officers of the troops. The seat of
each person at the meal is fixed; he does not move from it, nor
does anyone of them jostle another.

Ibn Battuta left Ta’izz on a horse given him by the sultan, but his
immediate destination is none too certain at this point in the
narrative. He may have journeyed 130 miles north along the
backbone of the Yemeni mountains to San’a, spiritual capital of
the Zaydis, and then back to Ta’izz again. But this excursion along
treacherous trails through some of the grandest scenery in the
world is described with such brevity and nebulous inexactitude as

116 The Arabian Sea

to raise serious doubts about its veracity.'’ It is more likely that he
went directly from Ta’izz to Aden on the south coast of Arabia,
arriving there sometime around the end of 1328 (1330) or early
part of 1329 (1331).'*

Looking out upon the Arabian Sea, Ibn Battuta was about to enter
a world region where the relationship of Islamic cosmopolitanism
to society as a whole was significantly different from what he had
hitherto experienced. Up to that point he had traveled through the
Irano—Semitic heartland of Islam, where the cosmopolitan class set
itself apart from the rest of society in terms of its standards —
urbane, literate, and committed to the application of the shari’a as
the legal and moral basis of social relations. This class was the
guardian of high culture and the means of its transmission within
the Dar al-Islam. But it also shared its religious faith and its
broader cultural environment with the less mobile and nearer-
sighted peasants and working folk who constituted the vast
majority. The lands bordering the Indian Ocean, by contrast,
displayed a greater diversity of language and culture than did the
Irano—Semitic core, and the majority of people inhabiting these
lands adhered to traditions that were neither Irano—Semitic nor
Muslim. In this immense territory Islamic cosmopolitanism com-
municated more than the unity and universality of civilized
standards; it also expressed the unity of Islam itself in the midst of
cultures that were in most respects alien. In the Middle East an
individual’s sense of being part of an international social order
varied considerably with his education and position in life. But in
the Indian Ocean lands where Islam was a minority faith, all
Muslims shared acutely this feeling of participation. Simply to be a
Muslim in East Africa, southern India, or Malaysia in the
fourteenth century was to have a cosmopolitan frame of mind.
This mentality may be partly attributed to the general tendency
of minority groups in foreign societies to preserve and strengthen
links with the wider cultural world of which they feel themselves
members. But more to the point was the fact that Muslim
minorities of the Indian Ocean were heavily concentrated in
coastal towns, all of whose economies turned on long-distance
seaborne trade. The intensity of this trade continuously reinforced
the world-awareness of the populations of these towns, and com-
pelled anyone with a personal stake in mercantile ventures to keep
himself keenly informed of market conditions throughout the

The Arabian Sea 117

greater maritime world. A measure of the internationalism of
Indian Ocean ports, whether in India, Africa, Malaysia, or the
Arab and Persian lands, was the degree to which the inhabitants
responded more sensitively to one another’s economic and politi-
cal affairs than they did to events in their own deep hinterlands.

In the high age of the Abbasid Caliphate Muslim mariners,
mostly Arabs and Persians, penetrated the southern seas, estab-
lishing trading colonies as far distant as China. The decline of the
Caliphate undercut the dominant role of these merchants, but it
had no contrary effect on the prestige of Islam as the religion of
trade. In Ibn Battuta’s time the western half of the Indian Ocean
was every bit a Muslim lake, and the seas east of India were
becoming more so with every passing year.

The ascendancy of Muslim trade is partly to be explained by
simple Eurasian geography — the central position of the Irano
-Semitic region in funneling goods between the Mediterranean
and the spice and silk lands. But equally important was the ease
with which Muslim merchants set themselves up in alien
territories. The shari’a, the legal foundation on which they erected
their communities and mercantile enterprises, traveled along with
them wherever they went, irrespective of any particular political or
bureaucratic authority. Moreover a place in the commercial com-
munity was open to any young man of brains and ambition, what-
ever his ethnic identity, as long as he were first willing to declare
for God and the Prophet. As the repute of Muslims as the movers
and shakers of international trade and the prestige of Islam as the
carrier of cosmopolitan culture spread across the southern seas,
more and more trading towns voluntarily entered the Islamic orbit,
producing what the historian Marshall Hodgson calls a
“bandwagon effect” of commercial expansion.'? Concomitant to
this was a great deal of conversion in coastal regions and the rise of
scholarly establishments and Sufi orders having their own webs of
international affiliation overlaying the mercantile network.

The Muslim communities of these maritime towns kept their
faces to the sea, not the interior forest and bush, since the
difference between prosperity and survival depended urgently on
the arrivals and departures of ships. The development of complex
interrelations among urban centers as far distant from one another
as Aden and Malacca followed upon a basic natural discovery
known among peoples of the ocean rim since ancient times. Across
the expanse of the sea the direction of winds follows a regular,

118 The Arabian Sea

alternating pattern. During the winter months, from October to
March, the northeast monsoon wind blows from off the Eurasian
continent, passing across India and both the eastern and western
seas in the direction of East Africa. In the west the wind extends
about as far as 17 degrees south latitude, that is, near the mid point
of the Mozambique Channel. In summer, from April to
September, the southwest monsoon prevails and the pattern is
reversed. Centuries before Islam, mariners of the Arabian Sea
possessed a rich body of technical information on the monsoons in
relation to other climatic and geographic factors, data on whose
strength they could plan, and survive, long-distance voyages. By
the later Middle Period, Muslim knowledge of the timing and
direction of the monsoons had advanced to a state where almanacs
were being published with which port officials and wholesale
bazaar merchants could predict the approximate time trading ships
would arrive from points hundreds or even thousands of miles
away. ;

The seasonal rhythm of the winds gave Indian Ocean trade and
travel an element of symmetry and calculability not possible in the
Mediterranean. There, the wind patterns were more complicated,
and the fury of the winter storms, howling down through the
mountain passes of Europe, all but prohibited long-distance ship-
ping for a few months each year. The Indian Ocean, lying astride
the equator, was a warmer, calmer, friendlier sea. It was especially
so in the months of the northeast monsoon, when, notwithstanding
the possibility of hurricanes, waters were placid and skies clear for
weeks at a time, and when navigators could depend on a long
succession of starry nights to make astronomical calculations of
their position. Shipping activity was greater in the winter season
than it was in summer, when the rain-bearing southwest monsoon
brought stormier conditions. Still, trans-oceanic circulation de-
pended on the full annual cycle of the winds, by which ships sailed
to a distant destination during one half of the year and home again
in the other.”°

We may suspect that when Ibn Battuta arrived in Aden, he did not
know exactly what his next move would be. If India and a job at
the court of Delhi were already in his mind, he may have changed
his plans on the strength of the sailing schedules. Presuming he
reached Aden about mid January 1329 (1331),*' the northeast
monsoon would have been at its peak, producing strong easterly

The Arabian Sea 119

winds. This was not a normal time for ships to embark from that
port on direct voyages to the western coast of India. Nor was it the
ideal time to set out for Africa, though some vessels did so. The
problem was getting out of the Gulf of Aden against the wind.
Once a ship beat eastward far enough to round Ras Asir (Cape
Guardafui), the headland of the Horn of Africa, it could run
before the northeast wind all the way to Zanzibar and beyond.”
There is no evidence in the Rihla that before reaching Aden Ibn
Battuta had a plan to visit tropical Africa. But his past record of
impulsive side-tripping suggests that he may have been impro-
vising his itinerary once again. If a ship were embarking for the
East African coast, then he would go along too.

In the meantime he rested at Aden for at least several days. Part
of the time he stayed as a guest in the home of one of the rich
international merchants:

There used to come to his table every night about twenty of the
merchants and he had slaves and servants in still larger
numbers. Yet with all this, they are men of piety .. . doing
good to the stranger, giving liberally to the poor brother, and
paying God’s due in tithes as the law commands.

When the young scholar was not sharing in this bounty, he was
probably exploring the city and the harbor and perhaps sizing up
the reliability of any ships bound for Africa. In the Middle Period
the commercial life of Aden was concentrated at the eastern end of
a mountainous, balloon-shaped peninsula jutting out from the
South Arabian coast. Part of this presque-isle was an extinct
volcano, Aden town occupying its crater, which on the eastern side
was exposed to the sea. The harbor, facing the town, was enclosed
within a stone wall with sea-gates, which were kept padlocked at
night and opened every morning on the order of the governor.”"

Like ’Aydhab, Aden was an international transit center whose
famed prosperity had little to do with the trade of its local hinter-
land, whose contribution to the import-export economy was mod-
est. It controlled the narrows of Bab al-Mandeb and skimmed off
the tariffs on a continuous flow of low-bulk luxury goods moving
predominantly westward: spices, aromatics, medicinal herbs,
plants for dyeing and varnishing, iron, steel, brass and bronze
containers, Indian silks and cottons, pearls, beads, ambergris,
cowrie shells, shoes, Chinese porcelain, Yemeni stoneware,

120 The Arabian Sea

African ivory, tropical fruits, and timber. In the Rihla Ibn Battuta
gives a list of ten different Indian ports from which merchants
commonly sailed to Aden.

Walking along Aden beach, Ibn Battuta is likely to have seen a
crowd of ships moored in the harbor or laid up on the beach, since
mid winter was a season for cleaning hulls and refitting. The scene
would not have been the same as the one he grew up with in
Tangier bay, since Mediterranean and Indian Ocean shipbuilding
traditions were as different as the patterns of wind and climate.
For one thing, he would probably not have seen any galleys, whose
use in the Indian Ocean was confined mainly to pirate gangs and
navies. He would certainly not have seen any of the square-rigged
round ships, which were just beginning to enter the Mediterranean
from Atlantic Europe in his time. To his untrained eye the dhows
of Aden might have looked tediously alike, except for variations in
size and hull design. All of them would have been double-ended,
that is, their hulls would have come to an edge at both ends of the
ship, the square, or transom, stern being a sixteenth-century de-
velopment introduced by the Portuguese. All of them would have
been carvel built, that is, the teak or coconut wood planks of the
hull laid edge to edge and lashed together with coir cord rather
than nails. And most of them would have carried two triangular,
or lateen, sails, a big mainsail and a smaller one on a mizzenmast
aft. The largest of fourteenth-century trading vessels were as big as
the dhows of modern times, having cargo capacities of up to 250
tons and mainmasts reaching 75 feet or more above the deck.”

The lack of variety in Indian Ocean shipbuilding was far less a
reflection of stolid mariner conservatism than of centuries of ex-
perimentation and refinement to solve the technological problems
of using the monsoons to full advantage. The key breakthrough
was the lateen sail, that gracefully curved, wing-like form that
brings to Western minds all the images of Sindbad and the Arabian
Nights. The lateen was probably first developed in the western
Indian Ocean in ancient times, then diffused into the
Mediterranean in the wake of seventh-century Muslim expansion.
Square sails, such as those being used in northern Europe in the
fourteenth century, performed efficiently when the wind was
astern. But if the breeze turned too much toward the beam of the
ship, the sail was taken aback, that is, it was pushed against the
mast. The lateen, on the other hand, was a fore-and-aft sail. The
wooden yard to which it was attached sloped downward toward

The Arabian Sea 121

the bow and thereby provided a stiff leading edge against the
breeze. Consequently the sail could be set much closer to the wind
without being taken back. A well-built lateen-rigged craft could
sail in almost any direction except into the eye of the wind.

The Indian Ocean dhow was not, however, in total harmony
with its monsoonal environment. The sewn, unreinforced hull
construction, whatever the advantages of its plasticity, could not
tolerate more than a modest tonnage of cargo. The size of ships
was also limited by the rigging itself, since the mainsail yard was
usually about as long as the vessel and extremely heavy. A large
crew was required to hoist it (perhaps thirty or more on the biggest
ships), and they of course displaced precious space for goods and
paying passengers. Moreover the crew had to perform extremely
laborious and difficult procedures to maneuver the sail and spar.
When wind conditions changed, the sail was never reefed aloft.
Rather the yard was hauled down, the sail removed, and a smaller
or larger one hoisted in its place, a task that might have to be
carried out in a heavy gale. Going about, that is, turning the ship
to the opposite tack, was an even trickier operation. It was always
done by wearing round (turning tail to wind), and this involved
pushing the luff end of the yard up to a position vertical to the
mast, swinging it from one side of the mast to the other, then
letting it fall again, all the while preventing the loose, sheet end of
the enormous sail from flapping wildly out of control. The heavier
the weather, the harder it was to control the rigging, all the worse
if the crew had to push and stumble its way through a muddle of
passengers, cargo, and livestock. Many a ship was lost when it
blew too close to a dangerous shore, and the crew could not bring
it round in time or lost control of the sail altogether. The danger
was especially great during the high season of the southwest
monsoon, when only a very brave captain or a fool would dare to
approach the western coast of India. The conventional method for
survival in violent storms was to haul down the yard, jettison the
cargo, and make vows to God.

Although Ibn Battuta logged thousands of miles at sea in the
course of his adventures, the Rih/a is a disappointing record of
fourteenth-century shipbuilding and seamanship. Since he pre-
sumably had no sailing experience in early life, and his Tangerian
upbringing was no doubt remote from the workaday world of the
port, he was excusably indifferent to the rudiments of nautical
technology. He is far better at recalling the characteristics of port

122 The Arabian Sea

towns and the pious personages inhabiting them than the
humdrum details of navigation and life at sea.*°

Sailing out of Aden, he has nothing whatsoever to say about the
size or design of the ship to which he committed his fate, not even
a classificatory name.”° Since it was bound for the distant reaches
of the East African coast, it was probably a relatively large vessel.
Trading dhows of that age sometimes had cabins of a sort, pre-
sumably with roofs that served as decks. But they were probably
not completely decked, obliging passengers to endure the voyage
in an open hold, settling themselves as best they could amongst
shifting bales of cargo.

Dhows making the run from Aden (or Omani and Persian gulf
ports) to East Africa carried a wide assortment of goods, some of
them destined for the interior trade and some exclusively for the
Muslim coastal towns, whose inhabitants depended on manu-
factured imports to maintain households of reasonable civility and
comfort. The staples of the upland trade were cloth (fine, colored
stuffs produced mainly in India) and glass beads. The coastal
population, especially the well-to-do families of merchants,
scholars, and officials, consumed most of the luxury items. No
genteel household would have been without its celadon porcelain
from China, its “yellow-and-black” pottery from South Arabia, its
silk wardrobes, glassware, books, paper, and manufactured tools.
In exchange for these goods, the ships returned north with a range
of raw, higher-bulk African commodities destined for dispersal
throughout the greater Indian Ocean basin: ivory, gold,
frankincense, myrrh, animal skins, ambergris, rice, mangrove
poles, and slaves.

Embarking from Aden, Ibn Battuta’s ship made a southwesterly
course for the port of Zeila on the African shore of the gulf. Zeila
was a busy town, the main outlet for inland trade extending to the
Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, but the ship anchored there for
only one night. Ibn Battuta made a quick foray into the bazaar,
but his nostrils were assaulted by the unhappy combination of
fresh fish and the blood of slaughtered camels. Pronouncing Zeila
“the dirtiest, most diasgreeable, and most stinking town in the
world,” he and his sailing companions beat a fast retreat to the
ship.

The following day the vessel made an eastward course out of the
gulf. In the winter monsoon season this could be accomplished

The Arabian Sea 123

only by making long tacks, beating to windward until they cleared
Ras Asir. Once past the headland, they swung round to the
southwest, hoisted the largest mainsail aboard, and ran before the
monsoon.”’ Ibn Battuta reckoned a voyage of 15 days from Zeila
to the next port-of-call, Mogadishu. The captain almost certainly
coasted the whole way. His passengers would never have been out
of sight of the great sand dunes heaped along the desolate Somali
shore.

Until around the time of Ibn Battuta’s visit, Mogadishu was the
busiest and richest port of the coast. It was in easy sailing range of
the Persian Gulf, even easier than from the Yemen. The winter
monsoon had carried the first Muslim settlers there, probably from
the Gulf, in the tenth century or even earlier. Within two hundred
years the town was booming, owing partly to its landward con-
nections with the Horn and Ethiopia and partly to the transit trade
in ivory and gold shipped there from the smaller towns further
south.

Like any of the other emporiums of the western ocean,
Mogadishu had plenty of employment for the commercial brokers
(called dallals in South Arabia) who provided the crucial
mediation between the arriving sea merchants and the local
wholesalers. Their speciality was knowledge of market conditions
and working familiarity with both the civilities of the local culture
and the relevant languages. In this case Arabic and Persian were
the linguae francae of the ocean traders. Somali, as well as Swahili,
the Bantu tongue that may have just been coming into use along
the coast at this time, were the languages of the townsmen and
hinterlanders.** When Ibn Battuta’s ship anchored in Mogadishu
harbor, boatloads of young men came out to meet it, each carrying
a covered platter of food to present to one of the merchants on
board. When the dish was offered, the merchant fell under an
obligation to go with the man to his home and accept his services
as broker. The Mogadishi then placed the visitor under his “pro-
tection,” sold his goods for him, collected payment, and helped
him find a cargo for the outbound passage — all this at a healthy
commission deducted from the profits. Sea merchants already
familiar with the town, however, had their own standing business
connections and went off to lodge where they pleased.”

When the ship’s company informed the greeting party that Ibn
Battuta was not a merchant but a faqih, word was passed to the
chief gadi, who came down to the beach with some of his students

124 The Arabian Sea

and took the visitor in charge. The party then went immediately to
the palace of Mogadishu, as was the custom, to present the learned
guest to the ruler, who went by the title of Shaykh. Upon arriving
there, the Moroccan recalls,

one of the serving-boys came out and saluted the gadi, who said
to him, “Take word to the intendant’s office and inform the
Shaykh that this man has come from the land of al-Hijaz.” So
he took the message, then returned bringing a plate on which
were some leaves of betel and areca nuts. He gave me ten
leaves along with a few of the nuts, the same to the gadi, and
what was left on the plate to my companions and the qadi’s
students. He brought also a jug of rose-water of Damascus,
which he poured over me and over the qgadi.

The Shaykh, moreover, commanded that the visitors be en-
tertained in a residence for students of religion. Retiring there and
ensconcing themselves on the carpets, the party addressed them-
selves to a meal of local fare, compliments of the palace: a stew of
chicken, meat, fish, and vegetables poured over rice cooked in
ghee; unripe bananas in fresh milk; and a dish comprised of sour
milk, green ginger, mangoes, and pickled lemons and chilies. The
citizens of Mogadishu, Ibn Battuta observed, did justice to such
meals as these: “A single person... eats as much as a whole
company of us would eat, as a matter of habit, and they are
corpulent and fat in the extreme.”

Dining with these portly notables over the course of the next
three days, the young scholar would likely have found them all
speaking Arabic. Neither Mogadishu, however, nor any other
towns of the coast could be described as alien enclaves of Arabs or
Persians, ethnically isolated from the mainland populations. On
the contrary, these were African towns, inhabited largely by
people of African descent, whether Somali or Bantu-speaking
stock. The spread of Islamic culture southward along the coast was
not synonymous with the peopling of the region by colonists from
the Irano—Semitic heartland. The rulers, scholars, officials, and
big merchants, as well as the port workers, farmers, craftsmen,
and slaves, were dark-skinned people speaking African tongues in
everyday life.

Human migration, however, accompanied trade as one of the
enduring consequences of the harnessing of the monsoons. It was

The Arabian Sea 125

seaborne settlers from Arabia and the Persian Gulf who intro-
duced Islam into the little ports and fishing villages along the
coast, and it was the continuing trickle of newcomers who, along
with the visiting merchants, assured and reinforced the Islamic-
mindedness of coastal society. For Arabs and Persians of the arid
northern rim of the sea, East Africa was a kind of medieval
America, a fertile, well-watered land of economic opportunity and
a place of salvation from drought, famine, overpopulation, and
war at home. There is even some evidence of a thirteenth-century
plantation at Mogadishu of a group of settlers from Tashkent,
refugees from a Central Asian war.*” The great majority of im-
migrants were males, who quickly married into the local families
or took slave concubines, thereby obliterating any tendencies to-
ward racial separatism.

Among new arrivals, the warmest welcome went out to sharifs
(or sayyids), who probably represented a substantial proportion of
colonists from South Arabia. A sharif was a person recognized as a
descendant of the Prophet. As a group, sharifs brought to the
coastal towns two qualifications in unlimited demand. One was
literacy and knowledge of the shari’a; the other was that elusive
attribute called baraka, the aura of divine blessing that was be-
lieved to attend sharifian status. Aside from commerce, which
everyone seemed to have had a hand in, sharifian families per-
formed multiple functions as town officials, judges, secretaries,
political mediators, Sufi teachers, miracle-workers, and general
validators of the Islamic status of the community and its gov-
ernment. Above all, the sharifs, as well as other literate im-
migrants, strove to implant the Sacred Law, specifically the Shafi’i
school predominant in South Arabia. This was their most
significant contribution to East African cosmopolitanism, for the
law was the seal of oceanic unity on which the towns thrived.

On the fourth day of his visit Ibn Battuta went out to meet the
Shaykh, a sharif of distant Yemeni origin whose family had
emerged as sultans of the city in the previous century. It was
Friday, and following prayer in the central mosque the young
guest (outfitted in new robes and turban for the occasion) was
formally introduced. Then the ruler (whose name was Abu Bakr)
led his retinue back to the palace.

All of the people walked barefoot, and there were raised over
his head four canopies of colored silk and on the top of each

126 The Arabian Sea

canopy was the figure of a bird in gold. His clothes that day
were a robe of green Jerusalem stuff and underneath it fine
loose robes of Egypt. He was dressed with a wrapper of silk and
turbaned with a large turban. Before him drums and trumpets
and pipes were played, the amirs of the soldiers were before
and behind him, and the qadi, the fagihs, the sharifs were with
him. He entered his council room; in that order, the viziers,
amirs and the commanders of the soldiers sat down there in the
audience chamber . . . They continued in this manner till the
afternoon prayer.”

Ibn Battuta seems to have witnessed more of these proceedings
in subsequent days and may have stayed in Mogadishu for a week
or two. But he was soon aboard ship again and continuing south-
ward along the tropical coast known to the Arab geographers as
the land of Zanj. Crossing the equator near the modern border
between Somalia and Kenya, he saw the dry scrub land of the
north gradually giving way to lusher vegetation and dense clusters
of mangrove forest around the estuaries of creeks and narrow
rivers. The ship anchored for one night off the island-town of
Mombasa, a modest commercial center at the time, though it
would become one of the leading ports of the coast in the next
century. After Mombasa, they passed between the mainland and
the islands of Pemba and Zanzibar, finally putting in at Kilwa, an
islet just off the coast of what is today Tanzania. This was as far
south as the ocean merchants normally went. With fair winds and
calm seas, the voyage from Mogadishu to Kilwa should have taken
something well short of two weeks, bringing the Moroccan and his
shipmates there sometime in March 1329 (1331).*”

Traveling through the Islamic world in the relatively stable times
of the early fourteenth century, Ibn Battuta had the good fortune
to intersect with a number of kingdoms and cities just as they were
experiencing an eruption of cultural energy. Kilwa was a case in
point. Growing up alongside other East African towns as a rustic
fishing village awakened to the promise of upland ivory and gold,
it was fast surpassing Mogadishu at the start of the century as the
richest town on the coast. The rise of Kilwa (Kulwa) seems to have
been linked to the sudden and shadowy appearing of a new ruling
family, called the Mahdali, who traced their line to a sharifian clan
of the Yemen. In all likelihood they came south along with other
families of Arabian descent, not directly from the peninsula, but

The Arabian Sea 127

from Mogadishu or other northerly ports. In any case they staged a
coup, bloodless or not, against the earlier rulers of Kilwa
sometime near the end of the thirteenth century.

Before the appearance of the Mahdali, most of the gold trade
seems to have been controlled by the merchants of Mogadishu, but
about three or four decades before Ibn Battuta’s visit, Kilwa
seized Sofala and other, smaller ports south of the Zambezi River
through which the gold was funneled to the market from the mines
of Zimbabwe. Consequently, the Kilwans clamped a near
monopoly on the trade, elevating their city to the status of the
principal transit center for gold in the western ocean. All this was
achieved without marshalling a great navy. Kilwa’s goals were
limited economic ones, not the creation of a seaborne empire.
Indeed the political organization of the coast was more akin to a
configuration of city-states on the fourteenth-century Italian
model than to the land kingdoms of the Middle East. And though
Ibn Battuta speaks of Kilwa’s “jihads” against the Africans of the
mainland, relations with the upcountry people must have been
reasonably good most of the time if trade were to flow.

Kilwa’s gold rush made its merchants, the Mahdali family
among them, extravagantly wealthy by coast standards. Living
amongst the laboring and seafaring population in the unwalled and
thoroughly unplanned town at the northern end of the island, the
well-to-do families enjoyed a style of living that was, in the words
of a scholar of coastal archaeology, “competent, comfortable, and
satisfying.”*> They lived in stone houses of up to three storeys and
entertained guests in spacious sunken courtyards. They wore silk
and cotton garments and plenty of gold and silver jewelry. They
had indoor plumbing. They ate off imported Chinese porcelain.
They attended the Friday sermon in a domed and vaulted mosque
of coral rock that had been expanded to four or five times its size
in the early part of the century.

When the leading citizens had audience with Sultan al-Hasan
ibn Sulayman (Abu |-’Mawahid Hasan), fourth ruler in the
Mahdali line (1309-32) ,** they climbed to the highest point of the
island overlooking the sea, where the great stone palace of Husuni
Kubwa was being constructed. When they had business with him
or his factor (for the sultan was probably the richest merchant in
the city), they probably appeared at the spacious emporium, res-
embling the plan of a Middle Eastern khan, which took up nearly
half the area of the palace. The working folk down in the town

128 The Arabian Sea

enjoyed a reasonable standard of living, but they lived in closely
packed little houses of mud-and-wattle and dined off coarser ware
than Chinese celadon.*°

Ibn Battuta was used to seeing impressive public monuments
and in the Rihla he makes no mention whatsoever of the town’s
distinctive architecture, though he certainly prayed in the central
mosque and probably visited Husuni Kubwa.*© Wherever he
traveled, however, he invariably took notice of pious and generous
kings, believing as any member of the ’ulama class did that piety
and generosity were the essential qualities of any temporal ruler
worthy of his title. He describes al-Hasan ibn Sulayman as “a man
of great humility; he sits with poor brethren, and eats with them,
and greatly respects men of religion and noble descent.”

If Ibn Battuta arrived at Kilwa in March, he is likely to have
stayed no more than a few weeks. The recommended seasons for
leaving the tropical coast were near the beginning (March and
April) or the end (September) of the southwest monsoon. Sailing
from Kilwa harbor in April, a captain could expect to reach an
Arabian or even Indian destination before high summer, when the
winds blasted those coasts with such force that ports had to be
closed.*”? The Rihla has no comment on the voyage or the ship
other than the destination, the port of Zafar (Dhofar) on the
South Arabian shore. A month’s voyage would have brought Ibn
Battuta there sometime in early May.**

Governed by an autonomous Rasulid prince, Zafar was one of the
chief ports of South Arabia, an entrepét on the India-to-Africa
route and an exporter of frankincense and horses, the latter col-
lected from the interior districts and shipped to India. It was a
torrid place (the people bathed several times a day, Ibn Battuta
reports), but in contrast to its grim hinterland it was also verdant,
Owing to monsoon rains along the low shore. It was not a bad town
to spend a summer, which the traveler very likely did, since there
was little ship traffic until September, when the southwesterly
winds broke up. He lodged and boarded with the usual dignitaries,
feasting on fish, bananas, and coconuts, and chewing betel leaves,
a favored breath sweetener and aid to digestion.”

If he was contemplating a voyage to India at this point, he could
easily have found a ship to sail him directly there in September.
Instead, he took passage on “a small vessel” making for the Gulf
of Oman. The ship was probably a coastal tramp, for the pilot was

The Arabian Sea 129

a local fellow. He put in at several anchorages along the way,
including al-Hallaniyah, the largest of the Kuria Muria Islands
(where Ibn Battuta met an old Sufi in a hilltop hermitage), the
long island of Masira (where the pilot lived), and finally, at the far
side of the headland of Ras al-Hadd, the little port of Sur on the
Gulf of Oman. It was a scorching, thoroughly disagreeable
voyage. Ibn Battuta lived on dates, fish, and some bread and
biscuits he bought in Zafar. He might have had meals of roasted
sea bird, but when he discovered that the blasphemous sailors
were not killing their game by slitting the throat as the Koran
prescribes, he kept well away from both the crew and their
dinners. Somewhere along that desert coast he and his fellow
passengers celebrated the Feast of the Sacrifice of the year 729
A.H., or 3 October 1329 (or 731 A.H., 12 September 1331).

Anchored off Sur a few days later, Ibn Battuta saw, or thought
he could see, the busy port of Qalhat, which lay 13 miles further up
the coast. His ship was to put in there the following day, but he
had taken an intense dislike to the impious crew and wanted as
little to do with them as he could. And since Qalhat promised to be
a more interesting place to spend the night than Sur, he resolved to
go there on foot. The intervening coastline was hot, rugged, and
completely waterless, but the locals assured him that he could
make the distance in a few hours. To be on the safe side, he hired
one of the sailors to guide him. A passenger friend, a scholarly
Indian by the name of Khidr, decided to go along as well, probably
for the lark. Grabbing an extra suit of clothes and leaving the rest
of his possessions on board with instructions to rendezvous the
next day, he and his companions set off. It promised to be a day's
promenade followed no doubt by a good dinner and lodging at the
house of the gadi of Qalhat.

In fact if things had gone any worse the two gentlemen would
never have reached Qalhat at all, and the travels of Ibn Battuta
might have ended in the wilds of Oman. Not long after leaving
Sur, he became convinced that their guide was plotting to kill them
and make off with the bundle of extra clothes, which would prob-
ably fetch a good price in the local bazaars. Luckily, Ibn Battuta
was carrying a spear, which he promptly brandished when he
realized that the villainous guide had in mind to drown his
employers as they were crossing a tidal estuary. Cowed for the
moment, the sailor led them further up into the rocks, where they
found a safe ford and continued on through the desert. Thinking

130 The Arabian Sea

all the time that Qalhat was round the next bend, they tramped on
and on, scrambling across an endless succession of treacherous
ravines that connected with the shore. They had not brought along
nearly enough water, although some horsemen passed by and gave
them a drink.

Toward evening, the sailor insisted they work their way back
down to the coast, which by that time was about a mile away. But
Ibn Battuta refused, thinking the rogue’s only plan was to trap
them among the rocks and run with the clothes. Then night fell,
and though the sailor urged them to push on, Ibn Battuta insisted
they leave the trail they were following and go into hiding. He had
no idea how far they still had to walk, and, what was worse, he
glimpsed a party of strange men lurking nearby. Khidr by this time
was sick and utterly overcome with thirst. And so mustering as
much strength and will as he could, Ibn Battuta kept watch
throughout the night, holding the contested garments under his
robe and clutching the spear, while Khidr and the malevolent
guide slept.

At dawn they returned to the trail and soon came upon country
folk going into Qalhat to market. The sailor agreed to fetch water
and after trudging across more ravines and precipitous hills they at
last reached the gates of the city. By this time they were ex-
hausted, Ibn Battuta’s feet so swollen inside his shoes “that the
blood was almost starting under the nails.” To add insult to injury,
the gatekeeper would not let them pass to find lodgings until they
had presented themselves before the governor to explain their
business.

As Ibn Battuta might well have expected from previous ex-
perience, the governor turned out to be “an excellent man,” who
invited the two prostrate scholars to be his guests. “I stayed with
him for six days,” Ibn Battuta recalls, “during which I was
powerless to rise to my feet because of the pains that they had
sustained.” Nothing more is heard of their tormentor, who pre-
sumably returned to his ship a disappointed thief, but none the
worse for trying.

From the Rrihla’s description of Qalhat and its environs, Ibn
Battuta is likely to have spent at least a few days having a look
around, following recovery from his ordeal. Politically a de-
pendency of the Sultanate of Hurmuz, Qalhat, like Muscat, Sohar,
and other ports stretched along the coast between Ras al-Hadd
and the Strait of Hurmuz, was a monsoon town of the first order.

The Arabian Sea 131

Cut off from the rest of Arabia by the sea on three sides and the
arid void of the Empty Quarter on the fourth, the city communi-
cated with western India more easily than with any other shore.
Strolling through the bazaar, Ibn Battuta would have seen many
Indian traders, selling rice and other foodstuffs to the port and
hinterland population, buying horses, and of course dealing in all
sorts of Asian luxuries bound ultimately for Tabriz, Cairo, Kilwa,
and Venice.

Friend Khidr is mentioned no more after Qalhat. Perhaps he
booked passage on a dhow and returned to India. By this time Ibn
Battuta seems to have resolved to head for Mecca again. And
perhaps he had had his fill, for the time being, of pitching, unde-
cked boats and their rascally crews. Qalhat was in fact to be his last
view of the Indian Ocean for twelve years. Turning westward into
the grim canyons of the eastern Hajar Mountains in the company
of unnamed caravaners, he set a course across the rugged heart-
land of Oman. The only stage he mentions 1s Nazwa (Nizwa), the
chief town of the interior and capital of a dynasty of tribal kings
known as the Banu Nabhan.”

His description of his journey from central Oman back to Mecca
leaves such a baffling trail of gaps. zigzags, time leaps, and con-
fused information that the route and chronology cannot be ex-
plained with any assurance, at least not until he arrives at al-Qatif,
a town on the Arabian shore about half way up the Persian Gulf.
He claims to have gone directly from Nazwa to Hurmuz, the great
emporium guarding the narrow passage into the gulf and, at that
time, the principal staging center for the overland caravan trade to
Tabriz, Turkey, and the Black Sea. Hurmuz lay at the northern
end of a barren little island (Jarun, or Jirun) five miles off the coast
of Persia. Ibn Battuta says nothing about how he got there, but of
course he would have had to make a short sea voyage across the
Strait, perhaps from Sohar, an important port on the coast of
Oman about 120 aerial miles over the mountains from Nazwa. Nor
does he indicate how long he stayed in Hurmuz, and his des-
cription of the town and its ruler seems to be associated entirely
with a second visit he made there in 1347 on his way home from
India and China.*!

From Hurmuz he crossed to the mainland and made a
northwestward excursion by way of Lar through the interior of
Fars, or southern Persia, with the aim of visiting a Sufi shaykh at a
place he calls Khunju Pal, probably the village of Khunj.** He

132 The Arabian Sea

then returned to the coast, but he mistakenly remembers the two
ports of Siraf and Qais as one and the same place, leaving doubt as
to which one he visited, if not both.** He describes pearl fisheries
off the eastern shore (pearls being the leading export from the gulf
to India), but their location remains vague. From Qais (or Siraf)
he traveled to Bahrain, meaning to him the Arabian coastal dis-
trict opposite the island that carries the same name.** But once
again, he is completely mute on the matter of his return voyage to
the western side of the gulf.

After a presumably short stay in al-Qatif, he set off across
Arabia, now for the fourth time and from a third new direction.
Traveling southward to the oasis of al-Hasa (now al-Hufuf), then
southwestward across the al-Dahna sand dunes, he arrived at al-
Yamama, today a ruin 58 miles southeast of the modern Saudi
capital of Riyadh. Here, he met a tribal chieftain of the Banu
Hanifa Arabs and joined his party going to Mecca. The Rihla says
nothing of the remaining stages nor of the date of arrival in the
Holy City. If he left Oman about November, he would probably
have reached Mecca some time in the winter of 1330 (1332). In any
case, having climbed through the highlands of Yemen, crossed the
equator to tropical Africa, endured several wearisome sea voyages
through the hottest regions on earth, and almost lost his life for a
clean suit of clothes, he was well deserving of another interlude of
rest with his Koran and his law books in the shade of the Haram.

Notes

1. A.J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted (New York, 1955), p. 211.

2. IB states that he performed the Aajj four successive times beginning in 1327
(727 A.H.) and that he resided in Mecca for approximately three years. It is
possible, however, that he stayed in the city only about one year, leaving for Aden
and East Africa following the pilgrimage of 1328 (728 A.H.). The question of the
length of his residence in Mecca is bound up with a much wider chronological
problem, which we must introduce here.

IB tells us that he left Mecca for East Africa following the hajj of 1330 (730 A.H.)
and that he arrived back in the city some time before the pilgrimage of September
1332 (732 A.H.). He states that he then left Mecca again following the 732 hay en
route to Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, Central Asia, and India, and that he arrived at
the banks of the Indus River on 12 September 1333 (1 Muharram 734), thus
accomplishing that ambitious journey in the space of one year. Yet his own
itinerary and chronological clues show that the trans-Asian trip took about three
years. Therefore, the two dates are irreconcilable and present the most baffling
chronological puzzle in the Rihla.

For the entire complex and roundabout journey from Mecca to India IB offers

The Arabian Sea 133

not a single absolute date, nor does anything he says in connection with his long
sojourn in India absolutely verify the year of his arrival there. Even the day he gives
for crossing the Indus, 1 Muharram, that is, the first day of the new year, suggests a
literary convention, symbolizing the start of the second major part of his narrative. Yet
I am inclined to agree with Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, pp. 529-30) that IB’s India arrival date of
September 1333 is approximately correct (see Chapter 8, note 26). Working backward
through the itinerary from that date, IB’s description of traveling times, feast day
celebrations, and seasons suggests that he must have left Arabia for Syria, Anatolia,
and Central Asia no later than the winter or spring of 1330 (730 A.H.). If that dating is
correct, he must have left Mecca for East Africa following the pilgrimage of October
1328 (728 A.H.). Returning from Africa to Arabia, he states that he celebrated the
Feast of Sacrifice (that is, the ceremony culminating the hajj festival) off the South
Arabian coast. He does not mention the year, but if my hypothesis is correct, it would
have been 3 October 1329 (10 Dhu I-Hijja 729). From South Arabia he traveled
through Oman and the Persian Gulf region, then returned to Mecca. If he stayed in
the city a relatively short time (not waiting for the pilgrimage of 730 A.H. to come
around) and then started on his India journey, he would have traveled through Egypt
and Syria in 1330 (730 A.H.), a chronology which accords with the 1333 India arrival
date.

Hrbek, contrary to Gibb, argues that IB’s Mecca departure date of 1332 (732 A.H.)
is correct and that the India date is wrong (Hr, p. 485). He believes that IB could not
have erred or lied in asserting that he attended the pilgrimages of 1329, 1330, and 1332
without the learned and well-traveled Moroccans for whom the Rihla was written
knowing the truth of the matter. Unfortunately, Hrbek never published the second
part of his study of the chronology, so we have no idea how he might have argued that
IB arrived in India two years later than he says he did.

Hrbek’s argument about the Mecca departure date is in any case weakened by his
admission that Gibb is probably correct in asserting that IB traveled in Egypt and Syria
in 1330 (730 A.H.). That is, some of the events the Rihla groups with IB’s travels in
Egypt and Synia in 1326 actually occurred in 1330. Most of the evidence that Gibb and
Hrbek present centers on known dates of office of governors or religious officials
whom IB says he met (Gb, vol. 2, pp. 536-37; Hr, pp. 483-84). Hrbek (Hr. p. 483)
also points out IB’s statement, linked in the Rihla to 1326, that he attended a
celebration in Cairo marking Sultan al-Nasir Muhammad’s recovery from a fracture of
his hand. All independent chronicle sources state that this event occurred in March
1330. Hrbek fits this evidence into his own hypothesis by suggesting, I think rather
lamely, that IB sandwiched a trip to Egypt and Syria (utterly unreported in the Rihla)
between the pilgrimages of 1329 and 1330. I prefer Gibb’s argument that IB was
already heading in the direction of Anatolia in 1330. Gibb indeed presents some
interesting though inconclusive evidence, which Hrbek fails satisfactorily to refute,
that IB traveled in Asia Minor in 1331 (Gibb, vol. 2, pp. 531-32; Hr, pp. 485-86).

No evidence I have seen eliminates the possibility that IB left Mecca after the hajj of
1328 (728 A.H.) and traveled to East Africa in 1329. Yet why would he state that he
stayed in Mecca throughout 1329 and most of 1330 and that he returned for the
pilgrimage of 1332 if the truth were otherwise? And how can we challenge him when
he describes, though briefly and impersonally, certain events which occurred in Mecca
during those periods of time? While I share Gibb’s view that the India arrival date is
nearly correct, I have no convincing answers to these questions. It must be re-
membered, however, that the relationship between the entire chronological structure
of the Rihla, a work of literature, and IB’s actual life experience is highly uncertain.

3. Gb, vol. 1, p. 203n.

4. IB mentions only that the Muzaffariya, where he lived, had a classroom and
that a Moroccan acquaintance lectured on theology in the building. But he does not
report that he attended a course.

5. In basing this description of education in Mecca mainly on the work of the

134 The Arabian Sea

Dutch onentalist C. Snouck Hurgronje, who lived in the city for a year in the 1880s, I
am assuming that the general patterns endured over the centuries. Snouck Hurgronje
notes that “from the chronicles of Mecca . . . we may conclude with certainty that a
life of learning like that which we have described, has been astir in the town for
centuries past.” Mekka in the Latter Part of the Nineteenth Century (Leiden, 1931), p.
211. Also A.S. Tritton, Materials on Muslim Education in the Middle Ages (London,
1957); and “Masdjid,” EI,, vol. 3, pp. 361-67, 368-71.

6. Ibn Jubayr crossed the Red Sea on a jalba and describes it. The Travels of Ibn
Jubayr, trans. R.J.C. Broadhurst (London, 1952), pp. 64-65. Also G.R. Tibbetts,
Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the Coming of the Portuguese (London,
1971), p. 56; and R. B. Serjeant, The Portuguese off the South Arabian Coast (Oxford,
1963), p. 134.

7. Ibn Jubayr, Travels, p. 65.

8. Ibid., p. 69.

9. Hr, p. 439; Tibbetts, Arab Navigation, p. 413.

10. Ibn Jubayr, Travels, pp. 64-65.

11. He landed at a port he calls al-Ahwab, whose location is not precisely known.
Gb, vol. 2, p. 366n.

12. At this point we need to note that the chronology of the journey from Mecca to
East Africa, the Persian Gulf, and back to Mecca again is extremely uncertain.
Traveling times between stages and length of stays are not often provided, and the
internal chronological evidence is more limited than for the earlier journeys. One can
be only as precise about the chronology as is warranted by IB’s statements and other
internal evidence. Hrbek’s method of rationalizing a chronology for each segment of
the journey in order to make everything fit properly between the few dates IB
provides seems to be excessively conjectural. But his guesses are more often than not
plausible.

13. Gaston Wiet, “Les marchands d'Epices sous les sultans mamelouks,” Cahiers
d'Histoire Egyptienne, ser. 7, part 2 (May 1952): 88; “Rasulids,” El,, vol. 3, pp. 1128-
29

14. Al-Khazrejiyy, The Pearl Strings: A History of the Resuliyy Dynasty of Yemen,
trans. J. W. Redhouse, 5 vols. (Leiden, 1906-18), vol. 3, part 3, p. 108.

15. Hrbek (Hr, pp. 440-41) suggests that a more rational route would have been
Zabid-Ghassana-San’a—Jubla-Ta’izz—Aden and that IB may have failed to remember
accurately the succession of stops. But he admits that there is no internal evidence in
favor of revising the itinerary.

16. R.B. Lewcock and G.R. Smith, “Three Medieval Mosques in the Yemen,”
Oriental Art 20 (1974): 75-86.

17. The Rihla’s description of the journey Ta’izz—-San’a—Aden is completely silent
on the routes taken, the stages, and the length of stopovers. Moreover, the bnef gloss
on San’a is a combination of standard descriptive clichés and false information. The
several lines devoted to this detour have the air of a purely literary adventure, possibly
added by Ibn Juzayy (with or without IB’s complicity) on the grounds that readers
would expect a traveler to the Yemen to tell them something of San‘a, whether he had
been there or not. The San‘a trip might fall into the same category as the spurious
journey to Bulghar described in Chapter 8, note 12, below. Robert Wilson, formerly
of the Faculty of Oriential Studies, Cambridge University, has pointed out to me that
everything IB says about San’a could have been drawn from the existing body of
conventional geographical knowledge on the subject, from, for example, Ibn Rusta
(tenth-century geographer), Kitab al-A’lak al Nafisa, ed. J. de Goeje (Leiden, 1892),
pp. 109-10. Hrbek (Hr, pp. 440-41) doubts that IB went to San’a. So does Joseph
Chelhod, a scholar of medieval Yemen. “Ibn Battuta, Ethnologue.” Revue de
!’Occident Musulman et de la Méditerranée 25 (1978): 9.

18. This approximate time of year is suggested by both Gibb (Travels, vol. 2, p. 373)
and Hrbek (“Chronology,” p. 441).

The Arabian Sea 135

19. Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1974), vol. 2,
pp. 542-48. ee ;

20. On the economy and organization of monsoon trade in the southern seas see
Phillip D. Curtin. Cross-Cultural Trade in World History (New York, 1984), pp. 96-

oe Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, p. 373) and Hrbek (Hr, p. 441) agree that he was probably in
Aden about that time of year.

22. Tibbetts, Arab Navigation, pp. 372-73, 378. This book is in part a translation of
the nautical works of Ahmad ibn Majid, the famous Arabian mariner-author who died
in the early sixteenth century. Aside from the navigational information contained in
the translation, Tibbetts has added extensive notes and commentary to produce in all a
richly detailed study of Indian Ocean seafaring in the later Middle Period. Alan
Villiers, a modern successor to Ibn Majid, sailed from Aden to East Africa in an Arab
dhow, leaving in December 1939. Sons of Sinbad (London, 1940).

23. R.B. Serjeant, “The Ports of Aden and Shihr,” Recueils de la Société Jean
Bodin 32 (1974): 212; $. D. Goitein, “Letters and Documents on the India Trade in
Medieval Times,” /slamic Culture 37 (1963): 196-97.

24. W.H. Moreland, “The Ships of the Arabian Sea about A.D. 1500,” Journal of
the Royal Asiatic Society | (1939): 176, Tibbetts, Arab Navigation, pp. 48-49.

25. Tibbets (Arab Navigation, p. 3) remarks that “Ibn Battuta is not very observant
of nautical affairs." The same point is made by Michel Mollat, “Ibn Batoutah et la
Mer,” Travaux et Jours 18 (1966): 53-70.

26. The design of the hull was the basis for classifying Indian Ocean ships. IB does
provide a classificatory name for some of the vessels he traveled on during his career,
but this is not necessarily very helpful. The connection between the medieval name of
a ship and its precise hull design cannot be ascertained with certainty. See J. Hornell,
“Classification of Arab Sea Craft.” Mariner’s Mirror 28 (1942): 11-40, A. H.J. Prins.
“The Persian Gulf Dhows: New Notes on the Classification of Mid-Eastern Sea-
Craft,” Persica 6 (1972-74): 157-165; George Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian
Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times (Princeton, N.J., 1951), pp. 87-89.

27. Alan Villiers (Sons of Sinbad, pp. 21-243, passim) describes in dramatic detail
his voyage from Aden to Mogadishu, Zanzibar, and the Gulf of Oman in 1939-40.

28. Neville Chittick remarks that the “Maqdishi” language IB says he heard in the
town was either Somali or an early form of a Swahili dialect, probably the latter. “The
East African Coast, Madagascar and the Indian Ocean,” Cambridge History of Africa,
5 vols. (Cambridge, England, 1977), vol. 3, p. 189.

29. In his research on the dallals (brokers) of South Arabia, R. B. Serjeant notes
the striking similanty between their functions and practices in modem times and IB's
description of the brokers of Mogadishu. “Maritime Customary Law in the Indian
Ocean” in Sociétés et compagnies de commerce en Orient et dans |’Océan Indien, Actes
du 8(éme) Colloque International d'Histoire Maritime (Paris, 1970). pp. 203-204.

30. B.G. Martin, “Arab Migration to East Africa in Medieval Times,” Inter-
national Journal of African Historical Studies 7 (1974): 368.

31. Ihave quoted this passage from Said Hamdun and Noel King’s lively translation
(H&K, pp. 16-17).

32. Both Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, p. 379n) and Hrbek (Hr. p. 442) suggest that he sailed
from Mogadishu in late February or early March. By the end of March the northeast
monsoon was dying out (Tibbetts, Arab Navigation, p. 378).

33. Peter Garlake, The Early Islamic Architecture of the East African Coast
(London, 1966), p. 117.

34. On the regnal dates of the Mahdali dynasty see Elias Saad, “Kilwa Dynastic
Historiography: A Critical Study,” History in Africa 6 (1979): 177-207.

35. More is known about life in Kilwa than any other coastal town in that age
thanks largely to the excavations of Neville Chittick, Kilwa: An Islamic Trading City
on the East African Coast, 2 vols. (Nairobi, 1974).

136 The Arabian Sea

36. IB’s description of the East African coast, though brief, is the only eye-witness
account of the medieval period, so historians have squeezed the Rihla for every tidbit of
information. See Neville Chittick, “Ibn Battuta and East Africa,” Journal de la Société
des Africanistes 38 (1968): 239-41.

37. Tibbetts, Arab Navigation, pp. 373, 377-78. Alan Villiers (Sons of Sinbad, p.
191) left the mouth of the Rufiji River south of Kilwa in late March for his return voyage
to Oman.

38. Hamdun and King (H&K, p. 68) have it from East African sailors that the trip
would take about four weeks. Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, p. 382n), based on Villiers’ journey
from Zanzibar to Muscat, says three to four weeks. Hrbek (Hr, p. 444) suggests six to
eight weeks, which seems too long.

39. In connection with his sojourn at Zafar, IB makes one of his important
contributions to ethno-botany, describing in detail the cultivation and use of both
coconuts and betel.

40. The veracity of IB’s stay in Nazwa is uncertain, so I have not drawn attention to
his description of the Banu Nabhan king of Oman, who he claims to have met, nor to his
remarks on the religious beliefs of the Omanis. The interior region of Oman was the
bastion of the Islamic sect known as the Ibadis. Reversing the Shi’ia doctrine of the
supremacy of the House of ’Ali, the Ibadis believed that any member of the community
of believers could be chosen as the Imam as long as he displayed the proper moral
qualities and a capacity to uphold the Koranic law. If he failed, the community was
obliged to withdraw its support. The Banu Nabhan (1154-1406), however, were not
Imams, and their ascendancy represented a hiatus in the Imamate, which was restored
in the fifteenth century. Roberto Rubinacci, “The Ibadis,” in A. J. Arberry and C. F.
Beckingham (eds.), Religion in the Middle East, 2 vols. (Cambridge, England, 1969),
vol. 2, pp. 302-17; and Salij ibn Razik, History of the Imams and Seyyids of Oman,
trans. G. P. Badger (London, 1871).

IB’s description of Nazwa is brief and fuzzy, he makes inaccurate or doubtful remarks
about Ibadi customs, and his itinerary from Nazwa to Hurmuz on the far side of the
Persian Gulf is a complete blank. Neither Gibb nor Hrbek explicitly questions the
truthfulness of IB’s journey through the interior of Oman. J. C. Wilkinson, a scholar of
Omani history, expresses grave doubts and has pointed out to me some of the textual
problems with this section of the Rihla. Personal communication from J.C. Wilkinson,
Oxford University.

41. Hrbek (Hr, pp. 445-48) develops a line of argument suggesting that IB did not
visit Hurmuz, Persia, or any point on the eastern shore of the Gulf in 1329 (1331), but
rather has inserted into the narrative a description of a journey that actually took place
in 1347 when he traveled from India to Hurmuz and thence to Shiraz. Hrbek thinks that
in 1331 he went directly from Nazwa to al-Qatif overland along the eastern coast of
Arabia. The argument is based heavily on the fact that IB’s description of Hurmuz, his
meeting with its sultan (Tahamtan Qutb al-Din), and the civil war in which that ruler had
been engaged all relate to a situation pertaining in 1347. The other points Hrbek makes
to sustain his theory are inferential and speculative. I cannot accept it, partly on the
grounds that IB may well have blended his descriptions of two trips to Hurmuz, and
partly on the fact that in his report of an interview with the King of Ceylon in 1344 he
speaks of having discussed with that monarch the pearls he had already seen on the
island of Qais off the eastern shore of the Gulf. MH, p. 218. Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, p. 402n)
also recognizes the chronological confusion here.

42. Hr, p. 450; Gb, vol. 2, p. 406n.

43. Ibid., p. 407n. Gibb thinks he visited Qais; Hrbek (Hr, p. 450) believes it was
Siraf. In the fourteenth century Qais was a far more important commercial center than
Siraf and a likelier place for IB to embark for Arabia.

44. IB refers to Bahrain as a city, but Hrbek (Hr, p. 451) believes his description of
such a place refers in fact to al-Qatif, the chief town of the coastal district known in
earlier Muslim times as Bahrain. The term later referred solely to the island.

7 Anatolia

This country called Bilad al-Rum is one of the finest
regions in the world; in it God has brought together the
good things dispersed through other lands. Its inhabitants
are the comeliest of men in form, the cleanest in dress, the
most delicious in food, and the kindliest of God’s

creatures. !
Ibn Battuta

Sometime near the end of 1330 (1332) Ibn Battuta boarded a
Genoese merchant ship at the Syrian port of Latakia (Ladiqiya)
and sailed westward into the Mediterranean, bound for the south
coast of Anatolia. He was on his way to India and once again
headed squarely in the wrong direction.

His intentions had been straightforward enough when he left
Arabia some months earlier. He would go to Jidda, buy passage
ona ship for Aden, and continue from there to India on the winter
monsoon, just as hundreds of returning South Asian pilgrims were
doing at the same time. First, though, he must secure the services
of a rafiq, a guide-companion who knew India well, spoke Persian,
and would have contacts of some value in official circles. Although
the illustrious Sultan of Delhi was welcoming scholars from abroad
and offering them prestigious and rewarding public posts, a young
North African could not wander through rural India on his own
and then, if he made it to Delhi at all, simply turn up unannounced
at the royal palace. A rafiq was essential, and after several weeks
in Jidda he failed to find one.?

At this point he seems to have decided it would be better to
approach India by a more circuitous route and hope to meet up
with persons along the way who could lead him to Delhi and
provide him with the necessary connections. And so boarding a
sambugq he sailed directly to the Egyptian coast, made his way to
’Aydhab, and from there retraced his journey of a few years
earlier across the desert and down the Nile to Cairo. He rested
there a short time, then continued across Sinai, now for the second

137

Map 7: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Anatolia and the Black Sea Region, 1330—32 (1332-34)

aA

ivasy, Sr wet gh
a Erzincana.. AeA"
t

¢

oo { Mach
Y a2 oo

ore Probable Itinerary AR
OR eS eedeteanees Doubtful Journey

Anatolia 139

time, to Palestine. From this point his precise itinerary is un-
certain, but he is likely to have traveled northward (including a
quick inland detour to Jerusalem) through the Levantine coast
towns — Ashqelon, Acre (Akko), Beirut, and finally Latakia.*
Arriving there, he had in his company one al-Hajj Abdallah ibn
Abu Bakr ibn Al-Farhan al-Tuzari. All we know of. this
gentleman, whom Ibn Battuta met in Cairo, is that he was an
Egyptian legal scholar and that he determined to accompany the
Moroccan on his travels. As it came to pass, the two men would
remain fast friends and companions for many years.

Sailing from the coast of Syria to Anatolia in order to get to
India made some sense, for it is precisely what Marco Polo had
done more than sixty years earlier on his way to the Persian Gulf.
From the south Anatolian ports of Ayas (Lajazzo), Alanya, and
Antalya, trade routes ran northward over the Taurus Mountains to
the central plateau where they joined the trans-Anatolian trunk
road linking Konya, Sivas, and Erzurum (Arz al-Rum) with Tabriz
and thence with Central Asia or the gulf. But since Ibn Battuta
would spend about two years in Anatolia and the Black Sea region
and finally approach India by way of the Hindu Kush and
Afghanistan, a far more difficult and time-consuming passage than
the gulf route, we can only conclude that he was playing the tourist
again, his Indian career plans sidetracked in favor of more casual
adventures.

There was nothing unusual about him and al-Tuzari taking
passage out of Latakia on a European vessel. Italians. Catalans,
and Provengals had long since eliminated Muslim shipping from
the eastern Mediterranean except for coasting trade and the short
run between the Levantine coast and Cyprus. Using Famagusta,
the chief port of Cyprus, as the hub of their operations in the
eastern sea, the Genoese called at both Levantine ports and those
along the south Anatolian coast.*

Ibn Battuta describes the vessel he boarded as a gurqura, which
was probably lateen-rigged, two-masted, and fitted with two or
even three decks. It may have been much larger than any ship he
had seen in the Indian Ocean, since the Italian “round ships” of
the time, with their great superstructures over the bow and stern,
were known to hold as much as 600 tons dead weight of cargo and
as many as 100 crewmen. As usual, Ibn Battuta fails to tell us
what sort of lading the ship was carrying, perhaps a load of Syrian
cotton or sugar, but he does note that the captain treated his

140 Anatolia

Muslim passengers “honorably” and did not even charge them for
the trip. Making a course northwestward around the tip of Cyprus,
the ship approached Alanya, the western Taurus Mountains
looming behind it, some time in the last weeks of 1330 (1332).°

Except for his brief trip to Tabriz in Azerbaijan, Ibn Battuta was
for the first time visiting a land whose Muslim inhabitants were
mostly Turkish. Arab travelers to Anatolia in the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, a modern scholar has noted, experienced
jarring attacks of culture shock when they confronted the alien
ways of the Turks, as if finding themselves in some remote part of
equatorial Africa.’ In the centuries of the Abbasid Caliphate the
ridges of the eastern Taurus had effectively protected the Asian
territory of Christian Byzantium from the Arab armies of Iraq and
Syria. But the high green valleys of eastern Anatolia were a
magnet to the hordes of Turkish herdsmen who poured into the
Middle East in the eleventh century as part of the conquests of the
Great Seljuks. The natural route of this vast sheep and horse
migration was westward from Khurasan to Azerbaijan, then on to
Anatolia. At Manzikert in 1071 Seljuk cavalry achieved the
military triumph over the Byzantine army that had eluded the
Abbasids for three centuries. Once the Greek defenses of the
eastern mountains collapsed, one nomadic throng after another
advanced through the passes and fanned out over the central
plateau. Within a century Byzantium had given up all but the
western quarter of Anatolia, and a new Muslim society was
emerging which had had no more than peripheral contact with the
world of the Arabs.

The transformation of Asia Minor from a land of Greek and
Armenian Christians to the country we call Turkey was a long and
extremely complex process not by any means completed until
several centuries after Ibn Battuta made his visit. When the
empire of the Great Seljuks broke up in the twelfth century, their
dynastic heirs, the Seljuks of Rum (as Anatolia was traditionally
known to Muslims, a term harking back to the rule of “Rome”)
gradually consolidated their authority over the central and eastern
regions. While the Seljukid commanders settled down in Konya
and other ancient Greek and Armenian towns and took up the
ways of the city, Turkish pastoral clans, conventionally called
Turcomans (or Turkmens), continued to drift over the Anatolian
plateau and into the highland valleys that rimmed it on all sides. In

Anatolia 141

the first half of the thirteenth century, however, the majority of the
inhabitants of the region were still neither Muslim nor Turkish.
Large Christian populations thrived in the towns and crop-bearing
lands of the Seljukid domain. A steady process of conversion to
Islam was occurring, sometimes as a result of unfriendly pressures,
but it was slow. Moreover, along the perimeters of Anatolia, Chris-
tian polities continued to survive: the kingdom of Little Armenia in
Cilicia bordering the southeastern coast, the Empire of Trebizond (a
Greek state that had broken away from Constantinople) on the
Black Sea, and of course the remaining Asian provinces of
Byzantium. Moreover, the frontier between Byzantium and the
sultanate became relatively stable, and the two governments treated
one another much of the time in a spirit of neighborly diplomacy.

This political pattern was radically disrupted in the aftermath of
the Mongol invasions. In 1243 the Tatars stormed over the Armenian
mountains, flattened the Seljukid army at Kose Dagh, and
penetrated deep into the plateau. In 1256 they returned again in a
campaign strategically linked to Hulegu’s conquest of Iraq. In the
following year Konya, the Seljukid capital, was taken, and by 1260
Mongol garrisons occupied most of the important towns of eastern
and central Anatolia. The sultanate was not abolished, however, but
propped up as a vassal state paying tribute to the Ilkhanate of Persia.
Indeed the invasion was carned off without the usual cataclysm of
terror and destruction. Only one city, Kayseri, was sacked, and the
conquest never seriously threatened Byzantine territory. Trebizond
and Little Armenia continued to endure under the Mongol shadow.

Yet if the military record of the invasion seems a vapid sideshow
set against the terrifying drama in Persia, it nonetheless jolted
Anatolia into an era of profound political and cultural change by
laying it open to more migrations of Central Asian nomads. The first
thirteenth-century wave of Turcomans arrived in panicky flight from
the Mongol war machine, the second came in its ranks. Throughout
the IIkhanid period, more bands continued to press in. The im-
mediate demographic effects of these movements are obscure, but
there is no doubt that in the century after 1243 the ethnically Turkish
population of Anatolia rose dramatically. Turkish came to be spoken
and written more widely, and the situation of Christian communities,
especially in rural villages in the path of migrating flocks and herds,
became more and more precarious.

In the west of the peninsula the Turco-Mongol irruption con-
fronted Byzantium with unprecedented nomadic pressure. Giving

142 Anatolia

way to the new migrants arriving from Azerbaijan, Turcoman
groups long established in central Anatolia pushed westward.
Moreover, as the Tatar overlords turned their attention to the
business of tax collecting and civil order, many of the newcomers
preferred to pass on quickly to the mountain peripheries where
Mongol-Seljukid authority was safely nominal. Here great leagues
of Turcoman warriors led a wild and wooly existence, raiding back
into Seljukid territory and battling one another for choice grazing
land.

The very shape of Anatolia, a finger between the seas pointing
due westward, directed the surge of pastoral movement into the
Byzantine marches and the upper reaches of the valleys that ran
down to the Aegean. Ever since the ninth century the Muslim —
Byzantine frontier had given employment to mounted fighting
men, called ghazis, who made a vocation of staging raids into
Greek territory and living off the booty. Organized in war bands
and often operating just beyond the boundaries of the Muslim
government whose military interests they served, these volunteer
champions of jihad lived by a chivalric code of\ virtue and loyalty
founded on the precepts of the Koran and thé teachings of the
early Sufis. Though not all ghazis were of Turkish blood, the
tactics and traditions of mounted holy war had been elaborately
developed on the Muslim frontiers of Central Asia. Turkish
warriors led the conquest of eastern and central Anatolia on behalf
of the Seljuks, and though the Mongols were not ih the beginning
Muslims at all, the ghazi spirit was already deeply engrained in the
Turkish warrior-herdsmen who preceded and followed them.
Frontier warfare died down in the high period of the Seljukid
sultanate when relations with Byzantium were relatively calm, but
it flared up again in the crowded, turbulent ae of the
western marches in the later thirteenth century. |

The withering of the great state structures thlat governed
Anatolia encouraged this new phase of roisterous disorder on the
frontier. Behind the lines of Turcoman advance, the sultanate was
no longer in a position to control or restrain the nomads to its own
ends. The Ilkhanid governors, obliged to take an ever-greater
share of responsibility for the affairs of the state they themselves
had defeated and repressed, were by 1278 running eastern
Anatolia as a distant province of Persia with neither the will nor
the manpower to take charge of the Turcoman peripheries. Just
beyond the nomad frontier, the Byzantine defenses proved weaker

Anatolia 143

than expected. In 1204 the Frankish and Venetian leaders of the
Fourth Crusade, having decided to capture Constantinople rather
than Jerusalem, had forced the Greek emperor to rule in exile
from the Anatolian city of Nicaea (Iznik). The traditional capital
was restored in 1261, but this Latin interlude seriously weakened
Byzantine resources. Preoccupied thereafter with the protection of
their European and Aegean territories against Christian rival
states, the emperors of the later thirteenth century defended their
Asian domain in a spirit of phlegmatic resignation.

As the Seljukid dynasty slid gently into oblivion, several small
Turcoman principalities, or amirates, emerged along a
mountainous arc extending from the border of Little Armenia in
the south to the coasts of the Black Sea. Some of these states were
tiny and ephemeral, but by the beginning of the fourteenth century
about twelve important centers of power, including the Ilkhanid
provinces as one of them, dominated the new political map of
Anatolia. The princes, or amirs, of these states ruled simply by
virtue of their fitness as Turcoman war captains, the biggest of the
“big men” who succeeded in gathering a larger following of
mounted archers than their rivals with promises of booty and land.
As the Byzantines fell back to their ships almost everywhere
except the fragment of Asian territory opposite the Bosphorus, the
Aegean hinterland was partitioned among five principal amirates
extending along the curve of the arc: Menteshe in the south, then
Aydin, Sarukhan, Karasi, and in the far north facing the remaining
Byzantine strongholds the Osmanlis, or state of Osman.

The Muslim conquest of western Anatolia in the first half of the
fourteenth century was in the long view only the beginning of a
new age of Turkish power. For under the banner of the des-
cendants of Osman, called by Europeans the Ottomans, Turkish
cavalry would cross the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles and swarm
into the Balkans. Traveling among the Turkish amirates in 1331,
two years before his own Moroccan sovereign was preparing a last
and utterly futile attempt to retake Spain for Islam, Ibn Battuta
may have gained some comfort from the spectacle in Anatolia,
where the situation was quite the reverse. By the time he ended his
traveling career, the Ottoman armies were advancing on Greece.
Barely more than a century and a half after his death they would
be attacking the eastern frontiers of Morocco and marching up the
Danube to Central Europe.

Though the Anatolia Ibn Battuta saw was nearing the end of the

144 Anatolia

century of political cracking and straining that marked the transition
from the Seljukids and Byzantines to the Ottoman Empire, the
continuity of urban and lettered culture was never really broken.
Putting up their mosques and palaces in the midst of ancient Greek
cities, the Turkish dynasties were naturally profoundly influenced by
Byzantine architecture, craftsmanship, and everyday custom. But
their model of Muslim civilization was the Persian one they brought
with them over the mountains. A literate tradition of their own still in
the future, the Turkish rulers and officials who took up residence in
the towns encouraged the immigration of Persian scholars,
secretaries, and artisans, who helped to make Konya in the twelfth
and thirteenth centuries an important international center of belles-
lettres, Sufi teaching and architectural innovation. Then, in the
Mongol panic of the 1220s and later, many more educated and
affluent Persians arrived in Anatolia, attracted by the prosperous
urban culture of the sultanate. Like Cairo and Shiraz, Konya and
other Anatolian towns found themselves benefiting unexpectedly
from the flight of brains and money from greater Persia. These
refugees, as it turned out, did not get far enough away from home by
half, but the Mongol invasion was so uncharacteristically mild that
city life went on much as before. Indeed, under Ilkhanid sovereignty
the high culture of eastern and central Anatolia became more Persia-
nized than ever before.

In the west the hard-riding Turcoman chiefs wasted no time for-
saking their tents for the urban Byzantine citadels they captured and
assembling around themselves Persian-speaking immigrant
schoolmen who would show them proper civilized behavior. At the
time of Ibn Battuta’s visit Persianate letters and refinements pre-
vailed in the courtly circles of the amirates. Moreover the Arabic
influence at higher levels of society was not entirely missing. Arabic
was the accepted language of building and numismatic inscriptions
and of legal and fiscal documents. Some Persian scholars could speak
the language, and a few notable intellectual figures from Arab lands
lived and worked in Asia Minor.* Though Ibn Battuta did not know
Persian at that point in his travels (by his own admission) and would
never learn much Turkish (a fact he was loath to admit), he could
expect to have no more trouble making himself understood among
the learned fraternity of Anatolia than he had had in Iran.”

The spectacular city of Alanya (‘Alaya), where Ibn Battuta, al-
Tuzari, and apparently other companions stepped onto Anatolian

Anatolia 145

soil in the early winter of 1330 (1332), was one of the chief south
coast ports linking the interior beyond the coastal ridges of the
western Taurus with the lands of the Arabs and Latins. The harbor
and shipyards lay at the eastern foot of a great Gibraltar-like
promontory rising 820 feet above the sea and surmounted by a
complex of walls and forts. '0 The ruler of this bastion was the amir
of Karaman, one of the most powerful of the Turcoman states to
emerge in the later thirteenth century. In the company of the local
gadi Ibn Battuta prayed the Friday prayer in the mosque of the
citadel and the following day rode out ten miles along the shore to
pay respects to the Karamanid governor at his seaside residence.
There was the usual interview, and the traveler accepted his first
present, money in this instance, from an Anatolian dignitary.

After a presumably short stay in Alanya, Ibn Battuta and his
friends continued westward along the coast, probably on the same
Genoese ship, to Antalya, the next major port. Like Alanya, it
had been a Seljukid town until taken over by a Turcoman war lord
who subsequently founded a local dynasty called the Teke. Ibn
Battuta spent his first night in the local madrasa as the guest of its
shaykh. But the next day a man dressed in frowzy-looking clothes
and wearing a felt cap on his head came to the college and,
addressing the visitors in Turkish, invited them to come to dinner.
The invitation was translated and Ibn Battuta politely accepted.
But after the man jad gone away he protested to his host that the
fellow was obviously poverty-sticken and should not be imposed
upon to provide a meal.

Whereupon the shaykh burst out laughing and said to me “He is
one of the shaykhs of the . . . Akhis. He is acobbler, and a man
of generous disposition. His associates number about two
hundred men of different trades, who have elected him as their
leader and have built a hospice to entertain guests in, and all
that they earn by day they spend at night.”!!

