Travels with a Tangerine: A Journey in the Footnotes of Ibn Battutah

by Mackintosh-Smith, Tim

  We passed through Alma Vale – eponym, via the Crimean War, of dozens of roads in Victorian suburbia. Bakhchiserai also lay in a valley. The palace was really a series of kiosks – perhaps a throw-back to the Tatars’ tented origins – together with a mosque and a small cemetery, all dispersed among gardens and courtyards. Broad eaves shaded walls painted with curlicues and other Ottoman-style decorative etceteras. Nina stood beside an elaborate wall-fountain and recited a verse by Pushkin, in which he admired its ‘poetical tears’. It was all rather whimsical and – considering the masters of Bakhchiserai sprang from the loins of Genghis Khan – decadent.

  I only realized just how early the decay had set in when we approached the khan’s audience hall. The entrance was framed by a stucco doorcase. Flat pilasters topped by fiddly acanthus supported an inscribed lintel and a heavy classical cornice with a line of egg-and-tongue mouldings. The whole thing ended in a bloated tympanum that sprouted frothy little panaches. It was coloured in preposterous, prawn-cocktail pink. The inscriptions were in Arabic script; the design was undiluted Renaissance camp.

  Then again, ‘decay’ might be the wrong word. Perhaps it was more a case of symbiosis. Once more, I remembered the orientalizing porch of my parish church in Bristol, that strange Indo-Perso-Saraceno-Gothic growth. This was merely its converse – executed, according to a plaque beside the door, by a visiting Italian craftsman in 1503.

  That date, however, was ominous. Vasco da Gama was founding the first European colony in the Indian Ocean, Amerigo Vespucci discovering that those transatlantic islands were no Indies, but a new world. There would be no more symbiosis. The old world IB had known was about to be slowly, mercilessly throttled.

  Constantinople

  Talking about Jerusalem

  ‘O mankind! We created you from male and female, and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know one another.’

  Qur’an, chapter 49, verse 13

  ‘OUR ENTRY INTO Constantinople the Great was made about noon or a little later, and they beat their church-gongs until the very skies shook with the mingling of their sounds. When we reached the first of the gates of the king’s palace we found it guarded by about a hundred men. I heard them saying, “Sarakinu! Sarakinu!”’

  Sarakenoi. Saracens. Muslims. IB had entered the city that for over six centuries had been the most elusive goal of Islamic conquest. During his Anatolian trip he had been within eighty miles of it. When eventually he got there, it was three thousand miles later and in the grandest style possible.

  From the Crimea IB had travelled to the mobile metropolis of Özbeg Khan. He found it in transit near the spa of Beş Dağ, Five Hills; now, translated literally as Pyatigorsk, it is the Baden-Baden of southern Russia. ‘We saw a vast city on the move, complete with mosques and bazaars, the smoke of the kitchens rising into the air, and horse-drawn wagons transporting the people. On reaching the camping place they took down the tents from the wagons and set them on the ground, for they are light to carry, and so likewise they did with the mosques and shops.’ At the heart of the camp stood Özbeg’s Golden Pavilion, ‘covered with plaques of gold, in the centre of which is a couch covered with silver gilt and encrusted with precious stones’. This was nomadism de luxe.

  Özbeg’s ordu, or camp (origin of both ‘horde’ and Urdu, the camp language of Hindustan) inspired a long excursus on the manners and customs of the Tatars. IB was unimpressed by their cuisine, mainly millet porridge, horsemeat and macaroni pudding. Qumizz, koumiss, the fermented mares’ milk of the Tatars, he found disgusting. One aspect of Tatar life, however, fascinated him. ‘In this country I witnessed a remarkable thing, namely the respect in which women are held by them; indeed, they are higher in dignity than men.’ Unveiled, they were magnificent in bejewelled conical headdresses that nodded with peacock feathers – ‘anyone seeing their husbands would take them for their servants’. Doyenne of these ladies was Taytughli, Özbeg’s number one sultana. ‘He spends most of his nights with her,’ the traveller confided, ‘and I was told for a fact by a trustworthy individual, a person well acquainted with matters relating to this queen, that the Sultan is enamoured of her because of a peculiar property in her, namely that he finds her every night just like a virgin.’ (This earns a double exclamation mark in Dr Abdelhadi’s edition of the Travels.) Apparently, this gynaecological quirk ran in Taytughli’s family, said to be descended from a woman who tempted Solomon and was banished to the steppe. IB was clearly itching to get down to some fieldwork; but, he says wistfully, ‘nothing like that ever came into my hands’.

