The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century

by Ross E. Dunn

  When the royal ordu reached Astrakhan, it was learned that Princess Bayalun had received permission from her husband to return temporarily to Constantinople to give birth to a child in the palace of her father. As we should not be surprised to learn, Ibn Battuta immediately applied to the khan for authorization to go along. Here was an unexpected opportunity to venture beyond the Dar al-Islam for the first time in his career and to see one of the great cities of the world, renowned among Muslims for its spectacular setting, its fabulous bazaars, its splendid buildings, and the fact that it had held out against the relentless expansion of Islam over the previous 700 years. There was nothing extraordinary about a Muslim visiting Constantinople in the fourteenth century. Merchants and envoys from Turkish or Arab lands went there when business required it, and in the previous century the Emperor Michael VIII had sponsored reconstruction of a mosque in the heart of the city.14 A Muslim gentleman would not have been advised to wander overland through Christian territory as a purely private adventure, but he might do so in the train of an embassy from one ruler to another. At first Ozbeg refused the Moroccan’s request, fearing the risk.

  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, and when we took leave of him he presented me with 1,500 dinars, a robe, and a large number of horses, and each of the khatuns gave me ingots of silver . . . The sultan’s daughter gave me more than they did, along with a robe and a horse, and altogether I had a large collection of horses, robes, and furs of miniver and sable.

  On 10 Shawwal (5 July 1332 or 14 June 1334) the cavalcade set out westward across the hot flat prairie, crossing the Don and the Dnieper, then turning southward toward the delta of the Danube.15 Ibn Battuta was attended by a small following of companions and slaves, the Princess Bayalun by 5,000 horsemen under the command of an amir, 500 of her own troops and servants, 200 slave girls, 20 Greek and Indian pages, 400 wagons, 2,000 horses, and about 500 oxen and camels. The peasants and herdsmen who had the misfortune to live along the route were obliged (as such folk were in all the Mongol states) to supply this monstrous caravan with food, often to their destitution and ruin. After traveling some 52 days the company arrived at the fortress of Mahtuli on the frontier between Byzantium and the Christian kingdom of Bulgaria. The place is probably to be identified with the town of Jamboli (Yambol) in the southeastern interior of modern Bulgaria.16 Here the steppe wagons were exchanged for horses and mules, the Turkish amir and his troops turned back to the Volga, and the khatun continued on into the mountains of Thrace with her personal retinue. Ibn Battuta soon had plenty of evidence that he was entering an alien world:

  She left her mosque behind at this castle and the prescription of the call to prayer was discontinued. Wines were brought to her as part of her hospitality-gift, and she would drink them, and [not only so but even] swine . . . No one was left with her who observed the [Muslim] prayers except a certain Turk, who used to pray with us. Inner sentiments concealed [hitherto] suffered a change through our entry into the land of infidelity, but the khatun charged the amir Kifali to treat me honorably, and on one occasion he beat one of his mamluks when he laughed at our prayer.

  About three weeks after leaving Mahtuli the procession reached the landward walls of Constantinople.

  Ibn Battuta stayed in the city for more than a month. As a guest of the daughter of Andronicus III, he was given a robe of honor and awarded an interview with the emperor (who employed a Syrian Jewish interpreter and questioned him about the Christian shrines of Palestine). He wanted to see as much of the city as he could, and for this the emperor assigned him a Greek guide, who mounted him on a royal steed and paraded him through the streets in a noisy fanfare of trumpets and drums. He visited markets, monasteries, and the great church of Hagia Sophia (though he did not go inside because he would have had to prostrate himself before the cross). He traversed the Golden Horn, that is, the arm of the Bosphorus protecting the northern side of the city, in order to see the busy Genoese colony of Galata.