And so, following the sunset prayer the puzzled visitor and his
host went off with the shabby cobbler to his lodge.

We found it to be a fine building, carpeted with beautiful Rumi
rugs, and with a large number of lustres of Iraqi glass...
Standing in rows in the chamber were a number of young men
wearing long cloaks, and with boots on their feet. Each one of

146 Anatolia

them had a knife about two cubits long attached to a girdle
round his waist, and on their heads were white bonnets of woo]
with a piece of stuff about a cubit long and two fingers broad
attached to the peak of each bonnet . . . When we had taken
our places among them, they brought in a great banquet, with
fruits and sweetmeats, after which they began their singing and
dancing.

Thus Ibn Battuta had his introduction to the fityan associations
of Anatolia, the institution that would subsequently see him
through more than 25 different towns and cities with displays of
hospitality more lavish and enthusiastic than he would experience
anywhere else in the Muslim world.'* The fityan organizations,
also called the akhis (originally a Turkish word meaning
“generous”), were corporations of unmarried young men repres-
enting generally the artisan classes of Anatolian towns. Their
purpose was essentially the social one of providing a structure of
solidarity and mutual aid in the urban environment. The code of
conduct and initiation ceremonies of the fityan were founded ona
set of standards and values that went by the name of futuwwa,
both words coming from the same Arabic root and referring in
concept to the Muslim ideal of the “youth” (fata) as the exemplary
expression of the qualities of nobility, honesty, loyalty, and
courage. The brothers of the fityan were expected to lead lives
approaching these ideal qualities, which included demonstrations
of generous hospitality to visiting strangers. The leaders of the
associations were usually prestigious local personages of mature
years who held the honorific title of “Akhi.”

Known from Abbasid times in varying forms of organization and
purpose, the precepts of the futuwwa appear to have entered Asia
Minor from Iran where fityan corporations had long been estab-
lished (though Ibn Battuta barely mentions them in connection
with his travels there). By the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries
associations existed in probably every Anatolian town of any size.
In the era of political upheaval and fragmentation extending from
the Mongol invasion to the rise of the Ottoman Empire, the fityan
were filling a crucial civic function of helping to maintain urban
cohesiveness and defense. Each association had its distinctive
costume, which normally included a white cap and special
trousers, and the members met regularly in their lodges or the
homes of their Akhis for sport, food, and fellowship. Drawing

Anatolia 147

their initiates from young workers and craftsmen, the clubs were
organized to some degree along occupational lines, though they
were not synonymous with trade guilds, which also existed.
Meetings and initiation rites incorporated prayers and mystical
observances, the religious dimension reinforcing the secular bonds
of common interest and civic idealism.

Coming away from his first fityan banquet “greatly astonished at
their generosity and innate nobility” and doubtless looking for-
ward to the pleasant evenings that lay on the road ahead, Ibn
Battuta turned his back on the Mediterranean and pushed north-
ward through the coastal hills to the lake district of the
southwestern interior and the territory of the Amirate of Hamid.
At the town of Burdur he and al-Tuzari (and perhaps other com-
panions) stayed in the house of the mosque preacher, but the
fityan put on a marvelous entertainment, “although,” he admits,
“they were ignorant of our language and we of theirs, and there
was no one to interpret between us.” Turning northeastward next
day the travelers continued to Egridir (Akkridur), capital of the
Hamid dynasty situated at the southern end of a beautiful
mountain lake.

From this point in the Anatolian journey Ibn Battuta’s recon-
struction of his itinerary presents serious and puzzling im-
plausibilities. Though we will never be quite sure which way he
went after leaving Egridir, the force of logic would suggest that he
continued eastward over the Sultan Daghlari mountains to Konya
at the southwestern edge of the central plateau, arriving there
sometime early in January 1331 (1333).""

Talking with the scholars under the domes of the beautiful
Seljukid mosque of ’Ala al-Din or the college of Ince Minare. Ibn
Battuta might have felt a bit as though he were back in Iran again,
for Konya, whose population was a mix of Turks, Persians,
Greeks, Armenians, and Jews, was the most Persianized of
Anatolian cities at the level of educated culture.'* It was not.
admittedly, the grand capital it had been in the heyday of the
Seljukids. But it was an important trade center. and it glowed with
the residual prestige of its great endowments and the memory of
Jalal al-Din Rumi, the thirteenth-century Sufi poet whose works
are classics of world literature.

During the late winter and spring of 1331 (1333), if our guess at
the actual itinerary is correct, Ibn Battuta traveled from Konya
across the central plateau to as far east as Erzurum in the

148 Anatolia

mountains of Armenia, and then back again. If he had at the time
no immediate desire to go to India, some of the merchants and
scholars he met on the trail probably did, for much of the way he
kept to the Mongol-controlled trunk roads connecting both the
eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea with Tabriz and the
main spice and silk routes beyond it. In 1271 the young Marco
Polo and his father had disembarked at Ayas in Little Armenia
and followed the trans-Anatolian road by way of Sivas, the
principal long-distance emporium of the eastern interior, to the
upper Tigris and thence to China.

In the later twelfth and the thirteenth centuries the Seljukids
had built numerous caravansaries (Khans) along the main routes
eastwards of Konya. A merchant bound for Persia could not have
found grander or more comfortable road accommodations
anywhere in the Muslim world. Designed to serve both ordinary
travelers and sultans on the march during the long and cold
Anatolian winters, the most elaborate khans had, in addition to
the usual sleeping quarters and storerooms grouped around an
open courtyard, a large covered hall, a bath, a small mosque. and
a massive, ornately carved portal. The Mongols built even more
hostelries and placed contingents of mounted police along the
roads to collect tolls and ensure the safety of the merchants. Even
today the ruins of 23 khans still stand along the old road between
Konya and Sivas.'°

In the Rihla Ibn Battuta does not, surprisingly enough, mention
staying in any of these caravansaries. But he has much to say about
the hospitality of the Akhis. At all his major stops between Konya
and Sivas (excepting Karaman (Laranda). the capital of the
Karamanid dynasty, where he was entertained by the sultan
himself) he lodged with the local fityan. At Sivas he had the happy
experience of being argued over by two different associations for
the honor of regaling him first. One group of brothers representing
the Akhi Bichaqchi met him and his companions at the gate of the
city:

They were a large company, some riding and some on foot.
Then after them we were met by the associates of the . . . Akhi
Chalabi, who was one of the chiefs of the Akhis and whose rank
was higher than that of Akhi Bichaqchi. These invited us to
lodge with them, but I could not accept their invitation, owing
to the priority of the former. We entered the city in the

Anatolia 149

company of both parties, who were boasting against one
another, and those who had met us first showed the liveliest joy
at our lodging with them.

Ibn Battuta stayed with one club for three nights, the other for
six, and during that time had an interview with the Ilkhanid
governor, for he was now once again in the territory of the Mongol
king. He gave the usual account of his wanderings, but it was also
an occasion where he reveals the aptitude for well-timed un-
ctuousness that would later serve him so well in India. The gov-
ernor questioned him about the rulers of various countries through
which he had traveled:

His idea was that I would praise those of them who had been
generous and find fault with the miserly, but I did nothing of the
kind, and, on the contrary, praised them all. He was pleased
with this conduct on my part and commended me for it, and
then had food served.

From Sivas eastward the sequence of stopovers given in the Rihla
leaves doubt as to the precise route Ibn Battuta and his com-
panions followed. The high road to Tabriz, the route of the spice
merchants, ran from Sivas across the hills of the eastern plateau to
Erzincan (Arzanjan), a large Armenian city, and thence to
Erzurum, the last important town west of the passes leading into
Azerbaijan. Ibn Battuta, however, made two long and arduous
side trips. One was to Amasya (Amasiya) and Sunisa (Sunusa),
two Ilkhanid towns in the Pontic Mountains (Kuzey Anadolou
Daghari), the lofty range that runs parallel to the Black Sea coast.
The other was to Gumushane (Kumish), high up in the forests on
the main road between Erzurum and the sea.'® He intended to
stay in Erzurum only one night but was obliged to remain for
three, at the insistence of an elderly Akhi, who personally catered
the visitors’ meals, though he was by local accounts more than 130
years old!

As the itinerary in the Rihla has it, Ibn Battuta and his friends
were suddenly and inexplicably transported as if by jet aircraft
from Erzurum to the city of Birgi, which lay almost 700 miles to
the west. He says nothing of his return journey from eastern
Anatolia, but by his own account he was in Egridir, capital of the
Hamid principality, at the beginning of Ramadan, which was 8

150 Anatolia

June in 1331 (16 May in 1333). Accounting logically for his where-
abouts during the previous several months, he may well have been
in Egridir for a second time, returning westward, when Ramadan
arrived.'’ He remained there several days, attending the royal
court and breaking the fast every evening in the company of the
sultan and his qadi.

He then rode westward to Ladhiq, prosperous capital of the
little amirate of Denizli, where he celebrated the Id al-Fitr, the
Breaking of the Fast, with the local doctors of the law. He was now
approaching the Aegean and passing into the marches where
Turcoman cavalry had only in the previous few decades expelled
the Byzantine armies and landlords and where the majority of the
urban population was still Christian. Ladhiq had a large and
economically vigorous population of Greeks engaged in the pro-
duction of fine cotton fabrics. “Most of the artisans there are
Greek women,” the Rihla reports, “for in it there are many
Greeks who are subject to the Muslims and who pay dues to the
sultan... The distinctive mark of the Greeks there is their
[wearing of] tall pointed hats, some red and some white, and the
Greek women for their part wear capacious turbans.”

The fityan associations were there too of course, and this time
their vehement ministrations were almost enough to send Ibn
Battuta and his friends fleeing in panic:

As we passed through one of the bazaars, some men came down
from their booths and seized the bridles of our horses. Then
certain other men quarrelled with them for doing so, and the
altercation between them grew so hot that some of them drew
knives. All this time we had no idea what they were saying, and
we began to be afraid of them... At length God sent us a
man, a pilgrim, who knew Arabic, and I asked what they
wanted of us. He replied that they belonged to the fityan, that
those who had been the first to reach us were the associates of

the ... Akhi Sinan, while the others were the associates of
the .. . Akhi Tuman, and that each party wanted us to lodge
with them . . . Finally they came to an agreement to cast lots,

and that we should lodge first with the one whose lot was
drawn.

After resting in Ladhiq for some days following the festivities of
"Id al-Fitr, the little party joined a caravan going west. Now their

Anatolia 151

road wound down along the valleys of the ancient Aegean lands of
Phrygia and Caria and past the vineyards and olive groves that
signalled the travelers’ return to the Mediterranean rim.

Throughout the rest of 1331 (1333) Ibn Battuta continued his
tour of Turkish principalities, moving northward through the
Aegean hinterland and visiting in succession the courts of
Menteshe, Aydin, Sarukhan, Karasi, Balikesir, and_ finally
Osman. These were the front line states of the Muslim advance,
which by the time of his arrival in the region had left the hapless
Byzantines clinging precariously to a few patches of fortified Asian
territory. Moreover, by 1331 Turkish bands were already raiding
Aegean islands and the Balkan shore opposite the Dardanelles,
preliminary bouts for the invasion of Europe that was soon to
come.

The speed with which the Byzantines vacated the Aegean
littoral left the Turkish invaders suddenly in possession of a region
of tremendous agricultural and commercial wealth and an urban
tradition going back more than two millennia. Barely out of the
saddle, the upstart ghazi chiefs readily transformed themselves
into civilized princes. Ibn Battuta was much impressed by his
reception at Birgi, capital of the Amir Mehmed of Aydin, where
he arrived probably some time in July. Owing to the intense
summer heat, he spent several days in the company of the sultan
and his retinue at a royal mountain retreat. Then, moving down
out of the highlands to the Aegean coast, the travelers turned
north again, visiting in succession the ancient cities of Aya Soluk
(Ephesus), Izmir (Smyrna), Manisa, Bergama (Pergamom),
Balikesir, and finally Bursa and Iznik (Yaznik, Nicaea). Akhis,
shaykhs, and princes came forward all along the way to host him
and ply him with gifts. Everywhere except in Aya Soluk. There he
forgot to get off his horse when he saluted the governor, a son of
the amir of Aydin, thus breaking a fundamental Turkish courtesy.
Consequently the governor snubbed him by sending him nothing
more valuable than a single robe of gold brocade. The traveler also
seems to have had an unsatisfactory time in the mini-amirate of
Balikesir, whose sultan he describes as “a worthless person” and
its people as “a large population of good-for-nothings™ for failing
to build a roof on their new congregational mosque and therefore
having to conduct the Friday prayer in a grove of walnut trees.

In a completely contrasting tone he reports his introduction to
Orkhan, ruler of the principality of Osman: “This sultan is the

152 Anatolia

greatest of the kings of the Turkmens and the richest in wealth,
lands and military forces.” From the perspective of the mid 1350s
when the Rihla was composed, such a comparative evaluation
would have seemed painfully accurate to all the other western
amirates as well as the Christians of Constantinople. For between
the time of the Moroccan’s visit to Anatolia and the close of his
traveling career, the Osmanlis, or Ottomans, elbowed their way
into world history.

Osman, the Turcoman chief, who appears in history through a
fog of later Ottoman legend, started his military career in the late
thirteenth century organizing mounted archers in the Sakarya river
region sandwiched between the great amirates of Germiyan and
Kastamonu. He achieved fame suddenly in 1301 when he defeated
a 2,000-man Byzantine force near Izmit (Nicomedia). As Greek
resistance stiffened out of desperation to keep their remaining
footholds in Asia, Osman’s ranks swelled with Turcoman cavalry
from other amirates. In 1326, the year Osman died, the important
Greek city of Bursa was taken and became for a time the Ottoman
capital. In early 1331 Orkhan, his son and successor, captured
Iznik and in the following six years virtually eliminated Byzantine
power east of the Bosphorus.

Ibn Battuta passed through the Osmanli kingdom at the historic
moment when it was consolidating a rich agricultural and urban
base in Anatolia and was on the brink of almost seven decades of
military expansion in every direction. Orkhan’s talents as a
military leader were apparent to the visitor:

Of fortresses he possesses nearly a hundred, and for most of his
time he is continually engaged in making the round of them,
staying in each fortress for some days to put it into good order
and examine its condition. It is said that he had never stayed for
a whole month in any one town. He also fights with the infidels
continually and keeps them under siege.

Less than fifteen years after Ibn Battuta observed Orkhan’s com-
pulsive war-making, the Ottoman army conquered the
neighboring amirate of Karasi and soon thereafter crossed the
Dardanelles into Thrace. The Byzantine fortress of Gallipoli fell in
1354, and when Orkhan died in 1360, the Turkish war machine
was poised for the conquest of southeastern Europe.'®

When he was not fighting, Orkhan found time to establish a

Anatolia 153
madrasa in Iznik in 1331'? and would undertake a good deal more
public building later in his reign, laying the cultural foundations
that would transform his still very Greek cities into Turko—Muslim
ones. The fityan clubs were already active in Bursa. Ibn Battuta
lodged in the hospice of one of the Akhis and passed the night of
the fast of Ashura (10 Muharram, or 13 October 1331) there in a
“truly sublime” state, listening to Koranic readings and a homiletic
sermon. He also met Orkhan himself during his stay in Bursa
(though he has nothing to say about the meeting) and received
from him a gift of “a large sum of money.” In Iznik he met the
Khatun, wife of Orkhan, and remained in that city for some weeks
owing to one of his horses being ill.

When he started out again sometime in November,”’ now
traveling eastward to his rendezvous with the Black Sea, he had in
his company, he tells us, three friends (including al-Tuzari), two
slave boys, and a slave girl. This is one of the few occasions in the
Rihla where he reveals precisely the composition of his entourage.
He was also trailing, we may surmise, several horses and a large
accumulation of baggage. Heading into the last stage of his
journey through Asia Minor, it seems clear that a significant
change had occurred in both his material welfare and his own
sense of his social status as an ’alim of moderate fortune. He
speaks in the Rihla of “the prestige enjoyed by doctors of law
among the Turks.” Indeed, as a jurist, a pilgrim, and a represen-
tative of Arab culture, he was treated with more honor and de-
ference among the Turkish princes, themselves hungry for
approval as legitimate and respectable Muslim rulers, than
anywhere else in his travels up to that point. In turn he began to
assert himself more as a mature and lettered man in the presence
of secular power. In Milas at the court of Menteshe he successfully
interceded before the sultan on behalf of a jurist who had fallen
out of favor owing to a political slip. In Aydin the amir Mehmed
asked him to write down a number of hadiths, or traditions of the
Prophet, recalled from memory, then had expositions of them
prepared in Turkish. Later, at the palace in Birgi Ibn Battuta
loudly denounced a Jewish physician, who had a prominent posi-
tion at court, for seating himself in a position above the Koran
readers. The incident was not so much an expression of anti-
semitism as a demonstration of his sense of pious propriety and his
willingness to stand up for righteous standards as he perceived
them, whatever the sultan’s reaction.”

154. Anatolia

Visiting about twenty princely courts (including seats of gOv-
ernors) in the space of less than a year, he could well support his
claim to status as a gentleman of consequence with a growing store
of assets in hospitality gifts, not only clothes, horses, and money,
but slaves and concubines. For the first time in his travels he
speaks of acquiring bonded servants, portending the day in India
when he would be accompanied by a large retinue of them. The
amir of Aydin gave him his first slave, a male Greek captive. In
Ephesus he purchased for himself a young Greek girl for forty gold
dinars. In Izmir the sultan’s son gave him another boy. In Balikesir
he bought a second girl. When he left Iznik he had, as he reports,
only three slaves (one perhaps having been sold), but he was in
any case traveling as a man of substance. The conspicuous
evidence of his wealth and prestige would continue to grow during
the ensuing journey across Central Asia.

But first he had to get across the Pontic Mountains to the Black
Sea in the dead of a bitter Anatolian winter. In stark contrast to his
summer promenade through the orchards and vineyards of the
lovely Aegean valleys, the final trek out of Asia Minor was a chain
of annoyances and near fatal calamities reminiscent of his dis-
tastrous march to Qalhat along the South Arabian coast. The
trouble began at the Sakarya River several miles east of Iznik
when the little party started to follow a Turkish horsewoman and
her servant across what they all thought was a ford. Advancing to
the middle of the river, the woman suddenly fell from her horse.
Reaching out to save her, her servant jumped into the frigid water
but both of them were carried away in the swirling current. A
group of men on the opposite bank, witnessing the accident,
immediately swam into the stream and managed to drag both
victims ashore. Half-drowned, the woman eventually revived, but
her servant perished. The men then warned Ibn Battuta and his
companions that they must go further downstream to cross safely.
After heeding this advice, they discovered a primitive wooden
raft, loaded themselves and their baggage on it, and were pulled
across by rope, their horses swimming behind.

Then at the village of Goynuk (Kainuk), where they lodged in
the house of a Greek woman for a night, they encountered heavy
snow. A local horseman guided them onward through the drifts as
far as a Turcoman village, where another rider was hired to take
them to Mudurnu (Muturni), the next important town on the far
side of a wooden mountain pass.” After leading them deep into

Anatolia 155

the hills, the guide suddenly made signs that he wanted money.
When he was refused any compensation until he delivered his
employers safely into town, he snatched a bow belonging to one of
the travelers and threatened to steal it. Ibn Battuta relented then,
but the moment the rogue had money in his hand he fled, leaving
the startled little band to find their own road in the deep snow.
Eventually they came to a hill where the track was marked by
stones, but by this time the sun was setting. If they tried to camp in
the forest overnight, they were likely to freeze to death; if they
continued on they would only lose their way in the dark.

I had a good horse, however, a thoroughbred, so I planned a
way of escape, saying to myself, “If I reach safety, perhaps I
may contrive some means to save my companions,” and it
happened so. I commended them to God Most High and set
out... After the hour of the night prayer I came to some
houses and said “O God, grant that they be inhabited.” I found
that they were inhabited, and God Most High guided me to the
gate of a certain building. I saw by it an old man and spoke to
him in Arabic; he replied to me in Turkish and signed me to
enter. I told him about my companions, but he did not under-
stand me.

Then, in a thoroughly improbable stroke of providence, Ibn
Battuta found that he was at a Sufi hospice and that one of the
brethren was a former “acquaintance” of his, an Arabic-speaking
chap (from what corner of the worid we are not told) who quickly
grasped the situation and sent a party to rescue the stranded
companions. After a warm night and a hot meal in the lodge, the
group continued on to Mudurnu, arriving just in time for the
Friday prayer.

Convinced now that they needed an interpreter, Ibn Battuta
engaged a local man (who had made the hajj and spoke Arabic) to
take them to Kastamonu, the largest town in the region, which lay
ten days to the northeast. Though the man was prosperous and
reasonably well educated, he quickly revealed himself to be a
greedy and unscrupulous character, selling anything he could lay
his hands on in the village market places, stealing part of the daily
expense funds, and appropriating for himself the money the
travelers wished to pay a sister of his who fed them in a village
along the way. But they still needed the fellow to get them through

156 Anatolia

the mountains. “The thing went so far that we openly accused him
and would say to him at the end of the day ‘Well, Hajji, how much
of the expense-money have you stolen today?’ He would reply ‘So
much,’ and we would laugh at him and make the best of it.”

On top of all these miseries Ibn Battuta’s slave girl almost
drowned crossing another river.

The weary caravaners must have been blessedly relieved to
arrive at Kastamonu, capital of the principality of the Jandarids
and an island of moderately civilized comfort in the snowy
wilderness. Ibn Battuta once again received the sort of treatment
to which he was accustomed, feasting with the local scholars,
meeting the amir in his lofty citadel overlooking the city,** and
accepting the usual robes, horse, and money. He remained there
some weeks, enjoying his last encounter with a generous
Anatolian prince and perhaps waiting for the weather to improve.
Then, riding northeastward into the Pontic, now apparently with
an entourage of nine, he crossed one of the high passes and
descended through the dense forests of the northern slopes, the
Black Sea and the land of the Golden Horde before him.

Notes

1. Gb, vol. 2, p. 416.

2. IB’s reference to a stay of 40 days in Jidda cannot be taken as a precise
recollection. As Hrbek points out (Hr, pp. 453, 467) IB repeatedly reports the
length of his stopovers in particular places as “forty days” or “about forty days.”
The use of this number as a conventional rounded figure was common among
Middle Eastern and Islamic peoples. It appears frequently in Islamic ideology and
ritual in Morocco. See Edward Westermarck, Ritual and Belief in Morocco, 2 vols.
(London, 1926), vol. 1, p. 143.

3. The Rihla’s earliest description of travels through Greater Syria appears to
be a compilation of four separate journeys, the second one being in 1330 (1332)
(see Chapter 3, note 26 and Chapter 6, note 2). Thus it is difficult to know precisely
which cities he visited during each of the four tours. He claims, without adding any
descriptive material, to have passed through Hebron, Jerusalem, and Ramla on his
way from Gaza to Acre in 1330 (1332). Hrbek (Hr, p. 454) is inclined to believe, for
reasons of chronology and logic, that these stopovers are out of place and that he
went directly up the coast to Latakia without passing into the interior. However, IB
could have fitted in a second visit to the holy places of Hebron and Jerusalem and
been back on the coast in a matter of a few days. Moreover, he may have visited
several towns and castles in far northern Syria in 1330. He mentions them, how-
ever, only in connection with the 1326 itinerary.

4. In the 1330s the Genoese were probably just beginning to frequent
Levantine ports after a hiatus of several decades owing to conflict between the
Mamluks and the last of the Crusader states. W. Heyd, Histoire du commerce du
Levant au moyen-dge, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1936), vol. 1, pp. 547-8, vol. 2, pp. 61-62.

Anatolia 157

5. Eugene H. Byrne, Genoese Shipping in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
(Cambridge, Mass., 1930), pp. 5-9.

6. 1B claims to have taken ten nights to get from Latakia to Alanya, but if the
wind was favorable, as he says, the trip could have been made in two or three days.
Hr, pp. 4545S.

7. Claude Cahen, Pre-Ottoman Turkey (London, 1968), p. 153.

8. Ibid., pp. 227, 256, 349-50.

9. IB gives an oblique impression that he learned Turkish at some point in his
career, but, as Gibb points out (Gb, vol. 2, p. 420n), there is no evidence that he
did.

10. Seton Lloyd and D.S. Rice, Alanya (Ala‘iyya) (London, 1958).

11. Where Gibb has translated IB’s term al-fata akhi as “Young Akhi,” I have
made it simply “Akhi.” The leaders of the fityan were seldom young.

12. Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the
Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century (Berkeley
and Los Angeles, 1971), pp. 396-402. The author lists 26 places where IB speaks of
being entertained by a fityan club. I count 27 or possibly 28.

13. The main difficulty with the journey through Anatolia is that the trip from
Konya to Erzurum is arbitrarily inserted in the narrative between his stops at Milas
and Birgi, both cities in the far west of the peninsula. IB says nothing of how he got
from Milas to Konya or from Erzurum to Birgi. The journey through eastern
Anatolia seems obviously misplaced, but there are no internal clues to help sort out
the actual itinerary. Hrbek (Hr, pp. 455-64) suggests that if IB’s movements were
reasonably logical, he is likely to have gone from Antalya to Egnidir, then turned
eastward at that point and traveled on to Konya and Erzurum. He would have
returned to Egridir by a fairly direct route and arrived there in time for Ramadan (8
June 1331 or 16 May 1333). He states that he was in that city for the start of the
fast. Such a pattern of movement would fit in well with the chronology of the
Anatolian travels taken as a whole. That is, arriving on the south coast in late 1330
(1332), he would have spent the first five months or so going to Egridir, Konya,
Erzurum, and back again. He would then have continued westward to Milas, Birgi,
and the Aegean coast, traveling through that region, as he states several times,
during the summer. There is at least one annoying snag in this hypothetical
reconstruction. IB places himself in Egridir for the start of Ramadan, but during a
single visit to that town. Hrbek’s speculative solution hangs on the assertion that IB
probably visited Egridir twice and that the Ramadan visit in May occurred
following his return from the eastern region. There are of course several examples
in the Rihla of his collapsing descriptions connected with two or more visits to a
place into a single, first visit. I believe Hrbek’s reconstruction remains plausible for
want of anything better. P. Wittek thinks that owing to the chronological and
geographical problems of the Konya—Erzurum trip, IB made it up on hearsay. Das
Fiirstentum Mentesche (Amsterdam, 1967). p. 66. However, [B's eastern Anatolian
detour presents numerous details of personal experience.

14. “Konya,” EI, vol. 5, pp. 253-56; J. Bergeret. “Konya,” Archéologia 96
(July 1976): 30-37.

15. Halil Inalcik, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300-1600, trans.
Norman Itzkowitz and Colin Imber (London, 1973). pp. 53, 108-09.

16. IB’s precise itinerary in eastern Anatolia is impossible to fathom. The Rihla
has him going directly from Sunisa to Gumushane, but no direct route existed
owing to the high mountains. Hrbek speculates on alternative roads he could have
taken (Hr, pp. 458-59).

17. See note 13.

18. In contrast to the standard historiography I have not closely identified the
early Ottoman conquests with the holy war of ghazis. A recent essay convincingly
argues that the ideology of tribal solidarity and the shared adventure of “nomad

158 Anatolia

predation” unified Osman’s and Orkhan’s military enterprises, not jihad against the
Greeks. See Rudi Paul Lindner, Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia
(Bloomington, Ind., 1983).

19. Inalcik, Ottoman Empire, p. 8.

20. IB states that he was in Bursa for the fast of Ashura (10 Muharram 732 or 13
October 1331). He took two days getting from Bursa to Iznik and remained in the
latter city 40 days (probably more or less).

21. D&S, vol. 2, p. xiii. These authors point out that [IB demonstrated consider-
able tolerance toward non-Muslims. In this instance the Jewish physician did
something reprehensible in his eyes.

22. Charles Wilson (ed.), Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Asia Minor
(London, 1895), p. 14.

23. “Kastamuni,” El,, vol. 4, pp. 737-39; Wilson, Murray’s Handbook, p. 7.

Q The Steppe

We traveled eastward, seeing nothing
but the sky and the earth. '
William of Rubruck

If Ibn Battuta had inquired among the merchants of Sinope the
most sensible way to get from the northern coast of Anatolia to
India, they probably would have told him to go to Tabriz by way of
Trebizond, then on to Hurmuz and a ship to the Malabar coast. He
chose, on the contrary, to make for the city of al-Qiram (Solgat, or
today Stary Krim) in the interior of the Crimean Peninsula on the
far side of the Black Sea. Al-Qiram was the seat of the Mongol
lord governing the province of Crimea under the authority of
Ozbeg, Khan of Kipchak, the kingdom known later to Europeans
as the Golden Horde. It was also the chief inland transit center for
goods passing from Kaffa and other Italian colonies on the
Crimean coast to the towns of the populous Volga River basin, the
heart of the khanate.

Ibn Battuta does not explain why he and his companions de-
cided to cross the sea and approach India by the longer, more
difficult route across the Central Asian steppe, but it is easy
enough to guess. For one thing, he had already seen Tabriz,
Hurmuz, and a good bit of Persia, and if he was to honor his
extravagant pledge to shun territory already covered, then the
northern route, the fabulous silk road of Inner Asia, was his
obvious alternative. We may also suspect that by this time he had
devised a grand scheme not only to visit all the great cities of the
central lands of Islam, but to penetrate the outer fringes of the
expanding civilized world as well. He had been to Kilwa, the last
outpost of gadis and city comforts in the southern tropics. And
now he had the opportunity to discover the limits of cultured
society in the wilds of the north, where summer nights were so
short that intricate theological problems arose as to the hours of
prayer and the fast of Ramadan. Moreover, the previous year and
a half in Anatolia had taught him all he needed to know about the

159

160 The Steppe

satisfaction Turkish princes seemed to derive from entertaining
and rewarding visiting fagihs. He was certainly well aware that the
Kipchak state had become officially Islamic only in his lifetime and
that New Saray (al-Sara’), its capital on the Volga, was a flower of
cosmopolitan industry and culture that had bloomed overnight in
the frigid steppe. If the little amirs of Asia Minor could treat him
so well and contribute so materially to his personal fortune, what
might he expect from Ozbeg Khan. whose territories and wealth
were so much greater.

In the Rihla he proposes a list of “the seven kings who are the
great and mighty kings of the world.” One of them, naturally
enough, was the Sultan of Morocco, who commissioned the
writing of the book. Another was the Mamluk ruler of Egypt anda
third the Sultan of India. The remaining four were Mongols of the
House of Genghis: the Yuan emperor of China, the Ilkhan of
Persia, and the khans of Chagatay and Kipchak. Though the
Mongol world empire no longer existed in the Moroccan’s time
except as a political fiction, its four successor kingdoms (plus the
White Horde of western Siberia) ruled among them the greater
part of the land mass of Eurasia. Admittedly Ibn Battuta did more
than justice to Ozbeg and his cousin the Khan of Chagatay to put
them on his list at all, for unlike the others (excepting perhaps the
Sultan of Morocco, who had to be included anyway) they were not
masters of one of the core regions of agrarian civilization. They
were heirs rather to the Inner Asian plains, the core of the Turko
—Mongol domain where the pastoral way of life still predominated,
and where civilization came harder and later owing to the limits of
agriculture and to physical distance or isolation from the main
Eurasian centers of culture and trade.

But if mighty kings are to be judged by the size of their
kingdoms, the khans of Kipchak and Chagatay were among the
awesome, for together their territories covered an expanse of
grassland, desert, and mountain more than half the size of the
continental United States. From the fertile grain-growing valley of
the Volga, Ozbeg Khan dispatched his governors to the Crimea, to
the northern Caucasus, to the alluvial delta (called Khwarizm) of
the Amu Darya (Oxus) River, and to the immense Ukrainian
steppe north of the Black Sea. To the forested uplands in the
northwest he sent his cavalry to collect annual tribute from the
Christian princes of Russia and orchestrated their dynastic affairs
to keep them weak and divided. In the Slavic southwest he inter-

The Steppe 161

vened when it suited him in the affairs of the kingdom of Bulgaria.
In his foreign policy he exerted an influence of a special sort over
the Mamluk sultanate, because his kingdom supplied Cairo with
most of its ruling class, the young male slaves who were captured
in frontier wars or were purchased or extracted from poor families
of the Kipchak steppe.

Ibn Battuta visited the lands of Kipchak just a century after the
Mongols launched their invasion of western Eurasia. In six years
of cataclysmic violence (1236-41) the Tatar war machine under the
generalship of Batu and Subedei had devoured cities and towns of
Russia, Poland, and Hungary, leaving the Pope and the kings of
the Latin West trembling for the future of Christendom. Though
the conquerors withdrew from eastern Europe as precipitately as
they had come, Batu, son of Jochi and grandson of Genghis Khan,
established a camp near the lower Volga which became as Saray,
or later Old Saray, the capital of the Khanate of Kipchak. Ibn
Battuta knew the state under that name, the Golden Horde being
an appellation bestowed by the Russians two centuries later. The
adjective “golden” remains open to different explanations, but
“horde” came from the Turkish word “ordu,” meaning camp or
palace. The name carries a certain irony, for it suggested to the
fourteenth century a meaning contrary to the modern image of a
throng of wild barbarians riding into battle. The ordu of Batu (d.
1256) and his successors was the core of a stable and disciplined
government under which, as in Persia, rampant bloodshed and
destruction yielded to political conditions favoring revival of
agriculture, increased international trade, and the rise of towns,
some of them, like Old and New Saray, from the ground up.

Prior to the Mongol invasion Islam was the dominant faith
among the settled Bulghar Turks of the middle Volga region but
had made little headway in the Crimea or the Ukrainian steppe.
The khans of the Golden Horde were for the most part as inter-
nationally minded as their cousins in Persia, encouraging the
traders of all nations, tolerating confessional diversity, and for the
first seventy years of the khanate’s history keeping the promoters
of both Islam and Christianity guessing as to what religion the
royal court would finally accept. In 1313 Ozbeg ascended the
throne and, as Ghazan had done in Persia 18 years earlier, pro-
claimed Islam the religion of state. His decision was a blow to both
the Roman and Byzantine churches, which had until then held
sanguine hopes of bringing the khans to Christ.

162 The Steppe

The victory of Islam was in fact almost certainly inevitable. If
Mongol internationalism had from the point of view of European
history the effect of “opening” western Asia to Latin priests and
Italian merchants, it gave in the long run far greater advantage to
Muslim traders and preachers, who had already been pressing into
the steppe zone for centuries. The Volga had close historic links
with the Muslim Irano—Turkish cities of northern Persia and
Transoxiana, that is, the regions east of the Caspian. Those cities
offered a much handier and weightier model of civilization to the
khanate than either Byzantium or Latin Europe could do. As the
new political order in western Asia emerged, the caravans from
the southeast brought ever-growing numbers of merchants,
scholars, craftsmen, and Sufi brethren, seeking fortunes and con-
verts in the burgeoning towns of the khanate. Whether Christian
friars and Italian traders were present or not, these towns assumed
from the later thirteenth century an increasingly Muslim character.

Ozbeg’s Islamic policy was in fact recognition of a cultural
conversion of the region that was already taking place. The
Russian tributary states of the northern forests remained loyal to
their Orthodox church, and the Islamization of the steppe was by
no means complete when Ibn Battuta passed through, since he
himself bears witness to Turkish Christian communities in the
Crimea. For him, however, the important development was not
the conversion of the countryside; rather, the establishment of
Islam as the “official” religion signified that the shari’a was to have
a larger role in society, superseding local or Mongol custom in
matters of devotion and personal status. If the Sacred Law were to
be applied in the realm, then gadis and jurists had to be imported
from the older centers of literacy. Thus in Ibn Battuta’s time the
towns of the western steppe were firmly linked to the international
network of judges, teachers, and scribes along which he always
endeavored to travel.

He remembers spending more than a month and a half in Sinope in
the early spring of 1332 (1334), the last eleven days waiting for a
favorable wind after he, al-Tuzari, and other companions booked
passage on a ship bound for the Crimea. He remarks that the
vessel belonged to some “Rumi,” probably in this case Genoese
rather than Greek.” Italian shipping had invaded the Black Sea in
force following the fall of Constantinople to Frankish Crusaders in
1204. Both the Genoese and the Venetians held mercantile col-

The Steppe 163

onies in the Crimea and along the shore of the Sea of Azov. In Ibn
Battuta’s time these two powers competed murderously for the
trade of the Black Sea, but they had virtually no commercial
competition from either Muslims or Greeks.

When captains of the Black Sea were under sail, they usually
preferred to hug the coast because of the tempests that might
suddenly come blasting off the northern steppe. Though we have
no clue whether Ibn Battuta’s ship was a big one, his pilot seemed
confident enough to launch into the open sea and make a straight
course for the Crimea. But three nights out of Sinope a violent
storm blew up. In his Indian Ocean travels Ibn Battuta had seen
nothing like it.

We were in sore straits and destruction visibly before our eyes. I
was in the cabin, along with a man from the Maghrib named
Abu Bakr, and I bade him go up on deck to observe the state of
the sea. He did so and came back to me in the cabin saying to
me “I commend you to God.”

The vessel could make no headway against the furious wind and
was blown back nearly to Sinope. The storm subsided for a time,
then returned as savagely as before, and the ship was again driven
back. Finally the wind swung round to the stern and after several
days of panic and near-catastrophe the Crimean mountains
loomed ahead. The captain made for Kerch on the western bank
of the strait leading into the Sea of Azov. But as he approached
the port he sighted people on the shore apparently trying to signal
him off. Fearing enemy war galleys in the harbor (Venetians?
Turkish pirates?), he turned westward along the coast, probably
heading for either Kaffa or Sudak.

Then, for reasons unexplained, Ibn Battuta asked the captain to
put him and his companions ashore, not in a port but at a
roadstead somewhere along the rural Crimean coast. The party
disembarked and, after spending the night in a rural church,
negotiated with some local Christian Turks for the hire of horses
and a wagon. Within a day or so they reached Kaffa, chief colony
of the Genoese merchantry.

Ibn Battuta counted about 200 ships in Kaffa harbor. Some of
them would carry away the cloths and other luxury wares that had
come along the silk road from Persia or China. Others would
load their decks with war captives and the sad children of im-

164 The Steppe

poverished steppe folk, consigning some to the slave market of Cairo.
others to the sugar plantations of Cyprus or the rich households of
Italy. But mainly, ships’ holds would be filled with the raw products of
the steppe and forest: grain from the Volga, timber from the
mountains of southern Crimea, furs from Russia and Siberia, salt,
wax, and honey. Though the Franks built their houses and conducted
their business in Kaffa at the pleasure of the Khan of the Golden
Horde and though good relations between them sometimes broke
down, this city was the most profoundly Latinized of all the Black Sea
ports. Probably a large minority of the population was Genoese, the
rest a heterogeneous crowd of Turkish soldiers and nomads, Russian
fur traders, Egyptian slave agents, Greeks, Circassians and Alans,
not to mention Florentines, Venetians and Provencals.*

Ibn Battuta, in any case, was not to feel at home in Kaffa. When he
and his friends arrived there they went to lodge in the mosque. While
they were resting inside, the Catholic churches of the town suddenly
began ringing their bells. Pious Muslims in general regarded church
bells as one of the more odious manifestations of Christian sacrilege.
Ibn Battuta for one had never heard such a satanic clamor. Reacting
with more bravado than sense, he and his companions bounded to the
top of the minaret and began chanting out the Koran and the call to
prayer. Soon the local gadi rushed to the scene, weapon in hand,
fearing the visitors would be in danger for provoking the hostility of
Europeans. What the Christians in the streets below might have done
in response to this comic opera gesture we will never know, but the
incident ended with no sectarian violence.

Leaving Kaffa within a day or two, Ibn Battuta and his party
continued on by wagon to their immediate destination al-Qiram, the
provincial capital and main staging point for the trans-Asian caravans.
Traveling now in the company of an officer of state on his way to see
the governor, their route presumably took them westward along the
coast as far as the port of Sudak (Surdak or Soldaia), then inland over
the steep southern scarp of the Crimean mountains.* Al-Qiram lay
beyond the hills at the edge of the flat grassy plain that was ecologically
the vestibule of the great Kipchak steppe. Though a Genoese consul
was sometimes in residence, al-Qiram was a decidedly Muslim town in
its economy and culture (a mosque carrying Ozbeg Khan’s inscription
on it still stands).° Ibn Battuta met several scholars, including the
Hanafi and Shafi’1 judges, and stayed in a Sufi hospice.

Though Tuluktemur, the Muslim Turkish governor of the town,
was not feeling well, he received the visitors anyway and presented the

The Steppe 165

Moroccan with a horse. It was soon learned that this amir was
preparing to set out for New Saray to see the khan. In Persia Ibn
Battuta had been given the unexpected privilege of traveling in the
mahalla of the Mongol king, and now once again the chance of his
itinerary had brought him to al-Qiram just in time to make a 700-
mile journey to the Volga under imperial escort with no worries
about personal amenities, highwaymen, or malevolent guides. To
this purpose he bought three wagons and animals to pull them: one
cart for himself and a slave girl (probably one of the young Greek
women he acquired in Asia Minor), a second smaller one for al-
Tuzari, and a third large one for the rest of his companions.

Up to that point Ibn Battuta had had almost no experience with
wagons, for they were largely unknown in the Arab world where,
since Roman times, the backs of camels and other beasts had
replaced wheeled conveyances as the means of transporting people
and goods. This was not, however, the case in Central Asia. Over
the next year Ibn Battuta would find himself bumping and swaying
over the steppe in the Turkish version of the prairie schooner.
Both two and four wheeled carts were used, pulled by teams of
horses, camels, or oxen. Mongol and Turkish nomads customarily
followed their herds in wagons over which they erected round lath
and felt tents (yurts). Whenever they halted for a period of time
they disassembled these residences, or removed them in one piece,
and set them up on the ground. When William of Rubruck, the
French Franciscan who compiled a precious description of the
steppe peoples during the early Mongol Age, left Sudak in 1253 on
his way to the court of the Great Khan, he was advised by Greek
merchants to carry his possessions by wagon rather than pack
horse. That way he could leave his belongings on board
throughout the trip, and if he wanted to ride his own horse he
could go along at the relaxed pace of the oxen.° The felt sides of
the wagon covering, Ibn Battuta notes, were fitted with little
grilled windows: “The person who is inside the tent can see [other]
persons without their seeing him, and he can employ himself in it
as he likes, sleeping or eating or reading or writing, while he is still
journeying.” A prosperous steppe-dweller might own one or two
hundred wagons.

The ordu of a rich Moal [Mongol] seems like a large town,
though there will be very few men in it. One girl will lead
twenty or thirty carts, for the country is flat, and they tie the ox

166 The Steppe

or camel carts the one after the other, and a girl will sit on the
front one driving the ox, and all the others follow after with the
same gait.’

Ibn Battuta traveled as an honored member of the wagon train,
whose privileged company included not only the amir Tuluktemur
but also his brother, two sons, the wives of all these men, and a
small bureaucracy of Muslim functionaries. He reckons that the
first long stage of the journey from al-Qiram to Azak (Tana, now
Azov) on the southern side of the delta of the Don took 23 days.
He does not mention any known stopping places, so the route is a
puzzle. Very likely the caravan crossed the peninsula separating
the Crimea from the mainland, then turned eastward over the
grassland north of the Sea of Azov and across the esturaries of the
Miuss and the Don.*

Since driving the wagons through the shallow fords of the rivers
was a muddy, bothersome operation, Tuluktemur had _ the
solicitude to send Ibn Battuta on ahead with one of his officers and
a letter of introduction to the governor of Azak. Since European
ships could sail directly to the mouth of the Don but no further,
this town had become the most distant of the important Frankish
establishments, competing actively with Kaffa for the sale of
Italian and Flemish textiles.

Ibn Battuta and his party camped in their wagons outside the
town, though they were welcomed by the governor and the local
religious personalities. In two days’ time Tuluktemur arrived and
amid the requisite displays of obeisance and hospitality on the part
of the citizenry erected three huge tents, one of silk and two of
linen and around them a cloth enclosure with an antechamber in
the shape of a tower.

Here the amir entertained his retinue and Azak’s dignitaries
with titanic quantities of the rude cuisine the upper classes of Inner
Asia normally consumed — millet gruel, macaroni, boiled meat of
horse and sheep, and fermented mare’s milk, called qumizz.
Carried in hide bags on the wagons, qumizz was the nutritious
staple of the Turko—Mongol diet. William of Rubruck, tasting it
for the first time, “broke out in a sweat with horror and surprise,”
though later he decided it was “very palatable . . ., makes the
inner man most joyful and . . . intoxicates weak heads.”” He also
liked the millet beer which flowed freely at Mongol banquets. The
House of Genghis was notorious for its bibulousness, a family

The Steppe 167

attribute scarcely affected by conversion to Islam, since the Hanafi
doctors conveniently took the position that this particular potation
was not expressly prohibited by the Koran. Ibn Battuta found
qumizz “disagreeable” and, being a strait-laced Maliki, would have
nothing to do with liquor. But he had no other cause to complain
about Tuluktemur’s hospitality. He got the usual robe and horse
and indeed reports somewhat smugly that as they entered the
audience tent the amir “made me precede him, in order that the
governor of Azak should see the high esteem he had for me.”

At this time Ozbeg Khan was not in residence at New Saray but
camped about 280 miles southeast of Azak in the region known in
modern times as the Stavropol Plateau, a rugged upland jutting
northward from the main mass of the Caucasus Mountains. Since
the founding of the I!khanate of Persia, these mountains had been
the de facto frontier between the two states, but the grazing land
was too good and the trade routes running between the Black Sea
and the Caspian too important to allow the region any peace. In
1262 Berke and Hulegu, first cousins though they were, had gone to
war for control of the Caucasus, and in the ensuing century the two
dynasties hurled armies at one another time and time again. It is
conceivable that Ozbeg perhaps led his ordu south in 1332 to see to
frontier defenses or plan an operation against Abu Sa‘id.'” But the
Rihla says nothing of such a purpose. Possibly, the khan went south
to take the waters, for he was camped at Bish Dagh (Pyatigorsk).
celebrated than as now for its mineral spas.

Tuluktemur soon left Azak to join the khan, but Ibn Battuta and
his associates stayed behind for three days waiting for the governor
to provide him with new equipment for the next leg of his journey.
Perhaps attaching himself to a military column, he then set out
southeasterly across the Kuban—Azov lowland. Arriving at Bish
Dagh, he found that the khan had already decamped. Traveling
eight more days, he finally caught up with the ordu in the vicinity of
al-Machar (Burgomadzhary). It was the early days of Ramadan,
May 1332 (1334).!!

I set up my tent on a low hill thereabouts, fixed my flat in front of
the tent, and drew up my horses and wagons behind, then the
mahalla came up . . . and we saw a vast city on the move with its
inhabitants, with mosques and bazaars in it, the smoke of the
kitchens rising in the air (for they cook while on the march), and
horse-drawn wagons transporting the people.

168 The Steppe

On the morrow of his arrival in the camp he presented himself
before the khan on recommendation of two of the sovereign’s
religious dignitaries. He found Ozbeg seated upon a silver gilded
throne in the midst of an enormous tent whose exterior was
covered, after the fashion of all the Kipchak rulers, with a layer of
bright golden tiles. The Khan’s daughter, his two sons, other royal
kinsmen, and the chief amirs and officers were assembled below
the throne, but his four khatuns, or wives, sat on either side of
him. Ibn Battuta has a good deal to say in the Rihla about the
freedom, respect, and near equality enjoyed by Mongol and
Turkish women in startling contrast to the custom in his own land
and the other Arab countries. (When a well-dressed and unveiled
Turkish woman comes into the bazaar in the company of her
husband, he remarks derisively, “anyone seeing him would take
him to be one of her servants.”) If wives and mothers often
influenced politics in the palaces of the Moroccan Marinids, as we
may assume they did, counsel was given in the confines of the
harim. But in the Mongol states the women of the court shared
openly and energetically in the governing of the realm. Princesses
of the blood, like their brothers, were awarded apanages, or
landed properties, which they ruled and taxed as private fiefs quite
apart from the state domain. The khatuns sometimes signed de-
crees and made major administrative decisions independently of
the khan. The prim Moroccan fagih, in whose own country the
notion of a wife of the sultan appearing publicly at his side would
have seemed unimaginable, could only grimace in amazement at
the Kipchak ceremonial. He relates that when the senior khatun
and queen of the khanate enters the golden tent, the ruler
“advances to the entrance of the pavilion to meet her, salutes her,
takes her by the hand, and only after she has mounted to the couch
and taken her seat does the sultan himself sit down. All this is done
in full view of those present, and without any use of veils.”

In the following days Ibn Battuta went round to visit the
khatuns, each of whom occupied her own mahalla.

The horses that draw her wagon are caparisoned with cloths of
silk gilt... In front of {the wagon of] the khatun are ten or
fifteen pages, Greeks and Indians, who are dressed in robes of
silk gilt, encrusted with jewels, and each of whom carries in his
hand a mace of gold or silver, or maybe of wood veneered with
them. Behind the khatun’s wagon there are about a hundred

The Steppe 169

wagons, in each of which there are four slave girls full-grown
and young . .. Behind these wagons [again] are about three
hundred wagons, drawn by camels and oxen, carrying the
khatun’s chests, moneys, robes, furnishings, and food.

Ibn Battuta had to sleep in his own cart because the ruling class
of Central Asia had the exasperating habit of not giving lodging to
their distinguished visitors. But he dined a number of times in the
presence of the khan and thankfully accepted horses, sheep,
foodstuffs, and robes from the khatuns after regaling them
(through interpreters) with his earlier adventures. He probably
stayed in the camp throughout Ramadan.'? He was there to
celebrate the "Id al-Fitr, the Breaking of the Fast, an occasion of
public feasting during which Ozbeg Khan, notwithstanding his
contribution to the enduring triumph of Islam in the western
steppe, made himself helplessly drunk and arrived late and
staggering at the afternoon prayer.

A short time after this festival the khan and his retinue set out
for the city of Astrakhan, which lay about 80 miles across the
North Caspian lowlands on the left bank of the Volga.

When Ibn Battuta visited Princess Bayalun, Ozbeg’s third ranking
wife, and told her of the great distance he had journeyed from his
native land, he reports that “she wept in pity and compassion and
wiped her face with a handkerchief that lay before her.” She knew
how it felt to live in an alien country far from the familiar society of
her childhood, for she was a daughter of Andronicus III, Emperor
of Byzantium.'> Several times in the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries dynastic marriages took place between daughters of
Greek emperors and Mongol or Turkish rulers. These alliances
were ultimately of small help in checking the expansion of the
Ottomans (Orkhan married a Byzantine princess in 1346), but
relations between Constantinople and the court of the Golden
Horde were generally good. The emperors knew that Kipchak
power was an effective counterweight to their Balkan rivals, the
Christian kingdoms of Serbia and Bulgaria; they also endeavored
to defend the interests of the Byzantine church in the Mongol
protectorates of Christian Russia. The khans, for their part,
wanted the Bosphorus (which ran under the walls of Con-
stantinople) open to the trade and diplomatic exchanges on which
the vitality of their alliance with the Mamluks of Cairo depended.

170 The Steppe

When the royal ordu reached Astrakhan, it was learned that
Princess Bayalun had received permission from her husband to
return temporarily to Constantinople to give birth to a child in the
palace of her father. As we should not be surprised to learn, Ibn
Battuta immediately applied to the khan for authorization to g0
along. Here was an unexpected opportunity to venture beyond the
Dar al-Islam for the first time in his career and to see one of the
great cities of the world, renowned among Muslims for its
spectacular setting, its fabulous bazaars, its splendid buildings, and
the fact that it had held out against the relentless expansion of
Islam over the previous 700 years. There was nothing ex-
traordinary about a Muslim visiting Constantinople in the
fourteenth century. Merchants and envoys from Turkish or Arab
lands went there when business required it, and in the previous
century the Emperor Michael III had sponsored reconstruction of
a mosque in the heart of the city.'* A Muslim gentleman would not
have been advised to wander overland through Christian territory
as a purely private adventure, but he might do so in the train of an
embassy from one ruler to another. At first Ozbeg refused the
Moroccan’s request, fearing the risk.

But I solicited him tactfully and said to him “it is under your
protection and patronage that I shall visit it, so I shall have
nothing to fear from anyone.” He then gave me permission, and
when we took leave of him he presented me with 1,500 dinars, a
robe, and a large number of horses, and each of the khatuns
gave me ingots of silver... The sultan’s daughter gave me
more than they did, along with a robe and a horse, and
altogether I had a large collection of horses, robes, and furs of
miniver and sable.

On 10 Shawwal (5 July 1332 or 14 June 1334) the cavalcade set
out westward across the hot flat prairie, crossing the Don and the
Dneiper, then turning southward toward the estuary of the
Danube.'° Ibn Battuta was attended by a small following of com-
panions and slaves, the Princess Bayalun by 5,000 horsemen under
the command of an amir, 500 of her own troops and servants, 200
slave girls, 20 Greek and Indian pages, 400 wagons, 2,000 horses,
and about 500 oxen and camels. The peasants and herdsmen who
had the misfortune to live along the route were obliged (as such
folk were in all the Mongol states) to supply this monstrous

The Steppe 171

caravan with food, often to their destitution and ruin. After
traveling some 52 days the company arrived at the fortress of
Mahtuli on the frontier between Byzantium and the Christian
kingdom of Bulgaria. The place is probably to be identified with
the town of Jamboli (Yambol) in the southeastern interior of
modern Bulgaria.'° Here the steppe wagons were exchanged for
horses and mules, the Turkish amir and his troops turned back to
the Volga, and the khatun continued on into the mountains of
Thrace with her personal retinue. Ibn Battuta soon had plenty of
evidence that he was entering an alien world:

She left her mosque behind at this castle and the prescription of
the call to prayer was discontinued. Wines were brought to her
as part of her hospitality-gift, and she would drink them, and
[not only so but even] swine . . . No one was left with her who
observed the [Muslim] prayers except a certain Turk, who used
to pray with us. Inner sentiments concealed [hitherto] suffered
a change through our entry into the land of infidelity, but the
khatun charged the amir Kifali to treat me honorably, and on
one occasion he beat one of his mamluks when he laughed at
our prayer.

About three weeks after leaving Mahtuli the procession reached
the landward walls of Constantinople.

Ibn Battuta stayed in the city for more than a month. As a guest
of the daughter of Andronicus III, he was given a robe of honor
and awarded an interview with the emperor (who employed a
Syrian Jewish interpreter and questioned him about the Christian
shrines of Palestine). He wanted to see as much of the city as he
could, and for this the emperor assigned him a Greek guide, who
mounted him on a royal steed and paraded him through the streets
in a noisy fanfare of trumpets and drums. He visited markets,
monasteries, and the great church of Hagia Sophia (though he did
not go inside because he would have had to prostrate himself
before the cross). He traversed the Golden Horn, that is, the arm
of the Bosphorus protecting the northern side of the city. in order
to see the busy Genoese colony of Galata.

He also had a brief promenade and conversation with a monk
named George, whom he identifies as the ex-emperor Andronicus
II. This little episode has confounded Byzantinists and scholars of
the Rihla. Ibn Battuta reports accurately enough that in 1328 in

172 The Steppe

the climax of a seven-year civil war Andronicus III forced his
predecessor and grandfather to abdicate at the point of a sword.
The hapless old man retired to a monastery. He died, however, in
February 1332, and by no plausible rearranging of the Rihla’s
itinerary could Ibn Battuta have visited Constantinople in time to
see him alive. But since the story of his encounter with someone in
the streets of the city has the ring of truth about it, we may fairly
suppose that the palace guide failed to clarify the identity of the
mysterious cleric or, worse yet, was having a bit of fun with his
credulous Arab guest.!’

Ibn Battuta’s recollection of Constantinople is offered in a spirit
of tolerance, objectivity, and indeed wonder. But taken by itself it
would mislead us. The Byzantines thought of themselves as the
heirs of Rome and the guardians of Hellenic culture, but by the
fourteenth century all the ponderous grandeur of nobles and pre-
lates amounted to a vast pretension, kept up behind the walls of
the bastion-city while all around the empire was slowly crumbling
to bits. Though Andronicus stayed the territorial shrinkage on the
European side and presided over a time of considerable artistic
and literary vitality (as is often the case in civilizations on the brink
of destruction), Byzantium in the 1330s was a minor Greek state of
southeastern Europe and little more. Its international trade had
been abandoned to the Italians, its currency was almost worthless,
its landlords were grinding the peasantry unmercifully, its army
was an assemblage of alien mercenaries, and its Asian territories
had been all but lost to the triumphant Turks. It was a state living
on borrowed time and past glory. Ibn Battuta either senses little of
this or, to his credit, refrains from twisting the knife. Could he
have believed that 121 years after his visit the descendants of
Orkhan would storm the massive walls and transform Hagia
Sophia into a mosque?

Though the historical record suggests that Bayalun eventually
returned to her husband’s ordu,'® she made known to the Turks in
her suite that she still professed Christianity and wished to remain
with her father for an indefinite period. She granted her escorts
permission to return home, and thus Ibn Battuta left with them,
probably sometime in the autumn of 1332 (1334).'? After
journeying back through Thrace and recovering his wagons at the
Greek frontier, he rode north into the steppe just as the terrible
Asian winter was setting in. He was soon barricading himself

The Steppe 173

inside three fur coats, two pairs of trousers, two layers of heavy
socks, and horseleather boots lined with bearskin.

I used to perform my ablutions with hot water close to the fire,
but not a drop of water fell without being frozen on the instant.
When I washed my face, the water would run down my beard and
freeze, then I would shake it and there would fall from it a kind a
snow . . . | was unable to mount a horse because of the quantity
of clothes I had on, so that my associates had to help me into the

saddle.

Reaching Astrakhan and finding that Ozbeg had returned to New
Saray 225 miles up the Volga, the company turned northward in
pursuit, riding along the frozen river as if it were a highway. They
reached the capital probably in late November.””

New Saray was a creation of the Pax Mongolica. Ozbeg may have
undertaken its construction only about 1330, but Ibn Battuta found
it “of boundless size” and “choked with its inhabitants.” He claims
that he spent half a day walking across the breadth of the town and
back again, “this too through a continuous line of houses, among
which there were no ruins and no gardens.””! It was a city of wood
more than of stone, but he counted 13 congregational mosques and
numerous smaller ones. Its complex of craft shops exported metal
ware, leather, and woven silk and woolens. Its bazaars handled the
Volga traffic in grain, furs, timber, and slaves, crisscrossed with the
flow of the trans-Asian luxury caravans linking Persia and China
with the Italian colonies on the Black Sea.

Along with the silks, the decorated pottery, the mosaic tiles, and
all the other goods by which civilized taste might be expressed on
the Islamic frontier, there also arrived the little bands of scholars,
mystics, and hopeful bureaucrats. Some of them came from Egypt,
Bulghar, or Anatolia, most from the Irano—Turkish regions of
northern Persia and Khwarizm. During his brief stay in the icy
town, Ibn Battuta entered their circle and accepted their
hospitality. One of the most eminent of the immigrants. an auth-
ority on medicine and former head of a hospital in Khwarizm, even
gave him a Turkish slave boy as a gift. The Moroccan also
presented himself at the royal residence to give a full report on his
trip to Byzantium. We may wonder what Ozbeg’s reaction may
have been to his wife’s decision to remain in Constantinople, but on
this the Rihla is silent.

174 The Steppe

Having proudly reached the northerly limit of his traveling
career, Ibn Battuta left the Volga about mid December, de-
termined, it would seem, to progress in the general direction of
India. Over the ensuing eight months he made his way by an
erratic and, to students of the Rihla, perplexing course to the
valley of the Indus. For about the first five of those months he
traveled in parts of Khwarizm, Transoxiana (Mawarannahr), and
possibly Khurasan. Politically these regions fell among the Mongol
realms of Kipchak, Persia, and Chagatay. Together, they
embraced the immense arid zone extending from the northern
Iranian plateau to the Altai Mountains and the Kazakh steppe, a
land of sand deserts and barren, echoing plains. Not until his
journey through the western Sahara 19 years later would he con-
front such menacing, indomitable territory.

Yet Muslim civilization had pushed into this unsparing country
much before his time. The two river systems of the Amu Darya
and the Syr Darya (Jaxartes) bisected the desert and, like the Nile,
supported dense agricultural populations and big towns along dis-
continuous ribbons of irrigated land. In the previous century the
armies of Genghis had perfected their instruments of terror on the
unfortunate peoples of Transoxiana and in the aftermath of the
conquest civilization for a time simply vanished. It is a tribute to
the human spirit that the desert bloomed with markets and
mosques so quickly again, and this despite the later invasion of
Hulegu and a succession of mass destructions perpetrated in wars
between the Persian Mongols and their cousins, the khans of
Chagatay.

Ibn Battuta passed through the region during a period of rela-
tive peace and prosperity. He found some of the towns he visited
populous and flourishing. In Urgench (Urganj), provincial capital
of the Golden Horde in Khwarizm and chief emporium of the
fertile Amu Darya delta, he remembers that the bazaar was so
crowded he could not get his horse through it and had to save his
visit for a Friday, when most of the shops were closed. And this in
a town which Genghis Khan had submerged entirely under water
by opening a dam in the river. Bukhara, by contrast, once the most
sophisticated city of all Transoxiana, was still struggling to revive
after having been sacked, burned, and depopulated by Tatar
armies in 1220, 1273, and 1316. “Its mosques, colleges, and
bazaars are in ruins,” the Rihla reports, and “there is not one
person in it today who possesses any religious learning or who

The Steppe 175

Map 8: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Central Asia and
Afghanistan, 1332-33 (1334-35)

New Saray

Astrakhan

Saraychik

Doubtful Journey

Ae RE aw
100, 290 300 490 500 600 Kin wd Am "Ghazna
100 300 Mi. Ses
REA

176 The Steppe

shows any concern for acquiring it.” Balkh, oldest city of the Amu
Darya valley and capital of the ancient Greco—Bactrian empire,
Ibn Battuta found “completely delapidated and uninhabited.”

Mongol holocausts or no, Khurasan—Transoxiana remained to
the landward commerce of Afro—Eurasia what the Arabian Sea
was to the monsoon trade: the complex crossroads of trails con-
necting all the major agrarian regions of the hemisphere with one
another. Most of the time, Ibn Battuta and his party kept to the
main roads linking the principal cities, sometimes, perhaps almost
always, in the company of commercial caravans. The wagons he
had traveled with in the northern steppe were no longer suitable
further south. Crossing the Ustyurt plateau between the Volga and
Khwarizm, he accompanied a caravan of camel-drawn carts, but in
Urgench he reverted to horses and to camels mounted with litters.
When he left Khwarizm he was sharing a double litter with al-
Tuzari. He also had 50 horses given to him by Princess Bayalun
during the trip to Constantinople. These animals had been meant
to supplement his food supply, but he preferred simply to add
them to his growing store of personal wealth. He admits that after
he arrived in Khwarizm he began to accumulate a greater number
of horses than he dared mention. He even bought an unusually
beautiful black steed with part of a gift of a thousand dinars that
the Kipchak governor of the region gave him.

Aside from horses, the traveler’s property included a retinue of
slaves, though we can never be sure how many he had with him,
male or female, at any particular time. When he left the Volga he
was sharing his wagon with no fewer than three young women.
While traveling near Bukhara, one of them gave birth to a baby
girl. The new father believed that the child was born “under a
lucky star” and that his fortunes improved from the moment of her
birth. But, sadly, she died two months after he reached India.

He scarcely mentions his male companions other than the
ubiquitous and shadowy al-Tuzari. Travelers always banded
together on the open road, especially in such dangerous and
waterless parts of the earth as this, so we may suppose that the
composition of the party changed from one town to the next. In
New Saray he was joined by one ’Ali ibn Mansur, a sharif and
merchant of Iraq who planned to go all the way to India. But in
Urgench this gentleman met up with a party of traders from his
native town, changed his mind, and went off with them in the
direction of China. At Tirmidh on the upper Amu Darya, Ibn

The Steppe 177

Battua linked up with a Persian sharif and his two sons who were
also on their way to look for employment in Delhi.

He and this kaleidoscope of associates visited about 21 important
towns on his zigzag course through Khwarizm, Transoxiana,
Khurasan, and Afghanistan. Or so he claims. If he visited all the
cities of IIkhanid Khurasan that he mentions (Herat, Jam, Tus,
Nishapur, Bistam, and others), his tour was rushed and distracted,
evidenced in the Rihla in cursory descriptions and perfunctory
recollections of experiences and encounters.”

The most memorable event of these months was his meeting with
’Ala al-Din Tarmashirin, Khan of Chagatay (1326-37). Ibn Battuta
names him as one of the seven mighty kings of the world, though in
most respects he was the least of the lot. Alughu, a grandson of
Chagatay (the second son of Genghis), founded the khanate in the
1260s in the aftermath of the border wars and dynastic quarrels that
split the conqueror’s world empire into four kingdoms. The realm
of the House of Chagatay encompassed an enormous region of
desert, steppe, and mountain extending from the Amu Darya and
Afghanistan to beyond the Irtisch River deep in the recesses of
nomadic Asia. This was the geographic heart of the Mongol empire,
but it was also the region where agrarian resources were most
limited, where towns were most widely scattered, and where
Turko—Mongol captains perpetuated the harsh ways of their
ancestors long after their kinsmen in China and Persia were living in
palaces and dining with lawyers and sycophantic poets.

Ibn Battuta celebrates Tarmashirin as “a man of great dis-
tinction” and “just in his government” because, like Ozbeg, he was
the first of his dynasty to make Islam the official religion of state and
only the second who would have paid much attention to an itinerant
jurist from North Africa. Ibn Battuta stayed with the khan in his
camp on the road southwest of Samarkand for 54 days in the cold
late winter of 1333 (1335). When he left he was given 700 silver
dinars, two camels, and a warm sable coat. Only later in India did he
learn that perhaps within a few months of his departure from the
ordu this khan “of vast kingdom and immense power” had been
rudely overthrown by a treacherous nephew and a league of anti-
Muslim commanders. The Moroccan had been lucky to see this
tempestuous kingdom in a brief moment of unity under Islam, for in
the aftermath of the rebellion civil war broke out and the tealm was
sheared in half, not to be reunited again until the end of the century.

Ibn Battuta crossed the towering Hindu Kush, the great divide

178 The Steppe

separating Inner Asia from the watershed of the Indus, in the late
spring of 1333 (1335).** He might have chosen any of several high
passes through the mountains. Merchants running caravans from
Transoxiana to Afghanistan routed themselves through one pass or
another depending on the reports of snow, rock slides, or bandits.
After camping for a few weeks at Qunduz not far south of the upper
Amu Darya (which forms the modern Soviet—A fghan border) in order
to graze his horses and camels and await the warm weather, the faqih,
his slaves, and his learned associates ascended the northern slope
through the gorges of the Andarab River valley. He crossed the divide
at the 13,000 foot Khawak Pass. “We crossed the mountain,” Ibn
Battuta recalls, “setting out about the end of the night and traveling on
it all day long until sunset. We kept spreading felt cloths in front of the
camels for them to tread on, so that they should not sink in the snow.”

Descending along the spectacular Panjshir Valley, the caravan
passed through Charikar and onto the Kabul plain, where all the main
mountain trails converged. At Ghazna Ibn Battuta and his friends
were entertained by the Chagatay governor. Then, moving southwest-
ward in the company of merchants driving 4,000 horses to market in
India, they crossed the Sulayman Mountains by the main route
through the Khyber Pass, or possibly by a more southerly road.”
Traversing a narrow gorge, they had a skirmish with a band of Afghan
highwaymen, and later Ibn Battuta and some of his party became
separated for a time from the main caravan. But these were minor
adventures, and after a three- to four-month journey from the far side
of the Hindu Kush, they road into the Indus plain. Ibn Battuta tells us
that he reached the great river on the first day of 734 A.H., or 12
September 1333.76

With this event, the first part of the Rihla comes to an end, signifying
an important transition in Ibn Battuta’s career. During the three years
between his departure from Mecca and his arrival at the banks of the
Indus, he had become, with his slaves, his horses, and his pack train of
expensive accoutrements, a traveler of considerable private
means — but a traveler nonetheless. Except for his service as caravan
gadi on the road between Tunis and Alexandria, he had never had any
sustained employment in legal scholarship. Now, however, he was
about to seek an official career. Word had gone round the mosques
and madrasas of Islamdom that fortune and power were to be had in
service to Muhammad Tughlug and the court of Delhi. The Rihla
explains:

The Steppe 179

The king of India . . . makes a practice of honoring strangers
and showing affection to them and singling them out for gov-
ernorships or high dignities of state. The majority of his
courtiers, palace officials, ministers of state, judges, and rela-
tives by marriage are foreigners, and he has issued a decree that
foreigners are to be called in his country by the title of ’Aziz
(Honorable), so that this has become a proper name for them.

Gentleman, pilgrim, jurist, raconteur, world traveler, and guest
of amirs and khans, Ibn Battuta had good reason to think he was
just the sort of public servant Muhammad Tughluq was looking

for.

Notes

1. William Woodville Rockhill (trans. and ed.), The Journey of William of
Rubruck to the Eastern Parts of the World (London, 1900), p. 94.

2. “Rumi” is usually to be translated as “Greeks,” but at other points in the
narrative IB uses the term when he means Genoese. See Gb, vol. 2. p. 467n.

3. W. Heyd, Histoire du commerce du Levant au moyen-dge, 2 vols. (Leipzig,
1936), vol. 2, pp. 172-74.

3. IB associates a visit to Sudak with his later trip from Astrakhan to Con-
stantinople. Other than inserting Sudak into the itinerary, he says nothing about a
detour into the Crimea. More plausibly, 1B passed through Sudak on his way from
Kaffa to al-Qiram. See Gb, vol. 2, p. 499n and Hr, pp. 470, 478-79.

