Mission to the Volga

by Ahmad Ibn Fadlan

  Y 6.3   [76] They are the filthiest of all God’s creatures. They have no modesty when it comes to defecating or urinating and do not wash themselves when intercourse puts them in a state of ritual impurity. They do not even wash their hands after eating. Indeed they are like roaming asses.85 They arrive, moor their boats by the Itil, and build large wooden houses on its banks. They share a house, in groups of ten and twenty, sometimes more, sometimes fewer. Each reclines on a couch. They are accompanied by beautiful female slaves for trade with the merchants. They have intercourse with their female slaves in full view of their companions. Sometimes they gather in a group and do this in front of each other. A merchant may come in to buy a female slave and stumble upon the owner having intercourse. The Rūs does not leave her alone until he has satisfied his urge. They must wash their faces and their heads every day with the filthiest and most polluted water you can imagine. Let me explain. Every morning a female slave brings a large basin full of water and hands it to her master. He washes his face, hands, and hair in the water. Then he dips the comb in the water and combs his hair. Then he blows his nose and spits in the basin. He is prepared to do any filthy, impure act in the water. When he has finished, the female slave carries the basin to the man next to him who performs the same routine as his comrade. She carries it from one man to the next and goes around to everyone in the house. Every man blows his nose and spits in the basin, and then washes his face and hair.

  Y 6.4   [77] They disembark as soon as their boats dock. Each carries bread, meat, milk, onions, and alcohol to a large block of wood set in the ground. The piece of wood has a face on it, like the face of a man. It is surrounded by small figurines placed in front of large blocks of wood set in the ground. He prostrates himself before the large figure and says, “Lord, I have come from a distant land, with such and such a number of female slaves and such and such a number of sable pelts.” He lists all his merchandise. Then he says, “And I have brought this offering.” He leaves his offering in front of the piece of wood, saying, “I want you to bless me with a rich merchant with many dinars and dirhams who will buy from me whatever I wish and not haggle over any price I set.” Then he leaves. If he finds it hard to sell his goods and has to stay there too many days, he comes back with a second and a third offering. If his wishes are not fulfilled, he brings an offering to every single figurine and seeks its intercession, saying, “These are the wives and daughters of our lord.” He goes up to each figurine in turn and petitions it, begging for its intercession and groveling before it. Sometimes business is good, and he makes a quick sale. In that case he says, “My lord has satisfied my request, so I need to compensate him.” He acquires some sheep and cows and kills them, gives a portion of the meat as alms, and places the rest before the large block of wood and the small ones around it. He ties the heads of the cows and the sheep to the piece of wood set up in the ground. When night falls, the dogs come and eat it all up, and the man who has gone to all this trouble says, “My lord is pleased with me and has eaten my offering.”

  Y 6.5   [78] When one of them falls ill, they pitch a tent far away and lay him down inside, with some bread and water. They do not approach him or speak to him. Indeed, they have no contact with him for as long as he is ill, especially if he is a social inferior or a slave. If he recovers and gets back to his feet, he rejoins them. If he dies, they set fire to him. They do not bury dead slaves but leave them as food for the dogs and the birds. [79] When they catch a thief or a bandit, they take him to a solid tree and put a sturdy rope around his neck. They tie him to the tree, and he hangs there until he eventually decomposes through exposure to the rain and the winds.

  Y 6.6   [80] I was told that they set fire to their chieftains when they die. Sometimes they do more, so I was very keen to verify this. Then I learned of the death of an important man. They had placed him in his grave with a roof raised over him, for ten days while they finished cutting and sewing his garments. When the deceased is poor, they build a small boat for him, place him inside, and burn it. When he is rich, they collect his possessions and divide them into three portions. One-third goes to his household, one-third is spent on his funeral garments, and one-third is spent on the alcohol they drink the day his female slave kills herself and is cremated with her master. They are addicted to alcohol. They drink it night and day. Sometimes one of them dies cup in hand. When the chieftain dies, the members of his household ask his female and male slaves, “Who will die with him?” One answers, “I will.” At this point the words become binding. There is no turning back. It is not even an option. It is usually female slaves who offer. [81] When the man I just mentioned died, they said to his female slaves, “Who will die with him?” One said, “I will.” So they put two other female slaves in charge of her, caring for her and accompanying her wherever she went, even to the point of washing her feet with their hands. Then they attended to the chieftain, cutting his garments and setting in order what was required. The female slave drank alcohol every day and sang merrily and cheerfully.

