Splendid Exchange, A

by Bernstein, William L

  In spite of Islam’s long decline, Muslim traders dominated long-distance commerce until the sixteenth century, and in many areas, well into the early modern period.

  4

  THE BAGHDAD-CANTON EXPRESS: ASIA ON FIVE DIRHEM A DAY

  As the thirteenth century drew to a close, Genoa and Venice, the two great maritime powers of the Mediterranean Sea, savaged each other in a life-and-death struggle over trade routes. In a dank Genoese prison sometime around 1292, a Venetian naval commander whiled away the days and weeks dictating his memoirs to a fellow captive, a Pisan writer of modest renown named Rustichello.

  And what a tale this prisoner, captured off the Dalmatian island of Curzola, had to tell his new friend! For at least a century before he was captured, his family had grown rich in trade with the East and maintained a warehouse filled with spices and silks in the Venetian quarter of Constantinople, the great trade hub of that era. Venice earned its wealth not only from rare Oriental goods, but also from the pilgrim and crusader traffic to and from the Holy Land.

  Although the Venetian prisoner knew the East well, he was no pioneer. For centuries, European merchants, emissaries, and missionaries had ventured along the Silk Road in search of wealth, power, and converts. Indeed, about forty years previously, just after his birth, his father and uncle had struck out from their base in Constantinople and ventured deep into Mongol-ruled central Asia, where they eventually found themselves trapped by warring tribes in the trading town of Bukhara (in modern-day Uzbekistan). There they met an ambassador of Hulagu, the great khan of central Asia; fascinated by the brothers’ Italian tongue, the khan’s envoy invited them east. The two astute merchants did not need to be asked twice on an excursion to the lands of silk and spices.

  By 1265 or so the brothers had arrived in the court of Hulagu’s brother Kublai Khan in China, where they spent the better part of a decade before returning to Venice with a letter from Kublai to Pope Clement IV. The curious and ecumenical Kublai, it seems, needed a hundred Christian missionaries to teach the Chinese about this powerful Western faith. By the time the Venetians arrived home in 1269, however, Clement had died, and the brothers, Maffeo and Niccolò Polo, had to bide their time until a new pontiff could supply them with the monks requested by Kublai. While they were away seeking their fortunes in China, Niccolò’s wife had died, and he was left to care for his now fifteen-year-old son Marco, who had grown from a toddler to the brink of manhood.1

  The original version of The Travels of Marco Polo, reconstructed by Rustichello from Marco Polo’s recollections and notes requested from Venice, was probably first written down in French, then Europe’s lingua franca, so to speak. The fantastical stories—of lands where cows were sacred, where widows threw themselves onto their husbands’ funeral pyres, and where young men were abducted, drugged with hashish, plied with women and luxury, and trained as assassins (all of which occurred in India); of a place where the ground oozed with a gooey substance that burned (the oil fields of Mesopotamia); and of a place which was so far north that the sun never set in summer or rose in winter—struck Europeans as the product of a fevered imagination. The accuracy of Travels was, in fact, remarkable, including Polo’s descriptions, passed to him at second and third hand, of places he did not visit, such as Burma, Siberia, Java, and the even more mysterious Spice Islands.

  Although the family ran a well-known merchant house, and although Travels imparted a great deal about foreign mores, goods, dress, and customs, Marco Polo did not leave posterity many useful details about the texture of medieval long-distance trade. Perhaps the lack of quantitative data is the work of Rustichello, a seasoned writer who likely intuited that the medieval literary market responded better to self-immolating spouses and cities scores of miles in circumference than to pepper prices or to the precise patterns of monsoon sailing.2

  Just as the stability afforded by the Pax Romana and the Han Empire encouraged the long-range and highly indirect commerce between Rome and China in the first and second centuries after Christ, the power of the early Islamic and Tang empires stimulated a far more direct intercourse between the lands of the caliphate and China during the seventh through ninth centuries. Chinese sources suggest that Islam arrived in Canton in about 620, a full dozen years before the death of the Prophet.3

