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

by Ross E. Dunn

  The victory of Islam was in fact almost certainly inevitable. If Mongol internationalism had from the point of view of European history the effect of “opening” western Asia to Latin priests and Italian merchants, it gave in the long run far greater advantage to Muslim traders and preachers, who had already been pressing into the steppe zone for centuries. The Volga had close historic links with the Muslim Irano–Turkish cities of northern Persia and Transoxiana, that is, the regions east of the Caspian. Those cities offered a much handier and weightier model of civilization to the khanate than either Byzantium or Latin Europe could do. As the new political order in western Asia emerged, the caravans from the southeast brought ever-growing numbers of merchants, scholars, craftsmen, and Sufi brethren, seeking fortunes and converts in the burgeoning towns of the khanate. Whether Christian friars and Italian traders were present or not, these towns assumed from the later thirteenth century an increasingly Muslim character.

  Ozbeg’s Islamic policy was in fact recognition of a cultural conversion of the region that was already taking place. The Russian tributary states of the northern forests remained loyal to their Orthodox church, and the Islamization of the steppe was by no means complete when Ibn Battuta passed through, since he himself bears witness to Turkish Christian communities in the Crimea. For him, however, the important development was not the conversion of the countryside; rather, the establishment of Islam as the “official” religion signified that the shari’a was to have a larger role in society, superseding local or Mongol custom in matters of devotion and personal status. If the Sacred Law were to be applied in the realm, then qadis and jurists had to be imported from the older centers of literacy. Thus in Ibn Battuta’s time the towns of the western steppe were firmly linked to the international network of judges, teachers, and scribes along which he always endeavored to travel.

  He remembers spending more than a month and a half in Sinope in the early spring of 1332 (1334), the last eleven days waiting for a favorable wind after he, al-Tuzari, and other companions booked passage on a ship bound for the Crimea. He remarks that the vessel belonged to some “Rumi,” probably in this case Genoese rather than Greek.2 Italian shipping had invaded the Black Sea in force following the fall of Constantinople to Frankish Crusaders in 1204. Both the Genoese and the Venetians held mercantile colonies in the Crimea and along the shore of the Sea of Azov. In Ibn Battuta’s time these two powers competed murderously for the trade of the Black Sea, but they had virtually no commercial competition from either Muslims or Greeks.

  When captains of the Black Sea were under sail, they usually preferred to hug the coast because of the tempests that might suddenly come blasting off the northern steppe. Though we have no clue whether Ibn Battuta’s ship was a big one, his pilot seemed confident enough to launch into the open sea and make a straight course for the Crimea. But three nights out of Sinope a violent storm blew up. In his Indian Ocean travels Ibn Battuta had seen nothing like it.

  We were in sore straits and destruction visibly before our eyes. I was in the cabin, along with a man from the Maghrib named Abu Bakr, and I bade him go up on deck to observe the state of the sea. He did so and came back to me in the cabin saying to me “I commend you to God.”

  The vessel could make no headway against the furious wind and was blown back nearly to Sinope. The storm subsided for a time, then returned as savagely as before, and the ship was again driven back. Finally the wind swung round to the stern and after several days of panic and near-catastrophe the Crimean mountains loomed ahead. The captain made for Kerch on the western bank of the strait leading into the Sea of Azov. But as he approached the port he sighted people on the shore apparently trying to signal him off. Fearing enemy war galleys in the harbor (Venetians? Turkish pirates?), he turned westward along the coast, probably heading for either Kaffa or Sudak.

  Then, for reasons unexplained, Ibn Battuta asked the captain to put him and his companions ashore, not in a port but at a roadstead somewhere along the rural Crimean coast. The party disembarked and, after spending the night in a church, negotiated with some local Christian Turks for the hire of horses and a wagon. Within a day or so they reached Kaffa, chief colony of the Genoese merchantry.