5. B. D. Grekov and A.J. Iakubovskij, La Horde d'Or, trans. F. Thuret
(Paris, 1939), p. 91.

6. Rockhill, William of Rubruck, p. 49.

7. Ibid., p. 57. Marco Polo also describes the wagons. The Book of Ser Marco
Polo, trans. and ed. Henry Yule, 2 vols., 3rd edn, rev. Henri Cordier (London,
1929), vol. 1, pp. 252-55.

8. The caravan might conceivably have crossed the Kerch Strait east of al-
Qiram, then approached Azaq from the south. Some topographical hints in the
Rihla, however, argue for the northern route. Hr, pp. 470-71.

9. Rockhill, William of Rubruck, pp. 67, 85.

10. Ozbeg led unsuccessful invasions of IIkhanid territory in 1319, 1325, and
1335. J.A. Boyle, “Dynastic and Political History of the IIkhans” in The
Cambridge History of Iran (Cambridge, England, 1968), vol. 5, pp. 408, 412-13,
Bertold Spuler, Die Goldene Horde (Leipzig. 1943), pp. 93-96.

11. IB states that he arrived at Bish Dagh on | Ramadan, which was 27 May
1332 or 6 May 1334.

12. At this point in the narrative IB claims to have made a journey, all within
the month of Ramadan, from Ozbeg’s camp to the middle Volga city of Bulghar
and back again, a total distance of more than 800 miles. Stephen Janicsek has
argued convincingly that this trip never took place. “Ibn Battuta’s Journey to
Bulghar: Is it a Fabrication?” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (October 1929),
pp. 791-800. Janiscek shows that IB’s cursory description of both Bulghar and the
Land of Darkness beyond (to which he does not claim to have gone but only heard
about) are based on earlier geographical writings in Arabic. He also points out that

180 The Steppe

IB could not possibly have made the journey in anywhere near the time he allots to
it and that he says virtually nothing about his route, his companions, his personal
experiences. or the sights he would have seen along the way. The Bulghar trip is the
only section of the Rihla whose falsity has been proven beyond almost any doubt
though the veracity of some other journeys may be suspected. such as the trip is
San‘a in the Yemen. We must remember, however. that the Rihla was composed as
a literary survey of the Islamic world in the fourteenth century. It was well known
among literate Muslims that Bulghar was the most northerly of Muslim communi-
ties. Moreover, several medieval geographers wrote in fascination about the frigid
Land of Darkness, that is, Siberia. As Janiscek argues, IB knew that a book about
travels throughout Islamdom ought to include a description of those regions. If IB
did not go to Bulghar. he might nonetheless satisfy his readers’ expectations by
saying that he did. Scholars of the Rihla are generally in agreement that the
Bulghar detour is a fiction. Gb, vol. 2, p. 491n and Hr, pp. 471-73. Also. because
of IB’s rich and detailed description of life in Ozbeg’s ordu, we may suppose that he
remained there throughout Ramadan 1332 (1334).

13. A letter addressed from one Byzantine monk to another and dated 1341 has
confirmed that at that time a daughter of Andronicus II] was married to Ozbeg
Khan. R.J. Loenertz. “Dix-huit lettres de Gregoire Acindyne. analysées et
datées,” Orientalia Christiana Periodica 23 (1957): 123-24; also Hr. pp. 474-76.
“Bayalun™ is a Mongol name, not a Greek one. Paul Pelliot, Notes sur l'histoire de
la Horde d'Or (Paris, 1949), pp. 83-84.

14. Mehmed Izzeddin, “Ibn Battouta et la topographie byzantine.” Actes du VI
Congres Internationale des Etudes Byzantines, 2 vols. (Paris. 1951), vol. 2. p. 194.

15. IB’s reporting of his itinerary from Astrakhan to Constantinople is blurry
and confused. There is, however, no reason to doubt that he and the princess
traveled by way of the northern and western shores of the Black Sea. See Gb, vol.
pp. 498-503n: and Hr, pp. 476-79.

16. Gb, vol. 2, p. 500n.

17. IB presents detailed, vivid. and generally accurate descriptions of the
Byzantine court and some of the city’s important buildings. The account, however.
is also muddled by errors. puzzling observations, and impossible stories. He in-
forms us, for example, that the Latin Pope made an annual visit to Constantinople!
The supposed meeting with the ex-emperor Andronicus II (whom IB calls George,
when his monastic name was Antonius) is only the most egregious of his misunder-
standings. Hrbek (Hr. p. 481) believes that IB had a meeting with someone
important but fabricated his identity in order “to add a further item to his collection
of personal acquaintances with sovereigns.” Neither Gibb nor Hrbek believe that
the itinerary can be rearranged to place IB in Constantinople before February
1332.

18. According to the letter of Gregoire Acindyne. she was with Ozbeg in 1341.
See note 13.

19. Hr, p. 477.

20. Ibid., p. 482.

21. Scholars formerly believed that both Old and New Saray were founded in the
thirteenth century, the one by Batu. the other by his brother Berke. But recent
numismatic evidence suggests that Ozbeg not only made his capital at New Saray
but founded the city as well. I thank J. M. Rogers of the British Museum for use of
his unpublished MS (1981) reviewing recent Soviet archaeological work on the
cities of the Golden Horde. The great size of the city has been confirmed by
excavations. Grekov and Iakubovskij. La Horde d'Or. pp. 135-43.

22. On this scholar, Grekov and Iakubovskij. La Horde d'Or, pp. 157-58.

23. IB’s journey through Khurasan is doubtful. His itinerary is confusing and his
description almost devoid of personal details. He mentions only one stopover
between Bistam in the western part of Khurasan and Qunduz in northern

The Steppe 181

Afghanistan, the straight line distance between them being more than 700 miles. He
would also have had to undertake this excursion at top speed in order to sandwich it
into his own chronological scheme. Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, p. 534) believes that this section
of the narrative is “highly suspect” but offers no case. Most of the descriptive matenal
is taken up with an account of the popular rebellion that gave rise to the Sarbadar
state, one of the kingdoms that seized a share of greater Persia following the collapse
of the IIkhanate in 1335. The revolt began in 1336. IB was in India by that time and
does not claim to have witnessed any of the events he describes. See J. M. Smith, Jr..
The History of the Sarbadar Dynasty 1336-138] A.D. (The Hague, 1970).

24. Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, p. 531) proposes that IB crossed the Hindu Kush at the
Khawak Pass about the end of June. IB’s reference to snow and cold weather in the
pass. however, suggests a month no later than May. See J. Humlum, La géographie de
l' Afghanistan (Copenhagen, 1959). The Arabic passage of the Rihla Gibb translates
“we stayed on the northern side of the Hindu Kush until the warm weather had
definitely set in” may be rendered “until the warm weather had begun to set in.” D&S,
vol. 3, p. 84.

25. IB's route from Kabul to the Indus is a puzzle owing to the uncertain identity of
several place names as well as his failure to say precisely where he reached the river.
Gibb, Mahdi Husain, and Peter Jackson have analyzed the problem and each arrives
at a different conclusion. The issue pivots on the identity of “Shashnagar,” which IB
claims to have passed through on his road from Kabul to the river. If this locality is
Hashtnagar, a district near Peshawar (in northern Pakistan), IB is likely to have
crossed the Sulayman Mountains through the Khyber Pass. MH, pp. 1-2. If, however,
it is to be identified with Naghar, a place south of Kabul, he probably entered the
Indus plain in the Bannu (Banian) district about 100 miles south of Peshawar. Peter
Jackson, “The Mongols and India (1221-1351)”, Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University,
1977, p. 224. To complicate the problem further IB tells us that he spent 15 nights
crossing a “great desert.” Gibb (Gb, vol.3, p. 591n) believes that he probably traveled
through the desert south of Ghazna and reached the Indus in the Larkana district of
Sind, that is, less than 300 miles from the mouth of the river.

26. IB’s statement that he arrived at the Indus River on 1 Muharram 734 (12
September 1333) is probably more or less accurate. The date is open to question,
however, since he claims to have left Mecca at the end of 732 A.H. (12 September
1332), yet he took about three years traveling from there to India. Therefore, one date
or the other must be wrong, and if the Mecca departure date is correct he would not
have reached India until the autumn of 1335. (See Chapter 6, note 2 for a fuller
discussion of this issue.) On the whole, the indications that he crossed the Indus by the
autumn of 1333 are more compelling than the arguments supporting his departure
from Arabia in 1332. The evidence for the 1333 arrival may be summarized as follows:

(a) IB reports events surrounding the departure of Sultan Muhammad Tughluq
from Delhi in order to suppress a rebellion in Ma’bar in the far south of India (see
Chapter 9). The revolt broke out in 1334. IB states that the sultan left the capital on 9
Jumada I, which was 5 January in 1335 (see Chapter 9, note 21). IB had clearly been
living in the capital for some time when this event occurred. If the dating here is
correct, he must have entered India in 1333, or at least many months before the fall of
1335.

(b) Muslim medieval sources date the deposition and death of Tarmashinn, Khan
of Chagatay, in 1334-35 (735 A.H.). IB states that he heard about the khan‘s being
overthrown “two years” after his arrival in India (Gb, vol. 3, p. 560). This would
accord with IB’s having visited the ruler’s camp in the late winter of 1333. If he had
been there in 1335, that is, very shortly before Tarmashirin was overthrown, he would
likely have heard the news within a short time of reaching India, not two years.

(c) Passing through Ajodhan (Ajudahan) on his way from the Indus to Delhi, IB
recounts that he met the holy man Farid al-Din al-Badhawuni. Mahdi Husain (MH, p.
20) explains that no shaykh of that name existed at that time and that IB must have

182 The Steppe

been referring to his grandson ‘Alam al-Din Mawj-Darya. Mahdi Husain also notes
that this latter personage died in 734 A.H. Assuming Mahdi Husain is right on the
question of the saint's identity, then IB must have crossed the Indus no later than
that year. Gibb (Gb, vol. 2, p. 529n and vol. 3, p. 613n) also argues this point.

Q Delhi

Many genuine descendants of the Prophet arrived there
from Arabia, many traders from Khurasan, many painters
from China . . . many learned men from every part. In
that auspicious city they gathered, they came like moths
around a candle.!

Isami

Arriving at the western edge of the Indo—Gangetic plain, Ibn
Battuta was entering a world region where his co-believers made
up only a small minority of the population. They were, however,
the minority that ruled the greater part of the subcontinent of
India. Over the very long term the fundamental patterns of Indian
society and culture had been defined by the repeated invasions of
barbarian charioteers or cavalrymen from Afghanistan or the
steppe lands beyond. In the eleventh century, about the same time
that the Seljuks were radically changing the political map of the
Middle East, the Muslim Turkish rulers of Afghanistan began
dispatching great bands of holy warriors against the Hindu
cultivators of the Indus and Ganges valleys. These ghazis seized
the main towns of the Punjab, or upper Indus region. Lahore
became a capital of two Turko—Afghan dynasties, first the
Ghaznavids and later the Ghurids.

In 1193 Qutb al-Din Aybek, a Ghurid slave commander,
captured Delhi, then a small Hindu capital strategically located on
the Yamuna River at the eastern end of the natural military route
through the Punjab plain to the fertile Ganges basin. In 1206 he
seized power in his own right, proclaiming Delhi the capital of a
new Muslim military state. During the ensuing century the sultans
of the Slave Dynasty, as it was called after the mamluk origins of
its rulers, defeated one after another the Hindu kingdoms into
which North India was fragmented and founded an empire ex-
tending from the Indus to the Bay of Bengal.

The first phase of the Muslim conquest of North India was a
splendid ghazi adventure of looting, shooting, and smashing up

183

184 Delhi

Map 9: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in India, Ceylon, and the
Maldive Islands, 1333—45

ARABIAN

SEA

Alternative Itineraries
between Ghazna and
Multan

400 @00 800 Km.

400 s(Mi.

Delhi 185

the gods of Hindu idolators. The new kings of Dehli, however,
imposed civil order on the conquered areas and created a structure
of despotism designed to tax rather than slaughter the native
peasantry. In the rich plains around the capital, the Muslim
military elite secured its authority as a kind of ruling caste atop the
stratified social system of the Hindus. A pyramid of administration
was erected linking the sultan, from whom all power derived by
right of conquest, with several levels of officialdom down to the
petty Hindu functionaries who supervised tax collections in
thousands of farming villages. Like the Turkish rulers of the
Middle East and Anatolia, the sultans learned proper Muslim
statecraft from the Abbasid tradition, though adding here and
there colorful bits of Hindu ceremonial. Within several decades of
the founding of the sultanate, these erstwhile tribal chieftains were
transforming themselves into Indo—Persian monarchs, secluded
from the populus at the center of a maze of intimidating ritual and
an ever-growing army of officials, courtiers, and bodyguards.

Delhi grew rapidly in the thirteenth century, not because it was
an important center of industry or a key intersection of trade, but
because it was the imperial residence. As Ibn Battuta had
witnessed in other leading capitals, the operation of the army, the
bureaucracy, and the royal household required an immense
supporting staff of clerks, servants, soldiers, construction workers,
merchants, artisans, transporters, shopkeepers. tailors. and
barbers. Delhi was typical of parasitic medieval capitals, its royal
establishment feeding magnificently off the labor of the lower
orders and the revenues of hundreds of thousands of Hindu
farmers.

In 1290 the Slave dynasty expired and was succeeded by two
lines of Turkish sultans. The first were the Khaljis (1290-1320),
men sprung from an Afghan tribe of that name. The second were
the Tughlugids (1320-1414), called after the founding ruler, Ghiyas
al-Din Tughlug. During the first four decades of these kings, the
empire expanded spectacularly. "Ala al-Din Khalji (1296-1316), a
brilliant administrator, created a new standing army of cavalry,
war-elephants, and Hindu infantry. Advancing to the Deccan
plateau of Central India, he conquered one important Hindu state
and raided nearly to the tip of the subcontinent. Areas of South
India that "Ala al-Din merely plundered, Ghiyas al-Din Tughlug
(1320-25) and his son Muhammad Tughluq (1325-51) invaded
again, then annexed to the empire, replacing Hindu tributaries

186 Delhi

with Turkish or Afghan governors appointed from Delhi. By 1333
Muhammad Tughluq ruled over most of India. Thus the congeries
of ethnic groups, languages, and castes that comprised the civiliz-
ation of the subcontinent were politically united, however pre-
cariously, for the first time since the Gupta empire of the fifth
century A.D.

The great danger of dispatching armies as much as 1,300 miles
south of Delhi was that the northwest frontier might be inade-
quately defended against new disturbances emanating from Inner
Asia. In 1224, just 18 years after the founding of the sultanate,
Genghis Khan irrupted over the Hindu Kush and penetrated as far
east as the Indus. In the reign of the Great Khan Ogedei, the
Tatars invaded again, seizing Lahore in 1241. Later in the century
the Khans of Chagatay, hemmed into the steppe by the other three
Mongol kingdoms, looked upon India as the most promising outlet
for their combative energies. Chagatay armies and raiding parties
crossed the Sulayman mountain passes in the 1290s and continued
to do so repeatedly for three more decades. About 1329
Tarmashirin, the Chagatay khan whom Ibn Battuta visited a few
years later, invaded India and even threatened Delhi. But
Muhammad Tughlug chased him back across the Indus, putting an
end to further Mongol incursions of any moment (at least until the
catastrophic invasion of Tamerlane at the end of the century).

By successfully defending North India against the Tatars over
the course of more than a century, the sultans earned
well-deserved reputations in the wider world as champions of
Muslim civilization, a status akin to their contemporaries, the
Mamluks of Egypt. Thus Delhi, along with Cairo and the Turkish-
ruled towns of Anatolia, became a refuge for skilled and literate
men who had fled Transoxiana or Persia before the Mongols killed
or enslaved them. The silver lining around the devastations of the
Islamic heartland was the consequent flowering of civilized life in
cities just beyond the reach of Mongol cavalry. In the time of the
early Slave dynasty, Delhi had been an armed camp, an outpost of
hardy faith fighting for its survival against Hindu idolators on three
sides and Mongol devils on the fourth. But once the sultans
showed they could defend the community of believers against such
powers of darkness, Delhi rose quickly as the central urban base
for the advance of Islam into the subcontinent. The rulers basked
in their hard-won prestige by opening up their court and
administration to all Muslims of talent, skill, or spiritual repute

Delhi 187

and patronizing them with stipends and gifts, as well as grand
public edifices in which to pursue their vocations.

From Khurasan and Transoxiana came theologians and legists
who introduced the universalist standards of the Sacred Law. The
sultan appointed immigrant scholars as gadis and legal advisers
and generally deferred to them to enforce the shari’a in matters of
religious practice and civil disputes involving believers. Since the
Hanafi madhhab was dominant in Khurasan and Central Asia, it
became the basis of juridical practice in the sultanate. As the
Muslim population grew, so did the demand for qualified jurists,
requiring the construction of colleges offering studies in Hanafi
fiqh and the other religious sciences. According to the Egyptian
scholar al-Umari, who wrote from plainly exaggerated information
supplied by travelers returned from India, there were “one
thousand madrasas in Delhi, one of which is for the Shafi’ites and
the rest for the Hanafites.”*

Also from central Islamdom came belle-lettrists, historians,
poets, and musicians to entertain the imperial court, chronicle its
achievements, and extol the virtues of the king. Though Hindi,
Turkish, Gujarati, and numerous other Indian tongues could be
heard in the streets and bazaars of Delhi, Persian was used in
polite circles, thus extending its range as the language of literate
prestige all the way from Anatolia to Bengal. Speaking and writing
in Persian, the Muslim elite of India reaffirmed in effect their
cultural and historical connections to the central lands and at the
same time created a linguistic barrier of exclusivity and privilege
between themselves and the Hindu masses.

Craftsmen migrating from the west imported the Arabo-Persian
architectural and decorative traditions. Delhi, like other rising
Muslim cities of that period, grew outward from a hub of grand
public buildings — mosques, palaces, Sufi khangas, colleges, and
mausolea — that incorporated the domes, arches, and calligraphic
inscriptions characteristic of Middle Period architecture in Persia.
Since the immigrant community was small. however, Hindu
artisans and laborers had to be hired in large numbers to carry out
most of the work. Thus all sorts of native structural and decorative
elements found their way into these buildings, some of them built
with the sandstone blocks of demolished Hindu temples.

The earliest Muslim Delhi was established within the refortified
walls of the old Hindu town, Kil’a Ray Pithora. Here Sultan Qutb
al-Din Aybek (and several of his successors) built the con-

188 Delhi

gregational mosque and mausolea complex called the Quwwat al-
Islam. Near it rose the Qutb Minar, the great tapering sandstone
tower whose bands of Arabic inscriptions proclaimed Koranic
truths and the military triumphs of the first Slave sultans. By Ibn
Battuta’s time three additional urban aggregations — three more
cities of Delhi — had been founded, all on the west bank of the
Yamuna River within about five miles of one another. One was Siri,
built by Ala al-Din Khalji as a military camp and later walled in.
The second was Tughluqabad, a walled complex and fortress
founded by Ghiyas al-Din Tughluq. The third was Jahanpanah,
where Muhammad Tughluq built a magnificent residence, the
Palace of a Thousand Pillars.

The. prospering of Muslim life in Delhi and numerous other
Hindustani towns in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries
was evidence of a continuous stream of native conversion. India’s
immigrant population of Turks, Afghans, Persians, and Arabs
never represented more than a small minority of the total. By the
time Ibn Battuta visited the country, the great majority of Muslims
there were Indian-born. Most of India’s rural population remained
true to the Hindu tradition. Though the sultanate required
Hindus, at least in theory, to pay special taxes (as Christians and
Jews under Muslim authority were required to do), the gov-
ernment for the most part left them alone to live and worship as
they wished. Nevertheless, Indo—Muslims were by the late
thirteenth century working their way into the intelligentsia and the
elite circles of the sultanate. Ministers and provincial governors of
Indo—Muslim origin were being appointed. Indian-born scholars,
poets, and religious doctors were appearing in the royal court. As
Islam in the Indian context matured, the most conspicuous social
tensions within the upper strata were occurring, not between
Muslim and Hindu, but between the rising Indo—Muslim elite and
the still dominant notables who traced their lineages to the older
Islamic lands.

In fact the cultural ties between India and the rest of the Dar al-
Islam were becoming stronger in the early fourteenth century.
Under the Muslim Ilkhans Persia was restored to its old position as
the hub of circulation throughout the Islamic world. As a result,
merchants, holy men, and envoys were moving in greater numbers
between there and India over the high roads through Afghanistan.
Both the Khaljt and Tughluq sultans cultivated diplomatic ties not
only with the Ilkhans but also with the Mamluks and, later, the

Delhi 189

rulers of Kipchak and Chagatay. These connections in turn helped
broadcast information about the sultanate among international
professional and scholarly circles. Ibn Battuta may have first heard
in Cairo about attractive opportunities for official service at the
brilliant court of Delhi.

It was sometime between 1327 and 1330 that Sultan Muhammad
Tughluq decided on the policy of systematically filling the highest
posts of his administration and judiciary with foreigners and re-
warding them with fabulous gifts and stipends. This plan was but
one of several peculiarities of his reign. Ibn Battuta was himself
one of the prominent chroniclers of that period and shared with
other contemporary writers certain norms and expectations as to
the behavior of a proper Sunni ruler.” Most of the sultans and
amirs who starred in the drama of the later Mongol Age complied
outwardly with the standards of orthodoxy well enough that their
historians applied the conventional panegyrics to them and their
regimes. If the ruler upheld the shari‘a in religious and civil affairs,
patronized the scholars and spiritual luminaries, gave generously
to the prominent and the poor, attended feasts and Friday prayers,
condemned pagans and Shiites, and refrained from indulging
publicly in things forbidden. then learned opinion normally gave
its stamp of approval.

Muhammad Tughluq, however, was the odd duck of fourteenth-
century rulers — eccentric, anomalous, baffling. In the eves of the
educated men who served him (and later wrote books about him).
he repeatedly deviated from the norms of tradition and advocated
policies that were visionary, extreme, and unfathomable. Though
he presided over his court in the grand style of the Abbasid
Caliphs, cultivated relations with the major states of Islam, and
doubled, in God's name, the size of the Indian empire. the official
establishment could not adjust themselves to his quixotic schemes
and contradictions. They ultimately deserted him wholesale.

Muhammad was a religious scholar of greater attainments than
any of the other more or less polished rulers of his time. He
insisted that his Muslim subjects perform the ritual prayers and
abstain from wine. He took a lively interest in legal studies and
memorized large sections of the corpus of Hanafi law. He
mastered the art of calligraphy and wrote elegant Persian verse.
He learned Arabic in order to read religious texts. He showered
patronage on scholars and divines. Yet he also pushed his inquiries

190 Delhi

well beyond the boundaries of orthodox propriety. He invited
Hindu and Jain sages to court and engaged them in theological
discussion. He consorted with yogis. He even took up the study of
Greek philosophical rationalism, a subject anathema to
fourteenth-century Sunni doctors.*

Muhammad was also a man of action in the best tradition of the
Turkish war captain. Rather than confining himself to the usual
policy of merely seizing chunks of Hindu territory and squeezing
them for taxes, he pursued in a spirit of relentless logic a series of
ingenious, sweeping, and unprecedented projects to reorganize
government and society. Most of these schemes were initiated
during the first ten years of his reign, that is, prior to Ibn Battuta’s
arrival. All of them ended in disaster. The sultan developed a plan
to rationalize and improve agricultural production and
tax-gathering in the fertile Doab region between the Ganges and
Yamuna Rivers southeast of Delhi. The result was a serious decline
of productivity and a protracted peasant revolt. He conceived a
grand strategy to take the offensive in the northwest and invade
the Chagatay Khanate. He raised a huge mounted force, kept
them on the muster role for a year at great expense, then aban-
doned the entire plan — except for dispatching an army into
Kashmir, where Hindu mountain men annihilated it.” He issued
copper coins backed by gold in the treasury in order to compensate
for a shortage of silver, probably getting the idea from China. If
the Chinese were amenable to token money, however, Indians
were not. Counterfeiting became rampant, the coins dropped pre-
cipitously in value, and the sultan finally had to redeem them for
gold at immense cost to the government.

In 1326, he decided to found a new capital at Deogir, renamed
Daulatabad, a city located in the barren Deccan plateau more than
400 miles south of Delhi. His aim was apparently to better
assimilate newly conquered areas by shifting the center of gov-
ernment to South India. If the scheme was politically logical and
reasonably planned, it was from a human standpoint grievously
unrealistic. The official classes comfortably ensconced in Delhi
resisted the move, wanting nothing to do with life in that dismal
province. The sultan responded to such recalcitrance by ordering a
mass exodus of the royal household and almost the entire gov-
erning corps. Modern historians are divided on the question of the
extent to which Delhi was depopulated and ruined in consequence
of the migration. In any case the experiment failed. If Muhammad

Delhi 191

briefly achieved a tighter grip on the south, conspiracies and
revolts were soon erupting in the north, forcing him to return.
Moreover, about 1329 he was obliged to defend Delhi against the
invading army of Tarmashirin Khan. Within but a few years of his
decision to move his government to Daulatabad, his officials and
their retinues were being given authorization to desert the city and
trek back to Delhi.

The sultan appears to have decided early in his reign, perhaps
following the resistance of his officials to resettling in Daulatabad,
that he could best put his innovative policies into action by en-
trusting them to foreign political servants on whose personal
loyalty he could count in return for salaries and perquisites. Since
educated men were constantly circulating from one Muslim court
to another in that age, it was easy enough to attract them to India.
But once again the plan backfired. The more respectable Sunni
gentlemen recoiled at the sultan’s queer orthodoxy. The less hon-
orable tried to get rich on Muhammad's naive generosity, then
sneak out of the country at the first opportunity.

All of the sultan’s murky, fruitless dreams for a model Muslim
state reveal both an impressive vision and a deplorable inability to
accommodate his will to social and political realities. He was a bull
in the china shop of Indian society, insensitive to the delicate
compromises among social groups and power cliques that had held
the sultanate together for more than a century. The intricate
regional and caste divisions within Hindu society, the primitive
communications system, and the dogged rivalries within the
Muslim elite itself all put far greater limits on central authority
than Muhammad could bring himself to admit.

As the criticisms of his ’ulama and the leading divines became
known to him, he reacted with petulant brutality. Rather than com-
promise with opinion, he chose to ferret out and punish those who
failed by their disloyalty or incompetence to make his reforms
succeed. In any Muslim state of that age the ruling warrior class
was expected to be arbitrary, capricious, and nasty up to a certain
limit in the interest of public order. But Muhammad Tughlug went
too far. It was one thing to chastise rebels and thieves by having
them cut in half, skinned alive, or tossed about by elephants with
swords attached to their tusks. It was quite another thing to inflict
such humiliations on distinguished scholars and holy men for
merely questioning public policy or happening to be a friend of
someone who did. “Not a day or week passed,” reports the con-

192 Delhi

temporary chronicler Barani, “without the spilling of much
Musulman blood and the running of streams of gore before the
entrance of his palace.”°

At the same time that he repressed and terrorized his own boon
companions and officers of state, Muhammad continued to bestow
stupendous prizes and salaries on those he happened to favor at
the moment. Barani relates:

His indiscriminate liberality did not stop to differentiate be-
tween the deserving and the undeserving, between an
acquaintance and a stranger, between a new and an old friend,
between a citizen and a foreigner, or between the rich and the
poor. All of them appeared to him just the same. Nay more, the
gift of the monarch preceded the request and the amount or
value of the donation exceeded the wildest expectations of the
receiver; so that the latter was literally confounded.’

The political message such actions carried was that the sultan, the
Shadow of God, was the temporal source of all power, whether for
good or evil, and that the people must understand their utter
subordination to his will. Thus to take service with Muhammad
Tughlug was to live a life of reckless insecurity, to spin the wheel
of chance with every word or action on which the sultan might
choose to have an opinion.

As Muhammad’s schemes went awry and the empire began to
crack, the atmosphere of the imperial court became increasingly
paranoid and brooding. By 1334 the constructive energies of the
government were exhausted, a seven-year drought was about to
begin, and the sultan was facing the earliest of the 22 major
rebellions that would consume the last decade and a half of his
reign. The Sultanate of Delhi had reached its peak of power and
was about to founder. It was in these conditions of imminent
disaster that the Moroccan traveler chose to arrive in Hindustan.

Ibn Battuta reached the valley of the Indus River at an uncharac-
teristically tranquil moment in the history of that tumultuous
frontier. After more than a century of chronic hostilities between
the sultanate and the Mongols, Muhammad Tughluq had
accomplished something of a truce with his Tatar neighbor. The
routes from Persia and Central Asia were busy with trade, and
distinguished visitors were arriving regularly at the government

Delhi 193

immigration and customs posts set up at the main crossing points
along the river.

At the Indus, intelligence officers charged with controlling the
movements of persons in and out of the empire subjected the
Moroccan and his friends to meticulous observation. Who is this
individual? What does he look like? Where has he come from?
How does he dress and behave? How many servants and animals
does he have with him? The answers to these and numerous
other questions were immediately written up and dispatched by
rapid courier relay to the governor of the northwest frontier at
Multan, a city east of the river in the Punjab region, and to the
sultan in Delhi (or wherever in the kingdom he happened to be).
The visitors were then instructed to proceed to Multan to await
the sultan’s orders regarding their fitness to continue to Delhi
and the degree of honor to be accorded them.

Ibn Battuta relates that he did not in fact go directly to Multan
but set off on a side trip to visit Sind, the arid valley of the lower
Indus and its delta. The region was of special historic interest to
educated travelers — and to readers of the Rihla — since it had
first been conquered for Islam by an Arab army early in the
eighth century. The highlights of Ibn Battuta’s detour included a
five-day boat trip down the great river to the delta port of Lahari
in the company of its governor, meetings with various Sufi
divines, and an unpleasant brush with a rhinoceros. The itinerary
of the trip is ambiguous because Ibn Battuta fails to make clear
where along the Indus, within a range of about 550 miles, he had
first arrived from Afghanistan.* Moreover, a_ study of
chronological matters in the narrative suggests that the events he
describes in connection with Sind may well have taken place at a
later time, probably in 1341 when he traveled there from Delhi at
the summons of the sultan.” It seems plausible that he and his
company did in fact go directly to Multan in order to secure
official clearance before traveling further into the empire.

Located at that time near the Ravi River, one of the tributaries
of the Indus, Multan was the military capital of the western
borderlands. Multan was also known as the headquarters of the
Suhrawardiya, one of the two important Sufi orders represented
in India. Upon arriving in the city, Ibn Battuta presented himself
before the governor, then took lodgings in a Suhrawardi khanqga
Just outside the town. He was even introduced to Rukn al-Din
Abu I’Fath, the Grand Shaykh of the brotherhood, thus fulfilling

194 Delhi

the astonishing prediction that the old Egyptian mystic had made
to him in Alexandria seven years earlier. (On the road from
Multan to Delhi a short time later he would visit Ala al-Din
Mawj-i Darya, master of the Chishti order. This man was not
quite the second of the three divines the Egyptian told Ibn
Battuta he would meet in India. Rather it was his grandson. )

Ibn Battuta remained in Multan at least two months and
perhaps throughout much of the winter of 1333-34.!" There he
had the company of traveling notables from Bukhara,
Samarkand, and other cities to the west. Most prominent among
them was Khudhawand-Zada Oiwan al-Din, qadi of the Chagatay
city of Tirmidh. Ibn Battuta had been traveling off and on with
this judge, two of his brothers, and a nephew on the journey
through Afghanistan. When the intelligence reports on the new
visitors reached Muhammad Tughlugq, he replied that Qiwan al-
Din was to be given special honors. Consequently, there arrived
in Multan from Delhi one of the sultan’s chamberlains with
instructions to accompany the gadi and other foreign gentlemen
to the capital. Al-Makhdumah Jahan, the sultan’s mother, also
sent along three eunuchs to escort Qiwan al-Din’s wife and
children.

No one, however, was to be permitted to proceed to Delhi on
pretense of seeking official employment unless he planned to stay
permanently. Ibn Battuta was interviewed again: was he serious
in his intentions to serve the sultanate? He answered with con-
viction, and we have no reason to doubt that at this point in his
career he was expecting a long residence in India. Nonetheless,
his intentions had to be put in writing. “When I told them that I
had come to stay they summoned the qadi and notaries and drew
up a contract binding me and those of my company who wished
to remain in India, but,” he adds, “some of them refused this
engagement.”

As another sign of his commitment, he had taken the trouble
either in Afghanistan or the Punjab to buy a selection of suitable
gifts to present to the emperor at the critical moment of his first
audience. His purchases included a load of arrows, several
camels, more than thirty horses, and, he recalls vaguely, “white
slaves and other goods.” The financing of these expensive pre-
sents reflected rather ominously on the climate of brash
opportunism prevailing in Delhi. It was customary, everyone
knew, for Muhammad Tughluq to respond to honorable visitors

Delhi 195

with gratuities of far larger value, making the symbolic point that
he, and no one else, was the wellspring of all good things.
Speculating on the likelihood of such unequal exchanges, men
with capital advanced funds to newcomers to buy gifts with the
promise of a handsome return out of the value of the sultan’s
reciprocation. Always quick to grasp the local custom, Ibn Battuta
took a loan from a Multani entrepreneur to buy part of what he
needed. He notes in the Rihla that when he later paid the man
back, “he made an enormous profit through me and became one
of the principle merchants.”

Leaving Multan probably some time in the late winter of 1334,
Ibn Battuta and the other foreign gentlemen followed the
chamberlain and his government retinue along the main military
and commercial road leading eastward from the Indus watershed
to the valley of the upper Ganges. The route ran the breadth of the
high Punjab plain, where dense rice-growing settlements lay along
the tributary system that spread like the fingers of many hands to
the northeast of the Indus.'' Ibn Battuta was leading a group of
about 40 companions, servants, and slaves. They were, we may
assume, mainly the same people who had accompanied him
through Afghanistan, including the Egyptian friend al-Tuzari and
the young slave woman with the infant daughter she had borne her
master in the camp of Tarmashirin Khan.'* Qadi Qiwan al-Din
and his entourage, however, were all the center of official
attention. Twenty cooks were even hired to go ahead of the main
party each day, set up the evening camp. and greet the judge with
a hot meal as soon as he arrived.

The chamberlain might have been advised to take on fewer
cooks and a larger body of soldiers to protect his guests. On the
morning the caravan left the town of Abohar, Ibn Battuta and 21
others lagged behind in the place for several hours. Finally setting
out about midday to catch up with the main group, they were
suddenly attacked by 82 Hindu bandits. Only two of the assailants
had the advantage of being on horseback, but it was a close call
nonetheless.

My companions were men of courage and vigor and we fought
stoutly with them, killing one of their horsemen and about twelve
of the footsoldiers, and capturing the horse of the former. I was
hit by an arrow and my horse by another, but God in His grace
preserved me from them, for there is no force in their arrows.

196 Delhi

Apparently no force at all, for Ibn Battuta and his friends were
certainly not dressed in armor plate. The bandits were soon
driven off, and to celebrate victory in the fashion of the time the
heads of the 13 slain were cut off, carried to that evening's
stopping place, and suspended from the walls of a government
fort. The incident was the young visitor’s first experience with the
limits of imperial power among the rural Hindu population, even
near the trunk roads of the sultanate. In his next brush with
native insurgents some seven and a half years later, he would not
be so lucky.

Ibn Battuta’s first impression of Delhi might be clearer to us if
he did not describe it in one part of the Rihla as “a vast and
magnificent city... the largest city in India, nay rather the
largest of all the cities of Islam in the East” and in another part as
“empty and unpopulated save for a few inhabitants.” The con-
tradiction probably reflects the ’ulama’s disapproval. which Ibn
Battuta shared, of Sultan Muhammad’s decision in 1327 to move
them to Daulatabad, his new capital in the dreary Deccan. Over
about two years large numbers of officials, courtiers, and artisans
did relocate. When Ibn Battuta arrived some time in the spring of
1334, part of the intelligentsia was still in Daulatabad. When he
tells us the city was “empty and unpopulated”, he was probably
thinking only of the people that mattered, like a bored social
climber at a crowded cocktail party who recalls that “nobody was
there.” In fact the large lower-class Hindu population of Delhi
likely never went anywhere, excepting servants and employees of
the state. Indeed about the same time that the sultan imposed his
Daulatabad policy he also started building Jahanpanah, his new
walled urban complex and palace a few miles northeast of old
Delhi. Moreover, by the early 1330s he was giving up his dream
of a capital in the center of his empire and permitting groups of
unhappy exiles to return north if they wished. There seems little
doubt that the city Ibn Battuta saw was in fact the largest in India
and growing rapidly to serve the insatiable needs of the governing
class."

When he arrived there, the sultan was absent in the Doab
region southeast of Delhi. A tax revolt had erupted among the
much-burdened peasantry, and Muhammad had been obliged to
lead an army out from the capital to crush it. Nevertheless Ibn
Battuta and his party went immediately to the new palace in
Jahanpanah. There, in the huge wooden-roofed audience

Delhi 197

chamber called the Hall of a Thousand Pillars (Hazar Sutun).
they paid their respects to Khwaja Jahan, the sultan’s vizier.
They also presented gifts at the palace residence of
al-Makhdumah Jahan (the sultan’s blind mother), ate a cere-
monial meal, and accepted silk robes and other token gratuities
befitting their status. At a second audience on the following day
the vizier gave Ibn Battuta 2.000 silver dinars to “wash his head.”
a symbolic gift of welcome proportioned in amount to the
visitor's importance. A comfortably furnished house awaited him
and his personal retinue in Kila Ray Pithora, the ancient Delhi
of sandstone buildings and narrow streets clustered around the
Quwwat al-Islam and its lofty minaret. In this house he would
live during the next several years, passing many hours. we may
presume, in the courts and domed arcades of the great mosque.

Until Muhammad Tughlug returned to Delhi, Ibn Battuta had
no official appointment. However. the sultan was receiving reg-
ular reports on all the foreigners arriving in the capital in his
absence. He sent orders to the vizier to give the new man. who
had not yet lifted a finger in service to the state. an annual
stipend of 5,000 silver dinars to be paid from the revenue of two
and a half villages located about 16 miles north of the city.'* It
was customary for state officials, army officers, and special
honorees of the sultan to be paid regular allowances from taxes
on crops produced in peasant villages rather than directly from
the royal treasury. In the areas of North India where the auth-
ority of the sultanate was firm, the thousands of rural hamlets
were registered, grouped in units of one hundred, and
administered at the local level by petty Hindu or Muslim
functionaries under the authority of the provincial governors.
Grants of revenue from these villages could be awarded. with-
drawn, or transferred at the pleasure of the sultan, and they
carried no hereditary rights. The grantee did not have to live on
his estate (and normally did not) nor take responsibility for the
governing of its inhabitants, a task the state assumed directly.
The poor farmers who toiled to produce this income had, of
course, nothing to say about these arrangements.

Unknown fagih that he was. Ibn Battuta’s initial emolument
did not amount to much by comparison with the revenue estates
of the established elite. Nonetheless. while awaiting the
emperor’s return during the late spring of 1334, he took the
trouble to ride out to the North Indian plain to inspect his two

198 Delhi

and a half villages. The Hindu country folk inhabiting these
wretched clusters of mud wall and thatch held no fascination for
him. He says nothing in the Rih/a about the look of the hamlets
or their residents, and he probably never bothered to visit them
more than once.

Then on 8 June word came that Muhammad Tughlug was
camped at a castle just seven miles from the city. On the vizier’s
orders, Ibn Battuta and the other newcomers went immediately
out to the fort to greet the ruler with their gifts of obeisance. In
order of their professional eminence each suppliant entered the
audience room and was presented to the Master of the World, a
tall, robust, white-skinned man seated, his legs tucked beneath
him, on a gold-plated throne.'” This was the critical moment, for
the emperor’s first reaction to a man could mean the difference
between future riches and total, immediate ostracism from the
royal court.

I approached the sultan, who took my hand and shook it, and
continuing to hold it addressed me most affably, saying in
Persian “This is a blessing; your arrival is blessed; be at ease, |
shall be compassionate to you and give you such favors that
your fellow-countrymen will hear of it and come to join you.”
Then he asked me where I came from and I said to him “From
the land of the Maghrib”... Every time he said any en-
couraging word to me I kissed his hand, until I had kissed it
seven times, and after he had given me a robe of honor |
withdrew.

Thus Ibn Battuta jumped the first hurdle into the circle of
privilege. The next day he joined the triumphal entry into Delhi,
a spectacular cavalcade of festooned elephants and cavalry,
Hindu infantry columns, and singing girls. Muhammad Tughluq,
the crusher of insurgent peasants, was now the benefactor to his
people in the most extravagant tradition of a Hindu king:

On some of the elephants there were mounted small military
catapults, and when the sultan came near the city parcels of
gold and silver coins mixed together were thrown from these
machines. The men on foot in front of the sultan and the other
persons present scrambled for the money, and they kept on
scattering it until the procession reached the palace.

Delhi 199

Shortly after these events two court Officials paid a visit to Ibn
Battuta and some of his associates to tell them the emperor was
ready to make appointments to various government and religious
posts: ministers, secretaries, commanders, judges, and madrasa
teachers. “Everyone was silent at first,” Ibn Battuta remembers,
“for what they were wanting was to gain riches and return to
their countries.” He for one was ready to come forward, de-
claring that he was descended from a long line of legal scholars
and that he would be pleased to serve in some juridical capacity.

Forthwith he and several other notables were led to the Hall of
a Thousand Pillars, where Sultan Muhammad awarded him the
important office of gadi of Delhi. The emperor controlled all
appointments to the judiciary, which constituted a branch of
government separate from the political administration. Ibn
Battuta would serve under the gadi al-qudat, or Chief Judge of
the realm. Moreover, in a city as large as Delhi he was probably
only one of several judges holding comparable positions.'® His
compensation was to be two villages in addition to the ones he
already had, carrying a total annual salary of 12,000 silver dinars.
He also received 12,000 dinars in cash as an advance bonus, a
horse with saddle and bridle, and yet another robe of honor.
Such an income was not nearly as large as that of other, more
prominent appointees. The average Hindu family, however, lived
on about 5 dinars a month; a solider in the royal army was paid
1914,"7 Compared to ordinary folk of Hindustan, the obscure
Moroccan fagih was about to become a very rich man.

After several years of enjoying the favor of numerous kings
and princes purely on the strength of his social status, earnest
piety, and bright personality, Ibn Battuta was now walking into
circumstances far more promising than anything he had known
before. Muhammad Tughluq’s policy was to pack his government
with foreign professionals on whose personal loyalty he thought
he could rely. Alien origin had become a more important
criterion for office than distinction and experience. Only such
circumstances can explain this stranger from the Far West of
Islam being handed a magistracy whose responsibilities should
have put him way out of his depth. Since leaving Morocco, he
had spent hardly any time in sustained study of the law, excepting
his brief sojourn in Damascus and his months in Mecca. He had
had virtually no experience as a jurisconsult or sitting judge.
Persian

200 Delhi

sultanate, yet he did not, as he pointed out to his new master,
speak it well at all. He also admitted that, as a Maghribi, he was
trained in the Maliki madhhab, whereas almost all shari’g
decisions in India were founded on the Hanafi school. Very few
people from Maliki countries lived in India, so there could hardly
be much work to do. The sultan dismissed all these objections
and appointed two Persian-speaking Hanafi scholars to serve as
his “substitutes.” Their job was presumably to do the day-to-day
work of hearing cases of religious infraction or civil disputes
among Muslims, the normal responsibilities of a qadi. “They will
be guided by your advice,” the emperor charged his new
magistrate, “and you will be the one who signs all the
documents.”

Ibn Battuta’s appointment to what can only be characterized as
a sinecure'® supports the complaint of contemporary critics that
the official ’u/ama of the sultanate, comprising both the judiciary
and the various state ministries, were on the whole a mediocre,
self-interested, and acutely insecure group of men, more so than
in other Muslim states of the time, and more so under
Muhammad Tughlug than his predecessors. The emperor’s
method of governing was to mobilize the skills and energies of
the learned classes in the interests of his personal despotism. He
demanded that the ’u/ama endorse his every scheme. He even
routed the most saintly, apolitical Sufis out of their lodges,
dispersing them to the provinces to propagate the faith under his
personal orders. Though publicly he showed respect for the
shari’a and the legal scholars (on a few occasions submitting with
symbolic humility to a gadi’s unfavorable judgment in a case
against the state), he curtailed the independence of his judges
and controlled their legal opinions more closely than did other
Muslim rulers of the time.

Among officers of state, the sultan’s energy, wilfulness, and
fabulous generosity invited toadyism and corruption. On the
other hand, the ’ulama, though not as a group highly distin-
guished, leaned to rigidity and ultra-conservatism in their Sunni
orthodoxy, an attitude brought on partly by Islam’s precarious
dominance in an overwhelmingly infidel land. Consequently, the
sultan’s continuing flirtations with unacceptable, even pagan,
philosophies, his strange reform ideas, and finally his failure to
hold on to all the territory won for the faith in South India
produced a swell of outrage, private mutterings, and secret

Delhi 201

resistance. Muhammad was undeterred. “My remedy for rebels,
opponents, disobedient persons and evil-wishers is the sword,” he
says in a hypothetical conversation with the chronicler Barani. “I
will continue punishing and striking with my sword till it either
cuts or misses. The more the people oppose me, the greater will
be my punishments.”'” Ibn Battuta indeed bears witness to a
desperate crescendo of brutality far worse than anything he had

seen in other lands.

In spite of all that we have related of his humility, his sense of
fairness, his compassion for the needy, and his extraordinary
liberality, the sultan was far too free in shedding blood...
[He] used to punish small faults and great, without respect of
persons, whether men of learning or piety or noble descent.
Every day there are brought to the audience-hall hundreds of
people, chained, pinioned, and fettered, and those who are for
execution are executed, those for torture tortured, and those
for beating beaten.

Open-hearted, eager to please, and far too gregarious for his
own good, the young qgadi soon found himself enmeshed in the
morbid, dangerous politics of the imperial court. The sultan
remained in Delhi only about seven months — from June 1334 to
the following January. During this period neither Ibn Battuta nor
his two “substitutes” got around to hearing any legal cases.
Rather he occupied his time attending at court or accompanying
his master on the great gaudy hunting expeditions for which all
Turkish and Mongol warrior kings were known. These colossal
promenades in the Delhi hinterland required the participation of
almost the entire ruling establishment. Courtiers and high offi-
cials were expected to purchase their own outing equipment, as it
were, in diminutive imitation of the sultan’s splendid en-
campment. Like everyone worthy of esteem, Ibn Battuta felt
obliged to buy a large tent with a white fabric enclosure. together
with food, utensils, clothing. carpets, animals, and a corps of
servants sufficient to haul and supervise all this matériel. A team
of eight men had to be hired to carry the dula, or decorated
palanquin, in which a notable rode when not preferring his horse
or elephant. In the Rih/a Ibn Battuta makes much of the “vigor
and energy” he showed in always being ready to leave Delhi the
same day the sultan did and how he was honored during these

202 Delhi

excursions with invitations to sit or ride in close proximity to the
Shadow of God.

Keeping up with the ruling class of India, however, was
frighteningly expensive. Like the Turko—Mongol states, the
sultanate was an extremely personal system of power. Bonds of
loyalty and respect between social groups were maintained
through a chain of favor starting with the sultan and extending
downward through the political ranks to the lowliest servant.
What the ruler expended in gifts and stipends his officeholders
were expected to give back in future presents to him or redis-
tribute to their own servants, clients, and suppliers. This
medieval version of “trickle down theory” kept the political
system reasonably stable, but it also put tremendous pressure on
men of position to spend freely. Spectacular donations and
purchases strengthened a man’s authority over those below him
and his prestige among those above. Caution and frugality invited
scorn. Any temptation to invest in long-term capital enterprise or
save for a rainy day was easily resisted, for the state could part a
man from his riches with devastating suddenness. Everyone in
the elite circles, and especially the governors and senior military
officers, were thus encouraged to compete feverishly with one
another in stupendous, ceaseless spending. “If one of the nobles
bestowed fifty horses in his wine party and gave robes to two
hundred persons,” says Barani, “another noble hearing this
would feel jealous, and would try to give away a hundred horses
and to bestow robes on five hundred persons.”””

Ibn Battuta was not of course in the same league with the great
commanders of the realm, but he lost no time piling up debts to
finance his gifts to the sovereign and a properly luxurious house-
hold. He confesses frankly in the Rihla that he developed a
reputation for extravagance and that the sultan was well aware of
it. We should not conclude, however, that he was necessarily a
bigger spender than other men of comparable status. He admits
freely of his prodigality, not to confess humbly to a bad habit, but
to show that he lived generously and expansively as befitting a
qadi of Delhi. Nonetheless, he had to find a way to pay off the
merchants who had staked him to his début in the capital because
they were preparing to leave the country on a commercial
venture. The amount in question was 55,000 silver dinars. The
Rihla rather tires the reader with its lengthy description of his
strategies for getting Muhammad Tughluq to pay his bills for

Delhi 203

him, suggesting that he spent a good part of his first half year in
Delhi preoccupied with his personal finances. To broach the
subject before his master he composed a praise poem to him in
Arabic that ended, candidly enough, with the lines:

Make speed to aid the votary to thy shrine,
And pay his debt — the creditors are dunning.

The sultan was pleased with the ode and agreed to pay, but the
disbursement from the treasury was held up. Ibn Battuta then got
his creditors to make an appeal to Muhammad on his behalf.
Success again, but payment was delayed a second time because of
certain procedural improprieties involving another official. Ibn
Battuta appealed once more, this time sending the sultan three
camels, two gilded saddles, and plates of sweets. At long last the
money was released, not only the 55,000 dinars for the debt but
also the 12,000 the sultan had earlier agreed to give him.

By the time all this was settled Muhammad Tughluq was
preparing to leave the capital once again. Sometime in 1334
rebellion had broken out in Ma’bar, the Tamil-speaking region in
the far southeast of the subcontinent that had been annexed to
the empire by Muhammad Tughluq’s father only eleven years
earlier. The leader of the rising was not a Hindu prince but Jalal
al-Din Ahsan Shah, the sultan’s own governor. Rallying the
support of the Muslim amirs and soldiers under his authority, he
proclaimed himself Sultan of Ma’bar. Despite the political perils
of campaigning 1,300 miles from the capital, Muhammad
mustered an army to march to Daulatabad, then on to Madurai,
chief city of Ma’bar. Ibn Battuta expected to be ordered to go
along on the expedition. To his surprise and relief, the sultan
instructed him to remain in Delhi and, aside from his judgeship,
appointed him administrator of the mausoleum of Qutb al-Din
Mubarak, the Khalji sultan who reigned from 1316 to 1320 and
under whom Muhammad Tughluq had entered military service as
a young man. Just before the royal departure on 5 January
1335,?' Ibn Battuta gained one more audience with his master,
this time persuading him to allot extra funds for the upkeep of
the tomb, not to mention money to repair his own residence.

During the next two and a half years, he resided in Delhi.
refurbishing his house, building a little mosque next to it, and
running up more debts. He even spent, much to his later

204 Delhi

embarrassment, 1,060 dinars a friend had left in his trust before
leaving with the sultan. He and his substitutes may have heard legal
cases in Delhi during this period, but he makes no mention of them.
His principal interest seems to have been the mausoleum. The burial
place of a sultan was often an important royal endowment. It was
first of all a mosque but might also have associated with it a college, a
Sufi retreat, and facilities to dispense food and lodging to wayfarers
and the needy. Ibn Battuta had to supervise all these functions. He
recalls that this complex employed 460 persons, including Koran
reciters, teachers, theological students, Sufis, mosque officials,
clerks, and various classes of cooks, servants, and guards. All of
these people were supported from the revenue of 30 villages whose
crops were assigned to the tomb and with funds allocated directly
from the state treasury. He also busied himself overseeing con-
struction of a dome over the sepulchre.”*

His responsibilities were made even greater by the disastrous
famine that hit North India in 1335 and lasted seven years. Barani
reports that “thousands upon thousands of people perished of
want,”*’ and Ibn Battuta speaks of Indians being reduced to eating
animal skins, rotten meat, and even human flesh. As the famine
became general and starving country folk poured into Delhi to find
relief, Ibn Battuta distributed quantities of food from the stores
allocated to the mausoleum. He presents a picture of himself in this
work as an exemplary administrator, mentioning that the sultan sent
him a robe of honor from Daulatabad after hearing from one of his
officers about the fine job the Maghribi was doing dispensing welfare
to the stricken.

Some time during this period, probably in the summer of 1335 or
1336, he left Delhi for two months to make an official inquiry in the
region of Amroha, a town located across the Ganges about 85 miles
east of Delhi.** He traveled with a proper retinue, including 30
companions and “two brothers, accomplished singers, who used to
sing to me on the way.” Charges had been made that ‘Aziz al-
Khammar, the district’s tyrannical tax-collector, was holding back on
grain shipments assigned from a number of villages to the
mausoleum. Meeting first with the notables of Amroha, Ibn Battuta
learned that al-Khammar was to be found in a village on the Sarju
River, requiring a journey of another 190 miles or so eastward across
the north Gangetic plain.*” Finally catching up with his man, he
succeeded in having him arrange for transport of a large quantity of
grain to Delhi.

Delhi 205

But more revealing of the young qadi’s authority was his official
investigation of a violent feud that had broken out between al-
Khammar and the amir of the military district. Al-Khammar pre-
sented a number of complaints against the officer, including the
charge that one of the amir’s servants, a man named al-Rida, had
broken into his house, stolen 5.000 dinars, and drunk some wine.

] interrogated al-Rida on this subject and he said to me “I have
never drunk wine since J left Multan, which is eight years ago.”
I said to him “Then you did drink it in Multan?” and when he
said “Yes” I ordered him to be given eighty lashes and impris-
oned him on the charges preferred. because of the presumptive
evidence against him.

Ibn Battuta was not behaving with arbitrary severity here.
Rather he was imposing the precise sharia punishment for im-
bibing wine — 80 lashes, no more, no less. It was a religious
infraction falling within a gadi’s normal authority. On the charge
of burglary. however, the man was to suffer the penalty of the
sultan’s law and thus sent off to Delhi in chains. If Ibn Battuta
sentenced other malefactors to the lash while he served in Delhi,
we have no way of knowing, for this is the only judgment he
reports having made during his years in India.

Some time in 1337 or 1338 the sultan returned north. Because of
the famine that still raged around Delhi, he apparently stopped
there only briefly before moving to a temporary capital at a place
on the west bank of the Ganges some distance north of the town of
Kanauj (Qinnawj).”° Intending to remain there several months, he
ordered construction of a modest palace and called it Sargadwari,
the Gate of Paradise. It was hardly so happy a residence. for the
expedition against Ma’bar had ended in total failure. Muhammad
had advanced as far as the central Deccan when an epidemic broke
out among his troops, forcing him to return to Daulatabad and
leaving the traitorous Ahsan Shah still on his throne in Madurai.
Not only did the embattled sultan lose any hope of preventing the
secession of Ma’bar, but between the time he left Delhi and re-
turned to the north, several other defecting Turkish or Afghan
commanders raised rebellions, effectively terminating imperial
rule over much of South and Central India.

The empire disintegrating around him, the sultan summoned

206 Delhi

many of his Delhi officials to join him at Sargadwari, Ibn Battuta
among them. Some time after the gadi and his entourage arrived
there, “Ain al-Mulk, the Indo—Muslim governor of the province
immediately east of the Ganges, revolted out of fear that the
emperor wrongly suspected him of disloyalty. After boldly raiding
the army’s stocks of elephants and horses, ’Ain al-Mulk, four of
his brothers, and a force of Hindu soldiers escaped eastward across
the river to safety. At this point the sultan contemplated marching
back to Delhi to reinforce his depleted army and deal with the
rebels at some later time. Ibn Battuta, who was in the thick of the
crisis and an eye witness to all that occurred, reports that
Muhammad’s commanders urged him to strike back at the rebels
before they had time to consolidate their position. If Muhammad
Tughlug was a disaster as a politician, he had proven himself a
skillful soldier and tactician from the time of his father’s reign.
Taking his officers’ advice, he advanced by forced march along the
west bank of the Ganges to Kanauj to secure the town ahead of
Ain al-Mulk. Ibn Battuta was traveling in the vanguard under the
command of the vizier Khwaja Jahan. In the meantime ’Ain al-
Mulk and his company crossed the river again. Foolishly over-
estimating his own military talents and the likelihood of defections
from the sultan’s ranks, ’Ain al-Mulk attacked the imperial
vanguard near Kanauj in the early hours of the morning.

The troops, then, drawing their swords, advanced towards their
adversaries and a hot battle ensued. The sultan gave orders that
his army’s password should be “Dilhi” [Delhi] and “Ghazna”;
each one of them therefore on meeting a horseman said to him
“Dilhi” and if he received the answer “Ghazna” he knew that
he was one of his side and if not he engaged him. The aim of the
rebel had been to attack only the place where the sultan was,
but the guide led him astray and he attacked the place of the
vizier instead . . . In the vizier’s regiment there were Persians,
Turks and Khurasanians; these, being enemies of the Indians,
put up a vigorous fight and though the rebel’s army contained
about 50,000 men they were put to flight at the rising of the day.

Numerous rebel soldiers drowned trying to reach the east bank
of the river; others were captured, including ‘Ain al-Mulk himself,
and brought before the sultan. “Muleteers, pedlars, slaves and
persons of no importance” were released, but on the very after-

Delhi 207

noon of the battle 62 of the traitorous leaders were thrown to the
elephants. “They started cutting them in pieces with the blades
placed on their tusks and throwing some of them in the air and
catching them,” Ibn Battuta remembers, “and all the time the
bugles and fifes and drums were being sounded.” ‘Ain al-Mulk
must have expected a similar fate, or worse. But what Muhammad
Tughlug could take away he could also give. Convinced that his
governor had acted rashly “through mistake,” as Barani has it,””
the emperor pardoned him and gave him the modest post of
supervising the royal gardens in Delhi.

Despite his total victory, Muhammad returned to his capital in a
fury of despair.*” The famine raged on, Bengal had broken away
from the sultanate or was about to, other revolts were igniting here
and there, and all his dreams of a tidy, productive empire were
falling to ruin. Thus he lashed out at whatever enemies, real or
imagined, happened to be at hand. In such a sinister environment
as this, only the most circumspect, inconspicuous officeholder
might expect to survive indefinitely. Eager, sociable young qadis,
on the other hand, were likely to make a disastrous slip sooner or
later.

It might well have happened earlier than it did. At some point
during his residence in Delhi, Ibn Battuta married a woman
named Hurnasab and had a daughter by her. As usual we learn
almost nothing in the Rihla about his domestic affairs, except that
this woman was a daughter of Ahsan Shah, leader of the Ma’bar
rebellion, and a sister of Sharif Ibrahim, a court official and
governor who had plotted a rebellion and was subsequently ex-
ecuted in the palace while Ibn Battuta was in attendance there.
Although the Rihla gives no hint that his marriage to Hurnasab
brought him under suspicion, having family ties with men guilty of
high treason was hardly an advantage at the court of Muhammad
Tughluq. Ibn Battuta would later in his travels be a guest of one of
Ahsan Shah’s successors in Ma’bar, suggesting that he may well
have had some concealed sympathy for the rebellion there.””

The event that finally got him into trouble was his friendship
with Shaykh Shihab al-Din, a venerable Sufi originally from
Khurasan. It was a long-held tradition among the most pious and
principled divines of Islam to shun relationships with secular rulers
on the argument that such collaboration would taint them and
detract from their total service to God. Nizam al-Din Awliya, the
illustrious master of the Chishti brotherhood who died eight years

208 Delhi

before Ibn Battuta came to India, bluntly cold-shouldered both Khalji
and Tughluq emperors at every opportunity. “The house of this
humble one has two doors,” Nizam al-Din is known to have said. “If
the Sultan enters through one, I shall go out by the other.”*’ Such
aloofness as this was quite unacceptable to Muhammad Tughlug,
whose political theory included the idea that Sufi ascetics and ivory-
tower theologians should submit to his will as much as the official
"ulama.

Whether Shihab al-Din was a Chishti or not is unclear, but twice he
brashly refused to obey his sovereign’s commands. In the first incident
he spurned a government post offered to him. In retaliation
Muhammad had the shaykh’s beard plucked out hair by hair, then
banished him to Daulatabad. Some time later he had him restored to
favor and appointed him to an office, which in that instance Shihab al-
Din agreed to accept. When Muhammad went off on the Ma’bar
expedition, Shihab al-Din established a farm near the Yamuna Rivera
few miles from Delhi and there dug himself a large underground house
complete, as Ibn Battuta describes it, with “chambers, storerooms, an
oven and a bath.” Returned to the capital, the sultan ordered Shihab
al-Din to appear at court, but the troglodyte refused to emerge. When
Muhammad had him summarily arrested, the shaykh retorted that the
sultan was an oppressor and a tyrant. The court ’ulama pleaded with
him to recant. When he would not, he was tortured in the most
heinous manner, then beheaded.

Ibn Battuta, by contrast, was hardly the sort to martyr himself for
rigid principles. The odor of politics did not bother him at all, and
official service and reward were his ambition. Unfortunately, he had
made the mistake of going out one day to see Shihab al-Din and his
marvelous cave. Following the shaykh’s arrest, the sultan demanded a
list of all who had visited him, and the Maghnibi’s name was on It.
“Thereupon,” Ibn Battuta recalls, “the sultan gave orders that four of
his slaves should remain constantly beside me in the audience-hall,
and ‘customarily when he takes this action with anyone it rarely
happens that the person escapes.” For nine days Ibn Battuta remained
under guard, imagining in cold horror his short final journey to the
main gate of the Jahanpanah palace where executions were carried out
and the corpses left to lie three days in public view.

The day on which they began to guard me was a Friday and God
Most High inspired me to recite His words Sufficient for us is God
and excellent the Protector. | recited them that day 33,000 times and

Delhi 209

passed the night in the audience-hall. I fasted five days on end,
reciting the Koran from cover to cover each day, and tasting
nothing but water. After five days I broke my fast and then
continued to fast for another four days on end.

Then, just after Shihab al-Din was executed, the terrified gadi,
much to his surprise, was suddenly released and allowed to go
home.

Shaken by this dreadful experience, he secured permission a
short time later to withdraw from his official duties and seclude
himself with Kamal al-Din "Abdallah al-Ghari, a well-known Sufi
who occupied a hermitage, indeed another cave, on the outskirts
of Delhi. Kamal al-Din was a rigorous ascetic, living in extreme
poverty and performing awesome feats of self-denial. Ibn Battuta
had gone into brief periods of spiritual retreat previously in his
career, but this time he threw himself into the abstinent life,
ridding himself of his possessions, donning the clothes of a beggar,
and fasting to the point of collapse. He remained in these penitent
circumstances for five months, probably unsure of what he would
do next. Apparently he had decided at least that life with
Muhammad Tughluq was far too dangerous to continue.

Meanwhile, the sultan went on a military tour to Sind and from
the town of Sehwan summoned his gadi to appear before him. Ibn
Battuta presumably made the journey immediately, though the
Rihla has no comment on it or the route.*'! When he arrived,
Muhammad received him “with the greatest kindness and
solicitude” and pressed him to return to his judgeship and rejoin
the palace circle. Determined to avoid that fate at all costs, Ibn
Battuta countered with a request to make the hajj, the most
persuasive reason he could come up with for getting permission to
leave the country. Much to his relief, the sultan agreed. For
several weeks thereafter, beginning in June 1341, he resided in
another Sufi Ahanqa, this time progressively extending his periods
of self-denial until finally he could fast for 40 days at a stretch.

Then suddenly he was called into the royal presence again, this
time to hear an astounding proposal. Knowing his “love of travel
and sightseeing,” the sultan wished to make his North African gadi
ambassador to the Mongol court of China. His mission would be to
accompany 15 Chinese envoys back to their homeland and to carry
shiploads of gifts to the Yuan emperor. Ibn Battuta was preparing
to leave for Mecca and until that moment probably had no thought

210 Delhi

of traveling eastwards of India. Now he was being handed an
opportunity, not only to get away from Muhammad Tughlug and the
gloom of Delhi, but to visit the further lands of Islam and
beyond — and to do it in grander style than he had ever traveled
before. It was an offer much too promising to refuse.

Notes

1. Quoted in P. Hardy, Historians of Medieval India (London, 196), p. 98.

2. Ibn Fadl Allah al--Uman, A Fourteenth Century Arab Account of India under
Sultan Muhammad bin Tughluq, trans. and ed. Iqtidar Husain Siddigi and Qazi
Mohammad Ahmad (Aligarh, 1971), p. 36.

3. Since IB lived and traveled in India for about a decade and since he and his editor
expected literate Moroccans to be particularly interested in facts about that distant land,
he devotes nearly a fifth of the Rih/a to a description of the history, political affairs,
social customs, class relations, and Muslim religious life of the sultanate and other
regions of the subcontinent. The Rihia is one of a very few contemporary literary sources
on fourteenth-century India, especially the life and times of Muhammad Tughlua. IB is
indeed the sole source of information on a number of historical events, including some
of the rebellions against the sultan. He also gives a brief dynastic history of the kingdom,
based, as he reveals, on information supplied to him mainly by Kamal al-Din ibn al-
Burhan, the chief judge. Where IB’s reporting has been checked against the other
contemporary sources, he has been found reasonably accurate. For the modern
historian, however, the value of the narrative has been restricted by the lack of a clear
chronological framework and almost no references to either absolute or relative dates.
The other chronicles of the time suffer from the same deficiency.

Since the Rihla is a book for Muslims about Muslims. indeed literate Muslims, it is an
inadequate source on Hindu society and civilization. Though IB does describe certain
Hindu customs and gives some examples of the interpenetration of Hindu and Muslim
culture, he is generally disinclined to examine the life of Muslim peasant folk, much less
infidel peasant folk. Despite the thread of amiable tolerance that runs through the
Rihla, 1B’s perspective is identical with that of the other Muslim writers of the time. “For
them, indeed as for Muslim historians outside India,” Peter Hardy writes, “the only
significant history is the history of the Muslim community; they are historians of the res
gestae of the politically prominent members of a group united by ties of common faith
rather than historians of the whole people of the area controlled by the Delhi sultan.”
Historians of Medieval India, p. 114.

4. Muhammad Tughlugq was also suspected of being under the pernicious influence
of a disciple of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), a famous theologian and exponent of the
Hanbali madhhab who had lived in Damascus. Ibn Taymiyya incurred the opposition of
the orthodox scholars by his critical rejection of Sufi mysticism and by his insistence on
the right of ijtihad, that is, the freedom to inquire into the foundations of particular
points of law even where an authoritative madhhab decision already existed. IB claims
to have heard him preach in Damascus in 1326 and characterizes him as having,
according to Gibb’s translation, “some kink in his brain.” Gb, vol.1, p. 135. The validity
of IB’s remark is examined by D. P. Little, “Did Ibn Taymiyya Have a Screw Loose?”
Studia Islamica 41 (1975): 39-111.

5. Peter Jackson links the plan for the conquest of Chagatay with an abortive
invasion of Kashmir, called the Qarachil expedition. “The Mongols and the Delhi
Sultanate in the Reign of Muhammad Tughlug (1325-51).” Central Asiatic Journal 19
(1975): 128-43.

Delhi 211

6. Ziya al-Din Barani, Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi, trans. and ed. H.M. Elliot and
John Dowson, The History of India as Told by its Own Historians, vol. 3
(Allahabad, 1964), p. 236. Barani was a courtier at the court of Muhammad
Tughluq and perhaps an acquaintance of IB. Under the patronage of Firuz Shah,
Muhammad’s successor, he wrote a history of the sultanate from 1266 to 1351. He
interprets each reign in the light of his own orthodox morality and finds
Muhammad Tughluq badly wanting.

7. Quoted in K.M. Ashraf, Life and Conditions of the People of Hindustan,
2nd edn (New Delhi, 1970), p. 150.

8. See Chapter 8, note 25.

9. IB states that his first visit to Sind took place shortly after the suppression of
a local uprising, the Sumra revolt, by the military governor Imad al-Mulk Sartiz.
This official was not appointed, however, until about 1337. Peter Jackson, “The
Mongols and India (1221-1351),” Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1977, pp.
225-26. IB may therefore be confusing this alleged tour of Sind with the trip he
took there from Dethi shortly before July 1341. He also says that he visited Sind for
the first time during the “hottest period of the summer.” Such a remark fits poorly
into the chronological scheme of his arrival in India, which he claims began on 12
September 1333. There is no evidence that he remained in the Punjab and Sind
from then until the following summer. The 1341 visit, however, apparently did take
place in early summer, which was indeed the time of the scorching southwesterly
winds. Jackson develops a line of argument about IB’s chronology to suggest that
he did not visit China at all, that he stayed in India until 1346-47 (747-48 A.H.),
and that he left there definitively by way of an overland route through Sind and
Khurasan. Jackson admits, however, that if IB did pass through Sind as late as
1346-47, Sartiz was no longer governor there, having been transferred to the
Deccan in 1345 (p. 226). Thus the Sumra rebellion, for which IB offers the only
description, may well have taken place in 1341 rather than 1333. M.R. Haig
discusses IB’s itinerary in Sind and struggles unsuccessfully with the chronological
difficulties. “Ibnu Batuta in Sindh,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 19
(1887): 393-412. C. F. Beckingham suggests the Sind visit may have taken place in
1341 rather than 1333-34. “Ibn Battuta in Sind” in Hamida Khuhro (ed.), Sind
through the Centuries: Proceedings of an International Seminar, Karachi 1975
(Karachi, 1981), pp. 139-42.

