Mission to the Volga

by Ahmad Ibn Fadlan

  I have also added to the translation some headers, toponyms, and ethnonyms that help identify the principal agents and locations of the action.

  The Guide to Further Reading is intended to provide readers, students, and scholars interested in studying the work further with a representative catalogue of secondary scholarship on Ibn Faḍlān and his world. For ease of reference, it is therefore organized according to subject. I hope this will be a useful study aid to what can sometimes be a complicated bibliographical tumult.

  I have also prepared the Glossary as a repository of information that, in a publication intended for an academic audience, might be included in the form of annotations to the text. This approach has the added advantage of keeping to a minimum both the glossary and the annotation to the translation. Each glossary entry includes key references to the copious annotations provided by the scholars who have edited and/or translated the work. I hope that, in this way too, this version of the glossary can become a useful study aid.

  CONCLUSION

  To be sure, Ibn Faḍlan’s account is in many ways a strange book. It has no textual analogues, no other works from the third/ninth or fourth/tenth centuries we can compare it with. Its obsession with eyewitness testimony, connected ultimately with the practice of, and requirements for, giving witness in a court of law, is almost pathological. It contains many wonderful encounters, conversations, dialogues, and formal audiences—and we hear so many non-Muslims speak, from tribesmen of the Ghuzziyyah and the Bulghār king to the Rūs who mocks Ibn Faḍlān for the primitiveness of his religious observances. On top of all this, it is a cracking good read. I hope others enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed translating it and, along the way, kept alive my boyhood love of adventure stories.

  NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

  1 Relation, 51.

  2 Zetterstéen and Bosworth, “al-Muḳtadir,” 542; Kennedy, The Prophet and the Age of the Caliphates, 188.

  3 See Kennedy, Prophet, 187; Zetterstéen and Bosworth, “al-Muktafī.”

  4 Zetterstéen and Bosworth, “al-Muḳtadir.”

  5 Massignon and Gardet, “al-Ḥallādj,” 102; Massignon, Hallāj. Mystic and Martyr.

  6 Shaban, Islamic History: A New Interpretation, 2:149–51.

  7 Reisebericht, xx–xxvii.

  8 Bukharaev, Islam in Russia, 39.

  9 Subrahmanyam, The Career and Legend of Vasco da Gama, 170.

  10 Riley-Smith, “The State of Mind of Crusaders to the East, 1095–1300.”

  11 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 53–85; Zamora, “Christopher Columbus’s ‘Letter to the Sovereigns.’”

  12 Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth Century Revolution, 34.

  13 Edwards, The Story of the Voyage, 26–27.

  14 These quotations are also available, with the corresponding Arabic, on the Library of Arabic Literature Web site.

  15 This reconstruction is also available, with the corresponding Arabic, on the Library of Arabic Literature Web site.

  MISSION TO THE VOLGA

  MISSION TO THE VOLGA

  1   This is the written account of Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān ibn al-ʿAbbās ibn Rāshid1 ibn Ḥammād, the envoy of al-Muqtadir to the king of the Ṣaqālibah. His patron was Muḥammad ibn Sulaymān.2 It records his observations in the realm of the Turks, the Khazars, the Rūs, the Ṣaqālibah, the Bāshghird, and other peoples. It also includes reports of their various customs and ways of living, their kings, and many other related matters, too.

  Baghdad

  2   Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān said:3 In the letter of al-Ḥasan, son of Yilṭawār, the king of the Ṣaqālibah, which al-Muqtadir the Commander of the Faithful received, the king petitioned al-Muqtadir to send people to instruct him in law and acquaint him with the rules of Islam according to the sharia, and to construct a mosque and build a minbar from which he could proclaim al-Muqtadir’s name throughout his kingdom. He also beseeched him to build a fort to protect him against the kings who opposed him. His requests were granted.