  Before the Chinese invented the magnetic compass, in around the twelfth century, mariners depended on celestial navigation; fog and overcast skies often proved as deadly as the fiercest storms. Although sailors since Greek times knew how to measure latitude, accurate determination of longitude did not become possible until the eighteenth century. The constant companion of the medieval traveler on the open seas was terror. As vividly recounted by a fifth century Chinese pilgrim who had voyaged to India and back:

  The Great Ocean spreads out over a boundless expanse. There is no knowing east from west; only by observing the sun, moon, and stars was it possible to go forward. If the weather was dark and rainy, the ship went forward as she was carried by the wind, without any definite course. In the darkness of the night, only the waves were to be seen, breaking on one another, emitting a brightness like that of fire. . . . The merchants were full of terror, not knowing where they were going. The sea was deep and bottomless, and there was no place where they could drop anchor.4

  As early as the seventh century, the Chinese had seen enough Middle Eastern merchants to distinguish among the Muslims flooding into their ports: the “Po-ssi,” or Persians, with their long Gulf-based tradition of seafaring, were far more numerous than the more landlocked “Ta-shih,” or Arabs. The Chinese also clearly differentiated the world of Islam from a more mysterious land farther to the west called “Fu-lin”—the Byzantine Empire—known for its wondrous gemstones and glass.5 By 758, there were enough Muslims in Canton that they were able to sack the city, burn it, and make off to sea with their booty.6

  The Muslims, especially the Persians, knew China much better than the Chinese knew them. While the existence of pre-Islamic Persian trade with China is controversial, it is certain that not long after the Muslim armies defeated the Persian Sassanids at the battle of Ctesiphon (just south of modern Baghdad) in 636, Arab and Persian vessels voyaged directly to Chinese ports. As good a description as any of the Islamic world trade system under the caliphate is found in a Chinese document from 727:

  The World of Medieval Trade

  The Po-ssi being by nature bent on commerce, they are in the habit of sailing in big craft on the [Mediterranean] sea, and they enter the Indian Ocean to Ceylon, where they get precious stones. . . . They also go to the K’un-lun country [probably Africa] to fetch gold. They also sail in big craft to China straight to Canton for silk piece goods and the like ware. The inhabitants enjoy the killing of cattle; they serve Heaven [Allah] and do not know the law of Buddha.7

  The “Po-ssi” established trade diasporas all along the Chinese coast—large populations of Muslim merchants who handled an increasing volume of imports and exports. Jews accompanied them or followed in their footsteps. Nearly simultaneously, Nestorian Christians, expelled for their heresies from the Byzantine Empire but tolerated in the Muslim world as “people of the book,” began to arrive from the West via the overland route. It is easy to see how a splinter Christian movement, repelled by the savage intolerance of the Catholic Church and attracted by the relative tolerance of Islam, spread ever eastward.

  Contact between the East and West intensified with the triumph of the Abbasids over the Umayyads in 750; this moved the center of Islam from the landlocked capital of Damascus to riverine Baghdad, with its easy connection to the Gulf. One Abbasid ruler exclaimed, “This is the Tigris; there is no obstacle between us and China; everything on the sea can come to us on it.”8

  The premodern record provides few statistics regarding trade, and history’s flashlight illuminates the commerce between China and the Islamic world only with sporadic manuscript finds. One of the best-known manuscripts is the Arabic Akhbar Al-Sin wa’l-Hind—“An Account
of China and India.” Supposedly written in the mid-ninth century by several Arab merchants, particularly one Sulayman, this compilation takes the reader on a whirlwind journey from Baghdad to Canton, presaging the wonder and adventure evoked more than four hundred years later in The Travels of Marco Polo.