  He also had a brief promenade and conversation with a monk named George, whom he identifies as the ex-emperor Andronicus II. This little episode has confounded Byzantinists and scholars of the Rihla. Ibn Battuta reports accurately enough that in 1328 in the climax of a seven-year civil war Andronicus III forced his predecessor and grandfather to abdicate at the point of a sword. The hapless old man retired to a monastery. He died, however, in February 1332, and by no plausible rearranging of the Rihla’s itinerary could Ibn Battuta have visited Constantinople in time to see him alive. But since the story of his encounter with someone in the streets of the city has the ring of truth about it, we may fairly suppose that the palace guide failed to clarify the identity of the mysterious cleric or, worse yet, was having a bit of fun with his credulous Arab guest.17

  Ibn Battuta’s recollection of Constantinople is offered in a spirit of tolerance, objectivity, and indeed wonder. But taken by itself it would mislead us. The Byzantines thought of themselves as the heirs of Rome and the guardians of Hellenic culture, but by the fourteenth century all the ponderous grandeur of nobles and prelates amounted to a vast pretension, kept up behind the walls of the bastion-city while all around the empire was slowly crumbling to bits. Though Andronicus stayed the territorial shrinkage on the European side and presided over a time of considerable artistic and literary vitality (as is often the case in civilizations on the brink of destruction), Byzantium in the 1330s was a minor Greek state of southeastern Europe and little more. Its international trade had been abandoned to the Italians, its currency was almost worthless, its landlords were grinding the peasantry unmercifully, its army was an assemblage of alien mercenaries, and its Asian territories had been all but lost to the triumphant Turks. It was a state living on borrowed time and past glory. Ibn Battuta either senses little of this or, to his credit, refrains from twisting the knife. Could he have believed that 121 years after his visit the descendants of Orkhan would storm the massive walls and transform Hagia Sophia into a mosque?

  Though the historical record suggests that Bayalun eventually returned to her husband’s ordu,18 she made known to the Turks in her suite that she still professed Christianity and wished to remain with her father for an indefinite period. She granted her escorts permission to return home, and thus Ibn Battuta left with them, probably sometime in the autumn of 1332 (1334).19 After journeying back through Thrace and recovering his wagons at the Greek frontier, he rode north into the steppe just as the bitter Asian winter was setting in. He was soon barricading himself inside three fur coats, two pairs of trousers, two layers of heavy socks, and horseleather boots lined with bearskin.

  I used to perform my ablutions with hot water close to the fire, but not a drop of water fell without being frozen on the instant. When I washed my face, the water would run down my beard and freeze, then I would shake it and there would fall from it a kind a snow . . . I was unable to mount a horse because of the quantity of clothes I had on, so that my associates had to help me into the saddle.

  Reaching Astrakhan and finding that Ozbeg had returned to New Saray 225 miles up the Volga, the company turned northward in pursuit, riding along the frozen river as if it were a highway. They reached the capital probably in late November.20

  New Saray was a creation of the Pax Mongolica. Ozbeg may have undertaken its construction only about 1330, but Ibn Battuta found it “of boundless size” and “choked with its inhabitants.” He claims that he spent half a day walking across the breadth of the town and back again, “this too through a continuous line of houses, among which there were no ruins and no gardens.”21 It was a city of wood more than of stone, but he counted 13 congregational mosques and numerous smaller ones. Its complex of craft shops exported metal ware, leather, and woven silk and woolens. Its bazaars handled the Volga traffic in grain, furs, timber, and slaves, crisscrossed with the flow of the trans-Asian luxury caravans link
ing Persia and China with the Italian colonies on the Black Sea.

  Along with the silks, the decorated pottery, the mosaic tiles, and all the other goods by which civilized taste might be expressed on the Islamic frontier, there also arrived the little bands of scholars, mystics, and hopeful bureaucrats. Some of them came from Egypt, Bulghar, or Anatolia, most from the Irano–Turkish regions of northern Persia and Khwarizm. During his brief stay in the icy town, Ibn Battuta entered their circle and accepted their hospitality. One of the most eminent of the immigrants, an authority on medicine and former head of a hospital in Khwarizm, even gave him a Turkish slave boy as a gift.22 The Moroccan also presented himself at the royal residence to give a full report on his trip to Byzantium. We may wonder what Ozbeg’s reaction may have been to his wife’s decision to remain in Constantinople, but on this the Rihla is silent.