  3   The representative of the king of the Ṣaqālibah at court was Nadhīr al-Ḥaramī.4 I, Aḥmad ibn Faḍlān, was delegated to read al-Muqtadir’s letter to him, to present him with the official gifts designated, and to supervise the jurists and instructors. Nadhīr identified a fixed sum of money to be brought to him, to cover the construction costs and to pay the jurists and instructors. These expenses were to be covered by Arthakhushmīthan, one of the estates of Ibn al-Furāt in Khwārazm. The envoy from the king of the Ṣaqālibah to the caliph was a man named ʿAbdallāh ibn Bāshtū al-Khazarī. The caliph’s envoy was Sawsan al-Rassī. Sawsan’s patron was Nadhīr al-Ḥaramī. Takīn al-Turkī, Bārs al-Ṣaqlābī, and I accompanied him. As I said, I was charged with the following responsibilities: I presented him with the official gifts for him, his wife, children, brothers, and commanders. I also handed over the medication that the king had requested, in writing, from Nadhīr.5

  4   We traveled from Baghdad, City of Peace, on Thursday, the twelfth of Safar, 309 [June 21, 921]. We stayed one day in Nahrawān, then rode hard until we reached al-Daskarah, where we stayed three days. Then we traveled without delay or diversion and came to Ḥulwān, where we stayed two days. From there we traveled to Qirmīsīn, where we stayed another two days, and next arrived at Hamadhān, where we stayed three days. We traveled to Sāwah and, after two days, on to Rayy, where we stayed eleven days, until Aḥmad ibn ʿAlī, the brother of Ṣuʿlūk, had left Khuwār al-Rayy. Then we traveled to Khuwār al-Rayy itself and three days later to Simnān, then on to al-Dāmghān, where our caravan happened to encounter Ibn Qārin, who was preaching on behalf of the dāʿī. We concealed our identity and hurried to Nishapur, where we met Ḥammawayh Kūsā, the field marshal of Khurasan. Līlī ibn Nuʿmān had just been killed. Then we proceeded to Sarakhs, Marw, and Qushmahān, at the edge of the Āmul desert. We stayed three days there and changed camels for the desert journey. We crossed the desert to Āmul and then reached Āfr*n, the outpost of Ṭāhir ibn ʿAlī, on the other side of the Jayḥūn.6

  Bukhara

  5   We traveled via Baykand to Bukhara, where we went straight to al-Jayhānī, the chancellor of the emir of Khurasan, known there as the chief shaykh. He had ordered a residence for us and had appointed someone to attend to all our needs and concerns and make sure that we experienced no difficulty in getting what we wanted. After a few days, he arranged an audience with Naṣr ibn Aḥmad. We discovered that he was still a boy and did not even have a beard. We greeted him as befits an emir. He commanded us to be seated. His very first words were: “How was my patron, the Commander of the Faithful, when you left him? May God give him long life and cherish him, his retinue, and his spiritual companions.” “He was well,” we replied. He said, “May God increase his well-being!” The letter was then read out to him. It gave the following instructions: the estate of Arthakhushmīthan was to be handed over by al-Faḍl ibn Mūsā al-Naṣrānī, Ibn al-Furāt’s agent, to Aḥmad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārazmī; we were to be provided with funds, with a letter to his governor in Khwārazm ordering him not to hinder us, and with a letter to the garrison at the Gate of the Turks, who were to provide us with an escort and not detain us. “Where is Aḥmad ibn Mūsā?” he asked. “We left the City of Peace without him, and he set off four days later,”7 we replied and he said, “I hear and obey the commands of my patron, the Commander of the Faithful, may God give him long life!”

  6   Ibn Faḍlān said: al-Faḍl ibn Mūsā al-Naṣrānī, Ibn al-Furāt’s agent, got wind of this and came up with a plan to deal with Aḥmad ibn Mūsā. He wrote to the deputies of the superintendent of the Khurasan highway, in the military district of Sarakhs-Baykand, as follows: “Tell your spies to keep a lookout for Aḥmad ibn Mūsā in the caravanserais and the lookout posts. Enclosed is his description. The man who catches him is to detain him until we specify the punishment in writing.” Aḥmad ibn Mūsā was later arrested in Marw and put in chains. We stayed twenty
-eight days in Bukhara. ʿAbdallāh ibn Bāshtū and other members of our party kept saying, “If we tarry, the winter onslaught will mean we will miss the crossing. Aḥmad ibn Mūsā will catch up with us and will join us.” Al-Faḍl ibn Mūsā encouraged this.

  7   Ibn Faḍlān said: I noticed in Bukhara that the dirhams were 7 made of different colored metals. One of them, the ghiṭrīfī dirham, is made of red and yellow brass. It is accepted according to numerical value rather than weight: one hundred ghiṭrīfī dirhams equals one silver dirham. In the dowries for their womenfolk they make the following stipulations: so-and-so, the son of so-and-so, marries so-and-so, the daughter of so-and-so, for so many thousand ghiṭrīfī dirhams. This also applies to the purchase of property and the purchase of slaves—they specifically mention ghiṭrīfī dirhams. They have other dirhams, made only of yellow brass, forty of which equal one dānaq, and a further type of yellow-brass dirham called the samarqandī, six of which equal one dānaq.

