Also by Tim Mackintosh-Smith
Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land
The Hall of a Thousand Columns: Hindustan to Malabar with Ibn Battutah
Landfalls: On the Edge of Islam from Zanzibar to the Alhambra
The Travels of Ibn Battutah (editor)
www.johnmurray.co.uk
First published in Great Britain in 2001 by John Murray (Publishers)
An Hachette UK company
Text © Tim Mackintosh-Smith 2001
Illustrations © Martin Yeoman 2001
The right of Tim Mackintosh-Smith to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
Maps drawn by Martin Collins
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library
ISBN 978-1-84854-676-9
John Murray (Publishers)
338 Euston Road
London NW1 3BH
www.johnmurray.co.uk
‘If you are a son of this Maghrib of ours and wish for success, then head for the land of the east!’
Ibn Jubayr of Valencia (d. 1217), Travels
‘I have milked the teats of Time, pair after pair,
Wandered the world around,
And rivalled al-Khadir in my circumambulations.’
Abu Dulaf (tenth century), The Ode of the Banu Sasan
For
Professor , of Aden,
and
Professor Alan Jones, of Oxford,
two outstanding teachers
Contents
Cover
Also by Tim Mackintosh-Smith
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Dedication
Prefatory Note
Maps
Preamble: Lust and Lore
Morocco: One End of the World
The Delta: A Dark and Greenish Country
Cairo: The Palace on Crimson Street
Upper Egypt: Eastward from Edfu
Damascus: The Shilling in the Armpit
Northern Syria: Old Men of the Mountains
Oman: The Coast of the Fish-eaters
Dhofar: The Importance of Being Rasulid
Kuria Muria: Minor Monuments
Anatolia: Hajji Baba, the Skystone and Other Mysteries
The Crimea: Fourteenth-century Features
Constantinople: Talking about Jerusalem
Bibliographical Note
Acknowledgements
Prefatory Note
IBN BATTUTAH (hereafter IB) spent half a lifetime on his journeys and travelled some 75,000 miles. I grappled with the logistics of covering his Travels in one volume of my own, and lost. This book deals therefore with the first stage of his journey, from Tangier to Constantinople; another one – perhaps other ones – will follow him to further parts. In many places I have shadowed him more or less closely. Elsewhere I have dropped in on him. I have left gaps, and sometimes big ones. I only wish I had the odd thirty years to spare, and IB’s enviable knack of extracting large amounts of cash, robes and slaves from compliant rulers.
For reasons of clarity and conciseness, I have made a few alterations to the Hakluyt Society’s English translation by Gibb of the Travels. Computers tend to treat my Ibn Battutah and Gibb’s Ibn Battuta as two distinct persons. They are, of course, identical. The final h is a matter of taste, which is not among the criteria of electronic indexing.
IB was born in Tangier in 1304. His family were of Berber origin but thoroughly Arabized; they belonged to the educated classes and had a tradition of serving as qadis, Islamic judges. Nothing is known of IB’s youth, but he probably received the scholastic training usual to his class. At the age of 21 he set out on the Pilgrimage to Mecca. So far so unremarkable; but let us turn to the notice of him from Ibn Hajar’s Concealed Pearls, a biographical dictionary of the fourteenth century:
‘Ibn al-Khatib says: “Ibn Battutah had a modest share of the sciences. He journeyed to the East in the month of Rajab 725 [1325], travelled through its lands, penetrated into Iraq al-Ajam, then entered India, Sind and China, and returned through Yemen … In India, the king appointed him to the office of qadi. He came away later and returned to the Maghrib [the western Islamic world, i.e. north-west Africa and Muslim Spain], where he related his doings and what had befallen him, and what he had learned of the people of different lands. Our shaykh Abu ’l-Barakat Ibn al-Balfiqi told us of many strange things which Ibn Battutah had seen. Among them was that he claimed to have entered Constantinople and to have seen in its church twelve thousand bishops. He subsequently crossed the Strait to the Spanish coast, and visited the Negrolands. Thereafter the ruler of Fez summoned him and commanded him to commit his travels to writing.”
