The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century

by Ross E. Dunn

  7 Anatolia

  This country called Bilad al-Rum is one of the finest regions in the world; in it God has brought together the good things dispersed through other lands. Its inhabitants are the comeliest of men in form, the cleanest in dress, the most delicious in food, and the kindliest of God’s creatures.1

  Ibn Battuta

  Sometime near the end of 1330 (1332) Ibn Battuta boarded a Genoese merchant ship at the Syrian port of Latakia (Ladiqiya) and sailed westward into the Mediterranean, bound for the south coast of Anatolia. He was on his way to India and once again headed squarely in the wrong direction.

  His intentions had been straightforward enough when he left Arabia some months earlier. He would go to Jidda, buy passage on a ship for Aden, and continue from there to India on the winter monsoon, just as hundreds of returning South Asian pilgrims were doing at the same time. First, though, he must secure the services of a rafiq, a guide-companion who knew India well, spoke Persian, and would have contacts of some value in official circles. Although the illustrious Sultan of Delhi was welcoming scholars from abroad and offering them prestigious and rewarding public posts, a young North African could not wander through rural India on his own and then, if he made it to Delhi at all, simply turn up unannounced at the royal palace. A rafiq was essential, and after several weeks in Jidda he failed to find one.2

  At this point he seems to have decided it would be better to approach India by a more circuitous route and hope to meet up with persons along the way who could lead him to Delhi and provide him with the necessary connections. And so boarding a sambuq he sailed directly to the Egyptian coast, made his way to ’Aydhab, and from there retraced his journey of a few years earlier across the desert and down the Nile to Cairo. He rested there a short time, then continued across Sinai, now for the second time, to Palestine. From this point his precise itinerary is uncertain, but he is likely to have traveled northward (including a quick inland detour to Jerusalem) through the Levantine coast towns — Ashqelon, Acre (Akko), Beirut, and finally Latakia.3 Arriving there, he had in his company one al-Hajj ’Abdallah ibn Abu Bakr ibn Al-Farhan al-Tuzari. All we know of this gentleman, whom Ibn Battuta met in Cairo, is that he was an Egyptian legal scholar and that he determined to accompany the Moroccan on his travels. As it came to pass, the two men would remain fast friends and companions for many years.

  Map 7: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Anatolia and the Black Sea Region, 1330–32 (1332–34)

  Sailing from the coast of Syria to Anatolia in order to get to India made some sense, for it is precisely what Marco Polo had done more than sixty years earlier on his way to the Persian Gulf. From the south Anatolian ports of Ayas (Lajazzo), Alanya, and Antalya, trade routes ran northward over the Taurus Mountains to the central plateau where they joined the trans-Anatolian trunk road linking Konya, Sivas, and Erzurum (Arz al-Rum) with Tabriz and thence with Central Asia or the gulf. But since Ibn Battuta would spend about two years in Anatolia and the Black Sea region and finally approach India by way of the Hindu Kush and Afghanistan, a far more difficult and time-consuming passage than the gulf route, we can only conclude that he was playing the tourist again, his Indian career plans sidetracked in favor of more casual adventures.

  There was nothing unusual about him and al-Tuzari taking passage out of Latakia on a European vessel. Italians, Catalans, and Provençais had long since eliminated Muslim shipping from the eastern Mediterranean except for coasting trade and the short run between the Levantine coast and Cyprus. Using Famagusta, the chief port of Cyprus, as the hub of their operations in the eastern sea, the Genoese called at both Levantine ports and those along the south Anatolian coast.4

  Ibn Battuta describes the vessel he boarded as a qurqura, which was probably lateen-rigged, two-masted, and fitted with two or even three decks. It may have been much larger than any ship he had seen in the Indian Ocean, since the Italian “round ships” of the time, with their great superstructures over the bow and stern, were known to hold as much as 600 tons dead weight of cargo and as many as 100 crewmen.5 As usual, Ibn Battuta fails to tell us what sort of lading the ship was carrying, perhaps a load of Syrian cotton or sugar, but he does note that the captain treated his Muslim passengers “honorably” and did not even charge them for the trip. Making a course northwestward around the tip of Cyprus, the ship approached Alanya, the western Taurus Mountains looming behind it, some time in the last weeks of 1330 (1332).6

