One of Abraham’s correspondents was Madmun ben Hasan-Japheth, a shipowner of Persian descent whose family had lived in Aden for several generations. Like his father before him, Madmun was head of the Jewish community in Yemen, superintendent of the port of Aden, and a representative of merchants there, a position his descendants held until the 1200s. In a letter to Abraham characteristic of the Geniza correspondence, Madmun explains that he is sending a cargo of mats imported to Aden from the Horn of Africa together with personal gifts including “two [sets] of fine, large paper, government paper, the like of which no one has” in India, as well as sugar and raisins. He also reports on the safe arrival of a cargo of iron and cardamom and asks Abraham to get in touch with three other merchants—two Indians and a third who could be either Jewish or Muslim. “And if they can they should dispatch a ship from Mangalore, and send in it any available pepper, iron, cubeb, and ginger; it should set out at the beginning of the season for al-Dyyb [the Maldives] taking some coir, fine aloes wood, mango and coconuts, because all these are selling well.”c Madmun provides detailed information on the prices these will fetch, and offers to invest in the enterprise: “If they are equipping a ship in Aden, and they want me to take part, I will share [in it] with them. If there were a ship sailing from Mangalore this year, I would send them gold, sugar, raisins and [other] goods.”
The Commercial World of the Arabian Sea
The Geniza records are replete with instances of commercial collaboration across religious lines, which include several references to “partnerships according to Muslim law,” the qirad, or commenda. Interfaith borrowings were not limited to Jews and Muslims: on the Monsoon Seas religious and other institutional boundaries between people of different faiths were far more porous than in the Mediterranean world. Another example is found in the institution of the karim, “a convoy or group of nakhodas, or shipowners” adopted by Jewish merchants to compensate for the inadequacies of state protection against piracy in the Red Sea. One theory holds that the word comes from the Tamil karyam, meaning “business.” Initially, the karim seems to have been an informal collection of merchants, but by the 1200s it had achieved a prominence in the trade between Egypt, Aden, and India comparable to that of the Hanse in northern Europe at roughly the same time, although karimi merchants never exercised the same degree of political autonomy or influence.
On the Red Sea, the chief threat came from pirates who could threaten merchants and pilgrims en route to Jeddah, Aydhab, Quseir-al Qadim, and other Egyptian ports. Rather than dedicate government resources to commerce protection across the entire sea, the Fatimids entrusted local merchants with their own security. Madmun ben Hasan-Japheth was empowered to conclude agreements with “the lords of the seas and deserts”—in effect to pay for protection for both shipping and desert caravans—and to coordinate the activities of the karim. This seemingly offhand approach belied the sultan’s dual interest in the Red Sea. Revenues from the trade were vital to the state treasury, but Egyptian rulers were additionally obliged to regulate access to the Red Sea to protect the pilgrimage sites of Mecca and Medina from infidels, and in this they were successful. Although enemies and rivals from around the Mediterranean posed a significant and persistent threat to Egypt, especially after the start of the Crusades, they reached the Red Sea only once. In 1183, the rogue crusader Reynald de Châtillon launched a fleet of ships which he assembled from parts carried overland to the Gulf of Aqaba, perhaps inspired in this effort by the example of Jehoshaphat recorded in the Old Testament. Reynald captured or destroyed about twenty ships before the Fatimid squadron based at Qulzum routed him.