  Taytughli was also tight of fist, ‘the stingiest of the sultanas’. Of the other three, the most generous was Bayalun. She showered IB with presents – money, horses and, a great rarity in Tatar lands, bread. She also showered him with tears: ‘She asked about us and our journey hither and the distance of our native lands, and she wept in pity and compassion and wiped her face with a handkerchief that lay before her.’ One can understand her sympathy, as she herself was far from home. Bayalun, part of that extraordinary fourteenth-century network of nuptial alliances, was the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor.

  On her marriage to Özbeg, Bayalun seems to have been given the dubious honour of being renamed after her mother-in-law. Her baptismal name is a mystery; since the Emperor’s other daughters can be accounted for, she was probably illegitimate. In the Byzantine documents, only a single chance survival mentions the marriage. It is a letter dated 1341 from a monk in Constantinople to a brother monk in Thrace, warning him that the Scythians are about to invade (‘Scythians’ is a glorious anachronism for ‘Tatars’). The source of this intelligence was highly placed, the writer says – no less than the wife of the Scythian king, the daughter of the Emperor Andronicus III. A brief Arabic reference by IB’s contemporary al-Umari also confirms the marriage. Özbeg, he says, took tribute from the Byzantines ‘until the time he allied himself to them in marriage, whereupon he removed the burden of that tax’.

  IB had found in Bayalun the most unexpected soul-mate, a fellow stranger in the alien world of the Tatars. He had also found his passport to Constantinople. Bayalun was pregnant, and when Özbeg gave her permission to give birth at home, IB ‘begged of him to allow me to go in her company to see Constantinople the Great for myself. He forbade me, out of fear for my safety; but I solicited him tactfully and said to him, “It is under your protection and patronage that I shall visit it, so I shall have nothing to fear from anyone.” He then gave me permission.’

  Özbeg lived up to his expected gift-rating. IB’s going-away present included 1,500 gold dinars, ingots of silver and ‘a large collection of horses, robes and furs’. Jingling with cash, cushioned by miniver and sable, he set out from the Golden Horde to the Golden Horn, across the steppe with Bayalun and her retinue of six thousand.

  *

  Following my own Anatolian trip I had crossed the Sea of Marmara to Constantinople the Great in the company of a large Bulgarian Turkish woman, a practitioner of t’ai chi with a not unpleasing moustache. Eheu fugaces! We travelled by hydrofoil, and the journey was over before I could discover more.

  Is there an arrival more intoxicating? Domes bursting out of a backlit skyline; pavements tacky with mussel liquor, air with sardine fumes and diesel, light with vapour; a city resonant with the honk of vapurs as they dash over the water tacking Europe to Asia – the sound too of another city of arrivals and departures, on the brink of another continent: Tangier, where the journey had begun.

  IB’s first sight of Constantinople was of its Land Wall, a four-mile line of bastions gazing out to Thrace. He had crossed southern Russia, the Ukraine, Moldavia, Romania and Bulgaria in the uneventful comfort of the royal wagon train. At the Byzantine border the princess parked her mobile mosque and celebrated her homecoming, like any Western expat returning from Islamic lands, with bacon. She may have put aside her Islamic mores, but she did not forget her Muslim guest: at her instigation, a servant was beaten for giggling at IB and his co
mpanions as they prayed. Bayalun knew what it was like to be a stranger.

  Behind the walls, Constantinople was in a state of terminal loucheness. It had never really recovered from the events of 1204 when Enrico Dandolo, that unsavoury nonagenarian Doge, had redirected the Fourth Crusade to pillage the imperial city. More recently, a senseless squabble had weakened it further. In 1320 the future emperor, IB’s Andronicus III Palaeologue, killed his brother in a spat over a woman. Their father died a week later, apparently of a broken heart; their grandfather, Andronicus II, excluded the young prince from the succession. The prince made war on him, and five years later was recognized as co-Emperor. In 1328, the younger Andronicus deposed the elder and put him in a monastery, ending a reign described by Gibbon as ‘prolix and inglorious’. Indeed, the Palaeologue dynasty as whole, wrote the historian, was ‘prolix and languid’.

