A brief association with a dissident Sufi cleric earned Battuta nine days under armed guard, during which he imagined one unpleasant end after another. Disillusioned with his terms of employment, he pleaded with the sultan to allow him to depart on the hajj; instead, he was made an offer he couldn’t refuse: the ambassadorship to Kublai Khan’s China. Preferring escape east with a retinue of ambassadorial slaves, concubines, and an escort of one thousand horsemen to escape west as a pilgrim, he left for China.
Even in the best of times, danger plagued the overland journey from Delhi to the Malabar Coast, from where his enormous party would embark for China. And with Tughluq’s regime tottering, these were not the best of times. A few days out of New Delhi, a force of four thousand rebels attacked his entourage. Although they greatly outnumbered the ambassador’s party, the attackers were slaughtered, apparently at little cost. Shortly thereafter, another rebel force captured Battuta, who escaped just before he was to be executed.
He rejoined his party and embarked from the northwestern Indian port of Cambay in four relatively small Indian craft for the southwestern port of Calicut. (Calicut is on the other side of the subcontinent from Calcutta, which would be settled two centuries later by the British.) This was pepper country, and the farther south he went, the richer the towns became. As the land grew more fertile and prosperous, the more frequent became his sightings of the huge Chinese junks sent to fetch the mountains of black spice used by Kublai’s subjects to flavor their dishes. Fifty years before, Marco Polo had observed of Zaitun’s spice markets, “The quantity of pepper imported there is so great that what is carried to Alexandria to supply the demand of the western parts of the world is trifling in comparison—perhaps not more than a hundredth part.”38
Ibn Battuta cared little for such details of maritime technology or the volume of trade between India and China (or, for that matter, almost everything else besides Islamic law and the finer things in life). He was, however, smitten by the luxurious Chinese vessels, with their multiple decks, private enclosed toilets, steward service, lifeboats, and, of course, a cabin door “which can be bolted by the occupant, who may take with him his female slaves and women.”39
To Battuta’s annoyance, Chinese officials had already reserved the best rooms in the huge ships, leaving him with a smaller cabin, sans private bathroom. This simply would not do, so he took a larger room on a smaller Indian vessel. While he was at Friday prayers, the flotilla of large junks and smaller Indian ships put to sea to ride out a sudden storm; the junks went aground and sank, while the smaller vessel he was supposed to be on, carrying his servants, luggage, and concubines (one of whom was pregnant with his child), sailed south without him, and later was captured in Sumatra by “heathen” (i.e., Hindus).
Battuta eventually found passage to China on yet a smaller boat and in greatly reduced company. Along the way, on the western Malay Peninsula, he was the guest of a king and witnessed a strange spectacle. One of the ruler’s subjects, wishing to demonstrate his loyalty, held a knife to his own neck:
He then made a long speech, not a word of which I could understand; he then firmly grasped the knife, and its sharpness and the force with which he urged it were such that he severed his head from his body, and it fell to the ground. . . . The King said to me: Does any among you do such a thing? I answered, I never saw one do so. He smiled and said: “These our servants do so, out of their love to us.”40
Shortly thereafter, Battuta spent several months in the northern Sumatran city of Samudera, awaiting the reversal of the monsoons that would blow him north to China. At the time of his visit there, it was the first place in Southeast Asia to come under Islamic rule, spread by Muslim traders from India. The year was 1345, and Battuta had no way of knowing that he was witnessing the vanguard of a religious conversion that would produce the modern world’s most populous Muslim nation, Indonesia.