The Fatimid fleet concentrated its efforts in the northern Red Sea; in the Gulf of Aden and Arabian Sea, Yemeni and other merchants were completely on their own. By the same token, they had little to fear from state-sponsored violence, although the Geniza letters do mention an attack on Aden by the emir of Kish and its defeat by ships belonging to a celebrated merchant named Ramisht. Aden did not begin to fulfill its potential as a port until the Zurayid emirs of Yemen (1080–1173) took an interest and import duties quickly became an important source of their revenue. Aden’s prosperity under the Zurayids owed much to the broader changes sweeping the Arabian Sea. Trade in the Persian Gulf had begun to tail off due to Baghdad’s decline under the Seljuqs. Siraf and other ports were eclipsed by the emirate of Kish (in Arabic, Qais or Kays), an island in the Strait of Hormuz. Benjamin of Tudela reported that Kish was a magnet for merchants from India, Mesopotamia, Yemen, and Persia who came there to trade “all sorts of silk, purple, and flax, cotton, hemp, worked wool, wheat, barley, millet, rye, and all sorts of food, and lentils of every description, and they trade with one another, whilst the men from India bring great quantities of spices thither. The islanders act as middlemen, and earn their livelihood thereby.”
Despite Aden’s strong fortifications and its distance from the Persian Gulf, its wealth and the lack of a naval presence made the port a tempting target for the emir of Kish, who in 1135 demanded a share of Aden’s revenues. When this was denied, he launched an expedition comprising fifteen vessels and about seven hundred men to seize the port. This proved too small to assault Aden itself, but for two months the Kishites intercepted and plundered ships that attempted to enter or pass the port. “We faced each other,” according to one of the Geniza letters, “but they did not dare to land, while the people of the town had no vessels for attacking their ships.” The stalemate was finally broken when two ships belonging to Ramisht sailed into Aden. “As soon as the ships entered the port, they were manned with a great number of regular troops, whereupon the enemy was chased from the port and began to disperse on the sea.”
In the 1930s, Alan Villiers spent a year sailing with Muslim sailors on the Red Sea and western Indian Ocean. The bulk of his time was spent aboard a boom called Triumph of Righteousness in transit from Aden to Mogadishu and Basra by way of Shihr, Mombasa, and the Rufiji delta, among other stops. “With the Triumph packed to the gunwales with mangrove poles for the voyage home to the Gulf,” he wrote, “her crew had to sleep where they could” in conditions unchanged in a thousand or more years. Courtesy of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England.
Ramisht was no run-of-the-mill trader and he is renowned for his sumptuous endowments at Mecca: a gold waterspout, a silk covering for the Kaaba, and a hospice for Sufi pilgrims. According to an anonymous contemporary who knew the family, one of Ramisht’s employees
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 [Ramisht] be worth! It was Ramisht who removed the silver waterspout of the Ka’ba and replaced it with a golden one, and also covered the Ka’ba with Chinese cloth, the value of which cannot be estimated. In short, I have heard of no merchant in our time who has equaled Ramisht in wealth or prestige.
Given the general state of trade in the Persian Gulf, Ramisht’s wealth seems extraordinary: the value of the Kaaba covering was recorded as either four thousand or eighteen thousand dinars—at a time when a lower-middle-class family could live in Cairo on twenty-four dinars a year. But if Ramisht was more successful than most, he was not unique. The freedman of a governor of Aden who died in 1152 left an estate valued at 650,000 local dinars, 300,000 Egyptian dinars, seventeen hundred pounds of silver ornaments, and vast quantities of perfumes, spices, weapons, and other merchandise; there is no record of what the governor himself was worth.
Notwithstanding the benefits to the state of a prosperous trade, later Egyptian rulers seem to have viewed successful merchants in the India trade as a threat rather than an asset. The Mamluks were especially quick to undercut anyone they suspected of amassing excessive influence. As a result, the more institutionalized nature of the later karim may have evolved to protect merchants not from pirates as much as from the caprice of political rulers. Perhaps the most outrageous of these was al-Malik al-Mansur, the first Rasulid sultan of Y
emen, who notoriously cheated merchants by impounding the pepper they imported and then forcing them to repurchase it at a profit of 50 percent for himself. He further decreed that when he made purchases from the merchants, a buhar should measure 170 kilograms, but that when he sold, it should be only 100 kilos. Although their actions were no less arbitrary, not all rulers acted against merchants’ interests, and some went so far as to exempt a portion of merchants’ import duties. The benefits of such largesse to the port, and therefore the sultanate, were obvious. A fourteenth-century Rasulid sultan “dispensed unaccustomed justice” by conferring honors on the maritime merchants of Aden and abolishing many of their taxes, with the result that “the merchants began to tell to every part on land or sea of his good conduct and his great liberality.”