10. IB states that he had been in Multan for two months when the sultan’s
chamberlain arrived. Gb, vol. 3, p. 606. If he did not in fact visit Sind at this time,
he may have stayed quite a bit more than two months in Multan.

11. A description of the route during the Sultanate period is found in A.M.
Stow, “The Road between Delhi and Multan,” Panjab University Historical Society
3 (1914-15): 26-37.

12. He mentions in connection with his arrival on the Indus that he had about 40
people with him. This company probably numbered more or less the same on the
continuing trip to Delhi.

13. Mahdi Husain, Tughlug Dynasty (Calcutta, 1963), pp. 145-75. The author
presents a lengthy analysis of the transfer of the capital and its consequences for
Delhi. He suggests that the destruction of Delhi alleged by Barani and others has
been greatly exaggerated. Other modern historians disagree.

14. IB names the villages, which have been identified by Gibb (Gb, vol. 3. p.
741) and Mahdi Husain (MH, p. 122).

15. Mahdi Husain (Tughlug Dynasty, p. 480) presents a description of the sultan
compiled from various medieval sources.

16. On the general organization of the judicial system, S.M. Ikram, Muslim
Rule in India and Pakistan, 2nd edn (Lahore, 1966), pp. 149-52; and A. B.M.
Habibullah, The Foundation of Muslim Rule in India, 2nd edn. (Allahabad, 1961),
pp. 271-79.

212 Delhi

17. Ashraf, Life and Conditions, p. 291.

18. Onsinecurism among the religious, judicial, and educational officeholders of
fifteenth-century Egypt see Carl F. Petry, The Civilian Elite of Cairo in the later
Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J., 1981), pp. 201, 319.

19. Quoted in Mohammad Habib and Afsar Umar Salim Khan, The Political
Theory of the Delhi Sultanate (Allahabad, n.d.), p. 159.

20. Quoted in M. Mujeeb, The Indian Muslims (Montreal, 1967), p. 209.

21. IB gives the departure date as 9 Jumada I, or 5 January 1335. All recent
authorities are agreed that the Ma’bar rebellion broke out in 1334, and Mahdi
Husain (Tughlug Dynasty, p. 243) affirms that Muhammad Tughlug must have left
Delhi the following year. Unfortunately, in a note in his translation of the narrative
(MH, p. 140), he mistakenly converts 9 Jumada I to 21 October 1341. Gibb (Gb,
vol. 3, p. 758) repeats the error.

22. The tomb of Qutb al-Din Mubarak no longer exists.

23. Barani, Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi, p. 238.

24. IB states that he made this trip during “the period of the rains,” that is,
during the summer or early fall monsoon season. Although he says nothing in the
context of his years in Delhi about other excursions other than the trips to Kanauj
(see below) and Sind, he mentions later in the Rihla of having visited Gwalior, a
city about 150 miles south of the capital, sometime between 1334 and 1341.

25. IB’s Saru River is the Sarju. MH, p. 145n.

26. Gibb (Gb, vol. 3, p. 698) and Mahdi Husain (Tughlug Dynasty, pp. 254, 658)
agree that the sultan established his temporary capital on the Ganges in 1338.
Jackson (‘The Mongols and the Delhi Sultanate,” p. 149) suggests 1337 or 1338. IB
states that Muhammad was absent from Delhi on the Ma’bar expedition for two
and a half years from January 1335.

27. Barani, Tarikh-i-Firuz Shahi, p. 249.

28. Mahdi Husain (Tughlug Dynasty, p. 254) asserts that Muhammad Tughluq
stayed at Sargadwari from late 1338 until mid 1341, then returned to Delhi. IB also
implies that the sultan remained there two and a half years (Gb, vol. 3, p. 698), but
he does not make clear how much of that time he spent with the royal party. Mahdi
Husain (Tughlug Dynasty, p. 256) dates the ’Ain al-Mulk rebellion to 1340. A date
of mid 1341 for the sultan’s return to Delhi, however, does not accord well with
IB’s statement that he visited him in Sind sometime before July of that year.

30. Aziz Ahmad, “The Sufi and the Sultan in Pre-Mughal Muslim India,” Der
Islam 38 (1962): 147.

31. See note 9.

10 Malabar and the Maldives

And in this land of Malabar there are Moors in great
numbers. . . They are rich, and live well, they hold all the
sea trade and navigation in such sort that if the King of
Portugal had not discovered India, Malabar would already
have been in the hands of the Moors, and would have had
a Moorish King. '

Duarte Barbosa

About 1340, 15 ambassadors representing Toghon Temur, the
Mongol emperor of the Yuan Dynasty of China. arrived at the
court of Delhi.” Commercial ties between China and the sultanate
may have been the main business of the mission, since the Yuan
emperors were pursuing a vigorous overseas trade policy. Ibn
Battuta’s explanation of the event is that the delegation came to
seek permission of Muhammad Tughlug to have a Buddhist shrine
constructed at a town about 80 miles east of Delhi.” The sultan
declined to authorize the project, and this was the message he
wished his special envoy to carry to Peking. Ibn Battuta claims that
the sultan chose him for this honor because he knew his gadi loved
“to travel and go abroad.” This is hardly a convincing rationale for
appointing an ambassador to the largest and most populous
kingdom in the world. Perhaps Muhammad thought the peripate-
tic Moroccan would have the energy and motivation to persevere
in the mission despite the hardships of a long sea voyage. And
perhaps he wished to maximize the prestige of the embassy by
selecting an Arab, a pious scholar of the Prophet's race, to repres-
ent him. (Ibn Battuta was an Arab in his literate culture, though
Berber in ethnic origin.)

Whatever the reason, the ex-qadi was taking on a greater weight
of official responsibility than he ever had before. Not only was he
required to get himself to Peking and back, he also had to trans-
port, and safeguard with his life. an entire caravan of royal pre-
sents for the Yuan emperor. The Chinese emissaries had earlier
arrived in Delhi with 100 slaves and cartloads of fine clothing,

213

214 Malabar and the Maldives

brocade, musk, and swords, compliments of Toghon Temur.
Muhammad Tughluq naturally felt obliged to reciprocate with an
even more magnificent array of gifts. The list included 200 Hindy
slaves, songstresses, and dancers, 15 pages, 100 horses, and
wondrous quantities of choice textiles, robes, dishware, and swords.

Ibn Battuta left Delhi at the head of his mission in late summer,
probably 2 August 1341.* His companions included the 15 Chinese
gentlemen, who were returning home, and two officials of the
sultanate besides himself. One of them was Zahir al-Din al-Zanjani,
a scholar of Persian origin. The other was a eunuch named Kafur,
who held the title of shurbdar, or cupbearer, and had day-to-day
responsibility for overseeing the slaves and the bullock carts laden
with the imperial presents. Al-Tuzari was also along, as well as other
unnamed individuals among Ibn Battuta’s personal friends, old com-
rades, and concubines. Muhammad al-Harawi, one of the sultan’s
amirs, led a troop of 1,000 horse to escort the embassy from Delhi to
the coast. The plan of travel was to march southward along the
government trunk road to Daulatabad, then make for the western
coast at Cambay (Kinbaya), the chief port of Gujarat. From there
the mission would take ship for Calicut on the Malabar coast of
South India. At Calicut they would board ocean-going junks to carry
them across the Bay of Bengal to China. The landward itinerary from
Delhi to Cambay was hardly the most direct route possible, as
Daulatabad lay some 240 miles southeast of that port. Sultan
Muhammad may have given his envoy official business in
Daulatabad that the Rihla fails to mention, or perhaps he instructed
the caravan to make an appearance there as a symbolic show of
Delhi's continuing authority in the Deccan.

If Ibn Battuta had undertaken this mission eight or ten years
earlier, that authority would have been relatively secure and the
journey all the way to Gujarat accomplished in safety. By the 1340s,
however, the conditions of travel, even under armed escort, had
changed drastically. Seven years of famine, repeated rebellion, and
disastrous government had left the rural areas of what remained of
the empire more and more difficult to control. Hindu insurgency and
brigandage had become endemic outside the walls of the garrison
towns, even in the Ganges heartland. Traffic on the high roads
connecting the major cities was even more susceptible to interference
than when Ibn Battuta had his first encounter with Hindu dacoits on
his way to Delhi in 1334.

The embassy had left the capital only a few days when it ran into

Malabar and the Maldives 215

trouble and came near to losing tts leader. Arriving at Koil (mod-
ern Aligarh), a city in the Doab plain about 75 miles southeast of
Delhi, a report reached the company that a force of Hindu in-
surgents was laying siege to the nearby town of Jalali. Riding
immediately to the rescue, al-Harawi’s cavalry escort caught the
rebels by surprise. Although outnumbered four to one, the troops
made short bloody work of the assailants, killing, according to Ibn
Battuta, all 4,000 of them and capturing their horses and weapons.
The imperial force lost 78 men, including Kafur, the cupbearer. At
this point Ibn Battuta decided that he should send a messenger to
inform the sultan about what happened and ask him to dispatch a
replacement for the unfortunate Kafur. In the meantime the mis-
sion would wait in Koil for a reply from Delhi. Since the district
was apparently in a state of alarm and Hindu bands continued to
raid the outskirts of Jalali, al-Harawi and his men joined forces
with the local commander to undertake counter-insurgency sweeps
through the local countryside.

Riding into the Doab one morning in the heat of August, Ibn
Battuta and a party of his comrades intercepted a rebel band that
was just then retreating after an attack on one of the villages near
Jalali. The Muslims gave chase but in the confusion of the pursuit
Ibn Battuta and five of his men became separated from their
companions. Suddenly a force of Hindus on foot and horse sprang
from a wood. The six men scattered and Ibn Battuta found himself
alone. Ten of the assailants pursued him at full gallop across the
fields, then all but three fell away. Twice he was forced to stop and
dismount, first to pick a stone from his horse's hoof, then to
recover one of his swords, which had bounced out of its scabbard.
His pursuers closing in, he eluded them by driving away his mount
and hiding at the bottom of a deep ditch.

When his enemies had finally given up trying to find him, he
started off on foot to find his way back to safety. Going only a
short distance, he was confronted again, this time by 40 bowmen,
who promptly robbed him of his remaining sword and everything
else he had with him except his shirt, pants, and cloak. The
brigands then led him to their camp and put him under guard. Ibn
Battuta did not speak any Hindi, but he succeeded in communi-
cating with two Indo—Muslims in the camp who knew some
Persian, telling them a little about himself but wisely concealing
his status as an officer of Delhi. The two men let him know that,
whoever he was, he was certainly to be killed, and it soon became

216 Malabar and the Maldives

apparent that his three guards, one of them an old man, had been
instructed to do the job whenever they were so disposed.

The assassins, however, seemed to lack resolve. After keeping
their prisoner in a cave throughout the night, they returned in the
morning to the robber camp, which was by this time deserted.
Here they sat throughout the day, the captors working up the
nerve to do their deed, Ibn Battuta sweating in mortal fear that
each breath was to be his last. Then at nightfall three of the bandits
suddenly returned and demanded to know why the prisoner had
not been dispatched. The guards had no satisfactory answer, but
one of the young brigands, perhaps admitting the pointlessness of
executing a man who had already given up his possessions,
suggested that as far as he was concerned the foreigner could go
free. Jumping at this change of events, Ibn Battuta offered the
man his expensive tunic in thanks, accepted an old blue loincloth
in return, and bolted into a nearby bamboo forest.

Alive but alone again and completely lost in a fairly heavily
populated district whose hostility toward representatives of
Muhammad Tughluq was all too apparent, he wandered the
countryside for six days, avoiding villages, sleeping under trees or
in abandoned houses, and subsisting on well water and herbs. At
one point he eluded a band of 50 armed Hindus by hiding all day in
a cotton field. On the seventh day, exhausted and starving, he
entered a village in desperation, but when he begged for some-
thing to eat, one of the locals threatened him with a sword,
searched him, and stole his shirt.

Then on the eighth day salvation came. After having escaped
from the Hindu village with nothing but his trousers, the fugitive
found himself beside a deserted well. He was just cutting one of his
boots into two pieces, after having lost its mate down the well
while trying to draw water with it, when a dark complexioned man
suddenly appeared, offered him some beans and rice, and revealed
that he too was a Muslim. The man invited Ibn Battuta to
accompany him and even insisted on carrying him on his back
when the exhausted wanderer’s legs gave out. Reciting a verse
from the Koran over and over as they plodded along, Ibn Battuta
finally fell asleep. When he awoke, his mysterious benefactor had
disappeared, but he found himself in a village with a government
officer in residence who warmly took him in, fed him, and gave
him a bath and a suit of clothes.

Learning from his Muslim host that the village they were in was

Malabar and the Maldives 217

only six or seven miles from Koil, [bn Battuta immediately sent a
message to his comrades. In a day or two a party of them arrived to
collect their foot-weary ambassador, astonished and jubilant that
he was still alive. He then learned that during his absence the
sultan had sent an official named Sumbul to replace the dead Kafur
and that the mission was to proceed on its way.

I also learned that my companions had written to the sultan
informing him what had befallen me and that they had regarded
the journey as ill-omened on account of the fate which I and
Kafur had met in the course of it and that they intended to
return. But when I saw the sultan’s injunctions ordering us to
prosecute the journey I pressed them to prosecute it and my
resolution was made firm.

Thus undaunted by his ordeal, he led his embassy on to
Daulatabad without further incident. The caravan appears to have
followed more or less the main government route to the erstwhile
southern capital, a road fastidiously kept up to ensure rapid
courier and military communication between Delhi and the De-
ccan. From the fortress city of Gwalior on the southern edge of the
Ganges plain, the company trekked southwesterly across the
Malwa plateau to Ujjain, the chief commercial entrepdt on the
direct route from Delhi to Cambay. From there they crossed the
Vindhya Hills, descending the steep southern scarp near Dhar to
the Narmada River, the traditional historic dividing line between
the cultural worlds of North India and the Deccan. South of the
Narmada they crossed the wooded Satpura Range, probably by
way of the Burhanpur Gap, the famous pass through which the
armies of the Turks had repeatedly invaded South India. The last
stretch of the journey took them from the Tapti River through the
richly cultivated tableland of northern Maharashtra _ to
Daulatabad.*

There the mission was the guest of Qutlugh Khan. He had been
Muhammad Tughluq’s governor of the Deccan provinces since
1335, commanding his territories from the spectacular citadel of
Deogir set atop a granite, cone-shaped rock rising 800 feet above
the surrounding plain. Defended by a perpendicular scarp 80 to
120 feet high on all sides. the castle could be reached only by
passageways and staircases hewn out of the solid rock. An outer
wall two and a half miles around enclosed the city of Daulatabad,

218 Malabar and the Maldives

which lay to the south and east of the keep. Despite its aban-
donment as the capital of the empire, the town appears from the
Rihla’s brief description to have been prospering from trade and
from the tax revenues of the densely populated Maharashtra
countryside. Yet not much more than two years after Ibn Battuta’s
visit, a band of army officers would rise in rebellion, seize the great
fort, and in 1347 found another independent Muslim kingdom, the
Bahmani. And so, as the Maghribi traveler made his way out of
the Sultanate of Delhi, it progressively collapsed behind him.

The embassy probably stayed in Daulatabad only a few days,
then continued northwesterly through Maharashtra, across the
Tapti and Narmada rivers again, and thence along the eastern
lowland shore of the Gulf of Cambay into the region of Gujarat.

The fair city of Cambay stood on the northern shore of the Mahi
River estuary where it flows into the head of the gulf. Walking
among the bazaars and imposing stone houses of the port, Ibn
Battuta found himself for the first time in a decade in the familiar
cultural world of the Arabian Sea. The sultanate had ruled
Cambay since the early part of the century, but the soul of the city
was more kindred to Muscat, Aden, or Mogadishu than to
Daulatabad or Delhi. It was indeed one of the great emporia of the
Indian Ocean. “Cambay is one of the most beautiful cities as
regards the artistic architecture of its houses and the construction
of its mosques,” Ibn Battuta recalls. “The reason is that the
majority of its inhabitants are foreign merchants, who continually
build there beautiful houses and wonderful mosques — an
achievement in which they endeavor to surpass each other.” Many
of these “foreign merchants” were transient visitors, men of South
Arabian and Persian Gulf ports, who migrated in and out of
Cambay with the rhythm of the monsoons. But others were men
with Arab or Persian patronyms whose families had settled in the
town generations, even centuries, earlier, intermarrying with
Gujarati women and assimilating everyday customs of the Hindu
hinterland. Ibn Battuta visited Cambay just at a time when these
dark-skinned, white-shirted Gujarati traders were venturing
abroad in increasing numbers, founding mercantile colonies as far
away as Indonesia and creating a diaspora of commercial
association that would continue on the ascendancy in the Indian
Ocean until the time of the Portuguese.°

The ambassador spent a few days in the town as the guest of the
governor and some of the religious lights, then led his company

Malabar and the Maldives 219

back along the eastern shore of the gulf to the port of Gandhar
(Qandahar) at the mouth of the Narmada. Owing to the
shallowness of the upper gulf, Cambay could not accommodate
sea-going ships, so it was normal practice for them to put in either
at Gandhar or at another port, which lay directly across the gulf.’
Agents of the sultan had apparently made advance arrangements
with the local ruler of Gandhar, a Hindu tributary, to provide the
delegation with four ships for the voyage down the coast to
Malabar. As usual Ibn Battuta has virtually nothing to tell us
about the architecture of these vessels. Certainly they were all
two-masted “dhows” with stitched hulls, the same general type of
ships Ibn Battuta had sailed along the coasts of Africa and Arabia.
Three of them were ordinary cargo ships, but large ones, since
they had to have room for the Great Khan’s presents, including
the 100 horses and 215 slaves and pages. The fourth vessel was a
type of war galley. Ibn Battuta’s ship. one of the three
merchantmen, carried a force of 100 soliders to defend the mission
against the Hindu pirates who habitually lay in wait along the
western coast. Fifty of the warriors were archers. The others were
black spearmen and bowmen, representatives of a long tradition of
African fighting men taking service on the larger trading ships of
the Indian Ocean.*

Embarking from Gandhar, the four ships put in briefly at two
other gulf ports. Then, turning due south, the little fleet made for
the Arabian Sea. If the time was about December, they ran briskly
before the northeast monsoon under clear skies and a placid sea.

When Ibn Battuta visited the East African coast more than a
decade earlier, he had found a series of petty maritime
principalities competing with one another for long-distance trade
between the sea basin and the uplands of the interior. Along the
west coast of India the political pattern was similar. From the
southern frontier of Gujarat to Cape Comorin at the tip of the
subcontinent, he counted twelve trading states strung out along
the narrow coastal lowlands. The Turkish sultans may have
claimed suzerainty over some of these little kingdoms. but the
peaks and ridges of the Western Ghats, which ran the length of
peninsular India 50 to 100 miles inland, effectively prevented
Delhi from exerting direct authority on the coast south of Gujarat.
excepting sporadic intervention in a few of the more northerly
ports.” From Delhi or Daulatabad, imperial cavalry could reach

220 Malabar and the Maldives

the northerly coast, called the Konkan, only by squeezing their
way through rugged woodland passes usually guarded by
belligerent Hindu chieftains. The great ports of Malabar, on the
southerly shore, were more easily accessible from the interior but
much too far from the centers of Turkish power to make sustained
military pressure feasible. No doubt Muhammad Tughlug pined to
conquer the coastal territories, but in fact the commercial needs of
the empire were better served by leaving the sea towns to carry on
their business in peace.

The summer monsoons, blowing up against the Ghats, emptied
heavy rains on the coastal lowlands, producing a lush tropical
economy startlingly different from that of the interior plateaus. In
medieval times the maritime towns exported rice, coconuts,
gemstones, indigo and other dyes, and finished textiles. Among
the spice exports, black pepper was king in the overseas trade. The
forests of the steep western slopes of the Ghats, the only region of
dense woodland anywhere around the rim of the Arabian Sea,
produced the teakwood with which most of the oceanic trading
ships were built. The major ports all had busy shipbuilding in-
dustries, and Indian teak was exported to the Persian Gulf,
Arabia, and northeast Africa to meet the general needs of those
wood-starved regions.

The natural landfall for ships making the long hauls across the
Arabian Sea or the Bay of Bengal was southwest India. The largest
and richest west coast towns were in Malabar, partly because of
their relatively broad agricultural hinterland, their pepper crop,
and their links to the populous interior of South India, but also
because they served as the main transshipment centers for goods
moving between the western and eastern halves of the Indian
Ocean. Trade from the China Seas westward across the Bay of
Bengal was carried on mainly in Chinese junks. These great ships
were structurally capable of sailing safely from one end of the
Indian Ocean to the other, but the normal pattern, at least until
the early fifteenth century, was for them to go only as far west as
Malabar. There, goods in transshipment were carried in lateen-
rigged vessels to all the countries of the Arabian Sea. Thus
Malabar was the hinge on which turned the inter-regional sea-
borne trade of virtually the entire Eastern Hemisphere.

Almost all the transit trade of the west coast (as well as that of
both Ceylon and the southeastern coast of India, called
Coromandel) was in the hands of Muslims. The rulers of nearly all

Malabar and the Maldives 221

the maritime states, however, were Malayalam- or Tamil-speaking
Hindus. The populations of the hinterlands were Hindu as well,
or, in the case of Ceylon, Buddhist. Arab and Persian merchants
had been settling on those shores since Abbasid times, but by the
later medieval period most west coast Muslims were racially In-
dian, notwithstanding some cherished strain linking them to the
prestigious Arabo—Persian center. Moreover, the culture of the
towns, like the ports of East Africa, represented a complex,
long-simmering synthesizing of native and alien elements, that is,
traits and practices responsive to the requirements of the Sacred
Law inter-penetrating with local Hindu customs, styles, dress, and
cuisine. The hindu rajas of the coastal states left their Muslim
subjects to worship as they wished, indeed encouraged it, since the
rulers’ power and wealth depended almost entirely on customs
revenues and the profits of their personal transactions in the
maritime trade. We may suppose that the government of these
cities was nothing less than a working partnership between the
rajas and the leading Muslim merchants.

For three days out of the Gulf of Cambay Ibn Battuta’s four ships
made good speed along the Konkan coast, the dark green wall and
sheared-off summits of the Western Ghats looming off the port
beam. Bypassing Chaul, Sandapur (Goa), and other busy ports
which lay on little bays or the estuaries of rivers flowing from the
mountains, the fleet finally put in at Honavar (Hinawr), a town on
the stretch of coast known as North Kanara.

Derelict in modern times, Honavar in the fourteenth century
was a thriving port with a typical Indo—Muslim coastal culture, its
children, according to Ibn Battuta, dutifully attending a choice of
36 Koranic schools, its Muslim women wearing colorful saris and
golden rings in their nostrils. Jamal al-Din Muhammad, the ruler
of the town, was, exceptionally enough, a Muslim, though under
vassalage to the Hindu king of the Hoysalas state, whose center
was in the southwestern interior.'” Ibn Battuta describes him as
one of “the best and most powerful rulers” on the coast. possessing
a fleet of ships and a force of horsemen and infantry so impressive
that he could command annual tribute from the ports of Malabar
as “protection” against seaborne attack. In the three short days the
mission rested up in Honavar and restocked the ships, Jamal al-
Din féted his distinguished visitor in the correct and predictable
ways and introduced him to the local notables. But more than that,

222 Malabar and the Maldives

a friendship of sorts seems to have been sparked between the two
men. At least it was a relationship Ibn Battuta would be eager to
draw on a few months later when he returned to the town under
drastically different circumstances.

South of Honavar along the Kanara and Malabar coasts, the
towns became progressively larger and more affluent. This was
black pepper country and the land where the commercial
dominions of the dhow and the junk made their crucial con-
nection. Perhaps because the sailing season to China was still a few
months off and the urban scene along the south Kanara and
Malabar shores notably worth investigating, the embassy cast
anchor and enjoyed the local hospitality at eight different ports,
including Mangalore (Manjurur) and Cannanore (Jurfattan).''

Then, about three weeks out of Honavar, the little convoy
arrived off Calicut to a warm official reception. The dignitaries of
the city, both Muslim and Hindu, came out to meet the mission,
Ibn Battuta says, with “drums, trumpets, horns, and flags on their
ships. We entered the harbor amid great ovation and pomp, the
like of which I have not seen in these parts.” The ambassador and
his associates were given houses as guests of the zamorin, or
prince, of Calicut and settled in for three months of leisure, since
no ships would embark for East Asia until March, that is, near the
end of the northeast monsoon season.'* In the meantime the
zamorin made advance arrangements for the delegation to travel
to China on a large ocean-going junk and one smaller vessel (or
possibly more) that would accompany it. The Chinese envoys, who
had been travelling with Ibn Battuta up to this point, were to make
plans to return home on a separate ship.

Ibn Battuta saw 13 junks wintering at Calicut, their corpulent
hulls and multiple soaring masts dwarfing even the largest
lateen-rigged vessels in the harbor. These were the ocean liners of
the medieval age, artifacts of the great technological leap forward
achieved in China between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries.
Not only Ibn Battuta, but other travelers of the time, including
Marco Polo, made clear their preference for sailing on junks over
the creaky, sewn-together ships of the Arabian Sea. The shell of a
junk was built of double-superimposed timbers attached with iron
nails to several transverse bulkheads, dividing the hull into a series
of watertight compartments that prevented the ship from sinking
even if it were pierced below the water line in more than one
place. A large junk might step five masts or more. The lug-type

Malabar and the Maldives 223

fore-and-aft sails were aerodynamically more cfficient and far
easier to maneuver than the lateen type. They were made of
bamboo matting stiffened with battens, or laths, which gave them
their characteristic ribbed appearance. Unlike lateen sails, they
could be reefed and furled with ease by means of a complex
arrangement of sheets. The tautness, variety, and adjustability of
the sails permitted a junk to make headway under almost any wind
condition. Medieval junks were all equipped with stern rudders,
the efficient way of steering a ship that was becoming known in the
Mediterranean world only near the end of the thirteenth century.
Ibn Battuta was so impressed with Chinese ships that he even
rouses himself in the Rihla to offer a word or two about their
nautical design. He was most interested, naturally, in the comforts
they offered traveling notables like himself. The dhows of the
western sea were only partially decked or not decked at all, and if
some vessels had a rudimentary cabin or two, most of the passen-
gers were expected to brave the elements the whole time they were
at sea. Owing to bulkhead construction, which distributed weight
evenly on the hull, ocean-going junks could support as many as
five decks, as well as numerous enclosed cabins for the con-
venience of the more affluent passengers. Some of the rooms even
had private lavatories, a convenience far superior to the little seat
hooked over the side of a dhow. Fire-fighting equipment, steward
service, lifeboats, and common rooms for the passengers added to
the comfort and safety of a voyage across the eastern sea. Ibn
Battuta, man of private pleasures that he was, informs us that

a good cabin has a door which can be bolted by the occupant,
who may take with him his female slaves and women.
Sometimes it so happens that a passenger is in the aforesaid
residential quarters and nobody on board knows of him until he
is met On arriving at a town.

He also claims that the crew of a sizable junk might number
1,000 men, counting both sailors and fighting marines. He may
exaggerate, but within tolerable limits since Odoric of Pordenone,
the Latin monk who traveled through South Asia earlier in the
century, reports that he sailed out of Malabar on a junk with
“seven hundred souls, what with sailors and merchants.”!* Ibn
Battuta says that in his time junks were built exclusively in the
southern Chinese ports of Canton (Kuang-Chou) or Zaitun

224 Malabar and the Maldives

(Ch’uan-chou). Owing to the Yuan policy of encouraging foreign
participation in the sea trade, however, the owners and Captains of
the ships, as well as the big merchants, were more often than not
Muslims of Indian, Arab, or Persian descent.

Astonishing as they were in cargo capacity and technical
efficiency, these “whales” of the sea, as the Chinese called them,
could be simply too big and too rigid for their own safety if they
chanced to blow into shallows or reef-infested waters. There was
some truth in Ibn Battuta’s remark that “if a ship nailed together
with iron nails collides with rocks, it would surely be wrecked; but
a ship whose beams are sewn together with ropes is made wet and
is not shattered.”

And so he discovered as his grand embassy to China was
suddenly aborted in tragedy off Calicut harbor. What exactly
happened the Rihla does not make entirely clear. As the day for
the mission to embark arrived, probably sometime in Feburary
1342,'4 a minor difficulty arose over accommodations. Chinese
merchants, it seems, had reserved in advance all the best cabins on
the large junk the embassy was to board, and the Sultan of India’s
ambassador was going to have to settle for a more modest room,
one with no lavatory. Ibn Battuta had his luggage and entourage
put aboard but then decided the following morning that the cabin
was simply unsuitable and far too small. The ship’s agent, a Syrian
gentleman, suggested that the best solution might be for the envoy
and his personal retinue to travel on the kakam. This was a
somewhat smaller junk-type vessel that would accompany the
larger ship, but it had good cabins available.'? Ibn Battuta thought
this compromise was all right and so ordered his servants, con-
cubines, personal friends, and belongings to be transferred. How-
ever, Zahir al-Din and Sumbul, the other officers of the mission,
remained on the larger vessel along with the slaves, horses, and
presents destined for Peking. Meanwhile Ibn Battuta spent the day
in Calicut attending Friday prayer.

Then that evening a storm came up. Calicut harbor was not a
deep, sheltered bay but a shallow roadstead. Recognizing the
danger of riding at anchor close to shore, the captains of the junk,
the kakam, and a third large vessel quickly put out to sea.
Throughout the night Ibn Battuta waited helplessly on the beach
and the next morning watched in horror as the two larger ships
went aground in the shallows, broke up, and sank. Some of the
passengers and crew on one of the junks were saved, but no one

Malabar and the Maldives 225

survived on the vessel he himself was to have boarded the previous
day. On Sunday morning the bodies of Zahir al-Din and Sumbul
washed ashore, the one with his skull broken in, the other with an
iron nail piercing his temples. The slaves, pages, and horses were
all drowned, and the precious wares either sank or washed up on
the beach, where the zamorin’s gendarmes struggled to prevent
the townsfolk from making off with the loot. Meanwhile, the
captain of the kakam steered his ship safely out to sea and, not
wanting to risk entering the harbor again, sailed southward down
the coast. On board were Ibn Battuta’s baggage, servants, and
concubines, one of these women carrying her master’s child.

Alone on the Calicut shore, the lofty ambassador found himself
suddenly reduced to the status of a penniless fagih. He had
nothing to his name, save his prayer rug, the clothes on his back,
and ten dinars an old yogi had given him. But for all that, he was
fortunate to be alive. And it seems he still had the company of al-
Tuzari and perhaps one or two other companions. Even more
hopeful, there was still a chance of catching up with the kakam.
The vessel, he was told, was almost certain to put in at the port of
Quilon (Kawlam) 180 miles down the coast before sailing away
from India altogether. So, hiring a Muslim porter to carry his
carpet for him, he made his way to Quilon, traveling this time by
riverine craft that plied the lagoons and interconnecting canals
paralleling the southern Malabar shore.

After ten miserable days in the company of the porter, who
turned out to be a quarrelsome drunkard, he arrived in the city,
not to the applause of the local raja’s court, but to a modest
reception in a Sufi hospice, the usual refuge of an anonymous
wanderer. Much to his surprise his old associates, the Chinese
envoys, turned up while he was there. They had left Calicut
somewhat before the sea tragedy had occurred, but they had also
barely escaped with their lives when their own ship ran aground.
The Chinese merchants resident in Quilon helped them out with
clothes and assistance and later sent them home on another junk.
The forlorn ex-ambassador, however, waited in vain for his kakam
to show up and after several hopless days in the Sufi lodge decided
to move on.

But where indeed was he to go? “I wanted to return from
Quilon to the sultan,” he remembers, “in order to tell him what
had happened to the gifts. But I feared that he would condemn
me, saying ‘Why did you separate yourself from the presents?"”'°

226 Malabar and the Maldives

If the mission’s two other officials, together with the Slaves,
horses, and magnificent wares all went to the bottom of the sea.
why was the Maghribi so shiftless in his duty that he failed to g0
down with them? Knowing well that his wish to travel in private
comfort with his slave girls was hardly a convincing explanation for
not boarding the junk, and perhaps imagining his head affixed to a
pole or his skin stuffed with straw hanging from the wall of
Jahanpanah palace, he concluded easily enough that, no, he would
not return to Delhi. He did, however, need a patron to restore him
to a position of dignity and perhaps give him a job while he waited
for news of the kakam or figured out some new plan. The closest
and most likely seigneur was Jamal al-Din Muhammad, the pious
Sultan of Honavar and the only Muslim ruler on the southwestern
coast of India.

Returning to Calicut, he found there a fleet of ships belonging to
Muhammad Tughlug himself. They were en route to the Persian
Gulf to recruit more Arab notables for service in the sultanate. Ibn
Battuta struck up an acquaintance with the chief of the expedition,
a former chamberlain in the Delhi government, who advised him
to stay away from the capital but invited him to accompany the
fleet as far up the coast as Honavar. Ibn Battuta gladly accepted
the offer and sailed northward out of Calicut sometime around 1
April 1342.1”

If he expected Jamal al-Din of Honavar to elevate him at once
to a high office on the strength of the imperial rank he had held the
first time he visited the town, he was to be a bit disappointed.

He quartered me in a house where I had no servant and direc-
ted me to say prayers with him. So I sat mostly in his mosque
and used to read the Koran from beginning to end every day.
Later on, I recited the whole Koran twice daily . . . I did this
without a break for three months, of which I spent forty con-
secutive days in devotional seclusion.

While the Moroccan fagih quietly passed a steaming summer on
the Kanara coast in a bout of spiritual renewal, Sultan Jamal al-
Din busied himself plotting the violent overthrow of his neighbor,
the raja of Sandapur. Wars between the little maritime states of
the west coast do not appear to have occurred very often in
medieval times. Conflict was terrible for trade, and in any case
none of the petty princes had armies or fleets large enough to

Malabar and the Maldives 227

sustain control over long stretches of the coast for indefinite
periods of time. Yet a fortuitous opportunity to seize a
neighboring port and milk its customs revenues might be too
tempting to pass up. As the Rihla explains it, an internal struggle
had broken out within the ruling family of Sandapur, a fine port
located on an island in the estuary of a river about 90 miles north
of Honavar. (In 1510 Sandapur would become Goa, capital of
Portugal’s seaborne empire in Asia.'*) A son of the raja of
Sandapur, scheming to wrest the throne from his father, wrote a
letter to Jamal al-Din, promising to embrace Islam if the sultan
would intervene on his side in the quarrel. Once victory was
achieved, the new raja would marry the sultan’s sister, sealing an
alliance between the two towns. Forthwith, Jamal al-Din outfitted
a war fleet of 52 ships, two of them built with open sterns to enable
his cavalry to make a rapid amphibious assault on Sandapur beach.

Weary of inactivity and perhaps hoping to ingratiate himself
with his patron by some more vigorous show of homage, Ibn
Battuta had the idea of offering his services to the expedition. He
claims that Jamal al-Din was so pleased with his proposal that he
put him in charge of the campaign, though we may presume the
office was more or less honorific. Preparations complete, the fleet
set sail from Honavar on 12 October 1342.'°

On Monday evening we reached Sandapur and entered its creek
and found the inhabitants ready for the fight. They had already
set up catapults. So we spent the night near the town and when
morning came drums were beaten, trumpets sounded and horns
were blown, and the ships went forward. The inhabitants shot
at them with the catapults, and I saw a stone hit some people
standing near the sultan. The crews of the ships sprang into the
water, shield and sword in hand . . . I myself leapt with all the
rest into the water . . . We rushed forward sword in hand. The
greater part of the heathens took refuge in the castle of their
ruler. We set fire to it, whereupon they came out and we took
them prisoner. The sultan pardoned them and returned them
their wives and children . .. And he gave me a young female
prisoner named Lemki whom I called Mubaraka. Her husband
wished to ransom her but I refused.

Having acquitted himself well in this day-long holy war and even
acquired part of the living spoils, Ibn Battuta remained at

228 Malabar and the Maldives

Sandapur for about three months in the company of Jamal al-Din.
who seems to have been in no hurry to turn the town over to his
Hindu ally, the raja’s son. Then about the middle of January
1343”? Ibn Battuta decided to take leave of his patron and travel
back down the coast in search of information on the fate of the
kakam. On this trip he visited once again most of the ports he had
seen the previous year, including Calicut, and spent “a long time,”
perhaps a few months, in Shaliyat (Shalia), a famous Malabar
weaving town.

Then, returning to Calicut, he came upon two of his own
servants who had been aboard the kakam and had somehow made
their way back to Malabar. The news was bad. The ship had sailed
to the Bay of Bengal, apparently without stopping at Quilon, and
after reaching Indonesia had been seized by an infidel ruler of
Sumatra. The concubine who was carrying Ibn Battuta’s child had
died, and the other slave girls, as well as his possessions, were in
the hands of this king. The mystery of the kakam finally settled in
more tragedy, he returned immediately to Sandapur, arriving
there in June 1343.7!

However, any expectation he had of taking up an official career
in the service of Jamal al-Din soon ended in yet another disaster.
Sometime in August the deposed raja of Sandapur, who had
escaped at the time of the invasion, suddenly reappeared with a
Hindu force, rallied the peasants of the hinterland, and laid siege
to the town. Most of Jamal al-Din’s troops, apparently unaware of
an impending attack, were scattered in the surrounding villages
and could not get back into the city to defend it. Having attached
himself to Jamal al-Din in victory, Ibn Battuta saw no reason to
stick by him in defeat, a point of view in the best tradition of
Muslim public men, for whom loyalty to one sultan or another was
of no great importance. In the thick of the assault, he somehow
managed to get past the siege line and headed down the coast
again, perhaps this time by land. In a few weeks he reached
Calicut, entering that city now for the fifth time.”*

Sometime during the months following the Calicut tragedy, he
decided to try to visit China on his own. His prospects for a career
on the west coast of India were no longer encouraging, he could
not return to Delhi, and he had no immediate urge to make
another pilgrimage to Mecca. Moreover, he knew that he could
find hospitality among the Muslim maritime communities all along
the sea routes to the South China coast. He even had a potential

Malabar and the Maldives 229

entrée to the Yuan government through the 15 Chinese diplomats,
who were presumably then on their way home. His plan would be
to make a brief tour of the Maldive Islands (“of which I had heard
a lot”), continue to Ceylon to see the famous religious shrine of
Adam’s Peak, then cross over to the southeastern coast of India to
visit the Sultanate of Ma’bar. whose ruler was married to a sister of
Hurnasab, the ex-wife Ibn Battuta had left back in Delhi. From
there he would go on to Bengal, Malaysia, and China.

After staying in Calicut for an unspecified time, perhaps some
months, he met up with a sea captain from Honavar named
Ibrahim and took passage on his ship bound for Ceylon and
Ma’bar by way of the Maldives.”* The idea of visiting this outlying
tropical archipelago on his way to the Bay of Bengal was not such
an erratic scheme as it might appear, even though the islands lay
about 400 miles west and a bit south of Ceylon. Sea-going ships
trading eastbound from the Arabian Sea could not sail through the
Palk Strait that divided the subcontinent from Ceylon owing to the
extremely shallow reef called Adam's Bridge that traversed the
channel. Rather, they had to go around the southern tip of
Ceylon. For traffic moving both east and west, the Maldive atolls
were close enough to this route to be drawn into the international
commerce between the western and the eastern seas. Shuttle trade
between Malabar and the Maldives seems to have been very
regular in medieval times. Moreover, the islands exported two
commodities that were of major importance in the trans-
hemispheric economy. One was coir, or coconut fiber rope, used
to stitch together the hulls of the western ocean dhows. The other
was the shells of the little marine gastropod called the cowrie,
which were used as currency as far east as Malaysia and as far west
as the African Sudan.

The people of the Maldives (Dhibat al-Mahal) were a brown-
skinned fishing and sea-trading folk. They spoke Divehi, a
language closely related to Sinhalese. evidence of ancient sea-
borne migrations from Ceylon. About the middle of the twelfth
century they had been converted from Buddhism to Islam. In the
Rihla Ibn Battuta recounts the legend, told even today by old men
of the islands, of Abu I’Barakat, a pious Berber from the Maghrib
who rid the land of a terrible demon (jinni) and brought the people
to the faith of the Prophet.** Each month the fiend had arisen
from the sea and demanded a young virgin to ravish and kill.
When Abu I’Barakat arrived in the islands and heard about the

230 Malabar and the Maldives

situation, he offered to go to the idol house where the Sacrifice
took place and substitute himself for the girl. He seated himself in
the temple and recited the Koran through the night. As he ex-
pected, the demon refused to approach him out of fear of the
Sacred Word. When Abu I’Barakat repeated this feat a second
time a month later, the king of the islands razed the infidel shrines
and ordered that the new faith be propagated among his subjects.
Behind the veil of this heroic myth may be discerned the coming
and going of Muslim merchants in the Maldives from as early as
Abbasid times and the incorporation of the islands into the com-
mercial network of the western ocean. Since North African and
Andalusian Muslims seem to have been more active in the India
trade in the eleventh and twelfth centuries than they were later on,
there was nothing implausible about a Berber turning up to intro-
duce the faith.?°

Approaching the Maldives from Malabar, Ibn Battuta may have
blinked in wonder at the sight of tall coconut palms apparently
growing directly out of the sea. He was to discover that the islands
rise barely a few feet above the surface of the ocean and that not a
single hill is to be found on any of them. Stretching 475 miles north
to south like a string of white gems, the Maldives are divided into
about twenty ring-shaped coral atolls. Each of these clusters of
islands and tiny islets is grouped more or less around a central
lagoon. With the help of a Maldivian pilot who knew his way
through the dangerous reefs that surrounded the islands, Captain
Ibrahim put ashore at Kinalos Island in the northerly atoll of
Malosmadulu.”° As usual, the visiting fagih immediately found
lodging with one of the literate men of the place.

For all the tropical charm of the Maldives and their people, Ibn
Battuta had no other intention than to play the tourist for a few
weeks and get on with his planned itinerary. As soon as he arrived,
however, he got fair warning that a different fate lay ahead. The
islands were politically united, and had been since pre-Islamic
times, under a hereditary king who ruled in a reasonably benign
spirit in collaboration with his extended royal family and a small
class of titled noblemen. The Maldives had no real towns, but the
center of government was on the mile-long island of Male located
about midway in the chain of atolls. At the time Ibn Battuta
arrived, the monarch happened to be a woman, Rehendi Kabadi
Kilege, called Khadija, the nineteenth in the line of Muslim rulers.
Female succession to the throne was unusual in Maldivian history,

Malabar and the Maldives 231

and in fact Sultana Khadija’s administration was thoroughly
dominated by her husband, the Grand Vizier Jamal al-Din (not
the same man of course as the Sultan of Honavar). Aside from
island governors and other secular offictals, the queen appointed
Muslim judges and mosque dignitaries and expected them to up-
hold the standards of the shari’a.

However, the man who held the position of chief gadi at that
time was not given much credit for ability. No sooner had Ibn
Battuta set foot on Kinalos and revealed himself to be a scholar of
refinement and worldly experience than one of the educated men
there told him he had better not go to Male if he did not want the
grand vizier to appoint him as judge and oblige him to stay on
indefinitely. Ibn Battuta was no doubt better qualified for this job
than he had been for his magistracy in Delhi. Not only was Arabic,
rather than Persian, the language of jurisprudence and literate
prestige in the islands, but the Maliki madhhab, Ibn Battuta’s own
legal school, was practiced. The existence of a Maliki community
in the Indian Ocean is odd, but if the men who introduced Islam to
the Maldives were North Africans, they would have brought their
Maliki learning with them. (In the sixteenth century the islanders
would shift to the Shaf’i madhhab, which made more sense in the
context of sustained maritime connections with Malabar and the
other Muslim lands around the Arabian Sea.”’)

Anchoring his ship off Kinalos Island probably some time in
December 1343,** Captain Ibrahim hired a small lateen-rigged
boat of the sort the Maldivians used in inter-island trade and set
off for Male with Ibn Battuta and several unnamed companions
aboard. As soon as they arrived, they went the short walk to the
wooden, thatched-roof palace to be introduced to Queen Khadija
and Grand Vizier Jamal al-Din. Captain Ibrahim, who had been in
the islands before, guided the other visitors in the peculiarities of
Maldivian ceremonial:

When we arrived in the council-hall — that is, the dar — we sat
down in the lobbies near the third entrance .. . Then came
Captain Ibrahim. He brought ten garments, bowed in the direc-
tion of the queen and threw one of the garments down. Then he
bowed to the grand vizier and likewise threw another garment
down; subsequently he threw the rest . . . Then they brought us
betel and rose-water, which is a mark of honor with them. The
grand vizier lodged us in a house and sent us a repast consisting

232 Malabar and the Maldives

of a large bowl of rice surrounded by dishes of salted meat
fowl, quail, and fish.

Ibn Battuta had learned by experience that Muslim rulers whose
kingdoms lay in the outer periphery of the Dar al-Islam were
always avid to attract the services of ’ulama with previous links to
the great cities and colleges of the central lands. He had also
learned that once a scholar developed a public reputation for pious
learning, his royal benefactor might use more than simple
persuasion to prevent him from moving somewhere else. In order
to forestall any complications over his own timely departure, Ibn
Battuta decided to say nothing to the Maldivians about his legal
background and enlisted Captain Ibrahim to honor the secret. The
sultans of Delhi had never had the slightest authority, symbolic or
otherwise, in the Maldives, but the small-time nobility of the
islands nevertheless looked upon the empire with fear and awe.
Any former high official of the sultanate who turned up in the
atolls would have to carry a heavy load of distinction and might
even stir up a certain apprehension.

For about the first ten days of his visit Ibn Battuta managed to
preserve his secret, as he and his companions explored the coconut
groves of the island and enjoyed the hospitality of the government.
But then a ship arrived from Ceylon carrying a group of Arab and
Persian Sufis. Some of them happened to know Ibn Battuta from
his Delhi years and immediately let the cat out of the bag. The
Moroccan visitor, the queen and her court were told, had been an
important qadi in the service of the mighty Muhammad Tughluq.
The grand vizier was delighted at the news. Here was a celebrity
who should be specially honored and must not be allowed to
escape the islands too easily or too soon!

To his dismay, but also, the tone of the Rihla makes clear, to his
vain satisfaction, Ibn Battuta was suddenly the center of attention.
At first Jamal al-Din tried to flatter him into staying on Male with
gifts and preferments. He invited him to the nightly feasts of
Ramadan in the queen’s palace. He gave him a piece of land and
offered to build him a house on it. He sent him slave girls, pearls,
and golden jewelry. Ibn Battuta accepted all this fuss with grim
courtesy, but he was in no mood to revise his travel plans, even
less so when he fell seriously ill for some weeks, possibly with the
malaria that was endemic in the islands.’” As soon as he recovered
sufficiently to move about, he tried to hire passage on an outbound

Malabar and the Maldives 233

ship, but Jamal al-Din made it impossible for him by obstructing
the financial arrangements. Finally he had to conclude that the
grand vizier was going to keep him on Male whether he liked it or
not. Under such circumstances as these, it was better to negotiate
his fate voluntarily than to be coerced into service. Presenting
himself before Jamal al-Din, he gave his word that he would
remain in the islands indefinitely, making the condition, however,
that he would not go about Male on foot and that the Maldivian
custom of allowing only the vizier to appear publicly on horseback
(the queen rode in a litter) would in his case have to be set aside.

The brashness of this demand was the first sign that Ibn
Battuta’s sojourn in the Maldives was to be unlike any of his other
traveling adventures. His years in India reveal plainly that he had
political ambition. But there he had been a relatively small fish in a
large, shark-infested pond. Among the ingenuous Maldivians,
however, his prestigious connections to the sultanate gave him a
status of eminence out of all proportion to the power he had
actually exercised in Delhi. Once he agreed to stay in the islands,
he seems to have determined to capitalize on his reputation and
throw himself into politics. To be sure, the upper-class factional
quarrels of this remote equatorial paradise had something of a
comic opera quality about them in contrast to the majestic affairs
of the sultanate or the Mongol kingdoms. Nevertheless, Ibn
Battuta became a very big man in the Maldives for a few fleeting
months, and he is at pains to have the reader of the Rih/a under-
stand that this was the case. Even though the account of his
involvement is disjointed, incomplete, and ambiguous, he reveals
more about his personal social and political relations there than he
does in connection with any of his other experiences, including his
years in Delhi. There is no reason to doubt that he became deeply
enmeshed in the rivalries of the Maldivian nobility, even to the
point where, if things had gone his way, he might have ended his
traveling career there in a position of lasting power.

In February 1344, probably less than two months after his
arrival, he married a woman of noble status.*” She was the widow
of Sultan Jalal al-Din "Umar, who was the father (by another
marriage) and a predecessor of Queen Khadija. This noblewoman
also had a daughter who was married to a son of the grand vizier.
Marriage among the governing families of the Maldives was as
much a political tool as it was in any other kingdom in that age. Ibn
Battuta, like other scholars who circulated among the cities and

234 Malabar and the Maldives

princely courts of Islam, sought marriage as a way of gaining admission
to local elite circles and securing a base of social and political support.
By wedding this woman (whose name is never mentioned in the Rihla,
though he says he found her society “delightful”), he allied himself to
both the royal family and the household of the grand vizier.

Jamal al-Din had in fact urged the marriage on him and as soonasit
was consummated invited his new cousin to fill the office of chief judge
of the realm. Ibn Battuta pleads rather coyly in the Rihla that “Jamal
al-Din compelled me against my will to accept the gadi’s post,” but he
hardly discouraged his own candidacy when he criticized the in-
cumbent judge for being “absolutely no good at anything.” Ibn
Battuta makes it plain that once he got the job he used the office to
wield considerably more power over other men than he ever had in his
opulent sinecure in Delhi:

All sentences proceed from the qgadi, who is the most influential
man with them, and his orders are carried out like those of the
sultan or even more punctiliously. He sits on a carpet in the
council-hall and has three islands, the income which he
appropriates for his personal use according to an old custom.

In the absence of any independent observation, we cannot know
how much he may have inflated his power in the islands for the benefit
of admiring readers of the Rihla. He claims, in any case, to have gone
about his judicial practice in the same spirit of orthodox zeal that had
prompted him to expose the errant bath operators in that Nile town of
Upper Egypt 18 years earlier. “When I became gadi,” he reports
triumphantly, “I strove with all my might to establish the rule of law,”
implying that the Maldivian bumpkins had much to learn about
rigorous canonical standards and that he was just the man to rid the
kingdom of “bad customs.” Among his reforms, he ordered that any
man who failed to attend Friday prayer was to be “whipped and
publicly disgraced.” He strove to abolish the local custom that re-
quired a divorced woman to stay in the house of her former husband
until she married again; he had at least 25 men found guilty of this
practice “whipped and paraded round the bazaars.” At least once he
sentenced a thief to have his right hand severed, a standard shari'a
judgment that nonetheless caused several Maldivians present in the
council hall to faint dead away. In one matter, however, the populace
refused to conform to his idea of scriptural propriety. Most of the
women, he relates,

Malabar and the Maldives 235

wear only a waist-wrapper which covers them from their waist
to the lowest part, but the remainder of their body remains
uncovered. Thus they walk about in the bazaars and elsewhere.
When I was appointed qadi there, I strove to put an end to this
practice and commanded the women to wear clothes; but |
could not get it done. I would not let a woman enter my court to
make a plaint unless her body were covered; beyond this,
however, I was unable to do anything.

When the zealous magistrate was not hearing cases in the
council chamber or ferreting out derelictions of Koranic duty, he
was busy building up his network of political alliances with the
chief families and making a high place for himself in the pecking
order of power. Within a short time of his first marriage, he wed
three more women, four being the most wives a man could have
according to Islamic law. His second wife was the daughter of an
important minister and great granddaughter of a previous sultan.
His third was a widow of Queen Khadija's brother and immediate
predecessor. His fourth was a step-daughter of “Abdallah ibn
Muhammad al-Hazrami, a nobleman who had just been restored
to a ministerial position after having spent a period of time in exile
on one of the outer islands for some unnamed transgression
against the state. “After I had become connected by marriage with
the above-mentioned people.” Ibn Battuta tells us bluntly, “the
vizier and the islanders feared me, for they felt themselves to be
weak.”

Despite the unity of Maldivian government, the political
claustrophobia of tiny Male coupled with the fragmented
geography of the kingdom encouraged both factional intrigues and
dissidence.*' The Rihla makes it apparent that the grand vizier.
the de facto ruler, did not have the whip hand over his nobility and
could not fully control the actions of political cliques. Ibn Battuta’s
recounting of the events that led to his precipitous departure from
the islands is subjective and episodic and leaves the reader of the
narrative straining to discern the deeper currents of the political
drama. He leaves no doubt. however, that he had not been a
figure in the royal court for very long before he began to make
enemies. Vizier “Abdallah, the minister who had returned from
temporary exile, seems to have regarded him as an arriviste and a
threat to his own position of power. The two men got on badly
from the start, clashing over symbolic matters of precedence and

236 Malabar and the Maldives

protocol that concealed a far more serious rivalry for influence in the
kingdom. As Ibn Battuta explains it, and we will never know anvone
else’s side of the story, “Abdallah and certain of his kinsmen and allies
plotted to turn the grand vizier against his new gadi, and they finally
succeeded. A nasty row broke out between Ibn Battuta and Jamal al-
Din over a legal judgment involving a sordid affair between a slave and
a royal concubine. The grand vizier accused Ibn Battuta of insub-
ordination and called him before the ministers and military officers
assembled in the palace.

Usually I showed him the respect due to a ruler, but this time I did
not. I said simply “salamu ‘alaikum.” Then I said to the bystanders,
“You are my witnesses that I herewith renounce my post as gadi as |
am not in a position to fulfill its duties.” The grand vizier then said
something addressing me, and I rose up moving to a seat opposite
him, and I retorted in sharp tones . . . Thereupon the grand vizier
entered his house saying, “They say I am a ruler. But look! |
summoned this man with a view to making him feel my wrath; far
from this, he wreaks his own ire on me.”

On the heels of this stormy confrontation, Ibn Battuta paid off his
debts, packed up his luggage, divorced one of his wives (probably
"Abdallah’s step-daughter), and hired a boat to take him to Captain
Ibrahim’s ship, which was at that moment in the southern region of the
atolls. Yet far from washing his hands of the Maldive government and
sailing off in an offended huff, he reveals, tantalizingly and obscurely.
that he was playing for bigger stakes than merely the independence of
his authority as gadi. Describing his departure from Male, he writes in
the Rihla, as if adding a forgotten detail,

I made a compact with the vizier ‘Umar, the army commander. and
with the vizier Hasan, the admiral, that I should go to Ma’bar, the
king of which was the husband of my wife's [that is, Hurnasab’s]
sister and return thence with troops so as to bring the Maldive
islands under his sway, and that I should then exercise the power in
his name.” Also I arranged that the hoisting of the white flags on
the ships should be the signal and that as soon as they saw them they
should revolt on the shore.

Then he adds rather disingenuously, “Never had such an idea
occurred to me until the said estrangement had broken out between

Malabar and the Maldives 237

the vizier and myself.” He also hints that Jamal al-Din had at least a
suspicion of this astonishing plot, but the vizier’s own political position
had apparently weakened so much that he could not risk arresting his
gadi, Whatever Jamal al-Din’s fears may have been, the threat of an
invasion was not entirely far-fetched, for the Chola empire of South
India had conquered the islands in early medieval times.*?

As it turned out, Ibn Battuta left Male without further incident and
sailed in several days’ time to Fua Mulak (Muluk) island, which lay
near the southern end of the archipelago just across the equator.”
Here Captain Ibrahim’s ship awaited him. Ibn Battuta had sailed out
of Male with three wives in his company, but he divorced them all in a
short time. One of these women, the wife of his first Maldive marriage,
fell seriously ill on the way to Fua Mulak, so he sent her back to Male.
Another he restored to her father, who lived on Fua Mulak. He offers
no explanation for his divorcing the third woman, though she was
pregnant. He stayed on Fua Mulak for more than two months, and
there he married, and presumably divorced, two more women. Quite
apart from his political motives in taking a total of six wives during his
sojourn in the islands, such transitory alliances reflected the custom of
the country:

It is easy to marry in these islands because of the smallness of the
downs and the pleasures of society which the women offer . .
When the ships put in, the crew marry; when they intend to leave
they divorce theit wives. This is a kind of temporary marriage. The
women of these islands never leave their country.*°

Ibn Battuta made a brief trip back to Male in the company of
Ibrahim in order to help the captain iron out a dispute he had with the
inhabitants of Fua Mulak. He did not, however, leave the ship while it
was anchored in Male harbor. Then, after touching briefly at Fua
Mulak once again, they set sail northeastward for the coast of Ceylon.
The time was late August 1344.°°

Notes

1. The Book of Duarte Barbosa, trans, and ed. Mansel Longworth Dames, 2 vols.
(London, 1918-21), vol. 2, p. 74.

2. The Rihia is the sole record of this event. No evidence of the embassy has come to
light in Chinese sources so far as I know, though Peter Jackson notes that a Yuan
mission is known to have visited Egypt in 1342-43. “The Mongols and India
(1221-1351), Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1977, p. 222. The envoys probably

238 Malabar and the Maldives

arrived several months before IB left Delhi. On the dating of his departure see note
>:

3. Henry Yule identifies this town as Sambhal east of Delhi. Cathay and the
Way Thither, 4 vols. (London, 1913-16), vol. 4, p. 18. Also MH, p. 150.

4. IB states that he left Delhi on 17 Safar 743 A.H., that is, 22 July 1342
Evidence suggests that IB did not remember the year correctly or that an error was
made in copying the Rihla. A departure date of 17 Safar 742 (2 August 1341) makes
more sense within the context of subsequent statements in the Rihla about
chronology and itinerary. The fundamental problem with IB’s chronology for the
travels in India, the Maldive Islands, and Ceylon is that he claims to have left the
Maldives (following the first and longer of two visits) in the middle part of Rabi’ II
745 (late August 1344), that is, a little more than two years after leaving Delhi. His
own statements about traveling times and lengths of sojourns in particular places,
however, indicate that about three years elapsed between his leaving Delhi and his
first departure from the Maldives. For the period of travels between these two
events, the Rih/a is not very helpful, since IB offers not one absolute year date. The
Maldive departure date of 745, however, is probably accurate. In the space of a few
months following that date, he arrived in the Sultanate of Ma’bar in the far
southeastern corner of the subcontinent. There he witnessed and was involved in
events surrounding the death of Sultan Ghiyath al-Din and the accession of Nasir
al-Din. Numismatic evidence shows that this regnal change took place in 745 A.H.
(The last coin of Ghiyath al-Din is dated 744; the first coin of Nasir al-Din is dated
745.) S.A.Q. Husaini, “Sultanate of Ma’bar” in H. K. Sherwani and P.M. Joshi
(eds.), History of Medieval Deccan, 2 vols. (Hyderabad, 1973-74), vol. 1, pp. 65,
74. If IB’s Maldive departure date is accurate, at least for the year, then we may
hypothesize that the Delhi date should be pushed back a year to make room for
three years of travel.

5. As it is set forth in the Rihla, IB’s itinerary from Delhi to Daulatabad is
erratic and illogical. Part of the explanation is probably that some of the stages have
been pfaced in incorrect order. For example, he states that he visited Dhar before
Ujjain, when it was almost certainly the reverse. Furthermore, he may have visited
some of the places mentioned during earlier excursions out of Delhi which he does
not report and whose descriptive information is woven into the account of the trip
to Daulatabad. He indicates, for example, that he had visited Gwalior at some
earlier time, though nothing is said about the circumstances of such a trip (D&S,
vol. 4, p. 33). IB offers almost no help in deducing the chronology of his journey
through the interior of India. Mahdi Husain calculates that he arrived in
Daulatabad on 3 November. A general estimate of late autumn seems reasonable,
but this author’s precise town-to-town chronology for the entire range of IB’s
travels in India, the Maldives, and Ceylon is delusive, for it is based almost entirely
on informed guessing and inferential evidence such as “normal” traveling times
from one place to another. MH, pp. Ixiv—lxvi.

6. Gujaratis were well established in the East Indies in the fifteenth century and
were probably arriving there in the fourteenth. M. A. P. Meilink-Roelofsz, “Trade
and Islam in the Malay-Indonesian Archipelago Prior to the Arrival of the
Europeans” in D.S. Richards (ed.), Islam and the Trade of Asia (Oxford, 1970),
pp. 144-45.

7. Duarte Barbosa, vol. 1, pp. 134, 136, 138.

8. Simon Digby, “The Maritime Trade of India” in Tapan Raychaudhuri and
Irfan Habib (eds.), The Cambridge Economic History of India, 2 vols. (Cambridge,
England, 1982), vol. 1, p. 152.

9. P.M. Joshi, “Historical Geography of Medieval Deccan” in Sherwani and
Joshi, Medieval Deccan, vol. 1, pp. 18, 20.

10. IB states that the suzerain of Jamal al-Din was a ruler named Haryab, but
historians have disagreed as to whether this individual is Ballala III of the Hoysalas

Malabar and the Maldives 239

or Harihara I of the Kingdom of Vijayanagar. See R.N. Saletore, “Haryab of Ibn
Battuta and Harihara Nrpala,” Quarterly Journal of the Mythic Society 31 (1940-41):
384-406; also MH, p. 180n.

11. The location and identity of these ports, some of which no longer exist, are
investigated in Duarte Barbosa, vol. 1, pp. 185-236, vol. 3, pp. 1-92; Yule, Cathay, vol.
4, pp. 72-79; and MH, pp. 178-88.

12. According to the fifteenth-century navigator Ibn Majid, the best time for sailing
from the west coast of India to the Bay of Bengal was around 11 April, or from mid
March through April. G. R. Tibbetts, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the
Coming of the Portuguese (London, 1971), p. 377.

13. Yule, Cathay, vol. 2, p. 131.

14. Junks normally left the Malabar coast for China after mid March (see note 12).
However, it seems likely that IB’s vessels were planning to stop over at Quilon, a major
port further down the coast, before departing for the Bay of Bengal. Moreover, the
subsequent chronological clues IB gives suggest that his departure from Calicut was not
scheduled for any later than about | March (see note 19).

15. IB does not describe this vessel. Joseph Needham suggests the name may be
related to cocca, coque, or cog, which was a medieval ship of the Mediterranean and
North Atlantic. Science and Civilization in China, vol. 4, part 3, Civil Engineering and
Nautics (Cambridge, 1971), p. 469n.

16. My translation. D&S, vol. 4, pp. 103-4.

17. IB says that his second departure from Calicut took place “at the end of the
season for traveling on the sea.” meaning the weeks before the southwest monsoon
came up in full force. Although the Malabar ports did not close down altogether until
June, [B almost certainly left Calicut no later than about 1 Apmil, since vessels bound for
Arabia or the Persian Gulf had to reach their destinations before the monsoon reached
full strength in those latitudes. Tibbetts, Arab Navigation, p. 375. Therefore. the sinking
of IB’s junk off Calicut must have taken place no later than about 1 March to make room
for his tip to Quilon and back, which probably consumed at least 25 days. (He says it
took him ten days to travel from Calicut to Quilon.)

18. Yule (Cathay, vol. 4, pp. 64-66) identifies Sandapur with Goa, although the
evidence is not conclusive. Duarte Barbosa, vol. 1, pp. 170-72. IB presents the only
account of Jamal al-Din’s conquest of the city and its subsequent recovery by the raja.

19. IB states that the ships left Honavar on Saturday and attacked Sandapur on the
following Monday, or 13 Jumada I 743 A.H. (14 October 1342).

20. IB declares that he stayed in Sandapur from 13 Jumada J until the middle part of
Sha’ban, that is, about three months. 15 Sha’ban 743 corresponds to 13 January 1343. In
connection with his first visit to Honavar, IB mentions that at some subsequent time he
stayed with Jamal al-Din for eleven months (D&S, vol. 4, p. 70), but a sojourn of this
length fits badly with the other meager chronological information IB provides con-
cerning his India travels.

21. He says he arrived there in late Muharram, which is the first month of the Muslim
year; 28 Muharram, that is, one of the last days of the month, calculates as 22 June 1343.

22. IB’s date for his flight from Sandapur when it was under seige is 2 Rabi’ IT. That
date in 744 A.H. corresponds to 24 August 1343. In his initial description of the west
coast in the Rihla, he implies that at some point he traveled along the road that
paralleled the Kanara and Malabar coasts. This may have been the time, since escape
from Sandapur by sea would likely have been more difficult than by land.

23. IB says that he left Sandapur on 2 Rabi’ II, and he implies that he arrived in the
Maldives shortly before the following Ramadan. The intervening time was four to five
months, presumably divided between his journey from Sandapur to Calicut, his stay in
the latter place, and his ten-day sea voyage (as he recalls it) to the Maldives.

24. Clarence Maloney collected a version of the legend, very similar to IB’s story, in
the mid-1970s. People of the Maldives (Madras, 1980), pp. 98-99.

25. S.D. Goitein, “From Aden to India: Specimens of the Correspondence of India

240 Malabar and the Maldives

Traders of the Twelfth Century,” Journal of the Economic and Social Hist
of the Orient 23 (1980): 43-66; “Letters and Documents on the India Trade in
Medieval Times,” Islamic Culture 37 (1963): 188-205; “From the Mediterranean to
India: Documents on the Trade to India, South Arabia and East Africa from the
Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries,” Speculum 29 (1954): 181-97.

26. IB’s Kannalus may be identified with Kinalos Island. The Voyage of Francois
Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies, the Maldives, the Moluccas and Brazil, trans.
and ed. Albert Gray, 2 vols. (London, n.d.; reprint edn., New York, 1963), vol. 2
p. 438. Francois Pyrard was a French sailor who spent five and a half years in the
Maldives in the early seventeenth century and subsequently wrote a lively and
detailed description of the customs and manners of their inhabitants. The edition
cited here also includes edited translations of earlier reports on the Maldives,
including IB’s narrative.

27. Maloney, People of the Maldives, pp. 219, 233.

28. IB implies that he reached the islands some weeks before Ramadan 744.
That month began on 17 January 1344 (see note 23).

29. IB and subsequent travelers to the islands speak of the “Maldivian fever,”
which was almost certainly malaria. Maloney, People of the Maldives, p. 398. If IB
became infected with malaria, he would probably have been seriously ill for a few
weeks.

30. He dates his first marriage in the Maldives to the month of Shawwal, which
began on 16 February 1344.

31. Maloney, People of the Maldives, pp. 191-96.

32. Mahdi Husain’s translation reads “so as to bring back the Maldive islands
under his sway” (MH, p. 214). “Bring back” is an accurate translation of the verbal
noun farajju’i, but the islands had not previously been invaded or ruled by the
Sultanate of Ma’bar. See D&S, vol. 4, p. 160.

33. In the seventeenth century the King of Bengal would send a fleet of galleys
to raid and sack the Maldives. Gray, Frangois Pyrard, vol. 1, pp. 310-20.

34. Ibid., vol. 2, p. 465.

35. Pyrard also remarks on the high frequency of marriage and divorce in the
islands. Ibid., vol. 1, pp. 150-55.

36. IB gives the date of his departure from the islands as mid Rabi’ II 745 A.H.,
15 Rabi’ II calculates as 26 August 1344. That would have been the late summer
monsoon period and a plausible time to be sailing northeastward from the Mal-
dives. Here my revised chronology, placing his departure from Delhi in 742 rather
than 743, falls back into line with IB’s own dating. His departure from the Maldives
in 745 accords well with the dating of the subsequent visit to Ma’bar (see note 4). IB
mentions that he lived in the Maldives for a year and a half (D&S, vol. 4, p. 114),
but this statement does not seem compatible with the other chronological data he
provides. A stay of about eight months, from mid Sha’ban 744 to mid Rabi’ II 745,
makes more sense.

ory

] l China

I assure you that for one spice ship that goes to Alexandria
or elsewhere to pick up pepper for export to Christendom,
Zaiton is visited by a hundred . . . I can tell you further
that the revenue accruing to the Great Khan from this city
and port is something colossal.’

Marco Polo

Ibn Battuta visited Ceylon (Sri Lanka) on his way to Ma’bar so
that he might go on pilgrimage to the top of Adam’s Peak, the
spectacular conical mountain that loomed over the southwestern
interior of the island. “That exceeding high mountain hath a
pinnacle of surpassing height, which, on account of the clouds, can
rarely be seen,” wrote John de Marignolli, the Christian monk
who passed through Ceylon just a few years after Ibn Battuta.
“But God, pitying our tears, lighted it up one morning just before
the sun rose, so that we beheld it glowing with the brightest
flame”’ Ibn Battuta recalls that he first saw the peak from far out
to sea, “rising up into the sky like a column of smoke.” The
mountain was sacred to Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists alike,
and pilgrims of all three faiths climbed together to the summit to
behold a depression in the surface of the rock vaguely resembling
the shape of an enormous foot. For Buddhists it is the footprint of
Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha. For Hindus it is a trace of the
Great God Shiva, and for some Christians it belongs to St.
Thomas. In Muslim tradition God cast Adam and Eve from the
seventh heaven in disgrace, and when they tumbled to earth the
man landed hard on the peak of the mountain, leaving an impress
of his foot in the solid rock. He remained there for a thousand
years atoning for his sins, until the Archangel Gabriel led him to
Arabia, where Eve had fallen. The man and the woman met on
the plain of "Arafat and later returned to Ceylon to propagate the
human race. Adam was not only the first man but the first prophet
of Islam as well, and it was to reverence him that Muslim pilgrims
trekked to the Foot, as they still do today.

