The History of the Renaissance World: From the Rediscovery of Aristotle to the Conquest of Constantinople

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  Al-Nasir had had years to plan out what he would do, once he got the sultanate into his hands, and immediately he started to reorganize the country’s disorderly affairs. He commissioned a survey of the empire’s land, its owners, and the taxes paid by each, a formal audit called a rawk; he then redistributed estates to those who were most loyal to him. He would do this three more times during his thirty-year rule, each time with enormous attention to detail, personally supervising the work of the scribes and surveyors.3

  He had become sultan at a fortunate time; the most dangerous enemy of the Egyptian kingdom, the Mongol Il-khanate kingdom in the Middle East, had mellowed. The Il-khanate khan, Oljeitu, had married a daughter of the Byzantine emperor and allied himself with the Byzantine empire against the mamluks; in 1305, he had even tried to persuade the French and English kings to join him in an allied attack on Egypt. But unlike his brother and predecessor Ghazan, Oljeitu had little luck in battle. In 1312, he organized an invasion of Syria, across the Euphrates, which failed completely to conquer any mamluk-held cities; al-Nasir answered by sending an army into Il-khanate territory and seizing the eastern cities of Kahta, Gerger, and Malatya for himself.

  Oljeitu made no more efforts to conquer the mamluks; he seems to have lost his appetite for war, and he was unwell. In 1316, he died of a bleeding stomach ulcer that had troubled him for years. He was only thirty-six, and his heir was his ten-year-old son Abu Sa’id Bahadur Khan. Serving as the child’s regent was one of Oljeitu’s most distinguished generals, Chupan.4

  Despite a lifetime spent in war, Chupan was by nature a treaty maker and a bridge builder. When George V, the vassal king of Georgia (entirely in Mongol hands since 1248), arrived at Baghdad to attend the coronation of the new young khan, Chupan rewarded him by giving him back full control of a southwestern piece of Georgia that previous khans had ruled directly. And he began to negotiate a peace with the mamluks; the eventual truce, ratified in 1323 by both young Abu Sa’id and al-Nasir, set the Euphrates river as the boundary between the Il-khanate state and the mamluk empire. It was a line that would outlast both empires.5

  At the same time, al-Nasir took the precaution of firming up his alliance with the Golden Horde. The khan, Uzbek, remained hostile to his Mongol cousins in the Il-khanate, but agreed to send one of his daughters to marry al-Nasir and seal the alliance.6

  Egypt was now the single strongest power between Morocco and the Persian Gulf; Cairo alone was populated by perhaps 600,000 people, making it fourteen times larger than contemporary London. It stood at the intersection of the spice route that ran from the Red Sea to the Nile and then to the west of Africa, and al-Nasir’s efficient administration meant that the Egyptian sultanate collected a percentage of the trade passing through. The Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta, journeying from his home in Tangiers to Mecca to perform the hajj, came to Cairo in 1325 at the midpoint of al-Nasir’s reign. “Boundless in the profusion of its people, peerless in beauty and splendor,” he marveled, “she is the crossroads of travellers, the sojourn of the weak and the powerful. . . .”

  There are reported to be twelve thousand water carriers and thirty thousand mocaris [renters of beasts of burden]; thirty-six thousand watercraft on the Nile belonging to the sultan and his subjects that do nothing but come and go . . . laden with merchandise of every kind. . . . There is a continuous series of bazaars from the city of Alexandria to Cairo. . . . Cities and villages succeed one another along its banks without interruption and have no equal in the inhabited world, nor is any river known whose basin is so intensively cultivated as that of the Nile.7

  Al-Nasir himself plowed a huge amount of tax money back into Cairo and the surrounding cities. He built at least thirty mosques and schools, dug new canals and wells, ordered bridges and waterwheels constructed on the Nile: the sort of activity that could take place only in the absence of a treasury-draining war.

  TO THE EAST, Al-Nasir’s new ally, the khan of the Il-khanate, was fretting.