  Except for his brief trip to Tabriz in Azerbaijan, Ibn Battuta was for the first time visiting a land whose Muslim inhabitants were mostly Turkish. Arab travelers to Anatolia in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a modern scholar has noted, experienced jarring attacks of culture shock when they confronted the alien ways of the Turks, as if finding themselves in some remote part of equatorial Africa.7 In the centuries of the Abbasid Caliphate the ridges of the eastern Taurus had effectively protected the Asian territory of Christian Byzantium from the Arab armies of Iraq and Syria. But the high green valleys of eastern Anatolia were a magnet to the hordes of Turkish herdsmen who poured into the Middle East in the eleventh century as part of the conquests of the Great Seljuks. The natural route of this vast sheep and horse migration was westward from Khurasan to Azerbaijan, then on to Anatolia. At Manzikert in 1071 Seljuk cavalry achieved the military triumph over the Byzantine army that had eluded the Abbasids for three centuries. Once the Greek defenses of the eastern mountains collapsed, one nomadic throng after another advanced through the passes and fanned out over the central plateau. Within a century Byzantium had given up all but the western quarter of Anatolia, and a new Muslim society was emerging which had had no more than peripheral contact with the world of the Arabs.

  The transformation of Asia Minor from a land of Greek and Armenian Christians to the country we call Turkey was a long and extremely complex process not by any means completed until several centuries after Ibn Battuta made his visit. When the empire of the Great Seljuks broke up in the twelfth century, their dynastic heirs, the Seljuks of Rum (as Anatolia was traditionally known to Muslims, a term harking back to the rule of “Rome”) gradually consolidated their authority over the central and eastern regions. While the Seljukid commanders settled down in Konya and other ancient Greek and Armenian towns and took up the ways of the city, Turkish pastoral clans, conventionally called Turcomans (or Turkmens), continued to drift over the Anatolian plateau and into the highland valleys that rimmed it on all sides. In the first half of the thirteenth century, however, the majority of the inhabitants of the region were still neither Muslim nor Turkish. Large Christian populations thrived in the towns and crop-bearing lands of the Seljukid domain. A steady process of conversion to Islam was occurring, sometimes as a result of unfriendly pressures, but it was slow. Moreover, along the perimeters of Anatolia, Christian polities continued to survive: the kingdom of Little Armenia in Cilicia bordering the southeastern coast, the Empire of Trebizond (a Greek state that had broken away from Constantinople) on the Black Sea, and of course the remaining Asian provinces of Byzantium. Moreover, the frontier between Byzantium and the sultanate became relatively stable, and the two governments treated one another much of the time in a spirit of neighborly diplomacy.

  This political pattern was radically disrupted in the aftermath of the Mongol invasions. In 1243 the Tatars stormed over the Armenian mountains, flattened the Seljukid army at Kose Dagh, and penetrated deep into the plateau. In 1256 they returned again in a campaign strategically linked to Hulegu’s conquest of Iraq. In the following year Konya, the Seljukid capital, was taken, and by 1260 Mongol garrisons occupied most of the important towns of eastern and central Anatolia. The sultanate was not abolished, however, but propped up as a vassal state paying tribute to the Ilkhanate of Persia. Indeed the invasion was carried off without the usual cataclysm of terror and destruction. Only one city, Kayseri, was sacked, and the conquest never seriously threatened Byzantine territory. Trebizond and Little Armenia continued to endure under the Mongol shadow.

>   Yet if the military record of the invasion seems a vapid sideshow set against the terrifying drama in Persia, it nonetheless jolted Anatolia into an era of profound political and cultural change by laying it open to more migrations of Central Asian nomads. The first thirteenth-century wave of Turcomans arrived in panicky flight from the Mongol war machine, the second came in its ranks. Throughout the Ilkhanid period, more bands continued to press in. The immediate demographic effects of these movements are obscure, but there is no doubt that in the century after 1243 the ethnically Turkish population of Anatolia rose dramatically. Turkish came to be spoken and written more widely, and the situation of Christian communities, especially in rural villages in the path of migrating flocks and herds, became more and more precarious.