  Akhbar describes the loading of the ships in Basra and at Siraf, a deepwater Persian Gulf port, followed by a monsoon-driven passage of one month from Oman, just outside Hormuz, to the Malabar coast of India, where the local ruler collected a tax of between ten and thirty dinars per vessel (approximately $800 to $2,400 in today’s money). The Persian ships then set sail for another monthlong reach across the Bay of Bengal, provisioning midway in the Andaman Islands:

  The inhabitants are cannibals. They are black with curly hair, and have ugly faces and eyes and have long legs. Each one has a penis that is nearly a cubit [twenty inches] long; and they are naked. . . . Sometimes the cannibals catch some of the sailors, but they escape.9

  The merchants made landfall in Southeast Asia on the coast of Kedah, just north of Penang in present-day Malaysia, where they could choose between proceeding south around the Strait of Malacca or portaging across the narrow waist of the Malay Peninsula. The journey from Kedah past Malacca to Indochina took about twenty days; from Indochina to Canton an additional month. Although Akhbar suggests that the entire voyage from Basra to Canton consumed only about four months’ sailing time, the dance of the monsoons, as well as bureaucratic obstacles along the route, would have lengthened the transit time to well over a year.

  Because merchants and captains preferred to ride the monsoons to and from their home port on an annual schedule, individual boats and crews tended to ply only one segment of the route year after year (if they were lucky enough to survive so many journeys). A Gujarati merchant, for example, would typically load his ship with the fine cotton cloths and indigo of his native land, sail the summer monsoon to Malacca, exchange there his goods for silk, spices, and porcelain, and return home on the winter monsoon. Or he might choose to sail west in the winter and return in the summer from Aden with horses and incense, or to Malindi on the East African coast and return with gold and slaves. Because of the pattern of the monsoons and the need to return home, goods traveling the entire length of the Baghdad-Canton route sailed in at least three different bottoms.

  The Chinese sought from Akhbar’s Arab and Persian traders copper, ivory, incense, and turtle shells, while in Canton the Muslims loaded up on gold, pearls, and, naturally, silk and brocade. The exchange process was agonizing and appears to have been conducted through a government monopoly; the Chinese held the goods brought from Baghdad in Canton warehouses for six months until “the next batch of sailors come in.” Thirty percent of the goods were taken as an import duty, and then, “Whatever the government wishes to take, [it] buys at the highest price and pays the amount immediately, and in the transaction do not act unjustly.”10

  Akhbar kicked off the venerable Western tradition of the China travelogue, later amplified by Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, and numerous subsequent voyagers. The mostly anonymous authors of Akhbar wondered at the size and sophistication of the Celestial Empire, with its more than two hundred large cities, its exotic lifestyle, and its advanced institutions: “Everyone among the Chinese, whether he is poor or rich or young or old, learns calligraphy and the art of writing.” Those concerned with the current debate over Social Security would do well to consider Akhbar’s description of the Chinese system of taxes and old-age pensions:

  [Tax] is collected per head on the basis of personal possession of wealth and land. If a son is born to anyone, his name is registered with the authority. When he reaches eighteen years of age, poll-tax is collected from him, and, when he reaches eighty years of age, no poll-tax is collected from him. He is then paid a [pension] from the treasury. They say, “We took from him when he was a youth, and we pay him a salary when he is old.”11

  Not all things Chinese pleased the sensibilities of pious Muslims. Particularly disagreeable were the diet high in pork and the use of toilet paper, both serious violations of Muslim sanitary rules. Finally, the Muslims made note of a most peculiar beverage:

  Among the important sources of revenue of the king is . . . an herb which they mix in hot water and then drink. It is sold in every town at a very high price. It is called al-sakh. It is more leafy than the green trefoil and slightly more perfumed, and has a soury taste. They boil water and then sprinkle the leaves over it. It is a cure for them for everything.12

  The West had just encountered tea, a commodity that almost a thousand years later would spawn its own trading empire and multiply the world’s demand for sugar, slaves, and porcelain.