  Ibn Battuta counted about 200 ships in Kaffa harbor. Some of them would carry away the cloths and other luxury wares that had come along the silk road from Persia or China. Others would load their decks with war captives and the sad children of impoverished steppe folk, consigning some to the slave market of Cairo, others to the sugar plantations of Cyprus or the rich households of Italy. But mainly, ships’ holds would be filled with the raw products of the steppe and forest: grain from the Volga, timber from the mountains of southern Crimea, furs from Russia and Siberia, salt, wax, and honey. Though the Franks built their houses and conducted their business in Kaffa at the pleasure of the Khan of the Golden Horde and though good relations between them sometimes broke down, this city was the most profoundly Latinized of all the Black Sea ports. Probably a large minority of the population was Genoese, the rest a heterogeneous crowd of Turkish soldiers and nomads, Russian fur traders, Egyptian slave agents, Greeks, Circassians and Alans, not to mention Florentines, Venetians and Provençals.3

  Ibn Battuta, in any case, was not to feel at home in Kaffa. When he and his friends arrived there they went to lodge in the mosque. While they were resting inside, the Catholic churches of the town suddenly began ringing their bells. Pious Muslims in general regarded church bells as one of the more odious manifestations of Christian sacrilege. Ibn Battuta for one had never heard such a satanic clamor. Reacting with more bravado than sense, he and his companions bounded to the top of the minaret and began chanting out the Qur’an and the call to prayer. Soon the local qadi rushed to the scene, weapon in hand, fearing the visitors would be in danger for provoking the hostility of Europeans. What the Christians in the streets below might have done in response to this comic opera gesture we will never know, but the incident ended with no sectarian violence.

  Leaving Kaffa within a day or two, Ibn Battuta and his party continued on by wagon to their immediate destination al-Qiram, the provincial capital and main staging point for the trans-Asian caravans. Traveling now in the company of an officer of state on his way to see the governor, their route presumably took them westward along the coast as far as the port of Sudak (Surdak or Soldaia), then inland over the steep southern scarp of the Crimean mountains.4 Al-Qiram lay beyond the hills at the edge of the flat grassy plain that was ecologically the vestibule of the great Kipchak steppe. Though a Genoese consul was sometimes in residence, al-Qiram was a decidedly Muslim town in its economy and culture (a mosque carrying Ozbeg Khan’s inscription on it still stands).5 Ibn Battuta met several scholars, including the Hanafi and Shafi’i judges, and stayed in a Sufi hospice.

  Though Tuluktemur, the Muslim Turkish governor of the town, was not feeling well, he received the visitors anyway and presented the Moroccan with a horse. It was soon learned that this amir was preparing to set out for New Saray to see the khan. In Persia Ibn Battuta had been given the unexpected privilege of traveling in the mahalla of the Mongol king, and now once again the chance of his itinerary had brought him to al-Qiram just in time to make a 700-mile journey to the Volga under imperial escort with no worries about personal amenities, highwaymen, or malevolent guides. To this purpose he bought three wagons and animals to pull them: one cart for himself and a slave girl (probably one of the young Greek women he acquired in Asia Minor), a second smaller one for al-Tuzari, and a third large one for the rest of his companions.

  Up to that point Ibn Battuta had had almost no experience with wagons, for they were largely unknown in the Arab world where, since Roman times, the backs of camels and other beasts had replaced wheeled conveyances as the means of transporting people and goods. This was not, however, the case in Central Asia. Over the next year Ibn Battuta would find himself bumping and swaying over the steppe in the Turkish version of the prairie schooner. Both two and four wheel
ed carts were used, pulled by teams of horses, camels, or oxen. Mongol and Turkish nomads customarily followed their herds in wagons over which they erected round lath and felt tents (yurts). Whenever they halted for a period of time they disassembled these residences, or removed them in one piece, and set them up on the ground. When William of Rubruck, the Flemish Franciscan who compiled a precious description of the steppe peoples during the early Mongol Age, left Sudak in 1253 on his way to the court of the Great Khan, he was advised by Greek merchants to carry his possessions by wagon rather than pack horse. That way he could leave his belongings on board throughout the trip, and if he wanted to ride his own horse he could go along at the relaxed pace of the oxen.6 The felt sides of the wagon covering, Ibn Battuta notes, were fitted with little grilled windows: “The person who is inside the tent can see [other] persons without their seeing him, and he can employ himself in it as he likes, sleeping or eating or reading or writing, while he is still journeying.” A prosperous steppe-dweller might own one or two hundred wagons.