  Y 6.7   [82] I arrived at the river where his boat was moored on the day when the chief and the female slave were set on fire. I noticed that the boat had been beached and that it was supported by four props of khalanj and other wood. These props were surrounded by what looked like huge structures of wood. The boat had been hauled on top of the wood. The Rūsiyyah approached, going to and fro around the boat, uttering words I did not understand. The chief was still in his grave and had not been exhumed. They produced a couch and placed it on the boat, covering it with quilts and cushions made of Byzantine silk brocade. An aged woman whom they called the Angel of Death turned up. She spread the coverings on the couch. It is her responsibility to sew the chieftain’s garments and prepare him properly, and it is she who kills the female slaves. I saw her myself: she was gloomy and corpulent, but neither young nor old. [83] When they arrived at his grave, they removed the soil from the wood. Then they removed the wood and exhumed him, dressed in the garment he was wearing when he died. I saw that the coldness of the climate had turned him black. They had placed alcohol, fruit, and a ṭanbūr in his grave. They removed all of this. Surprisingly, only his color had deteriorated. They dressed him in trousers, leggings, boots, a tunic, and a silk caftan with gold buttons. They placed a peaked silk cap fringed with sable on his head. They carried him inside the yurt which was on the boat and rested him on a quilt, propping him up with the cushions. They placed the alcohol, fruit, and basil beside him. Then they placed bread, meat, and onions in front of him. They cut a dog in two and threw it onto the boat. They placed all his weaponry beside him. They made two horses gallop into a sweat, cut them into pieces with their swords, and threw the meat onto the boat. They cut two cows into pieces and threw them on board. Then they produced a cock and a hen, killed them and put them on board too. [84] Meanwhile, the female slave who was to be killed came and went, entering one yurt after another. One by one the owner of the yurt had intercourse with her and said, “Tell your master that I have done this out of love for you.” At the time of the Friday late afternoon prayer they brought the female slave to an object they had built that resembled a door-frame. She stood on the hands of the men and she was lifted above the doorframe. She uttered some words, and they brought her down. They lifted her up a second time, and she did what she had done before. They lowered her and lifted her a third time, and she did what she had done the last two times. Then they handed her a hen. She cut off the head and cast it aside. They picked the hen up and threw it onto the boat. I quizzed the interpreter about her actions and he said, “The first time they lifted her up, she said, ‘Look, I see my father and mother.’ The second time she said, ‘Look, I see all my dead kindred, seated.’ The third time she said, ‘Look, I see my master, seated in the Garden. The Garden is beautiful and dark-green. He is with his men and his retainers. He summons me. Bring me to him.’” They took her to the boat, and she removed both of her bracelets, handing them to the woma
n called the Angel of Death, the one who would kill her. She also removed two anklets she was wearing, handing them to the two female slaves who had waited upon her, the daughters of the woman known as the Angel of Death. [85] They lifted her onto the boat but did not take her into the yurt. The men approached with shields and sticks and handed her a cup of alcohol. Before drinking it she chanted over it. The interpreter said to me, “Now she bids her female companions farewell.” She was handed another cup which she took and chanted for a long time. The crone urged her to drink it and to enter the yurt where her master was lying. I could see she was befuddled. She went to enter the yurt but missed it, placing her head to one side of the yurt, between it and the boat. The crone took hold of her head and entered the yurt with her. The men began to bang their shields with the sticks so that the sound of her screaming would be drowned out. Otherwise it would terrify the other female slaves, and they would not seek to die with their masters. [86] Six men entered the yurt. They all had intercourse with the female slave and then laid her beside her master. Two held her feet, two her hands. The crone called the Angel of Death placed a rope around her neck with the ends crossing one another and handed it to two of the men to pull on. She advanced with a large, broad-bladed dagger and began to thrust it in between her ribs, here and there, while the two men strangled her with the rope until she died.