‘I have seen in the handwriting of Ibn Marzuq the statement … that Ibn Battutah lived to the year 770 [1368–9] and died while holding the office of qadi in some town or other. Ibn Marzuq also said: “And I know of no person who has travelled through so many lands as Ibn Battutah did on his travels, and he was withal generous and welldoing.”’
Preamble
Lust and Lore
‘A book is a visitor whose visits may be rare, or frequent, or so continual that it haunts you like your shadow and becomes a part of you.’
al-Jahiz (d. 868–9), The Book of Animals
A LETTER HAS just arrived here in San’a from a Russian lady, Nina Suvorova. She writes on lightly scented paper from the Crimean port of Feodosia, a place still known to Tatars and to Turks of the older generation as Keffe. Nina was very pleased, she says, to receive my letter on the eve of the New Year. ‘But there are no more letters from you. Maybe you went somewhere … How is Battutah? I often recollect your eyes and your expression talking about Battutah, and how we called you Battutah.’
*
I first met Ibn Battutah – strictly, Nina is incorrect to drop the ‘Ibn’ – in San’a, in the Greater Yemen Bookshop, so small that all the departments are within the diameter of a swung cat. I wasn’t looking for him; it was a chance encounter – better, as the saying goes, than a thousand appointments.
Not long before, while I was eating a boiled potato from a barrow on the street outside my house, I felt a tap on my elbow. It was a neighbour, a man who takes gentle pleasure in publicly eroding my bookish reputation. ‘Where does the word batatah, potato, come from?’ he asked. Without waiting for an answer he said, ‘Haven’t you heard of IB? Battutah … batatah,’ and disappeared.
It seemed plausible, for about a nanosecond. Then I thought: surely IB lived in the old, pre-potato world … didn’t he? Of course I had heard of him. He was the most famous Arab traveller. And that, I realized, was the extent of my knowledge.
So, while I wasn’t looking for him, he was filed under ‘Shameful Gaps in Knowledge’ in some dusty lobe of my brain. And there he was, sitting on a shelf in the Greater Yemen Bookshop and bound in pillar-box red – or rather his Tuhfat al-nuzzar fi ghara’ib al-amsar wa aja’ib al-asfar (The Precious Gift of Lookers into the Marvels of Cities and Wonders of Travel; or perhaps, to preserve the original rhymed prose – an effect called saj’, ‘the cooing of doves’ – An Armchair Traveller’s Treasure: the Mirabilia of Metropolises and the Wonders of Wandering; although maybe, to avoid music-hall levity, the Travels, tout court, is best). I looked at the C
ontents. There was an introduction, then on page ten we were off with ‘Departure from Tangier’. I turned to the text: ‘My departure from Tangier, my birthplace, took place on Thursday the second of the month of God, Rajab the Unique, in the year seven hundred and twenty-five …’ Chapter and verse: AH 725 was AD 1325, give or take a year – the Middle Ages. Potatoes were still slumbering in the pre-Columbian sod.
I bought a Yemeni history I had come for; and, as an afterthought, picked up the Travels, not suspecting that I had set the course of my life into its own middle age.
That afternoon I opened the Travels with that slight thrill of anticipation, of a book to be explored greedily, and alone. I turned first to the section on Yemen, to find out what IB had to say about my adoptive home, and was soon into his description of lunch with the Sultan. The doorbell rang. I swore, but pulled the rope that opens the door down on the street. A minute later Hasan appeared, breathless from the climb.
Hasan is one of the few people I enjoy being disturbed by. An afternoon with him will touch on many topics, always interleaved with jokes, few of them repeatable and fewer translatable. He asked what I was reading, and I passed him the Travels. Arabic is a language of recitation, and he began reading aloud, as he often does, sometimes for twenty minutes at a time: ‘“Account of the Sultan of Yemen. He is the Sultan al-Mujahid Nur al-Din Ali, son of the Sultan al-Mu’ayyad Hizabr al-Din Da’ud, son of al-Muzaffar Yusuf ibn Ali ibn Rasul.”’