Compared with the uncertainties of conducting trade in the lands of their coreligionists, Muslim merchants seem to have had a more stable and satisfying reception on the coasts of the Indian subcontinent. Contrary to a conventional narrative that stresses religious animosity between Hindus and Muslims, maritime enterprise in medieval India often transcended confessional divisions. A number of stories accounting for good intercommunal relations have little to do with business per se. According to one inscription from the turn of the eleventh century, a Muslim merchant saved a Hindu king from shipwreck near Goa. In acknowledgment of this act of charity, his grandson was made a regional administrator and allowed to found a mosque at Goa, the upkeep of which was paid for by duties collected in the port. Other inscriptions reveal that Hindu rulers from the Konkan Coast routinely made the pilgrimage by sea to the Hindu shrine in the predominately Muslim port of Somnath in Gujarat. A later tradition holds that the Chalukya king of Gujarat, Jayasimha Siddharaja, founded Muslim communities there in the twelfth century, and several sects claim to have converted Siddharaja to Islam.
Somnath was not merely a center of religious devotion for Hindus but an integral part of the commercial network of the Monsoon Seas. “The reason why in particular Somnath has become so famous,” according to an Arab historian a century before Siddharaja, “is that it was a harbour of seafaring people, and a station for those who went to and fro between Sofala in Zanj [East Africa] and China.” As such, it played an important role in the economy of the Chalukya kingdom, and Jain merchants, who exercised considerable authority, may well have encouraged Siddharaja and other rulers to treat their Muslim counterparts generously. Whatever the case, the Hindu-Muslim accommodation endured and just as Hindu Chola kings endowed temples for the benefit of Buddhist merchants from Southeast Asia, Chalukya rulers did so for Muslims. A bilingual Arabic and Sanskrit inscription of the thirteenth century describes the endowment of a mosque by Nuruddin Firuz, a shipowner from Hormuz. Lauded as a “great and respected chief, prince among seamen, king of kings of merchants,” Firuz built the mosque with the help of prominent Hindus, and he and the Hindu ruler of Gujarat were described as “righteous friends.”
The thirteenth century represents a watershed in the history of Islam in South and Southeast Asia, thanks in part to the ripple effects from the rise of the Mongol Empire, which led to the final demise of the Abbasid Caliphate, confirmed the Mamluks as the rulers of Egypt, and rejuvenated Muslim interest in South and Southeast Asia. Muslim merchants had established enclaves of varying size in India, East Africa, China, and mainland Southeast Asia in the preceding centuries, but these were essentially merchant communities with limited if any political power. Territorial expansion into northern India had led to the capture of Delhi in 1025, but it took another two centuries for an independent Delhi sultanate to break away and envelop Bengal by 1225, and Gujarat in 1297. By this time, the first Muslim-ruled kingdoms had started to emerge “below the winds” in island Southeast Asia, starting with a handful of port cities like Samudra-Pasai on northwest Sumatra, which became a major supplier of pepper to both China and western markets. Whether the first Muslim rulers here came from Bengal, Gujarat, southern India, or the Arabian Peninsula is unknown, but Samudra-Pasai and its rivals attracted Muslims from across Asia and East Africa, and this period has been described as a “moment of incandescence” when Islam assumed a completely new aspect in the political world of the Indian Ocean. From this point on, the religion flowed easily through the existing networks of trade to the east. For indigenous people, the wealth of Muslim merchants was notable and their practices were worthy of imitation. For traders, profession of a common faith facilitated transactions and increased trust, and many Southeast Asian rulers converted to Islam to attract Muslim traders to their ports.
