The sailors of the Baribatani heard the cries of the sailors of the Kulami and their screams and shrieks in the night as the water inundated them. When morning came, the sailors of the Baribatani did not encounter any trace or evidence of the Kulami, because from the time the two ships had left Aden they had kept abreast of each other.54
Distressing as this was, it was a less disastrous fate than that facing a certain ibn al-Muqaddam, whose religion is unknown; after several voyages from Aden to the Malabar Coast he lost his ship at sea, replaced it, and lost the replacement. These were not everyday occurrences; they are known from the legal cases that then arose – it was very important in Jewish law to be able to certify that those who had been shipwrecked had indeed died, so that any widows could remarry without fear of the particularly severe but fortunately quite rare bastardy that any new children would bear if the first husband were still alive.55
Remarkable Indian inscriptions survive that shed light on the maritime connections and town life of the Indian coast around this time. The light they shed is obscured by the great difficulty in making sense of a series of copper plates in the difficult Malayalam language. They are legal documents, such as a royal grant of land and privileges to a Christian church, and they were inscribed in the port city of Kollam, or Quilon, in the far south-west of India not far from Ceylon, in AD 849. Important privileges were preserved in this permanent form in order to express the intention that they would hold ‘for as long as the Earth, the Moon and the Sun shall endure’. The simple fact that the texts carry signatures in several scripts brings into focus the ethnic and religious diversity of the major trading towns along the coast of India at this period: twenty-five witnesses to these texts wrote their names in their everyday alphabet and language, whether Arabic and Middle Persian (written in Arabic script) or Judaeo-Persian (written in Hebrew script); some were Jews, others Christians, Muslims, Hindus or Zoroastrians, who described themselves uncompromisingly as ‘those of the Good Religion’. The copper plates mention the two guilds that brought together merchants trading out of Kollam; one, called ‘Manigraman’, specialized in Sumatra and the Malay peninsula, and the other, ‘Ancuvannam’, looked in the other direction entirely, towards Arabia and east Africa. While the Sumatra-bound merchants were themselves south Indian Tamils, those trading towards Asia were Arabs, Persians and Jews, the sort of people who signed the copper plates. The guilds operated under royal supervision; as one of the plates states: ‘all royal business whatsoever, in the matter of pricing commodities and suchlike, shall be carried out by them.’ What this meant was that the guilds, on behalf of the rajah, would collect taxes on the goods that came and went through the port and out of the land-gates.56 This also shows that the rajah believed he could trust both native and foreign merchants to act responsibly on his behalf; it was only natural that he should show such a warm welcome to the foreign traders, because without them Kollam would have been nothing, and his own income would have shrivelled.
In 851, at almost the moment when these plates were being prepared, the Muslim merchant probably named Sulayman placed on record his voyages around the Indian Ocean and beyond, as far as China, to which he devoted most of the space in his book. Sulayman knew about the place he called Kûlam of Malaya (which here signified Malabar, not the Malay peninsula), that is, Kollam; he placed it a month’s sailing beyond Muscat in south-east Arabia. He knew that ships arrived here from as far away as China. He saw Kollam as the major interchange point between the trade of the eastern and the western Indian Ocean, which matches closely what is known about the activities of the two merchant guilds.57 As far as he was concerned, the sea route was the obvious way to China. No doubt different places along the Malabar Coast enjoyed greater success at different times. In Sulayman’s time, the route from Siraf and the Persian Gulf to India was particularly active; but Sulayman was active before Fatimid Egypt took command of the maritime routes across the western Indian Ocean. Therefore it is no surprise that the copper documents mention Muslims and Jews of Persian origin, while the Genizah letters survive from an era when Jews and Muslims of Egyptian or even Tunisian origin were just as likely to be found in the coastal cities of southern India.58