Suddenly, Hasan stopped and looked up. ‘That’s funny. You know who Sultan al-Mujahid is, don’t you?’
‘You’ve just told me. He was the Sultan of Yemen. IB had lunch with him.’
‘No, the point is … our family, Bayt al-Shamahi, we’re a section of Bayt al-Mujahid. Sultan al-Mujahid is my ancestor. My direct paternal ancestor.’
For a moment, I felt a strange sensation. Perhaps I could call it temporal vertigo: the feeling of looking at a spot in time, far away yet reachable in a single, breathtaking leap. I think Hasan felt it too.
When he left after sunset, he borrowed the book. My glimpse into IB’s world had been brief; but it had waited 650 years and could wait a week or two more. As for that temporal glitch, it was something that would return when I came to explore that world on the ground.
*
I have always been conscious of the nearness of time past. It may be the result of coming from an elderly family. My childhood was inhabited by Edwardian aunts who wore their hair in vestigial bobs and said ‘orf’. My youngest grandparent, the only one I knew, was born a little before the moving picture. My maternal grandfather dated back to the year in which cricketers were permitted to bowl overarm.
From an early age, I was conscious too of an even more distant past. As a toddler, I would stray on to the founder of Pennsylvania’s father, who lay under a slab in front of our pew in church, and try to wake up the fifteenth-century merchant whose effigy slept in a recess in the wall behind. I cannot remember ever being bored. Who could be, in that light-dappled forest of columns? I would sit there and look upwards, and lose myself in its sheer oldness.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, our parish church was anything but parochial. In about 1325, the year in which IB set out from his home town of Tangier, a pious inhabitant of my own native city decided to give the church of St Mary Redcliffe a new north porch. The plan of the building, a hexagon, was unusual. The doorway, though, was a fit of eccentricity: cusped and sub-cusped like the mouth of some toothy sea creature, it sprouts a deep undergrowth of foliage from which small figures peep. Pevsner called the structure ‘desperately original’ and ‘curiously tropical’, and suggested that it might be ‘the first case of orientalisme in major Western architecture’. I have shown a photograph of the door to several architectural historians. All but one (she recognized it) have transported it eastwards: prayer niche? some influence from metalwork – Mosul perhaps? Mongol Persia? Islamic India? The porch is truly ectopic, a sort of medieval Brighton Pavilion. But perhaps the outlandishness is not misplaced: the shrine which the porch once contained was a favourite place for travellers to offer prayers, before setting sail a few yards away from the busiest quay in England and, by the grace of God, when they returned. And whatever inspired the design, its date - and that of IB’s departure – could hardly be more apt: the first half of the fourteenth century was one of those rare periods when everything was in motion. Writing at the other end of the world in 1350, the Chinese scholar Wang Li said in his Unicorn Plain Essays, ‘He who travelled 1,000 li [about 200 miles], it was as if he had walked across the courtyard; he who travelled 10,000 li, as if he had gone to his neighbour’s house.’ For a few decades – IB’s decades – the world seemed to have contracted.
The Crusades were over, the Tatars tamed and Islamized, and the world by and large made not war but love, or at least nuptial alliances. The Mamluk Sultan of Egypt and Syria, whose father and predecessor had begun his career as a Kipchak Turkish slave, was romantically attached to the young Tatar Ilkhan of Iraq and Persia – a descendant of Genghis Khan and thus a cousin of the Yuan Emperor of China – and married to another cousin of the Ilkhan, a daughter of the Khan of the Golden Horde, the latter being married to the Emperor of Byzantium’s daughter, one of whose illegitimate stepsisters was Empress of Trebizond and two of whose legitimate stepsisters, the daughters of Anne of Savoy, were married respectively to a Bulgarian prince and a nobleman of Genoa, and whose stepmother was a daughter of Duke Henry the Wonderful of Brunswick.