241

242 China

Arriving from the Maldives in the company of Captain Ibrahim,
Ibn Battuta put ashore at a place he calls Battala, probably mod-
ern Puttalam on the west central coast.* In the pattern of Muslim
maritime settlement, Ceylon’s western coast was an extension of
Malabar. Merchants of the Arabian Sea had operated from ports
like Puttalam since Abbasid times, exporting rubies, pearls, areca
nuts, and from about the fourteenth century large quantities of
cinnamon. Puttalam lay within the domain of the Hindu kingdom
of Jaffna, which at that time dominated the northern half of the
island, prospering from the Indo—Ceylonese trade and the wealth
of the pearl fisheries in the Gulf of Mannar.

Ibn Battuta arrived in Puttalam to find the King of Jaffna, the
Arya Chakravarti, temporarily in residence. Announcing himself a
kinsman by marriage of the Sultan of Ma’bar (with whom Jaffna
had good relations), he had no trouble getting himself introduced
into the royal court. Since the Arya Chakravarti understood some
Persian, Ibn Battuta regaled him for three days with stories of
“kings and countries,” then politely requested patronage to secure
guides and provisions for the long walk to Adam’s Peak. The king
not only gave him all the supplies he needed but also a palanquin
for his personal comfort plus the fellowship of 10 Brahmin priests,
15 porters, 10 courtiers of the royal household, and 4 yogis. At this
point Ibn Battuta’s personal suite appears to have consisted of al-
Tuzari, a second Egyptian gentleman, and two slave girls.

The party made the round trip up the mountain and back to
Puttalam by a circular route through the southwestern quarter of
the island, a journey facilitated by Ceylon’s superior network of
high roads, stone bridges, and rest houses.* They first traveled due
south along the palm-lined coast to the port of Chilaw (Bandar
Salawat). There they turned southeastward into the interior,
passed briefly through the territory of the Buddhist Sinhalese
kingdom of Gampola, then climbed gradually upwards through
the lush montane forests of the central highlands.” There were two
tracks to the summit of the mountain, but custom instructed that a
pilgrim would acquire divine merit only if he ascended by the more
difficult route and came down by the easy one. The final ascent up
the rocky cone was itself an act of religious faith, for the pilgrim
had to haul himself grunting and sweating up a series of nearly
vertical cliffs by means of little stirrups affixed to chains suspended
from iron pegs.

Making it to the top in one piece, Ibn Battuta and his comrades

China 243

camped for three days at a cave near the summit. Following
tradition, he walked each morning and evening to the site of the
Foot and joined the cluster of Hindus, Buddhists, and fellow
Muslims, each group possessing its own notion of what holy event
the imprint represented but sharing nonetheless a rare moment of
transcendent brotherhood. He also beheld one of the most
breathtaking scenic views anywhere in the world, a panorama of
wooded hills rippling away from the base of the Peak to the golden
band of the sea in the far distance.

The party returned to the coast by a roundabout route south-
ward to the port of Dondra (Dinawar), then up along the western
shore. When they reached Puttalam again, Ibn Battuta found the
ubiquitous Captain Ibrahim waiting to ferry him and his com-
panions across the Gulf of Mannar to the shore of the subcontinent
and the kingdom of Ma’bar. The stages of the trip to Adam’s Peak
and back suggest that he may have put out from Puttalam in
October.°®

This was the transitional period between the two monsoons, a
season when heavy squalls might come up in the gulf without
warning. More than that, Ibn Battuta mentions twice in the Rihla
that despite his long acquaintanceship with Ibrahim, he never
really had much confidence in him as a sailor. Setting a course
northeastward from Puttalam, the vessel had almost made it to the
South Indian coast, when suddenly

the wind became violent and the water rose so high that it was
about to enter the ship, while we had no able captain with us.
We then got near a rock, where the ship was on the point of
being wrecked; afterwards we came into shallow water wherein
the ship began to sink. Death stared us in the face and the
passengers jettisoned all that they possessed and bade adieu to
one another.

Racing against the wind and waves, the crew managed to cut down
the main mast and throw it overboard, then lash together a crude
raft and lower it to the sea. Ibn Battuta got his two companions
and his concubines down onto it, but there was no room left for
him. Too poor a swimmer to jump into the water and hang onto
the raft with a rope, he could only stick with the ship and hope for
the best. The sailors who stayed behind tried vainly to tie together
more floats, but darkness fell and the work had to be given up.

244 China

Throughout the night Ibn Battuta huddled terrified in the stern as the
water rose around him. In the meantime his companions made it safely
to shore and sought help from Tamil villagers, for in the morning a
rescue party of boatmen suddenly appeared alongside the rapidly sink-
ing dhow. The crew and remaining passengers were all taken to shore,
apparently including Captain Ibrahim, though of him we hear no more.

Reunited with his friends and slave women on a rural stretch of the
southeastern coast, Ibn Battuta gladly accepted food and shelter from
the Tamil country folk who had plucked him from the sea. He seems to
have saved some of his personal belongings from the shipwreck,
including mementos from various Sufi divines and a bag of pearls,
rubies, and other gems given to him by the King of Jaffna. The party
remained with the local Tamils while word was sent to Ghiyath al-Din,
the Sultan of Ma’bar, that a brother-in-law of his, late of Delhi, had
arrived on the coast in distressing circumstances. The sultan happened
to be ona military tour not far away, and in three days’ time a company
of horse and infantry arrived to conduct the visitors across the dry
coastal lowlands to the royal camp.

Ibn Battuta spent altogether about two months in Ma’bar, but it was
not a period of his travels he recalls with any joy. More than a decade
had passed since Jalal al-Din Ahsan Shah, the father of Ibn Battuta’s
ex-wife, Hurnasab, had revolted against Muhammad Tughluq and
founded an independent Muslim state held precariously together by a
small, turbulent minority of Turko—Afghan fighting men. Jalal al-Din
had died in 1338 or 1339 while Ibn Battuta was still in Delhi. His
successor ruled less than two years before taking a Hindu arrow in the
head. The third sultan was assassinated by his own commanders after
only a few months in power. The fourth was Ghiyath al-Din. A former
cavalryman under Muhammad Tughlugq and husband of Hurnasab’s
sister, he had fought his way to the throne in 1340 or 1341.

Since the entire Muslim population of Ma’bar was small, limited to
the military aristocracy, coastal merchants, and a modest bureaucratic
and religious corps, Ghiyath al-Din would likely have welcomed the
former gadi of Delhi to his court whether the marriage connection
existed or not. Beyond that, Ibn Battuta arrived with a fascinating
proposal that Ghiyath al-Din was only too happy to entertain:

I had an interview with the sultan in the course of which I broached
the Maldive affair and proposed that he should send an expedition
to those islands. He set about with determination to do so and
specified the warships for that purpose.

China 245

The plan the two men devised was to have Ibn Battuta lead a naval
invasion of the atolls and intimidate Queen Khadija into accepting
an unequal alliance with the sultanate. Ghiyath al-Din would
marry one of the queen’s sisters while men loyal to him, Ibn
Battuta among them, would run the kingdom as a satellite of
Ma’bar. The plot had only to await preparation of an attack fleet,
which, the sultan’s naval chief reported, would take at least three
months.’

Presumably the admiral set to work fitting out the warships, but
the plan began to go awry almost as soon as it was hatched. From
the outset, Ibn Battuta took a dislike to Ghiyath al-Din, whose
troops went about the land rounding up Tamil villagers and indis-
criminately impaling them on sharpened stakes, the sort of politi-
cal atrocity absolutely forbidden to Muslim rulers by Koranic
injunction. Ibn Battuta and his retinue spent some time in Pattan
(Fattan), the main port of Ma’bar,” then traveled upcountry to
Madurai, the capital of the sultanate and one of the major towns of
southeastern India. There he found the population in the throes of
an epidemic so lethal that “whoever caught infection died on the
morrow, or the day after, and if not on the third day, then on the
fourth.” He purchased a healthy slave girl in the city, but she died
the following day. Ghiyath al-Din, who was already ill from taking
a love potion containing iron filings, witnessed the loss of his
mother and son to the plague. A week later he himself died.” Nasir
al-Din, a nephew of the dead sultan and a soldier of apparently
low origins, quickly seized the throne and got to the business of
dismissing or murdering various political enemies.

The new ruler was happy enough to retain the services of his
predecessor’s brother-in-law and pressed him to carry on with the
expedition. Ibn Battuta might at that point have been willing to
move ahead, but he suddenly fell seriously ill himself, probably
not with the disease that had killed so many in Madurai but from
the malaria he had contracted in the Maldives. By the time he
recovered he had lost all interest in the conspiracy, disliked
Madurai intensely, and wanted only to get out of Ma’bar. He
never explains why he had such a drastic change of heart, but he
gives the impression that he had little confidence in Nasir al-Din
and liked him even less than Ghiyath al-Din. Whatever the reason,
he refused the sultan’s urgings to launch the war fleet and finally
got permission to leave Ma‘bar with his little entourage. His
Original plan of travel — before he got involved in Maldivian

246 China

politics — was to visit Ceylon and Ma’bar, then go directly on to
Bengal. But if he was leaving from Pattan about December 1344,
he would not have found any vessels sailing into the Bay of Bengal
until the start of the summer winds in May." Ships were going in
the other direction, however — westward around Ceylon to
Malabar and Aden. If his immediate object was to flee the
Sultanate of Ma’bar as fast as possible, then he and his com-
panions would go wherever the monsoon blew.'! And so he re-
turned once again to Quilon on the Malabar coast.

His career at sixes and sevens, he stayed in Quilon for three
months, still recovering from his illness. Then he decided to try his
luck with his old patron Jamal al-Din of Honavar. The sultan
might well have been less than delighted to see the man who had
abandoned him so abruptly during the siege of Sandapur two and a
half years earlier, but in any case the reunion was not to be. Ibn
Battuta and his group took passage on a ship bound for Honavar,
well enough aware that storms and shallows were not the only
perils on the west Indian coast. Marco Polo had passed through
the region about a half century earlier and described the danger
well:

You must know that from this kingdom of Melibar, and from
another near it called Gozurat, there go forth every year more
than a hundred corsair vessels on cruise . . . Their method is to
join in fleets of 20 or 30 of these pirate vessels together, and
then they form what they call a sea cordon, that is, they drop off
till there is an interval of 5 or 6 miles between ship and ship, so
that they cover something like a hundred miles of sea, and no
merchant ship can escape them. For when any one corsair sights
a vessel a signal is made by fire or smoke, and then the whole of
them make for this, and seize the merchants and plunder them.
After they have plundered them they let them go, saying: “Go
along with you and get more gain, and that mayhap will fall to
us also!” But now the merchants are aware of this, and go so
well manned and armed, and with such great ships, that they
don’t fear the corsairs. Still mishaps do befall them at times.”

For Ibn Battuta and his luckless friends, the “mishap” occurred
near a small island just south of Honavar.'* Caught in the corsair’s
net, twelve ships suddenly converged on the lonely vessel and
attacked at once. Clambering over the gunwales from all direc-

China 247

tions, the pirates quickly overpowered the hapless crew, and
stripped the passengers of everything they had. “They seized the
jewels and rubies which the king of Ceylon had given me,” Ibn
Battuta remembers, “and robbed me of my clothes and provisions
with which pious men and saints had favored me. They left nothing
on my body except my trousers.”'* Then, with an encouraging
word to their terrified victims to pass that way again sometime, the
brigands politely dropped them all off on the nearby shore un-
harmed.

Dispossessed and humiliated once again, [bn Battuta did not
walk the short distance up the Kanara coast to Honavar, probably
concluding that it would be impolitic, if not thoroughly boorish, to
appear before Jamal al-Din a second time in a state of destitution.
Somehow he and his party managed to make their way back down
the coast to Calicut — no details are given — where “one of the
jurists sent me a garment, the qadi sent me a turban, and a certain
merchant sent me another garment.”

While recuperating in Calicut he learned through the port gossip
that the other Jamal al-Din, the grand vizier of the Maldives, had
died and that the pregnant woman Ibn Battuta had divorced had
given birth to a son shortly after his departure the previous year.'”
He also learned that his old nemesis, the vizier Abdallah, had
married Queen Khadija and assumed the office of chief minister.
By this time Ibn Battuta had given up any idea of returning to the
islands at the head of the Ma’bar navy, but he did have an urge to
claim his son, a right he had in Muslim law. Well knowing that
"Abdallah could make considerable trouble for him if he turned
up on Male again, especially if the Ma’bar conspiracy had become
known, he decided nonetheless to chance a visit. Sailing from
Calicut, presumably no later than May 1345, he reached the atolls
in ten days.'°

Landing first on Kinalos Island then sailing southward to Male,
he found ’Abdallah reasonably well disposed toward him, though
a bit suspicious. He dined with the vizier and was given lodgings
near the royal palace, but he says nothing in the Rihla of renewing
his political contacts. When his ex-wife learned that she was about
to lose her son, probably for all time, she complained bitterly to
"Abdallah, who was nevertheless disinclined to stand in the
father’s way. The father, however, was a man with a long history
of abandoning we may only guess how many sons and daughters in
various parts of the Muslim world. After seeing the little boy and,

248 China

we might hope, responding to the pleas of his wretched mother, he
“deemed it fit for him to continue with the islanders.” And SO,
after staying in the Maldives only five days, he boarded a junk
bound for Bengal. He was not to return again, much to the relief
we may suppose, of all concerned.

Sailing round the southern tip of Ceylon into the Bay of Bengal,
Ibn Battuta was joining a surge of Muslim migration into the
maritime lands of greater southeastern Asia. The fourteenth was a
century of bright opportunities for any believer seeking career,
fortune, or spiritual self-mastery out beyond the frontier of the
Dar al-Islam, where the Sacred Law and the rightly guided society
it embodied had yet to be introduced to benighted millions. It was
the century when Islamic urban culture secured itself firmly in
Bengal, when Muslim mercantile settlements took charge of the
international trade through the Strait of Malacca, and when
cosmopolitan Islam reached its zenith of infuence and prosperity
in China.

Arab and Iranian seamen of the eighth century had first intro-
duced Islam in the Far East during bold, year-and-a-half trading
voyages from the Persian Gulf to the South China coast and back
again. Yet these missions were given up by the tenth century as the
Abbasid state and the T’ang empire of China deteriorated
simultaneously. The Arabo—Persian settlement at Canton virtually
disappeared, and the voyages left hardly any Islamic impress on
eastern Asia. Historians used to suppose that the cessation of
these direct, long-distance links between the Middle East and
China was evidence of a protracted “decline” of Muslim trade with
the farther East. On the contrary, the long run of commercial
developments between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries in-
volved a more or less steady increase in the variety, and no doubt
volume, of goods exchanged along the chain of southern seas, as
well as proliferation of ports and local hinterlands incorporated
into the inter-regional system. By the eleventh or twelfth centuries
a Muslim network of trust, friendship, and social expectation ruled
the commerce of the western Indian Ocean. Since the sea routes
from there through the Bay of Bengal to the China Seas had since
ancient times constituted a continuum of commercial exchange, it
was almost inevitable that the network should push out along the
shores north and east of Ceylon in search of new bases of
operation. Sharing as they did an unusual esprit de corps and

China 249

monopolizing the routes leading to the markets of Africa, Persia,
and the Mediterranean basin, upstart Muslim merchants had
powerful advantages over Indian, Malay, or Chinese trading
groups, who found themselves gradually superseded by or, more
likely, coopted into the Muslim club.

During the era of the two Sung dynasties (960-1279), China
experienced spectacular economic growth. Agricultural and indus-
trial output shot up, population soared, cities multiplied, and the
internal network of roads and canals was vastly improved. A
remarkable expansion of overseas trade accompanied these
trends. Chinese nautical and naval technology was well in advance
of the Arabian Sea tradition and could conceivably have been
wielded to enforce a monopoly over the eastern sea routes. In fact,
the Sung emperors embraced a dual policy. They encouraged
Chinese merchants to trade directly to India (or in some isolated
instances as far west as the Red Sea). But at the same time they
invited foreign traders, notably Muslims, to establish, or in the
case of Canton re-establish, settlements in the cities of South
China.

Moreover, Chinese overseas mercantile operations tended to be
hampered by the Sung government's insistence on close regulation
and control. By contrast, the alien Muslim trading groups were
fluid, versatile, and unimpeded by any central bureaucratic auth-
ority. They could therefore move goods across the Bay of Bengal
and the South China Sea more speedily, more efficiently, and
probably at lower cost than could the Chinese junk masters. Thus,
the “commercial revolution” of Sung China stimulated the ex-
pansion of Muslim shipping east of Malabar and the growth of
busy, multinational settlkements in Ch’uan-chou (Zaitun, or
Quanzhou), Canton, and other south coast ports. Muslim
mercantile communities even sprang up in Hang-chou, the capital
of the Southern Sung Dynasty (1127-1279), and other major towns
along the interior land and water routes. Indeed, a significant
proportion of Chinese merchants in the international trade appear
to have converted to Islam, improving, as it were, their credit
rating.

The Mongol invasion of China and overthrow of the Sung only
reinforced these trends. The Yuan dynasty was the only one of the
four great Mongol khanates whose rulers never converted to
Islam. Nevertheless, the khans of the early Yuan period, dis-
trusting, as well they might have, the loyalty and commitment of

250 China

the sullen, hyper-civilized class of Chinese scholar-bureaucrats,
brought in numerous foreigners of diverse origins and religions
and placed them in responsible, even powerful, positions of state.
These men depended completely on their Mongol masters to pro-
tect them and promote their careers and were expected to give
unquestioning loyalty in return. The influence of foreign cadres
reached its peak in the reign of Khubilai Khan (1260-94), when
hundreds of Muslims of Central Asian or Middle Eastern origin
(not to mention a few European adventurers such as Maffeo Polo
and his son Marco) held jobs as tax-collectors, finance officers,
craftsmen, and architects.

The Yuan “open door” policy on foreign recruitment, combined
with their enthusiastic promotion of pan-Eurasian trade, attracted
Muslim merchants into China’s vast, largely unexploited market as
never before. They came not only to the China Sea ports and the
cities of the populous south, but also across Inner Asia and
through the gates of the Great Wall to found settlements in the
northern towns, including even Korea. The largest communities
were in Ch’uan-chou and Canton on the southern coast. These
groups largely governed the internal affairs of their own city
quarters, and Muslim merchant associations, called ortakh, even
took loans from the Yuan government to capitalize their foreign
trade enterprises. Mosques, hospitals, khanqahs, and bazaars rose
up in the Muslim neighborhoods of Ch’uan-chou and Canton, and
gadis were appointed to adjudicate the Sacred Law in civil and
business affairs. '”

Following Khubilai’s death in 1294, the appointment of fore-
igners to official posts trailed off as the Yuan emperors lost touch
with the stout ways of the steppe, took up the habits of traditional
Chinese potentates, and gradually brought the Confucian
scholar-gentry back into government. The Sinicization of the
dynasty, which was especially pronounced after 1328, does not
seem to have much affected Muslim trading enterprise in the
cities, which continued to thrive until the collapse of the Mongol
regime in 1368. Until that time, a Muslim might travel the main
roads and canals of China, finding in the major towns little clusters
of co-believers always eager to offer hospitality and to hear news
from the west. After 1368, however, resurgent Chinese rule under
the Ming dynasty brought a severe native reaction against foreign
influences, and the alien Muslim settlements quickly withered
away.

China 251

The growth of Muslim commercial settlements in China in the
Mongol Age was mirrored in similar developments along the
coasts of Southeast Asia. The strategic link in the trade between
India and China was the Strait of Malacca, connecting the Bay of
Bengal with the South China Sea. Like the Malabar coast, the
strait was a hinge in the monsoonal sailing system. Vessels crossing
the Bay of Bengal eastbound on the summer monsoon could not
normally reach China before the opposing northeast wind set in.
Therefore they would winter in a port along the strait before
continuing around the Malay Peninsula and across the South
China Sea in April or May. Climatic reality encouraged India-
based merchants to sell their goods in the strait towns, then return
directly to Malabar on the winter wind. China shippers followed
the same seasonal pattern of travel, only in reverse.

By the thirteenth century local Malay rulers of the strait, men
who practiced Hinduism or a combination of Hindu—Buddhist
devotions, were avidly encouraging Muslim traders to settle in
their ports owing to the obvious fiscal advantages of tying them-
selves securely into the southern seas’ commercial network.
Wherever such communities sprouted, their members felt im-
pelled to order their collective lives in accord with the demands of
the shari’a to the extent the authorities permitted. Thus a call went
out for scribes, judges, Koranic teachers, mosque Officials,
craftsmen, and, since business was good, more merchants. In time,
the Muslim population, with its universalist claims and _ its
cosmopolitan connections, became large, rich, and prestigious
enough to win over members of the Malay elite and ultimately to
impress, intimidate, or manipulate the princely court into official
conversion. This event in turn set off a new round of immigration
from abroad, as enterprising, footloose men responded to what
Marshal Hodgson calls the “drawing power” of new Muslim com-
munities. '®

This process was only just beginning in Southeast Asia when Ibn
Battuta came through. A Malay prince, ruler of the port of
Samudra on the northwestern coast of Sumatra, converted to
Islam sometime in the late thirteenth century, and his is the
earliest Islamicized state in the region historians have been able to
discover.'” Elsewhere in the Eastern Archipelago, that is, in the
countries bordering the Java Sea and the “spice islands” further off
to the east, Islam was still largely unknown in the first half of the
fourteenth century. The subsequent three hundred years would be

252 China

the crucial period of quiet, persistent conversion, ultimately trans-
forming Indonesia into an overwhelmingly Muslim country.

From the eleventh century, when the high age of Arab
geographical writing had almost run its course, down to the end of
the Islamic Middle Period, the Rihla stands alone as an eye-
witness Muslim travel account of Eastern Asia. Yet the story of
Ibn Battuta’s journey to China must be told briefly and in a spirit
of uneasy skepticism. If we take his word for the itinerary he
followed, insofar as we can make sense of it, this was the longest
more or less uninterrupted trip of his career, spanning somewhere
between 11,000 and 12,000 miles of travel by land and sea. Yet his
narrative of the entire tour from the Maldives to Bengal, Sumatra,
China as far north as Peking, and back to Malabar occupies less
than 6 percent of the Rih/a text. And as both a descriptive account
and a record of personal experience of what alleges to be a bold,
arduous journey far beyond the frontiers of the Dar al-Islam, it is
the least satisfying and most problematic section of the entire
book.

The itinerary is vague, possibly disordered, and sometimes
baffling. Chronological information, except for what can be in-
ferred here and there, is almost altogether lacking. Descriptions of
places, events, and things observed are often muddled or patently
inaccurate. The sort of precise personal witnessing that lends
credibility to so much of the narrative, while not altogether
lacking, is suspiciously spare. The fuzziness and obscurity of the
story stands out uneasily against the rich, vivid, even introspective
accounts of the years in India and the Maldives. Indeed, the
deficiencies of this part of the book give the impression that Ibn
Battuta remembered the details of his much earlier travels in
Persia, Africa, or Anatolia better than he did the Far Eastern trip,
which occurred less than a decade before the Rihla was composed.
Moreover, an estimation of the probable starting date of the
journey (that is, his second departure from the Maldives) and his
own recollection of the month when he returned to Malabar
suggest that he made the entire journey from the Maldives to
Peking in the far north of China and all the way back to South
India again in the space of about twenty months, including several
leisurely rest stops. Since we can safely eliminate the possibility of
his traveling by jet plane or hydrofoil, such a pace seems incon-
ceivable, and if not that, then at least pointless. All of these

China 253

difficulties have led some scholars to doubt that Ibn Battuta really
traveled to China or even anywhere east of Ceylon, contending
that this part of the Rihla may be a fabrication and the descriptive
information it contains based entirely on hearsay.*”

No one, however, has made a completely convincing case that
Ibn Battuta did not go to East Asia, at least as far as the ports of
South China. The riddle of the journey probably defies solution
since the Rihla, we must remind ourselves, is a work of literature,
a survey of the Muslim world of the fourteenth century in narrative
form, not a travel diary composed along the road. We have no way
of knowing the precise relationship between Ibn Battuta’s real life
experience and the account of it contained in the fragile manu-
scripts that have come down to us from his time. Moreover, the
narrative of the China trip is by no means a collection of abstract
reports or improbable tales. For all its sketchiness and ambiguity,
it is still a story of countries and cities visited, events experienced,
people talked to, and aspects of everyday life observed. And so,
honoring Ibn Battuta with the benefit of the doubt, we follow him,
albeit warily, to Bengal and beyond.

Instead of sailing directly from the Maldives to the Strait of
Malacca on some pepper ship out of Malabar, Ibn Battuta decided
first to visit Bengal. He probably had no trouble finding a vessel to
take him there since the islanders carried on regular trade with
that region, importing quantities of rice from the Ganges Delta,
paid for in cowrie shells.”!

Like the Deccan, Bengal in the thirteenth and early fourteenth
centuries was a frontier of Turkish arms and Persian-style Islamic
culture emanating from the Indo—Gangetic plain. But much unlike
the central plateau, Bengal was a heavily populated, water-soaked
garden of immense fertility. In the later thirteenth century the
region was annexed to the Sultanate of Delhi. As Muslim gov-
ernors and garrisons occupied the important delta towns, im-
migrants streamed in from the northwest, making Bengal the
eastward overland terminus for the class of skilled and literate
refugees and their descendants who had introduced Arabo-
Persian civilization to India. By Ibn Battuta’s time, a number of
Bengali cities had madrasas and important Sufi lodges, and the
conversion of Hindu or Buddhist peasant folk that would prove so
successful in subsequent centuries was already getting under way.

The sultans of Delhi, however, found it exasperatingly difficult

254 China

to hold the mastery of their eastern frontier. Unlike the northern
plains, Bengal was extremely unaccommodating to the operations
of cavalry. Jungles and mountains obstructed the routes in from
the capital, and rivers were numerous and unfordable. Con-
sequently, the local Turkish lords, who built up riverine navies to
ensure their own purely regional power, repeatedly rebelled
against Delhi. Muhammad Tughluq succeeded in placing gov-
ernors over his delta provinces early in his reign, but when the
pretense of his vast subcontinental empire became exposed,
Bengal was one of the first provinces to bolt. In 1338, the eastern
half of the region broke away when Muhammad’s governor died,
prompting an obscure Turkish officer named Fakr al-Din Mubarak
Shah to seize the main chance and proclaim a kingdom of his own.
Two years later West Bengal seceded under similar circumstances.

Ibn Battuta seems to have wanted to visit the delta in the
summer of 1345 mainly to seek the blessing of Shah Jalal. He was a
celebrated holy warrior who, in the year our traveler was born,
participated in the Muslim takeover of Sylhet, a town and district
in the northeastern corner of the delta.*? Under normal circum-
stances, Ibn Battuta would also have had himself presented at the
princely court of Fakr al-Din, whose capital was at Sonargaon, a
city about half way along the route from the coast to Sylhet. In this
case, however, Fakr al-Din’s dissidence was too recent and his
own identification with Muhammad Tughlug too well known to
make such an introduction advisable. Consequently, he decided to
steer clear of royal interviews and make a quick trip up to Sylhet as
anonymously as possible.

He probably disembarked at the busy eastern port of
Chittagong, a city overflowing with agricultural goods transported
by river craft down through the maze of delta channels to the
coast.** He notes in the Rih/a that foreigners liked to call Bengal
“a hell crammed with good things.” The noxious, humid vapours
exuded from the delta’s marshes and riverbanks made for an
oppressive climate, but food was abundant and remarkably cheap.
To prove his point, he even offers in the Rihla a list of prices for
rice, meat, fowl, sugar, oil, cotton, and slaves. Not to pass up a
bargain himself, he purchased an “extremely beautiful” slave girl
in Chittagong. One of his comrades acquired a young boy for “a
couple of gold dinars.”

He tells us nothing very lucid about the itinerary or time
schedule of his trip from Chittagong to Sylhet, but he very likely

China 255

traveled by boat northward along the Meghna River valley, a lush,
watery, rice-growing country leading to the Assam Plateau and the
Tibetan Himalayas beyond.** He seems to have had a party of
companions, but they are more phantom-like than ever. Al-
Tuzari was apparently with him when he visited Ma’bar, but he is
never mentioned after that and indeed we learn parenthetically in
an earlier part of the Rih/a that the man died in India.”°

Shah Jalal of Sylhet, whose tomb is still a local pilgrimage
center, was renowned in medieval India for awesome miracles,
prognostications, and the feat of dying at the age of 150.°° One
day, the Rihla reports, the old shaykh, who had no previous
knowledge of Ibn Battuta, told his disciples that a traveler from
the Maghrib was about to arrive and that they should go out to
meet him. This they did, intercepting the visitor two days’ distance
from the khangqah. The story gives Ibn Battuta a convenient entrée
to remind his readers of his own singular accomplishments as a
globetrotter:

When I visited him he rose to receive me and embraced me. He
enquired of me about my country and journeys, of which I gave
him an account. He said to me, “You are a traveler of Arabia.”
His disciples who were then present said, “O lord, he is also a
traveler of the non-Arab countries.” “Traveler of the non-Arab
countries!” rejoined the shaykh, “Treat him, then, with favor.”
Therefore they took me to the hospice and entertained me for
three days.

Returning southward along the Meghna River past “water
wheels, gardens, and villages such as those along the banks of the
Nile in Egypt,” he reached Sonargaon (not far from modern
Dacca), the capital of Sultan Fakr al-Din. Without dallying long or
identifying himself at the royal residence, he bought passage on a
commercial junk departing down the river and went directly on to
Sumatra.

The route of his voyage to the Strait of Malacca, which would
probably have taken place in the fall or winter of 1345-46, is an
annoying puzzle since this part of the Rih/a is murky and possibly
disarranged. The ship made one stop at a place he calls Barah
Nagar, which may have been a small Indo—Chinese tribal state
along the western coast of Burma.’ The ship’s company presented
gifts to the local chief (who appeared dressed in a goatskin and

256 China

Map 10: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Southeast Asia and China,
1345—46

YUAN te

’ Hang-bhou
Riv er {
ty Puehou
we CoH Ch'uan-chou = (
Canton
wy \e
¥ =
Chittagong 3s <=
ys &
a
YS
Barah Nagar
”) . SOUTH Q
Als
CHINA
BAY p
or!

Q®
9
eesecacseene Doubtful Journey ©

O 200 400 600 800 1000 Km.

ape)
0 200 = 400 600 Mi.

China 257

riding an elephant), then did a bit of trading and sailed away. A
second stop was made at a port called Qaqula (Kakula, or
Qaqulla), a lair of pirates. It may have been located somewhere
along the Tenasserim coast on the western side of the Malay
Peninsula.2® Here Ibn Battuta visited the walled town, accepted
the hospitality of the infidel Malay ruler for three days, and had
the grisly treat of watching one of the prince’s subjects decapitate
himself as a show of affection for his sovereign!

Continuing south along the Malay coast and into the mouth of
the strait, the junk put in at the Sumatran port of Samudra, a
transshipping town located on one of the rivers flowing down from
the wild mountains of the northwestern interior.”’ In a political
sense Samudra was the last outpost of the Dar al-Islam. Though
other towns down along the Sumatran coast had thriving com-
mercial settlements, no sovereign Muslim states are known to have
existed anywhere east of Samudra before the mid fourteenth
century.

Al-Malik al-Zahir (or Ahmad), the prince of the place and third
in a line of Muslim rulers extending back some years before
1297,°° warmly entertained Ibn Battuta and his companions in his
wooden-walled town, which was a few miles upriver from the port
settlement. Except for the mosque, the Friday prayer ritual, the
foreign Muslims attending at court, and the fact that the sultan
enjoyed lively discussion on points of Islamic law with a small
cadre of legal scholars, the palace of Samudra followed custom
and ritual not much different from any of the Hindu—Buddhist
states of Malaya or the Archipelago.*' Getting into the spirit of
things, Ibn Battuta exchanged his under-breeches for a loincloth,
and before appearing at court, donned a rich set of garments in the
local fashion. His first official host was a ranking military officer,
whom, it turned out, he already knew. The man had traveled to
Delhi some years earlier on a diplomatic mission for Samudra.
Later, the newcomer was presented to al-Malik al-Zahir, who
invited him to sit on his left at royal meals and plied him with
questions about his travels and the affairs of Delhi.

Ibn Battuta recalls that he spent only two weeks in Samudra, but
it may have been longer than that since he did not leave for China
until about April 1346, that is, when the southwest monsoon
started and ships bound for Ch’uan-chou or Canton normally left
the strait.*? In any event, he departed in style. Al-Malik al-Zahir
honored his learned guest by outfitting and provisioning a junk for

258 China

him and even sending along one of his courtiers to provide pood
company at shipboard meals.

The normal sailing time from Sumatra to the South China coast was
about 40 days,’ but Ibn Battuta remembers that the trip took
something short of four months. He accounts for the longer time by
describing two stops at ports along the way, possibly on the coasts of
eastern Malaya, Champa, or Tonkin. Untortunately, the Rihla’s
description of these places is so murky and, in the case of one of them,
of such doubtful authenticity that their location remains a puzzle.*4

Ibn Battuta arrived on the coast of China during the last peaceful
years of Mongol rule. Signs were growing of the violent popular
uprisings against the Yuan that would begin in a few years, but in 1346
the country was still unified and prosperous. On the throne was
Toghon Temur. He had come to power in 1333 after an unsettling
period of murderous succession fights within the royal family. Turning
his back on the Mongolian steppe, he ruled in the style of a traditional
Confucian emperor and cultivated reasonably amiable relations with
the Chinese elite.

Ibn Battuta praises China as vast and bounteous, noting the quality
of its silk and porcelain, the excellence of its plums and watermelons,
the enormous size of its chickens, and the advantages of its paper
money. He says that “China is the safest and most agreeable country in
the world for the traveler. You can travel all alone across the land for
nine months without fear, even if you are carrying much wealth.”** On
the other hand, he admits to experiencing the worst culture shock of
his traveling career, unable to accept or understand much of what he
witnessed, like a member of some American tour group, hopping
through Asia from one Hilton and air-conditioned bus to another.

China was beautiful, but it did not please me. On the contrary, |
was greatly troubled thinking about the way paganism dominated
this country. Whenever I went out of my lodging. I saw many
blameworthy things. That disturbed me so much that I stayed
indoors most of the time and only went out when necessary. During
my stay in China, whenever I saw any Muslims I always felt as
though I were meeting my own family and close kinsmen.*°

Through the cultural lens of a Maliki schoolman, he saw the Chinese
as heathens, worse indeed than the Christians in their rejection of the
Almighty Creator and every single one of the prophets. More
shocking than that, they were also a people supremely confident that

China 259

the Moroccan traveler’s own ideas of God and the universe were
not worthy of serious discussion. If we allow the assumption that
he did in fact visit China, we should be tolerant of his failure to
learn much about Chinese culture or to report much of what he
had learned in the Rihla. It was, after all, a book about the
triumphant expansion of the Dar al-Islam, not about civilizations
still befogged in idolatry.

Even his account of his own itinerary through China is vague,
brief, and uncharacteristically superficial. Although he claims to
have traveled something close to 3,500 miles, mostly along China’s
extensive river and canal system, he mentions visiting only six
different cities and what he says about them is mostly cither
conventional or inaccurate.*’ Only his encounters with
acquaintances old or new seem to ring true. After landing at the
great port of Ch’uan-chou on the coast of Fukien (Fujian) pro-
vince, he had the good fortune, as he certainly hoped he would, to
meet up with one of the Chinese envoys who had accompanied
him from Delhi to Calicut and who had made it back to China
ahead of him. This gentleman willingly introduced him to the
Yuan chief of customs in Ch’uan-chou, who assigned him a com-
fortable house. Ibn Battuta told this official that he had come to
China as the ambassador of the sultan of India. and a letter to this
effect was duly sent off to the emperor in Peking. Since
Muhammad Tughluq’s gifts to Toghon Temur were lying at the
bottom of the sea off Calicut, one wonders just how Ibn Battuta,
suddenly wandering in with none of the retinue or accoutrements
of an official diplomat, established his credibility. In any case, the
emperor was to decide whether the man should be told to proceed
to the capital.

In the meantime the visitor met the Muslim worthies of Ch’uan-
chou and even ran into a man named Sharif al-Din al-Tabrizi, one
of the merchants who had loaned him money when he was first
setting himself up in Delhi. He also made a brief trip 300 miles
down the coast to the port of Canton (Kuang-chou), where he
lodged for two weeks with one of the rich traders.

Soon after he returned to Ch’uan-chou, he received word that
he was indeed to go onto Peking as the guest of the emperor. He
relates that he traveled by river boat, but he mentions only two
place names between Ch’uan-chou and Hang-chou (Khansa, or
Hangzhou), cities almost 400 miles apart as the crow flies. It would
have been logical for him to follow the coastline northward, but we

260 China

can only guess at the route he took. He made one stop at a city he
calls Qanjanfu, which may have been the port of Fu-choy
(Fuzhou).*® Here he had the remarkable pleasure of meeting a
fellow Moroccan. The man was a young scholar named al-Bushri
who had come originally from Ceuta, a city only 40 miles from
Tangier. He had left home to travel to the eastern lands in the
company of an uncle. Ibn Battuta in fact had already made a slight
acquaintance with him in Delhi.

I had spoken of him to the sultan of India, who gave him three
thousand dinars and invited him to stay at his court, but he
refused, as he was set on going to China, where he prospered
exceedingly and acquired enormous wealth. He told me that he
had about fifty white slaves and as many slave-girls, and pre-
sented me with two of each, along with many other gifts.*?

Al-Bushri accompanied his compatriot for four days out of
Qanjanfu, then sent him on his way north to Hang-chou.

Former capital of the Southern Sung empire, Hang-chou may
well have been the largest city in the world in the fourteenth
century.*’ Ibn Battuta declares that it was indeed the biggest place
he had ever seen and that its foreign Muslim population was large
and thriving. He speaks of residing in the Muslim quarter with a
family of Egyptian origin, then later meeting the Yuan governor in
the palace and enjoying banquets, canal rides, and performances
of magic. Yet his description of Hang-chou is cursory, blurred, and
defective, as though he had been told it was the greatest city on
earth but could not convey in the Rihla any concrete or convincing
images of what such a place was like.*!

He claims to have continued on from Hang-chou to Peking (a
distance of about 700 miles) by way of the Grand Canal, which the
Mongol rulers had completed earlier in the century to link the two
cities. This section of the Rihla, however, is so strange and so
deficient in historical accuracy that it seems highly unlikely he
traveled anywhere north of Hang-chou, if that far, or that he ever
completed his checkered diplomatic mission to Toghon Temur.”
Indeed, his own dating clues lead us to infer that his entire tour of
China was jammed into the summer and early autumn of 1346.
Unless a full year has mysteriously dropped out of the chronology,
the journey to Peking must be apocryphal. However deep into
China he actually went, he recounts that he returned to Ch’uan-

China 261

chou by retracing his route through Hang-chou and Qanjanfu and
that he arrived on the south coast to find a junk belonging to the
Sultan of Samudra ready to embark for the Strait of Malacca.

Setting sail from the port on the first rush of the fall monsoon of
1346, he was, if he did not quite know it at the time, on his way
home again. Within a little over three years he would be walking
the steep streets of Tangier and telling his wondrous tales among
the learned men of Fez.

Notes

1. The Travels of Marco Polo, trans. and with an introduction by Ronald Latham
(New York, 1958), p. 237.

2. Henry Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither, 4 vols. (London, 1913-16), vol. 3,

oon:
: 3. S. Pathmanathan, The Kingdom of Jaffna (Colombo, 1978), p. 235; MH. p.
217n.,

4. William Geiger, Culture of Ceylon in Mediaeval Times (Wiesbaden, 1960),
pp. 105-08.

5. IB states that he visited a place he identifies as Kunakar, capital of the king
called Kunwar. He does not say that he met this ruler and indeed reveals that,
about the time he passed through, the lords of the realm rose against the man and
installed his son on the throne in his place. Mahdi Husain (MH, p. 219n) identifies
Kunakar with Kurunegala, but more recent studies suggest it was either the city of
Ratnapura, which lay south of Adam's Peak, or Gampola, the Sinhalese capital,
which was more or less on the way from Puttalam to the mountain. C. W. Nicholas
and S. Paranavitana, A Concise History of Cevlon (Colombo. 1961). p. 296:
Pathmanathan, Kingdom of Jaffna, p. 240. IB’s Kunwar was probably not the
Sinhalese king but a well-known chief minister who was exercising power in the
ruler’s name. Nicholas and Paranavitana, History of Ceylon, p. 296; Pathman-
athan, Kingdom of Jaffna, p. 238. The Sinhalese state had been a large and
powerful one in earlier medieval times. but by the fourteenth century it had
declined precipitously and would be invaded by Jaffna about 1359.

6. IB offers no chronological information on his journey through Ceylon. By
his own reckoning he left the Maldives in August. Mahdi Husain (MH, pp. Ixviii-
Ixix) estimates a stay on the island of about two months, which seems reasonable.

7. IB says the admiral reported that no voyage could be made to the islands for
three months. This might be taken to mean that the summer monsoon was in full
strength, making the expedition risky from a navigational point of view. But unless
our chronological scheme is hopelessly off track, IB arrived in Ma‘bar in the fall,
that is, near the start of the northeast monsoon and the best time to sail for the
Maldives.

8. IB’s Pattan has not been identified, but Yule (Cathay, vol. 4, p. 35) suggests
that it stood somewhere on the Palk Strait leading into the Bay of Bengal. H. A. R.
Gibb suggests Kaveripattanam or Negapatam in the Kaveri River delta. [bn
Battuta: Travels in Asia and Africa (London, 1929), pp. 365-66n. Large vessels
leaving this port for the Maldives would have had to circumnavigate Ceylon owing
to the blocking reefs of Adam’s Bridge.

9. IB gives no clue about the pathology of this epidemic, but he does not link it
specifically to plague. which he witnessed later in Syria. The assertion of some

262 China

historians that the Black Death passed through India on its way to the Middle East and
Europe on the grounds that IB witnessed it in Madurai is not justified. Michael W. Dols
The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, N.J., 1977), p. 377.

10. G.R. Tibbetts, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the Coming of the
Portuguese (London, 1971), p. 377.

11. Ships would very likely have been leaving the Ma’bar coast in December for
voyages to Malabar and on to South Arabia. The West Coast of India Pilot, 1\th edn.
(London, 1975), p. 24; Tibbetts, Arab Navigation, p. 375. Such a departure time fits in
well with my suggested reconstruction of the chronology.

12. The Book of Ser Marco Polo, trans. and ed. Henry Yule, 2 vols., 3rd edn., rev.
Henri Cordier (London, 1929), vol. 2, p. 389.

13. Yule (Cathay, vol. 4, p. 35) identifies this place with Pigeon Island.

14. At several other places in the Rihia IB refers to gifts and souvenirs he lost in this
holdup, including a set of tomb inscriptions he had copied when he passed through
Bukhara in Central Asia.

15. IB states that his son was about two years old when he saw him in the Maldives.
But if the boy was born shortly after his father left the islands the first time (in August
1344), he would have been less than a year old at the time of the second visit. See note
16. Perhaps a lapse of memory is the explanation here.

16. Following the monsoon pattern, IB must have left Calicut no later than May.
Calicut harbor would have been closed in June and July, and if he waited until the end of
the summer to go to the Maldives, he would not have found ships at that season sailing
from there to Bengal.

17. Morris Rossabi, “The Muslims in the Early Yuan Dynasty” in John D. Langlois,
Jr., China under Mongol Rule (Princeton, N.J., 1981), pp. 274-77; Howard D. Smith,
“Zaitun’s Five Centuries of Sino-Foreign Trade,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society,
pts. 3 and 4 (1958): 165-77.

18. Marshall G. S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1974), vol. 2, p.
541.

19. A.H. Hill, “The Coming of Islam to North Sumatra,” Journal of Southeast Asian
History 4 (1963): 6-21.

20. The most adamant skeptic is Gabriel Ferrand, Relations de voyages et textes
géographiques arabes, persans et turks relatifs a l’Extréme Orient du VIII au XVIII
siécles, 2 vols. (Paris, 1913-14). He finds IB’s itinerary through Southeast Asia and
China “absurd or unrealizable” (vol. 2, p. 429) and concludes that IB “never went to
Indochina and invented the journey out of whole cloth; or else either Ibn Juzayy or
copyists of manuscripts of the narrative modified the text to the point where it is devoid
of any exactitude” (vol. 2, pp. 432-33). Yule, who had published the most detailed
annotation of the China trip, accepts IB’s veracity in general but points out numerous
flaws and puzzles in this section of the Rih/a that must raise genuine doubts. Cathay, vol.
4, pp. 50-51 and passim. Gibb believes IB went to China, observing that to reject its
veracity raises more problems with the text than otherwise. Travels in Asia and Africa,
pp. 13-14. More recently, Peter Jackson has argued that IB’s sojourn in China is “highly
suspect,” emphasizing Yule’s observations that (1) the mosque IB claims to have seen at
Canton in 1346 burned down in 1343 and was not rebuilt until 1349-51, and (2) his
account of political events in Peking and North China during his visit there in 1347 bears
almost no resemblance to what we know from numerous other sources. “The Mongols
and India (1221-1351),” Ph.D. diss., Cambridge University, 1977, p. 221.

21. The Voyage of Francois Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies, the Maldives, and
Moluccas and Brazil, trans. and ed. Albert Gray, 2 vols. (London, n.d. (Hakluyt
Society); reprint edn., New York, 19637), vol. 1, pp. 237-42; MH, p. 201.

22. N.K. Bhattasali, Coins and Chronology of the Early Independent Sultans of
Bengal (Cambridge, England, 1922; reprint edn., New Delhi, 1976), pp. 150-54.

23. IB identifies the place of his debarkation as Sudkawan. Several historians have
taken sides on the issue of whether this toponym corresponds to Chittagong, today an

China 263

important city in southeastern Bangladesh, or Satgaon, a medieval commercial
center in the western delta region north of modern Calcutta. The proponents of
Chittagong are Muhammad Abdur Rahim, Social and Cultural History of Bengal
(Karachi, 1963), pp. 12-14; Bhattasali, Coins and Chronology, pp. 145-49; Gibb,
Travels in Asia and Africa, p. 366n, MH, p. 235n; and Yule, Cathay, vol. 4, p. 82n.
The advocates of Satgaon are Jadunath Sarkar (ed.), The History of Bengal, 2 vols.
(Dacca, 1948), vol. 2, p. 100; fbn Batutah’s Account of Bengal, trans. Harinath De,
and ed. P.N. Ghosh (Calcutta, 1978), app. 1, pp. 1-4; Ferrand, Relations de
voyages, pp. 434-35; and Henri Cordier, editor of 3rd edn. of Yule’s Cathay, vol. 4,
p. 82n. Without laying out the several semantic and geographical arguments ad-
vanced on both sides, I find the case for Chittagong the more convincing, especially
in the context of IB’s subsequent movements through Bengal.

24. IB states that he went to see Shah Jalal in the mountains of Kamaru, that is,
Kamrup in Assam. Sylhet, however, is on the edge of the delta region just south of
the hills of Assam. IB does not mention Sylhet by name, but Shah Jalal is known to
have resided there. Yule, Cathay, vol. 4, pp. 151-52. Mahdi Husain (MH, p. 237n)
suggests that IB made a long looping tour up the Brahmaputra River through
central Assam, then southward to Sylhet. But there is nothing in IB’s account of his
personal experiences indicating he went any further north than Sylhet.

25. In connection with his befriending al-Tuzari in Cairo, IB states that the man
“continued to accompany me for many years, until we quitted the land of India,
when he died at Sandabur.” Gb, vol. 2, p. 415. However, IB says nothing of al-
Tuzari in the account of his experiences at Sandapur. and the man was apparently
still in his suite later in Ma’bar. It is conceivable that IB made a subsequent visit to
Sandapur that he never mentions in the Rih/a and left al-Tuzari there; or else al-
Tuzari went there on his own when JB left India on his way to China.

26. IB calls the man he visited Shaykh Jalal al-Din al-Tabrizi, but he appears to
have confused the saint of this name, a divine of the Suhrawardi order who died
about 1225, with Shah Jalal, the Muslim conqueror of Sylhet. Abdul Karim, Social
History of the Muslims of Bengal (Dacca, 1959), pp. 91-101; Abdur Rahim, Social
and Cultural History of Bengal, pp. 85-103; Bhattasali, Coins and Chronology, pp.
149-54. This mistake might raise questions about the authenticity of IB’s journey
into the interior of Bengal, except that Bengalis themselves commonly confuse
these two holy men and even use “Shah Jalal” as a generic term for any powerful
saint. Personal communication from Richard Eaton, University of Arizona.

27. G.R. Tibbetts, A Study of the Arabic Texts Containing Material on South-
East Asia (Leiden, 1979), p. 97; Yule, Cathay, vol. 4, pp. 93-94n.

28. The identification of Qaqula is a puzzle. IB places his visit there after his
stopover in Sumatra and identifies the place with Mul-Java, which in some Arabic
texts means the island of Java. None of the principal commentators, however, are
convinced that IB actually visited Java. Cordier (Yule, Cathay, vol. 4, p. 157n)
believes Qaqula to be located on the east coast of the Malay Peninsula, that is,
along IB’s route from the Strait of Malacca to China. Tibbetts (Arabic Texts, pp.
97-98) makes an interesting case for placing Qaqula on the western, or Tenasserim,
coast of Malaya. He suggests that the description of it may be displaced in the Rihla
and that IB probably stopped there on his way from Burma to Samudra (northwest
Sumatra).

29. IB calls the island of Sumatra “Java,” which was common medieval usage.
Marco Polo calls Sumatra “Java the Less.” Paul Pelliot, Notes on Marco Polo, 2
vols. (reprint edn, Paris, 1959-63), vol. 2, pp. 757-58; Yule, Cathay, pp. 94-95.
The commercial center, known as Samudra, whose exact medieval site is not
certain, later gave its name to the entire island. Kenneth R. Hall, “Trade and
Statecraft in the Western Archipelago at the Dawn of the European Age,” Journal
of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 54 (1981): 30-31, Hill, “North
Sumatra,” pp. 7-12.

264 China

30. Hill, “North Sumatra,” pp. 13-15.

31. Kenneth R. Hall, “The Coming of Islam to the Archipelago: A
Re-Assessment” in Karl L. Hutterer (ed.), Economic Exchange and Social Inter.
action in Southeast Asia (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1977), p. 226.

32. IB implies in the Rihla that he left at the start of the southwest monsoon. as
Défrémery and Sanguinetti (D&S, vol. 4, p. 239) note parenthetically.

33. Teobaldo Filesi, China and Africa in the Middle Ages, trans. D.L. Morisen
(London, 1972), p. 15.

34. One of the stops mentioned is Qaqula. See note 28. The other is a port called
Kaylukari (Cailoucary) in the country of Tawalisi. IB’s description of his visit to the
female governor of the city (and daughter of the king) reads as though it were a
pastiche of legends, misplaced anecdotes, and garbled geography. The people of
this realm look like Turks, IB says, and the king is the equal of the emperor of
China, against whom he conducts successful naval campaigns. The governor-
princess, who happens to have the same name as one of the wives of Ozbeg, Khan
of Kipchak, speaks Turkish, writes Arabic characters skillfully, but is not a Muslim!
She also commands a force of female mounted archers! Yule (Cathay, vol. 4, pp.
157-60) develops a lengthy, unconvincing argument to suggest that Tawalisi is a
kingdom in the Sulu Archipelago, the most southerly island group of the
Philippines. Défrémery and Sanguinetti (D&S, vol. 4, p. 248) put forward Tonkin
or the Celebes without explanation. Yamamato Tatsuro argues for Champa, i.e.,
southeastern Indochina. “Tawalisi Described by Ibn Battuta,” Memoirs of the
Research Department of the Toyo Bunko, no. 8 (1936), pp. 93-133. Tibbetts
(Arabic Texts, p. 98) favors Indochina. Assuming that IB traveled the normal route
from the Strait of Malacca to South China and did not visit Java, then intermediary
stops along the Malayan or Indochinese coast would not have been out of the
ordinary. The description of Tawalisi, however, does seem embellished with infor-
mation pulled from other contexts. Legends and tales about a mysterious “kingdom
of women” or “island of women” appear in Arabic, as well as European and
Chinese, medieval literature. Pelliot, Notes on Marco Polo, vol. 2, pp. 671-725.

35. D&S, vol. 4, p. 267.

36. D&S, vol. 4, pp. 282-83.

37. Because of the language barrier, IB would certainly have had difficulty
remembering, or even recording in notes, numerous Chinese place names. When
he and Ibn Juzayy composed the Rihla, we may suppose they had at hand a library
of standard Arab geographical and travel works and used them to help IB refresh
his memory about particular places, including the spelling of toponyms. Such
reference works, however, had little to say about China, obliging him to rely on his
own recollections or notes (if there were any) when mentioning strange Chinese
place names to his collaborator.

38. Gibb (Travels in Asia and Africa, p. 371n) makes a tentative case for
Qanjanfu being Fu-chou. Yule (Cathay, vol. 4, pp. 126-27n) argues that the place
may be identified with Kien Ch’ang Fu in the interior province of Kiang’si
(Juangxi). But, as Gibb points out, a route from Ch’uan-chou to Hang-chou by
way of Kiang’si would have been roundabout and very unlikely.

39. Gibb, Travels in Asia and Africa, p. 292. Gibb notes (p. 14) that IB would
never have told of such an encounter if he had not really traveled to China, since
the citizens of Ceuta might well have confirmed the story through the family of al-
Bushri at some later time. Also see Chapter 13 on IB’s meeting al-Bushri’s brother
in southern Morocco in 1353.

40. Jacques Gernet, Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion
1250-1276, trans. H.M. Wright (Stanford, Calif., 1970), pp. 27-31.

41. Yule (Cathay, vol. 4, p. 130) notes that “there are several very questionable
statements in Ibn Batuta’s account of the great city.”

42. Aside from some descriptive incongruities, IB’s account of his visit to Peking

China 265

is made barely credible by his assertion that he witnessed the funeral of the Yuan
emperor, who, he says, had died in battle attempting to quell a revolt led by a rival
member of the royal house. There is no doubt at all, however, that Toghon Temur
reigned straight through from 1333 to 1368. Yule (Cathay. vol. 4, p. 142) can find
no “indication of any circumstance occurring about this time that could have made
the foundation of such a story,” though IB’s description of Mongol funereal ritual is
generally accurate (p. 143). Jackson (“Mongols and India *, p. 221) thinks the story
may be “a very garbled version” of a succession conflict that had taken place in
China in 1328-29, when IB was far away in Arabia and Africa.

12 Home

Civilization both in the East and the West was visited bya
destructive plague which devastated nations and caused
populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good
things of civilization and wiped them out . . . Civilization
decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and
buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were
obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty,
dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited
world changed. '

Ibn Khaldun

Sometime in Ramadan 747 A.H. (December 1346 or January
1347) Ibn Battuta arrived back in Quilon on the south Malabar
coast. He had sailed all the way through from Chu’an-chou to
India on a single winter’s monsoon, changing ships at Samudra in
the Malacca Strait and making a return visit of a few weeks to the
court of Sultan al-Malik al-Zahir. Once in Quilon he lodged with
the qadi until the Breaking of the Fast, then traveled on up the
coast to Calicut.

Here he had another argument with himself over the advisability
of returning to North India, throwing himself on the mercy of
Muhammad Tughlug, and perhaps recovering his judicial
sinecure. Such a plan might be brash enough to work in the short
run. Yet quite apart from the probability that his appearance
before the royal Person would be swiftly followed by his ex-
ecution, anyone in Malabar could have warned him that the
Tughlug empire was in a more advanced state of deterioration
than when he had left India and that Delhi in 1346 was hardly an
auspicious place to rebuild a career in public service. And so,
repudiating once and for all the attractions of that extraordinary
city, he decided not to travel north. (Muhammad Tughluq had in
fact left Delhi the previous year on one of his frantic campaigns.
He would never return again, perishing of an illness on the banks
of the Indus in 1351 while obsessively chasing down his last rebel.

266

Map II: Ibn Battuta’s Return Itinerary from China to North Africa, 1346—49

Isfahan

3 a

Ch’uan-chou 0

268 Home

His successor, Firuz Tughluq, would inherit only a modest North
Indian state and be obliged to share the subcontinent with a
patchwork of upstart Muslim and Hindu kingdoms.)

When Ibn Battuta had first angered Muhammad Tughlug back
in 1340 over the Shihab al-Din affair, he had thought then of
making the hajj again, if only as a credible excuse for getting out of
the sultanate. Now, in the absence of any further prospects for a
career in India, Mecca seemed more than ever a sensible des-
tination.

The season for westbound voyages from Malabar was coming to
an end, but he managed to secure passage on a ship embarking for
Zafar (Dhofar), the South Arabian port he had visited 18 years
earlier in connection with his trip to East Africa. He has nothing to
say about his spring voyage across the open expanse of the
Arabian Sea except that the trip took a normal 28 days and that he
reached Zafar in Muharram 748, that is, sometime after 13 April
1347. Possibly because the next hajj season was almost a year away
or because he would have had to wait in tedious Zafar until
September to get a westbound ship to Aden, he decided to make a
grand looping tour through Persia, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt,
violating once again his quixotic oath never to travel by the same
road twice.

From Zafar he sailed on a coasting vessel that was running
before the early summer monsoon up to the Gulf of Oman and the
Strait of Hurmuz. Arrived at Hurmuz city, he found the elderly
Arab ruler of that great emporium locked in a naval war with two
of his nephews for control of the family domain, which included all
the key ports of the strait. The fighting had severely disrupted the
India trade, and the country was gripped by famine. Ibn Battuta
stayed there for about two weeks but had only one brief meeting
with the old sultan, who was preoccupied fitting out his war
galleys.*

The political and economic troubles [bn Battuta found at the
mouth of the Persian Gulf were echoes of the violent disin-
tegration of the IIkhanid state, which had occurred twelve years
earlier when he was just beginning his career in Delhi. For
three-quarters of a century the successors of the Mongol con-
queror Hulegu had held greater Persia precariously together, but
the finances of the IIkhanate rested on an agricultural and urban
recovery that was too limp to ensure firm, confident central rule
over the long term. When the young king Abu Sa’id died suddenly

Home 269

in 1335 while on campaign in the Caucasus against the Golden Horde,
he left a government debilitated by chronic frontier wars and a throne
with no obvious successor groomed to mount it. On the instant, an
omnivorous mix of Mongol and Turkish commanders leapt into the
political void, violently challenging one another for control of the
land. By the time Ibn Battuta returned to the region, the great
kingdom had been superseded by a cluster of states, ruled by parvenu
military dynasties. Thus the Khanate of the Ikhans was the first of the
four Tatar empires to run its course, heralding the last days of the
Mongol Age.

Apparently having little urge to discover what any of these petty
regimes might offer him, Ibn Battuta hurried through Persia, making
his only important stopover at Shiraz. Traveling north to Isfahan, then
westward over the Zagros Mountain passes to Basra, he retraced his
journey of 1327 up the valley of the Euphrates. In January 1348
(Shawwal 748) he made a brief stop in Baghdad. From there he
continued along the valley beyond ’Anah, then crossed the Syrian
desert on the camel route through Palmyra (Tadmor). He reached
Damascus, second capital of the Mamluk Sultanate, some time in the
late winter of 1348.

The first time he had visited Damascus in 1326, he had married a
woman of Moroccan ongin. But he divorced her when he set out for
Mecca, terminating a union that lasted hardly more than a few weeks.
Much later in India he learned that after the separation the woman had
given birth to a son. Feeling some responsibility for the boy, if not for
the mother, he had sent his ex-wife's father, who lived not in Syria but
in Morocco, a gift of 40 gold dinars. presumably through the good
offices of a westbound merchant. Now arrived in Damascus again, he
soon learned that the son he had never seen had died about 1336 at the
age of ten.

More unhappy news followed. a Moroccan jurist who was affiliated
with one of the Damascene colleges informed him that his father had
passed away in Tangier some 15 years earlier. His mother, as far as the
man knew, was still alive and well.

After resting in Damascus for several weeks, he decided about the
end of March to make a trip up to Aleppo (Haleb), the second ranking
city of industry and commerce in Syria and the seat of Mamluk
administration on the northern frontier. This journey was to be one of
his leisurely diversions, an itinerary to occupy a few months before it
was time to travel toward Mecca. Yet even as he rode north, the
catastrophe of the fourteenth century descended on Syria behind him.*

270 Home

While Ibn Battuta was enjoying the company of the ‘ulama of
Aleppo in June 1348, travelers reaching the city from the south
reported that a virulent disease had been raging at Gaza on the
Egyptian frontier and that more than a thousand people had been
dying from it every day. Buboes, or inflamed swellings, appeared
in the groin, armpits, or neck of the afflicted, and this irruption
was typically accompanied by nausea, pain in the head, stomach,
and limbs, insomnia, and delirium. If a victim began to spit blood
and experience pneumonic symptoms, he usually died within
hours.

Amid rumors of this lethal darkness advancing into Syria, Ibn
Battuta decided to return south. He got as far as the town of Homs
when he suddenly found himself engulfed in the epidemic, 300
people dying the day he arrived there. Continuing on to Damacus,
he reached the great oasis in July to find that the plague had
already struck. The death toll had risen to 2,000 a day, the
population was reeling in shock, and the mundane routines of the
city had come to a halt.

The people fasted for three successive days, the last of which
was a Thursday. At the end of this period the amirs, sharifs,
gadis, doctors of the Law, and all other classes of the people in
their several degrees, assembled in the Great mosque, until it
was filled to overflowing with them, and spent Thursday night
there in prayers and liturgies and supplications. Then, after
performing the dawn prayer . . ., they all went out together on
foot carrying Korans in their hands — the amirs too barefooted.
The entire population of the city joined in the exodus, male and
female, small and large, the Jews went out with their book of
the law and the Christians with their Gospel, their women and
children with them; the whole concourse of them in tears and
humble supplications, imploring the favor of God through His
Books and His Prophets.”

At the same time that Ibn Battuta had been sailing westward from
China to his expectant reunion with the Islamic heartland, so the
Black Death, the greatest pandemic disaster since the sixth
century, was making its terrible way across the Central Asian
grasslands to the shores of the Black Sea. Plague was endemic
among ground-burrowing rodent populations of the Inner Asian
steppe. It was transmitted from animals to humans by the bite ofa

Home 271

common species of flea. Hatching and living in the fur of plague-
afflicted rats, infected fleas found their way to sacks of grain and
other foodstuffs or to clothing. The plague appears to have started
among pastoral folk of East Central Asia, spreading outward from
there along the trade routes both southwest and west, beginning
about 1331. Lurking among the merchandise in commercial wagon
trains or the storerooms of caravansaries, fleas carried the bacillus
Yersinia pestis to the bloodstream of humans. The bubonic type of
plague, which produced buboes on the body, could be spread only
by infected fleas and their rodent hosts. However, pneumonic
plague, the deadlier form of the disease, was transmitted directly
from one human to another. As the pestilence broke out in one
oasis or khan after another, survivors hurried onto the next place
along the trail, thereby unwittingly carrying the disease
throughout the commercial network of the steppe. The same
Mongol law and order that made possible a century of intense
human interchange between China and the Atlantic coast now
quickened the progress of the plague bacillus across Eurasia. The
Black Death was the grimly ironic price the world paid for the
trans-hemispheric unity of the Pax Mongolica.

In China, where the Great Wall was no defense whatsoever
against the advance of such an invader, major outbreaks of plague
occurred in 1353 and 1354, producing massive mortality and
economic disruption and probably contributing to the collapse of
the Yuan dynasty 14 years later. In the west the disease advanced
through the Kipchak Khanate to the Black Sea, where it struck the
Genoese colony at Kaffa in 1346. From there Italian ships carried
infected rats and fleas amongst cargoes of grain, timber, and furs
southward to Constantinople, then on to Venice and Genoa. The
epidemic appeared about simultaneously in Sicily and Egypt in the
autumn of 1347. The Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi tells the ghastly
tale of a trading ship, probably from the Black Sea, arriving one
day in Alexandria harbor. Out of a total company of 332, all but 40
sailors, 4 merchants, and 1 slave had succumbed to the plague at
sea. And all who had survived the voyage presently died in the
port.°

In the calamitous year of 1348 ships of death coursed westward
throughout the Mediterranean basin, inflicting their grim lading
on one port after another. From the ports, mule trains and camel
caravans transmitted the disease to the interior regions of Europe,
northern Africa, and the Middle East. Paris and Bordeaux,

272 Home

Barcelona and Valencia, Tunis and Cairo, Damascus and Aleppo
all suffered massive plague mortality in the spring and summer of
1348. By the following year the contagion was moving up the
valley of the Nile and crossing the English Channel to the British
Isles. By the end of 1350, when the first assault of the disease was
playing itself out, Europe may have lost as much as one-third of its
population. Mortality rates in the Islamic lands were probably
comparable. Cairo’s pre-plague population of perhaps half a
million may have been reduced by 200,000. The population of
Damascus may have diminished from 80,000 to less than 50,000,’

The Black Death struck the cities and towns of Islam with the
suddenness and surprise of a Mongol attack. The usual patterns of
quotidian life were abandoned, and communities gave themselves
to prayers of supplication and to the overwhelming task of
washing, shrouding, and burying the proliferating dead. Funeral
processions moved through the streets in a never-ending parade of
grief. Stocks of coffins and burial garments ran out, and
gravediggers who managed to survive commanded exorbitant fees
for their work. Mosques closed when all the officials and
caretakers died. Many who fled the plague in vain hope of evading
it fell dead along the road with their horses and camels. A scholar
witnessing the scene in Egypt writes of “these dead who are laid
out on the highway like an ambush for others.”®

Both Muslims and Christians struggled to fit this unprecedented
disaster into a framework of spiritual meaning. Christian doctrine
invited the conclusion that the sins of mankind had accumulated to
the point where God was obliged to teach his creation a lesson it
would never forget. Amid the horrors of the plague, many be-
lieved the lesson was to be the final one, the end of the world. A
mood of impending apocalypse seized Europe, producing
obsessive preoccupation with images of death, furious
self-flagellating movements to expiate sins, and massacres of Jews,
the traditional target of hostility and fear. In Islam, by contrast, no
doctrine of original sin pervaded theology. All events affecting the
community of believers were to be understood as the continuing
revealing of God’s will. Despite social trauma in the midst of the
plague, Muslims mostly accepted it as a manifestation of God’s
unknowable plan for His creation. Mass public supplications to
God to lift the scourge probably occurred in most cities and towns
of the Middle East, but expiation crusades, messianism, OF
persecution of minorities were not in evidence.

Home 273

Neither Muslims nor Christians in that age had the faintest
notion of the medical pathology of the disease, which was not
discovered until the late nineteenth century. In both Europe and
the Islamic world the epidemic was generally attributed to a
miasma, that is, a corruption of the air. Some authorities linked it
to a polluted wind, a mysterious “impoisoned blast” blowing out of
Central Asia or from the open sea.” Prophylactic advice
abounded. Muslims were recommended to live in fresh air,
sprinkle one’s house with rose water and vinegar, sit as motionless
as possible, and eat plenty of pickled onions and fresh fruit. Those
who fell victim to the disease were advised to have their blood
drawn, apply egg yolk to the plague buboes, wear magical
amulets, or have their sick bed strewn with fresh flowers. Above
all, God’s creatures were urged to spend their nights in the mosque
and beg divine mercy.

Ibn Battuta says nothing of any personal measures he may have
taken to keep from falling ill, but he left Damascus sometime after
July 1348 in good health, even as the pestilence raged around him.
He does not seem to have taken to the road to escape the plague
but only to continue on his way to Mecca by way of Egypt, where
the sickness was as bad as it was in Syria, if not worse. Traveling
southward into Palestine through one depopulated village after
another, their water wheels idle and their fields abandoned, he
arrived at Jerusalem to find that the contagion had abated there.
In fact, the preacher of the grand mosque invited him to a feast in
fulfillment of an oath to give special thanks to God as soon as a day
passed on which no one perished.

Joining up with two gentlemen of North African origin, Ibn
Battuta continued on in their company through Judaea to Gaza,
which he found mostly deserted in the wake of the Death. Indeed
the population of the entire Nile Delta region was declining
drastically in the fall months of 1348, when the plague was at its
worst.'° The travelers passed through Alexandria, where the
epidemic may have first entered Egypt in the fall of 1347, to learn
that there the daily mortality rate was finally subsiding.

In Cairo, however, the toll was still rising. Urban land and
property were being abandoned precipitately, commerce and in-
dustry became paralyzed, and, in the words of one chronicler, “the
deaths had increased until it had emptied the streets.”'! The
Mamluk Sultan al-Hasan fled from Cairo to a country estate in

274 Home

September and stayed away from his capital for three months. !2
The royal officer corps, living in close quarters in the Citadel and
refusing to leave Cairo for fear of losing their power and rank to
rival Mamluks, sustained such a high rate of die-off that the army
and administration of the sultanate fell into a state of disorder and
diminished capacity lasting several decades.!*

Ibn Battuta probably stayed in the ravaged city no more than a
few days, then continued on up the Nile. Now, happily, he moved
ahead of the plague, which did not strike Upper Egypt until about
February 1349.'* Crossing the Red Sea from ’Aydhab to Jidda as
he had done in the reverse direction 18 years earlier, he performed
the ceremony of the tawaf around the Holy Ka’ba on 16 November
1348 (22 Sha’ban 749), praising God that he had so far been
spared. He remained in Mecca for more than four months as the
guest of the Maliki imam, awaiting the hajj of 749. He relates
nothing about plague in the city, though other historical sources
report that it raged there during the pilgrimage season, introduced
by the caravans from Egypt or Syria.'°

Since returning from India, Ibn Battuta’s wish had been to stand
before the Holy House one more time. Now that he had done it,
he may have had no further plans in particular. For the time being
at least, he decided to go back to Cairo (by a route through
Medina, Jerusalem, and the Sinai). The Mamluk capital was
hardly the city he had known in 1326. Aside from the ruin and
wastage of the plague (which abated only after January 1349), the
quality of leadership over the Mamluk state had badly de-
teriorated since the death of al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qala’un in
1341. Over the ensuing decade that great builder was succeeded by
four different sons and grandsons, all of whom were lusterless or
infantile pawns of one quarreling military faction or another.

