by Ross E. Dunn
In the fourteenth century an aspiring pilgrim of Tangier had the choice of traveling by land or sea, or a combination of the two. European vessels which put in at Maghribi ports, as well as Muslim coasting ships, commonly took passengers on board and delivered them to some port further east along the Mediterranean shore.2
Until the age of the steamship and the charter flight, however, most pilgrims chose the overland route across the Maghrib, Libya, and Egypt. This route was in fact part of a network of tracks linking the towns and cities of northern Africa with one another. A traveler from Morocco might follow a number of slightly varying itineraries, passing part of the way along the Mediterranean coast and part of the way across the high steppes which ran west to east between the coastal mountains and the Atlas ranges of the deep interior. Or, pilgrims starting out in southern Morocco could go by way of the oases and river valleys which were strung out at comfortable intervals along the northern fringe of the Sahara. Northern and southern routes alike converged in Ifriqiya. From there to Egypt pilgrims took the coast road, the lifeline between the Maghrib and the Middle East, which ran along the narrow ribbon of settled territory between the Mediterranean and the Libyan desert.
Map 3: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary from Tangier to the Nile Delta, 1325–36
Whether by land or sea, getting to Mecca was a risky affair. If seafarers had to brave storms, pirates, and hostile navies, overland travelers confronted bandits, nomad marauders, or the possibility of stumbling into a war between one North African state and another. Consequently, most pilgrims going overland kept, for the sake of security, to the company of others, often the small caravans that shuttled routinely between the towns and rural markets. Travelers who had little money to start with frequently traded a stock of wares of their own along the way — leather goods or precious stones for example — or offered their labor here and there, sometimes taking several months or even years to finally work or chaffer their way as far as Egypt.
Quite apart from these little bands of pilgrims in the company of merchants and wayfarers was the great hajj caravan, which ideally went every year from Morocco to Cairo, and from there to the Hijaz with the pilgrims from Egypt. Starting usually in Fez or Tlemcen, the procession picked up groups of pilgrims along the way like a rolling snowball, some of them walking, others riding horses, mules, donkeys, or camels. By the time the company reached Cairo, it might in some years number several thousand.
The flow of pilgrims across the nearly 3,000 miles of steppe, desert, and mountain separating Morocco from Mecca was one of the most conspicuous expressions of the extraordinary mobility and cosmopolitanism within the Dar al-Islam in the Middle Period. Although North Africa was known as the Island of the West (Jazirat al-Maghrib), a mountainous realm separated from the heartland of Islam by sea and desert, the intercommunciation across the barren gap of Libya, whether by hajj caravan or otherwise, was nonetheless continuous — barring times of unusual political instability on one side or the other. And while the commercial aspect of the link was important, its cultural dimension was even more so. If few educated Egyptians, Syrians, or Persians found reason to travel west in the fourteenth century (and tended to think of the Maghrib as Islam’s back country, its Wild West), the learned classes of North Africa and Granada were always setting off on tours to the East in order to draw spiritual and intellectual sustenance from their scholarly counterparts in Cairo, Damascus, and the Holy Cities of the Hijaz.
For scholarly North Africans the hajj was almost always more than a journey to Mecca and home again. Rather it was a rihla, a grand study tour of the great mosques and madrasas of the heartland, an opportunity to acquire books and diplomas, deepen one’s knowledge of theology and law, and commune with refined and civilized men.
Literate Moroccans of the fourteenth century owed their greatest intellectual debt not to the Middle East but to the learned establishment of Muslim Iberia. Yet Andalusia’s time was fast running out, and beleaguered little Granada, despite a brave showing of artistic energy in its latter days, could no longer provide much cultural leadership. The Middle East, however, having somehow survived the dark catastrophes of the Mongol century, was experiencing a cultural florescence, notably in the Mamluk-ruled lands of Egypt and Syria. Gentlemen scholars of far western cities like Tangier could readily look there for civilized models, higher knowledge, and learned companionship. And though the road to Mecca was long and perilous, the internationalism of Islamic culture, continuously reaffirmed, held men of learning in a bond of unity and shrank the miles between them.