  Khwārazm

  8   I listened to the warnings of ʿAbdallāh ibn Bāshtū and the others about the onslaught of winter. We left Bukhara and returned to the river, where we hired a boat for Khwārazm, more than two hundred farsakhs from where we hired the boat. We were able to travel only part of the day. A whole day’s travel was impossible because of the cold. When we got to Khwārazm, we were given an audience with the emir, Muḥammad ibn ʿIrāq Khwārazm-Shāh, who gave us a warm and hospitable reception and a place to stay. Three days later, he summoned us, quizzing us about wanting to enter the realm of the Turks. “I cannot let you do that,” he said. “I am not permitted to let you risk your lives. I think all this is a ploy devised by this soldier.” (He meant Takīn.)8 “He used to live here as a blacksmith, when he ran the iron trade in the land of the infidels. He is the one who beguiled Nadhīr and got him to speak to the Commander of the Faithful and to bring the letter of the king of the Ṣaqālibah to him. The exalted emir,” (he meant the emir of Khurasan) “has more right to have the name of the Commander of the Faithful proclaimed out there, if only he could find a safe way to do it.9 And then there are a thousand infidel tribes in your path. This is clearly an imposture foisted upon the caliph. Such is my counsel. I now have no recourse but to write to the exalted emir, so that he can write to the caliph (God give him strength!) and consult with him. You will remain here until the answer comes.” We left things at that but came back later and pressured him. “We have the orders and the letter of the Commander of the Faithful, so why do you need to consult?” we said. In the end, he granted us permission and we sailed downriver from Khwārazm to al-Jurjāniyyah. The distance by water is fifty farsakhs.

  9   I noticed that the dirhams in Khwārazm are adulterated and should not be accepted, because they are made of lead and brass. They call their dirham a ṭāzijah. It weighs four and a half dānaqs. The money changers trade in sheep bones, spinning tops, and dirhams. They are the strangest of people in the way they talk and behave. When they talk they sound just like starlings calling. There is a village one day away called Ardkwā, whose inhabitants are called al-Kardaliyyah. When they talk they sound just like frogs croaking. At the end of the prayer they disavow the Commander of the Faithful, ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib, God be pleased with him.

  Al-Jurjāniyyah

  10   We stayed several days in al-Jurjāniyyah. The River Jayḥūn froze over completely, from beginning to end. The ice was seventeen spans thick. Horses, mules, donkeys, and carts used it like a road and it did not move—it did not even creak. It stayed like this for three months. We thought the country we were visiting was an «infernally cold»10 portal to the depths of Hell. When snow fell, it was accompanied by a wild, howling blizzard.

  11   When people here want to honor each other and be generous they say, “Come to my house so we can talk, for I have a good fire burning.” This is their custom for expressing genuine generosity and affability. God the exalted has been kind to them by making firewood plentiful and very cheap: a cart load of ṭāgh wood costs only two local dirhams, and their carts can hold about three thousand raṭls. Normally, their beggars do not stand outside at the door but go into the house, sit for a while, and get warm by the fire. Then they say, “Bakand” meaning “bread.”

  12   We were in al-Jurjāniyyah for a long time: several days of Rajab and all of Shaʿban, Ramadan, and Shawwal.11 We stayed there so long because the cold was so severe. Indeed, I was told that two men had driven twelve camels to transport a load of firewood from a particular forest but had forgotten to take their flint and tinderbox and passed the night without a fire. In the morning it was so cold that they had frozen to death, as had their camels. The weather was so cold that you could wander round the markets and through the streets and not meet anyone. I would leave the baths, and, by the time I got home, I would look at my beard and see a block of ice. I would have to thaw it at the fire. I would sleep inside a chamber, inside another chamber,12 with a Turkish yurt of animal skins inside it, and would be smothered in cloaks and pelts, and even then my cheek would sometimes freeze and stick to the pillow. I noticed containers wrapped in sheepskins, to stop them shattering and breaking, but this did them no good at all. I even saw the ground open up into great rifts and mighty, ancient trees split in two because of the cold.