  The ordu of a rich Moal [Mongol] seems like a large town, though there will be very few men in it. One girl will lead twenty or thirty carts, for the country is flat, and they tie the ox or camel carts the one after the other, and a girl will sit on the front one driving the ox, and all the others follow after with the same gait.7

  Ibn Battuta traveled as an honored member of the wagon train, whose privileged company included not only the amir Tuluktemur but also his brother, two sons, the wives of all these men, and a small bureaucracy of Muslim functionaries. He reckons that the first long stage of the journey from al-Qiram to Azak (Tana, now Azov) on the southern side of the delta of the Don took 23 days. He does not mention any known stopping places, so the route is a puzzle. Very likely the caravan crossed the peninsula separating the Crimea from the mainland, then turned eastward over the grassland north of the Sea of Azov and across the esturaries of the Miuss and the Don.8

  Since driving the wagons through the shallow fords of the rivers was a muddy, bothersome operation, Tuluktemur had the solicitude to send Ibn Battuta on ahead with one of his officers and a letter of introduction to the governor of Azak. Since European ships could sail directly to the mouth of the Don but no further, this town had become the most distant of the important Frankish establishments, competing actively with Kaffa for the sale of Italian and Flemish textiles.

  Ibn Battuta and his party camped in their wagons outside the town, though they were welcomed by the governor and the local religious personalities. In two days’ time Tuluktemur arrived and amid the requisite displays of obeisance and hospitality on the part of the citizenry erected three huge tents, one of silk and two of linen and around them a cloth enclosure with an antechamber in the shape of a tower.

  Here the amir entertained his retinue and Azak’s dignitaries with titanic quantities of the rude cuisine the upper classes of Inner Asia normally consumed — millet gruel, macaroni, boiled meat of horse and sheep, and fermented mare’s milk, called qumizz. Carried in hide bags on the wagons, qumizz was the nutritious staple of the Turko–Mongol diet. William of Rubruck, tasting it for the first time, “broke out in a sweat with horror and surprise,” though later he decided it was “very palatable . . ., makes the inner man most joyful and . . . intoxicates weak heads.”9 He also liked the millet beer which flowed freely at Mongol banquets. The House of Genghis was notorious for its bibulousness, a family attribute scarcely affected by conversion to Islam, since the Hanafi doctors conveniently took the position that this particular potation was not expressly prohibited by the Qur’an. Ibn Battuta found qumizz “disagreeable” and, being a strait-laced Maliki, would have nothing to do with liquor. But he had no other cause to complain about Tuluktemur’s hospitality. He got the usual robe and horse and indeed reports somewhat smugly that as they entered the audience tent the amir “made me precede him, in order that the governor of Azak should see the high esteem he had for me.”

  At this time Ozbeg Khan was not in residence at New Saray but camped about 280 miles southeast of Azak in the region known in modern times as the Stavropol Plateau, a rugged upland jutting northward from the main mass of the Caucasus Mountains. Since the founding of the Ilkhanate of Persia, these mountains had been the de facto frontier between the two states, but the grazing land was too good and the trade routes running between the Black Sea and the Caspian too important to allow the region any peace. In 1262 Berke and Hulegu, first cousins though they were, had gone to war for control of the Caucasus, and in the ensuing century the two dynasties hurled armies at one another time and time again. It is conceivable that Ozbeg perhaps led his ordu south in 1332 to see to frontier defenses or plan an operation against Abu Sa’id.10 But the Rihla says nothing of such a purpose. Possibly, the khan went south to take the waters, for he was camped at Bish Dagh (Pyatigorsk), celebrated than as now for its mineral spas.

  Tuluktemur soon left Azak to join the khan, but Ibn Battuta and his associates stayed behind for three days waiting for the governor to provide him with new equipment for the next leg of his journey. Perhaps attaching himself to a military column, he then set out southeasterly across the Kuban–Azov lowland. Arriving at Bish Dagh, he found that the khan had already decamped. Traveling eight more days, he finally caught up with the ordu in the vicinity of al-Machar (Burgomadzhary). It was the early days of Ramadan, May 1332 (1334).11

  I set up my tent on a low hill thereabouts, fixed my flat in front of the tent, and drew up my horses and wagons behind, then the mahalla came up . . . and we saw a vast city on the move with its inhabitants, with mosques and bazaars in it, the smoke of the kitchens rising in the air (for they cook while on the march), and horse-drawn wagons transporting the people.