  Having proudly reached the northerly limit of his traveling career, Ibn Battuta left the Volga about mid December, determined, it would seem, to progress in the general direction of India. Over the ensuing eight months he made his way by an erratic and, to students of the Rihla, perplexing course to the valley of the Indus. For about the first five of those months he traveled in parts of Khwarizm, Transoxiana (Mawarannahr), and possibly Khurasan. Politically these regions fell among the Mongol realms of Kipchak, Persia, and Chagatay. Together, they embraced the immense arid zone extending from the northern Iranian plateau to the Altai Mountains and the Kazakh steppe, a land of sand deserts and barren, echoing plains. Not until his journey through the western Sahara 19 years later would he confront such menacing, indomitable territory.

  Yet Muslim civilization had pushed into this unsparing country much before his time. The two river systems of the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya (Jaxartes) bisected the desert and, like the Nile, supported dense agricultural populations and big towns along discontinuous ribbons of irrigated land. In the previous century the armies of Genghis had perfected their instruments of terror on the unfortunate peoples of Transoxiana and in the aftermath of the conquest civilization for a time nearly vanished. It is a tribute to the human spirit that the desert bloomed with markets and mosques so quickly again, and this despite the later invasion of Hulegu and a succession of mass destructions perpetrated in wars between the Persian Mongols and their cousins, the khans of Chagatay.

  Ibn Battuta passed through the region during a period of relative peace and prosperity. He found some of the towns he visited populous and flourishing. In Urgench (Urganj), provincial capital of the Golden Horde in Khwarizm and chief emporium of the fertile Amu Darya delta, he remembers that the bazaar was so crowded he could not get his horse through it and had to save his visit for a Friday, when most of the shops were closed. And this in a town which Genghis Khan had submerged entirely under water by opening a dam in the river. Bukhara, by contrast, once the most sophisticated city of all Transoxiana, was still struggling to revive after having been sacked, burned, and depopulated by Tatar armies in 1220, 1273, and 1316. “Its mosques, colleges, and bazaars are in ruins,” the Rihla reports, and “there is not one person in it today who possesses any religious learning or who shows any concern for acquiring it.” Balkh, oldest city of the Amu Darya valley and capital of the ancient Greco–Bactrian empire, Ibn Battuta found “completely delapidated and uninhabited.”

  Map 8: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Central Asia and Afghanistan, 1332–33 (1334–35)

  Mongol holocausts or no, Khurasan–Transoxiana remained to the landward commerce of Afro–Eurasia what the Arabian Sea was to the monsoon trade: the complex crossroads of trails connecting all the major agrarian regions of the hemisphere with one another. Most of the time, Ibn Battuta and his party kept to the main roads linking the principal cities, sometimes, perhaps almost always, in the company of commercial caravans. The wagons he had traveled with in the northern steppe were no longer suitable further south. Crossing the Ustyurt plateau between the Volga and Khwarizm, he accompanied a caravan of camel-drawn carts, but in Urgench he reverted to horses and to camels mounted with litters. When he left Khwarizm he was sharing a double litter with al-Tuzari. He also had 50 horses given to him by Princess Bayalun during the trip to Constantinople. These animals had been meant to supplement his food supply, but he preferred simply to add them to his growing store of personal wealth. He admits that after he arrived in Khwarizm he began to accumulate a greater number of horses than he dared mention. He even bought an unusually beautiful black steed with part of a gift of a thousand dinars that the Kipchak governor of the region gave him.

  Aside from horses, the traveler’s property included a retinue of slaves, though we can never be sure how many he had with him, male or female, at any particular time. When he left the Volga he was sharing his wagon with no fewer than three young women. While traveling near Bukhara, one of them gave birth to a baby girl. The new father believed that the child was born “under a lucky star” and that his fortunes improved from the moment of her birth. But, sadly, she died two months after he reached India.

