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

by Ross E. Dunn

  No one, however, was to be permitted to proceed to Delhi on pretense of seeking official employment unless he planned to stay permanently. Ibn Battuta was interviewed again: was he serious in his intentions to serve the sultanate? He answered with conviction, and we have no reason to doubt that at this point in his career he was expecting a long residence in India. Nonetheless, his intentions had to be put in writing. “When I told them that I had come to stay they summoned the qadi and notaries and drew up a contract binding me and those of my company who wished to remain in India, but,” he adds, “some of them refused this engagement.”

  As another sign of his commitment, he had taken the trouble either in Afghanistan or the Punjab to buy a selection of suitable gifts to present to the emperor at the critical moment of his first audience. His purchases included a load of arrows, several camels, more than thirty horses, and, he recalls vaguely, “white slaves and other goods.” The financing of these expensive presents reflected rather ominously on the climate of brash opportunism prevailing in Delhi. It was customary, everyone knew, for Muhammad Tughluq to respond to honorable visitors with gratuities of far larger value, making the symbolic point that he, and no one else, was the wellspring of all good things. Speculating on the likelihood of such unequal exchanges, men with capital advanced funds to newcomers to buy gifts with the promise of a handsome return out of the value of the sultan’s reciprocation. Always quick to grasp the local custom, Ibn Battuta took a loan from a Multani entrepreneur to buy part of what he needed. He notes in the Rihla that when he later paid the man back, “he made an enormous profit through me and became one of the principal merchants.”

  Leaving Multan probably some time in the late winter of 1334, Ibn Battuta and the other foreign gentlemen followed the chamberlain and his government retinue along the main military and commercial road leading eastward from the Indus watershed to the valley of the upper Ganges. The route ran the breadth of the high Punjab plain, where dense rice-growing settlements lay along the tributary system that spread like the fingers of many hands to the northeast of the Indus.11 Ibn Battuta was leading a group of about 40 companions, servants, and slaves. They were, we may assume, mainly the same people who had accompanied him through Afghanistan, including the Egyptian friend al-Tuzari and the young slave woman with the infant daughter she had borne her master in the camp of Tarmashirin Khan.12 Qadi Qiwam al-Din and his entourage, however, were all the center of official attention. Twenty cooks were even hired to go ahead of the main party each day, set up the evening camp, and greet the judge with a hot meal as soon as he arrived.

  The chamberlain might have been advised to take on fewer cooks and a larger body of soldiers to protect his guests. On the morning the caravan left the town of Abohar, Ibn Battuta and 21 others lagged behind in the place for several hours. Finally setting out about midday to catch up with the main group, they were suddenly attacked by 82 Hindu bandits. Only two of the assailants had the advantage of being on horseback, but it was a close call nonetheless.

  My companions were men of courage and vigor and we fought stoutly with them, killing one of their horsemen and about twelve of the footsoldiers, and capturing the horse of the former. I was hit by an arrow and my horse by another, but God in His grace preserved me from them, for there is no force in their arrows.

  Apparently no force at all, for Ibn Battuta and his friends were certainly not dressed in armor plate. The bandits were soon driven off, and to celebrate victory in the fashion of the time the heads of the 13 slain were cut off, carried to that evening’s stopping place, and suspended from the walls of a government fort. The incident was the young visitor’s first experience with the limits of imperial power among the rural Hindu population, even near the trunk roads of the sultanate. In his next brush with native insurgents some seven and a half years later, he would not be so lucky.

  Ibn Battuta’s first impression of Delhi might be clearer to us if he did not describe it in one part of the Rihla as “a vast and magnificent city . . . the largest city in India, nay rather the largest of all the cities of Islam in the East” and in another part as “empty and unpopulated save for a few inhabitants.” The contradiction probably reflects the ’ulama’s disapproval, which Ibn Battuta shared, of Sultan Muhammad’s decision in 1327 to move them to Daulatabad, his new capital in the dreary Deccan. Over about two years large numbers of officials, courtiers, and artisans did relocate. When Ibn Battuta arrived some time in the spring of 1334, part of the intelligentsia was still in Daulatabad. When he tells us the city was “empty and unpopulated”, he was probably thinking only of the people that mattered, like a bored social climber at a crowded cocktail party who recalls that “nobody was there.” In fact the large lower-class Hindu population of Delhi likely never went anywhere, excepting servants and employees of the state. Indeed about the same time that the sultan imposed his Daulatabad policy he also started building Jahanpanah, his new walled urban complex and palace a few miles northeast of old Delhi. Moreover, by the early 1330s he was giving up his dream of a capital in the center of his empire and permitting groups of unhappy exiles to return north if they wished. There seems little doubt that the city Ibn Battuta saw was in fact the largest in India and growing rapidly to serve the insatiable needs of the governing class.13