  Still in his teens, Abu Sa’id was increasingly unhappy in his role as figurehead. Chupan had assured peace in the Il-khanate, but the young khan, like al-Nasir a decade and a half before, found himself pushed constantly into the shade by his efficient and hardworking regent: “Chupan took all the realms of . . . Abu Sa’id into the grasp of his authority and the hand of his control,” writes the court historian Hafiz-i Abru.8

  The khan began to suspect that Chupan, far from working to bring him into full power, was planning to install his own son as his successor, in a shogun type of arrangement that would leave Abu Sa’id entirely out of the circles of power. In 1325, he prodded hard at Chupan’s authority. Chupan’s daughter, the famous beauty Khatun, had two years earlier been married off to an Il-khanate nobleman; now Abu Sa’id summoned her father and demanded the young woman for himself. “For it was the custom of the Mongol house,” says Hafiz-i Abru, “that should any lady please the king, usage required her husband to forgo her with a good grace.”9

  Abu Sa’id was a handsome youth (“The most beautiful of God’s creatures in features,” says Ibn Battuta, who passed through Baghdad after leaving Cairo and saw the khan with his own eyes), and the court historian Abru rather romantically chalks this demand up to love. “When the heart falls for a languid narcissus-eye,” he sighs, “be it a king’s or a slave’s, it slips out of control.”10

  But the order was clearly an attempt to discover just how loyal to his khan Chupan actually was. When the vizier refused to order his daughter to obey, Abu Sa’id had his answer. He bided his time until Chupan was out of Baghdad, and then ordered Chupan’s oldest son arrested and executed, on charges that the young man was sleeping with one of the khan’s own concubines. Chupan, hearing the news, realized that a purge was upon him. He fled to the Il-khanate city of Herat, believing that the governor—a personal friend—would protect him. But the governor refused to defy the khan; instead, he offered his old acquaintance a choice between beheading and the more honorable death of strangulation.

  Chupan chose strangulation. Afterwards, the governor chopped off one of his fingers and sent it to Abu Sai’d as proof of his obedience.11

  Chupan’s second son fled to Cairo, but al-Nasir was also unwilling to offend Abu Sa’id; he put the boy in jail and then executed him the following year. Abu Sa’id then forced the beautiful Khatun to divorce her husband, and married her himself. At twenty, he was now in full control of the Il-khanate.

  Unlike al-Nasir in Egypt, he did not blossom into an efficient ruler. To replace Chupan, he appointed one of his favorites, the minister Ghiyath al-Din: a good man, of “angelic temperament,” a contemporary account says, but incompetent. “Instead of punishing those who had wrought . . . ill deeds,” the chronicler says, “he drew the pen of forgiveness through the record of their crimes, recompensed their evil actions with good, and . . . entrust[ed] to them the most important functions.” The Il-khanate was in a downward spiral, and Abu Sa’id did not live long enough to mature into its savior. Ibn Battuta, repeating court gossip, says that around 1335 Abu Sa’id developed a “violent passion” for a new wife, and neglected Chupan’s daughter Khatun: “She became jealous in consequence, and administered poison to him. . . . So he died, and his line became extinct.”12

  The Christian kingdom of Georgia at once declared its independence under George V. And Muslim dynasties, ruling over mini-kingdoms, sprang up all over the old Il-khanate lands: “When the King died and left no issue,” Ibn Battuta writes, “each of the governors assumed the government of the district over which he had been placed.” Almost overnight, the entire Il-khanate vanished.13

  64.1 The Collapse of the Il-khanate

  Chapter Sixty-Five

  Mansa Musa of Mali

  Between 1312 and 1360,

  the riches of Mali become known to the outside world

  IN 1312, the king of Mali handed the throne over to his first cousin (once removed) for safekeeping, and set off on an adventure.

  His name was Abubakari II; he was
the nephew of Sundiata, his mother’s brother, the great Muslim conqueror who had founded Mali as an independent kingdom. Mali was now half a century old. It had swallowed the nearby cities of Gao and Mani on the east; the entire Senegal river valley was enfolded; Mali stretched all the way to the West Africa coast.

  Beyond this lay the ocean.

  “The king who was my predecessor,” his first cousin later explained, “did not believe that it was impossible to discover the furthest limit of the Atlantic Ocean and wished vehemently to do so. So he equipped 200 ships filled with men and the same number equipped with gold, water, and provisions enough to last them for years.” Abubakari gave strict orders to his newly appointed admiral: Sail west, and do not return until you have come to the end of your food and drink.