Battuta’s travelogue grows increasingly sketchy as he arrives in China. He recounts extensive travel there, supposedly covering thousands of miles of roads and canals between Beijing and Canton in a few months, an impossibly short period of time. He was not pleased with what he saw. As he so often does in Travels, Battuta affects the mood of a surly Western package tourist who consorts only with his own countrymen and is fed strange food, housed in substandard hotels, and cheated at every turn by the locals:
I was greatly troubled thinking about the way paganism dominated this country. Whenever I went out of my lodging, I saw many blameworthy things. That disturbed me so much that I stayed indoors most of the time and went out only when necessary.41
Neither was Battuta pleased with the remarkable Chinese innovation of paper currency. Like the archetypal American abroad exasperated with foreign “funny money,” he complained: “When any one goes to the market with a dinar or a dirhem in his hand, no one will take it until it has been changed for these notes.”42 (Polo, by contrast, thrived on China’s religious and cultural diversity: “The country is delightful. The people are idolators.”43)
Not everything Battuta saw in China displeased him. Like Marco Polo, he marveled at the size of Zaitun, which by then was a city with six separate boroughs: one for ordinary Chinese, one for the city’s guards, one for the Jews and Christians, one for sailors and fishermen, one for the seat of government, and, of course, one for Muslims. This metropolis, probably the world’s largest at the time, took three full days to circumnavigate. He also could not help commenting favorably on the safety of travel within China, an unimaginable luxury to someone inured to the perils of the road in Asia and the Middle East. His most enthusiastic entry, naturally enough, came when he encountered in the port city of Fuzhou a fellow Moroccan from near his home in Tangier, who gave Battuta many wonderful gifts, among which were two white male slaves, and in addition, two local females.44
In many regards, the Genoese Polo and the Moroccan Battuta provided mirror images of the epic medieval wanderer: Polo was Christian, intensely curious about the peoples, customs, and places he visited, and almost completely dependent on the goodwill of the Mongol khans of China and central Asia. By contrast, Battuta was Muslim, profoundly uncurious about the non-Islamic world, and achieved his greatest degree of wealth, fame, and influence in the Muslim court of Delhi.
The Polos eagerly sought contact with the non-Christians of Asia, if for no other reason than simply to survive and conduct business. Polo’s fascination with and openness to outside influences shines through every page of his memoirs; the same cannot be said of Battuta, who exudes a remarkable lack of interest in non-Muslim peoples and affairs. About all that ties the two accounts together is that they concerned the East and were transcribed by a professional writer.
It is precisely Battuta’s lack of interest in peoples outside Dar-al-Islam—the world of Islam—that testifies to Muslim dominance of medieval Asian trade. In the fourteenth century, Battuta could travel 74,000 miles through Morocco, East Africa, India, central Asia, Southeast Asia, and China and remain entirely within the Muslim cultural envelope, never having to interact in a meaningful manner with those outside it in order to survive, to travel, or even to make a living.
The Muslim spice importer in Cairo or Tangier obeyed the same religious, ethical, and—most important—commercial code (and was just as likely to need the services of a qadi like Battuta) as his Muslim supplier in Cambay or Malacca. The Muslim ruler, whether in Africa, Arabia, India, or Southeast Asia, observed the same basic rules regarding tax and customs rates. Typically, 2.5 percent was charged to believers, 5 percent to protected dhimmi (Christians and Jews), and 10 percent to nonprotected nonbelievers, such as Hindus and animist natives.45
The hajj, the Muslim obligation to visit Mecca and Medina, served to unite the world of Indian Ocean trade. Not all could afford the hajj, and many, if not most, who did undertake the expensive voyage paid for it with baggage of spices, silks, and cottons, in the process making the port city of Jeddah one of the era’s great commercial centers.46
&n
bsp; Certainly, the Indian Ocean, studded with more or less autonomous trading states, was no Muslim lake. The rulers of these states belonged to different nationalities and sects, and some were not even Muslim. Calicut, for instance, was ruled by the Hindu zamorin. Nonetheless, it is no exaggeration to state that the world of fourteenth-century medieval Indian Ocean trade was essentially one and the same with Dar-al-Islam.
In Battuta’s obsession with sharia and the Muslim world and in his lack of interest in nearly everything outside it (besides the comforts of Chinese junks) we clearly see the double-edged sword of Islam so visible in today’s world: an ecumenical but self-satisfied faith capable of uniting far-flung peoples under one system of belief and one regime of law, but also severely limited in its capacity to examine and borrow from others.