  In the west of the peninsula the Turco-Mongol irruption confronted Byzantium with unprecedented nomadic pressure. Giving way to the new migrants arriving from Azerbaijan, Turcoman groups long established in central Anatolia pushed westward. Moreover, as the Tatar overlords turned their attention to the business of tax collecting and civil order, many of the newcomers preferred to pass on quickly to the mountain peripheries where Mongol-Seljukid authority was safely nominal. Here great leagues of Turcoman warriors led a wild and wooly existence, raiding back into Seljukid territory and battling one another for choice grazing land.

  The very shape of Anatolia, a finger between the seas pointing due westward, directed the surge of pastoral movement into the Byzantine marches and the upper reaches of the valleys that ran down to the Aegean. Ever since the ninth century the Muslim – Byzantine frontier had given employment to mounted fighting men, called ghazis, who made a vocation of staging raids into Greek territory and living off the booty. Organized in war bands and often operating just beyond the boundaries of the Muslim government whose military interests they served, these volunteer champions of jihad lived by a chivalric code of virtue and loyalty founded on the precepts of the Qur’an and the teachings of the early Sufis. Though not all ghazis were of Turkish blood, the tactics and traditions of mounted holy war had been elaborately developed on the Muslim frontiers of Central Asia. Turkish warriors led the conquest of eastern and central Anatolia on behalf of the Seljuks, and though the Mongols were not in the beginning Muslims at all, the ghazi spirit was already deeply engrained in the Turkish warrior-herdsmen who preceded and followed them. Frontier warfare died down in the high period of the Seljukid sultanate when relations with Byzantium were relatively calm, but it flared up again in the crowded, turbulent conditions of the western marches in the later thirteenth century.

  The withering of the great state structures that governed Anatolia encouraged this new phase of roisterous disorder on the frontier. Behind the lines of Turcoman advance, the sultanate was no longer in a position to control or restrain the nomads to its own ends. The Ilkhanid governors, obliged to take an ever-greater share of responsibility for the affairs of the state they themselves had defeated and repressed, were by 1278 running eastern Anatolia as a distant province of Persia with neither the will nor the soldiery to take charge of the Turcoman peripheries. Just beyond the nomad frontier, the Byzantine defenses proved weaker than expected. In 1204 the Frankish and Venetian leaders of the Fourth Crusade, having decided to capture Constantinople rather than Jerusalem, had forced the Greek emperor to rule in exile from the Anatolian city of Nicaea (Iznik). The traditional capital was restored in 1261, but this Latin interlude seriously weakened Byzantine resources. Preoccupied thereafter with the protection of their European and Aegean territories against Christian rival states, the emperors of the later thirteenth century defended their Asian domain in a spirit of phlegmatic resignation.

  As the Seljukid dynasty slid gently into oblivion, several small Turcoman principalities, or amirates, emerged along a mountainous arc extending from the border of Little Armenia in the south to the coasts of the Black Sea. Some of these states were tiny and ephemeral, but by the beginning of the fourteenth century about twelve important centers of power, including the Ilkhanid provinces as one of them, dominated the new political map of Anatolia. The princes, or amirs, of these states ruled simply by virtue of their fitness as Turcoman war captains, the biggest of the “big men” who succeeded in gathering a larger following of mounted archers than their rivals with promises of booty and land. As the Byzantines fell back to their ships almost everywhere except the fragment of Asian territory opposite the Bosphorus, the Aegean hinterland was partitioned among five principal amirates extending along the curve of the arc: Menteshe in the south, then Aydin, Sarukhan, Karasi, and in the far north facing the remaining Byzantine strongholds the Osmanlis, or state of Osman.

  The Muslim conquest of western Anatolia in the first half of the fourteenth century was in the long view only the beginning of a new age of Turkish power. For under the banner of the descendants of Osman, called by Europeans the Ottomans, Turkish cavalry would cross the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles and swarm into the Balkans. Traveling among the Turkish amirates in 1331, two years before his own Moroccan sovereign was preparing a last and utterly futile attempt to retake Spain for Islam, Ibn Battuta may have gained some comfort from the spectacle in Anatolia, where the situation was quite the reverse. By the time he ended his traveling career, the Ottoman armies were advancing on Greece. Barely more than a century and a half after his death they would be attacking the eastern frontiers of Morocco and marching up the Danube to Central Europe.

