The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century
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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.”6
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.7 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 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, including 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, eventually 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 experience. There were thousands of shops in the vicinity of the avenue, as well as more than thirty markets, each one a concentration 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 international trade in the city were the caravansaries, called funduqs 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.8
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 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 commoners thronging the streets below.
The origins of this “oligarchy of lost children,” as one historian has characterized the Mamluks,9 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 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 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), consolidated 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 interpreters 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 commanders 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 intelligent, 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 wit
hin. Power 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 Dome of the Rock, Jerusalem.
Photo by the Author.
The Mausoleum of the Mamluk sultan al-Mansur Qala’un (1279–1290), Cairo.
Photo by the Author.
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 architects chose increasingly to build in stone rather than the brick and plaster of earlier generations, and so their monuments have endured. 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,10 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,11 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, including 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 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.12
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 congregational, or Friday, mosques. Opening onto the court were four vaulted halls, or liwans, where classes were normally held. 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 people 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, encyclopedists, and biographers of spectacular erudition and nimbleness of mind. It was these luminaries 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.13
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.14 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 international trade in the Afro–Eurasian world. The commercial infrastructure 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.15 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 bathhouses 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 transshipment 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 smouldering Red Sea Hills took 15 days, about the normal time for the trip.16
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: