This first flush of direct trade centering on China, so well described in Akhbar and Marvels, came crashing down as the Tang dynasty spiraled into instability in the ninth century. In a scenario painfully familiar to modern Chinese in Indonesia, Indians in East Africa, and Jews nearly everywhere, the colonies of foreign traders on China’s coast became convenient scapegoats during tough times.
As early as AD 840, the emperor Wuzong sought to blame foreign ideologies for China’s plight. In 878, the rebel Huang Chao sacked Canton, slaughtering 120,000 Muslims (mainly Persians), Jews, and Christians living in that city’s trade community.19 Not content to massacre traders, Huang Chao also tried to kill China’s main export industry by destroying the mulberry groves of south China.20 After the calamitous events of 878 in Canton, China’s foreign trade gradually migrated north to the port of Tsuan-chou on the Taiwan Strait—the legendary Zaitun of Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta. Canton, which had been China’s main portal for foreign goods, would not regain its preeminence until the modern period.
This more northerly entrepôt had long-standing connections with Korea and Japan, whose wares attracted Arab and Persian traders. The size and cargoes of the Muslim ships, some of which required ladders dozens of feet tall for boarding, astounded the Chinese of the eighth and ninth centuries. The emperor soon appointed an inspector of maritime trade, whose job was to register these vessels, collect duties, and prevent the export of “rare and precious articles.”21 One such inspector was a nobleman, Chau Ju-Kua, who oversaw foreign trade at Zaitun in the early thirteenth century. A methodical compiler of knowledge, he cataloged the recollections of hundreds of homesick sailors and traders in Chu-Fan-Chi: “A Description of Barbarous Peoples.” The book was a sort of reverse Travels of Marco Polo; although Chau never left China, the Chu-Fan-Chi describes in some detail places as remote as Asia Minor and Alexandria, including details (some accurate, some not) of that city’s famous lighthouse.22
By the time the Mongols roared out of the northern steppes into China in the thirteenth century, Persian and Arab traders had more or less monopolized the long-distance trade in China, with two large and relatively self-governing Muslim communities at Canton and Zaitun. According to Chau:
In its watchful kindness to the foreign Barbarians, our government has established at [Zaitun] and Canton Special Inspectorates of [maritime trade], and whenever any of the foreign traders have difficulties or wish to lay a complaint they must go to the Special Inspectorate. . . . Of all the wealthy foreign lands which have a great store of precious and varied goods, none surpasses the realm of the Arabs.23
Numerous other medieval travelers speak to us from differing perspectives. In the mid-twelfth century, a Spanish rabbi, Benjamin of Tudela, journeyed widely through Europe and the Middle East and reported on the bustle and splendors of Alexandria and Constantinople. He was particularly impressed by the intellectual life of Baghdad: “the place of meeting of philosophers, mathematicians, and all the other sciences.” Almost at the same time, the Muslim merchant Shereef Idrisi, under the patronage of the Viking king of Sicily, Roger II, produced a geography, Pleasure for the Man Who Wants to Know Thoroughly the Various Countries of the World, which describes in great detail the Red Sea trade of the period. Idrisi was especially taken with the port of Aden, where he encountered Chinese junks laden with “pepper, some strong smelling, other odorless, wood of aloes, as well as bitter aloes, tortoise shell and ivory, ebony and rattan, porcelain, [and] leather saddles.”24
The trading world of these accounts also found expression in a series of anonymous stories told by the fictional Scheherazade in her attempt to postpone her death at the hands of her husband: the famous Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night. Among its contents are the well-known tales of Ali Baba, Aladdin, and, of course, Sinbad the Sailor, which were probably recorded sometime in the fourteenth century.25
Sinbad’s adventures were anything but children’s stories. Many of them are remarkably similar to those told in The Book of the Marvels of India; the reader of both works will suspect that many of the Sinbad leg-ends, if not lifted in whole cloth from the earlier book, at least share the same oral tradition.
In each of his seven trading voyages in search of spices and gems, our hero is shipwrecked or otherwise becomes separated from his ship. He then battles a series of deadly monsters or human villains. On his third trip, for example, he and his companions are captured by a grotesque giant who first examines potential victims “as a butcher feeleth a sheep he is about to slaughter.” The gorgon finally settles on the ship’s most plump and delectable morsel, its rais (master). The gorgon
seized him, as a butcher seizeth a beast, and throwing him down, set his foot on his neck and brake it; after which he fetched a long spit and thrusting up his backside, brought forth of the crown of his head. Then, lighting a fierce fire, he set it over the spit with the Rais thereon, and turned it over the coals, till the flesh was roasted, when he took the spit off the fire and set it like a Kabab-stick before him. Then he tare off the body, limb from limb, as one jointeth a chicken and, rending the flesh with his nails, fell to eating of it and gnawing the bones, till there was nothing left but some of these, which he threw on one side of the wall.26
All of Sinbad’s companions meet the same end except for our skinny hero, who is deemed an unworthy tidbit and released. In addition to his far-fetched escapades, the tales of Sinbad also provide a picture of the gritty day-to-day reality of long-distance commerce in the Abbasid and Fatimid periods. Even a cursory reading of Nights reveals that Sinbad was no sailor at all, but rather the scion of a wealthy Baghdad trading family that possessed many palaces and warehouses. Sinbad did not own, command, or, as far as we can tell, even crew on any of the vessels he sailed.
In fairness, a fine line separated the trader from the sailor on the Indian Ocean, as few crew members received a salary; rather, most of them made their living carrying trade goods on their own account.27 Whatever Sinbad’s precise job description, he recounts the modus operandi of traders familiar to the reader of the Geniza papers:
I bought me goods, merchandise all needed for a voyage and, impatient to be at sea, I embarked, with a company of merchants, on board a ship for Bassorah [modern Basra, at the head of the Persian Gulf]. There we again embarked and sailed many days and nights, and we passed from isle to isle and sea to sea and shore to shore, buying and selling and bartering everywhere the ship touched.28
As already discussed, the Red Sea challenged the merchant with pirates, narrow channels, dangerous shoals, and adverse winds, and the Silk Road suffered from the inherent physical inefficiencies and even greater dangers and political problems of a land route. Of the three great conduits between Asia and Europe, the remaining path—“Sinbad’s Way,” via the Mediterranean, across the Syrian desert, down the Tigris or Euphrates, and out the Persian Gulf into the Indian Ocean—was clearly the preferred route.
Each of Sinbad’s expeditions begins with the laying in of goods from his Abbasid homeland to be exchanged abroad, in particular the fine textiles of Baghdad. From that city, Sinbad proceeded by small river craft downstream to Basra, thence onto a larger oceangoing vessel for the journey through the Persian Gulf and Indian Ocean.
In the course of his travails, he usually managed to lose and later regain his Baghdadi trade goods, then proceed to make “a great profit on them, and bought me goods and gear of the growth and fashion” to fill his family’s warehouses back home. Soon after he avoided being a dinner course for the gorgon, Sinbad recounts:
We ceased not to buy and sell at the several islands till we came to the land of Hind [India], where we bought cloves and ginger and all manner of spices; and thence we fared on to the land of Sind [China], where we also bought and sold. . . . Then we set sail again with a fair wind and the blessing of Almighty Allah; and after a prosperous voyage, arrived safe and sound in Bassorah. Here I abode a few days and presently returned to Baghdad where I went at once to my quarter and my house and
saluted my family and familiars and friends.29
What drives this mythical hero? Nothing more and nothing less than a faithful medieval Islamic rendition of Adam Smith’s propensity to truck and barter: a desire for “the society of the various races of mankind and for traffic and profit,” to which has been added more than a dab of romance and adventure along the sea-lanes between Baghdad and Canton.30
Sinbad’s mythical creatures—gigantic, ferocious birds who fed on jewel-encrusted carrion (identical to the beasts in Marvels), fish so large that sailors mistook them for islands, and man-eating gorgons—merely reflected the limited geographical horizons of the premodern world. Europeans spun equally fabulous yarns about the East: the lands of Gog and Magog, of a breed of hairy kneeless humanoids whose blood yielded the precious red dye used in Chinese fabrics, and of a Far Eastern Christian empire ruled by Prester John. The Chinese spun equally wild tales of the West, such as water-dwelling sheep from which cotton was sheared.31
These fictional and nonfictional accounts from the era of the medieval Indian Ocean trade, scattered and incomplete as they are, make clear that the four main luxury products of China—silk, sandalwood, spices, and porcelain—were somehow exchanged for what the East desired from Arabia and Africa: thoroughbred horses, ivory, incense, cottons, gold, and copper. Grain, as always, was shipped, particularly as ballast: rice, which in some cases actually improves with age, was heavily favored over wheat, which is far more prone to spoilage.32
Since ancient times, the great civilizations of both East and West had been beset by bordering tribes of plundering herdsmen. Stretching in a broad band from northern Europe to Mongolia, and usually of Turkic origin in Asia or of Germano-Scandinavian origin in Europe, these nomadic raiders deployed skills honed over millennia of attacks on settled farmers. Periodically, they overwhelmed their more agriculturally proficient, institutionally advanced, and culturally accomplished sedentary neighbors, as occurred to Rome in the fifth century after Christ.