Perhaps the bleak scene in Cairo quickened the journeyer’s
resolve to return at last to his native land. He was 45 years old, he
had been abroad for 24 years, and, so far as he knew, his aged
mother was alive and still living in Tangier. In his absence Fez, the
capital of the Marinid dynasty, had blossomed into the premier
city of Maliki religious and legal studies in western Islam. As a
former gadi of the Sultanate of Delhi, he should, if he wished,
have no trouble securing a government post either in Fez or some
other Moroccan town. And, ironically enough, Morocco was one
of the few corners of the Islamic world he had not yet explored. In
the end, however, sentiment and nothing else may have impelled

Home 275

him to head for that beautiful land of the Far West: “I was moved
{to go back] by memories of my homeland, affection for my family
and dear friends, who drew me toward my land, which, in my
opinion, was better than any other country.”'®

Leaving Egypt for the last time on a small vessel belonging to a
mariner from Tunis, Ibn Battuta sailed along the Cyrenaican and
Tripolitanian coasts to the port of Gabés (Kabis) on the south
Ifriqiyan mainland where he passed the feast of the Prophet’s
birthday on 31 May 1349 (12 Rabi’ I 750) in the company of the
local notables. Continuing up the coast by sea, he joined a party of
bedouin traveling overland to Tunis, a city then under the com-
mand of the Amir of the Muslims and Defender of the Faith Abu
l’Hasan, Sultan of Morocco.

A quarter of a century earlier Ibn Battuta had traveled across
the Eastern Maghrib in conditions of military turmoil. Now it
might have appeared to him that little had changed. The Arab
tribes of the Ifriqiyan plains were up in arms, and Tunis lay under
siege. Yet the pattern of North African power politics had altered
drastically in his absence. By going abroad for so long he had
missed most of the reign of Abu Hasan (1331-51), the most
illustrious of the Marinid kings. Called the Black Sultan because of
the dark visage he inherited from his Ethiopian slave mother, Abu
!’'Hasan was more than any of his predecessors impassioned by the
old Almohad vision of a vast Islamic state embracing the entire
western Mediterranean basin. In 1333 he recaptured Gibraltar
from King Alfonso XI of Castile and during the ensuing four years
seized most of the important towns of the "Abd al-Wadid kingdom
of the central Maghrib, including Tlemcen, the capital. In 1340 he
sent 44 war galleys into the Strait of Gibraltar to inflict a
calamitous defeat on the Castilian fleet. Six months later he
launched an invasion of Spain in alliance with the Sultanate of
Granada. This time, however, a combined army of heavily
armored knights from Castile, Aragon, and Portugal routed his
forces near the Rio Salado.

The Battle of Rio Salado ended once and for all any serious
Muslim hopes of reversing the Christian reconquista. Indeed, Abu
"Hasan may have been so fearful that the Spanish crusade would
now advance on Africa that he redoubled his efforts to bring the
entire Maghrib and its resources in commerce and manpower
under his control. Taking advantage of a succession crisis within

276 Home

the ruling Hafsid family, he invaded Ifriqiya by land and sea in
September 1347 and drove the Hasfids from Tunis.

The Marinid seizure of Tunis was a remarkable feat of military
leadership. Yet Abu l’Hasan’s army was now operating almost 900
miles from Fez, and the Ifriqiyan population remained implacably
hostile to his occupation. In the spring of 1348 he ventured to firm
up his authority over the plains south of the capital, but an alliance
of bedouin tribes met his forces near Kairouan and beat them so
badly that he was forced to retreat to Tunis by sea in utter
humiliation. As if his human detractors were not troublesome
enough, his Ifriqiyan campaign coincided with the arrival of the
Black Death. According to the historian Jbn Khaldun, the plague
so debilitated his army in the field that it “settled the affair” at the
Battle of Kairouan.'!’ When he fell back on Tunis, he found the
contagion ravaging the city and killing off his courtiers and offi-
cials. Abu ’Inan, the sultan’s son and governor of the central
Maghrib, heard reports that his father had died at Kairouan.
Fearing rebellion in Morocco, he had himself proclaimed sultan at
Tlemcen in June 1348 and quickly marched on Fez.

When Ibn Battuta arrived in Tunis just one year later, the
Marinid dream of Mediterranean empire was for the time being
dead. Abu I’Hasan was still there, but bottled up within the Hafsid
palace and doing nothing to repel the bedouin forces which com-
manded the countryside beyond the city walls. A large number of
Moroccan scholars had accompanied the sultan to Ifriqiya, and Ibn
Battuta found lodging with one of them, apparently a cousin of
his. He had at least two audiences with his hapless sovereign,
giving him the usual information about the countries he had
visited.

Ibn Battuta stayed in Tunis for about a month, then decided to
continue on to Morocco despite the agitated state of political
affairs all across the Maghrib. He left Ifriqiya on a Catalan vessel,
hardly a surprising choice since in the mid fourteenth century the
merchants and ship masters of Barcelona dominated trade on the
sea routes between Spain and the Sicilian Channel. The ship was
bound for Tenés on the Algerian coast but on the way put in at
Cagliari at the southern end of the island of Sardinia.'*

The Kingdom of Aragon-Catalonia ruled the coastal regions of
Sardinia, giving Ibn Battuta an opportunity to set foot on Latin
Christian soil, the only time he would do so in his traveling career.
The visit, however, was brief and disagreeable. He left the ship to

Home 277

Map 12: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in North Africa, Spain and
West Africa, 1349-54

ATLANTIC

Ghadamés
e

Bir al-Ksaib

Takedda

Mali’s Capital
(?)

400 600
200

278 Home

visit a marketplace inside a chateau-fort in the vicinity of the port.
But then he was informed that some piratical residents of the
island had in mind to pursue his vessel after it embarked in order
to seize the Muslim passengers and presumably hold them for
ransom. Swearing that he would fast for two consecutive months if
the Almighty saved him from these sea rovers, he reboarded his
ship, which, as it happened, continued on its way without incident.
After ten days at sea, he reached Tenés.

From here he traveled overland to Tlemcen, which was then
under the authority of the rebellious Abu ‘Inan. Here he joined
two men of Tangierian origin and continued westward in their
company. In the wild hills near the modern day Algero—Moroccan
border the little party had a close brush with a band of high-
waymen, but they passed on safely to Taza. the little hillside city
commanding the high road to Fez. Apparently meeting up with
more travelers from Tangier, Ibn Battuta learned that the Black
Death had carried off his elderly mother only several months
earlier. Had she heard in her last days, perhaps from pilgrims
returning from the hajj of 749, that her long-departed son had
been seen in Mecca and might finally be coming home?

When Ibn Battuta left Morocco in 1325, he may well have in-
tended at the time to return in two or three years to pursue
advanced legal studies in Fez. Under the patronage of the Marinid
sultans, the city had come to rival Tunis as the premier North
African center of Maliki jurisprudence and Arab letters. The war
captains of the Banu Marin had rudely seized power in Morocco in
1248 without possessing any religious ideology to justify their
authority. Consequently, they moved quickly to assert their dis-
tinctive legitimacy by distancing themselves from the idiosyncratic
theological doctrines of the Almohads. They moved the dynastic
capital from Marrakech to Fez and invited learned exponents of
Malikism, whose views had been suppressed during the Almohad
century, to take up residence in the city, revitalize orthodox Maliki
education, and serve the administrative and judicial needs of the
new government.

When the Banu Marin came to power, Fez was already an
important Almohad military center and a busy commercial
junction linking the trans-Maghrib road with the caravan routes
that brought West African gold and ivory to the ports of the
Mediterranean. Nestled saucer-like in a lovely valley between the

Home 279

southern spurs of the Rif and the central plain, Fez had an
abundant water supply and a rich agricultural hinterland which
animated a profusion of craft industries.

Physically, ancient Fez occupied a remarkably small territory,
its growing population of merchants, artisans, civil officials,
scholars, laborers, and transients crammed within the circular
walls that enclosed the valley. Then in 1276 Abu Yusuf Ya’qub,
the second Marinid sultan, built a new urban foundation, called
Fez Jdid, or New Fez, to serve as the military and administrative
center of the dynasty. Set on a plateau above the old city and
enclosed within high double walls, Fez Jdid, like the Mamluk
citadel of Cairo, rose up as a conspicuous, fear-inspiring symbol of
Marinid power and permanence. It was the exclusive sanctuary of
the sultan, his high officials, his accountants and secretaries, and
selected units of the royal army.

Fez Jdid nonetheless remained dependent on the teeming,
labyrinthine city in the valley below, not only for its food and
luxuries, but also for many of the literate men who managed the
bureaus of state. As champions of Maliki orthodoxy, the early
Marinids sponsored the founding of madrasas on the organ-
izational and curricular pattern of the great colleges of the Middle
East. Abu Yusuf built the first college sometime before 1285.
Sultans Abu Sa’id and Abu I’Hasan founded five more, employing
the most talented Moroccan and Andalusian craftsmen to produce
buildings of exquisite decorative beauty. Abu IHasan also
founded madrasas in several other Moroccan cities, including
Tangier. The colleges of Fez soon attracted the flower of erudition
from all across the Maghrib, as well as from Muslim Granada.
Some of these luminaries divided their time between the madrasas
in the depths of the old city and the ministries of Fez Jdid. Others
came mainly to teach, thereby attracting to the colleges increasing
numbers of bright young men, several hundred of them by the mid
fourteenth century, to undertake advanced studies in the religious
sciences.

Sufi ideas were only just beginning to penetrate higher
education in Fez at the mid point of the fourteenth century. The
more rigorous leaders of the Maliki elite opposed any teachings
not firmly grounded in scriptural orthodoxy. The Marinids dis-
played respect for the most celebrated saints of western Islam, but
they distrusted the potential political influence of the Sufi holy
men who were becoming so popular among the Berber folk of the

280 Home

countryside. Yet despite the resistance of both the government
and the conservative religious establishment to the teachings of a
movement they could not satisfactorily control, the Sufi precepts
of love, divine grace, and spiritual fulfillment were already by the
middle of the century warming the chill corridors of Maliki for-
malism. An unknown Tangierian scholar just back from the East
could expect at least the more liberal-minded within the learned
circles of Fez to take a keen interest in his stories of personal
meetings with the great mystics of the age.

Ibn Battuta arrived in Fez on 8 November 1349 to find the city in
a state of uncertainty and suspense over the fate of the empire. !?
The usurper Abu ’Inan was the son of a Christian slave woman and
as slender and fair as his father was corpulent and black. He had
occupied Fez for more than a year and had made himself master of
Morocco. Like his father, he was a pious, cultivated man, given to
holding regular study sessions with the leading divines and jurists
and to writing belles-lettres and poetry. The elite of Old Fez
accommodated to his regime readily enough, but the fact re-
mained that for the moment there were two sultans and no one
knew when or if Abu |’Hasan might appear before the walls of Fez
at the head of his army. The usual course for the cosmopolitan
professional man in such circumstances was to submit to
whomever happened to be occupying the royal audience chamber
at the time.

Ibn Battuta, having just come from making obeisance to Abu
Hasan in Tunis, now presented himself at the great palace of Fez
Jdid to stand before his “illustrious master” Abu ’Inan. He appar-
ently did not get an opportunity to address the sultan, but a vizier
named Abu Ziyan ibn Wadrar offered him gifts and questioned
him about Egypt, a country the minister had visited. Ibn Battuta
decided not to stay in Fez for very long, however, since he was
anxious to return to Tangier. Given the precarious political situ-
ation in the capital, it was probably prudent, in any case, to go
elsewhere.

Arrived in his natal town some time during the fasting month of
Ramadan, he tells us only that he visited his mother’s grave.*” He
does not mention his deceased father, suggesting that the man may
have died in some other place. Nor does he describe joyous
reunions with brothers, sisters, cousins, or old friends. Indeed, the
fourteenth-century reader of the Rihla would find too much of that
sort of information tedious and irrelevant. Yet we can imagine a

Home 28}

homecoming of warm recognition and nights spent in the central
mosque or the houses of kinsmen, sharing tales of Muhammad
Tughlug and Ozbeg Khan and of those glorious days in the pre-
cinct of the Holy House.

Restless again after only a few days among the haunts of his
childhood, Ibn Battuta decided to make the short trip overland to
Ceuta (Sabta), which in that age was the queen city of the Strait of
Gibraltar. Endowed with a fine sheltered harbor and superb
natural defenses, Ceuta was the headquarters of the Marinid navy
and the chief Moroccan terminus of the West African gold trade.
The town was set on a tongue of land jutting eastward into the
Mediterranean. The eastern half of this little peninsula was
dominated by the heights of Mount Hacho (Jabal al-Musa). From
its summit lookouts had a commanding view of the strait and the
Iberian shore beyond.?!

When Ibn Battuta walked through Ceuta’s western gate, he was
in a sense already arriving in Muslim Spain. Located a mere 14
miles from Europe but separated from its own Moroccan hinter-
land by a chain of mountains, the city was culturally a prolongation
of Andalusia. Its leading official and scholarly families had
centuries-old ties to the great Muslim intellectual centers of Spain,
and as the Christian reconquista progressed in the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries, it was the chief port of entry for skilled and
educated refugees fleeing into Africa. From the point of view of a
lettered man, Ceuta’s mellow Andalusian sophistication made it a
much more interesting place than Tangier. So it is not surprising
that Ibn Battuta spent “several months” there, undoubtedly
frequenting the new college Abu !’Hasan had built and perhaps
making acquaintance with the al-Bushri family, whose scholar
kinsman he had met a few years earlier in China. He was, unfor-
tunately, ill during much of his visit. The plague was still raging in
the region of the strait, but he says nothing about contracting the
bubonic type (from which many did recover). More likely he was
suffering from yet another bout of malaria.

At the time he arrived in Ceuta, the city was intently following
reports from Gibraltar, 22 miles across the strait. In the previous
July Alfonso XI of Castile, taking advantage of the Marinid civil
crisis and Abu I’Hasan’s absence in Ifriqiya, had laid stege to the
Rock and its mighty fortifications. Since the loss of Algeciras to
Castile in 1344, Gibraltar remained the only port on the northern
shore of the strait still in Muslim hands. If Alfonso breached its

282 Home

walls, the immediate consequence would be to cut the main
military supply route, not only to the few towns the Moroccans stil]
held in Iberia, but also to their ally, the Nasrid Sultan of Granada.
More than that, the loss of Gibraltar would give Castile and its
Christian allies such a naval advantage in the strait that both
Tangier and Ceuta would be under a greater danger of invasion
than ever before.

Either in Tangier or Ceuta, Ibn Battuta learned that volunteers
were urgently wanted to aid the Moroccan army in the defense of
Gibraltar. Recovering from his illness in Ceuta and thanking God
for it, he decided to respond to the call. He had taken up arms a
time or two in his career, and he was certainly susceptible to the
high esteem Islam paid to those who served spontaneously in the
jihad. He set sail for the Rock on a small Moroccan vessel in
March or April 1350.7* By this time, however, the immediate
military crisis had completely dissipated. During the months of the
Castilian siege, the Black Death had made war on both armies
with scrupulous impartiality. On 26 March 1350, it took the life of
King Alfonso, distinguishing him as the only monarch of Christian
Europe to die in the epidemic of mid century.*° The loss of their
valiant warrior king obliged the Castilian forces to abandon the
siege, leaving the promontory and the isthmus of Gibraltar under
Muslim control, a state of affairs that would endure, as it turned
out, for another 112 years.

Whether to his disgruntlement or relief, Ibn Battuta was dis-
charged of any military duty when he arrived in Gibraltar port and
so was free to see the sights. He made a thorough inspection of the
promontory and its ramparts, climbing up to the Calahorra, a
massive stone tower Abu |’Hasan had constructed at the summit of
the citadel to serve as the pivot of the town’s defenses. The qgadi of
Gibraltar accompanied him on his tour and hosted him in his
house on one of the streets of the town, which lay up against the
western face of the Rock. “I desired to be, until the end of my life,
among those who guarded and defended this place,” Ibn Battuta
recalls in the Rihla with perhaps a hint of bravado. But since at the
moment there was no serious defending to be done, he was soon
on the road again, crossing the sandy neck of land that linked
Gibraltar to the highlands of Andalusia. He mentions no com-
panions and may well have been traveling with only a servant or
two.

With the withdrawal of the Christian siege, it was relatively safe

Home _ 283

for Muslim travelers to venture along the overland routes to
Granada. This Ibn Battuta now proposed to do, probably with the
hope of adding the Nasrid sultan Abu !’Hajjaj Yusuf ibn Isma’il to
the list of Muslim rulers who had invited him to their table. The
direct route from Gibraltar to Granada City ran along the
Mediterranean coast to Malaga. Typically, he decided to go a
different way, traveling northward through the rich vineyards and
fruit orchards of the Rio Guadiaro valley, then up into the forests
of the Sierra de Ronda. The city of Ronda, which occupied a
spectacular site straddling the deep gorge of the Tajo River, was
still a possession of the Marinids in 1350. Ibn Battuta may have
gone there partly to see a paternal first cousin of his, who was the
gadi of the town. After five days he returned to the coast again by
the treacherous mountain road over the Sierra Bermeja to the
little port of Marbella.

Here he made the acquaintance of twelve men who were just
then setting out for Malaga along the coast road through Suhayl
(Fuengirola), a fortress at the western frontier of the Nasrid
kingdom. He intended to join up with them, but for some unex-
plained reason they left Marbella without him. He found another
party of travelers, however, and was soon on his way.

Moving eastward along the narrow plain between the sea and
the Sierra de Mijas, Ibn Battuta had a mind at one point to ride
out ahead of his companions. All along this shore the Nasrid
sultans, and other Muslim rulers before them, had constructed
stone watchtowers at regular intervals to guard against coastal
raiders and to survey the movements of foreign navies. As he was
nearing one of these towers, he suddenly came upon a dead horse
lying by the side of the road. Suspicious of trouble but moving
along a little further, he came upon another horse recently slain.
Then, hearing shouts behind him, he returned to his fellows to find
them in the company of the Nasrid commander of Suhayl fort. The
twelve horsemen who had left Ibn Battuta behind in Marbella, it
seemed, had run into a band of Christian corsairs. The marauders
had approached the coast in four galleys. Finding no one on guard
at the watchtower to sound the alarm, a party of them had gone
ashore and ambushed the first travelers who happened by. One of
the horsemen had been murdered and one escaped. The remaining
ten had been taken prisoner to be held for ransom. Thanking God
for delivering him from infidel pirates for the second time in his
life, Ibn Battuta accepted the invitation of the commander of

284 Home

Suhayl to spend the night in the castle. The next day the officer
escorted the travelers safely on to Malaga, chief port of the Nasrid
realm.

Entering the city’s central mosque, a magnificent building
whose interior court bloomed with orange trees, Ibn Battuta found
the ‘ulama and other notables of the town gathered to collect
ransom money for the captured men, who were no doubt citizens
of Malaga. He told the assembled group his story of having barely
escaped death or capture himself. They were all astonished at his
good fortune, and the qadi and preacher both gave him
hospitality. If he ever learned how the negotiations with the
pirates turned out, he does not report it.

From Malaga he continued eastward to Velez Malaga (Ballish),
then turned into the mountains. He passed through Alhama, a
town famous for its hot spring baths, then continued on northeast-
ward to the Vega, the upper valley of the Genil River, whose
fertile highland plain sustained Granada City’s 50,000 in-
habitants.”

Two decades earlier Ibn Battuta had visited Christian Byzantium
at a time of military retreat before the triumphant Turks. Yet in
the same period Constantinople was the scene of brilliant
erudition in Greek science and philosophy, as if to make a final,
defiant statement of a thousand years of creativity before
surrendering to an ineluctable fate. At the opposite end of the
Mediterranean the Sultanate of Granada was displaying a similar
contradiction of trends. Like the three kingdoms of the Maghrib,
the Nasrid state had been founded in the aftermath of the
Almohad collapse. By 1248 it was, with the exception of the
enclaves the Marinids held on the coast, the only remaining
stronghold of Muslim power in Iberia. Pressed into its
mountainous corner of the peninsula by Castile and
Aragon — Catalonia, Granada struggled to survive by building up
its frontier defenses and pursuing a policy of pragmatic diplomacy
with Christian and Muslim neighbours alike.

The Sultanate had a population of perhaps a million people in
the fourteenth century,” a fervently Muslim population ready to
defend valley by valley what remained of its Iberian patrimony.
Inescapably, time was on the side of the Christian states. But while
Granada endured, its people dedicated themselves, perhaps con-
sciously so, to the mission of summing up six centuries of

Home 285

Andalusian civilization. The Nasrid cultural achievement was not
intellectually or aesthetically innovative. Rather it was a final
exquisite reaffirmation of the literary and artistic heritage of
Islamic Spain.

Demonstrating once again his remarkable ability to visit Muslim
kingdoms at their efflorescent best, Ibn Battuta saw Granada in
the reign of Abu I’Hajjaj Yusuf, or Yusuf ] (1333-54). Together
with his successor Muhammad V (1354-59, 1369-91), Yusuf was
the most successful ruler in a dynastic line of 23 largely undistin-
guished men. Following the débacle of the Battle of Rio Salado, in
which Granada had fought on the side of the Marinids, Yusuf
succeeded in arranging what proved to be long-term military
truces with both Castile and Aragon. Free for the time being from
the threat of invasion, he and his circle of brilliant ministers and
secretaries devoted themselves to perpetuating Andalusia’s
legendary tradition of urbane learning and taste. It was Yusuf (and
later Muhammad) who constructed the most beautiful courtyards
and portals of the Alhambra, “the red fort” which stands on a spur
of the Sierra Nevada overlooking the city of Granada and the
fertile valley of the Genil River beyond. The Alhambra was the
seat of Nasrid government and court life. From the outside it was a
forbidding, mysterious complex of stone ramparts, but within a
buoyant, gossamer composition of exquisitely decorated halls and
courts, juxtaposed one to another in a symphony of light, shadow,
and flowing water. “The peculiar charm of this old dreamy
palace,” Washington Irving wrote in the nineteenth century, “is its
power of calling up vague reveries and picturings of the past, and
thus clothing naked realities with the illusions of the memory and
the imagination.””

Ibn Battuta may have presented himself at the palace as soon as he
arrived in Granada. But he had no audience with Yusuf I. The
sultan, it seemed, was ill and not disposed to receive learned
visitors from Morocco. The visitor, to his consternation, never did
get to meet Yusuf during his brief sojourn in the city. He does not
say in the Rihla whether he ever went inside the Alhambra and in
fact omits any mention of it. The twentieth-century tourist 1s so
amazed by those splendorous rooms and courts that Ibn Battuta’s
failure to take the slightest note of them seems puzzling. Yet the
Alhambra is the only Islamic palace of that age to survive down to
our own time in all its ornamental delicacy. Ibn Battuta had seen

286 Home

the royal mansions of far bigger and richer kingdoms than the
Nasrid state, and to his eyes and his world the Alhambra may not
have seemed so special as it does to us.

He was not on the other hand totally ignored by the royal
family. When his arrival in Granada was made known to the
authorities, as it routinely would be, the sultan’s mother sent him a
purse of gold coins, which he found “very useful” for meeting his
expenses. He spent part of his time as the guest of various Maliki
notables and the rest visiting a number of Sufi lodges in the
Granadine suburbs or the nearby countryside. He even notes that
little bands of mendicant Sufis from as far away as Anatolia,
Persia, India, and Samarkand were settled in the town.

It was in the home of Abu I|’Kasim ibn ’Asim., one of Granada’s
eminent jurists, that he made what later proved to be the most
fateful acquaintance of his life. Over a period of two days and a
night he sat amongst a group of Andalusian gentlemen in Abu
I’Kasim’s lovely garden, recounting scenes and episodes of his
travels abroad. One of the men present was Abu ‘Abdallah
Muhammad ibn Juzayy, a 28- or 29-year-old ’alim who held a
secretarial post in the Nasrid government. He was one of three
sons of a noted Granadine jurist and poet who had been killed at
the Battle of Rio Salado. The young Ibn Juzayy carried on the
family’s distinguished literary tradition, writing poetry and com-
posing respectable works in philology, history, and law.”’

Absorbed by Ibn Battuta’s stories and the sheer breadth of his
travels, Ibn Juzayy meticulously copied down the names of famous
doctors and shaykhs the journeyer had met over the previous
quarter of a century. Since Ibn Battuta did not stay in Granada
very long, his acquaintance with Ibn Juzayy was probably fleeting.
But in another two and a half years the young secretary, in the
pattern of roving Andalusian scholars, would leave Granada to
take up service with Sultan Abu "Inan in Fez. He would be there
when Ibn Battuta returned from the far side of the Sahara Desert,
ready to accept the sultan’s assignment to set down in proper
literary form the complete record of the Tangierian’s remarkable
career.

Sometime around the end of 1350 Ibn Battuta returned to Ceuta.
For the next several months he journeyed about his homeland,
spending a few months in the Atlantic port of Asilah, visiting Salé
briefly, then riding south across the coastal plains to Marrakech,

Home 287

late capital of the Almohads. The shift of political power to Fez,
and probably the havoc of the Black Death, had caused
Marrakech to fall into a dilapidated state, worse, he recalls, than
Baghdad. Finding no reason to remain in those surroundings for
long, he returned north to the coast and from there to Fez.

In the meantime the drama of the Marinid kings had come to its
denouement in the triumph of Abu ’Inan. Late in 1349 Abu
Hasan had abandoned Tunis and returned to Morocco, de-
termined to reckon with his mutinous son. Reaching Marrakech
with a small force of exhausted followers, he had attempted to
erect a rival government. But in May 1350 Abu ‘Inan defeated his
forces outside the city, then pursued him southward into a valley
of the High Atlas. Trapped and powerless, the old sultan held out
through the ensuing winter, then made formal abdication in favor
of his son. When he died of illness and despair in his mountain
refuge later in the spring of 1351, Abu ’Inan carried his body to the
city of Rabat and had it buried with all the honors of state in the
royal necropolis of the dynasty.

These events occurred while Ibn Battuta was traveling about
Spain and northern Morocco. When he arrived in Fez the second
time, probably in the early fall of 1351, Abu ‘Inan was ruling
unrivaled a tranquil Morocco, plotting a new invasion of the
eastern Maghrib, and busily constructing the grandest madrasa
Fez had yet seen. It was an auspicious moment for Ibn Battuta to
settle down, enter the Maliki judiciary, and reflect on his years
abroad. Yet there were a few Muslim kings he still had not seen,
among them Mansa Sulayman, Emperor of Mali, whose capital lay
due south 1,500 miles across the most fearsome wilderness on
earth.

Notes

1. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, 2nd edn., trans. F. Rosenthal, 3 vols.
(Princeton, N.J., 1967), vol. 1, p. 64.

2. IB’s reckoning of time spent between Chu’an-chou and Quilon either at sea
or in the port of Samudra adds up to 222 days, or almost seven and a half months.
Yet if he left China at the start of the fall monsoon in September and arrived at
Quilon, as he states in Ramadan 747 (the month began on 16 December 1346), the
trip took no longer than about four and a half months. It was indeed feasible, as
Arab seamen had demonstrated in Abbasid times, to sail from the South China
coast to Malabar in a single monsoon season. George Hourani, Arab Seafaring tn
the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times (Princeton, N.J., 1951), p.
75. We must assume either that IB failed accurately to remember time spent

288 Home

between stages of the journey or possibly that part of the text is a later addition
IB’s description of his voyage from Chu’an-chou to Samudra includes an oddly
vague report of his ship being lost at sea for 42 days and an uncharacteristically
credulous account of a close call with a rukh, a giant bird of Hindu legend. Henry
Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither, 4 vols. (London, 1913-16). vol. 4, p. 146.

3. In the Rihla IB links the civil war in Hurmuz and his meeting there with
Sultan Qutb al-Din Tahamtan with his brief visit there in 1329 (1331). These events
clearly occurred, however, in 1347. Jean Aubin, “Les Princes d’Ormuz du XII le au
XVe siécle,” Journal Asiatique 241 (1953): 102-08; Hr, pp. 447-48; Gb, vol. 2, pp.
402-03. See also Chapter 6, note 41.

4. He says that he stayed in Damascus until the end of 748 A.H. The last day of
that year was 31 March 1348. The precise itinerary of IB’s travels through greater
Syria at this time is uncertain. Altogether, he traveled through some parts of Syria,
Lebanon, and Palestine at least four different times during his career, in 1326, 1330
(1332), 1348, and 1350. The descriptions of numerous cities, towns, and castles he
claims to have visited, however, are largely grouped into the account of his 1326
journey, whose chronology does not admit of such an extended, complicated tour.
See Chapter 3, note 26. Therefore, a confident sorting out of the several itineraries
through this region is hardly possible. The several dates he gives for his travels in
Syria, Egypt, and Arabia in 1348 (748-749 A.H.), however, are generally
corroborated by independent contemporary reports on the spatial transmission of
the Black Death.

5. Gb, vol. 1, pp. 143-44.

6. Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, N.J.,
1977), p. 69.

7. Ibid., pp. 215, 219.

8. Ibid., pp. 238 and 236-54 passim.

9. Ibid., p. 96.

10. Ibid., pp. 154, 155, 160, 161.

11. Ibn al-Furat quoted in ibid., p. 277.

12. Ibid., p. 173.

13. David Ayalon, “The Plague and its Effects upon the Mamluk Army,” Journal
of the Royal Asiatic Society (1946): 67-73; and Dols, Black Death, pp. 185-92.

14. Dols, Black Death, p. 161.

1S. Ibid., p. 63.

16. D&S, vol. 4, p. 326.

17. Quoted in Dols, Black Death, p. 64.

18. IB does not mention the name of the port he visited, but there is no real
doubt that it was Cagliari. Monteil shares this opinion. D&S, vol. 4, p. 481.

19. IB says that he reached Fez on a Friday near the end of Sha’ban 750. D&S
calculate this date as 8 November 1349. The last Friday in Sha’ban of that year,
however, was 6 November.

20. Chronological clues regarding the length of his subsequent visit to Ceuta and
the date of his departure for Spain suggest that if he was in Fez in Sha’ban 750, as
he says, he probably went on to Tangier early in the following month of Ramadan.

21. Derek Latham, “The Strategic Position and Defence of Ceuta in the Later
Muslim Period,” /slamic Quarterly 15 (1971): 195.

22. IB states that he reached Gibraltar shortly after the death of Alfonso XI.
That event occurred on 26 March 1350.

23. Robert S. Gottfried, The Black Death (New York, 1983), p. 51.

24. Rachel Arié, L’Espagne musulmane au temps des Nasrides, 1232-1492 (Paris,
1973), p. 339.

25. Derek W. Lomax, The Reconquest of Spain (London, 1978), p. 162.

26. Washington Irving, The Alhambra (New York, 1926), p. 71.

27. “Ibn Djuzayy,” El, vol. 3, p. 756.

Home 289

28. IB offers no specific dates for the period between his arrival in Fez in
November 1349 and his departure from southern Morocco to West Afnca on 18
February 1352. Therefore, the chronology of his movements from city to city in
Andalusia and Morocco during that period is indeterminate.

13 Mali

The people of Mali outnumbered the peoples of the Sudan
in their neighborhood and dominated the whole

region . . . Their authority became mighty and all the
peoples of the Sudan stood in awe of them.!

Ibn Khaldun

When Ibn Battuta visited Cairo in 1326 on his way to his first hajj,
the population was undoubtedly still talking about the ex-
traordinary pilgrim who had passed through the city two years
earlier. Mansa Musa, ruler of the West African empire of Mali,
had arrived at the Nile in the summer of 1324 after having crossed
the Sahara Desert with a retinue of officials, wives, soldiers, and
slaves numbering in the thousands and a train of one hundred
camels loaded with unworked gold. A handsome young king of
piety and noble bearing, he had created a minor sensation among
Cairo’s protocol-conscious officials by refusing to kiss the ground
before the Mamluk sultan, al-Nasir Muhammad. Yet he “flooded
Cairo with his benefactions,” writes the historian al-Umari, and
“performed many acts of charity and kindness.”

Having come so far from their distant grassland kingdom, the
emperor and his gold-heavy entourage spent freely and indis-
criminately in the Cairo bazaars. like prosperous and naive tourists
from some American prairie state. “The Cairenes,” says al-Umari,
“made incalculable profits out of him and his suite in buying and
selling and giving and taking. They exchanged gold until they
depressed its value in Egypt and caused its price to fall.”

Musa was not the first mansa (king, sultan) of Mali to go on
pilgrimage to Mecca, but none before had made such a dazzling
display of pomp and riches. The Egyptian chroniclers wrote about
the event and its disturbing short-term effects on the Cairene gold
market well into the next century. In the history of medieval West
Africa no single incident has been more celebrated. Indeed the
hajj of Mansa Musa sums up Mali'’s important place among the
kingdoms of Africa and Asia in Ibn Battuta’s time.

290

Mali 29)

The unworked gold which the mansa showered on Cairo came
from three major alluvial deposits in West Africa. The mines of
the bilad al-sudan, or simply the Sudan, as the Arab geographers
called the steppe and savanna region south of the Sahara, had
been known to the Mediterranean world since Phoenician times.
But it was only the introduction of the dromedary to North Africa
about the second century A.D. that made feasible in terms of costs
and risks regular caravan trade from one rim of the Western
Sahara to the other. The one-humped camel is a difficult and
disagreeable animal, but he could carry a load of 125-150
kilograms, go without water ten days or more, and travel faster
than any other available beast of burden. When Islam reached the
Western Maghrib in the seventh century, Berber-speaking
merchants were already running camel caravans to commercial
settlements on the far side of the desert.

The founding of the Arab Empire and later the High Caliphate
created an ever-growing demand in the Islamic heartland for West
African gold to make coins and finery. This demand impelled
Muslim merchants and cameliers of the Maghrib and the North
Sahara to organize trans-desert business and transport operations
to an unprecedented level of sophistication. About the same time,
the Kingdom of Ghana emerged in the steppe region of West
Africa known as the Sahel (Sahal), the transitional climatic zone
between the southern desert and the savanna lands. The
appearance of Ghana as an imperial state was undoubtedly linked
to the gold trade, which encouraged the rise of military leaders
aggressive enough to seize monopolistic authority over the com-
mercial routes and settlements leading from the gold fields deep in
the Sudan to the “ports” at the edge of the desert where the North
African caravans arrived. The empire declined in the eleventh
century, perhaps in connection with a prolonged drought, and
eventually withered away.

Yet the pattern of imperial state-building in the Sudan con-
tinued with the rise of Mali early in the thirteenth century. The
founders of this kingdom were Malinke-speaking people whose
homeland was the region between the upper valleys of the Senegal
and the Niger Rivers. This region was in the heart of the savanna
and much nearer to the two gold-bearing areas, known as Bambuk
and Bure, than the center of Ghana had been. The early kings of
Mali, members of a chiefly clan of the Malinke known as the
Keita, succeeded in taking control of territory between the gold

292 Mali

fields and the Sahel, thereby positioning themselves to exact
tribute in gold from the producing populations. In this way the
cycle of expansion began. The gold revenues of the mansas
permitted heavier expenditures on the army, which was comprised
mainly of infantry bowmen and armored cavalry. As the royal
forces were deployed across the fertile grasslands both east and
west, greater numbers of farming and herding folk were subdued
and taxed, expanding the wealth and military energies of the state
even more.

In the course of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries,
the mansas extended their domains westward to the Atlantic coast,
eastward past the great bend of the Niger, and northward to the
commercial towns scattered along the Saharan fringe, building an
empire that incorporated many non-Malinke peoples. By
achieving political domination over a band of steppe and savanna
some 1,200 miles long at the peak of the empire, they effectively
controlled and taxed the north-south flow of commerce across the
Western Sudan.

Indeed, Mali’s high age from the mid thirteenth to the mid
fourteenth century corresponded to the period when Europe was
exchanging silver for gold as its principal currency, prompting
Italian and Catalan merchants to offer higher and higher prices for
the little bags of dust and nuggets that were transported across the
Sahara and over the Atlas Mountains to Ceuta and other North
African ports. The rising European demand for gold, added to the
perennial market in the Islamic states, stimulated more gold pro-
duction in the Sudan, to the enormous fiscal advantage of Mali. In
the later medieval period overall, West Africa may have been
producing almost two-thirds of the world’s gold supply.’

In addition to gold, north-bound caravans carried numerous
products originating either in the grasslands or the tropical forests
— ivory, ostrich feathers, kola nuts, ambergris, hides, and slaves.
In return for these goods the southbound trade brought many
products from North Africa and the Mediterranean basin: textiles,
copper, silver, books, paper, swords, iron ware, perfumes.
jewelry, spices, wheat, and dried fruits. Horses, which did not
prosper in the deep savanna country owing to the lethal bite of the
tsetse fly, were imported from the Maghrib to meet the needs of
the Malian cavalry. Cowrie shells were used as a form of currency
in the Sudan, as they were in India. As Ibn Battuta attests, they
were harvested exclusively in the Maldive Islands, then exported

Mali 293

to West Africa by way of Egypt and the Maghrib ports. The single
most precious commodity imported to the Sudan was salt, a food
essential to the human body that West Africa was unable to
produce in sufficient quantity to meet demand. Salt came from
mines in the Sahara and was transported southward in the form of
giant slabs, two to a camel.

In the fourteenth century that section of the West Africa-to-
Europe commercial exchange system extending from the northern
edge of the rain forest to the Mediterranean coast was entirely in
the hands of Muslims. Indeed from a global perspective the
trans-Saharan trade routes were north-south branch lines of the
hemispheric Muslim network that extended right across northern
Africa and Asia to the ports of the South China Sea. As early as
the ninth century, Berber-speaking merchants settled in com-
mercial centers in the Sahel belt, where they acted as hosts and
business agents for fellow Muslims who organized caravans in the
corresponding entrepdts along the northern rim of the desert. In
the time of Ghana, Muslim neighborhoods rose up in the major
towns where merchants of North African Berber or Arab origin
were permitted by royal authority to govern their internal affairs
according to the standards of the Sacred Law, just as they were
beginning to do among non-Muslim peoples in the Indian Ocean
basin.

These expatriate merchants did not organize the trade directly
to the gold fields or to the towns deep in the savanna. That stretch
of the network remained under the control of professional
Sudanese traders. Most of them were of the Soninke and, later,
Malinke culture groups. These men were among the first West
Africans to convert to Islam, thereby linking themselves into the
brotherhood of shared norms and trust that encouraged order and
routine along the trans-Saharan system.

As in India and Southeast Asia, the founding of new Mushm
trading communities created an immediate demand for literate
cadres to organize and superintend Islamic worship, education,
and law. From the beginning of Islamic expansion into West
Africa, Maghribi men of learning were accompanying the
merchant caravans across the desert to settle in the towns of the
Sahel. These towns became centers of Islamic education south of
the Sahara, which over the course of time gave rise to a class of
Muslims grounded in the “normative” traditions of piety and
scholarship as preached and practiced in North Aftica. In the

294 Mali

period of the Mali empire the communities of ‘ulama in the
Sahelian towns included families of both Arabo-Berber and
Sudanese origin, the latter mainly Malinke or Soninke. Deeper in
the Sudan, learned families of purely West African origin pre-
dominated.

Sudanese chiefs and petty kings are known to have converted to
Islam as early as the tenth or eleventh centuries. Whatever purely
religious feelings may have motivated such men individually, con-
version enhanced their esteem among Muslim merchants, the
economically most powerful group in the land, and potentially tied
them into a much wider commercial and diplomatic world than
they had known before. The origins of Islam among the Malinke
are obscure. In their tradition the founder of the empire was
Sunjaata (or Mari-Jaata), a larger-than-life homeric figure of the
early thirteenth century who rose from physical adversity and exile
to rid his homeland of an alien tyrant, then rebuilt the Malinke
capital and ruled from it for 25 years. The reign of Sunjaata is only
vaguely associated with Islam, but at some point in the thirteenth
century his successors made it the official religion of state, an act
certainly linked to the growing importance of the Muslim
mercantile communities which inhabited the main towns along the
trans-savanna routes.

Yet the military and political success of the mansas also de-
pended on the continuing allegiance and cooperation of the mass
of their subjects — farming, fishing, and herding people who for
the most part adhered to ancient animistic beliefs and rituals, not
Islam. Unlike the sultans of Delhi, the mansas had not come to
power as foreign invaders, prepared to organize a state as formally
Islamic as they pleased. The legitimacy of their authority rested to
a large extent on satisfying traditional Malinke expectations in
their public conventions and ceremonies. Consequently, they were
obliged to walk a narrow line between their urban Muslim sub-
jects, who wanted them to behave up to the public standards of
their Marinid or Mamluk counterparts, and the vast majority of
the tax- and tribute-paying population, which took no notice of
Maliki law or proper procedures at Friday prayer.

The character of official ritual and administration as more or
less Islamic probably depended on the ruler’s perception of the
relative importance of his Muslim and non-Muslim subjects from
one period to the next. Mansa Musa was naturally a great favorite
of Muslim opinion, both in Mali and the wider Islamic world. His

Mali 295

prestige resulted not only from his sensational pilgrimage, but
also, writes al-Umari, because

he built ordinary and cathedral mosques and minarets, and
established the Friday observances, and prayers in con-
gregation, and the muezzin’s call. He brought jurists of the
Malikite school to his country and there continued as sultan of
the Muslims and became a student of religious sciences.°

Yet Mansa Musa also reigned during a period when relations with
the Muslim merchants and with the states of North Africa were
particularly important owing to the strong market for gold.

This expansive period in the trans-Saharan trade continued into
the reign of Musa’s brother Sulayman, who came to the throne
about 1341. Sulayman came close to matching his brother’s rep-
utation for Islamic leadership and piety. Moreover, he ruled Mali
in prosperity and peace. He was the sort of king from whom Ibn
Battuta had come to expect an honorable and large-hearted re-
ception.

Sometime in the autumn of 1351 Ibn Battuta set out from Fez to
visit Mali. He says nothing in the Rihla to explain why he felt
impelled to cross the Sahara Desert. We may suppose he had the
usual private plans to seek favor from yet another Muslim court.
Obsessive traveler that he was, he may even have been urged on
by the knowledge that the Sudan was the one important corner of
the Dar al-Islam he had not yet seen.°

Some modern historians have suggested that Sultan Abu ’Inan
appointed him as a state envoy to the emperor. Both Mansa Musa
and Mansa Sulayman had initiated diplomatic exchanges with Abu
Hasan, Abu ’Inan’s father. Becuase of the Marinid campaign to
conquer all of North Africa and thereby control the northern
termini of the trans-Saharan trade from the Atlantic to Ifriqiya,
the rulers of Mali had abundant reason to cultivate good relations
with their northern neighbor. Abu ’Inan certainly knew that Ibn
Battuta was making the journey and expected him to report in
detail upon his return to Fez. Yet there is no convincing evidence
that this Tangierian fagih, who was little known in Morocco’s
official circles, had anything like the ambassadorial status he had
enjoyed (with such disastrous results) under Muhammad
Tughlug.’

296 Mali

Traveling due south from Fez across the ranges of the Middle
and High Atlas Mountains, he arrived in Sijilmasa, the
pre-eminent desert port of the Western Maghrib, after a journey
of eight or nine days. Sijilmasa lay in the midst of an immense
oasis called Tafilalt, the last important outpost of sedentary life at
the northern edge of the void. Today nothing remains of the city
except an agglomeration of unremarkable ruins strewn among the
palm groves. In the fourteenth century it was, according to al-
Umari, a place “of imposing palaces, high buildings, and tall
gates.”® Tafilalt’s rich agriculture, fed by a river flowing down out
of the Atlas 50 miles to the north, supported the urban population,
including a large resident community of Berber and Arab
merchants. From the perspective of Mali, Sijilmasa was the chief
northern terminus of the trans-Saharan gold caravans. Here the
products of the savanna and forest were off-loaded, stored in
warehouses, and finally carried by camel, mule and donkey trains
over the mountains to Fez, Marrakesh, Tlemcen, and the
Mediterranean ports.

Ibn Battuta spent about four months in Sijilmasa, waiting for the
winter season, when the big caravans set out for Walata, their
destination at the far side of the desert. During this time he pur-
chased camels of his own and fattened them up. When he was in
Ceuta some months earlier, he may have become acquainted with
the al-Bushri family, whose kinsman he had met in China. For he
lodged during his entire stay in Sijilmasa with one Muhammad al-
Bushni, a legal scholar and brother of the al-Bushri of Qanjanfu.
“How far apart they are,” he remarks blandly in the Rihla.

In February 1352 (beginning of Muharram 753) he set out from
Tafilalt with a caravan of “merchants of Sijilmasa and others.” The
leader was a fellow of the Masufa Berbers, a herding people of the
Western Sahara who appear to have had something close to a
monopoly on the supply of guards, guides, and drivers on the
entire route between Tafilalt and the Sahel. The twelfth-century
geographer al-Idrisi describes the normal routines for traveling
safely across “the empty waste” that yawned for a thousand miles
south of Sijilmasa:

They load their camels at late dawn, and march until the sun has
risen, its light has become bright in the air, and the heat on the
ground has become severe. Then they put their loads down,
hobble their camels, unfasten their baggage and stretch awnings

Mali 297

to give some shade from the scorching heat and the hot winds of
midday ... When the sun begins to decline and sink in the
west, they set off. They march for the rest of the day, and keep
going until nightfall, when they encamp at whatever place they
have reached... Thus the traveling of the merchants who
enter the country of the Sudan is according to this pattern. They
do not deviate from it, because the sun kills with its heat those
who run the risk of marching at midday.”

Twenty-five days out of Sijilmasa the caravan reached the
settlement of Taghaza, the main salt-mining center of the Western
Sahara. The paradox of Taghaza was the grim, treeless desolation
of the place set against its extreme importance to the entire inter-
regional commercial system. All the southbound caravans took on
loads of slab salt, since no product was in greater demand in the
Sudan. “This is a village with nothing good about it,” Ibn Battuta
complains. “It is the most fly-ridden of places.” Then he goes on to
speak of the enormous amounts of gold that changed hands there.

The caravan stayed in the village for ten days, giving him an
opportunity to watch wretched slaves belonging to Masufa pro-
prietors dig slabs out of the open mine and tie them against the
sides of the dromedaries. He also had the curious experience of
sleeping in a house and praying in a mosque made entirely of salt
blocks, except for the camel-skin roofs. The water of Taghaza was
brackish, and every bit of food for the laborers, except for camel
meat, had to be brought in from either Morocco or Mali. More
than a century and a half later the Granada-born traveler Leo
Africanus would visit Taghaza and find conditions little changed:

Neither haue the said diggers of salt any victuals but such as the
merchants bring vnto them: for they are distant from all in-
habited places, almost twentie daies iourney, insomuch that
oftentimes they perish for lacke of foode, whenas the merchants
come not in due time vnto them: Moreouer the southeast winde
doth so often blind them, that they cannot liue here without
great perill.'°

Between Taghaza and Walata lay the most dangerous stretch of
the journey, almost 500 miles of sand desert where the average
annual rainfull is a scant five to ten millimeters and where only one
watering point exists, a place called Bir al-Ksaib (Tasarahla)."' If

298 Mali

rain fell at all in the region, it usually came in late winter.'? [bn
Battuta and his fellows were, according to his chronology,
traveling south from Taghaza sometime in March. Fortunately,
the rain had come that year, leaving pools of water here and there
along the track, enough in fact for the caravaners to wash out their
clothes. Yet there was danger enough in this wilderness for all
that:

In those days we used to go on ahead of the caravan and
whenever we found a place suitable for grazing we pastured the
beasts there. This we continued to do till a man named Ibn Ziri
became lost in the desert. After that we neither went on ahead
nor lagged behind. Strife and the exchange of insults had taken
place between Ibn Ziri and his maternal cousin, named Ibn
"Adi, so that he fell behind the caravan and lost the way, and
when the people encamped there was no news of him.

Arriving safely at Bir al-Ksaib minus Ibn Ziri, the caravan stopped
for three days to rest and to repair and fill the water skins before
navigating the trek across the vast sand desert called Mreyye, the
final and most dangerous stage of the trip. Keeping to the usual
procedure, the company hired a Masufa scout called the takshif,
whose job it was to go on ahead of the caravan to Walata. If he did
not lose his way among the dunes, or run out of water, or fall prey
to the demons which Ibn Battuta tells us haunted those wastes, he
would alert the people of the town to the caravan’s approach. A
group of Walatans would then be sent four days’ journey north to
meet the caravan with fresh water.

The Masufa takshif earned the 100 mithqals of gold the
caravaners paid him, for on the seventh night out of Bir al-Ksaib
they saw the lights of the Walata relief party. A few days later,
sometime in the latter part of April 1352 (beginning of Rabi’ I
753), they reached the sweltering little town. Its mud brick houses
lay along the slope of a barren hill, a scattering of palm trees in a
little wadi below. The site was bleak, but as the main southern
terminus of the camel trains the town nonetheless supported a
population of two or three thousand.'* It ranked as a provincial
capital of Mali and had an important community of educated men
of Berber and Sudanese origin.

By a letter entrusted to the takshif Ibn Battuta had arranged to
rent a house through the good offices of a “respectable” Moroccan

Mali 299

trader named Ibn Badda’, who resided in the town. Yet as soon as
he arrived, he found cause to regret having come at all. Walata
was the most northerly center under the jurisdiction of the mansa.
Following custom, the members of the caravan went immediately
to pay their respects to the farba, or governor. They found him
seated on a carpet under a portico, surrounded by lancers,
bowmen, and warriors of the Masufa. Though he sat very close to
the visitors, he addressed them not directly but through a
spokesman. In Mali this was proper ceremonial procedure
symbolizing the sacred character of the mansa, in whose name the
farba held his authority. Ibn Battuta, however, thought the gov-
ernor’s behavior a shocking display of bad manners, misinterpre-
ting it as a show of contempt for the visiting “white men.”’* Later,
the newcomers all went to receive hospitality from one of the
governor’s Officials. The welcome turned out to be a bow! of millet
with a little honey and yogurt.

I said to them: “Was it to this that the black man invited us?”
They said: “Yes, for them this is a great banquet.” Then I know
for certain that no good was to be expected from them and I
wished to depart.

He soon got the better of his urge to retreat back to Morocco, but
the inclination of the Sudanese to combine Islamic practice with
regional custom was no end of irritation to him. His prejudice, if
he were to try to explain it, had nothing directly to do with race. It
was a matter of the failure of the Malians to conduct themselves
according to the normative standards that pious Muslims from
North African cities might expect of virtuous officers of state.Such
standards did not include rulers speaking to fellow believers
through ritual heralds or entertaining visiting ‘ulama with small
dishes of warm porridge.

The incident, unfortunately, was to be only the first of many
occasions when Ibn Battuta, the sophisticated Maliki jurist, would
find the Sudanese coming up short in their attention to moral and
legal niceties. He admits that the scholars of Walata treated him
warmly during his sojourn in the town, but he found their failure
to subscribe to what he regarded as the civilized rules of sexual
segregation even worse than the practices of the Central Asian
Turks. On one occasion he appeared at the house of the gadi to
find him seated in casual conversation with a young and beautiful

300 Mali

woman. That a woman should be present in the reception room of
a Muslim’s house when a male guest arrived was bad enough. But
the judge’s explanation, that it was all right to come in because the
woman was his “friend,” made the visitor recoil in shock. On
another occasion Ibn Battuta paid a call to a Masufa scholar and
found this worthy’s wife chatting with a strange man in the
courtyard. When he expressed profound disapproval of such
goings-on, the scholar replied insouciantly that “the association of
women with men is agreeable to us and a part of good conduct, to
which no suspicion attaches. They are not like the women of your
country.” Unpersuaded, Ibn Battuta left the house at once and
never came back. “He invited me several times,” he tells us, “but I
did not accept.”

He stayed in Walata several weeks, then started out for the
capital of Mali in the company of three companions and a Masufa
guide. He remarks that he did not need to travel in a caravan
because “neither traveler there nor dweller has anything to fear
from thief or usurper” owing to Mansa Sulayman’s firm gov-
ernment. Nor did he have to carry a large stock of supplies. As he
moved southward from the Sahelian steppe into the grassy plains,
giant baobab trees rising stalk-like on the horizon, he encountered
village after village of Sudanese farming folk. In them he and his
comrades offered glass beads and pieces of Taghaza salt in return
for millet, rice, milk, chickens, and other local staples. After two
weeks or more on the road by way of Zaghari (which may be
identified with the Sokolo area in modern Mali), he reached the
left bank of the Niger River at a place he names Karsakhu.'? He
calls the river the Nile (Nil), following the mistaken notion of
medieval Muslim geographers that that great river had its source in
West Africa. Whatever his error, the crocodiles here were as
dangerous as the ones he had seen in Egypt:

One day I had gone to the Nil to accomplish a need when one of
the Sudan came and stood between me and the river. I was
amazed at his ill manners and lack of modesty and mentioned
this to somebody, who said: “He did that only because he
feared for you on account of the crocodile, so he placed himself
between you and it.”

The traveler’s precise route from Walata to the Malian capital is a
puzzle because we do not know for certain where the town was.

Mali 301

The Rihla gives neither a name to the place nor a very useful
topographical description of it. The chief seat of royal power may
have changed location from one period to another, indeed more
than one “capital” may have existed at the same time. Some
modern scholars identify the site, at least at that time in Mali’s
history, with the village of Niani, located south of the Niger in the
modern Republic of Guinea. But the town may also have lain
north of the river somewhere east of Bamako.'° About ten miles
from his destination Ibn Battuta crossed what he calls the Sansara
River on a ferry (he never mentions crossing the Niger). If the
capital is to be identified with Niani, that river would have been
the Sankarani, a southern tributary of the Niger.

The seat of Mansa Sulayman was a sprawling, unwalled town set
in a “verdant and hilly” country.'’ The sultan had several enclosed
palaces there. Mansa Musa had built one under the direction of
Abu Ishaq al-Sahili, an Andalusian architect and poet who had
accompanied him home from the hajj. Al-Sahili surfaced the
building with plaster, an innovation in the Sudan, and “covered it
with colored patterns so that it turned out to be the most elegant of
buildings.”’® Surrounding the palaces and mosques were the res-
idences of the citizenry, mud-walled houses roofed with domes of
timber and reed.’”

Ibn Battuta arrived in the town on 28 July 1352 (14 Jumada |
753) and went immediately to the quarter where the resident
merchants and scholars of Maghribi origin lived. He had written to
the community in advance of his arrival, probably from Walata,
and was relieved to learn that his letter had been received and a
house made ready for him to occupy. Within a day, he made the
acquaintance of the qadi, a Sudanese, as well as the other
members of the Muslim notability. He was also introduced to the
mansa’s “interpreter,” or griot, a man named Dugha. This official
was a Sudanese of special social caste who performed a multiplicity
of important state functions: master of state ceremonies, royal
bard and praise singer, herald, confidant, counsellor, and keeper
of the oral traditions of the Keita dynasty.

Ibn Battuta no doubt expected to see the king promptly, but ten
days after his arrival he fell grievously sick after eating some yams
or similar root that may not have been cooked long enough to
remove the poison from its skin.*? He fainted away during the
dawn prayer, and one of the five men who had shared the meal
with him subsequently died. Ibn Battuta drank a purgative con-

302 Mali

coction to induce vomiting, but he remained so ill for two months
that he could not rouse himself to make an appearance at court.

He finally recovered just in time to attend a public memorial
feast for the deposed and deceased Moroccan sultan Abu I’Hasan,
with whom Mali had had amicable diplomatic relations. The cere-
monies of the mansa’s public sitting were not unlike the pageants
the traveler had witnessed in dozens of Muslim courts, but
elements of traditional Malinke chieftaincy were in evidence to be
sure:

[The sultan] has a lofty pavilion, of which the door is inside his
house, where he sits for most of the time . . . There came forth
from the gate of the palace about 300 slaves, some carrying in
their hands bows and others having in their hands short lances
and shields... Then two saddled and bridled horses are
brought, with two rams which, they say, are effective against
the evil eye . . . Dugha the interpreter stands at the gate of the
council-place wearing fine garments of silk brocade and other
materials, and on his head a turban with fringes which they have
a novel way of winding . . . The troops, governors, young men,
slaves, the Masufa, and others sit outside the council-place in a
broad street where there are trees . . . Inside the council-place
beneath the arches a man is standing. Anyone who wishes to
address the sultan addresses Dugha and Dugha addresses that
man standing and that man standing addresses the sultan.

If one of them addresses the sultan and the latter replies he
uncovers the clothes from his back and sprinkles dust on his
head and back, like one washing himself with water. I used to
marvel how their eyes did not become blinded.

The gadi and other scholars brought Ibn Battuta forward and
presented him to the gold-turbaned monarch seated on his dais
under a silken dome. There was nothing particularly special about
a Moroccan fagih passing through the kingdom and this first
meeting was perfunctory. Later, when Ibn Battuta had returned to
his house, one of the scholars called to tell him that the sultan had
sent along the requisite welcoming gift.

I got up, thinking that it would be robes of honor and money,
but behold! it was three loaves of bread and a piece of beet fried
in gharti [shea butter] and a gourd containing yoghurt. When I

Mali 303

saw it I laughed, and was long astonished at their feeble in-
tellect and their respect for mean things.

To make matters worse he spent almost another two months
attending court before the sultan paid any further attention to him.
Finally, on the advice of Dugha, he made an appeal to Sulayman,
brashly raising the issue of the mansa’s prestige among the Muslim
rulers of the world:

I have journeyed to the countries of the world and met their
kings. I have been four months in your country without your
giving me a reception gift or anything else. What shall I say of
you in the presence of other sultans?

In all probability Sulayman could not have cared less what this
wandering jurist said of him. At first he sublimely disavowed
having even known that Ibn Battuta was in the town. But when his
notables reminded him that he had received the Moroccan a few
months earlier and “sent him some food,” the mansa offered him a
house and an allowance in gold. Notwithstanding the sultan’s
desultory effort to put things right, Ibn Battuta never got over the
indifferent treatment he received, concluding in the Rihla that
Sulayman “is a miserly king from whom no great donation is to be
expected” and that Mansa Musa by contrast had been “generous
and virtuous.”

Ibn Battuta ended a sojourn of a little more than eight months in
the capital in a state of ambivalence over the qualities of Malian
culture. On the one hand he respected Sulayman’s just and stable
government and the earnest devotion of the Muslim population to
their mosque prayers and Koranic studies. “They place fetters on
their children if there appears on their part a failure to memorize
the Koran,” he reports approvingly, “and they are not undone
until they memorize it.” On the other hand he reproached the
Sudanese severely for practices obviously based in Malinke
tradition but, from his point of view, either profane or ridiculous
when set against the model of the nightly guided Islamic state:
female slaves and servants who went stark naked into the court for
all to see; subjects who groveled before the sultan, beating the
ground with their elbows and throwing dust and ashes over their
heads; royal poets who romped about in feathers and bird masks.
Ibn Battuta seems indeed to be harsher on the Malians than he

304 Mali

does on other societies of the Islamic periphery where behavior
rooted in local tradition, but contrary to his scriptural and legal
standards, colored religious and social practice. We may sense in
his reportage a certain embarrassment that a kingdom whose Islam
was so profoundly influenced by his own homeland and its Maliki
doctors was not doing a better job keeping to the straight and
narrow.

Ibn Battuta left Sulayman’s court on 27 February 1353 (22
Muharram 754), traveling by camel in the company of a merchant.
Since the location of the capital is uncertain, his itinerary away
from it is equally problematic. If he had a general plan of travel, it
seems to have been to explore the provinces of Mali further down
the Niger. He mentions that in the ensuing days he crossed, not
the great river itself, but a tributary channel, which might be
identified with the “canal du Sahel,” a northerly flood branch
located east of the modern Malian town of Ségou.”! From there he
followed a northeasterly route, keeping well to the west of the
river, then rejoining it again somewhere not far upstream from
Timbuktu.

In the Rihla Ibn Battuta expresses no particular wonder at that
legendary “city of gold.” In fact the rise of Timbuktu as a trans-
Saharan terminus and capital of Islamic learning came mainly in
the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In the mid fourteenth
century, when Ibn Battuta passed through, the town was only
beginning to flower. It had a population of about 10,000 and a
Malian governor, who had been installed when Mansa Musa
visited the town on his return from the Hijaz.?* It almost certainly
had a sizable community of Maghribi and Sudanese scholars.
According to tradition, Mansa Musa had commissioned an im-
pressive grand mosque.° Yet until later in the century Timbuktu
was junior to Walata as a trade and intellectual center. Ibn Battuta
found nothing there to detain him for long and was soon on his
way down the Niger.

At Kabara, Timbuktu’s “port” on the river four miles south of
the city, he abandoned his dromedary and boarded a small boat, a
type of canoe (“carved out of a single piece of wood”) that is still
used in the region today.2* From Kabara the Niger flows due
eastward for about 180 miles through the flat Sahelian steppe.
“Each night,” he reports, “we stayed in a village and bought what
we were in need of in the way of wheat and butter for salt, spices

Mali 305

and glass trinkets.” At one village he celebrated the Prophet's
Birthday (12 Rabi’ I 754 or 17 April 1353) in the company of the
local commander, whose generosity the Rihla praises so effusively
that the tacit negative comparison to Mansa Sulayman is not lost
on the reader. The officer not only entertained his visitor warmly
but even gave him a slave boy as a gift. The lad accompanied Ibn
Battuta back across the Sahara and remained with him for some
years.

Continuing down river, the traveler spent about a month in Gao
(Kawkaw), a thriving commercial city at the eastern extremity of
Mali’s political orbit. Then, having by this time crossed a large part
of the empire from west to east and visited most of the towns with
important Muslim populations, he decided to make for home. Gao
paralleled Walata and Timbuktu as a terminus of trans-Saharan
trade, but with relatively more important route connections to
Ifriqiya and Egypt. Ibn Battuta found “a big caravan” departing
from Gao for Ghadamés (Ghadamis), a major stop in the northern
desert about 450 miles due south of Tunis. He had no plans to go
to Ghadamés, but it made sense for him to accompany the convoy
as far east as the oasis of Takedda (Azelik), which lay to the
southwest of the Saharan highland region called Air.?> From there
he could expect to intercept a caravan en route to Sijilmasa from
the central Sudan (the region corresponding to the northern part
of modern Nigeria).

His journey to Takedda was disagreeable. In Gao he purchased
a riding camel, as well as a she-camel to carry his provisions. But
the sweltering desert summer was approaching, and after only one
stage on the trail the she-camel collapsed. Other travelers among
the company agreed to help transport Ibn Battuta’s belongings,
but further on he fell sick, this time “because of the extreme heat
and a surplus of bile.” Stumbling on to Takedda, he found a house
in which to recuperate as well as a welcoming community of
resident Moroccans.

Like Taghaza, Takedda was a grim spot in the desert important
for its mine, in this case copper. Unlike Taghaza, the town was
also a junction of trade routes and consequently a place of some
slight urbanity. Ibn Battuta reports:

The people of Takedda have no occupation but trade. They
travel each year to Egypt and import some of everything which
is there in the way of fine cloth and other things. Its people are

306 Mali

comfortable and well off and are proud of the number of male
and female slaves which they have.

Recovering from his illness, he thought of buying “an educated
slave girl” for himself. The effort brought nothing but trouble, not
least for the unfortunate young women involved. First, the gadi of
the town got one of the other notables to sell the traveler a girl of
his own for a quantity of gold. Then the man decided he had made
a mistake and asked to buy her back. Ibn Battuta agreed on
condition that a replacement be found. Another Moroccan in the
caravan, a man named ’Ali ’Aghyul, had a woman he was ready to
sell. But Ibn Battuta and this fellow had already had a personal
row. On the journey to Takedda, ’Ali ’Aghyul had not only
refused to help carry the load from Ibn Battuta’s dead camel but
even denied a drink of water to his countryman’s slave boy.
Nevertheless Ibn Battuta went through with the deal, this girl
“being better than the first one.” But then

this Moroccan regretted having sold the slave and wished to
revoke the bargain. He importuned me to do so, but I declined
to do anything but reward him for his evil acts. He almost went
mad and died of grief. But I let him off afterwards.

Some time following this shabby incident, a slave messenger
arrived in a caravan from Sijilmasa carrying an order from Sultan
Abu "Inan that the fagih should return immediately to Fez. Ibn
Battuta offers no explanation why the sultan should have kept
such close track of his movements south of the Sahara. It seems
likely that Abu ’Inan was anxious to have a report from him on
political and commercial conditions in Mali, matters so important
to the health of the Marinid state.”°

Ibn Battuta left Takadda on 11 September 1353 (11 Sha’ban
754) in the company of a large caravan transporting 600 black
female slaves to Morocco. These unfortunates had probably
started out from the savanna lands southeast of Takedda, regions
which, in the absence of gold deposits, engaged more extensively
in slave commerce than did Mali.?’ Once arrived in Sijilmasa or
Fez, the women would be sold into service as domestics, con-
cubines, or servants of the royal court.

The caravan trekked northward through 18 days of “wilderness
without habitation” to a point north of Air (possibly Assiou or In

Mali 307

Azaoua,”® where the route leading to Ghadamés forked off from
the road to Sijilmasa. From there the convoy skirted the western
side of the Ahaggar (Hoggar, or Hukkar) Mountains of the central
desert. Here they passed through the territory of veiled Berber
nomads who, Ibn Battuta informs us, were “good for nothing. . .
We encountered one of their chief men who held up the caravan
until he was paid an impost of cloth and other things.”

Now veering gradually to the northwest, the company eventually
reached the great north Saharan oasis complex of Tuwat (Touat).
Ibn Battuta mentions only one stopping place in this region (Buda),
then tells us simply that they continued on to Sijilmasa. He stayed
there no more than about two weeks, then continued on over the
High Atlas in the dead of winter. “I have seen difficult roads and
much snow in Bukhara, Samarkand, Khurasan and the land of the
Turks, but I never saw a road more difficult than that.” Somewhere
along that frigid highway he halted to celebrate the Feast of
Sacrifice, 6 January 1354.

Then I departed and reached the capital Fez, capital of our Lord
the Commander of the Faithful, may God support him, and
kissed his noble hand, and deemed myself fortunate to see his
blessed face. J remained in the shelter of his beneficence after my
long travels, may God... thank him for the great benefits
which he bestowed on me and his ample benignity.

Indeed Abu ‘Inan could afford to be amply benign, for his reign had
just about reached its high point when Ibn Battuta returned to the
capital. Morocco was generally at peace, and the sultan was even
planning for the day when he would best his father at conquering
Ifriqiya and unifying North Africa once and for all. If the Black
Death had temporarily deflated Fez’s productiveness in craft and
industry, the city was still the center of the intellectual universe west
of Cairo. Among the stars of saintliness and erudition gathered
there, Ibn Battuta might expect to shine for a moment or two on the
strength of the stories he had to tell.

Notes

1. Abu Zayd ’Abd al-Rahman Ibn Khaldun, Kitab al-'Ibar, in L&H, pp. 333-34.
2. Ibn Fad! Allah al-Umari, Masalik al-absar fi mamalik al-amsar, in L&H, pp.
269-70.

308 Mali

3. Al-Umari, L&H, pp. 270-71.

4. Andrew M. Watson, “Back to Gold and Silver,” Economic History Review 20
(1967): 30-31; Nehemia Levtzion, Ancient Ghana and Mali (London, 1973), pp.
131-33.

5. Al-Umari, L&H, p. 261.

6. The Rihia is the only existing eye-witness testimony on the Mali empire and
therefore a precious historical source.

7. The commentaries are divided on the question of IB’s purpose in going to the
Sudan. The issue hinges on the translation of the phrase bi-rasm al-safar in the
Arabic text. One version has it: “I took leave of our Master (may God uphold him). I
departed with orders to accomplish a journey to the land of the Sudan.” R. Mauny er
al., Textes et documents relatifs a I’histoire de l'Afrique: extraits tirés des voyages d’Ibn
Battuta (Dakar, 1966),p. 35. Levtzion and Hopkins (L&H, p. 414), however, believe
that this translation “seems to read too much into the text.” They prefer “and set of
with the purpose of traveling to the land of the Sudan.” Both D&S (vol. 4, p. 376) and
H&K (p. 22) give similar meaning to their translation of the phrase. Levtzion (Ghana
and Mali, p. 216) states that IB was “on a private visit to the Sudan” but that Abu
*Inan knew of his movements. When IB was at Takadda in the southern Sahara, the
sultan sent a messenger telling him to return to Fez. I agree with Levtzion. If IB were
on an official mission to Mali, we might expect him to make a good deal of it in the
Rihla or at least refer to it in connection with his appearance at the Mali court.

8. Al-Umari, L&H, p. 275.

9. Abu ’Abd Allah al-Idrisi, Nuzhat al-mushtag fi ikhtirag al-afaq, L&H, p. 118.

10. Leo Africanus, The History and Description of Africa, trans. Robert Pery, ed.
Robert Brown, 3 vols. (New York, 1896), vol. 3, pp. 800-01.