  He scarcely mentions his male companions other than the ubiquitous and shadowy al-Tuzari. Travelers always banded together on the open road, especially in such dangerous and waterless parts of the earth as this, so we may suppose that the composition of the party changed from one town to the next. In New Saray he was joined by one ’Ali ibn Mansur, a sharif and merchant of Iraq who planned to go all the way to India. But in Urgench this gentleman met up with a party of traders from his native town, changed his mind, and went off with them in the direction of China. At Tirmidh on the upper Amu Darya, Ibn Battuta linked up with a Persian sharif and his two sons who were also on their way to look for employment in Delhi.

  He and this kaleidoscope of associates visited about 21 important towns on his zigzag course through Khwarizm, Transoxiana, Khurasan, and Afghanistan. Or so he claims. If he visited all the cities of Ilkhanid Khurasan that he mentions (Herat, Jam, Tus, Nishapur, Bistam, and others), his tour was rushed and distracted, evidenced in the Rihla in cursory descriptions and perfunctory recollections of experiences and encounters.23

  The most memorable event of these months was his meeting with ’Ala al-Din Tarmashirin, Khan of Chagatay (1326–3?). Ibn Battuta names him as one of the seven mighty kings of the world, though in most respects he was the least of the lot. Alughu, a grandson of Chagatay (the second son of Genghis), founded the khanate in the 1260s in the aftermath of the border wars and dynastic quarrels that split the conqueror’s world empire into four kingdoms. The realm of the House of Chagatay encompassed an enormous region of desert, steppe, and mountain extending from the Amu Darya and Afghanistan to beyond the Irtisch River deep in the recesses of nomadic Asia. This was the geographic heart of the Mongol empire, but it was also the region where agrarian resources were most limited, where towns were most widely scattered, and where Turko–Mongol captains perpetuated the harsh ways of their ancestors long after their kinsmen in China and Persia were living in palaces and dining with lawyers and sycophantic poets.

  Ibn Battuta celebrates Tarmashirin as “a man of great distinction” and “just in his government” because, like Ozbeg, he was the first of his dynasty to make Islam the official religion of state and only the second who would have paid much attention to an itinerant jurist from North Africa. Ibn Battuta stayed with the khan in his camp on the road southwest of Samarkand for 54 days in the cold late winter of 1333 (1335). When he left he was given 700 silver dinars, two camels, and a warm sable coat. Only later in India did he learn that perhaps within a few months of his departure from the ordu this khan “of vast kingdom and immense power” had been rudely overthrown by a treacherous nephew and a league of anti-Muslim commanders. The Moroccan had been lucky to see this tempestuous kingdom in a brief moment of unity under Islam, for in the aftermath of the rebellion civil war broke out and the realm was sheared in half, not to be reunited again.

  Ibn Battuta crossed the towering Hindu Kush, the great divide separating Inner Asia from the watershed of the
Indus, in the late spring of 1333 (1335).24 He might have chosen any of several high passes through the mountains. Merchants running caravans from Transoxiana to Afghanistan routed themselves through one pass or another depending on the reports of snow, rock slides, or bandits. After camping for a few weeks at Qunduz not far south of the upper Amu Darya in order to graze his horses and camels and await the warm weather, the faqih, his slaves, and his learned associates ascended the northern slope through the gorges of the Andarab River valley. He crossed the divide at the 13,000-foot Khawak Pass. “We crossed the mountain,” Ibn Battuta recalls, “setting out about the end of the night and traveling on it all day long until sunset. We kept spreading felt cloths in front of the camels for them to tread on, so that they should not sink in the snow.”

  Descending along the spectacular Panjshir Valley, the caravan passed through Charikar and onto the Kabul plain, where all the main mountain trails converged. At Ghazna Ibn Battuta and his friends were entertained by the Chagatay governor. Then, moving southwest-ward in the company of merchants driving 4,000 horses to market in India, they crossed the Sulayman Mountains by the main route through the Khyber Pass, or possibly by a more southerly road.25 Traversing a narrow gorge, they had a skirmish with a band of Afghan highwaymen, and later Ibn Battuta and some of his party became separated for a time from the main caravan. But these were minor adventures, and after a three- to four-month journey from the far side of the Hindu Kush, they rode into the Indus plain. Ibn Battuta tells us that he reached the great river on the first day of 734 A.H., or 12 September 1333.26