  Long after, a single ship returned. Its captain reported to the king that the entire fleet had been caught in a strong current, with only his craft left behind: “They did not return,” he told Abubakari, “and no more was seen of them and we do not know what became of them.” The Mali expedition had been caught, apparently, in the North Equatorial Current: the Drifts of the Trade Winds, the current that flows westward into the Caribbean Sea.

  No trace of the expedition was ever found, but Abubakari still believed that the far edge of the ocean could be found. He prepared another, much larger fleet—two thousand ships, half of them dedicated entirely to provisions—and himself set off at its head. “That was the last we saw of him,” his cousin said, afterwards, “and all those who were with him, and so I became king in my own right.”1

  So Mansa Musa, cousin and deputy of the king, became king of Mali. And he cast his eyes in the opposite direction: not west, towards the unknown, but east, towards Mecca. He was, says an acquaintance, “pious and assiduous in prayer, Koran reading, and mentioning God”; it was his greatest desire to make the hajj.

  It was twelve years before his plans were finally in place. In 1324, as Ibn Battuta was beginning his travels across the northern edge of Africa, Mansa Musa too set off for the Holy City. With a massive caravan of slaves, soldiers, officials, and his wife’s maids (five hundred of them), he journeyed along the Niger valley and then northeast towards Cairo, crossing over the trade routes and passing through Taghaza on his way.2

  Mecca still lay under the protection of the Bahri sultan, and Cairo was an obligatory stop on the path from West Africa to Arabia. There, Mansa Musa became friendly with the court official Ibn Amir Hajib, governor of Old Cairo. “Musa told him,” says the fourteenth-century Arab historian al-‘Umari, “. . . that his country was very extensive and contiguous with the Ocean. By his sword and his armies he had conquered 24 cities, each with its surrounding district with villages and estates.” From all of these conquered cities, Mansa Musa demanded tribute in gold.3

  Whatever Mansu Musa told him, the governor came away from the conversation convinced that the gold in Africa grew in the ground, on gold plants, with roots of gold, that simply needed to be pulled up and shaken. He could perhaps be forgiven for the mistake, since the Mali contingent’s behavior gave the impression that gold was as common as goat’s milk in the Niger valley. Mansa Musa had brought with him thousands and thousands of gold ingots: eighty loads weighing 120 kilograms (260 pounds) each, says Ibn Khaldun, a total of over ten tons. During his stay he distributed it so lavishly that the worth of gold in Cairo fell as much as 25 percent. “This man flooded Cairo with his benefactions,” the governor later said. “He left no court emir nor holder of a royal office without the gift of a load of gold.”4

  65.1 The Height of Mali

  Either the king or his accountants lacked foresight, though; the Mali monarch spent most of his money on his initial passage through Cairo, and by the time he returned through the city after his pilgrimage to the Ka’aba, he was broke. He had to borrow from Cairo’s moneylenders to fund his trip back across the desert, to Mali, and the moneylenders charged him compound interest; he ended up paying back 233 percent on each dinar borrowed.5

  ABUBAKARI’S ADVENTURE to the west had brought Mansa Musa to the throne; and thanks to Mansa Musa’s pilgrimage east, Mali appeared more and more often on European maps of the world. The Catalan Atlas, an ambitious world map produced for Peter of Aragon by the Jewish cartographer Cresques Abraham, shows Mansa Musa himself seated on a golden throne, holding a golden scepter and a golden orb, wearing a crown of gold.

  In the remaining years of Mansa Musa’s rule, European traders and embassies from European governments traversed the Sahara again and again, seeking gold, forging alliances; and after Musa’s death in 1337, Mali remained strong. But outside the country, the exaggerated legends of Mali’s wealth, of the riches that needed only to be plucked from the ground, continued to grow. And inside Mali, factions and political parties began to clot towards critical mass.

