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The Boundless Sea

Page 24

by David Abulafia


  In the decades before the emergence of Islam in the early seventh century the southern Red Sea was a turbulent area.1 The opposing shores were the seats of kingdoms with radically different religious identities. On the African side, around Axum, a Christian kingdom, Ethiopia, warily watched developments in Himyar, roughly corresponding to Yemen, where the rulers had chosen to adopt Judaism, or possibly were descended from ancient Jewish tribes. Yūsuf, also known as ‘he of the locks’ (Dhu Nuwas), was the Jewish king of Himyar; he was accused of massacring hundreds of Christians and of desecrating churches. As reports of these killings spread, enthusiasm for a holy war against the Jewish unbelievers mounted. It is important to stress that the accounts of the massacre are found in Christian writings, and – despite the excitement of several modern historians at the sight of Jews ruthlessly persecuting Christians, rather than the other way round – no one really knows whether these reports were just a trumped-up charge to justify an invasion of South Arabia that has been seen as nothing less than a ‘crusade’.2 For in 525 the Ethiopian ruler, encouraged by the Byzantine emperor, invaded with an army said to number 120,000 men; a great navy was constructed and the troops set out from Somalia as well as Ayla at the top of the Red Sea. Yūsuf ordered a massive chain to be stretched across the water, to prevent the enemy from landing; but this ruse did not prevent the Ethiopians from penetrating into Himyar. The Christians gave as good as they had got, not just destroying synagogues but apparently killing large numbers of Himyarites in revenge. This and other campaigns back and forth across the southern Red Sea must have greatly disrupted traffic; and the war of 525 certainly destabilized the region, which became a battleground between the great powers of the Middle East, the Byzantine Empire and the Sasanian Empire in Persia.3

  Despite these severe crises, there are enough references in Mediterranean writings to traffic from Ethiopia and Yemen reaching as far north as Ayla to suggest that contacts remained alive, added to which finds of Axumite coins and pottery at Ayla confirm the literary evidence. This trade route would have fed into the land routes that passed through the famous city of Petra. Following his conquests in Syria and Palestine, in the early seventh century, Caliph ‘Umar promoted Ayla as a centre of maritime trade, and a grid-shaped new town was constructed next to the old Byzantine port. Ayla had easy access to the minerals of Sinai and the Negev that had already captured the interest of past rulers, maybe even King Solomon. By the mid-eighth century, after some interruptions, trade through Ayla was once again in full flow, as was the exploitation of copper mines in the region (the Negev Desert); there was gold there as well. Fragments of textiles made from cotton, linen, goat’s hair and silk have survived in the dry desert setting, and they testify to a lively trade reaching Yemen and well into the Indian Ocean. An overland route joined Ayla to Gaza, at this time a major port which functioned as an intermediary between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean.4 Even if the sixth, seventh and eighth centuries appear to have been a relatively, but not totally, quiet period in the trade of the Red Sea, the foundations were being laid for the network linking the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean that is clearly visible by the tenth century, and that would expand and expand (as demand in the Mediterranean also expanded and expanded) throughout the Middle Ages.5

  II

  But it was not, to use an obvious cliché, all plain sailing. In the middle of the eighth century, the dissensions and rivalries within the Islamic caliphate saw a new centre of power emerge in Iraq, at Baghdad, not far from ancient Babylon, where the Abbasid dynasty ruled in place of the Umayyads of Damascus, the last of whom had fled to the very ends of the earth, to found the emirate of Córdoba in al-Andalus, Muslim Spain. Damascus had been a glorious city, drawing in luxuries from the Indian Ocean and artists from Byzantium (such as those who decorated the Great Mosque with mosaics). Nothing much survives of mud-built Baghdad from its early days, but the new dynasty became even more exposed than the rulers of Damascus to Persian cultural influence, and their court was observed and envied across the world. This was particularly true around 800, in the days of Harun ar-Rashid, whose reign coincided with that of Charlemagne, to whom he sent gifts of an elephant and the keys to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.6

  The poet Horace wrote of Rome: ‘captive Greece captured her rude conqueror’; and much the same could be said of the Arab invasion of Persia, which did not displace the Persian language and took a long while to displace the Zoroastrian religion.7 The scintillating couturier, hairdresser and choir-master Ziryab brought the Persian fashions of the Abbasids all the way to Spain in the eighth century, introducing underarm deodorant, bouffant hairstyles and artichokes to the all-but-barbarian lands close to the dark ocean of the West. Yet the rise of the Abbasids had even greater impact on the Indian Ocean world. The Persian Gulf re-emerged as a lively passageway bringing goods from the Far East; ‘Persian’ (Bosi) merchants were already familiar in the coastal towns of China, though, as will become clear, this was a catch-all term that must have included plenty of Jews, Arabs and even Indians as well.8 This is not to deny that much of the silk and many of the perfumes, precious stones and spices that reached Baghdad came overland through Persia, beyond which, in Transoxiana and Uzbekistan, lay rich silver mines whose ore was purified and minted as coin in Bukhara. These were places that pointed towards the overland route, the Silk Road, leading across the deserts of central Asia to Tang China, a network of interconnected routes that at this period was still flourishing.9 Other routes led across western Asia towards Scandinavia, taking vast amounts of silver and swatches of Chinese silk through the empire of the White Bulgars and that of the Jewish Khazars towards the gloomy and frozen lands of the Swedes and their neighbours.10