  Writing at the time of IB’s visit, al-Umari comes across as a sort of Arabic Gibbon:

  They may be great in number, but their most powerful ammunition is wine and soft bread, their most reliable matériel brocade and silk. The only blows struck are on cymbal and lute, the only thrusts are in the direction of swelling breasts and pliant underbellies. Blood they spill, but from the wound of the wine-jar’s mouth; their glorious dead are but dead drunk, fallen in battle with the bottle. Their most valiant assaults are on the dinner table; their only active service takes place between mattress and bedsheet.

  IB was blithely unaware of the supposed moral decline. What caught his eye was something quite different: ‘Most of the inhabitants of this city are monks, devotees and priests, and its churches are numerous beyond computation. They display great magnificence in building them, constructing them of marble and mosaic work.’ The Palaeologues, their empire withering about them, with their comic-opera politics and ragtime army, presided over one of the greatest periods of Byzantine art. Now back in Istanbul, I visited the monastic church of Christ of the Chora, not far from the Adrianople Gate where IB entered the city. It is hard to identify exactly the churches he saw but I felt sure that this one, rebuilt a decade before his arrival and one of the masterpieces of the age, would have been on his tour. From the outside, like the pop-up book madrasah I had seen in Morocco, it gave nothing away.

  Inside, I found I had walked into a glittering cosmic cocktail party. Prophets and angels, saints and sinners jostled in mosaic and fresco on walls and vaults above a dado of rare marbles, a divine levee in levitation. There was the host of the party – Theodore Metochites the Logothete, rebuilder of the church, dwarfed by a gigantic striped turban. I was the only visitor, and in the silence the images were almost audible: the rustle of shrouds as Christ dragged the dead from their tombs, the polyphonic moan from Hell – a fiery red smear filled with indistinct, twisting bodies. IB heard other sounds. ‘A boy’, he wrote, perhaps of this very place, ‘was sitting on a pulpit reading the gospel in the most beautiful voice I have ever heard.’

  Also as in the Moroccan madrasah, the silence was soon shattered. This time they were French. I went to find the Palace of Blachernae.

  On his arrival, IB was taken to meet the Emperor. He was led by the sleeves through mosaic-covered halls, past ranks of silent courtiers, into the imperial presence. Andronicus III questioned him, via a Syrian Jew, on his travels. ‘He was pleased with my replies and said to his sons, “Honour this man and ensure his safety.”’ First, though, IB had a request – for a guide-interpreter, ‘that I might see the city’s wonders and curious sights and tell of them in my own country’. As always, the charm worked. IB left the palace on a richly caparisoned horse, accompanied by fanfares and by an imperial dragoman and parasol.

  As medieval Islamic tourism went, a city break in Christian Constantinople was something of a rarity. But IB was by no means the only Muslim in the capital. ‘Muslims in Constantinople’, wrote al-Umari, ‘are shown respect and hospitality. Indeed, some are resident in the city. Praise God, they suffer no contempt or scorn, but are allowed to have their mosques and imams.’ He added, perhaps wishfully, that any emperor who mistreated the Muslim community risked being deposed by the Patriarch. The tradition of respect was a long one. Ibn Rustah, writing in about 900, says that the Emperor would invite all the Muslim prisoners-of-war to Christmas dinner. ‘Huge amounts of food were served, both hot and cold. As it was brought in the Master of Ceremonies called out, “By the life of the Emperor’s head, I declare this banquet entirely free of pork products!”’ On leaving, the prisoners were each given two gold dinars and three silver dirhams.

  I found the Palace of Blachernae next door to a football pitch and a piece of waste ground dotted with goats. There were no fanfares; only a man trying out his novelty car horn at the gate. Neither were there whispering guards or silent courtiers, mummified in cloth of gold and etiquette. And there were no tourists. The place looked totally unvisited; but a bulky woman bumbled out of her cement bungalow, plonked impertinently in the palace courtyard, and took 300,000 lira off me. (Inflation is nothing new: IB noticed that the Byzantine gold hyperperon, debased under Andronicus, ‘is not good coin’.) Only one bit of the palace remained, a three-storey arcaded façade of grey stone chequered in rusty brick. Behind it, the floors had gone and the walls were cobwebbed and fire-blackened. IB remembered seeing ‘mosaics of creatures both animate and inanimate’; I scanned the ground, looking for tesserae among the rubbish, until I saw a glint of gold. I stooped down … A curtain twitched in the bungalow: the Mistress of Blachernae was watching. The gold tessera was a discarded sweet-wrapper.