  About a century after Akhbar was written, a Persian sea captain, Burzug Ibn Shahriyar, recorded 123 brief stories, which came to him first- or secondhand from sailors and traders. It was entitled The Book of the Marvels of India and featured unreal, fearsome beasts and man-eating giants worthy of a South American novelist; there was even an island of women who fell upon shipwrecked men:

  a thousand women or more to every one man, and carried them away towards the mountains and forced them to become the instruments of their pleasure. . . . One after the other, the men dropped off and died of sheer exhaustion.”13

  Strewn, however, throughout the fantastic narratives are vignettes illuminating the nature of medieval trade on the Indian Ocean. The book makes clear that the fear of shipwreck looms over both trader and sailor; almost every story involves at least one broken boat. The voyage to China is so fraught with peril that the story of a captain who made seven journeys there astonishes the author:

  Before his time, no one had ever accomplished this journey without accident. To reach China and not perish on the way—that, in itself, was regarded as a considerable feat; but come back again, safe and sound, was a thing unheard of.14

  Only the promise of fantastic wealth could drive men to risk such nearly certain disaster. Marvels tells of a Jewish merchant, Ishaq, the owner of a ship that was

  laden with a million dinars of musk, as well as silks and porcelain of equal value, and quite as much again in jewelry and stones, not counting a whole heap of marvelous objects of Chinese workmanship.15

  Marvels goes on to describe a gift given by Ishaq to a Muslim friend, a vase of black porcelain with a gold lid. When his friend asked what was in it, Ishaq replied, “A dish of sekbadj [fish] I cooked you in China.” His friend replied that the delicacy, now two years old, must be quite spoiled. When he opened the vase, he found inside “a golden fish, with ruby eyes, garnished with musk of the finest quality. The contents of the vase was worth fifty thousand dinars.” In the end, Ishaq is cheated out of his fortune by mendacious Muslim neighbors and then murdered by a Sudanese governor after failing to produce an expected bribe.16

  The longest story in Marvels poignantly describes two other features of the medieval Indian Ocean trade: the unself-conscious, unscrupulous, highly profitable slave trade; and the power of Islam to tie together Chinese, Arabs, Persians, and Indians into a commercial system whose customs and laws were well understood by all between Baghdad and Canton.

  The tale begins, as usual, with a shipwreck, this time on the shores of East Africa. Fearful of cannibals, the marooned traders are pleasantly surprised to be taken in and treated well by the local king, who even allows them to conduct their business: “and excellent business for us it was, with no restriction and no duties to pay.” After completing their trades, the ruler and his underlings accompany them onto their newly repaired vessels. As the merchants are about to depart, the narrator finds himself calculating his hosts’ value in the slave markets:

  That young king would fetch at least thirty dinars in the marketplace in Oman, and his attendants one hundred and sixty dinars the lot. Their clothes are worth twenty dinars at the lowest. Altogether, we should make a profit of not less than three thousand dirhems, without stirring a finger.17

  Away they sail with their captive
s. The king attempts to shame the merchants by reminding them of the kind treatment received under his care, but his pleas fall on deaf ears. Along the way, over two hundred other slaves are added to the cargo hold; all, including the king and his retinue, are duly sold into slavery in Oman.

  Years pass, and as luck would have it, the narrator finds himself once again shipwrecked on the exact same East African shore. Worse, he finds himself greeted by the very same king he had long ago sold into slavery. Staring directly into the eyes of the fearsome justice that is his due, the narrator is amazed when the king calmly and politely describes how his buyer in Oman took him to Basra and Baghdad, where the king-slave converted to Islam. Soon after arriving in Baghdad, he escaped, and after a series of hair-raising adventures in Cairo, on the Nile, and in the African bush, found himself back in his old kingdom, which had also converted to Islam in his absence.

  Observing the commercial customs and laws of Islam rewarded the trading nation; both now dictated that the king treat the treacherous merchant well. As put by the king, “Musulmans shall know that they may come to us like brothers, since we are Musulmans too.” The king laments that his fondest desire is to reimburse his old master in Baghdad for his loss, “a sum ten times what he paid, as recompense for the delay.” Unfortunately, this wish must remain unfulfilled, since this is a job for an honest man—something the narrator clearly is not.18