The Chinese leviathans of the Indian Ocean so admired by Battuta were the technological wonders of the medieval age. Beginning around the eleventh century, the Song Dynasty, forced to the south coast of China by steppe nomads, shifted their strategic focus toward the sea. In 1132, the emperor established a permanent navy, a nearly unheard-of innovation in the East. The Chinese military leadership made maritime engineering a high priority, and their boatyards began to turn out many types of huge military and maritime vessels with iron-nailed, multiple nested hulls; several decks; highly effective stern-mounted rudders; magnetic compass guidance (which allowed accurate navigation even in cloudy weather); and advanced fore-and-aft sails (which enabled ships to tack almost directly into the wind). The Chinese even briefly abandoned their famous cultural chauvinism and borrowed the sophisticated navigational techniques of the Persians and Indians.47
Compared with these advanced Chinese craft, the traditional Indian Ocean dhow, with its single hull stitched with coconut fiber, its clumsy lateen rigging (which had to be hauled up and down with each change of tack), and its lack of decks, was so flimsy that Marco Polo chose to endure the rigors, expense, and dangers of the Silk Road rather than embark on one at Hormuz.
One Westerner noted that the dhows were
mighty frail and uncouth with no iron in them and no caulking. They are sewn like clothes with twine! And so if the twine breaks anywhere there is a breach indeed! Once every year, therefore, there is a mending of this, more or less, if they propose to go to sea. They have a flimsy rudder like the top of a table . . . and when they have to tack, it is done with a great deal of trouble; and if it is blowing in any hard way, they cannot tack at all.48
Another European observed that the Chinese junks tended to
be very big, and have upon the ship’s hull more than 100 cabins, and with a fair wind they carry ten sails, and they are very bulky, being made of three thicknesses of plank, so that the first thickness is as great as in our ships, the second cross-wise, and the third again long-wise. In sooth ’tis a very strong affair.49
Nautical historians have in fact wondered why the Indians and Arabs stuck with the dhow so long, almost to the present day, and did not adopt the superior Chinese and European designs. The answer is at least threefold. First, the weight of tradition among Indian shipbuilders overwhelmed the needs of sailors for secure oceangoing craft. Second, India’s west coast did not produce enough iron for construction. Third, although the sewn craft may have been less seaworthy, they were more “beachworthy”—that is, more pliable, and thus better able to survive the frequent encounters with the reefs, rocks, and shallows of the coasting trade than were the more rigid planked and ribbed Chinese and European ships.50
Given China’s advantage in maritime technology, the relatively low profile of its traders west of Malacca is remarkable. Only during the period between 1405 and 1433 did the Chinese intentionally flex their muscle in the Indian Ocean. Perhaps the inferior status accorded traders by Confucianism, which viewed merchants as parasites, steered the brightest and most ambitious away from trade and into the economically stifling Mandarin bureaucracy. Then too, China’s (and later, Japan’s) centralized political structure could quickly shut off contact with the outside world.
In contrast, the highly decentralized nature of the medieval world of Indian Ocean trade produced a bubbling stew of Darwinian economic competition, in which those states whose political “mutations” were best suited to trade and commerce thrived, and those whose institutions were not withered. In much the same way, the political environment of Europe, fractured by its mountainous and riverine geography into thousands of competing states, favored those nations with the most economically efficient institutions. One of them, England, would emerge as history’s first truly global hegemon.51
In 1382, the army of the first Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, which had been pursuing the remnants of the Mongol army, captured a ten-year-old Muslim peasant boy named Ma. The commanding general asked the young captive the whereabouts of the Mongol pretender and received this impertinent answer: “He jumped into a pond.” Ma’s insouciance earned him captivity in the royal household, and three years later, as was the custom, he was castrated and added to the eunuch staff of the royal household, in this case of Zhu Di, the fourth of the emperor’s twenty-six sons.
Unlike most eunuchs, he did not develop a shrill tongue or a feminine manner, but instead grew into a huge, fierce, intelligent warrior with a deep booming voice. When his master, Zhu Di, finally became emperor after a brutal civil war against his older brother, the young protégé was promoted to the powerful position of superintendent of the office of eunuchs.52 His new name was Zheng He, or, as he was until recently called in the West, Cheng Ho, the commander of the treasure fleet and master of the Indian Ocean.