On 14 June 1325 (2 Rajab 725 A.H.) Ibn Battuta rode out of Tangier and headed southeastward through the highlands of the Eastern Rif to join the main caravan road that ran from Fez to Tlemcen. He was 21 years old and eager for more learning, and more adventure, than his native city could hope to give him. The parting was bittersweet:
My departure from Tangier, my birthplace, took place . . . with the object of making the Pilgrimage to the Holy House [at Mecca] and of visiting the tomb of the Prophet, God’s richest blessing and peace be on him [at Medina]. I set out alone, having neither fellow-traveler in whose companionship I might find cheer, nor caravan whose party I might join, but swayed by an overmastering impulse within me and a desire long-cherished in my bosom to visit these illustrious sanctuaries. So I braced my resolution to quit all my dear ones, female and male, and forsook my home as birds forsake their nests. My parents being yet in the bonds of life, it weighed sorely upon me to part from them, and both they and I were afflicted with sorrow at this separation.
He did not, it seems, set out from Tangier with any plan to join the hajj caravan, if there was one that year. It was not, in any event, a bad year for a young man to launch forth entirely on his own, for political conditions in the Western Maghrib were un-typically calm. Abu Sa’id (1310–31), the reigning Marinid Sultan of Morocco, was a pious and relatively unenterprising ruler and, unlike many of the kings of his line, not much interested in pursuing military adventures either in Iberia or North Africa. Around the end of the thirteenth century the pilgrimage caravans from Morocco had had to be suspended for several years owing to Marinid wars against their eastern neighbor, the ’Abd al-Wadid kingdom.3 But less intrigued than his predecessors with visions of a neo-Almohad empire, Abu Sa’id permitted a de facto peace to prevail on his eastern frontier during most of his reign. Consequently, merchants and pilgrims could expect to pass between the two realms in relative security.
Riding eastward through Morocco’s mountainous interior and then onto the high plains that stretched into the Central Maghrib, Ibn Battuta reached Tlemcen, capital of the ’Abd al-Wadid state, in the space of a few weeks. Although Tlemcen was a busy commercial transit center and intellectually the liveliest city anywhere between Fez and Tunis, he did not linger there. For upon arriving he learned that two envoys from the Hafsid Sultanate of Ifriqiya had been in the city on a diplomatic mission and had just left to return home. The ’Abd al-Wadids, enjoying an unusual break in their wars with the Marinids, had turned their full attention to their eastern marches where they were engaged in a protracted struggle with the Hafsids, notably over control of Bijaya (Bougie), a key Mediterranean port 450 miles west of Tunis. At the time Ibn Battuta arrived in Tlemcen, Abu Tashfin, the ’Abd al-Wadid sultan, was conspiring with a number of Ifriqiyan rebels and pretenders to unseat his Hafsid neighbor and satisfy his own expansionist ambitions.4 It may be that the two envoys had come to Tlemcen to try to negotiate peace with Abu Tashfin and were now going home, albeit empty-handed.5 In any case, someone advised Ibn Battuta to catch up with them and their entourage and proceed on to Tunis in the safety of their company.
The busiest commercial routes out of Tlemcen led northward to the ports of Oran and Honein. But Ibn Battuta took the lonelier pilgrimage trail running northeastward through a series of river valleys and arid plains flanked on one side or the other by the low, fragmented mountain chains that broke up the Mediterranean hinterland. This part of the Maghr
ib was sparsely populated in the fourteenth century. He might have ridden for several days at a time without encountering any towns, only Berber hamlets and bands of Arabic-speaking camel herders who ranged over the broad, green-brown valleys and depressions.
After what must have been two or three weeks on the road, he caught up with the Ifriqiyans at Miliana, a small commercial center in the Zaccar hills overlooking the plain of the Chelif River. Eager scholar that he was, he could hardly have made better choices of his first traveling companions. One of them was Abu ’Abdallah al-Zubaydi, a prominent theologian, the other Abu ’Abdallah al-Nafzawi, a qadi of Tunis. Unfortunately, tragedy struck as soon as Ibn Battuta arrived. Both envoys fell ill owing to the hot weather (it was mid summer) and were forced to remain in Miliana for ten days. On the eleventh the little caravan resumed its journey, but just four miles from the town the qadi grew worse and died. Al-Zubaydi, in the company of the dead man’s son, whose name was Abu al-Tayyib, returned to Miliana for mourning and burial, leaving Ibn Battuta to continue on ahead with a party of Ifriqiyan merchants.