  On the morrow of his arrival in the camp he presented himself before the khan on recommendation of two of the sovereign’s religious dignitaries. He found Ozbeg seated upon a silver gilded throne in the midst of an enormous tent whose exterior was covered, after the fashion of all the Kipchak rulers, with a layer of bright golden tiles. The Khan’s daughter, his two sons, other royal kinsmen, and the chief amirs and officers were assembled below the throne, but his four khatuns, or wives, sat on either side of him. Ibn Battuta has a good deal to say in the Rihla about the freedom, respect, and near equality enjoyed by Mongol and Turkish women in startling contrast to the custom in his own land and the other Arab countries. (When a well-dressed and unveiled Turkish woman comes into the bazaar in the company of her husband, he remarks derisively, “anyone seeing him would take him to be one of her servants.”) If wives and mothers often influenced politics in the palaces of the Moroccan Marinids, as we may assume they did, counsel was given in the confines of the harim. But in the Mongol states the women of the court shared openly and energetically in the governing of the realm. Princesses of the blood, like their brothers, were awarded apanages, or landed properties, which they ruled and taxed as private fiefs quite apart from the state domain. The khatuns sometimes signed decrees and made major administrative decisions independently of the khan. The prim Moroccan faqih, in whose own country the notion of a wife of the sultan appearing publicly at his side would have seemed unimaginable, could only grimace in amazement at the Kipchak ceremonial. He relates that when the senior khatun and queen of the khanate enters the golden tent, the ruler “advances to the entrance of the pavilion to meet her, salutes her, takes her by the hand, and only after she has mounted to the couch and taken her seat does the sultan himself sit down. All this is done in full view of those present, and without any use of veils.”

  In the following days Ibn Battuta went round to visit the khatuns, each of whom occupied her own mahalla.

  The horses that draw her wagon are caparisoned with cloths of silk gilt . . . In front of [the wagon of] the khatun are ten or fifteen pages, Greeks and Indians, who are dressed in robes of silk gilt, encrusted with jewels, and each of whom carries in his hand a mace of gold or silver, or maybe of wood veneered with them. Behind the khatun’s wagon the
re are about a hundred wagons, in each of which there are four slave girls full-grown and young . . . Behind these wagons [again] are about three hundred wagons, drawn by camels and oxen, carrying the khatun’s chests, moneys, robes, furnishings, and food.

  Ibn Battuta had to sleep in his own wagon because the ruling class of Central Asia had the exasperating habit of not giving lodging to their distinguished visitors. But he dined a number of times in the presence of the khan and thankfully accepted horses, sheep, foodstuffs, and robes from the khatuns after regaling them (through interpreters) with his earlier adventures. He probably stayed in the camp throughout Ramadan.12 He was there to celebrate the ’Id al-Fitr, the Breaking of the Fast, an occasion of public feasting during which Ozbeg Khan, notwithstanding his contribution to the enduring triumph of Islam in the western steppe, made himself helplessly drunk and arrived late and staggering at the afternoon prayer.

  A short time after this festival the khan and his retinue set out for the city of Astrakhan, which lay about 80 miles across the North Caspian lowlands on the left bank of the Volga.

  When Ibn Battuta visited Princess Bayalun, Ozbeg’s third ranking wife, and told her of the great distance he had journeyed from his native land, he reports that “she wept in pity and compassion and wiped her face with a handkerchief that lay before her.” She knew how it felt to live in an alien country far from the familiar society of her childhood, for she was a daughter of Andronicus III, Emperor of Byzantium.13 Several times in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries dynastic marriages took place between daughters of Greek emperors and Mongol or Turkish rulers. These alliances were ultimately of small help in checking the expansion of the Ottomans (Orkhan married a Byzantine princess in 1346), but relations between Constantinople and the court of the Golden Horde were generally good. The emperors knew that Kipchak power was an effective counterweight to their Balkan rivals, the Christian kingdoms of Serbia and Bulgaria; they also endeavored to defend the interests of the Byzantine church in the Mongol protectorates of Christian Russia. The khans, for their part, wanted the Bosphorus (which ran under the walls of Constantinople) open to the trade and diplomatic exchanges on which the vitality of their alliance with the Mamluks of Cairo depended.