The risks of travel did not prevent ambitious Fustat merchants from reaching India, rather than simply relying on the Indian and Muslim shippers who reached Aden. The greater the risks, the higher the profits. In the mid-twelfth century a group of Jews, including Salim ‘the son of the cantor’ and several goldsmiths, set out from Aden to Ceylon in partnership with a very wealthy Muslim merchant named Bilal. Ceylon was considered a good source of cinnamon. A north African merchant who had been living in Fustat, Abu’l-Faraj Nissim, went to India to buy camphor. He wrote to his family saying the voyage had been a terrible experience, but he managed to buy plenty of camphor, worth at least 100 dinars, and sent it to Aden, where it arrived safely. Two years passed and nothing was heard of him, so it was time to divide the profits from his shipment.59 A happier fate awaited the ben Yiju family, very active in Mediterranean trade but also seriously interested in the produce of the Indies. This family provides a marvellous example of how spices were transmitted all the way from India to major Mediterranean cities such as Palermo and Mahdia, a flourishing centre of exchange on the coast of Tunisia. Abraham ben Yiju set out for India in around 1131, and one of his correspondents commiserated with him for his difficult journey, but prayed that God would ‘make the outcome good’, that is, bring him great profit.60
In 1132 Abraham found himself at Mangalore on the Malabar Coast. This area was known as far away as China, where, in the early thirteenth century, the geographer Zhao Rugua described the people as dark brown, with long earlobes; they wore colourful silk turbans and sold pearls fished locally, as well as cotton cloth; they used silver coins and they bought silk, porcelain, camphor, cloves, rhubarb and other spices that arrived from further east, but in his day (he claimed) few ships made the long and difficult journey from China.61 This was a pessimistic judgement, echoing, consciously or otherwise, the reservations of the ninth-century merchant Sulayman about Chinese trade with Iraq, because the quantities of Chinese goods found in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East prove that contact was intense and continuous, and also very profitable. For Abraham ben Yiju prospered while he was based in Mangalore. He bought a slave girl there; he then freed her, which had the effect in Jewish law of converting her to Judaism (he gave her the Hebrew name Beracha, or ‘Blessing’), and after that he married her and raised a family. Meanwhile, he was sending goods up and down the coast of western India; he made a lengthy visit to Aden around 1140, but he stayed most of the time in India until 1149.
Abraham set up a factory where bronze goods were produced – trays, bowls, candlesticks, sometimes quite intricate in design, to judge from a letter from Aden ordering some custom-made metalwork from him. He imported arsenic from the West, for he was told there was strong demand for it in Ceylon, where it was used in medicine. He brought in Egyptian cotton, and sent out iron, mangoes and coconuts, working with Muslim, Jewish and Banyan, or Hindu, partners. The Muslim partners of ben Yiju included the wealthy merchant of Siraf, Ramisht, whose large ships were well trusted; but even then things could go badly wrong, for one letter says that two of his ships were ‘total losses’, including valuable cargo belonging to Abraham ben Yiju.62 Wealthy merchants needed some resilience; it was important not to place all one’s eggs in the same basket. Not for nothing did they interest themselves in a variety of goods, for one never knew what would prove most profitable, however closely one read letters coming in from Palermo, Alexandria, Fustat and Aden, with their information about prices, political conditions and which merchants should be trusted.