Descending the steep slopes of the Zaccar, the travelers arrived at the port of Algiers, and Ibn Battuta and his first sight of the sea since leaving Tangier. Algiers was a place of minor importance in the fourteenth century, not the maritime capital it would come to be in another two hundred years. It had little to recommend it to a member of the educated class. Abu Muhammad al-’Abdari, an An-dalusian scholar who had traveled from Morocco to Arabia 36 years earlier and had subsequently returned home to write a rihla of his experiences, sized up the city’s literate establishment and quickly wrote the place off:
In setting foot in this town, I wondered whether one would be able to meet any enlightened people or any persons whose erudition would offer some attraction; but I had the feeling of one looking for a horse that wasn’t hungry or the eggs of a camel.6
Ibn Battuta likely shared al-’Abdari’s opinion since he says nothing in his narrative about what Algiers was like. In any case, he and his merchant companions camped outside the walls of the city for several days, waiting for al-Zubaydi and Abu al-Tayyib to catch up.
As soon as they did, the party set out for the port of Bijaya, the western frontier city of the Hafsid kingdom. The journey took them directly eastward through the heart of the Grand Kabylie Mountains, a region of immense oak and cedar forests, spectacular gorges, and summits reaching higher than 6,500 feet, rougher country than Ibn Battuta had seen since leaving home. Bijaya lay up against the slopes of the mountains near the mouth of the Souman River, which separates the Grand Kabylie range from the Little Kabylie to the east. It was a busy international port and the principal maritime outlet for the dense communities of Berber farmers who inhabited the highland valleys behind it.
Bijaya was the first real city Ibn Battuta had the opportunity to explore since leaving Tlemcen. Nonetheless, he was determined to push on quickly, and this in spite of an attack of fever that left him badly weakened. Al-Zubaydi advised him to stay in Bijaya until he recovered, but the young man was adamant: “If God decrees my death, then my death shall be on the road, with my face set towards the land of the Hijaz.” Relenting before this high sentiment, al-Zubaydi offered to lend him an ass and a tent if he would agree to sell his own donkey and heavy baggage so that they might all travel at a quicker pace. Ibn Battuta agreed, thanked God for His beneficence, and prepared for the departure for Constantine, the next major city on the main pilgrimage route.
Al-Zubaydi’s insistence on traveling fast and light had less to do with his young friend’s illness than with the dangers that lay on the road ahead. Ibn Battuta had had the good fortune to cross Morocco and the ’Abd al-Wadid lands during a period of relative peace. But the Eastern Maghrib in 1325 was in the midst of one of the recurring cycles of political and military crisis that characterized the Hafsid age. Sultan Abu Yahya Abu Bakr, who had acceded to the Hafsid throne in 1318, was yet striving to gain a reasonable measure of control over his domains in the face of a Pandora’s box of plots, betrayals, revolts, and invasions. On one side were rival members of the Hafsid royal family, who from provincial bases in various parts of the country were organizing movements either to seize the capital city of Tunis or to set up petty kingdoms of their own. On the other side were the ’Abd al-Wadids, who repeatedly invaded Abu Bakr’s western territories and tried almost every year, though never successfully, to force the walls of Bijaya.
As if these enemies were not enough, the sultan had to contend with the turbulent and unpredictable Arab warrior tribes who for more than two centuries had been the dominant political force over large areas of rural Ifriqiya. These nomads were descendants of the great wave of Arabic-speaking, camel-herding migrants, known collectively as the Banu Hilal, who had trekked from Egypt in the eleventh century and then gone on to penetrate the steppes and coastal lowlands of the Maghrib as far west as the Atlantic plains. If over the long run the relationship between these companies of herdsmen and the indigenous Berbers of the towns and villages was described far less by hostility than by mutual commercial and cultural dependence, the migrations were nonetheless a source of persistent trouble for North African rulers, who tried time and again to harness the military power of the Arabs to their own ends, only to find their erstwhile allies putting in with rebels and pretenders. In 1325 Arab bands were politically teamed up with at least two Hafsid rebels as well as with Abu Tashfin, the ’Abd al-Wadid. At the same time that Ibn Battuta was making his way across the Central Maghrib, an ’Abd al-Wadid army was laying siege to Constantine and had Sultan Abu Bakr himself bottled up inside the city. In the meantime, a Hafsid pretender and his Arab cohorts took advantage of the sultan’s helplessness to occupy Tunis. The kingdom was in a state of civil confusion, the roads were unsafe, and roving bands of Arab cavalry plagued the countryside.