History associates the voyages of the great Chinese treasure fleets—seven in all between 1405 and 1433—with Zheng He, but these spectacular missions were for all intents and purposes just one cog in the grand design of the expansionist Emperor Zhu Di, and, in the end, a pawn in the age-old antagonism between the Confucian scholars and the eunuchs.
Zhu Di, unlike his isolationist peasant-warrior father, was a cultured ruler with an internationalist worldview who engaged China in dozens of costly foreign adventures. These efforts included diplomatic and military missions to the Mongol former enemy and, less successfully, an invasion of Vietnam that started a long and brutal guerrilla war (and from which modern France and America failed to learn the appropriate lessons).
None of Zhu Di’s many spectacular projects left their mark on history as did the great treasure fleets, the gargantuan successors to the vessels so coveted by Ibn Battuta. These ships ranged in size from relatively small support boats “only” a hundred feet in length to the massive three-to four-hundred-foot-long “treasure ships,” with their multiple nail-bound, watertight hull compartments; up to nine masts; dozens of spacious cabins; and sophisticated stern-post rudders of a type that would not be seen in Europe until the early modern period.53
Most voyages consisted of about three hundred vessels manned by approximately thirty thousand crew members, and sailed on two-year expeditions to Malacca, Sumatra, Java, and India, and on later journeys to Hormuz, the Red Sea, and much of the East African coast. The treasure fleets were hardly opening new markets for Chinese commerce; we know from Polo, Battuta, and Chinese and Muslim observers that they had been preceded into Asian ports by previous generations of Chinese diplomats and merchants. Rather, the primary purposes of the seven successive missions were diplomatic, military, and symbolic.
The monsoons drove the carefully choreographed arc of each voyage. Zheng He’s fleets assembled in the fall at an anchorage at Taiping in southern China, where they waited for the winter northeast monsoon to carry them to Surabaya in Java. There they remained until July, when the southwest monsoon blew them past Sumatra and Malacca to Sri Lanka and the Malabar Coast of India. Smaller detachments then ranged as far as Hormuz and Africa. Over the next twelve months, the process was reversed: south to Java with the winter northeast monsoon, then homeward on the summer southwest monsoon.
First and foremost, the ventures stabilize
d the critical Strait of Malacca, ruled by a renegade Sumatran sultan but claimed by the Siamese, who controlled Chinese access to the Indian Ocean. Zheng He not only suppressed the piracy that was rampant in the strait, but also adroitly reconciled competing Siamese and Malaccan interests in the vital waterway, keeping it open to the commerce of all parties. An additional, unspoken charge of Zheng He may have been to search for Zhu Yunwen, the brother Zhu Di supplanted, who was reported to have fled overseas.54
Much of what is known about the treasure fleets comes from the memoirs of a Chinese Muslim translator, Ma Huan, who was fluent in Arabic. He accompanied Zheng He’s later voyages, and his description of the visit to the sultan of Malacca speaks eloquently to the nature of “treasure fleet diplomacy”:
[The emperor bestowed upon the sultan] two silver seals, a hat, a girdle, and a robe. [Zheng He] set up a stone tablet and raised [Malacca] to a city, and it was subsequently called the country of Malacca. Thereafter [the king of Siam] did not dare to invade it. The sultan, having received the favor of having been made a king, conducted his wife and son and went to the court [in China] to return thanks and present tribute of local products. The court also granted him a sea-going ship, so that he might return to his country and protect his land.55
In India and Arabia, Ma Huan encountered the wellsprings of Western monotheism. In Calicut he recorded this wonderful whispering-down-the-lane story of Exodus, concerning one
Mou-hsieh, who established a religious cult; the people knew that he was a true man of Heaven, and all men revered and followed him. Later the holy man went away to another with [others] to another place, and ordered his younger brother to govern and teach the people.
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