  When he arrived there, the sultan was absent in the Doab region southeast of Delhi. A tax revolt had erupted among the much-burdened peasantry, and Muhammad had been obliged to lead an army out from the capital to crush it. Nevertheless Ibn Battuta and his party went immediately to the new palace in Jahanpanah. There, in the huge wooden-roofed audience chamber called the Hall of a Thousand Pillars (Hazar Sutun), they paid their respects to Khwaja Jahan, the sultan’s vizier. They also presented gifts at the palace residence of al-Makhdumah Jahan (the sultan’s blind mother), ate a ceremonial meal, and accepted silk robes and other token gratuities befitting their status. At a second audience on the following day the vizier gave Ibn Battuta 2,000 silver dinars to “wash his head,” a symbolic gift of welcome proportioned in amount to the visitor’s importance. A comfortably furnished house awaited him and his personal retinue in Kil’a Ray Pithora, the ancient Delhi of sandstone buildings and narrow streets clustered around the Quwwat al-Islam and its lofty minaret. In this house he would live during the next several years, passing many hours, we may presume, in the courts and domed arcades of the great mosque.

  Until Muhammad Tughluq returned to Delhi, Ibn Battuta had no official appointment. However, the sultan was receiving regular reports on all the foreigners arriving in the capital in his absence. He sent orders to the vizier to give the new man, who had not yet lifted a finger in service to the state, an annual stipend of 5,000 silver dinars to be paid from the revenue of two and a half villages located about 16 miles north of the city.14 It was customary for state officials, army officers, and special honorees of the sultan to be paid regular allowances from taxes on crops produced in peasant villages rather than directly from the royal treasury. In the areas of North India where the authority of the sultanate was firm, the thousands of rural hamlets were registered, grouped in units of one hundred, and administered at the local level by petty Hindu or Muslim functionaries under the authority of the provincial governors. Grants of revenue from these villages could be awarded, withdrawn, or transferred at the pleasure of the sultan, and they carried no hereditary rights. The grantee did not have to live on his estate (and normally did not) nor take responsibility for the governing of its inhabitants, a task the state assumed directly. The poor farmers who toiled to produce this income had, of course, nothing to say about these arrangements.

  Unknown faqih that he was, Ibn Battuta’s initial emolument did not amount to much by comparison with the revenue estates of the established elite. Nonetheless, while awaiting the emperor’s return during the late spring of 1334, he took the trouble to ride out to the North Indian plain to inspect his two and a half villages. The Hindu country folk inhabiting these wretched clusters of mud wall a
nd thatch held no fascination for him. He says nothing in the Rihla about the look of the hamlets or their residents, and he probably never bothered to visit them more than once.

  Then on 8 June word came that Muhammad Tughluq was camped at a castle just seven miles from the city. On the vizier’s orders, Ibn Battuta and the other newcomers went immediately out to the fort to greet the ruler with their gifts of obeisance. In order of their professional eminence each suppliant entered the audience room and was presented to the Master of the World, a tall, robust, white-skinned man seated, his legs tucked beneath him, on a gold-plated throne.15 This was the critical moment, for the emperor’s first reaction to a man could mean the difference between future riches and total, immediate ostracism from the royal court.

  I approached the sultan, who took my hand and shook it, and continuing to hold it addressed me most affably, saying in Persian “This is a blessing; your arrival is blessed; be at ease, I shall be compassionate to you and give you such favors that your fellow-countrymen will hear of it and come to join you.” Then he asked me where I came from and I said to him “From the land of the Maghrib” . . . Every time he said any encouraging word to me I kissed his hand, until I had kissed it seven times, and after he had given me a robe of honor I withdrew.