Their most spectacular success, however, occurred in the early thirteenth century, when Genghis Khan roared out of the steppes to conquer all of central Asia; within a few decades, the Great Khan’s descendants ruled over a group of empires comprising more territory than any dynasty before or since.
In 1255, one of Genghis Khan’s grandsons, Mongke, sent his brother Hulagu (whose ambassador had invited the Polo brothers east) to conquer the Muslim world. Hulagu destroyed Baghdad in 1258 and massacred hundreds of thousands in the process, a tragedy still mourned in the Muslim world today. The Mongols surely would have continued into the Mediterranean had not Mongke died at that moment, forcing Hulagu to return to Mongolia in an attempt to claim his dead brother’s mantle. He left behind a rump force that fell prey to the Mamluk Egyptians in 1260 at Ain Jalut in Palestine. Adding insult to injury, Hulagu failed to grab Mongke’s crown, which instead fell to a third brother, Kublai, who would subsequently wrest China from the Song dynasty.
For over a century, from the mid-1200s to the mid-1300s, the overland route from China to the gates of Europe lay in the hands of a more or less stable chain of Mongol states, which enthusiastically embraced commerce as well as the religions and cultures of the peoples they conquered. Three of Asia’s four great Mongol empires eventually converted to Islam; the only one that did not, the legendary Kublai’s Chinese dynasty, rapidly assimilated China’s ancient culture. The Mongols adopted Islamic and Christian influences as well. Kublai, distrusting the preexisting Mandarin bureaucracy, hired into his service many foreigners, whose numbers included all three Polos.
For about a century, beginning around 1260 after the conquests of Genghis’s grandchildren and ending with the dissolution of Mongol dynasties from internal strife and the plague, the Silk Road lay unobstructed. Large numbers of Europeans and Muslims exploited this relatively brief opportunity and shuttled with ease between China and the West, but the names of two burn brightest in the light of history—Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta.
The Polos, a clan of consummate traders, exploited the window first, just as it was being opened up by Ghengis’s grandchildren. Ibn Battuta, on the other hand, was not even a trader, but rather a qadi—a Muslim judge. Born into a scholarly family in Tangier, Morocco, in 1304, he studied Islamic law, as had generations of his male relatives. On completion of his studies he made the mandatory hajj to Mecca in 1325, one year after the death of Marco Polo.
The road must have appealed to him, for over the next three decades he journeyed approximately 74,000 miles throughout Asia, Africa, and Europe. A sort of medieval Islamic version of the modern Eurailpass-carrying flower child used to supplementing family money with guitar, harmonica, and donation box, he flogged his expertise in sharia (sacred law) for all it was worth and in the process acquired an ever-increasing amount of wealth, power, and female company. When boredom, adverse circumstances, or, on occasion, out-and-out self-preservation required him to, he moved on, not infrequently leaving behind a trail of discarded concubines and unhappy ex-wives, offspring, and in-laws.