  Mansa Musa’s son Maghan, who had served as regent during his father’s extended absence from the country, inherited his crown. But he died after a brief four-year reign, and the throne was claimed by his uncle Mansa Sulayman. “A most avaricious and worthless man,” Ibn Battuta calls him; arriving in Mali halfway through Mansa Sulayman’s reign, Ibn Battuta was told that the sultan had a gift for him, and was then presented with “three crusts of bread, with a piece of fried fish, and a dish of sour milk.” Highly offended—he had expected at least a horse and a golden robe or two—Ibn Battuta sent the sultan a piece of his mind and was rewarded with a house and provisions during the rest of his stay.6

  Sulayman had reason to be suspicious of new arrivals to his kingdom. In Mansa Musa’s wake, more and more outsiders had made their way to Mali, looking for the gold plants that lay on the ground, and counting on the gullibility of the Malians. The governor of Old Cairo, a generation before, had noted that the merchants of Cairo exploited Mansa Musa’s caravan with happy abandon: “Merchants . . . have told me of the profits which they made from the Africans,” the governor explained to the historian al-‘Umari, “saying that one of them might buy a shirt or cloak or robe or other garment for five dinars when it was not worth one. Such was their simplicity and trustfulness that it was possible to practice any deception on them.” And then he added, “Later, they formed the very poorest opinion of the Egyptians because of the obvious falseness of everything they said . . . and their outrageous behavior in fixing the prices.”7

  65.1 Mansa Musa of Mali on the Catalan Atlas.

  Credit: John Webb / The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY

  But Sulayman had apparently concluded that Ibn Battuta was harmless, and the honors soothed the traveler’s offended pride somewhat. During the two months he remained in Mali, Ibn Battuta paid grudging respect to the safety and justice of the kingdom: “A traveller may proceed alone among them, without the least fear of a thief or robber,” he noted. He also praised their piety, noting that it was common for the men of Mali to commit the entire Koran to memory. In al-‘Umari’s words,

  Their king at present is named Sulayman, brother of the sultan Musa Mansa. He controls, of the land of Sudan, that which his brother brought together by conquest and added to the domains of Islam. There he built ordinary and cathedral mosques and minarets, and established the Friday observances and prayers in congregation, and the muezzin’s call. . . . This king is the greatest of the Muslim kings of the Sudan. He rules the most extensive territory, has the most numerous army, is the bravest, the richest, the most fortunate, the most victorious over his enemies.8

  In Sulayman’s twenty-four years on the throne, Mali remained firmly under his authority. His subjects, Ibn Battuta says, “debase themselves . . . in the presence of their king” more than any other people, prostrating themselves and throwing dust upon their heads. Sulayman surrounded himself with the trappings of an emperor: gold arms and armor; ranks of courtiers and Turkish mamluks, warrior slaves bought from Egypt, surrounding him. They were required to keep solemn and attentive in his presence: “Whoever sneezes while the king is holding court,” al-‘Umari explains, “is severely bea
ten.”9

  But at Sulayman’s death, in 1359, the political factions that had been slowly coalescing during his reign—each one centered on a different descendant of Mansa Musa—broke the country apart.

  A civil war erupted between the supporters of Sulayman’s son Fomba and one of the sons of Maghan, Mari Diata II. After a year of fighting, Fomba was killed and Mari Diata II seized the throne: “A most wicked ruler over them,” says the fourteenth-century chronicler Ibn Khaldun, “because of the tortures, tyrannies, and improprieties to which he subjected them.”10

  In the wake of the coup, a chunk of Mali between the Senegal and Gambia rivers revolted. Instead of submitting to the despotic Mari Diata, three distinct but neighboring clans—Waalo, Baol, and Kajoor, all of them Wolof-speakers—formed a confederation, each independent but all three united under a single king. This king was elected, much like the German rulers, by a group of high-ranking clan members who joined together to choose a ruler from one of the clans.

  Tradition gives a name to the first-elected Emperor of the Wolofs: Ndiadiane N’Diaye. Little else is known about him, but legend preserves at least one telling detail. Ndiadiane was a magician; not an Islamic king, but a traditional African ruler. The kings of Mali had ruled an Islamic realm, but beneath the surface veneer of Muslim loyalty, the old practices had survived.

  Chapter Sixty-Six

  After the Famine

  Between 1318 and 1330,