  Y 6.8   [87] The deceased’s nearest male relative came forward. He picked up a piece of wood and set it alight. He was completely naked. He walked backwards, the nape of his neck towards the boat. He had the ignited piece of wood in one hand and had his other hand on his anus. He set fire to the wooden structure under the boat after they had placed the female slave they had killed next to her master. The people came forward with sticks and firewood. They each carried a lighted stick that they threw on top of the wood. The wood caught fire. Then the boat, the yurt, the dead man, the female slave, and everything else on board caught fire. A fearsome wind picked up. The flames grew higher and higher and blazed fiercely. [88] One of the Rūsiyyah was standing beside me. I heard him speaking to the interpreter who was with him. I asked him what he had said, and he replied, “He said, ‘You Arabs, you are a lot of fools! You purposefully take your nearest and dearest and those whom you hold in the highest esteem and put them in the ground, where they are eaten by vermin and worms. We, on the other hand, cremate them there and then, so that they enter the Garden on the spot.’” Then he laughed loud and long and said, “My lord feels such great love for him that he has sent the wind to take him away within an hour.” In fact, it took scarcely an hour for the boat, the firewood, the female slave, and her master to be burnt to ash and then very fine ash. The Rūsiyyah then built a structure like a round hillock over the beached boat and placed a large piece of khadhanj86 in the middle. They wrote the man’s name and the name of the king of the Rūsiyyah on it. Then they left.

  Y 6.9   [89] Ibn Faḍlān said: it is one of the customs of the kings of the Rūsiyyah to keep in their palaces four hundred of their bravest comrades and most trusted companions beside them. They die when the kings die and sacrifice themselves to protect them. Each companion has a female slave to wait on him, wash his head, and provide him with food and drink, and a second to have intercourse with. These four hundred companions sit below the huge couch of the king, studded with precious stones. Forty concubines who belong to the king also sit on his couch. Sometimes he has intercourse with one of them in the presence of his comrades. He never steps off his throne. When he wants to satisfy an urge, he does so in a salver. When he wants to ride, they bring his horse to the throne, and he mounts it from there. When he wants to dismount, he rides the horse to the throne so he can dismount there. He has a deputy who leads the armies, fights against the enemy, and represents him among his subjects.

  Y 6.10   I have taken this word for word from Ibn Faḍlān’s epistle. He is the one responsible for this account. Only God knows whether it is authentic. Nowadays, everyone knows that the Rūs practice Christianity.