Marriages were made, and so was money. The east–west road streamed with merchants. Pegolotti, a Florentine merchant banker who compiled a businessman’s guide to the east in the 1340s, assured his readers that the road to China could be travelled in perfect safety. Under his checklist of ‘Things needful for merchants who desire to make the journey to Cathay’, he stressed the importance of a good dragoman, warning that ‘you must not try to save money in the matter of dragomen by taking a bad one instead of a good one’. But his chief priority concerned the shibboleth of shaving: ‘In the first place, you must let your beard grow long.’ (During the Crusades, Franks and Muslims had learned that they had much in common. One point of complete incompatibility, however, was the question of which end of yourself you should shave. ‘The Franks shave their beards’, wrote one Muslim commentator, ‘and only let a nasty, rough stubble grow. One of them was asked about this and said, “Hair is an excrescence. You Muslims remove it from your crotches, so why should we leave it on our faces?”’)
Just as peace made in-laws of far-flung dynasties, so it brought about some exogamous marriages in the world of design and technology. One of these has rarely been matched in fertility. For centuries, Persian potters had been using cobalt to paint underglaze blue decorations. In the early fourteenth century, some bright entrepreneur had the idea of taking it to China. The Chinese potters tried out this ‘Muhammadan blue’ on their highly prized white porcelain, and in about 1325 started to export the barbarous results back to the Near East. The shapes were based on those of Islamic metalwork, the blue decorations incorporated jolly chinoiseries. Soon, imitations were being made in Persia, then in Egypt and Syria. Later on, the Ottomans took blue-and-white to heart and put tulips on their pots; the seventeenth-century Dutch then fell in love with it, putting windmills and armorials on their pots, and tulips in them. The bastard transfer-printed descendants of blue-and-white still leave Stoke-on-Trent in their willow-patterned millions.
The early decades of the fourteenth century were a period of toings and froings such as had not been seen since ancient times. With the world in such a confusion of currents, it was not so surprising that a piece of exotic jetsam like the porch of my parish church should land up in an English port city.
*
It was into this world that the 21-year-old IB launched himself: ‘I braced my resolution to quit all my dear ones, female and male, and forsook my home as birds forsake their nests.’ Hasan having returned the Travels, I launched myself with h
im.
It was a world of miracles and mundanities, of sultans, scholars, saints and slave-girls, in which outrageous fortune and dubious dragomen – the sort Pegolotti warned against – steered a course that lurched between luxury and poverty, asceticism and hedonism. IB, I discovered, had a penchant for the picaresque and a storyteller’s delight in close shaves, honed along the way by constant recounting in princely courts and caravanserais. He escaped pirates, storms and shipwrecks; he dodged the Black Death, purged himself of a fever with an infusion of tamarinds, survived the near-fatal consequences of undercooked yams and endured diarrhoea caused by a binge on melons; he worked for the Sultan of Delhi – ‘of all men the most addicted to the making of gifts and the shedding of blood’, who had bumped off his father in a Buster Keaton-style collapsing pavilion operated by elephants – and lived to tell the tale.
Twenty-nine years after he flew the nest, IB returned to Morocco. He had seen a huge swathe of the known world, visiting over forty countries on the modern map and travelling some 75,000 miles by horse, mule, camel, ox-wagon, junk, dhow, raft, and on foot – around three times the distance Marco Polo claimed to have covered. He had got as far north as the Volga and as far south as Tanzania. He had surfed the scholarly internet, meeting fellow Moroccans in China and savants from Samarkand in Granada. His itinerary was as irrational as that of a New Zealand backpacker. At one point, he left Jeddah by sea for India, only to get there via Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, the Crimea, Constantinople, the steppe, Khwarizm, Khurasan, Transoxiana and Afghanistan. Inexplicable spatial blips teleported him across hundreds of miles and then returned him, just as suddenly, to the point where he had left his original road. Along the way, he had been judge, hermit and ambassador, and had plotted a coup in the Maldives. He had earned the title Traveller of Islam, and can justly claim to be the greatest traveller of the pre-mechanical age.
Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah Page 1