  That there were links to China is plain from a statement by the tenth-century Arab geographer ibn Hawqal. Here he is describing the port of Siraf on the Iranian shore of the Persian Gulf:

  Its inhabitants are very rich. I was told that one of them, feeling ill, made his testament; the third part of his fortune, which he had in cash, amounted to a million dinars not counting the capital which he laid out to people who undertook to trade with it on a commission [commenda] basis. Then there is Ramisht, whose son Mūsā I have met in Aden, in the year 539 AH [AD 1144–5]; he told me that the silver plate used by him was, when weighed, found to be 1,200 manns. Mūsā is the youngest of his sons and has the least merchandise; Ramisht has four servants, each of whom is said to be richer than his son Mūsā. I have met ‘Ali al-Nili from the countryside of al-Ḥilla, Ramisht’s clerk, and he told me that when he came back from China twenty years before, his merchandise was worth half a million dinars; if that is the wealth of his clerk, what will he himself be worth! It was Ramisht who removed the silver water-spout of the Ka‘aba and replaced it with a golden one, and also covered the Ka‘aba with Chinese cloth, the value of which cannot be estimated. In short, I have heard of no merchant in our time who has equalled Ramisht in wealth or prestige.11

  The same Ramisht appeared in letters written by Jewish merchants based in Cairo and in India as the fabulously wealthy owner of massive ships, the sort of businessman whose palatial style of life is celebrated in the Thousand and One Nights (as in the case of Sindbad the Sailor, loaded with wealth after his return from his voyages).

  Sirafi merchants implanted themselves in many corners of the Indian Ocean: some traded to Zanzibar, while the head of the Muslim community at Saimur, near Bombay (Mumbai), was from Siraf.12 Other Arab writers describe complex maritime routes carrying dhows laden with goods beyond Ceylon to the Spice Islands and China itself. A ninth-century Arab merchant, whose name was probably Sulayman of Basra, knew China particularly well, and he reported that Siraf was the departure point for the ships carrying goods all the way to China. Whether these were actually Chinese ships is very doubtful, and whether they often went all the way to China is also uncertain, despite a reference to a ship leaving Siraf for China. Very long voyages that involved waiting out the monsoons wer
e best conducted in stages, as the same manuscript indicates later on (‘the trading voyages from Oman go, these days, as far as Kalah, then return from there to Oman’). However, Sulayman (or whatever he was called) insisted, against the other evidence, that few Chinese goods reached either his home city of Basra or the Abbasid capital at Baghdad, and that attempts to export cargoes from China had been hampered by fires in the wooden warehouses in China, by shipwrecks and by piracy.13

  Another author, Abu Zayd Hassan of Siraf, added extra chapters to Sulayman’s book, in which he complained that all maritime ties between Siraf and China had been sundered after a rebel named Huang Chao seized power in Guangzhou in 878: ‘because of events that occurred there, the trading voyages to China were abandoned and the country itself ruined, leaving all traces of its greatness gone and everything in utter disarray.’ His conquest was accompanied by ruthless massacres: ‘experts on Chinese affairs reported that the number of Muslims, Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians massacred by him, quite apart from the native Chinese, was 120,000.’ Moreover, the conqueror did the trade and industry of southern China no favours when he cut down the mulberry trees that provided raw silk: ‘owing to the destruction of the trees, the silkworms perished, and this, in turn, caused silk, in particular, to disappear from Arab lands.’ The rebel leader was defeated, but damage of this order could clearly not be repaired overnight.14 On the other hand, this writer was perfectly familiar with Chinese copper cash which had turned up in Siraf inscribed with Chinese characters. He was surprised that the Chinese had little interest in gold and silver coinage, but relied instead on strings of vast numbers of very low-value coins; the Chinese took the view that it was much more difficult to steal large amounts of money if it consisted of heavy strings of copper coins, each of which was worth only a tiny fraction of a gold dinar. He was also familiar with Chinese painting, drawing and craftsmanship, which, he admitted, was the finest in the world.15