  IBN FAḌLĀN’S LOGBOOK: AN IMAGINED RECONSTRUCTION

  [4] We traveled from Baghdad, City of Peace, on Thursday, the twelfth of Safar, 309 [June 21, 921]. We stayed one day in Nahrawān, then rode hard until we reached al-Daskarah, where we stayed three days. Then we traveled without delay or diversion and came to Ḥulwān, where we stayed two days. From there we traveled to Qirmīsīn, where we stayed another two days, and next arrived at Hamadhān, where we stayed three days. We traveled to Sāwah and, after two days, on to Rayy, where we stayed eleven days, until Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī, the brother of Ṣuʿlūk, had left Khuwār al-Rayy. Then we traveled to Khuwār al-Rayy itself and three days later to Simnān, then on to al-Dāmghān, where our caravan happened to encounter Ibn Qārin, who was preaching on behalf of the dāʿī. We concealed our identity and hurried to Nishapur, where we met Ḥammawayh Kūsā, the field marshal of Khurasan. Līlī ibn Nuʿmān had just been killed. Then we proceeded to Sarakhs, Marw, and Qushmahān, at the edge of the Āmul desert. We stayed three days there and changed camels for the desert journey. We crossed the desert to Āmul and then reached Āfr*n, the outpost of Ṭāhir ibn ʿAlī, on the other side of the Jayḥūn. [5] We traveled via Baykand to Bukhara, where we went straight to al-Jayhānī, the chancellor of the emir of Khurasan, known there as the chief shaykh. He had ordered a residence for us and had appointed someone to attend to all our needs and concerns and make sure that we experienced no difficulty in getting what we wanted. After a few days, he arranged an audience with Naṣr ibn Aḥmad…. [6] Al-Faḍl ibn Mūsā al-Naṣrānī, Ibn al-Furāt’s agent, got wind of this and came up with a plan to deal with Aḥmad ibn Mūsā. He wrote to the deputies of the superintendent of the Khurasan highway, in the military district of Sarakhs-Baykand…. Aḥmad ibn Mūsā was later arrested in Marw and put in chains. We stayed twenty-eight days in Bukhara. [8] … We left Bukhara and returned to the river, where we hired a boat for Khwārazm, more than two hundred farsakhs from where we hired the boat. We were able to travel only part of the day. A whole day’s travel was impossible because of the cold. When we got to Khwārazm, we were given an audience with the emir, Muḥammad ibn ʿIrāq Khwārazm-Shāh…. We sailed downriver from Khwārazm to al-Jurjāniyyah. The distance, by water, is fifty farsakhs. [10] We stayed several days in al-Jurjāniyyah. The River Jayḥūn froze over completely, from beginning to end…. [12] We were in al-Jurjāniyyah for a long time: several days of Rajab, and all of Shaʿban, Ramadan, and Shawwal…. [13] Halfway into Shawwal, 309 [February, 922], the season began to change and the river Jayḥūn melted. We set about acquiring the items we needed for our journey. We purchased Turkish camels, constructed the camel-skin rafts for crossing all the rivers we had to cross in the realm of the Turks, and packed provisions of bread, millet, and cured meat to last three months. The locals who knew us told us in no uncertain terms to wear proper clothing and to wear a lot of it…. We each wore a tunic, a caftan, a sheepskin, a horse blanket, and a burnoose with only our eyes showing, a pair of trousers, another pair of lined trousers, leggings, and a pair of animal-skin boots with yet another pair on top of them. Mounted on our camels, we wore so many heavy clothes we couldn’t move. The jurist, the instructor, and the retainers who had left the City of Peace with us stayed behind, too scared to enter the realm of the Turks. I pushed on with the envoy, his brother-in-law, and the two soldiers Takīn and Bārs. [14] … The caravan was ready to depart, so we hired a guide called Falūs, an inhabitant of al-Jurjāniyyah. We trusted in Almighty God and put our fate in His hands. [15] We left al-Jurjāniyyah on Monday, the second of Dhu l-Qaʿdah, 309 [Monday, 4 March, 922], and stopped at an outpost called Zamjān, the Gate of the Turks. The following morning we traveled as far as a stopping post called Jīt. The snow had fallen so heavily that it came up to the camels’ knees. We had to stay there two days. Then we kept a straight course and plunged deep into the realm of the Turks through a barren, mountainless desert. We met no one. We crossed for ten days. Our bodi