Ignoring the tumult, Ibn Battuta and his companions struck out from Bijaya across the Little Kabylie Mountains and arrived at Constantine without encountering trouble. By this time (it must have been August) the approaches to the city were clear. The ’Abd al-Wadid army had precipitously given up its siege some weeks earlier and returned to Tlemcen in failure, leaving Abu Bakr free to restore a degree of order in the region and lead his loyal forces back to Tunis to eject the rebels.7
Although Constantine was the largest city in the interior of the Eastern Maghrib, Ibn Battuta did not tarry there long. Consequently he has little to recall about it in the Rihla — except the one notable fact that he was privileged to make the acquaintance of the governor, a son of Abu Bakr, who came out to the edge of town to welcome al-Zubaydi. The meeting was a memorable one for the young pilgrim because the governor presented him with a gift of alms, the first of many presents he would receive from kings and governors during the course of his travels. In this instance it was two gold dinars and a fine woolen mantle to replace his old one, which by this stage of the journey was in rags. Almsgiving was one of the five sacred pillars of Islam, the duty of princes and peasants alike to share one’s material wealth with others and thus remit it to God. The obligation included voluntary giving (sadaqa) to specific classes of people: the poor, orphans, prisoners, slaves (for ransoming), fighters in the holy war, and wayfarers. Falling eminently into this last category, Ibn Battuta would during the next several years see his welfare assured, to one degree or another, by an array of pious individuals who were moved to perform acts of kindness, the more readily so since the recipient was himself an educated gentleman well worthy of such tokens of God’s beneficence.
Leaving Constantine better dressed and richer, he and his friends headed northeast across more mountainous country, reaching the Mediterranean again at the port of Buna (Bone, today Annaba). After resting here for several days in the security of the city walls, he bade farewell to the merchants who had accompanied him half way across the Central Maghrib and continued on toward Tunis with al-Zubaydi and Abu al-Tayyib. Now the little party “traveled light with the utmost speed, pushing on night an
d day without stopping” for fear of attack by Arab marauders. Ibn Battuta was once again struck by fever and had to tie himself to his saddle with a turban cloth to keep from falling off, since they dared not stop for long. Their route took them parallel to the coast through high cork and oak forests, then gradually downward into the open plain and the expansive wheat lands of central Ifriqiya. From there they had a level road along the fertile Medjerda River valley to the western environs of Tunis.
Of all the North African cities where art and intellect flourished, Tunis was premier during most of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Almohads had made it their provincial capital in the Eastern Maghrib, and it was under their patronage that it took on the physical and demographic dimensions of a major city, attaining a population of about 100,000 during peak periods of prosperity.8 The Hafsids, who started out as Almohad governors over Ifriqiya and subsequently represented themselves as the legitimate dynastic heirs of the empire, continued to rule from Tunis and to cultivate the city’s corps of scholars and craftsmen, much as the Marinids, equally driven to identify themselves with the Almohad model of civilized taste, were doing in Fez.
Like other Maghribi cities of that age, Tunis under the Hafsids built its splendid mosques and palaces, laid out its public gardens, and founded its colleges with wealth that came in large measure from long-distance trade. In the early fourteenth century Tunis was the busiest of the ports which lay along the economic frontier between the European seaborne trade of the Mediterranean and the Muslim caravan network of the African interior. The Ifriqiyan hinterland plain was narrow but rich enough to export a wide range of Maghribi products — wool, leather, hides, cloth, wax, olive oil, and grain. Tunis was also a consumer and transit market for goods from sub-Saharan Africa — gold, ivory, slaves, ostrich feathers. What gave the city its special prominence was its strategic position on the southern rim of the Sicilian Channel, which joined (and divided) the maritime complexes of the Western and Eastern Mediterranean. Tunis maintained close commercial ties with Egypt by way of Muslim coastal and overland trade and was well placed to serve as a major emporium for Christian merchants of the Western Mediterranean who found it a convenient place to buy exotic goods of the East without themselves venturing on the voyage to Egypt or the Levant.