Around 1300, a vigorous line of Turkic Muslims wrested northern and central India from its ancient Hindu dynasties and established their sultanate in Delhi. The most famous of these early Muslim masters of India was Sultan Muhammad Ibn Tughluq, who ruled from 1325 to 1351, a period roughly corresponding to the span of Battuta’s epic journey. Tughluq became notorious for his hare-brained military, agricultural, and institutional schemes. These included an ill-fated attempt to move his capital four hundred miles south into the dusty, desolate Deccan plain of south India; a regimentation of Indian agriculture that ended in starvation and revolt; and the raising of a vast army to conquer the central Asian Mongols. (He largely abandoned the last plan, except for a force sent to Kashmir that was destroyed by mountain tribes.)
But Tughluq’s real passion was Islamic law. Shortly after taking power, he began to import eminent scholars from the Islamic world. He spared no expense, offering fabulous sinecures, accommodations, and privileges to the most attractive recruits. By this time, Battuta was traversing the Hindu Kush mountains of northwest India. On the road for approximately eight years and accustomed to traveling in style (which in that era meant a train of pack mules, luxurious portable furniture and tents, and a small army of slaves and women), he was on the brink of exhausting his family funds. When word reached him of the opportunities at the Delhi court, he heeded the call.
Along the way, Battuta passed through the lower Indus Valley, revered by Muslims as the first part of the subcontinent to receive Islam in the eighth century. While he was en route, Hindu bandits attacked his party. He casually noted:
The inhabitants of India are in general infidels [Hindus]; some of them live under the protection of the Mohammedans, and reside either in the villages or cities: others, however, infest the mountains and rob by highways. I happened to be of a party of two and twenty men, when a number of Hindus, consisting of two horsemen and eighty foot, made an attack upon us. We, however, engaged them, and by God’s help put them to flight, having killed one horseman and twelve of the foot.33
Such was the day-to-day business of the medieval traveler; Battuta and his companions hung the heads of the thirteen unlucky bandits on the walls of the next government fort along their route.34 He also encountered (as had the Polos) suttee:
The woman adorns herself, and is accompanied by a cavalcade of the infidel Hindus and Brahmins, with drums, trumpets, and men following her, both Muslims and Infidels for mere pastime. The fire had already been kindled, and into it they threw the dead husband. The wife then threw herself upon him, and both were entirely burnt. A woman’s burning herself, however, is not considered absolutely necessary among them. . . . But when she does not burn herself, she is ever after clothed coarsely, and remains in constraint among her relatives, on account of her want of fidelity to her husband.35
Battuta finally arrived in Delhi, where he encountered what was surely one of the most curious credit markets in the history of finance.
The favor of Muhammad Tughluq, on which much enterprise (and certainly the fortunes of a foreign qadi such as Battuta) rested, had to be bought with lavish gifts. These gifts, in turn, were rewarded with favors from Tughluq of far greater value, creating a further sense of financial obligation to the court. Since such expensive presents went well beyond the means of the average person, enterprising supplicants almost always had to borrow:
The merchants of China and India began to furnish each newcomer with thousands of dinars as a loan, and to supply him with whatever he might desire to offer as a gift. . . . They place both their money and their persons at his service, and stand before him like attendants. When he reaches the sultan, he receives a magnificent gift from him and pays off his debt to them. This trade of theirs is a flourishing one and brings in vast profits.36
Even if the supplicant was successful, the lavish lifestyle of the court usually swept him into a downward credit spiral. Although Battuta eventually found himself qadi of Delhi, in charge of a royal mausoleum, and the tax farmer of several villages, he still accumulated a debt of 55,000 silver dinars (roughly 4,000 gold dinars).
Battuta had mounted not only a financial tiger in Delhi, but a political one as well. Even for his time, Tughluq was a particularly bloodthirsty master. His interest in Islamic law imparted to him the menace of the ideologically pure, so familiar to the modern world. Disloyalty, real or imagined, hastened the end of many of his subjects, and a lack of doctrinal purity was also a reliable shortcut to the next world. As one modern scholar put it:
It was one thing to chastise rebels by having them cut in half, skinned alive, or tossed about with elephants with swords attached to their tusks (the latter of which Battuta was to witness more than once). It was quite another thing to inflict such humiliations on distinguished scholars and holy men for merely questioning public policy.37
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