es suffered terrible injuries. We were exhausted. The cold was biting, the snowstorms never-ending. It made the cold of Khwārazm seem like summertime…. [17] We came to a place where there was a huge quantity of ṭāgh wood and stopped. The members of the caravan lit fires and got them going. They took their clothes off and dried them by the fires. Then we departed, traveling as quickly and with as much energy as we could manage, from midnight until the midday or afternoon prayer, when we would stop for a rest. After fifteen nights of this, we came to a huge rocky mountain. Springs of water ran down it and gathered to form a lake at its foot. [18] We crossed the mountain and reached a tribe of the Turks known as the Ghuzziyyah…. [25] The first king and chief we met was the Lesser Yināl…. We gave him some gifts. He was satisfied with a Jurjānī caftan worth ten dirhams, a cut of woven cloth, some flat breads, a handful of raisins, and a hundred nuts…. [30] Upon leaving the region where this group of Turks was camped, we stopped with their field marshal, Atrak, son of al-Qaṭaghān. Turkish yurts were pitched, and we were lodged in them. He had a large retinue with many dependents, and his tents were big. He gave us sheep and horses: sheep for slaughter and horses for riding. He summoned his paternal cousins and members of his household, held a banquet, and killed many sheep. We had presented him with a gift of clothing, along with raisins, nuts, pepper, and millet. [31] That night the interpreter and I were granted an audience in Atrak’s yurt. We delivered the letter from Nadhīr al-Ḥaramī, instructing him to embrace Islam. The letter specifically mentioned that he was to receive fifty dinars (some of them musayyabīs), three measures of musk, some tanned hides, and two rolls of Marw cloth. Out of this we had cut for him two tunics, a pair of leather boots, a garment of silk brocade, and five silk garments. We presented his gift and gave his wife a headscarf and a signet ring. I read out the letter…. [33] One day he summoned the four commanders of the adjacent territory: Ṭarkhān, Yināl, the nephew of Ṭarkhān and Yināl, and Yilghiz…. They debated for seven long days. We were in the jaws of death. Then, as is their wont, they came to a unanimous decision: they would allow us to continue on our way. We presented Ṭarkhān with a robe of honor—a Marw caftan and two cuts of woven cloth. We gave a tunic to his companions, including Yināl. We also gave them pepper, millet, and flat breads as gifts. Then they left. [34] We pushed on as far as the Bghndī River, where the people got their camel-hide rafts out, spread them flat, put the round saddle-frames from their Turkish camels inside the hides, and stretched them tight. They loaded them with clothes and goods. When the rafts were full, groups of people, four, five, and six strong, sat on top of them, took hold of pieces of khadhank and used them as oars. The rafts floated on the water, spinning round and round, while the people paddled furiously. We crossed the river in this manner. The horses and the camels were urged on with shouts, and they swam across. We needed to send a group of fully armed soldiers across the river first, before the rest of the caravan. They were the advance guard, protection for the people against the Bāshghird. There was a fear they might carry out an ambush during the crossing. This is how we crossed the Bghndī River. Then we crossed a river called the Jām, also on rafts, then the Jākhsh, the Adhl, the Ardn, the Wārsh, the Akhtī, and the Wbnā. These are all mighty rivers. [35] Then we reached the Bajanāk. They were encamped beside a still lake as big as a sea…. [36] We spent a day with the Bajanāk, continued on our way, and stopped beside the Jaykh River. This was the biggest and mightiest river we had seen and had the strongest current. I saw a raft capsize in the river and all the passengers on board drown. A great many died, and several camels and horses drowned, too. It took the greatest effort to get across. Several days’ march later, we crossed the Jākhā, the Azkhn, the Bājāʿ, the Smwr, the Knāl, the Sūḥ, and the Kījlū. [37] We stopped in the territory of a tribe of Turks called the Bāshghird…. [38] … We left their territory and crossed the following rivers: the Jrmsān, the Ūrn, the Ūrm, the Bāynāj, the Wtīʿ, the Bnāsnh, and the Jāwshīn. It is about two, three, or four days’ travel from one river to the next. [39] We were a day and night’s march away from our goal. The king of the Ṣaqālibah dispatched his brothers, his sons, and the four kings under his control to welcome us with bread, meat, and millet. They formed our escort. When we were two farsakhs away, he came to meet us in person. On seeing us, he got down from his horse and prostrated himself abjectly, expressing thanks to the great and glorious God! He had some dirhams in his sleeve and showered them over us. He had yurts pitched for us, and we were lodged in them. We arrived on Sunday, the twelfth of Muharram, 310 [May 12, 922]. We had been on the road for seventy days since leaving al-Jurjāniyyah. From Sunday to Wednesday we remained in our yurts, while he mustered his kings, commanders, and subjects to listen to the reading of the letter.