Among the goods that Abraham ben Yiju appreciated most were consignments of paper, which was in short supply in India and even in Aden, for, as his correspondent in Aden wrote, ‘for two years now, it has been impossible to get any in the market’.63 Foreign merchants such as ben Yiju preferr
ed using paper to writing on palm leaves or cloth, and ben Yiju had special reason to want more paper, as he was something of a poet in his spare time, and, even if his own poetry was not much good, he admired the great Spanish writers who in his day were producing beautiful religious poetry that was soon to be incorporated into the Jewish liturgy. He dabbled in Jewish law and took part in a religious court of law, or bet din, in India – there seems to have been another Jewish court at Barygaza, the ancient centre of the Indian Ocean trade in the north-west corner of India.64 All this suggests that he was far from alone in Mangalore; there were other Jews up and down the coast, and there must have been even larger communities of Muslim merchants, not to mention the Indian merchants who sailed westwards but also (along with the Malays) ensured that connections to Malaya and Indonesia, and even China, were maintained. The news network of which he was part extended all the way from India to Sicily and perhaps Spain. Now wealthy, he had hoped to settle for the rest of his days in Mahdia or somewhere near there; but just after he left India for Aden he heard that the king of Sicily had conquered the coast of Tunisia (he assumed that there had been massacres, but the conquest was relatively peaceful).65 It is hard to recover a sense of what it was like to live in Mangalore, so far from home; but the nostalgia for north Africa that ben Yiju showed when he had made his fortune reveals that he saw his trading career in India as just that, a career which would eventually, if luck held, make him rich enough to return to the land of his ancestors, taking with him his Indian wife and his children, for whom this would be a new world.
The Malabar coast looked in two directions, as it had in Roman times. The Chinese geographer Zhao Rugua remarked that one could reach that part of India from Śri Vijaya ‘in little more than a month’.66 Not very often, but sometimes, Jewish traders ranged far beyond India. A tenth-century book called Wonders of India was composed by a Persian author called Buzurg, but written in Arabic. Buzurg told the ‘curious tale’ (his own words) of Isaac the Jew who was sued by a fellow Jew in Oman and took flight to India somewhere around AD 882. He was able to take his goods with him, and for thirty years no one back in the West knew what had happened to him. In fact, he had been making a fortune in China, where he was taken for an Arab (as Jewish traders often were). In 912–13 he turned up in Oman once again, this time aboard his own ship, whose cargo was estimated to be worth 1,000,000 gold dinars, and on which he paid a tax of 1,000,000 silver dirhams. This may have amounted to a tax of about 12 per cent and it kept the local governor happy, but it also aroused the jealousy of other merchants who had no hope of supplying treasures of comparable quality. (Since a lower-middle-class family could subsist quite well on twenty-four dinars per annum, 1,000,000 dinars can be thought of as comparable to nearly 1,000,000 pounds sterling or more than a billion and a half dollars, though such comparisons are not particularly meaningful.)67 Silks, Chinese ceramics, jewels and high-quality musk were just some of the exotic goods he brought to Arabia. So after three years he decided he had experienced enough hostility, and commissioned a new ship, which he filled with merchandise, and sailed east in the hope of reaching China once again. This meant that he had to pass ‘Serboza’, which must be the maritime kingdom of Śri Vijaya. Its rajah saw a good opportunity to mint money, and demanded a fee of 20,000 dinars before he would let him leave for China. Isaac objected and was seized and put to death that very night. The rajah expropriated the ship and all the merchandise.68
Later generations were more circumspect about making such ambitious voyages. The Genizah merchants were generally content to stay in India or even Aden, and to wait for Chinese goods to reach them; these included the glazed porcelain bowls that aroused such concern about their ritual purity should they be touched by a menstruating woman.69 India was the interchange point between what at first sight appear to be two trading networks, or even three: from Egypt via Aden to the Malabar Coast, and from the Malabar Coast to Malaya and Indonesia, with a further extension to Quanzhou and other Chinese ports.70 But when the goods traded come under consideration this looks more like a single line of communication linking Alexandria in the Mediterranean to China, along which silk, spices, porcelain, metalwork and also religious ideas were transmitted, along with all those humdrum materials – wheat, rice, dates, and so on – in which the sheikh of Qusayr, among many others, mainly dealt.