Samudra-Pasai flourished as an independent sultanate thanks to its strong ties to the Muslim trading networks of the Monsoon Seas and because its nearest large neighbors—Srivijaya, Java, and the emergent state of Ayutthaya in Thailand—were preoccupied with keeping each other in check. Rivalry between Ayutthaya and Java was resolved by the establishment of the new port of Melaka by Paramesvara, who had ties to the Majapahit kingdom on Java, the royal house of Srivijaya, and a noble family of Pasai. Located on the Malay Peninsula near the middle of the Strait of Malacca, the port’s strategic position was enhanced by the Melakans’ adoption of Islam, under Paramesvara or one of his successors, and the exemplary business practices followed by their rulers. To a greater extent than even Srivijaya had, Melaka depended almost exclusively on its mastery of foreign trade, which provided its primary source of revenue through an elaborate system of taxes. Goods coming from the west were assessed customs duties, while those from the east were subject to a complex arrangement under which the sultan was permitted to buy certain goods below the market price. The sultans of Melaka further profited from direct participation in trade through ship ownership and other investments.
The commercial character of Melaka is attested by the existence of kampongs or ethnic communities including Gujarati Muslims (the most influential group before the coming of the Portuguese in the following century), Kelings from the Coromandel Coast, and traders from Fujian, Luzon, and Bengal, among other places, each group being represented by their own syahbandar, or harbormaster. Melaka also became the source of the prevailing maritime legal tradition for Southeast Asia, which was codified in the Melaka maritime code, Undang-undang Laut Melaka, around the end of the fifteenth century. This is one of the oldest comprehensive sets of Muslim-based maritime law and as such bears closer comparison with the chapters of the Rhodian Sea Law than with the more discursive Treatise Concerning the Leasing of Ships. One unusual aspect of the law is the attention it pays to relations between men and women aboard ship, a reflection of the high status and active participation of women in trade and other aspects of public life throughout Southeast Asia, even after the coming of Islam.
Zheng He and the Climax of Chinese Maritime Endeavor
Melaka’s initial prosperity was also linked to its close ties with China, whose single greatest burst of maritime commercial expansion coincided with Paramesvara’s rule. Starting in the 1330s, the Yuan Empire sustained a number of violent shocks including famine, plague (which killed tens of millions of Chinese before it reached the greater Mediterranean basin), and repeated flooding of the Yellow River. These calamities emboldened ethnic Chinese opponents to Yuan rule, and in 1356 rebels led by Zhu Yuanzhang captured Nanjing, which became the imperial capital. Having consolidated his power along the middle and lower reaches of the Yangzi, twelve years later Zhu captured Dadu (which he called Beiping, “the north pacified”) and established the Ming (“brilliant”) Dynasty. Ming Taizu, as he is known, installed reform-minded Confucianist bureaucrats who set China on a sinocentric path from which it would rarely deviate over the next six centuries.
As a native Chinese dynasty, the Ming had to turn their back to the sea in order to focus on the defense of their continental borders. The dynasty’s attitude toward maritime affairs is best captured in an edict of 1371 that “not even a little plank is allowed to drift to the sea.” That the ban on trade was so absolute was probably due to the Neo-Confucian cast
of the bureaucracy, whose priorities for the government were antithetical to the encouragement of those activities that made maritime trade feasible, namely travel, technological advances in shipbuilding and navigation, the encouragement of financial institutions, and the legal protection of private property. Nonetheless, Taizu and his successors recognized the need for coastal defense against pirates and they ordered the construction of thirty-five hundred ships for a variety of missions: four hundred warships based near Nanjing, twenty-seven patrol vessels and combat ships assigned to coast guard stations, and four hundred grain fleet escorts. Nor were their missions limited to coastal waters. Embracing Ming Taizu’s dictum that “To repel them at sea is easy, to check them after they are ashore is hard,” Chinese ships pursued pirates to the Ryukyu Islands and Korea and fought them in Dai Viet, which the Ming occupied from 1408 to 1428.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 51