11. Mauny et al. (Textes et Documents, p. 38) identify IB’s Tasarahla with Bir al-
Ksaib.

12. Mauny etal., Textes et documents, p. 37.

13. Raymond Mauny, Tableau géographique de I’ Quest Africain au Moyen Age
d’aprés les sources écrites, la tradition et l’archéologie (Amsterdam, 1967), p. 485.

14. H&K, p. 70n.

15. J.O. Hunwick identifies Zaghari with the Sokolo region and Karsakhu with a
point on the Niger south of there. “The Mid-Fourteenth century capital of Mali,”
Journal of African History 14 (1973): 199-200. Other hypotheses on this stretch of
IB’s itinerary are offered by Claude Meillassoux, “L’itinéraire d'Ibn Battuta de
Walata a Malli,” Journal of African History 13 (1972): 389-95; and Mauny et al.,
Textes et documents, pp. 46-47.

16. Textual, linguistic, and archaeological evidence have all been marshalled to
find the fourteenth century capital of Mali. Recent discussions, which also review the
earlier literature on the problem, are Wladyslaw Filipowiak, Etudes archéologiques
sur la capitale médiévale du Mali, trans. Zofia Slawskaj (Szczecin, 1979); Hunwick,
“Mid-Fourteenth Century Capital,” pp. 195-206; and Meillassoux, “L’itinéraire
d’Ibn Battuta,’ pp. 389-95. Hunwick hypothesizes that IB did not visit Niani but a
place north of the Niger, pointing out that the traveler never mentions crossing the
river.

17. Al-Umari, L&H, p. 263.

18. Ibn Khaldun, L&H, p. 335.

19. Al-Umari, L&H, pp. 262-63.

20. H&K, p. 72n.

21. Hunwick, “Mid-Fourteenth Century Capital,” p. 203.

22. Elias N. Saad, Social History of Timbuktu: the Role of Muslim Scholars and
Notables, 1400-1900 (Cambridge, England, 1983), pp. 11,27.

23. Levtzion, Ghana and Mali, p. 201; Mauny, Tableau géographique, pp. 114-
15; and Saad, Social History of Timbuktu, pp. 36-37.

24. Maunyetal., Textes et documents. p.71.

Mali 309

25. Mauny (Tableau gedgraphique, pp. 139-40) identifies IB‘s Takadda with
Azelik. Most other commentators agree.

26. Jean Devisse presumes that IB was on a mission for Abu ‘Inan and
speculates that the sultan wanted up-to-date intelligence out of fear that the gold
trade was being increasingly diverted towards Egypt. “Routes de commerce et
échanges en Afrique Occidentale en relation avec la Méditerranée,” Revue
d'Histoire Economique et Sociale 50 (1972): 373.

27. Levtzion, Ghana and Mali, pp. 174-76.

28. Mauny et al. (Textes et documents, p. 79) identify IB's watering place with
one or the other of these points. L&H (p. 418n) are doubtful but offer no
alternative.

] A The Rihla

I have indeed — praise be to God — attained my desire
in this world, which was to travel through the earth, and I
have attained in this respect what no other person has
attained to my knowledge. !

Ibn Battuta

We know only in a very general way what happened to Ibn Battuta
after he returned to Fez in 1354. Sultan Abu ‘Inan certainly
listened to his report on Mali and no doubt wanted to hear about
his traveling career, the political highlights in particular. After the
interview Ibn Battuta might have expected to slip quietly out of
public notice, perhaps to seek a judicial appointment elsewhere in
Morocco. Yet the king was sufficiently impressed by this genial
and sharp-witted fagih that he ordered him to stay in Fez for the
time being and prepare a narrative of his experiences for the
pleasure of the royal court.

Since Ibn Battuta was no belle-lettrist, Ibn Juzayy, the young
secretary he had met briefly in Granada three years earlier, was
commissioned by the sultan to shape the Tangierian’s story into a
proper oeuvre conforming to the literary standards of a rihla: an
account of travels centering upon a journey (or journeys) to
Mecca. Ibn Juzayy had fallen out of favor with his former
employer Yusuf I of Granada and left his service to accept a post
in Fez not long before Ibn Battuta’s return there from Mali. He
already had a reputation for his poetry, his prose writings in
philology, history, and law, and his fine calligraphic style.* He
seems to have come to his assignment with enthusiasm and may
well have developed a warm friendship with the journeyer.

The two of them probably met together regularly for about two
years from shortly after Ibn Battuta’s arrival in Fez until De-
cember 1355, when the redaction of the narrative was finished
under the florid formal title, “A Gift to the Observers Concerning
the Curiosities of the Cities and the Marvels Encountered in
Travels.” The work sessions likely took place in different places: in

310

The Rihla 311

the older man’s house or the younger’s, in the gardens or halls of
Fez Jdid, in the shady arcades of mosques. Ibn Juzayy admits that
what he wrote was only an abridgment of all that his collaborator
told him or had written out for him in notes. There is no direct
evidence that Ibn Battuta ever read the completed manuscript or
checked it for errors. Mistakes in the phonetic spelling of various
foreign words suggest that he did not.* Ibn Juzayy may have
continued to revise and refine the book after his interviews with
the traveler were completed. In any case, the connection between
the two men ended in 1356 or 1357 when Ibn Juzayy, not yet 37
years old, died of causes unknown.4

In his brief introduction to the Rihla, Ibn Juzayy explains pre-
cisely what the sultan had ordered Ibn Battuta to do:

he should dictate an account of the cities which he had seen in
his travel, and of the interesting events which had clung to his
memory, and that he should speak of those whom he had met of
the rulers of countries, of their distinguished men of learning,
and of their pious saints. Accordingly, he dictated upon these
subjects a narrative which gave entertainment to the mind and
delight to the ears and eyes.

This is a concise statement of the general subject matter of Ibn
Battuta’s interviews with Ibn Juzayy, although he ranged over
almost every conceivable aspect of fourteenth-century life from
cuisine, botany, and marriage practices to dynastic history and the
price of chickens. As he spoke or fed Ibn Juzayy notes, he wove
his descriptive observations haphazardly into the account of his
own experience. Ibn Juzayy, moreover, interjected rhetorical odds
and ends into the manuscript here and there, including a bit of
verse. But generally he stayed true to the structure of Ibn Battuta’s
verbal recounting. Consequently, the autobiography, the personal
adventure, remains at the heart of the book, revealing the
traveler’s gregarious, high-spirited, pushy, impetuous, pious, ing-
ratiating personality through the account of the life he lived. The
plan of the Rihla was very different from the organization of that
other famous travel narrative of the medieval age, the Book of
Marco Polo. The Venetian’s work is divided into two parts, the
first a brief summary of his traveling career, the second, which
makes up most of the account, a systematic, didactic presentation
of information about China and other lands east of Europe. All in

312 The Rihla

all, the book remains, in vivid contrast to the Rihla, “a treatise of
empirical geography,” revealing almost nothing about Marco’s
personality.°

There is no doubt, on the other hand, that in telling so much
about himself, Ibn Battuta aimed to project a definite persona: the
pious, erudite, Maliki gentleman, though one with a Sufi’s
sensitivity and reverence. It seems equally clear that as he told Ibn
Juzayy his story, he tended, as perhaps most of us would in his
place, to exaggerate his competence as a man of learning and his
social status among the kings and princes who entertained him, as
well as the importance of the judicial positions he held. Perhaps
we can discern in the thread of puffery that runs through the Rihla
a discomforting self-awareness of the limits of his education and
commitment to the rigorous academic life. There is no evidence
that he ever spent much time in serious study once he left Tangier
at the age of 21. To the learned jurisconsults and gadis of the great
cities of Islam, who toiled years on end reading and memorizing
the important texts of their legal school, Ibn Battuta’s deficiencies
would have been plain to see. Ibn Juzayy introduces him with
gusto as “the learned doctor of law.” But another scholar, a
celebrated Andalusian judge named Abu I’Barakat al-Balafigi,
had also met the traveler in Granada and duly sized him up. His
observation, reported in the brief article on Ibn Battuta in Ibn al-
Khatib’s fourteenth-century compilation of notable biographies,
was that the man may have traveled widely but he possessed only
“a modest share of the sciences.”° Or as another translator puts
the passage, “He had not too much of what it takes.”’ He could
never have landed a high judicial post in a city like Cairo or
Damascus (except perhaps in the aftermath of the Black Death,
when a large part of the civilian elite was dead). But he did thrive
out on the peripheries of Islam where Muslim princes, badly
needing experts in the shari’a and the prestige that came with
enforcing it, were less particular about honoring and employing
individuals with only “a modest share of the sciences.” In that
sense, Ibn Battuta belongs to a large class of lettered but not
accomplished men who, for want of serious career possibilities in
the central cities, gravitated out to the expanding Islamic frontiers,
where a Muslim name, a reasonable education, and a large
ambition could see a man to a respectable job, even to riches and
power.®

If Ibn Battuta never became a master of his legal profession, he

The Rihla 313

nonetheless possessed an extraordinary memory of the places he
had visited and the things he had seen. It seems highly unlikely
that when he got down to work with Ibn Juzayy he had extensive
travel notes or journals at hand. He never mentions in the Rihla
that he took notes, with the single exception of a remark that some
tomb inscriptions he jotted down in Bukhara were one of the items
he lost in the pirate attack off the coast of India.’ If he had other
notes with him at that time (1345), they would also have been lost.
In any case, a reading of the Rihla does not suggest that he had a
foggier memory of people, places, and events for the period of his
career antedating 1345 than for the time after. On the other hand,
he appears to have written out a rough version of his life and
observations, perhaps after he returned to Fez, since near the end
of the Rihla Ibn Juzayy refers to the work as his own “abridgment”
of the “writing” or “notations” (taqgyid) of the traveler.'” From
time to time in the narrative Ibn Battuta admits candidly that he
simply cannot remember the name of a particular person or town.
But he also misremembered numerous facts. He gets names and
dates wrong occasionally, he reports certain contemporary or
historical events inaccurately, he mixes up now and again the
order of his itinerary. Yet too close attention to his errors can
distract from the astonishing accuracy of the Rihla on the whole, as
both a historical document and a record of experience.

To conclude that Ibn Battuta did not rely on notes during his
interviews with Ibn Juzayy is not to say that the two of them had
no “research” aids at all. In Muslim historical and geographical
writing of that age, authors commonly drew upon the works of
earlier authorities to flesh out their essays, sometimes explicitly
crediting such authorities and sometimes not. Islamic literary
theory regarded what we would call plagiarism with a wide latitude
of tolerance. It was not considered improper to quote from or
paraphrase other writers without citing them, even where the ideas
or information such writers contributed might be partially or
wholly disguised.'! Ibn Juzayy may have had a substantial library
of geographical and travel literature of his own. In any case, Fez
had become such an important center of learning that the libraries
of its leading intellectuals, as well as that of the Karawiyin
mosque, which was founded about 1350, would have provided the
two men with a wealth of source material if they needed it.!?

It is perfectly plain that Ibn Juzayy copied outright numerous
long passages from the Rihla of Ibn Jubayr, the twelfth-century

314 The Rihla

Andalusian traveler who wrote the most elegant of the medieval
Muslim travel books. These passages pertain to Ibn Battuta’s
descriptions of Damascus, Mecca, Medina, and some other places
in the Middle East. It seems likely that where Ibn Battuta could
not remember very well certain places he visited, or where Ibn
Jubayr’s description was, from a literary point of view, as good as
anything Ibn Juzayy could produce, then deference might be made
to this learned predecessor.'? Modern scholars have suggested,
though not generally proven, that Ibn Juzayy paraphrased from
other earlier geographical books as well.'4

In his introduction to the Rihla, Ibn Juzayy declares that his
intention was to write down the story just as Ibn Battuta told it:

I have rendered the sense of the narrative... in language
which adequately expresses the purposes he had in mind and
sets forth clearly the ends which he had in view. Frequently I
have reported his words in his own phrasing, without omitting
either root or branch.

Yet Ibn Juzayy had been commissioned not simply to transcribe
mechanically Ibn Battuta’s reminiscences but to undertake
appropriate “pruning and polishing” of his associate’s verbatim
reports so as to produce a coherent, graceful work of literature in
the high tradition of the rihla genre. In the interests of literary
symmetry and taste, therefore, the raw record of the traveler’s
experience had to be reshaped to some extent. For one thing, the
itinerary over the entire 29 years was exceedingly complicated. Ibn
Battuta visited a number of cities or regions two or more times,
and his routes crisscrossed, backtracked, and overlapped. Con-
sequently, Ibn Juzayy found it desirable to group the descriptions
of certain places within the context of Ibn Battuta’s first visit
there — and to do it without much heed to the precise details of
his movements. The result is a more smoothly flowing narrative
but a vexatious snarl of problems for any modern scholar trying to
figure out exactly where Ibn Battuta went and when.’°

Even more troublesome for the historian is [bn Battuta’s re-
counting of visits to at least a few places that in fact he probably
never saw. Ibn Juzayy meant the Rihla to be at the broadest level a
survey of the Muslim world of the fourteenth century. Ibn Battuta
had not gone absolutely everywhere in that world. Yet Ibn Juzayy
probably thought that for the sake of literary integrity almost

The Rihla 315

every place in Eurasia and Africa having an important Muslim
population should be mentioned within the framework of the
traveler’s first-person experience, even though in a few cases that
experience might not be genuine. Ibn Battuta describes, albeit
rather lamely and self-consciously, a trip up the Volga River to
visit the Muslim community of Bulghar, a trip he almost certainly
did not make.'© Modern commentators have also cast doubts on
the authenticity of his journeys to China and Byzantium, as well as
to parts of Khurasan, Yemen, Anatolia, and East Africa, though
scholarly opinion is very much divided on these questions.’’ Even
if small parts of the Rihla are fabricated, we can never know for
sure how to parcel out the blame. It is conceivable that Ibn Juzayy
added certain passages without Ibn Battuta even knowing that he
did. Nor can we discount the meddlings of later copyists.

If the authenticity of the Rihla has generally stood up well under
modern scrutiny, Ibn Battuta was by no means let off easily in his
own time. By an extraordinary piece of historical coincidence,
*Abd al-Rahman ibn Khaldun, the Tunisian historian and
philosopher who came to tower over the Muslim intellectual world
in the later medieval age, arrived in Fez in 1354 to join the circle of
scholars around Sultan Abu ’Inan. Ibn Khaldun had been a young
government officer in Tunis when Abu I’Hasan’s army occupied
that city. He was impressed by the erudition of the Moroccan
scholars in the sultan’s suite and, having lost both his parents in the
Black Death, decided to leave home to pursue advanced studies in
Fez. There is no evidence that he ever made Ibn Battuta’s
acquaintance. But in The Muqaddimah, his great work of history
and sociology completed in 1377, he makes a brief and utterly
incidental remark about a certain “shaykh from Tangier” who
turned up in Fez after traveling widely in the Muslim world. “He
used to tell about experiences he had had on his travels,” Ibn
Khaldun reports, “and about the remarkable things he had seen in
the different realms. He spoke mostly about the ruler of India. He
reported things about him that his listeners considered strange.”
Ibn Khaldun then repeats some of Ibn Battuta’s stories about
Muhammad Tughlug: his provisioning the famine-stricken people
of Delhi out of his own income and his practice of having gold
coins showered upon his subjects from the backs of elephants. Ibn
Khaldun also notes that Ibn Battuta held a judgeship in the
sultanate. But then he goes on to remark darkly that the
Tangierian “told other similar stories, and people in the dynasty

316 The Rthla

(in oMical positions) whispered to each other that he must be a
liar.”

Abu I’Barakat al-Balafiqi, the Andalusian scholar who had met
Ibn Battuta in Granada and was later to express a low opinion of
his scholarship, also resided in Fez about this time and knew Ibn
Khaldun.!? According to Ibn al-Khatib, author of the
fourteenth-century biographical notice on Ibn Battuta, al-Balafigi
said that people considered the traveler “purely and simply a
liar.”*° Why such skepticism among the intelligentsia of Fez?
Perhaps it was a reflection of their casual contempt for Ibn
Battuta’s pedestrian erudition. Or it might simply have been the
incredulous parochialism of Far Western Muslims who had them-
selves never traveled very far from home.

Indeed Ibn Khaldun continues in The Mugaddimah:

One day I met the Sultan’s famous vizier, Faris ibn Wadrar. I
talked to him about this matter and intimated to him that I did
not believe that man’s stories, because people in the dynasty
were in general inclined to consider him a liar. Whereupon the
vizier Faris said to me: “Be careful not to reject such infor-
mation about the condition of dynasties, because you have not
seen such things yourself.”*'

Moreover Muhammad ibn Marzuk, a famous scholar of Tlemcen
who was occupying a government post in Fez when the Rihla was
being composed, also expressed an opinion on Ibn Battuta, which
found its way into Ibn Hajar’s fifteenth-century biographical
notice. According to Ibn Hajar, Ibn Marzuk cleared the traveler of
al-Balafiqi’s charge of lying and even declared, “I know of no
person who has journeyed through so many lands as [he did] on his
travels, and he was withal generous and welldoing.””

If Ibn Battuta stirred up courtly gossip for a few months with his
exotic tales, he seems to have attracted no more attention in Fez
after his work with Ibn Juzayy was completed. All that we know of
his later life is that, according to Ibn Hajar’s brief sketch, he held
“the office of gadi in some town or other.”*° He probably lived in
the modestly comfortable style of a provincial official, and, since
he was not yet 50 years old when he ended his travels, he very
likely married again and sired more children, little half brothers
and sisters of the offspring growing up all across the Eastern
Hemisphere.

The Rihla 317

As for the Rihla, very little is known of its history from the
fourteenth to the nineteenth century. In contrast to Marco Polo’s
book, which was widely circulated and acclaimed in Europe in the
later Middle Ages, the Rihla appears to have had a very modest
impact on the Muslim world until modern times. There is no
evidence of its being widely quoted or used as a source in Muslim
historical or geographical works written after 1355. To be sure,
copies of either the entire work or abridgments of it circulated
among educated households in Morocco and the other North
African countries. The Rihla was also known in the Western
Sudan in the seventeenth century and in Egypt in the eighteenth,
at least in the form of abridgments.** Whether it turned up in
libraries in Muslim regions anywhere east of the Nile is anyone’s
guess. Only in the mid nineteenth century, half a millennium after
it was written, did the narrative began to receive the international
attention it so profoundly deserved. The credit for that
achievement, ironically enough, fell to scholars of Christian
Europe, the one populous region of Eurasia Ibn Battuta had never
bothered to visit.

‘If the great journeyer attained no literary glory in his own time,
he nevertheless had good reason to review his long career with
satisfaction. He had seen and borne witness to the best that the
fourteenth century had to offer, three decades of relative pros-
perity and political calm in the Afro-Eurasian world. The second
half of the century was to be drastically different. It was in Barbara
Tuchman’s phrase the “calamitous” half of the century, a time of
social disturbance and economic regression that seemed to afflict
almost the entire hemisphere.2” The troubles of the age were
almost certainly associated with the great pandemic, not only the
Black Death itself but the multiple recurrences of pestilence that
followed decade after decade on into the fifteenth century. The
Black Death killed untold millions, but the repeated outbreaks of
plague prevented agrarian populations in Europe and the Middle
East, and probably in India and China as well, from recovering to
pre-plague levels.

The result was chronically depressed productivity, a condition
that grievously affected many kingdoms of the hemisphere just
about the time Ibn Battuta ended his travels. With the exception
of a few regions where real political vigor was in evidence (the
rising Ottoman Empire, Ming China after 1368, Vijayanagar in
southern India), almost every state he had visited either dis-

318 The Rihla

appeared (the Yuan dynasty in China, the Ilkhanids in Persia),
rapidly deteriorated (the Delhi Sultanate, Byzantium), or ex-
perienced dynastic strife, rebellion, or social upheaval (the
Khanates of Kipchak and Chagatay, the Mamluk Sultanate, Mali,
Granada). Latin Europe, which he had not visited, experienced
equally sorry times, with its deep economic recession, Hundred
Years War, Papal Schism, and succession of peasant uprisings.

In his own homeland he lived out his last years amid the
violent, anarchic disintegration of the Marinid state. Sultan Abu
*Inan invaded Ifriqiya and occupied Tunis in the fall of 1357, but
he was forced to withdraw within two months. The following year
he fell sick and was finally strangled by a rebellious vizier. No
Marinid king succeeded in restoring order and unity to the
country during the next century.

Perhaps safe in his remote judgeship from the turmoil of those
times, the aging globetrotter could look back over a quarter
century whose strong kingdoms, thriving hemispheric trade, and
cosmopolitan cities had given him so many opportunities for
adventure and fortune. And despite the spreading darkness of
the later century, his confidence in the continuing triumph of
Islam was doubtless undiminished. He would not have been
specially impressed to know that, as the fifteenth century
approached, Muslim merchants, preachers, soldiers, and
peripatetic scholars like himself still carried on the work of
implanting Islam and its treasury of values and institutions in
Southeast Asia, East and West Africa, India, and Southeastern
Europe. Even as the bellicose Portuguese prepared their attack
on Ceuta and the age of European power began, Islam as both a
living faith and a model of civilized life continued to spread into
new regions of the earth.

Ibn Battuta died in 1368 or 1369 (700 A.H.).7° Where his grave
lies, no one knows for sure. The tourist guides of Tangier are
pleased to take foreign visitors to see a modest tomb that
allegedly houses the mortal remains of the traveler. But the site
has no inscription and its genuineness is open to question. A
more vital memorial to him is the bn Battouta, the big ferry boat
that shuttles people and their automobiles across the Strait of
Gibraltar. From the kasba high above the city, you can see it
steam out of the harbor, carrying young Moroccan scholars to
their law schools in Paris and Bordeaux.

The Rihla 319

Notes
1. Gb, vol. 2, p. 282.
2. “Ibn Djuzayy,” EI,, vol. 3, p. 756; D&S, vol. 1, p. xxi.
3. H.A.R. Gibb, /bn Battuta: Travels in Asia and Africa (London, 1929), p. 12.
4. “Ibn Djuzayy,” EI,, vol. 3, p. 756.
5. Leonardo Olschki, Marco Polo’s Asia: An Introduction to his Description of

the World Called Il Milione (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1960) p. 12.

6. This is Gibb’s translation (Gb, vol. 1, p. ix) of the passage as it appears in Ibn
Hajar al-Ascalani’s fifteenth-century biographical dictionary Al-Durar al-Kamina.
The Arabic text and French translation of Ibn al-Khatib’s notice, upon which Ibn
Hajar’s is partially based, is found in E. Levi-Provengal, “Le Voyage d’Ibn Battuta
dans le royaume de Grenade (1350)” in Mélanges offerts a William Marcais (Paris,
1950), pp. 213, 223. Ibn al-Khatib quotes Abu I’Barakat as saying he met IB in
Granada in the garden of Abu I’Kasim ibn Asim. IB confirms this meeting (D&S,
vol. 4, p. 371). On Abu I|-Barakat al-Balafigi, see Soledad Gibert, “Abu-l-Barakat
al-Balafiqi, Qadi, Historiador y Poeta,” Al-Andalus 28 (1963): p. 381-424.

7. H&K, p. 5.

8. On the migration of Muslim literate cadres to the fringe areas of Islam, see
Marshall G.S. Hodgson, The Venture of Islam, 3 vols. (Chicago, 1974), vol. 2, pp.
539-42.

9. D&S, vol. 3, p. 28.

10. D&S, vol. 4, p. 449. Major commentators are divided on the question of IB’s
notes. Gibb, Hrbek, and Défrémery and Sanguinetti believe he did not use travel
notes when he worked with Ibn Juzayy. Gibb, Travels in Asia and Africa, p. 12; Hr,
pp. 413-14; D&S, vol. 1, p. ix. Mahdi Husain thinks he did. MH, p. xviin.

11. See John Wansbrough, “Africa and the Arab Geographers” in D. Dalby
(ed.), Language and History in Africa (London, 1970), pp. 89-101.

12. On the founding of the Karawiyin library, J. Berque, “Ville et université:
pete sur histoire de l’école de Fés,” Revue Historique de Droit Francais et

tranger (1949): 72. On the practice of learned men making their libraries available
to other scholars, George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in
Islam and the West (Edinburgh, 1981). pp. 24-27.

13. J.N. Mattock, “Ibn Battuta’s Use of Ibn Jubayr’s Rikia” in R. Peters (ed.),
Proceedings of the Ninth Congress of the Union Européene des Arabisants et
Islamisants (Leiden, 1981), pp. 209-18; and “The Travel Writings of Ibn Jubair and
Ibn Batuta,” Glasgow Oriental Society Transactions 21 (1965-66): 35—46.

14. On the Rihla’s possible debts to al-Bakri, Ibn Fadlan, al-’Umari, and other
Muslim authors see Herman F. Janssens, /bn Batouta, “Le Voyageur de I|’Islam”
(Brussels, 1948), pp. 108-09; Stephen Janicsek, “Ibn Battuta’s Journey to Bulghar:
Is it a Fabrication?” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (October 1929): 794;
Mattock, “Ibn Battuta’s Use of Ibn Jubayr’s Rihla,” pp. 210, 217; L&H, pp. 280-
81.

15. See particularly Chapter 3, note 26.

16. See Chapter 8, note 12.

17. See various footnotes pertaining to the chronology and itinerary of trips to
these areas.

18. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, trans. and ed. Franz Rosenthal, 3 vols.
(Princeton, N.J., 1958), vol. 1, pp. 369-70.

19. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, vol. 1, p. xl.

20. Ibn al-Khatib, quoted in Levi-Provengal, “Le Voyage d’Ibn Battuta,” p. 213.

21. Ibn Khaldun, The Mugaddimah, vol. 1, pp. 370-71.

22. Gb, vol. 1, pp. ix-x. On Ibn Marzuk see “Ibn Marzuk,” El), vol. 3, pp. 865—
68.

320 The Rihla

23. Gb, vol. 1, p. x.

24. "Abd al-Rahman ibn ’Abd Allah al-Sa’di, Tarikh es-Soudan, trans. O.
Houdas (Paris, 1964), pp. 15-16; D&S, vol. 1, pp. xiii-xvi.

25. Barbara W. Tuchman, A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century
(New York, 1978).

26. Ibn Hajar’s biography quoted in Gb, vol. 1, pp. ix-x.

Glossary

Akhi
‘alim (pl. ’ulama)
amir
baraka
faqih
figh
fityan
ghazi
hadith
hajj
harim

"Id al-Adha
"Id al-Fitr

ithram

yaza
imam

Jihad

Ka’ba

Member or leader of an urban men’s
association, or fityan.

A person learned in the Islamic sciences
A military commander or ruler.

Quality of divine grace

A specialist in Islamic law; a jurist.
Jurisprudence, the science of Islamic law.
Urban association of men devoted to
Muslim religious and social ideals.

A fighter in holy war against unbelievers.
Traditions of the words or actions of the
Prophet Muhammad; one of the major
sources of Islamic law.

The pilgrimage to Mecca.

The restricted women’s quarters of a
house or palace.

Feast of the Sacrifice celebrated on the
10th of Dhu 1-Hijja; part of the rites of the
Muslim pilgrimage.

Feast of Breaking of the Fast celebrated
on the 1st of Shawwal to mark the end of
Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting.
The state of ritual purity associated with
the rites of the pilgrimage in Mecca; the
simple white garments worn by males
during the pilgrimage.

Certificate authenticating the holder’s
mastery of an Islamic text; conveys the
right to teach the text to others.

Leader of prayer in mosques; for Shi’a
Muslims the divinely ordained ruler of the
Muslim community.

War against unbelievers to defend or ex-
pand Islam.

The sacred, cube-shaped building in Mecca.

321

322 Glossary

khan

madhhab

madrasa

Maghrib
Maliki

mamluk

qadi
Ramadan

rihla

shari’a
sharif
shaykh

Shi'a (Shi’ism)

Sufism

Sunni

A mercantile warehouse or hostel for
merchants and other travelers; also in
Turkish and Mongol usage a chief or
ruler.

A school of law in Sunni Islam. The four
major schools are the Hanafi, the
Hanbali, the Maliki, and the Shafi’i.

A school or college teaching the Islamic
sciences, especially law.

The lands of North Africa, corresponding
to modern Morocco, Algeria, and
Tunisia.

One of the four madhhabs, or schools of
law; predominant in North Africa.

A military slave; a member of the
Turkish-speaking cavalry elite that ruled
Egypt and Syria under the Mamluk
dynasty.

A Muslim judge.

The ninth month of the lunar year, which
Muslims devote to fasting during daylight
hours.

Travel; a type of Islamic literature con-
cerned with travels, particularly for study
and pilgrimage.

Islamic law.

A descendant of the Prophet Muhammad.
A title of respect, as for a tribal chief,
learned man, or leader of a Sufi brother-
hood.

Muslims who take the view that the
Caliph ’Ali and his descendants are the
rightful rulers of the Muslim community.
The Shi’ia are divided into several
minority sects within Islam. An adherent
of one of these sects is a Shi’l.

Islamic mysticism. A Sufi is a Muslim
mystic and usually a member of an Islamic
religious order.

The majority sect in Islam whose
members follow one of the four major

tawaf

’ulama (sing. ’alim)
zawiya

Glossary 323

madhhabs, or schools of law. Sunni
Muslims are differentiated from followers
of Shi’i Islam.

The ritual of walking around the Ka’ba in
Mecca seven times.

Persons learned in the Islamic sciences.
A Sufi religious center or hospice. In
eastern Islam, Khanqa.

Bibliography

Works on Ibn Battuta and his Rihla

This list excludes a number of general works on the history of
geography or travel that contain summary descriptions of Ibn
Battuta’s career. It also excludes partial translations of the Rihla that
subsequently appeared as part of larger published works.

Abdur Rahim. “Six Hundred Years After — in the Footsteps of Ibn Battuta in
Andalusia.” Peshawar University Review 51 (1973): 1-21

Beckingham, Charles F. “From Tangier to China — 14th Century.” Hemisphere: An
Asian-Australian Magazine, 8 August 1978, pp. 26-31

—— “Ibn Battuta in Sind.” In Sind through the Centuries: Proceedings of an Inter-
national Seminar, Karachi 1975. Edited by Hamida Khuhro. Karachi, 1981. pp. 139-
42.

— “In Search of Ibn Battuta.” Asian Affairs 8 (1977): 263-77.

Bhatnagar, R. “Madhyadesh in the Rehla of Ibn Battuta.” Saugar University Journal 4
(1955-56): 97-109

Bousquet, G.H. “Ibn Battuta et les institutions musulmanes.” Studia Islamica 24
(1966): 81-106

Carim, Fuad. Maco Polo ve Ibn Batuta. Istanbul, 1966

Chelhod, Joesph. “Ibn Battuta, Ethnologue.” Revue de [Occident Musulman et de la
Méditerranée 25 (1978): 5-24

Chittick, H. Neville. “Ibn Battuta and East Africa.” Journal de la Société des
Africanistes 38 (1968): 239-41

Cuogq, J.M. Recueil des sources arabes concernant l'Afrique occidentale du Ville au
XVie siécle. Paris, 1975

De, Harinath (trans.), and Ghosh, P.N. (ed.). /bn Batutah’s Account of Bengal.
Calcutta, 1978

Défrémery, C., and Sanguinetti, B. R. (trans. and eds.). Voyages d'Ibn Battuta. 4 vols.
Panis, 1853-58; reprint edn., edited by Vincent Monteil. Paris, 1979

Dulaurier, Edouard. “Description de l’archipel d’Asie, par Ibn Bathoutha.” Journal
Asiatique, 4th ser. , 9 (1874): 93-134, 218-59

Fanjul, Serafin. “Elementos folkloricos en la Rihla de Ibn Battuta.” Revista del Instituto
Egipico de Estudios Islamicos en Madrid 21 (1981-82): 153-79

~—— and Arbés, Federico (trans. and eds.). /bn Battuta a través del Islam. Madrid, 1981

Ferrand, Gabriel. Relations de voyages et textes géographiques arabes, persans, et turks
relatif al’ Extréme-Orient du VIII au XVIII siécles. 2 vols. Paris, 1913-14. See vol. 2,
pp. 426-58

Freeman-Grenville, G.S. P. “Ibn Batuta’s Visit to East Africa, 1332 A.D.: A Trans-
lation.” Uganda Journal 19 (1955): 1-6

Gabnieli, Francesco (trans. and ed.). / viaggi di Ibn Battuta. Florence, 1961

Gibb, H. A. R. (trans. and ed.). /bn Battuta: Travels in Asia and Africa. London, 1929,
reprint edn. , 1983

325

326 Bibliography

—— “Notes sur les voyages d'Ibn Battuta en Asie Mineure et en Russie.” Etudes
d'orientalisme dediées a la memoire de Lévi-Provencal. 2 vols. Paris. 1962. vol. 1,
pp. 125-33

—— The Travels of Ibn Battuta A.D. 1325-1354, Translated with Revisions and
Notes from the Arabic Text Edited by C. Défrémery and B. R. Sanguinetti. 3 vols.
Cambridge for the Hakluyt Society, 1958, 1961, 1971

Gies, Frances Carney. “To Travel the Earth.” Aramco World Magazine
(January-February 1978): 18-27

Haig, M. R. “Ibnu Batuta in Sindh.“ Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 19 (1887):
393-412

Hamdun, Said. and King, Noel (trans. and eds.). /bn Battuta in Black Africa.
London, 1975

Hasan, Mehdi. “The Rihla of Ibn Battuta.” Proceedings of the Second Indian
Historical Congress 2 (1938): 278-85

Hrbek, Ivan. “The Chronology of Ibn Battuta’s Travels.” Archiv Orientalni 30
(1962): 409-86

Husain, Agha Mahdi. “Dates and Precis of Ibn Battuta’s Travels with Ob-
servations.” Sind University Research Journal, Arts Series: Humanities and Social
Sciences 7 (1968): 95-108

—— “Ibn Battuta and His Rehla in New Light.” Sind University Research Journal,
Arts Series: Humanities and Social Sciences 6 (1967): 25-32

—— “Ibn Battuta, His Life and Work.” Indo-Iranica 7 (1954): 6-13

—— “Manuscripts of Ibn Battuta’s Reh/la in Paris and Ibn Juzayy.” Journal and
Proceedings of the Asiatic Societv of Bengal 20 (1954): 49-53

—— (trans. and ed.). The Rehla of Ibn Battuta. Baroda, India, 1976

—— “Studies in the Tuhfatunnuzzar of Ibn Battuta and Ibn Juzayy.“ Journal of the
Asiatic Society of Bangladesh 23 (1978): 18-49

Ibn Battuta. Rihla Ibn Batuta. Beirut, 1964

—— Rihla Ibn Battuta. 2 vols. Cairo, 1964

Ibn Hajar al-’Asqalani. A/l-Durar al-Kamina fi A'yan al-’Mia al-Thamina. 4 vols.
Hyderabad, 1929-31. See vol. 3, pp. 480-81 for biographical notice on Ibn
Battuta

Izzeddin, Mehmed. “Ibn Battouta et la topographie byzantine.” Actes du VI
Congres Internationale des Etudes Byzantines. 2 vols. Paris, 1951, vol. 2, pp.
191-96

Janicsek, Stephen. “Ibn Battuta’s Journey to Bulghar: Is it a Fabrication?” Journal
of the Royal Asiatic Society (October, 1929): 791-800

Janssens, Herman F. /bn Batouta, “Le Voyageur de I'Islam.” Brussels, 1948

Khan, Abdul Majed. “The Historicity of Ibn Batuta Re. Sham-Suddin Firuz Shah,
the So-Called Balbani King of Bengal.” /ndian Historical Quarterly 18 (1942):
65-70

King, Noel. “Reading between the Lines of Ibn Battuta for the History of Religion
in Black Africa.” Milla wa-milla 19 (1979): 26-33

Lee, Samuel (trans. and ed.). The Travels of [bn Batuta. London, 1929

Leva, A. Enrico. “Ibn Batuta nell’ Africa Nera.” Africa 16: (1961): 169-77

Lévi-Procengal, E. “Le voyage d'Ibn Battuta dans le royaume de Grenade (1350).”
Mélanges offerts a William Marcais. Paris, 1950, pp. 205-24

Markwart, J. “Ein arabischer Bericht tiber die arktischen (uralischen) Lander aus
dem 10 Jahrhundert.” Ungaarische Jahrbticher 4 (1924): 261-334

Mattock, J.N. “Ibn Battuta’s Use of Ibn Jubayr’s Rih/a.” In Proceedings of the
Ninth Congress of the Union Européene des Arabisants et Islamisants. Edited by
R. Peters. Leiden, 1981, pp. 209-18

“The Travel Writings of Ibn Jubair and Ibn Batuta.” Glasgow Oriental Society
Transactions 21 (1965-66): 35—46

Mauny. R., Monteil, V., Djenidi, A., Robert, S.. and Devisse, J. Textes et

Bibliography 327

documents relatifs a lhistoire d'Afrique: extraits tirés des voyages d'lbn
Battuta. Dakar, 1966

Meillassoux, C. “L‘itinéraire d'Ibn Battuta de Walata a Malli.” Journal of African
History 13 (1972): 389-95

Miquel, André. “Ibn Battuta, trente années de voyages de Pekin au Niger.” Les
Africains \ (1977): 117-40

—— “L’'Islam d‘Ibn Battuta.” Bulletin d'Etudes Orientales 30 (1978): 75-83

Mirza, M. Wahid. “Khusrau and Ibn Battuta, a Comparative Study.” In Professor
Muhammad Shafi’ Presentation Volume. Lahore, 1955, pp. 171-80

Mollat, Michel. “Ibn Batoutah et la mer.” Travaux et Jours 18 (1966): 53-70

Monteil. Vincent. “ Introduction aux voyages d‘Ibn Battuta (1325-53). Bulletin de
I'lFAN, ser. B, 30 (1968): 444-62

Moraes, G.M. “Haryab of Ibn Batuta.” Journal of the Bombay Branch of the
Royal Asiatic Society 15 (1938): 37-49

Morris, J. “Ibn Batuta: The Travels and the Man.” Ur (1980): 23-27

N’Diaye, Aissatou. “Sur la transcription des vocables africains par Ibn Bath-
thutah.” Notes Africaines 38 (1948): 26-27; 41 (1949): 31

Netton, Ian Richard. “Myth, Miracle and Magic in the Rihla of Ibn Battuta.”
Journal of Semitic Studies 29 (1984): 131-40

Norris, H.T. “Ibn Battutah’s Andalusian Journey.” Geographical Journal 125
(1959): 185-96

Quiros Rodriquez, C. “B. Batuta: un viajero tangerino sel siglo XIV.” Archivos del
Instituto de Estudios Aficanos 6 (1952): 11-27

Rashid, Abdur. “India and Pakistan in the Fourteenth Century as Described by
Arab Travellers.” In Congresso internacional de historia dos descobrimentos.
Lisbon, 1961

Rawlinson, H.G. “The Traveller of Islam.” /slarmic Culture 5 (1931): 29-37

Saletore, R. N. “Haryab of Ibn Battuta and Harthara Nrpala.” Quarterly Journal of
the Mythic Society 31 (1940-41): 384-406

Seco de Lucena, Luis. “De toponimia granadina: Sobre el vije de Ibn Battuta al
reino de Granada.” Al-Andalus 16 (1951): 49-85

Slane, M.G. (trans.). “Woyage dans le Soudan.” Journal Asiatique, 4th ser., 1
(1843): 181-246

Sobret, J. “Les Frontiéres chez Ibn Battuta.” In Actes du 8¢me Congres de l'Union
Européenne des Arabisants et Islamisants. Aix-en-Provence. 1978. pp. 305-08

Stewig, R. “Versuch einer Auswertung der Reisebeschreibung von Ibn Battuta
(nach der englischen Ubersetzung von H.A.R. Gibb) zur Bedeutungs-
differenzierung westanatolischer Siedlungen.” Der Islam 47 (1971): 43-S8

Von Mzik, Hans (trans. and ed.). Die Reise des Arabers Ibn Batuta durch Indien
und China. Hamburg, 1911

Yamamoto, T. “On Tawalisi as Described by Ibn Battuta.” Mernoirs of the Re-
search Department of the Toyo Bunko 8 (1936): 93-133

Yule, Henry. Cathay and the Way Thither. 4 vols. London. 1913-16. See vol. 4, pp.
5-166.

General Works

Abun-Nasr, Jamil M. A History of the Maghrib. Cambridge, England, 1971

Adler, Elkan N. Jewish Travelers. London, 1930

Arberry, Arthur J. The Koran Interpreted. New York, 1955

Ashtor, E. A Social and Economic History of the Near East in the Middle Ages.
Berkeley, 1976

Bel, Alfred. La religion musulmane en Berbérie: esquisse d'histoire et de sociologie
religieuses. Paris. 1938

328 Bibliography

Boyle, John Andrew. The Mongol World Empire 1206-1370. London, 1977

Brice, William C. (ed.). An Historical Atlas of Islam. Leiden, 1981

Brignon, Jean; Amine, Abdelaziz; Boutaleb, Brahim; Martinet, Guy; and
Rosenberger, Bernard. Histoire du Maroc. Paris, 1967

Chaunu, Pierre. L’expansion européenne du XIIle au XVe siécle. Paris, 1969

Cook, M.A. (ed.). Studies in the Economic History of the Middle East. Oxford,
1970

Curtin, Philip D. Cross-Cultural Trade in World History. Cambridge, England,
1984

Dodge, Bayard. Muslim Education in Medieval Times. Washington, D.C., 1962

Encyclopaedia of Islam. 1st edn., 4 vols. Leiden, 1913-38

Encyclopaedia of Islam. 2nd edn., 5 vols. Leiden, 1954; London, 1956-

Goitein, S.D. A Mediterranean Society. 4 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1967-83

— Studies in Islamic History and Institutions. Leiden, 1966

Grousset, René. The Empire of the Steppes: A History of Central Asia. New
Brunswick, N.H., 1970

Hazard, Harry W., and Setton, Kenneth M. (eds.). A History of the Crusades. 5
vols. of which 3 are published. Madison, Wis., vols. 1 and 2, 2nd edn., 1969; vol.
3, 1975

Heyd, W. Histoire du commerce du Levant au moyen-dge. 2 vols. Leipzig, 1885-86;
reprint edn., Leipzig, 1936

Hodgson, Marshall G.S. “Hemispheric Interregional History as an Approach to
World History.” Journal of World History 1 (1954): 715-23

—— “The Interrelations of Societies in History.” Comparative Studies in Society
and History 5 (1963): 227-50

—— “The Role of Islam in World History.” /nternational Journal of Middle East
Studies 1 (1970): 99-123

—— “The Unity of Later Islamic History.” Journal of World History 5 (1960):
879-914

—— The Venture of Islam: Conscience and History in a World Civilization. 3 vols.
Chicago, 1974

Holt, P.M., Lambton, Ann K.S., and Lewis, Bernard. The Cambridge History of
Islam. 2 vols. Cambridge, 1970

Hourani, A.H., and Stern, S.M. The Islamic City. Oxford, 1970

Howorth, Henry H. History of the Mongols. 3 vols. London, 1888

Ibn Jubayr, Muhammad ibn Ahmad. The Travels of Ibn Jubayr. Translated by
R.J.C. Broadhurst. London, 1952

Ibn Khaldun. Histoire des Berbéres et des dynasties musulmanes de I’Afrique
septentrionale. Translated by Baron de Slane. 4 vols. Paris, 1925-56

— The Mugqaddimah. Translated and edited by Franz Rosenthal. 3 vols.
Princeton, N.H., 1958; 2nd edn., 1967

Julien, Charles-André. History of North Africa. Translated by John Petrie and
edited by C.C. Stewart. New York, 1970

Kwanten, Luc. Imperial Nomads: A History of Central Asia. Philadelphia, 1979

Lattimore, Owen. Inner Asian Frontiers of China. Boston, 1940

Levtzion, Nehemia. Conversion to Islam. New York, 1979

McNeill, William H. The Rise of the West: A History of the Human Community.
Chicago, 1963

Makdisi, George. The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the
West. Edinburgh, 1981 2

Marcais, Georges. La Berbérie musulmane et l’orient au Moyen Age. Paris, 1946

Miquel, André. La géographie humaine du monde musulman jusqu’au milieu du
Ile siécle. 2 vols. Paris, 1975

Moule, A.C., and Pelliot, Paul. Marco Polo: The Description of the World. 2 vols.
London, 1938; reprint edn., New York, 1976

Bibliography 329

Niane, D.T. (ed.). General History of Africa. Vol. 4: Africa from the Twelfth to the
Sixteenth Century. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1984

Oliver, Roland (ed.). The Cambridge History of Africa. Multivol. Vol. 3: From c.
1050 to c. 1600. Cambridge, 1977-

Olschki, Leonardo. Marco Polo's Asia: An Introduction to his Description of the
World Called Il Milione. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1960

Parry, J.H. The Discovery of the Sea. New York, 1974

Pelliot, Paul. Notes on Marco Polo. 2 vols. Reprint edn., Paris, 1959-63

Pipes, Daniel. Slave Soldiers and Islam. New Haven, Conn., 1981

Polo, Marco. The Book of Ser Marco Polo. Translated and edited by Henry Yule.
3rd edn., 2 vols. London, 1929

Richard, J. “European Voyages in the Indian Ocean and the Caspian Sea
(12th-15th Centuries).” /ran 6 (1968): 45-52

Richards, D.S. (ed.). [slam and the Trade of Asia. Philadelphia, 1970

Richards, J.F. (ed.). Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern
Worlds. Durham, N.C., 1983

Saunders, J.J. The History of the Mongol Conquests. London, 1971

Schacht, Joseph. An Introduction to Islamic Law. Oxford, 1964

Seymour, M.C. Mandeville’s Travels. Oxford, 1967

Spuler, Bertold. History of the Mongols. Berkeley and Los Angeles. 1972

—— The Mongols in History. Translated by G. Wheeler. New York, 1971

—— The Muslim World. Vol. 2: The Mongol Period. Translated by F.R.C.
Bagley. Leiden, 1960

Terrasse, H. Histoire du Maroc. 2 vols. Casablanca, 1949-50

Trimingham, J. Spencer. The Sufi Orders in Islam. Oxford, 1971

Tritton, A.S. Materials on Muslim Education in the Middle Ages. London, 1957

Tuchman, Barbara W. A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century. New
York, 1978

’Umari, Ibn Fadl Allah al-. L’Afrique moins I’ Egypte (Masalik al-absar fi mamalik
al amsar). Translated and edited by Maruice Gaudfroy-Demombynes. Paris,
1927

Unger, Richard W. The Ship in the Medieval Economy. London, 1980

Westermarck, Edward. Ritual and Belief in Morocco. 2 vols. London, 1926

Chapter 1: Tangier

Brown, Kenneth L. People of Salé: Tradition and Change in a Moroccan City,
1830-1930. Cambridge, Mass., 1976

Caille, J. “Les Marseillais 4 Ceuta au XIIIe siécle.” In Mélanges d'histoire et
d'archéologie de l’occident musulman. Vol. 2: Hommage a Georges Marcais.
Algiers, 1957, pp. 21-31

Dufourcq, Charles-Emmanuel. “Berbérie et Iberie médiévales: un probléme de
rupture.” Revue Historique 92 (1968): 293-324

—— ‘La Question de Ceuta au XIJJe siécle.” Hespéris 41 (1955): 67-127

—— L’Espagne catalane et le Maghrib aux XIlle et XIVe siécles. Paris, 1966

—— “Méditerranée et Maghreb du XIIle au XVIe siécles.” Revue d'histoire et du
Civilization du Maghreb 3 (1967): 75-87

Eickelman, Dale F. Knowledge and Power in Morocco: The Education of a
Twentieth Century Notable. Princeton, N.J., 1985

Ibn Abi Zar. Roudh el-Kartas: Histoire des souverains du Maghreb et annales de la
ville de Fez. Translated by Auguste Beaumier. Paris, 1860

Krueger, Hilmar C. “Genoese Trade with Northwest Africa in the Twelfth
Century.” Speculum 8 (1933): 377-95

Lane, Frederic C. Venice, a Maritime Republic. Baltimore, 1973

330 Bibliography

Latham, Derek. “Towns and Cities of Barbary — the Andalusian Influence.”
Islamic Quarterly 16 (1972): 189-204

Lévi-Provengal, E. “Un nouvel text d'histoire merinide: le Musnad d’Ibn Marzuk.”
Hespéris 5 (1925): 1-82

Lewis, Archibald R. “Northern European Sea Power and the Straits of Gibraltar,
1031-1350 A.D.” In Order and Innovation in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor
of Joseph R. Strayer. Edited by William C. Jordan. Princeton, N.J., 1976, pp.
139-62

Mackeen, A. M. “The Early History of Sufism in the Maghrib Prior to al-Shadhili.”
Journal of the American Oriental Society 91 (1971): 398-408

Mascarello, Anna. “Quelques aspects des activités italiennes dans le Maghreb
médiéval.” Revue d'histoire et de Civilisation du Maghreb 5 (1968): 63-75

Mas Latrie, Louis de. Traités de paix et de commerce et documents divers con-
cernant les relations des Chrétiens avec les Arabes de l'Afrique septentrionale au
moyen age. Paris, 1866

Michaux-Bellaire, Edouard. Villes et tribus du Maroc: Tanger et sa zone. Paris,
1921, vol. 7

Nasiri, al-Slawi al-. “Kitab al-Istiqsa li-Akhbar duwal al-Maghrib al-Aksa.” Trans-
lated by Ismael Hamet. Archives Marocaines 23 (1934): 1-621

Robson, J. A. “The Catalan Fleet and Moorish Sea-power (1337-1344).” English
Historical Review 74 (1959): 386-408

Salmon, Geroges. “Essai sur l"histoire politique de Nord Marocain.” Archives
Marocains 2 (1904): 1-100

Thoden, Rudolf. Abu /-Hasan Ali: Merinidenpolitik zwischen Nordafrika und
Spanien in den Jahren 710-52 AH/1310-52. Freiburg, 1973

Chapter 2: The Maghrib

Brunschvig, Robert. La Berbérie orientale sous les Hafsides des origines a la fin du
XVe siécle. 2 vols. Paris, 1940 and 1947

— “Quelques remarques historiques sur les Médersas de Tunisie.” Revue
Tunisienne 6 (1931): 261-85

Canard, M. “Les relations entre les Merinides et Les Mamlouks au XIVe siécle.”
Annales de l'Institut d’Etudes Orientales 5 (1939): 41-81

Cherbonneau, A. “Notice et extraits du voyage d’El-Abdary 4a travers l'Afrique
septentrionale au VIle de I'Hégire.” Journal Asiatique, Sth ser., 4 (1854): 144-76

Daoulatli, A. Tunis sous les Hafsides. Tunis, 1976

Demeerseman, A. “Un type de lettré tunisien du X1Ve siécle.” Revue de [Institut
des Belles Lettres Arabes 22 (1959): 261-86

Dufourcq. Charles-Emannuel. “Les activités politiques et économiques des
Catalans en Tunisie et en Algerie orientale du 1262 4 1377.” Bulletin de la real
academia de buenas letras de Barcelona 19 (1947): |-96

Epalza, Miguel de, and Petit, Ramon. Recueil d'études sur les Moriscos andalous en
Tunisie. Madrid, 1972

Idris, H. R. “De la realité de la catastrophe hilalienne.” Annales, E.S.C. 23 (1968):
390-96

Lacoste, Yves. [bn Khaldoun: naissance de l'histoire passé du tiers-monde. Paris,
1966

Latham, Derek. “Towards a Study of Andalusian Immigration and its Place in
Tunisian History.” Les cahiers de Tunisie 5 (1957): 203-52

Lawless, Richard I., and Blake, Gerald H. Tlemcen: Continuity and Change in an
Algerian Islamic Town. London, 1976

Poncet, J. “Le mythe de la ‘catastrophe’ hilalienne.” Annales, E.S.C. 22 (1967):
1099-120

Bibliography 331

Soyous, A. E. Le Commerce des Européens a Tunis depuis le XIle siécle jusqu'a la
fin du XVIle siécle. Paris, 1929

Talbi, Mohamed. “Les contacts culturels entre I'Ifriqiya hafside (1230-1569) et le
sultanat nasride d’Espagne (1232-1492).” In Actas del I! Coloquis hispano-
tunecino de estudios historicos, pp. 63-90. Madrid, 1973

Thomassy, Raymond. “Des caravanes de |’Afrique septentrionale.” Bulletin de la
Société de Géographie, ser. 2, 20 (1843): 141-59

Tijani, Abdallah al-. “Voyage du Scheikh et-Tidjani dans la Regence de Tunis.”
Translated by A. Rousseau. Journal Asiatique, 4th ser., 20 (1852): 57-208; 5th
ser., 1 (1853): 101-68

Chapter 3: The Mamluks

Abu-Lughod, Janet. Cairo: 1001 Years of the City Victorious. Princeton, N.J., 1971

Adams, William Y. Nubia: Corridor to Africa. Princeton, N.J., 1977

’Ankawi, "Abdullah. “The Pilgrimage to Mecca in Mamluk Times.” Arabian
Studies 1 (1974): 146-70

Ayalon, David. “Aspects of the Mamluk Phenomenon.” Der Islam. Part 1, 53
(1976): 196-225; Part II, 54 (1977): 1-32

—— “The European-Asiatic Steppe: A Major Reservoir of Power for the Islamic
World.” Acts of the 25th Congress of Orientalists 2: 47-52. Moscow, 1960

— Gunpowder and Firearms in the Mamluk Kingdom. London, 1956

—— The Muslim City and the Mamluk Military Aristocracy. Jerusalem, 1967

Clerget, Marcel. La Caire: étude de géographie urbaine et d'histoire economique. 2
vols. Cairo, 1934

Cougat, J. “Les routes d’Aidhab.” Bulletin de l'Institut Francais d’Archéologie
Orientale 8 (1908): 135-43

Creswell, K. A.C. The Muslim Architecture of Egypt, 2 vols. Oxford, 1952, (1959)

Darrag, Ahmad. L’Egypte sous le regne de Barsbay, 825-41/]422-38. Damascus,
1961

Dodge, Bayard. Al-Azhar: A Millennium of Muslim Learning. Washington, D.C.,
1961

Dopp, P. H. “Le Caire vu par les voyageurs occidentaux du Moyen Age.” Bulletin
de la Société Royale de Géographie d’ Egypte 23 (1950): 117-49

Dussaud, Rene. Topographie historique de la Syrie antique et médiévale. Paris, 1927

Gaudefroy-Demombynes, Maurice. Le Syrie a l’époque des Mamelouks. Paris,
1923

Gilbert, Joan E. “The ‘Ulama of Medieval Damascus and the International World
of Islamic Scholarship.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley,
1977

Grant, C.P. The Syrian Desert: Caravans, Travel and Exploration. London, 1937

Hasan, Yusuf Fadl. The Arabs and the Sudan from the Seventh to the Early
Sixteenth Centuries. Edinburgh, 1967

Hitti, Philip K. History of Syria. 2nd edn. New York, 1957

Humphreys, R.S. “The Emergence of the Mamluk Army.” Studia Islamica 45
(1977): 46 (1977): 147-82

Jomier, Jacques. Le Mahmal et le caravane égyptienne des pélérins de la Mecque.
Cairo, 1953

Lane-Poole, Stanley. The Story of Cairo. London, 1902

Lapidus, I.M. Muslim Cities in the Later Middle Ages. Cambridge, Mass., 1967

Le Strange, Guy. Palestine under the Moslems. Beirut, 1965

Maqrizi, al-. Histoire des Sultans Mamlouks de | ‘Egypte. Translated by M.
Quatremere. Paris, 1937

Marmardji. A.S. Textes géographiques arabes sur la Palestine. Paris, 1951

332 Bibliography

Muir, William. The Mameluke or Slave Dynasty of Egypt, 1260-1517. London,
1896

Murray, G. W. “’Aidhab.” The Geographical Journal 68 (1926): 235-40

Paul, A. A History of the Beja Tribes of the Sudan. Cambridge, England, 1954

Petry, Carl F. The Civilian Elite of Cairo in the Later Middle Ages. Princeton, N.J.,
1981

Popper, William. Egypt and Syria under the Circassian Sultans, 1382-1486.
Berkeley, 1955 and 1957

Raymond, André, “La population du Caire de Maqrizi a la Description de I’ Egypt.”
Bulletin d’ Etudes Orientales 28 (1975): 201-15

Rogers, J. M. “Evidence for Mamluk—Mongol Relations, 1260-1360.” In Colloque
international sur l'histoire du Caire. 1969, pp. 385—403

Sauvaget, Jean. “Esquisse d’une histoire de la ville de Damas.” Revue des Etudes
Islamiques 4 (1934): 421-80

—— La poste aux chevaux dans l’empire des Mamelouks. Paris, 1941

Semeonis, Symon. The Journey of Symon Semeonis from Ireland to the Holy Land.
Translated and edited by Mario Esposito. Dublin, 1960

Staffa, Susan Jane. Conquest and Fusion: The Social Evolution of Cairo, A.D.
642-1850. Leiden, 1977

Suchem, Ludolph von. Ludolph von Suchem’s Description of the Holy Land and of
the Way Thither. Translated by Aubrey Stewart. London, 1895

Trimingham, J. Spencer. Islam in the Sudan. London, 1965

Wiet, Gaston. Cairo: City of Art and Commerce. Norman, Okla., 1964

—— “Les communications en Egypte au Moyen Age.” L’Egypte Contemporaine 24
(1933): 241-64

Ziadeh, Nicloa A. Damascus under the Mamluks. Norman, Okla., 1964

—— Urban Life in Syria under the Early Mamluks. Beirut, 1953

Chapter 4: Mecca

Amin, Mohamed. Pilgrimage to Mecca. London, 1978

Bey, Ali. The Travels of Ali Bey. 2 vols. Philadelphia, 1816

Bidwell, Robin L. Travellers in Arabia. New York, 1976

Burckhardt, John Lewis. Travels in Arabia. 2 vols. London, 1829; reprint edn.,
London, 1968

Burton, Richard Francis. Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and
Meccah. 2 vols. Reprint edn., New York, 1964

Frescobaldi, Gucci and Sigoli. Visit to the Holy Places of Egypt, Sinai, Palestine,
and Syria in 1384. Translated and edited by Theophilus Bellorini and Eugene
Hoade. Jerusalem, 1948

Gaudefroy-Demombynes, M. Le Pélérinage a la Mekke. Paris, 1923

Gaury, Gerald de. Rulers of Mecca. London, 1951

Hogarth, D.C. Arabia. Oxford, 1922

Hurgronje, C. Snouck. Mecca in the Latter Part of the Nineteenth Century. Trans-
lated by J. H. Monahan. Leiden, 1931

Kamal, Ahmad. The Sacred Journey. London, 1961

Long, David Edwin. The Hajj Today: A Survey of the Contemporary Pilgrimage to
Mekkah. Albany, New York.

Musil, Alois. Arabia Deserta, a Topographical Itinerary. New York, 1927

—— The Northern Hegaz. New York, 1926

Rutter, Eldon. The Holy Cities of Arabia. 2 vols. London, 1928

Varthema, Ludovico di. The Travels of Ludovico di Varthema. Translated by John
W. Jones. London, 1863

Bibliography 333
Chapter 5: Persia and Iraq

Arberry, A.J. Shiraz. Norman, Okla., 1960

Barthold, W. An Historical Geography of Iran. Translated by Svat Soucek and
edited with an introduction by C. E. Bosworth. Princeton, N.J., 1984

Boyle, J. A. (ed.). Cambridge History of Iran. Vol. 5: The Saljug and Mongol
Periods. Cambridge, England, 1968

Browne, Edward G. A Literary History of Persia. 4 vols. Cambridge. England,
1929-30

—— A Year amongst the Persians. London, 1893

Bulliet, Richard W. The Patricians of Nishapur. Cambridge, Mass., 1972

Dawson, Christopher. The Mongol Missions. London, 1955

Juvaini. The History of the World Conqueror. Translated by John Andrew Boyle. 2
vols. Cambridge, Mass., 1958

Lambton, A.K.S. Islamic Society in Persia. London, 1954

— Landlord and Peasant in Persia. London, 1953

Le Strange, Guy. Baghdad during the Abbasid Caliphate. Oxford, 1924

—— The Lands of the Eastern Caliphate. Cambridge. England, 1905; 2nd edn..,
1930; reprint edn., New York, 1966

—— Mesopotamia and Persia under the Mongols in the Fourteenth Century A.D.:
From the “Nuzhat al-Qulub” of Hamd Allah Mustaufi. London, 1903

Lewis, Bernard. “The Mongols, the Turks and the Mulsim Polity.” Transactions of
the Royal Historical Society, Sth ser. (1968): 49-68

Minorsky, Vladimir. The Turks, Iran and the Caucasus in the Middle Ages.
London, 1978

Morgan, D.O. “The Mongol Armies in Persia.” Der Islam 56 (1979): 81-96

Mustawfi, Hamd-Allah. The Geographical Part of the “Nuzhat al-Qulub.” Trans-
lated by G. Le Strange. Leiden, 1919

— Tarikh-i-Guzidah. Translated by M.J. Gantin. Paris. 1903

Rashid al-Din. The Successors of Genghis Khan. Translated by John A. Boyle.
New York, 1971

Smith, John Masson. “Mongo! Manpower and Persian Population.” Journal of the
Economic and Social History of the Orient 18 (1975): 271-99

Spuler, B. Die Mongolen in Iran. 2nd edn. Bertin, 1955

Thesiger, Wilfred. The Marsh Arabs. London, 1964

Wiet, Gaston. Baghdad: Metropolis of the Abbasid Caliphate. Norman, Okla.,
1971

Wilber, Donald N. The Architecture of Islamic Iran: The Il Khanid Period. Reprint
edn., Leiden, 1980

Chapter 6: The Arabian Sea

Allen, James de Vere. “Swahili Culture and the Nature of East Coast Settlement.”
International Journal of African Historical Studies 14 (1981): 306-34

Ashtor, E. “The Karimi Merchants.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1956):
45-56

Aubin, J. “Les Princes d'Ormuz du XIITe au XVe siécle.” Journal Asiatique 241
(1953): 77-138

Chelhod, J. “Introduction 4 histoire sociale et urbaine de Zabid.” Arabica 25
(1978): 48-88

Chittick, Neville. Kilwa: An Islamic Trading City on the East African Coast. 2 vols.
Nairobi, 1974

—— “Shirazi Colonization of East Africa.” Journal of African History 6 (1965):
275-94

334 Bibliography

Faroughy, Abbas. The Bahrein Islands, 750-1951. New York, 1951

Fischel, Walter J. “The Spice Trade in Mamluk Egypt.” Journal of the Economic
and Social History of the Orient | (1958): 157-74

Freeman-Grenville, G.S.P. The East African Coast: Select Documents from the
First to the Earlier Nineteenth Century. Oxford. 1962

—- The Medieval History of the Tanganyika Coast. Oxford, 1962

Garlake, Peter S. The Early Islamic Architecture of the East African Coast.
London, 1966

Goitein, S.D. “From Aden to India: Specimens of the Correspondence of India
Traders of the Twelfth Century.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of
the Orient 23 (1980): 43-66

—— “From the Mediterranean to India: Documents on the Trade to India, South
Arabia, and East Africa from the Eleventh to the Twelfth Centuries.” Speculum
29 (1954): 181-97

“Letters and Documents on the India Trade in Medieval Times.” /slamic

Culture 37 (1963): 188-205

“New Light on the Beginnings of the Karim Merchants.” Journal of the
Economic and Social History of the Orient 1 (1958): 175-84

Guest, R. “Zufar in the Middle Ages.” /slamic Culture 9 (1935): 402-10

Hornell, J. “Classification of Arab Sea Craft.” Mariner's Mirror 28 (1942): 11-40

Hourani, George. Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early
Medieval Times. Princeton, N.J., 1951

Howarth, David. Dhows. London, 1977

Huntingford, G.W.B. (trans. and ed.). The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea.
London, 1980

Ibn Rusta. Kitab al-A'lak al Nafisa. Edited by J. de Goeje. Leiden, 1892

Kammerer, A. La Mer Rouge. 4 vols. Cairo, 1929-35

Khazrejiyy. al-. The Pearl Strings: A History of the Resuliyy Dynasty of Yemen. 5
vols. Translated by J. W. Redhouse. Leiden. 1906-18

Kirk, William. “The NE Monsoon and Some Aspects of African History.” Journal
of African History 3 (1962): 263-67

Kirkman, J.S. Monuments and Men on the East African Coast. London, 1964

Labib, S. “Les marchands Karimis en Orient et sur |’Ocean Indien.” In Sociétés et
compagnies de commerce en Orient et dans |'Océan Indien. Actes du 8éme
colloque international d'histoire maritime. Paris, 1970, pp. 209-14

Lewcock, R. B. “Islamic Towns and Buildings in East Africa.” Storia della Citta 7
(1978): 49-53

—— and Smith, G.R. “Three Medieval Mosques in the Yemen.” Oriental Art 20
(1974): 75-86, 192-203

Lewis, Archibald. “Maritime Skills in the Indian Ocean, 1368-1500." Journal of the
Economic and Social History of the Orient 16 (1973): 238-64

Martin, B.G. “Arab Migration to East Africa in Medieval Times.” /nternational
Journal of African Historical Studies 7 (1974): 367-90

Moreland, W.H. “The Ships of the Arabian Sea about A.D. 1500.” Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society 1 (1939): 63-74, 173-92

Persian Gulf Pilot. 11th edn. London, 1967

Playfair, R.L. A History of Arabia Felix or Yemen. Bombay, 1859; reprint edn.,
London, 1970

Pouwels, Randall. L. “The Medieval Foundations of East African Islam.” nter-
national Journal of African Historical Studies 11 (1978): 201-22, 393-409

Prins, A.H.J. “The Persian Gulf Dhows: New Notes on the Classification of Mid-
Eastern Sea-Craft.” Persica 6 (1972-74): 157-65

Razik. History of the Imams and Seyyids of Oman. Translated by George P.
Badger. London, 1871

Red Sea and Gulf of Aden Pilot. 11th edn. London, 1967

Bibliography 335

Rubinacci, Roberto. “The Ibadis.“ In A.J. Arberry and C. F. Beckingham (eds.),
Religion in the Middle East. 2 vols. Cambridge, England, 1969

Saad, Elias. “Kilwa Dynastic Historiography.” History in Africa 6 (1979): 177-207

Serjeant, R.B. “The Dhows of Aden.” Geographical Journal 14 (1942): 296-301

—— “Maritime Customary Law in the Indian Ocean.” In Sociétés et compagnies de
commerce en Orient et dans l'Océan Indien, Paris, 1970, pp. 195-207

— “The Ports of Aden and Shihr (Medieval Period).” Recueils de la Société Jean
Bodin 32 (1974): 207-24

—— The Portuguese off the South Arabia Coast. Oxford, 1963

Teixeira, Pedro. Travels. Translated by W.F. Sinclair. London, 1902

Tibbetts, G.R. Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean before the Coming of the
Portuguese. London, 1971

Toussaint, Auguste. Histoire de l’'Océan Indien. Paris, 1961

Trimingham, J. Spencer. /slam in East Africa. Oxford, 1964

Tritton, A.S. The Rise of the Imams of Sanaa. Madras, 1925

Villiers, Alan. Sons of Sinbad. London, 1940

The West Coast of India Pilot. \1th edn. London, 1975

Wiet, Gaston. “Les marchands d'Epices sous les sultans mamelouks.” Cahiers
d’Histoire Egyptienne 7 (1952): 81-147

Wilkinson, J.C. “Oman and East Africa: New Light on Early Kilwan History from
the Omani Sources.” International Journal of Afircan Historical Studies 14
(1981): 272-305

—— “The Origins of the Omani State.” In The Arabian Peninsula: Society and
Politics. Edited by Derek Hopwood. London, 1972, pp. 67-88

Williamson, Andrew. “Hurmuz and the Trade of the Gulf in the 14th and 15th
Centuries A.D.” In Proceedings of the Sixth Seminar for Arabian Studies.
London, 1973, pp. 52-68

Wilson, Arnold T. The Persian Gulf: An Historical Sketch from the Earliest Times
to the Beginning of the Twentieth Century. Oxford, 1928; reprint edn., London,
1954

Chapter 7: Anatolia

Aflaki. Managib al-’Arifin: les saints des derviches tourneurs. 2 vols. Translated by
C. Huart. Paris, 1918-22

Akurgal, Ekrem (ed.). The Art and Architecture of Turkey. Oxford, 1980

Beldiceanu-Steinherr, Irene. Recherches sur les actes des regnes des Sultans Osman,
Orkhan et Murad I. Monachii, 1967

Bergeret, J. “Konya. Archéologia 96 (July, 1976): 30-37

Boase, T.S.R. (ed.). The Cilician Kingdom of Armenia. Edinburgh, 1978

Brown, John P. The Dervishes, or Oriental Spiritualism. London, 1868; reprint
edn., 1927

Bryer, Anthony A.M. The Empire of Trebizond and the Pontos. London, 1980

Byrne, E.H. Genoese Shipping in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries.
Cambridge, Mass., 1930

Cahen, Claude. Pre-Ottoman Turkey. London, 1968

Cook, M.A. (ed.). A History of the Ottoman Empire to 1730. Cambridge, Eng-
land, 1976

Gabriel, Albert. Une capitale turque, Brousse. 2 vols. Paris, 1958

Hasluck, F. W. Christianity and Islam under the Sultans. 2 vols. Oxford, 1929

Inalcik, Halil. The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300-1600. Translated by
Norman Itzkowitz and Colin Imber. London, 1973

Karpat, K.H. (ed.). The Ottoman State and its Place in World History. Leiden,
1974

336 Bibliography

Koprulu, M.F. Les origines de l'empire ottoman. Paris, 1935; reprint edn.,
Philadelphia, 1978

Lemerle, P. L’Emirat d’Aydin, Byzance et l’Occident. Paris, 1957

Lindner, Rudi Paul. Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia. Indiana University
Uralic and Altaic Series, vol. 144. Bloomington, Ind., 1983

Lloyd, Seton, and Rice, D. S. Alanya (Ala’iyya). London, 1958

Murray’s Handbook: Constantinople, Brusa and the Troad. London, 1900

Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Asia Minor. Edited by Charles Wilson. London,
1895

Pitcher, Donald Edgar (ed.). An Historical Geography of the Ottoman Empire. Leiden,
1972 :

Shaw, Stanford J. History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey. 2 vols. Vol. 1:
Empire of the Gazis: The Rise of the Ottoman Empire, 1280-1808. Cambridge,
England, 1977

Vryonis, Speros, Jr. The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of
Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century. Berkeley and Los
Angeles, 1971

Wittek, P. Das Fiirstentum Mentesche. Reprint edn., Amsterdam, 1967

—— “Le Sultan of Rum.” Annuaire de I’ Institut de Philologie et d’ Histoire Orientales et
Slaves 6 (1938): 361-90

—— The Rise of the Ottoman Empire. London, 1938

Zachariadou, Elizabeth A. Trade and Crusade: Venetian Crete and the Emirates of
Menteshe and Aydin (1300-1415). Venice, 1983

Chapter 8: The Steppe

Balard, M. “Notes sur l’activité maritime des Genois de Caffa a la fin du XI Ile siécle.”
In Sociétés et compagnies de commerce en Orient et dans |’Océan Indien. Paris, 1970,
pp. 375-86

Barthold, W. Histoire des Turcs d’Asie Centrale. Paris, 1945

—— Turkestan down to the Mongol Invasion. 3rd edn. London, 1968

Bosworth, Clifford Edward. The Medieval History of Iran, Afghanistan and Central
Asia. London, 1977

Bratianu, Gheorghe Ivan. La Mer Noire des origines a la conquéte ottomane. Monachii,
1969

—— Recherches sur le commerce genois dans la Mer Noire au XI Ile siécle. Paris, 1929

Chambers, James. The Devil's Horsemen: The Mongol Invasion of Europe. Translated
by Guy Le Strange. London, 1928

Clavijo, Ruy Gonzales de. Clavijo: Embassy to Tamerlane, 1403-06. London, 1979

Dupree, Louis. Afghanistan. Princeton, N.J., 1980

Ebersolt, J. Constantinople byzantine et les voyageurs du Levant. Paris, 1918

Fisher, Alan. The Crimean Tatars. Stanford, 1978

Gregkov, B. D. and Iakubovskij, A. J. La Horde d’Or. Translated by F. Thuret. Pans,
1939

Hambly, Gavin. Central Asia. London, 1969

Humlum, J. La géographie de l'Afghanistan. Copenhagen, 1959

Izzeddin, Mehmed. “Quelques voyageurs musulmans 4 Constantinople au Moyen
Age.” Orient 9 (1965): 75-106

Jackson, Peter. “The Dissolution of the Mongol Empire.” Central Asiatic Journal 22
(1978): 186-244

Krader, Lawrence. Peoples of Central Asia. 3rd edn. Indiana University Publications:
Uralic and Altaic Series, vol. 26. Bloomington, Ind., 1971

Loenertz, R. J. “Dix-huit lettres de Gregoire Acindyne, analysées et datées.” Orientalia
Christiana Periodica 23 (1957): 114-44

Bibliography 337

Martin, Janet. “The Land of Darkness and the Golden Horde: The Fur Trade under the
Mongols, XIII-XIVth Centuries.” Cahiers du Monde Russe et Sovietique 19 (1978):
401-21

Meeker, Michael E. “The Black Sea Turks: Some Aspects of their Ethnic and Cultural
Background.” /nternational Journal of Middle East Studies 2 (1971): 318-45

Nemtseva, N. B. “The Ongins and Architectural Development of the Shah-i Zinde.”
Translated by J. M. Rogers and Adil Yasin. /ran 15 (1977): 51-73

Nicol, D. M. The Last Centuries of Byzantium, !126]—1453. London, 1972

Oliver, E. E. “The Chaghatai Mughals.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 20 (1888):
72-128

Ostrogorsky, George. History of the Byzantine State. 2nd edn. Translated by Joan
Hussey. Oxford, 1968

Pelliot, Paul. Notes sur l'histoire de la Horde d’Or. Paris, 1949

Poliak, A. N. “Le caractére colonial de l'état mamlouk dans ses rapports avec la Horde
d’Or.” Revue d’ Etudes Islamiques 9 (1935): 231-48

Riasanovsky, A. A History of Russia. 3rd edn. Oxford, 1977

Rockhill, William Woodville (trans. and ed.). The Journey of William of Rubruck to the
Eastern Parts of the World. London, 1900

Rogers, J. M. “Summary of Soviet Research on the Khanate of the Golden Horde.”
Unpublished paper, 1980?