VI
The twelfth century saw important changes in the character of the merchants who passed up and down the Red Sea, even though the goods they carried probably did not alter very significantly, except to increase in volume. The increasing sensitivity of the Muslim rulers to the presence of non-Muslims in the Red Sea was in large part the result of the attempt by a crusader lord, Reynaud de Châtillon, to launch a fleet on the Red Sea during the 1180s, with the aim of attacking Mecca and Medina, and of launching pirate raids on traffic passing through the Red Sea. Although Reynaud’s activities were suppressed, his pirates came dangerously close to Medina; this resulted in the closure of the Red Sea to non-Muslims.71 A corporation of Muslim merchants was created in Egypt who excluded the old generation of Genizah merchants from the India trade. These karimi merchants, as they were known, benefited from the goodwill of the government in Cairo, which saw how profitable taxation of the spice traffic could be.72
Yet the intimate relationship between Egypt and India continued, and the flow of precious metals that resulted from these exchanges can be likened to a pair of rivers that converged on India. India was, as it always has been, a land in which a rich elite lived a luxurious life far removed from the daily grind of the poor, and the same picture can be painted of medieval China. Payments for Indian luxuries continued to flood into the coffers of the rajahs, in gold and silver, and some of this income was spent on courtly magnificence and warfare. But the thésaurisation (to use a handy French word) of bullion flowing in from the West and from China proceeded apace, as the treasuries of Indian princes immobilized the precious metals that came into the country; Egypt, Syria and north Africa found themselves short of silver, which was needed for smaller payments, though expedients to solve the problem included glass tokens and lead coins. They could obtain silver from northern Iran, to some extent; but Iranian silver tended to drain towards Baghdad. They could obtain silver from western Europe; and the growing demand there for eastern spices, from the late eleventh century onwards, meant that merchants from Venice, Genoa and Pisa were keen to establish a presence in Alexandria and other Levantine cities, and to pay in white money for prodigious amounts of pepper, ginger and other Indian or Indonesian goods. It will be seen too that vast amounts of Chinese cash were being taken out of the Middle Kingdom towards surrounding lands, including Japan and Java. It is often said that the beating of a butterfly’s wings can affect the climate of the whole world. It can at least be said that the transactions which took place along a series of maritime trade routes that stretched from Spain – and eventually the Atlantic – to Japan had knock-on effects capable of reaching far down the line. Setting aside the Americas, still unknown to the inhabitants of other continents (ignoring for the moment the Norsemen), a global network existed, one that had gained in strength and permanence since the days of the Greco-Roman trade towards India.
10
The Rising and the Setting Sun
I
As well as merchants and travellers from the Far West, merchants and travellers from lands further east – Japan and Korea – converged on China. It has long been assumed that trade had little impact on daily life in Japan. A classic account of Japan in the years around 1000 simply states: ‘trade and commerce played a minimal part in the country’s economy.’1 In this view, everything really depended on the cultivation of rice and other basic necessities, and we see the gradual emergence of a society in which power was exercised through control over landed estates, a system with many similarities to the feudalism of medieval Europe. But this is greatly to simplify a much more complex picture. At court, whether in Korea or Japan, the desire for acc
ess to Chinese culture was overwhelming; and that contact was effected by sea and was made real through the transfer of people, objects and texts. Moreover, Chinese cultural influence became so powerful that these neighbours started to imitate the Chinese imperial court and began to see themselves as imperial powers in their own right. By virtue of his mastery, real or imagined, over parts of Korea, the Japanese ruler asserted in a cheeky letter sent to the Chinese emperor in 607 that ‘the Son of Heaven in the Land of the Rising Sun sends this letter to the Son of Heaven in the Land Where the Sun Sets’.2 Even so, the Japanese emperors were realistic: they still sent occasional tribute to their supposed Chinese counterpart. The Chinese paid no respect to these claims to equality, and the Japanese learned that it was more diplomatic (in the modern sense of the word) to use a Japanese term, sumera mikoto, ‘Great King who rules under All Heaven’, for their own emperor in the credentials their envoys presented, which the Chinese conveniently pretended was just his personal name.3
The Boundless Sea Page 26