  13   Halfway into Shawwal of 309 [February, 922], the season began to change and the Jayḥūn melted. We set about acquiring the items we needed for our journey. We purchased Turkish camels, constructed the camel-skin rafts for crossing all the rivers we had to cross in the realm of the Turks, and packed provisions of bread, millet, and cured meat to last three months. The locals who knew us told us in no uncertain terms to wear proper clothing outdoors and to wear a lot of it. They gave us a terrifying description of the cold and impressed upon us the need to take the matter very, very seriously. But when we experienced it ourselves, it was so much worse than what they had described, even though we each wore a tunic, a caftan, a sheepskin, a horse blanket, and a burnoose with only our eyes showing, a pair of trousers, another pair of lined trousers, leggings, and a pair of animal skin boots with yet another pair on top of them. Mounted on our camels, we wore so many heavy clothes we couldn’t move. The jurist, the instructor, and the retainers who had left the City of Peace with us stayed behind, too scared to enter the realm of the Turks. I pushed on with the envoy, his brother-in-law, and the two soldiers, Takīn and Bārs.13

  14   On the day we planned to set off, I said to them, “The king’s 14 man accompanies you. He knows everything. And you carry the letters of the caliph. They must surely mention the four thousand musayyabī dinars intended for the king. You will be at the court of a non-Arab king, and he will demand that you pay this sum.” “Don’t worry about it,” they replied, “he will not ask us for them.” “He will demand that you produce them. I know it,” I warned. But they paid no heed. The caravan was ready to depart, so we hired a guide called Falūs, an inhabitant of al-Jurjāniyyah. We trusted in almighty God, putting our fate in His hands.

  15   We left al-Jurjāniyyah on Monday, the second of Dhu l-Qaʿdah, 309 [Monday, March 4, 922], and stopped at an outpost called Zamjān, the Gate of the Turks. The following morning we traveled as far as a stopping post called Jīt. The snow had fallen so heavily that it came up to the camels’ knees. We had to stay there two days. Then we kept a straight course and plunged deep into the realm of the Turks through a barren, mountainless desert. We met no one. We crossed for ten days. Our bodies suffered terrible injuries. We were exhausted. The cold was biting, the snowstorms never-ending. It made the cold of Khwārazm seem like summertime. We forgot all about our previous sufferings and were ready to give up the ghost.

  16   One day, the cold was unusually biting. Takīn was traveling beside me, talking in Turkic to a Turk at his side. He laughed and said, “This Turk wants to know, ‘What does our Lord want from us? He is killing us with this cold. If we knew what He wanted, then we could just give it t
o Him.’” “Tell him,” I replied, “that He wants you to declare ‘There is no god but God.’” “Well, if we knew Him, we’d do it,” he said with a laugh.14

  17   We came to a place where there was a huge quantity of ṭāgh wood and stopped. The members of the caravan lit fires and got them going. They took their clothes off and dried them by the fires.15 Then we departed, traveling as quickly and with as much energy as we could manage, from midnight until the midday or afternoon prayer, when we would stop for a rest. After fifteen nights of this,16 we came to a huge rocky mountain. Springs of water ran down it and gathered to form a lake at its foot.

  The Ghuzziyyah

  18   We crossed the mountain and reached a Turkic tribe known as the Ghuzziyyah. Much to our surprise,17 we discovered that they are nomads who live in animal-hair tents that they pitch and strike regularly. Their tents were pitched with some in one place and the same number in another place, as is the practice of transhumant nomads. They lead wretched lives. They are like roaming asses.18 They practice no recognizable form of monotheism, they do not base their beliefs on reason, and they worship nothing—indeed they call their own chiefs “lord.”19 When one of them consults his chief on a matter, he says to him, “My lord, what shall I do about such and such?” «They decide matters by consultation»,20 though it is quite possible for the lowliest and most worthless individual in their community to turn up and overturn the consensus they have reached. To be sure, I have heard them declare, “There is no god but God! Muḥammad is God’s emissary.” But this was a way of ingratiating themselves with the Muslims passing through their lands and not out of conviction. When one of them is wronged or something unpleasant happens to him, he raises his head to the heavens and shouts, “Bīr Tankrī,” which in Turkic means “By God, by the One!” Bīr means “one” and Tankrī is “God” in the language of the Turks. They do not clean themselves when they defecate or urinate, and they do not wash themselves when intercourse puts them in a state of ritual impurity. They avoid contact with water, especially in the winter.