  Siraf is especially interesting, because, in addition to the testimony of these writers, there is the evidence from excavations conducted by the British Institute of Persian Studies in the 1960s. Siraf turned out to be rather older than had been assumed: inhabited by Zoroastrians, the town acquired the distinctive red pottery of the Roman Empire, and a gold coin of a mid-seventh-century Byzantine emperor, Constans II, was found as well. Its high point was in the ninth to the tenth centuries, but it was already a lively centre of business soon after AD 700. In the eighth century coins from Iraq, Afghanistan, Persia and even Spain were buried in a coin hoard, only to be rediscovered 1,200 years later. During the excavation of what had been the platform of the Great Mosque, plenty of Tang pottery from the same period was found. However, in 977 an earthquake damaged the town, and thereafter merchants trading up the Persian Gulf concentrated their attention on the island of Kish (or Qays), which became the seat of a small but successful pirate kingdom, and by the end of the twelfth century Siraf had disappeared off the map. Ramisht lived at a time when Siraf was long past its best. Another factor, to which this chapter will return, was the increasing importance of the rival route taking spices up the Red Sea, following a political revolution in Egypt. At its peak, Siraf was rather less than half the size of the circular inner core of Baghdad, but that actually speaks for its very great size, given the vastness of the Abbasid capital. Shops and bazaars stretched along the seafront for a kilometre or more, which was about half the length of the town. Two-storey buildings with paved courtyards were probably the residences of prosperous merchants and officials, but one building, said to be larger than Hatfield House in southern England (an odd comparison), was, one would imagine, the palace of someone like the merchant-prince Ramisht.16 The town lay in an unpropitious setting, dry and stony. It was not easy to produce food locally. But, as a citizen of another city set in a rocky landscape, Dubrovnik, argued several centuries later, the very sterility of the surrounding countryside made trade an imperative.17

  While it would be a mistake to underestimate the importance of the Persian Gulf in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, changes further west stimulated the revival of Red Sea commerce from the tenth century onwards. The Abbasid Empire began to fragment; the greatest challenge came from the rise to power of the Shi‘ite Fatimid dynasty, first in Tunisia (where they founded the city of Qayrawan, ‘the caravan’, with its Great Mosque), and then in Cairo, where they were able to compete for domination over the Levant. Partly as a result of these political changes, the Mediterranean began to reawaken, and this reawakening was further stimulated by the emergence of Christian trading republics, first Amalfi and Venice, then Pisa and Genoa, that eagerly bought the spices of the East and passed them across the sea to Europe, and then along land and river routes that reached as far as Flanders, Germany and England. And all of these developments had major repercussions in the Indian Ocean as well. The sea routes across the Mediterranean have already been traced in the accompanying volume on ‘the Great Sea’.18 But now it is time to trace a sea route that leads all the way from the Nile to Indonesia and China.

  III

  By 1000 Persia and Mesopotamia lost their primacy; the Gulf did not exactly become a backwater, for it was home to the pirate kingdom of Kish, but the old Greco-Roman routes down the other coast of Arabia were reborn. The Red Sea revival is plain from the archaeological record along its shores. From the late ninth century onwards, sherds of Chinese celadons and of white porcelain from distant Jingdezhen appear in excavations as far north as Ayla.19 Goldmining in Sudan began to produce handsome returns. Egyptian emeralds were exported in the direction of India, and were traded by Chola Tamils from there towards Sumatra and beyond. Further afield, Chinese ceramics arrived in Cairo. An off-white ewer, decorated with an engraved portrait of a phoenix, arrived there by 1000, but now lies in the British Museum. Hundreds of thousands of sherds from shattered Chinese pots have been found on medieval sites in Cairo. As time went by, the strong demand for Chinese porcelain in Egypt prompted Egyptian potters to manufacture their own imitations, but they never compared seriously with the genuine article.20 Another sign of growing familiarity with celadons and white wares from the Far East was the request to a rabbinical court to investigate whether the impurity attributed in Jewish law to a menstruating woman would be communicated to a porcelain cup were she to touch it. Different categories of goods – earthenware, glass, metalwork – were deemed susceptible to impurity in differing degrees, but what about fine glazed wares from the East?21

  This curious request comes from the mountain of papers, or rather fragments of paper, that make up the Cairo Genizah documents, most of which were sold to Cambridge University following their discovery in the attic storeroom of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Fustat, or Old Cairo, at the end of the nineteenth century. The Genizah is not an ordered archive, but a giant rubbish basket, a random assortment of documents thrown away because no one could be bothered to sort out those that might contain the divine name (and thus need to be preserved with reverence, or buried if too dilapidated). Precisely for this reason, the documents, including merchant letters, pages of account books, rabbinic decisions, or responsa, magical, medical and religious texts, shed a brilliant light on the daily life of Jews and also Muslims in Egypt between the tenth and the twelfth centuries. In particular, they expose the business affairs of Egyptian Jewish merchants who traded westwards into the Mediterranean, particularly towards Tunisia and Sicily, but who also had very substantial trading interests in the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean up to the late twelfth century.22 The first scholar to conduct intensive research on this material, S. D. Goitein of Princeton, rather assumed that the character of the trade of these merchants was static, whereas the Red Sea and Indian Ocean trade became increasingly important during the twelfth century, in response to growing demand within the Mediterranean for exotic eastern products used as food flavourings, dyestuffs and medicines. There is a flipside to this argument: the increasing dominance of the Genoese, Pisans and Venetians in the spice trade linking the Levant
to Europe, and the success of their navies in dominating the Mediterranean sea routes, prompted the Genizah merchants to turn away from the Mediterranean and to look with greater interest at the opportunities offered by the Red Sea and the route bringing spices from India, where some of them even installed themselves. The letters left by these merchants trading towards Aden and India permit an intimate portrait that goes beyond their account books and reveals their daily life, their contacts with Muslim and Hindu merchants, and the trials and tribulations of those seeking to bring goods across what were for those times vast distances.

 

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