  Though the Anatolia Ibn Battuta saw was nearing the end of the century of political cracking and straining that marked the transition from the Seljukids and Byzantines to the Ottoman Empire, the continuity of urban and lettered culture was never really broken. Putting up their mosques and palaces in the midst of ancient Greek cities, the Turkish dynasties were naturally profoundly influenced by Byzantine architecture, craftsmanship, and everyday custom. But their model of Muslim civilization was the Persian one they brought with them over the mountains. A literate tradition of their own still in the future, the Turkish rulers and officials who took up residence in the towns encouraged the immigration of Persian scholars, secretaries, and artisans, who helped to make Konya in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries an important international center of belles-lettres, Sufi teaching, and architectural innovation. Then, in the Mongol panics of the 1220s and later, many more educated and affluent Persians arrived in Anatolia, attracted by the prosperous urban culture of the sultanate. Like Cairo and Shiraz, Konya and other Anatolian towns found themselves benefiting unexpectedly from the flight of brains and money from greater Persia. These refugees, as it turned out, did not get far enough away from home by half, but the Mongol invasion was so uncharacteristically mild that city life went on much as before. Indeed, under Ilkhanid sovereignty the high culture of eastern and central Anatolia became more Persia- nized than ever before.

  In the west the hard-riding Turcoman chiefs wasted no time forsaking their tents for the urban Byzantine citadels they captured and assembling around themselves Persian-speaking immigrant scholars who would show them proper civilized behavior. At the time of Ibn Battuta’s visit Persianate letters and refinements prevailed in the courtly circles of the amirates. Moreover the Arabic influence at higher levels of society was not entirely missing. Arabic was the accepted language of building and numismatic inscriptions and of legal and fiscal documents. Some Persian scholars could speak the language, and a few notable intellectual figures from Arab lands lived and worked in Asia Minor.8 Though Ibn Battuta did not know Persian at that point in his travels (by his own admission) and would never learn much Turkish (a fact he was loath to admit), he could expect to have no more trouble making himself understood among the learned fraternity of Anatolia than he had had in Iran.9

  The spectacular city of Alanya (’Alaya), where Ibn Battuta, al-Tuzari, and apparently other companions stepped onto Anatolian soil in the early winter of 1330 (1332), was one of the chief south coast ports linking the interior beyond the coastal ridges of the western Taurus with the lan
ds of the Arabs and Latins. The harbor and shipyards lay at the eastern foot of a great Gibraltar-like promontory rising 820 feet above the sea and surmounted by a complex of walls and forts.10 The ruler of this bastion was the amir of Karaman, one of the most powerful of the Turcoman states to emerge in the later thirteenth century. In the company of the local qadi Ibn Battuta prayed the Friday prayer in the mosque of the citadel and the following day rode out ten miles along the shore to pay respects to the Karamanid governor at his seaside residence. There was the usual interview, and the traveler accepted his first present, money in this instance, from an Anatolian dignitary.

  After a presumably short stay in Alanya, Ibn Battuta and his friends continued westward along the coast, probably on the same Genoese ship, to Antalya, the next major port. Like Alanya, it had been a Seljukid town until taken over by a Turcoman war lord who subsequently founded a local dynasty called the Teke. Ibn Battuta spent his first night in the local madrasa as the guest of its shaykh. But the next day a man dressed in frowzy-looking clothes and wearing a felt cap on his head came to the college and, addressing the visitors in Turkish, invited them to come to dinner. The invitation was translated and Ibn Battuta politely accepted. But after the man had gone away he protested to his host that the fellow was obviously poverty-sticken and should not be imposed upon to provide a meal.

  Whereupon the shaykh burst out laughing and said to me “He is one of the shaykhs of the . . . Akhis. He is a cobbler, and a man of generous disposition. His associates number about two hundred men of different trades, who have elected him as their leader and have built a hospice to entertain guests in, and all that they earn by day they spend at night.”11