Sinor, Denis. Jnner Asia And its Contacts with Medieval Europe. London, 1977

—— Introduction al étude de I’ Eurasie Centrale. Wiesbaden, 1963

Smith, J.M., Jr. The History of the Sarbadar Dynasty, 1336-138] A.D. The Hague,
1970

Spuler, B. Die Goldene Horde. Leipzig, 1943

Vernadsky, G. The Mongols and Russia. New Haven, Conn. , 1953

Wilber, Donald N. Afghanistan. 2nd edn. New Haven, Conn., 1962

Chapter 9: Delhi

Ahmad, Aziz. An Intellectual History of Islam in India. Edinburgh, 1969

— “Mongol Pressure in an Alien Land.” Central Asiatic Journal 6 (1961): 182-93

—— Studies in Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment. Oxford, 1964

— “The Sufi and the Sultan in Pre-Mughal Muslim India.” Der Islam 38 (1962): 142-
53

Ahmad, Magbul. Indo-Arab Relations. Bombay, 1969

Ashraf, K. M. Life and Conditions of the People of Hindustan. 2nd edn., New Delhi,
1970

Ballhatchet, Kenneth, and Harmison, John. The City in South Asia. London, 1980

Barani, Ziya al-Din. The Political Theory of the Delhi Sultanate. Translated and edited
by Mohammed Habib and Afsar Umar Salim Khan. Allahabad, n.d.

Basham, A. L. (ed.). A Cultural History of India. Oxford, 1975

Chand, Tara. Influence of Islam on Indian Culture. Allahabad. 1936

Day, U.N. Some Aspects of Medieval Indian History. New Delhi, 1971

Digby, Simon. “Muhammad bin Tughluq’s Last Years in Kathiawar and his Invasions of
Thattha.” Hamdard Islamicus 2 (1979): 79-88

—— War-horse and Elephant in the Delhi Sultanate: A Study of Military Supplies.
Oxford, 1971

Elliot, H.M. and Dowson, John. The History of India as Told by its Own Historians. 31
vols. Vol. 3: The Muhammadan Period. Allahabad, 1952-59

Habib, Irfan. “Economic History of the Delhi Sultanate, An Essay in Interpretation.
Indian Historical Review 4 (1978): 287-303

Habibullah, A. B.M. The Foundation of Muslim Rule in India. 2nd edn., Allahabad,
1961

338 Bibliography

Haig, Wolseley (ed.). The Cambridge History of India. Vol. 3: Turks and Afghans. New
York, 1928; reprint edn., Delhi, 1958

—— “Five Questions in the History of the Tughluq Dynasty of Dilhi.” Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society (1922): 319-72

Hardy, Peter. Historians of Medieval India. London, 1960

Husain, Mahdi Agha. Le gouvernement du sultanat de Delhi. Paris, 1936

— Tughluq Dynasty. Calcutta, 1963

Ikram, Sheikh Mohamad. Muslim Rule in India and Pakistan. 2nd edn., Lahore, 1966

Imperial Gazetteer of India. 26 vols. Oxford, 1907

Jackson, Peter. “The Mongols and the Delhi Sultanate in the Reign of Muhammad
Tughlug (1325-51).” Central Asiatic Journal 19 (1975): 118-57

—— “The Mongols and India (1221-1351).” Ph.D. dissertation, Cambridge University,
1977 :

Khan, M.S. “An Undiscovered Arabic Source of the History of Sultan Muhammad bin
Tughlag.” Islamic Culture 53 (1979): 187-205

Lal, K. S. History of the Khaljis, A. D. 1290-1320. 2nd edn. London, 1967

Lambrick, H. T. Sind: A General Introduction. Hyderabad, 1964

Lehmann, Fnitz. “Architecture of the Early Sultanate Period and the Nature of the
Muslim State in India.” Indica 15 (1978): 13-31

Little, D. P. “Did Ibn Taymiyya Have a Screw Loose?” Studia Islamica 41 (1975): 39-
Hl

Majumdar, R. C. (ed.). The History and Culture of the Indian People. Vol. 6: The Delhi
Sultanate. Bombay, 1960

Mujeeb, Mohammad. The Indian Muslims. Montreal, 1967

— Islamic Influence on Indian Society. Meerut, India, 1972

Nizami, K. A. Some Aspects of Religion and Politics in India in the Thirteenth Century.
Aligarh, 1961

—— Studies in Medieval Indian History and Culture. Allahabad, 1966

Nath, R. History of Sultanate Architecture, New Delhi, 1978

Rothermund, Dietmar (ed.). /slam in Southern Asia. Wiesbaden, 1975

Schimmel, Annemarie. [slam in India and Pakistan. Leiden, 1982

Schwartzberg, J. E. A Historical Atlas of South Asia. Chicago, 1978

Singh, Attar (ed.). Socio-Cultural Impact of Islam on India. Chandigarh, 1976

Stow, A. M. “The Road between Delhi and Multan.” Journal of the Punjab Historical
Society 3 (1914-15): 26-37

*Uman, Ibn Fadl Allah al-. A Fourteenth Century Arab Account of India under Sultan
Muhammad bin Tughlugq. Translated and edited by Iqtidar Husain Siddiqi and Zazi
Mohammad Ahmad. Aligarh, 1971

Chapter 10: Malabar and the Maldives

Barbosa, Duarte. The Book of Duarte Barbosa. 2 vols. Edited by Mansel Longworth
Dames. London, 1918-21

Bell, H.C. P. Maldive Islands. Colombo, 1882

Carswell, J. “China and Islam in the Maldive Islands.” Transactions of the Oriental
Ceramic Society 41 (1975—77): 121-97

—— “Mosques and Tombs in the Maldive Islands.” Art and Archaeology Research
Papers 9 (1976): 26-30

Chaube, J. History of the Gujarat Kingdom. New Delhi, 1973

Cheriau, A. “The Genesis of Islam in Malabar.” Indica 6 (1969): 13-20

Derrett, J., and Duncan, M. The Hoysalas: A Medieval Indian Royal Family. Oxford,
1957

Eaton, R.M. Sufis of Bijapur, 1300-1700: Social Roles of Sufis in Medival India.
Princeton, N.J., 1978

Bibliography 339

Forbes, A., and Fanzia, Ali. “Republic of 100 Islands.” Geographical Magazine 50
(1978): 264-68

Krishnaswanni Aiyangar, S. South India and her Muhammadan Invaders. London,
1921

Maloney, Clarence. People of the Maldives. Madras, 1980

Misra, S. C. The Rise of Muslim Power in Gujarat. New York, 1963

Moreland, W. H. “The Shahbandar in the Eastern Seas.” Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society (1920): 517-33

Needham, Joseph. Science and Civilization in China. Multivol. Vol. 4, Part 3: Civil
Engineering and Nautics. Cambridge, 1954-; this volume, 1971

Pyrard, Frangois. The Voyage of Francois Pyrard of Laval to the East Indies, the
Maldives, the Moluccas and Brazil. Translated and edited by Albert Gray. 2 vols.
London, n.d. Repnnt edn., New York, 1963?

Raychaudhuri, Tapan, and Habib, Irfan (eds.). The Cambridge Economic History of
India. 2 vols. Cambridge, England, 1982

Sastri, Nilakanta K. A. Foreign Notices of South India. Madras, 1939

— A History of South India. 3rd Edn., Madras, 1966

Sherwani, H. K. and Joshi, P. M. (eds.). History of Medieval Deccan, 1295-1724. 2 vols.
Hyderabad, 1973-74

Venkata Ramanayya, N. The Early Muslim Expansion in South India. Madras, 1942

Chapter 11: China

Abdur Rahim, Muhammad. Social and Cultural History of Bengal. Karachi, 1963

Andaya, Barbara Watson and Leonard Y. A History of Malaysia. New York, 1982

Bhattasali, N. K. Coins and Chronology of the Early Independent Sultans of Bengal.
With Translation of “Ibn-Batuta’s Travels in Bengal” from French by S. N. Bose.
Cambnidge, England, 1922; reprint edn., New Delhi, 1976

Chang, Kuei-sheng. “The Maritime Scene in China at the Dawn of the Great European
Discoveries.” Journal of the American Oriental Society 94 (1974): 347-57

Coedes, G. The Indianized States of Southeast Asia. Translated by Susan Brown
Cowing. Edited by Walter F. Vella. Honolulu, 1968

Cordier, Henri. Histoire générale de la Chine. 4 vols. Paris, 1920

Dardess, J. W. Conquerors and Confucians: Aspects of Political Change in Late Yuan
China. New York, 1973

Elvin, Mark. The Pattern of the Chinese Past. Stanford, Calif., 1973

Filesi, Teobaldo. China and Africa in the Middle Ages. Translated by David L. Morisen.
London, 1972

Geiger, Wilhelm. Culture of Ceylon in Mediaeval Times. Wiesbaden, 1960

Gernet, Jacques. Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion 1250-1276.
Translated by H. M. Wnght. Stanford, Calif. , 1970

Hall, D. G. E. A History of South-East Asia. 4th edn. New York, 1981

Hall, Kenneth R. “Trade and Statecraft in the Western Archipelago at the Dawn of the
European Age.” Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 54, part
1 (1981): 21-48

—— and Whitmore, John K. The Origins of Southeast Asian Statecraft. Ann Arbor,
Mich., 1976

Hill, A.H. “The Coming of Islam to North Sumatra.” Journal of Southeast Asian
History 4 (1963): 6-21

Hutterer, Karl L. (ed.). Economic Exchange and Social Interaction in Southeast Asia.
Ann Arbor, Mich., 1977

Jack-Hinton, Colin (ed.). Papers on Early South-East Asian History. Singapore, 1964

Johns, A. H. “From Coastal Settlement to Islamic School and City: Islamization in
Sumatra, the Malay Peninsula and Java.” Hamdard Islarnicus 4 (1981): 3-28

340 Bibliography

— “Islam in Southeast Asia: Reflections and New Directions.” Indonesia 19
(1975): 33-55

Karim, Abdul. Social History of the Muslims in Bengal. Dacca, 1959

Langlois, John D. (ed.). China under Mongol Rule. Princeton, N.J., 1981

Lo, Jung-pang. “The Emergence of China as a Sea Power during the Late Sung and
Early Yuan Periods.” Far Eastern Quarterley 14 (1954-55): 489-503

—— “Maritime Commerce and its Relation to the Sung Navy.” Journal of the
Economic and Social History of the Orient 12 (1969): 57-101

Ma Huan. Ying-yai Sheng-lan: The Over-all Survey of the Ocean’s Shores. Trans-
lated and edited by J. V.G. Mills. London, 1970

Nichols, C. W., and Paranavitana, S. A Concise History of Ceylon. Colombo, 1961

Pathmanathan, S. The Kingdom of Jaffna. Colombo, 1978

Raghavan, M.D. India in Ceylonese History, Society and Culture. 2nd edn.
Bombay, 1969

Ray, H.C., and Paranavitana, S. History of Ceylon. Colombo, 1959

Ricklefs, M.C. History of Indonesia. Bloomington, Ind., 1981

Rossabi, Morris (ed.). China among Equals: The Middle Kingdom and its
Neighbors, 10th-14th Centuries. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1983

Sarkar, Jadunath (ed.). The History of Bengal. 2 vols. Vol. 2: Muslim Period
1200-1757. Dacca, 1948

Schurmann, Herbert Franz. Economic Structure of the Yuan Dynasty. Cambridge,
Mass., 1956

Sirisena, W.M. Sri Lanka and Southeast Asia: Political, Religious and Cultural
Relations from A.D. 1000 to 1500. Leiden, 1978

Smith, D. Howard. “Zaitun’s Five Centuries of Sino-foreign Trade.” Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society, 1958, parts 3 and 4, pp. 165-77

Tibbetts, G.R. A Study of the Arabic Texts Containing Material on South-East
Asia. Leiden, 1979

Wheatley, P. The Golden Khersonese: Studies in the Historical Geography of the
Malay Peninsula before A.D. 1500 Kuala Lumpur, 1961

Chapter 12: Home

Arié, Rachel. L’Espagne musulmane au temps des Nasrides (1232-1492). Paris,
1973

Ayalon, David. “The Plague and its Effects upon the Mamluk Army.” Journal of
the Royal Asiatic Society (1946): 67-73

Benchekroun, M.B.A. La vie intellectuelle marocaine sous les Merinides et les
Wattasides. Rabat, 1974

Berque, Jacques. “Ville et université: apercu sur l'histoire de l’école de Fes.”
Revue Historique de Droit Frangais et Etranger (1949): 64-117

Blachére, R. “Quelques détails sur la vie privée du sultan merinide Abu I-’Hasan.”
In Memorial Henri Basset. Paris, 1928, pp. 83-89

Dols, Michael W. The Black Death in the Middle East. Princeton, N.J., 1977

Gibert, Soledad. “Abu-l-Barakat al-Balafiqi, Qadi, Historiador y Poeta.” Al-
Andalus 28 (1963): 381-424

Gottfried, Robert S. The Black Death: Natural and Human Disaster in Medieval
Europe. New York, 1983

Grabar, Oleg. The Alhambra. Cambridge, Mass., 1978

Irving, Washington. The Alhambra. Edited by F.H. Law, New York, 1926

Ladero Quesada, Miguel Angel. Granada: historia de un pais islamico (1232-1571).
2nd edn. Madrid, 1979

Latham, Derek. “The Later ’Azafids.” Revue de I’Occident Musulman et de la
Méditerranée 15-16 (1973): 109-25

Bibliography 341

—— “The Strategic Position and Defence of Ceuta in the Later Muslim Period.~
Islamic Quarterly 15 (1971): 189-204

Le Tourneau, Roger. Fés avant le Protectorat. Casablanca. 1949

— Fez in the Age of the Marinides. Norman, Okla., 1961

Lévi-Provengal, E. Histoire de l’Espagne musulman. New edn.. 3 vols. Paris, 1950

Lomax, Derek W. The Reconquest of Spain. London, 1978

Mackay, Angus. Spain in the Middle Ages: From Frontier to Empire, 1000-1500.
London, 1977

McNeill, William H. Plagues and Peoples. Garden City, N.Y., 1976

Prémare, A.L. de. Maghreb et Andalousie au XIVe siécle: notes de voyage d'un
Andalou au Maroc, 1344-1345. Lyon, 1981

Sauvaget, Jean. Alep. Paris, 1941

Shatzmiller, Maya. “Les premiers Merinides et le milieu religieux de Fes:
introduction de médersas.” Studia Islamica 34 (1976): 109-18

Terrasse, Charles. Médersas du Maroc. Paris, 1927

Terrasse, H. “Le royaume nasride dans la vie de l‘Espagne du Moyen Age:
indications et problemes.” Mélanges offerts a Marcel Bataillon. Bordeaux, 1963,
pp. 253-60

Torres Balbas, L. “Gibraltar: Ilave y guarda del reino de Espana.” Al-Andalus 7
(1942): 168-216

Verlinden, Charles. “Le grande peste de 1348 en Espagne.” Revue Belge de
Philologie et d’Histoire 17 (1938): 103-46

Ziegler, Philip. The Black Death. New York, 1969

Chapter 13: Mali

Bovill, E.W. The Golden Trade of the Moors. London, 1968

Chapelle, F. de la. “Esquisse d'une histoire du Soudan Occidental.” Hespéris 11
(1930): 35-95

Conrad, David, and Fisher. Humphrey. “The Conquest that Never Was: Ghana
and the Almoravids, 1076.” History in Africa 9 (1982): 21-59; 10 (1983): 53-78

Delafosse, Maurice. Haut-Senegal—Niger. 3 vols. Paris, 1919; reprint edn., 1972

—— “Le Gana et le Mali et ‘emplacement de leurs capitales.” Bulletin du Comité
d’Etudes Historiques et Scientifiques de l'A.O.F. 9 (1924): 479-542

—— “Les relations du Maroc avec le Soudan 4a travers les ages.” Hespéris (1924):
153-74

Devisse, J. “Routes de commerce et échanges en Afrique Occidentale en relation
avec la Méditerranée.” Revue d'Histoire Eronamiaie et Social 50 (1972): 357-97

Filipowiak, Wladyslaw. “Contribution aux recherches sur la capitale du royaume
de Mali a ’époque du haut Moyen-Age.” Archaeologia Polona \0 (1968): 217-32

—— Etudes archéologiques sur la capitale médiévale du Mali. Translated by Zofia
Slawskaj. Szczecin, 1979

Hiskett, M. The Development of Islam in West Africa. London, 1982

Hopkins, A.G. An Economic History of West Africa. New York, 1973

Hunwick, J.O. “The Mid-Fourteenth Century Capital of Mali.” Journal of African
History 14 (1973): 195-208

Leo Africanus. The History and Description of Africa. Translated by Robert Pory
and edited by Robert Brown. 3 vols. New York, 1896

Levtzion, Nehemia. Ancient Ghana and Mali. London, 1973

and Hopkins, J.F.P. (trans. and eds.). Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for
West African History. New York, 1981

Lewis, I. M. /slam in Tropical Africa. 2nd edn. Bloomington, Ind.. 1980

Lhote, H. “Recherches sur Takedda, ville décrite par le voyageur arabe Ibn
Battouta et située en Air.” Bulletin d 'IFAN 34 (1972): 429-70

342 Bibliography

McIntosh, Roderick J. and Susan Keech. “The Inland Niger Delta before the
Empire of Mali: Evidence from Jenne-Jeno.” Journal of African History 22
(1981): 1-22

McIntosh, Susan Keech. “A Reconsideration of Wangara/Palolus, Island of Gold.”
Journal of African History 22 (1981): 145-58

Malowist. M. “Sur l’or du Soudan: quelques observations sur le commerce de |"or
dans le Soudan Occidental au Moyen Age.” Annales E.S.C. 25 (1970): 1630-36

Mauny, Raymond. Tableau géographique de !'Ouest Africain au Moyen Age
d'apres les sources écrites, la tradition et l'archéologie. Amsterdam, 1967

Monteil. Charles. Les Empires du Mali. Paris, 1968

Niani, D. T. Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali. Translated by G. D. Pickett, London,
1965

Peres, Henri. “Relations entre le Tafilelt et le Soudan a travers le Sahara du XIe
au XIVe siécle.” In Mélange de géographie et d'orientalisme offerts a E.-F.
Gautier. Tours, 1937. pp. 410-14

Saad, Elias N. Social History of Timbuktu: The Role of Muslim Scholars and
Notables, 1400-1900. Cambridge. England, 1983

Sa‘di. “Abd al-Rahman ibn ‘Abd Allah al-. Tarikh es-Soudan. Translated by O.
Houdas. Paris, 1964

Terrasse, Henri. “Note sur les ruines de Sijilmasa.” Revue Africaine 368-69 (1936):
581-89

Trimingham, J. Spencer. A History of Islam in West Africa. Oxford, 1962

Wansbrough, John. “Africa and the Arab Geographers.” In Language and History
in Africa. Edited by D. Dalby. London, 1970. pp. 89-101

Watson, Andrew M. “Back to Gold and Silver.” Economic History Review, 2nd
ser., 20 (1967): 1-34

Willis, John R. (ed.). Studies in West African Islamic History. 3 vols. Vol. 1: The
Cultivators of Islam. London, 1979

INDEX

Page numbers in italics refer to maps.

Abadan 82,93
Abbasid Caliphate 9, 47, 117
‘Abd al-Wadid sultanate 15, 16, 28,
31-2, 34, 275
al--Abdari, Abu Muhammad 32-3
Abohar 82, 184,195
Abraham 56
Abu al-Tayyib 32-3, 35, 36
Abu Bakr, Abu Yahya, suftan 33-4,
35, 37
Abu Bakr, caliph 68
Abu Bakr, shaykh of
Mogadishu 125-6
Abu'Inan, sultan
and Abu I’Hasan 276, 278, 287
and Ibn Battuta 3, 295, 306, 307,
308n7, 309n26, 310
character of 280
death of 318
Abu l’Barakat 229-30
Abu !’Fath, Rukn al-Din 193-4
Abu l’Hasan, sultan 275, 276, 279, 287
Abu I’Mawahid Hasan see Ibn
Sulayman, al-Hasan
Abu Sa’id, Iikhan 86-7, 98-9, 100,
101, 268-9
Abu Sa’‘id, sultan 31,279
Abu Tashfin, sultan 31-2, 34
Abu Yusuf Ya’qub, sultan 16, 279
Acre 107, 139
Adam and Eve 241
Adam’s Bridge 229
Adam’s Peak 184, 229, 241, 242-3
Aden 2, 107, 110, 111, 113, 118,
119-20
Aden, Gulf of 119
Aegean Sea 151
Afghanistan 139, 178
*Aghyul, ‘Ali (traveler) 306
Ahaggar mountains 307
Ahsan Shah, Jalal al-Din, sultan 203,
205, 207, 244
’Ain al-Mulk, rebellion of 206-7
Air 277, 305, 306
Ajlun 42, 58
akhis 146,
see also fityan

Akhmim 42
Akko see Acre
Akkridur see Egridur
Aksaray /38
*Ala al-Din mosque 147
Ala al-Din Muhammad 98, 100, 101
al-Andalus see Andalusia
Alanya 107, 138, 139, 140, 144-5
*Alaya see Alanya
Alburz mountains 84
Aleppo 267, 269, 270
Alexandna 28, 41, 42, 43, 267, 273
Alfonso XI, king 275, 280, 282
Algeciras 14, 16
Algeria 4
Algiers 28, 32,277
Alhama 284
Alhambra 285, 286
Aligarh see Koil
*Ali ibn Abi Talib, caliph
‘alim 21
see also 'ulama
Almohads 14-15, 35-6
alms giving 35
Alughu, khan 177
Amasiya see Amasya
Amasya /38, 149
amir
caravan leader 38
military commander 47
amic al-hajj 66, 67, 89
amirs, of Turkish Anatolia 143-4
Amroha /84, 204
Amu Darya River 175, 174
*Anah 267, 269
Anatolia
society and culture 140-4
see also Turks
Andalusia 14-15
Muslim emigrants from 25, 37-8
Andarab River 178
Andronicus II, emperor 171, 172,
180n17
Andronicus III, emperor 169, 171-2
Annaba see Buna
Antalya 138, 139, 145
Aqaba (town) 55

344 Index

Aqaba, gulf of 42, 67
Arabia 82

see also Mecca, Medina, Yemen
Arabian Sea 107, 184
Arabic language 20, 88, 144, 231
Arab nomads 8-9, 32, 34, 39, 52
Arafat, plain of 70, 76-7, 241
Aragon see Aragon-Catalonia
Aragon-Catalonia 16, 276
Aral Sea 175
arid belt, historical importance of 8
Armenia, Armenians 140, 148, 149
Arya Chakravarti (king) 242
Arz al-Rum see Erzurum
Arzanjan see Erzincan
Ashgelon 107, 139
Asia Minor see Anatolia
Asilah 277, 286
Asir 112
Assiou 277, 306
Astrakhan 138, 169, 170, 173, 175
Aswan 52
Asyut 42
atabeq 94
Atlantic Ocean 14

trade on Moroccan coast of 17-18
Awliya, Nizam al-Din 207-8
Ayas 139, 148
Aya Soluk 138, 151
Aybek,Qutb al-Din, sultan 183,

187-8
*Aydhab 42, 51,52, 53-4, 107, 110,
111, 137, 274

commercial importance of 43, 53
Aydin, amirate of 143, 151, 153
Azak 138, 166, 167
Azelik see Takadda
Azerbaijan 84, 100, 140
Azov see Azak
Azov, seaof 138, 163

Bab al-Mandeb, strait of 107, 111,
113, 119

Babylon 2, 9, 41, 82, 97-8, 107, 267,
269

Bahmani sultanate 218

Bahrain 132

Bahri Mamluks see Mamluk sultanate

al-Balafiqi, Abu ’Barakat 312, 316

Balikesir 138, 151

Balkh 175, 176

Ballish see Velez Malaga

Bamako 301

Bambuk 291

Bandar-e-Ma’shur see Machul

Bandar Salawat see Chilaw
bandits and pirates
in Strait of Gibraltar 16-17
inIndia 195-6, 215-16, 246-7
in Morocco 278
in Spain 283-4
Bantu-speaking people 124
Banu Hanifa 132
Banu Hilal 34
see also Arab nomads
Banu Marin see Marinid sultanate
Banu Nabhan 131, 136n40
al-Baqi’ 69
Barah Nagar 255-6
baraka 23, 24, 58, 125
Baran, Zia al-Din 192, 202, 204, 207
211n6
Barcelona 17,276
Basra 82, 91, 92~3, 269
Battala see Puttalam
Batu, khan 161
Bengal, Bay of 184, 256
Bayalun, princess 169-70, 172, 176
Bayn al-Qasrayn 46
Bayt al-Fagih 107, 114
Beirut 107, 139
Beja (people) 52, 54, 112
Beja (town) 28
Bengal 207, 248, 253-4
Berbers 32, 33, 34, 38
and Marinid dynasty 15
and Sufism 23-4
see also Lawata Berbers
Berganma 138, 151
Berke, khan 167
Bethlehem 42, 56
Biba 42
Bibliothéque Nationale 4
Bichaqchi, Akhi 148
Bijaya 28, 31, 33-4
bilad al-sudan see Mali, Sudan
Bir al—Ksaib 277, 297, 298
Birgi 138, 149, 151, 153
Bish Dagh 138, 167
Bistam 175, 177
Black Death
and epidemic in India 261-2n9
causes and treatment 272-3
in Ifriqiya 276
in Spain 282
origins and spread of 270-3
social effects of 272
see also plague
Black Sea 138, 162, 163
Bone see Buna

Booksellers, madrasa of the 37
Borneo 256
Bosphorus 169, 171
Bougie see Bijaya
bubonic plague see Black Death,
plague
Buda 277, 307
Buddhism, Buddhists 86, 213, 241,
251
Bukhara 174, 175
al-Bukhari 61
Bulgaria, kingdom of 169
Bulghar 2, 161, 175, 179-80n12, 315
Buna 28, 35
Burckhardt, John 4, 76
Burdur 138, 147
Bure 291
Burgomadzhary see Machar
Burhan al-Din 43-4
Burhanpur Gap 184, 217
Burma 255-6
Bursa 138, 151, 152, 153
Burton, Richard 73
al-Bushri family 260, 281, 296
al-Bushri, Muhammad see Al-Bushri
family
Byzantine empire
and Khanate of Kipchak 169
and Turkish expansion 140-4, 151
decline of 172
see also Anatolia, Turks

Cagliari 276-7
Cairo
architecture of 49-50
Black Death in 272, 273-4
maps 2, 28, 42, 107, 267
population of 45, 62n7
society and economy 45-6, 49
see also Mamluk sultanate
Calahora 282
Calicut 2, 184, 214, 222-8 passim,
247, 266, 267
Caliphate, High see Abbasid
Caliphate
Caliphs, mosque of the 98
Cambay 2, 184, 214, 218-19
Cambay, Gulf of 218, 219
camels 291
canal du Sahal 304
Cannanore 184, 222
Canton 223, 248, 249, 250, 256, 259
Cape Comorin 219
caravans
of hajj pilgrims: from

Index 345

Damascus 54, 65-7; from
Egypt 51, 54-5; from North
Africa 27, 29-30, 38; from
Yemen 66; of Iraq 66, 88-9, 91;
organization of 38, 66
trans-Saharan 291, 292-3
caravanserais see khans
Caria 151
Caspian Sea 82, 175
Castile, kingdom of 16, 281-2, 284
Catalans 17, 18, 176
Catalonia see Aragon-Catalonia
Caucasus mountains 167
Ceuta
intellectual life of 281
maps 14, 28,277
political importance of 16, 281, 282
trade of 16, 17, 18, 281, 292
Ceylon 229, 241-2
Chagatay, khanate of 160, 175, 186
Chagatay, son of Genghis Khan 177
Champa 258
Charikar 175, 178
Chaul 1/84, 221
Chelif River 28, 32
Chilaw 184, 242
China, Chinese
envoys to India 213, 214, 222, 225,
259
in Persia 88
see also Yuan dynasty
Chishti brotherhood 194, 207, 208
Chittagong 2, 184, 254, 256, 262-
3n23
Choban family 105n30
Chola empire 237
Christianity, Christians
in Anatolia 140, 141, 150
in Crimea 160
in Persia 86 :
Ch’uan-chou 2, 224, 249, 250, 256,
259, 260-1, 267
Cilicia 141
Citidel, of Cairo 47
Cizre 82, 102
Collection of Histories 87
colleges see madrasas
Constantine 28, 33, 34-5
Constantinople 2, 138, 169, 170,
171-2
Cordova 15
cosmopolitanism
defined 7
in Islamic society 7, 116-18
in IIkhanid Persia 87-8

346 Index

cowrie shells 229, 292-3
Crimea 161

Crusade, fourth 143
Cyprus 139, 140
Cyrenaica 28, 38, 39

Dacca 255
dallal 123
Darmanhur 42, 44
Damascus
as center of learning 61
great mosque of 60, 61
Mamluk capital in Syria 54, 59-60
maps 2, 42, 267
Mongol attack on 49
society and economy 58-60
trade of 54, 59
Damietta 42, 44
Danube river /38
Dar al-Islam
defined 6-7
Muslim allegiance to 11
Daulatabad 196, 205, 214, 217-18
capitol of sultanate 190-1
map 184
Deccan 185, 196, 205, 217
Défrémery, C. 4
Delhi, sultanate of
and west coast of India 219-20
government of 185, 193, 197
international relations of 188-9
lavish spending tn 202
map 184
origins of 183
rebellions against 203, 205, 206-7,
214, 254
rule in Bengal 2534
Delhi (city)
as center of Muslim culture 186-7
architecture of 187-8
capital of sultanate 182, 185
maps 2, 184, 267
Denizli 150
Deogir see Daulatabad
Dhar /84, 217
Dhibat al-Mahal see Maldive islands
dhikr 91
Dhofar see Zafar
dhow see ships
Dhu I-Hulaifa 42, 69
Dinawar see Dondra
Divehi 229
Djerba island 28, 38
Dneiper river /38, 170
Doab 190, 196

Dome of the Rock 57

Dondra /84, 243

Don river /38, 166, 170

Dugha, official in Mali 301, 302, 303

East African coast, society and
economy of 123-8
Eastern Hemisphere, as subject of
history see intercommunicating
zone
Eastern Maghrib see Ifriqiya
Ecumene, Atro-Eurasian see
intercommunicating zone
education, Islamic
curriculum 20, 51
in Morocco 19-20
in Mecca 108-9
memorization in 20
Egridir /38, 147, 149, 150
Egypt
ancient ruins of 63n15
Black Death in 271
see also Cairo, Mamluk sultanate
Egypt, upper 51,52
Ephesus seeAya Suluk
Erzincan 138, 149
Erzurum 1/38, 139, 147, 149
Ethiopia 122
Euphrates river 82, 97, 107, 269
Europe, Black Death in 271-2, 273

Faid, map 82
Famagusta 139
faqih, defined 19
farha(governor) 299
Fars 13!
Fatima, daughter of Muhammad 68
Fatimid dynasty 46, 50
Fattan see Pattan
Feast of the Sacrifice 78, 129
Fez
as center of learning 25, 274, 278,
279-80
founding of 15
maps 2, 28, 277
Marinid capital 278-9
society and economy 278-9
Fez Jdid (New Fez) 279, 280
fityan associations 146-7, 148-9, 150,
153
fiqh 21
see also legal schools, shari'a
forty days, as conventional
figure 156n2
Frescobaldi (Italian traveler) 65

Fua Mulak island 237

see also Maldive islands
Fu-chou see Qanjanfu
Fuengirola see Suhayl
Fujian see Fukien province
Fukien province 259
fundug see khan
Fustat 46
futuwwa 146

see also fityan associations
Fuzhou see Qanjanfu

Gabés 28, 38, 267, 275
Gabriel, angel 57, 241
Galata 171
Galilee 55,58
Gallipoli 152
Gampola 242, 261n5
Gandhar 1/84, 219
Gao 305
Ganges river 183, 184, 205
Gaykhatu, khan 88
Gaza 42, 55, 267, 270, 273
Genghis Khan 81, 83, 86, 186
see also Mongols
Genil river 284
Genoa, Genoese 17, 18, 139, 162-3,
164, 271
Ghadamés 277, 305
Ghana 291, 293
al-Ghari, Kamal al-Din
‘Abdallah 209
Ghassana see Bayt al-Fagih
Ghazan, ilkhan 84, 86, 87, 100-1
ghazis 142, 157n18, 182
see also Turks
Ghazna /75, 178, 184
Ghaznavid dynasty 183
Ghiyath al-Din, sultan 244, 245
Ghurid dynasty 183
al-Ghuta 59
Gibb, Sir Hamilton 4
Gibraltar, strait of, historical
importance of 13-14
Gibraltar (city) 14, 16, 273, 277, 281-2
Goa see Sandapur
Golan Heights 58
gold, of African Sudan 291, 292
Golden Horde 161
see alsoKipchak, khanate of
Golden Horn 171
Goynuk 154
Granada, kingdom of see Nasrid
sultanate
Granada (city) 2, 28, 277, 284, 285-6

Index 347

Grand Canal 260

Grand Kabylie mountains 33

Great Swamp 91, 92

Grecks see Byzantine empire;
Christianity, Christians, in
Anatolia

griot 301

Guardafui, Cape see Ras Asir

Guinea, republic of 301

Gujarat 109, 214, 218

Gumushane /38, 149

Guptaempire 186

Gwalior /84, 212n24, 217

Hacho, Mount 281

hadith, defined 20

Hafsid sultanate 15, 16, 28, 31, 33-4,
276

Hagia Sophia 171

Hajar mountains 131

hajj 27, 109

rites of 76-9, 80n14
see also caravans

al-Hajj (title) 76, 79

hajjis 78,89

Hakluyt Society 4

Haleb see Aleppo

Hali /07, 112

al-Hallaniyah /07, 129

Hamadan 82, 100

Hamid, amirate of 147, 149

hammam 94

Hanafi legal school see legal schools

Hanbali legal school see legal schools

Hang-chou 2, 184, 249, 260

Hangzhou see Hang-chou

Haram, in Mecca 70-1, 72-3, 75-6,
108-9

al-Harawi, Muhammad 214, 215

Harun al-Rashid, caliph 89

al-Hasa 132

Hasan, son of ’Ali 66, 90

al-Hasan, sultan 273-4

al-Hasani, Abu Muhammad
‘Abdallah 53, 54

al-Hawih, Pehlewan Muhammad 89,
102-3

Hazar Sutun see Thousand Pillars,
Hall of the

al-Hazrami, ‘Abdallah ibn Muhammad,
vizier 235-6, 247

Hebron 55,56

Herat 42, 175, 177

Hijaz, Hijaz mountains 67, 68, 70

Hijaz railway 67

348 Index

al-Hilla 82, 97
Hinawr see Honavar
Hindu Kush 139, 177-8, 186
Hindus
influence on Islamic art 187
in revolt against sultanate 215
on west coast of India 221
under Muslim rule 185-6, 188, 197
Hiw 53, 54
Hodgson, Marshall 7~8, 117, 251
Hoggar mountains see Ahaggar
mountains
Holy Land see Judaea, Palestine
Holy Sepulchre, church of the 56
Homs 267, 270
Honavar 184, 221-2, 226-7, 246, 247
Honein 32
Hoysalas kingdom 221
Hu see Hiw
Huang Ho 256
al-Hufuf 107
see also al-Hasa
Hukkar mountains see Ahaggar
mountains
Hulegu, ilkhan 84, 85, 87, 97, 167,
174
Hurmuz (city) 2, 107, 131, 136n41,
267, 268
Hurmuz sultanate 130
Hurnasab, wife of Ibn Battuta 207,
229, 244
Husayn, Qutb al-Din 94-5
Husayn, son of’Ali 66,90
Husuni Kubwa 127, 128

Ibadis 71, 136n40
Iberia, Iberian peninsula 14
Christian conquest of 14-15, 38
Ibn ’Asim, Abul’Kasim 286
Ibn al-Athir 83
Ibn al-Khatib 312, 316
Ibn al-Rifa’i, Ahmad 91
Ibn Battouta(boat) 318
Ibn Battuta, Abu ‘Abdallah
Muhammad
academic and legal studies 21-2,
61-2, 312
adminstration of tomb 203, 204
allegiance to Dar al-Islam 12
and Muhammad Tughluq 3, 198,
199, 202-3, 207-10
and plot to conquer Maldive
islands 235-7, 244-5, 247
and Sufism 5—6, 11, 23-4, 57-8,
91-2, 93, 209

appointed envoy to China 209-10,
213-14, 259

arrested in Delhi 208-9

attitude toward Jews 153

attitude toward people of the
Sudan 299-300, 3034

attitude toward Shi’a 90-1

captured by bandits 215-17

character and personality 21, 22-3,
89, 101, 153

children of 176, 195, 247-8, 269

compared to Marco Polo 5-6

Constantinople journey 170-2

early life andeducation 19-25

East Africa journey 118-19, 122-8

expenditures inIndia 194—5, 201,
202-3, 203-4

family of 19, 269, 278, 280, 283

illnesses of 33,35, 61-2, 103, 232,
245, 246, 281, 301-2, 305

in Anatolia 144-56

in Arabia and Yemen 66-79, 110-16,
128-32, 137

in Bengal 253-5

inCeylon 241-3

in Chagatay khanate 177-8

in China 252-3, 258-61

income and gifts received 35, 44,
106, 154, 197-8, 199, 244

in Delhi 196-210

inEgypt 39, 40, 41-S1, 137, 273, 274

in Ifriqiya 36-8, 275, 276

in Iraq and Persia 88-103, 131-2,
268-9

in Kipchak khanate 162-70, 173-7

in Ma’bar sultanate 207, 244-6

in Maldive islands 299-37, 247-8

in Mali (Sudan) 299-305

in Mecca 74-9, 106-9, 274

innorthern India 192-210, 214-19,
221-2

in Southeast Asia 255-8, 266, 268

in Spain 282-6

in Syria and Palestine 55-8, 60-2, 65,
139, 269-70, 273

in west coastal India 222-9, 246-7,
266-7

journey across North Africa 30-40

journeys across Sahara desert 295-9,
305-7

languages of 20, 199-200

later life anddeath 318

marriages 39, 44, 62, 207, 233-4,
235, 237, 247, 269

miles traveled 3, 12n2

return to Morocco 278, 280-2, 286-
7, 307, 310-16
service as gadi 39, 199-200, 204-5,
232-7
slaves and concubines of 154, 176,
227, 228, 254, 305, 306
summary of life 1-3
see also Rihla
Ibn Hajar 316
Ibn Jubayr 53, 63n28, 76, 102, 313-14,
quoted 59, 71, 72-3, 97, 110, 111
Ibn Juzayy, Abu ’Abdallah
Muhammad
collaboration with Ibn Battuta 3-4,
286, 310-15 passim
scholarship of 286, 310
Tbn Khafif, Abu ’Abdallah 96
Ibn Khaldun, ’Abd al-Rahman 51,
276, 316-17
Ibn Majid, Ahmad 135n22
Ibn Mansur, ’Ali 176
Tbn Marzuk, Muhammad 316
Ibn Mustafa, ’Abd al-Rahman 57
Tbn Sulayman, al-Hasan, sultan 127,
128
Ibn Taymiyya 210n4
Ibn "Ujayl, Ahmad 114
Ibn Wadrar, Abu Ziyan, vizier 280
Ibn Zin 298
Ibrahim, ship’s captain 229-44 passim
Ibyar 42, 44
‘Id al-Adha see Feast of the Sacrifice
‘Id al-Fitr 37, 150, 169
Idfu 42, 52, 107
Idhaj 82,94
al-Idrisi, 296-7
Ifriqiya 15, 28, 36
ihram (garment and state of
sanctity) 69-70, 75, 78
ijaza (certificate) 61,62
Ilkhan, defined 84
Ilkhans, khanate of the 84-8
Chinese influence on 88
conversion to Islam 86
disintegration ot 268-9
map 82
rule in Anatolia 141-2
wars of 167, 174
imam
prayer leader 60, 62
shi’a leader 90, 113
In Azaoua 277, 306-7
Ince Minare, madrasa 147
India, west coast, society and trade
of 219-21

Index 349

see also Bengal; Dethi, sultanate of:
Ma‘bar sultanate
Indian Ocean 2, 267
Indo-Muslims 188
Indonesia 252
Indus river 175, 184, 192, 193
intercommunicating zone, defined 8
Iran see Persia
Irano-Semitic region 116, 117
Iraq 82
see also Baghdad, Iikhans, khanate
of the
Iraq al-Ajami 93
Irtisch river 177
Isaac 56
Isfahan 2, 82, 93-5, 107, 267, 269
Islam
and Black Death 272-3
beginnings of 8-9
egalitarianism in 10-11
expansion of: in Africa 124-5,
293-5; in Anatolia 141; in China
and Southeast Asia 248-50,
251-2, 257; in India 186-9, 221,
248, 253; in Indian Ocean
region 116-18; in Kipchak
khanate 161-2; in Maldive
islands 229-30, 231
western historical view of 9
see also Shi'ism
Izeh see Idhaj
Izmir /38, 151
Izmit 152
Iznik /38, 143, 151, 153

Jabal al-Musa see Hacho, Mount

Jabal Sabr 114

Jacob 56

Jaffna, kingdom 242

Jahanpanah 188, 196

Jains 190

Jalali 215

jJalba 110

Jam 175, 177

Jamal al-Din Muhammad,
sultan 221-2, 226-8. 231-7
passim, 246, 247

Jamboli /38, 171

Jandarids, amirate of the 156

Jarun (Jirun) 131

Java 256

Jaxartes river see Syr Darya river

Jazira 102

Jazirat al-Maghrib 29

Jazirat ibn "Umar see Cizre

350 Index

Jerusalem 42, 55, 56-7, 107, 267, 273

Jibal 93

Jibla see Jubla

Jidda 42, 51, 102, 110, 111, 267, 274

Jihad 142

Joseph 56

Jubla 107, 114

Judaea 55, 273

judge see qadi

junks, Chinese see ships

Jurfattan see Cannanore

jurists see faqgih; legal schools;
scholars, Muslim

Juvaini, “Ata Malik

Ka'ba 57, 66, 70, 72-3, 76
Kabara 304
Kabis see Gabés
Kabul 1/75, 178, 184
Kaffa 138, 163-4, 271
Kafur, sultanate official 214, 215
Kainuk see Goynuk
Kairouan, battle of 276
kakam 224, 225, 228

see also ships
Kakula see Qaqula
Kanara 222
Kanauj 184, 205, 206
Karakorum 2
Karaman /38, 145
Karasi, amirate of 143, 151, 152
Karawiyin mosque 313
Karbala 82, 97
Karsakhu 277, 300
Kashmir 190
Kastamonu /38, 155, 156
Kawkaw see Gao
Kawlam see Quilon
Kaylukari 264n34
Kayseri 138, 141
Kazarun 82, 96
Keita clan 291
Kenya 126
Kerch 138, 163
Kerman 83
Kermanshah 8&2, 100
Khadija, queen 230-5 passim, 245
al-Khalil see Hebron
Khalil, Malikischolar 106
Khalji, Ala al-Din 185, 188
Khalji dynasty 185
al-Khammar, ’Aziz 204-5
khan (caravansary) 46, 55, 148
khanqa 187

see also zawiya

Khansa see Hang-chou
khatun 98, 168
Khawak pass /75, 178
Khidr, Indian scholar 129-30, 131
khirga 57,94
Khubilai Khan 250
Khun /07, 131
Khunju Pal see Khunj
Khurasan 81-2, 84, 177, 180-1n23
khutba
Khwaja Jahan 197, 206
Khwarizm 8, 160, 174, 176, 177
Khyber pass 181n25, 184
Kil’a Ray Pithora 187, 197
Kilwa 2, 107, 126-8
Kinalos island 230, 231, 247
see also Maldive islands
Kinbaya see Cambay
Kipchak, khanate of /38, 160-2, 169,
271
al-Kiswa (village) 67
kiswa (Ka’ba covering) 42, 66, 73
Koil 184, 215
Konkan 220, 221
Konya 138, 139, 140, 141, 144, 147
Koran 19, 60-1
Korea 250
Kose Dagh, battle of 141
Kuang-chou see Canton
Kubbat al-Skhra see Dome of the Rock
Kufa 68, 82, 89, 97
Kumariver 138
Kumish see Gumushane
Kunakar 216n5
Kuria Muria islands 129
Kuzey Anadolou Daghlari see Pontic
mountains

Ladhiq 138, 150
Ladiqiya see Latakia
Lahari 184, 193
Lahore 183
Lajazzo see Ayas
Lar 107, 131
Laranda see Karaman
Las Navas de Tolosa, battle of 15
Latakia 107, 137, 139
lateen sail 120-1
law, Islamic see shari’a, legal schools
Lawata 19
Lee, Samuel 4
legal schools
Hanafi 22, 187, 200
Hanbali 22
Maliki: in Damascus 60; in

Egypt 43; in India 200; in
Maldive islands 231; in North
Africa 22, 37, 278, 279, 280
Shafi’i 22, 43, 50, 77, 113, 125, 187,

231

Leo Africanus 297

Levantine coast 139

Libya 38-9

Little Armenia 141, 148

Little Kabylie mountains 33, 34

liwan 50

Luristan 93

Lurs 94

Luxor 42

Ma’an 42, 67
Ma’bar sultanate 203, 205, 229, 244
Manzikert, battle of 140
al-Machar 138, 167
Machul 82, 94, 97
McNeill, William 7-8
Madagascar 107
madhhak see legal schools
madrasas 19, 26n9, 37, 50-1, 60, 279
architecture of 50-1
origin and spread of 50
Madurai 184, 203, 205, 245
Maghnib
kingdoms of 15-16
pilgrimage and trade routes of 27,
2

mahalla 98,99
Maharashtra 217, 218
Mahdali dynasty 126, 127
mahmal 66
Mahtuli 171
Majd al-Din 96
Majorca 17, 18
el-Mahalla el-Kubra 42
al-Makhdumah Jahan 194, 197
Malabar 214, 220, 222
Malacca, strait of 251, 256
Malaga 277, 284
Malamir see Idhaj
Malaya 258
Malayalam 221
Malay states 251, 257
Maldive islands
geography of 229, 230
government of 230, 231
map 184
society and economy 229-30
Male 184, 230, 231, 237, 247
Mali
army and government 292

Index 351

ceremonies of mansas 302-3
location of capital 301, 308n6
map 277
religious policies of mansas 294
rise of 291-2
sex relations in 299-300
see also mansas
al-Malik al-Zahir, sultan 257-8, 266
Malik ibn ‘Anas 22, 69
Maliki legal school see legal schools
Malinke 291, 293, 294
Malosmadulu atoll 230
see also Maldive islands
mamluks, defined 47
Mamluk sultanate
and Christian pilgrims
and Yemen 113
government of 46-8, 55
in upper Egypt 52, 54
maps 28, 42
origin and rise of 41-2, 47-8
overlordship in Arabia 66
plague mortality of ruling class
274
rivalries within 48-9
supervision of hajj 65-6
Mangalore 184, 222
Manisa /38, 151
Manjurur see Mangalore
Mannar, gulf of 243
mansas 290
see also Mali; Musa, Mansa;
Sulayman, Mansa
al-Maqrizi 271
Marbella 283
Mardin 82, 102
Mari-Jaata see Sunjaata
Marinid sultanate 15, 16, 31, 275,
276, 278
compared to Mamluks 47
Maristan 49-50
Marmara, sea of 138
Marrakech 277, 286-7
Marseille 17, 18
al-Marwa 74

. Mashhad ’Ali see al-Najaf

Masira /07, 129
Masufa Berbers 296, 298, 299
Mawarannahr see Transoxiana
Mawj-Darya, ’Alial-Din 194
Mecca 2, 27, 42, 66, 70-2, 82, 107,
267

see also hajj
Medina 2, 42, 57, 66, 68-9, 82, 267
Mediterranean Sea

352 Index

climate compared to Indian
Ocean 118
trade on 17-18
Medjerda river 35
Meghna river /84, 255
Mehmed, amir 151, 153
Mekong river 256
Menteshe, amirate of 143, 151, 153
merchants
European: in Black Sea 162-3; in
Eastern Mediterranean 139; in
North Africa 17-18, 36; in
Persia 100
Muslim: expansion of 10; in
African Sudan 291, 293; in Bay
of Bengal and China Seas 248-
§2; in China 249-50; in Indian
Ocean region 116-18, 218, 220,
221
Mercy, mount of 70,77
Mesopotamia 90
see also IlIkhans, khanate of the
Michael III, emperor 170
Middle Period, defined 9
migration, of literate Muslims 10-11
Milas 138, 153
Miliana 28, 32
Mina 77, 78
Ming dynasty 250
Minya 42, 52
Misr see Fustat
Miuss river 138, 166
Mogadishu 2, 107, 123-4, 125-6
Mombasa /07, 126
money
Indian government policy on 190
paper 88
Mongols
and Islamic expansion 11
conquests of 8;in Anatolia 141-2;
in Persia 81-4; in Russia and
Eastern Europe 161; in
Transoxiana 174
raids in India 186
rule in China 249-50
wars with Mamluks 41-2
see also Chagatay, khanate of;
Ilkhans, khanate of the:
Kipchak, khanate of; Yuan
dynasty
monsoon winds 117-18, 118, 119,
121, 251
Morocco 14
see also Marinid sultanate
Mosul 82, 102

Mozambique channel 118

Mreyye 298

Mubarak Shah, Fakr al-Din,
sultan 203, 254, 255

Mudurnu /38, 154, 155

muezzin 60, 66

Muhammad 9, 57, 68, 73

Muhammad V, king 285

muhtasib 66

mujawic 106, 109

Multan /84, 193-4

Mugqaddimah, The 315, 316

see also Ibn Khaldun

Musa, mansa 290-1, 294-5, 304

musalla 37

Muscat 1/07, 130

Muslim rulers, duties of 189

Mustansiriya, madrasa 98

Mustawfi, Hamd Allah 84, 95

Muturni see Mudurnu

al-Muwaffaq, Sufi lodge 75

Muzaffariya, madrasa 133n4

Muzaffariya, mosque 115

Muzdalifah 77-8

Nablus 42, 58

Nafud desert 89

al-Nafzawi, Abu ’Abdallah 32, 36

al-Najaf 82, 89-90, 91

Nakhshab /75

Narmada river 184,217, 218, 219

Nasir al-Din, sultan 245

al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qala’un,
sultan 48-9, 60, 274

Nasrid sultanate 15, 28, 30, 283,
284-6

Nazwa 107, 131, 136n40

Nejd plateau 89

Nestorian Christians 86

New Saray 2, 160, 173, 175, 180n21

Niani 301

Nicaea see Iznik

Nicomedia see Izmit 152

Niger river 277, 291, 300, 304-5

Nile, Blue /07

Nile delta 44

Nile river, trade of 28, 41, 42, 43, 44,
§1-2, 54, 107

Nishapur 175, 177

Nizamiya, madrasa 98

Nizwa see Nazwa

nomads 8

see also Arab nomads, Mongols,

Turks

North Africa see Maghrib

Nur al-Din ’Ali, Malik Mujahid,
sultan 113, 115

Odoric of Pordenone 223
Ogedei, khan 186
Old Saray 161

see also New Saray
Oljeitu, ilkhan 86, 87, 96, 101
Oman 131, 136n40
Oman, Gulf of 107
Oran 32
ordu 161
Orkhan, sultan 151, 152-3, 169
ortakh 250
Osman, sultan 143, 152
Osmanlis see Ottomans
Ottoman state 143, 151-3
Ozbeg, khan 159, 167, 168, 169, 170,

173
reign of 160, 161-2

Palestine 55
Palk strait 229
Palmyra 267, 269
Panjshir valley 178
Pattan 184, 245, 246
Pax Mongolica 11
Peking 2, 252, 256, 259, 260, 264-
5n42, 267
Pemba island /07, 126
Pergamom see Berganma
Persia
effects of Mongol conquest on 81-8
see also Ilkhans, khanate of the
Persian gulf maps 82, 107
Persian language 88, 187
Persians
cultural influence: in Anatolia 144,
147; in India 187, 188
in China 88
migration to India of 186, 187
Pharos island 41, 43
Phrygia 151
pilgrimage see caravans, hajj
pirates see bandits and pirates
Pisa 17, 18
plague 270-1, 317
see also Black Death
Polo, Maffeo 250
Polo, Marco 102, 139, 148, 222, 246,
250
book by 311-12
compared to Ibn Battuta 5-6
Pompey’s pillar 43
Pontic mountains 149

Index 353

Provengals 17

Punjab 182, 195
Puttalam /84, 242, 243
Pyatigorsk see Bish Dagh
Pyrard, Francois 240n26

qadi

defined 19

of caravan 38, 66
qadi al-qudat 199
al-Qahirah see Cairo
Qais 107, 132
Qala’un, Sayf al-Din, sultan 49
Qalhat 107, 129, 130-1
Qandahar see Gandhar
Qanjanfu 256, 260, 296
Qaqula 256, 257, 263n28
al-Qatif 107, 131, 132
Qatya 42, 55
Qena 42
Qinnawj see Kanau)
al-Qiram 138, 159, 164-5
Qiwan al-Din, Khudhawand-

Zada 194, 195

Quanzhou see Ch’uan-chou
Quilon /84, 225-6, 246, 266, 267
qumizz 166-7
Qunduz 178
qurqura 139
Qus 42, 52, 54
Qutb Minar 188
Qutlugh Khan 217

Rabigh 42, 70
Rafidi 90
rafiq 137
rajas 221
Ramadan 37,61 .
Ramhormoz 82, 94
Ramiz see Ramhormoz
Ras Abu Shagara /07, 111
Ras al-Hadd 107, 129
Ras Asir /07, 119, 123
Ras Dawa’‘ir see Ras Abu Shagara
Rashid al-Din,Fazlullah 87, 88
Rasulid sultanate 113, 115
see also Yemen
Ratnapura 261n5
Ravi river 193
reconquista see Iberia
Red Sea 42, 82, 107, 110-11
Red Sea Hills 52
Rehendi Kabadi Kilege see Khadija,
queen
Rif mountains 24, 30

354 Index

Rifa’i brotherhood 57
rihia (genre of literature)
defined 3, 30
of al-Abdari 32-3
of Ibn Jubayr 313-14
Rihla, of Ibn Battuta
authenticity of 63, 313-14, 315-16

chronology and itinerary problems:

Anatolia 157n13; China 252-3,
262n20; Constantinople 180n17;
Egypt and Syria 62n4, 63n26,
156n3, 288n4; India 211n9,
238n4, 238n5; journey to
Bulghar 179-80n12; journey to
East Africa 134n12; journey to
India 132-3n2, 181n25, 181-
2n26; Khurasan 180—1n23;
Yemen 134n17
composing of 310-17
contents described 4, 5
descriptions: of China 258-9, 260;
of Delhi 196; of India 210n3
domestic and marital affairs in 39
historical value of 5
history of 4, 317
maritime technology in 121-2
notes for 264n37, 313
organization of 4, 311-12, 314
translations of 4-5
see also Ibn Battuta, Ibn Juzayy
Rio Guadiaro 283
Rio Salado, battle of 275, 285
Riyadh 132
Rock of Zion 57
Ronda 25, 277, 283
Rosetta branch, of the Nile 44
Rubruck, William of 165, 166
rukh 288n2
Rumi, Jalal al-Din 147
Russia, Mongol rule of 160
Russian Orthodox Church 162
Rusticello, of Pisa 5

Sabta see Ceuta
sadaga 35

Sa’di 96

al-Safa 74

Safi 17

Sahel 291, 293
al-Sahili, Abu Ishaq 301
St. Thomas 241
Sakarya river 138, 154
Saladin 50

Salé 17,277, 286

salt, trade in 293, 297

Samannud 42, 44
Samarkand 2, 175, 177
sambugq 93, 137
Samudra 2, 251, 256, 263n29, 266,
267
sSamum 67
San’a 107, 113, 115, 134n17
Sandapur 221, 226, 227-8
raja of 226-7, 228
map 184
Sankarani river see Sansara river
Sanguinetti, B.R. 4
Sansara river 301
al-Sara’ see New Saray, Old Saray
Saray see New Saray, Old Saray
Saraychik 1/75
Sardinia 276-7
Sargadwari 205, 206
Sarju river 184, 204
Sartiz, Imad al-Mulk 211n9
Sarukhan, amirate of 143, 151
Satgaon see Chittagong
Satpura range 217
sa’y 74,76
sayyids see sharifs
scholars, Muslim
in Anatolia 144
in Damascus 60
in Delhi sultanate 191, 200
in Egypt 48, 50, 51
in Mecca 108-9
in Persia 85
in Sudan 293-4
migrations of 10-11, 191, 312
Ségou 304
Sehwan 184, 209
Seljukids see Seljuks, of Anatolia
Seljiks, Great 10, 140
see also Turks
Seljuks, of Anatolia 140-1, 142, 148
Semeonis, Symon 43, 44, 55
Senegal river 291
Serbia, kingdom of 169
Seville 15
Sfax 28, 38, 39
Shafi’i legal school see legal schools
Shagara 107
Shah, Jalal 254, 255, 263n26
Shalia see Shaliyat
Shaliyat 184, 228
Shari'a 7,21, 116, 117, 187
see also legal schools; scholars,
Muslim
Sharif Ibrahim 207
Sharifs 53, 110

in East Africa 125
of Mecca and Medina 66
Shatt al-’Arab 82, 93
shaykh 23
Shi’a see Shi’ism
Shihab al-Din 207-8, 209
Shi’ism, 86, 90-1
ships
Chinese junks 200, 222-4
of Arabian Sea 120-2, 219
of Mediterranean 139
of Red Sea 110-11
see also jalba, sambuq
Shiraz 82, 83, 95—6, 267, 269
Shiva 214
shurhdar 214
Shushtar 82, 94
Sicilian channel 36, 276
Siddhartha Gautama (Buddha) 241
Sierra Bermeja 283
Sierra de Mijas 283
Sierra de Ronda 283
Sijilmasa 277, 296, 307
Sinai peninsula 49, 137
Sinhalese 229, 242
Sind 193, 209, 211n9
Sinjar 82, 102
Sinope 138, 159, 162, 163
Siraf 107, 132
Siri 188
Sirte see Surt 39
Sitt Zahida 102
Sivas 138, 139, 148
Slave dynasty 183, 185, 186
Smyrna see Izmir
Socotra island 107
Sofala 107, 127
Sohar 107, 130, 131
Sokolo 300
Soldaia see Sudak
Solomon, temple of 57
Somali, Somalia 123, 126
Sonargaon 184, 254, 255
Soninke 293, 294
Souman river 33
Sousse 28, 38
South China Sea 256
Sri Lanka see Ceylon
states, educated Muslims’ view of 11
Stavropol plateau 167
Suakin 107, 112
Subedei 161
Suchem, Ludolph von 59
sudak /38, 164
Sudan 36

Index 355

see also Mali
Sudkawan see Chittagong
Suez Canal 55
Suez, Gulf of 42
Sufis, Sufism 11,91, 286
growth of 23-4, 58, 279-80
Suhay! 283, 284
Suhrawardiya brotherhood 94, 193-4
Sulayman, mansa 295, 302-3
Sulayman mountains 178, 186
Sultan Daghlari mountains 147
Sultaniya 82, 87,98, 100, 101
Sumatra 251, 256
see also Samudra
Sumbul, sultanate official 217, 224,
225
Sumra revolt 211n9
Sunisa 138, 149
Sunjaata 294
Sunni Islam 21, 86-7
Sunusa see Sunisa
Sur 107, 129
Surt 28, 39
Swahili 123
Sylhet 184, 254, 255
Syr Darya river 174, 175
Syria 41, 42, 269, 270
see also Damascus

Takedda 277, 305-6

Tabriz 2, 82, 83, 87, 100-1, 138, 139

al-Tabrizi, Jalal al-Din see Shah Jalal

al-Tabrizi, Sharif al-Din 259

Tabuk 42, 67

Tadmor see Palmyra 269

Tafilalt 296

Taghaza 277, 297

Taghnibirdi 99

Ta’izz 107, 113, 144-15

Tajo river 283

takshif 298

Tamattu’ 80n14

Tamils 203, 221, 244

Tana see Azak

T’ang empire 248

Tangier 2, 13-14, 16-17, 18-19, 28,
277, 280

Tanja see Tangier

Tankiz, Saif al-Din 60

Taptiriver 184, 217,218

taqyid 313

Tarifa /4, 16

Tarmashinn, khan 177, 186

Tasarahla see Bir al-Ksaib

Tashkent 125

356 Index

Tatars see Mongols
Taurus mountains 139, 140
tawaf 73, 76, 78
Tawalisi 264n34
Taza 277, 278
Teke 145
Tenasserim coast 257
Tenés 276, 277
Thousand pillars, hall of the 197, 199
Thrace 152, 171, 172
Tigris-Euphrates basin 91, 104n13
Tigris river 82, 93,97, 102, 107
Timbuktu 2, 277, 304
Tirmidh 175, 176-7, 194
Tlemcen 28, 31, 34, 275, 277, 278
Toghon Temur, emperor 213, 214,
258, 260
tombs, as religious institutions 204
Tonkin 258
Touat see Tuwat
trade, European see merchants
trade, Muslim 122, 127
see also merchants, ships
Transoxiana 174
travel
of Europeans 44, 55-6
of Muslims 10-11, 24-5, 30
see also Ibn Battuta; merchants;
scholars, Muslim
Trebizond 138, 141
Tripoli 28, 38, 39
Tripolitania 28, 38
Tuchman, Barbara 317
Tughluq, Firuz 268
Tuchluq, Ghiyas al-Din 185, 188
Tughluq, Muhammad
and China 213-14
and Mongols 186, 192
and religious scholars 200
brutality of 191-2, 201, 206-7, 208
character of 188-9, 198
conquests of 185-6
death of 266
employment of foreigners 137,
178-9, 191, 199
hunting expeditions of 201-2
patronage of 188, 192, 194-5, 198
rebellions against 203, 205, 206-7,
254
scheme to move capital 190-1, 196
unorthodox policies of 189-92,
200-1
Tughluqabad 188
Tughlugid dynasty 185-6
Tuluktemur 164-5, 166, 167

Tunis 2, 28, 34, 35—6, 267, 275, 276,
277
Turcomans 140, 142, 171
see also Turks
Turkey see Anatolia
Turkmens see Turcomans
Turks 47-8, 83-4, 85
conquests: of Anatolia 140-4; of
India 183-6
Tus 175,177
Tustar see Shustar
Tuwat 277, 307
al-Tuzani, al-Hajj ‘Abdallah 139,
144, 147, 153, 162, 176, 195, 225,
242, 255, 263n25

Ubulla canal 93
Uigur 85
Ujjain 184, 217
Ukrainian steppe 160, 161
‘ulama 21, 108
see also scholars, Muslim
‘Umar, caliph 68
‘Umar, Jalal al-Din, sultan 233
al-Umani, Ibn Fadl Allah 187, 290,
295, 296
umma 10
Umm ‘Ubaida 91
‘umra 76
Ural river 175
Urganj see Urgench
Urgench 174, 175
Urmiya, lake 82, 100
Ustyurt plateau 176

Valencia 15

Vega 284

Velez Malaga 284

Venice, Venetians 2, 17, 162-3, 271
Vindhya hills 217

Vivaldi brothers 18

Volga river 138, 162, 175

wagons in central Asia 165-6
Walata 277, 296, 298, 299, 300, 304
wali 23
Wagisa 82, 89
Wasit 82, 91,92
West Africa 4

see also Mali, Sudan
Western Ghats mountains 220, 221
Western wall 56
women, in Mongol and Turkish

society 168
see also Ibn Battuta

al-Yamama 107, 132
Yambol see Jamboli
Yamuna river 183, 184, 188
Yangtze river 256
Yaznik see Iznik
Yemen, 112-13

see also Rasulid sultanate
Yersinia pestis 271

see also Black Death, plague
Yuan dynasty 213, 250, 256, 258, 271
yurt 165
Yusuf ibn Isma’il, Abu l’Hajjaj

(Yusuf I), sultan 283, 285, 310

Zabid 107, 112, 114
Zaccar hills 32
Zafar 2, 107, 128, 267, 268,

Index 357

Zaghari 277, 300

Zagros mountains 94, 96, 100, 269

Zaitun see Ch’uan-chou

Zambezi river 107

zamorin 222

Zamzam, wellof 74

Zanj, land of 126

al-Zanjani, Zahir al-Din 214, 224,
225

Zanzibar island /07, 119, 126

zawiya 23

Zaydis 71, 113, 114

Zeila 107, 122, 123

Zimbabwe 127

Zubayda 89

al-Zubaydi, Abu ‘Abdallah 32-3, 35,
36