  *

  Of all the churches IB visited, only one is immediately identifiable. ‘It is called in their language Aya Sufiya. I can only describe its exterior. As for its interior I did not see it.’ But what an exterior! – a scrummage of vaults, semidomes and buttresses, a rippling architectonic musculature hefting up the huge central cupola like the world on Atlas’s shoulders.

  Not that IB noticed. Or rather, what remained in his memory was two-dimensional: marble paving and pietra dura in the temenos of the church, gold and silver plaques on its doors. Also he recalled people – judges, pen-pushers from the Patriarchate, churchwardens, sweepers and lamplighters. IB’s is not a photographic memory, but that of a miniaturist in which figures are set against richly decorated planes. Two figures are central, one of them IB himself. I stood before the west front of Hagia Sophia, among the chattering coach parties and fallen conkers, and tried to picture their meeting. It is one of the most extraordinary in the whole literature of travel.

  Account of the King Jirjis, who became a Monk. This king invested his son with the kingdom, consecrated himself to the service of God, and built a monastery outside this city, on the bank of its river. I was out one day with the Greek appointed to ride with me when we chanced to meet this king, walking on foot, wearing hair-cloth garments, and with a felt bonnet on his head. He had a long white beard and a fine face, which bore traces of his austerities; before and behind him was a body of monks, and he had a pastoral staff in his hand and a rosary around his neck. When the Greek saw him he dismounted and said to me, ‘Dismount, for this is the king’s father.’ When the Greek saluted him the king asked about me, then stopped and said to the Greek (who knew the Arabic tongue), ‘Say to this Saracen, “I clasp the hand that has entered Jerusalem and the foot that has walked within the Dome of the Rock and the Church of the Resurrection, and Bethlehem”,’ and so saying he put his hand upon my feet and passed it over his face. I was amazed at their belief in one who, though not of their religion, has entered these places. He then took me by the hand and as I walked with him asked me about Jerusalem and the Christians living there, and questioned me at length. I entered with him into the enclosure of the Great Church. When he approached the main door, there came out a number of priests and monks to salute him, for he is one of their great men in the monastic life, and when he saw them he let go my hand. I said to him, ‘I should like to go into the church with you,’ but he said to the interpreter, ‘
Tell him that every one who enters it must needs prostrate himself before the great cross, for this is a rule laid down by the ancients and it cannot be contravened.’ So I left him and he entered alone and I did not see him again.

  The monk was of course not the Emperor’s father but his grandfather, Andronicus II. Deposed in 1328, he had remained for a time, Lear-like, losing his sight, in the echoing emptiness of Blachernae, until forced to take on the monk’s habit. Gibb and others have pointed out two further problems in IB’s account. The first is that the elder Andronicus’s monastic name was not Jirjis, George, but Antony; the second that, however we stretch the elastic chronology of the Travels, by the time IB arrived in Constantinople the ex-Emperor was dead.

  The name is not so worrying. After all IB dictated the Travels more than twenty years on, without notes, and to have remembered any Greek names at all would have been a remarkable feat. Some of his stabs are far from the mark. For example, the Golden Horn appears as ‘Absumi’ – probably a garbled version of potamos, river. ‘Andronicus’, with its unArabic consonant cluster -ndr-, could conceivably be lopped and deformed by an Arab and by the passage of time into ‘Jirjis’. (I am grasping at a phonemic straw; but then, several people in Yemen are convinced that my name is Ahmad Kandash. Work that one out.)

  Timing, however, is a greater problem. Andronicus-Antony died in February 1332; IB, according to Gibb, could not have arrived in Constantinople before September. Perhaps then IB misunderstood the monk’s identity, or was misled; perhaps the monk was another member of the imperial family; or perhaps, pace Gibb, the conundrum of IB’s chronology could be twisted into a solution, like a four-dimensional Rubik’s Cube.

  Does any of this matter? Whoever Jirjis was, the meeting – a meeting – did take place. The details are convincing – the pastoral staff, the rosary, the coarse garments, the hand held then released. Gibb himself, a canny and not unsceptical scholar, admits the passage bears the ‘unmistakable stamp of truth’. And it is a meeting that takes place still: with Umm Baha in the Egyptian desert, the old stationer of Aleppo, Hajji Baba of Konya, the Imam of Feodosia; and with Hasan in San’a, with whom I often saunter around predestination and free will, Aquinas and Mu’tazilism, keeping in step until we come to the inevitable Qur’anic threshold – ‘Whoever adopts a din other than Islam, it will not be accepted of him.’ Din is religion; din is also custom, the rules of the ancients. Meetings, and partings.