  Thus Ibn Battuta jumped the first hurdle into the circle of privilege. The next day he joined the triumphal entry into Delhi, a spectacular cavalcade of festooned elephants and cavalry, Hindu infantry columns, and singing girls. Muhammad Tughluq, the crusher of insurgent peasants, was now the benefactor to his people in the most extravagant tradition of a Hindu king:

  On some of the elephants there were mounted small military catapults, and when the sultan came near the city parcels of gold and silver coins mixed together were thrown from these machines. The men on foot in front of the sultan and the other persons present scrambled for the money, and they kept on scattering it until the procession reached the palace.

  Shortly after these events two court officials paid a visit to Ibn Battuta and some of his associates to tell them the emperor was ready to make appointments to various government and religious posts: ministers, secretaries, commanders, judges, and madrasa teachers. “Everyone was silent at first,” Ibn Battuta remembers, “for what they were wanting was to gain riches and return to their countries.” He for one was ready to come forward, declaring that he was descended from a long line of legal scholars and that he would be pleased to serve in some juridical capacity.

  Forthwith he and several other notables were led to the Hall of a Thousand Pillars, where Sultan Muhammad awarded him the important office of qadi of Delhi. The emperor controlled all appointments to the judiciary, which constituted a branch of government separate from the political administration. Ibn Battuta would serve under the qadi al-qudat, or Chief Judge of the realm. Moreover, in a city as large as Delhi he was probably only one of several judges holding comparable positions.16 His compensation was to be two villages in addition to the ones he already had, carrying a total annual salary of 12,000 silver dinars. He also received 12,000 dinars in cash as an advance bonus, a horse with saddle and bridle, and yet another robe of honor. Such an income was not nearly as large as that of other, more prominent appointees. The average Hindu family, however, lived on about 5 dinars a month; a solider in the royal army was paid 19½.17 Compared to ordinary folk of Hindustan, the obscure Moroccan faqih was about to become a very rich man.

  After several years of enjoying the favor of numerous kings and princes purely on the strength of his social status, earnest piety, and bright personality, Ibn Battuta was now walking into circumstances far more promising than anything he had known before. Muhammad Tughluq’s policy was to pack his government with foreign professionals on whose personal loyalty he thought he could rely. Alien origin had become a more important criterion for office than distinction and experience. Only such circumstances can explain this stranger from the Far West of Islam being handed a magistracy whose responsibilities should have put him way out of his depth. Since leaving Morocco, he had spent hardly any time in sustained study of the law, excepting his brief sojourn in Damascus and his months in Mecca. He had had virtually no experience as a jurisconsult or sitting judge. Persian was the language of administrative and legal affairs in the sultanate, yet he did not, as he pointed out to his new master, speak it well at all. He also admitted that, as a Maghribi, he was trained in the Maliki madhhab, whereas almost all shari’a decisions in India were founded on the Hanafi school. Very few people from Maliki countries lived in India, so there could hardly be much work to do. The sultan dismissed all these objections and appointed two Persian-speaking Hanafi scholars to serve as his “substitutes.” Their job was presumably to do the day-to-day work of hearing cases of religious infraction or civil disputes among Muslims, the normal responsibilities of a qadi. “They will be guided by your advice,” the emperor charged his new magistrate, “and you will be the one who signs all the documents.”

  Ibn Battuta’s appointment to what can only be characterized as a sinecure18 supports the complaint of contemporary critics that the official ’ulama of the sultanate, comprising both the judiciary and the various state ministries, were on the whole a mediocre, self-interested, and acutely insecure group of men, more so than in other Muslim states of the time, and more so under Muhammad Tughluq than his predecessors. The emperor’s method of governing was to mobilize the skills and energies of the learned classes in the interests of his personal despotism. He demanded that the ’ulama endorse his every scheme. He even routed the most saintly, apolitical Sufis out of their lodges, dispersing them to the provinces to propagate the faith under his personal orders. Though publicly he showed respect for the shari’a and the legal scholars (on a few occasions submitting with symbolic humility to a qadi’s unfavorable judgment in a case against the state), he curtailed the independence of his judges and controlled their legal opinions more closely than did other Muslim rulers of the time.

  Among officers of state, the sultan’s energy, wilfulness, and fabulous generosity invited toadyism and corruption. On the other hand, the ’ulama, though not as a group highly distinguished, leaned to rigidity and ultra-conservatism in their Sunni orthodoxy, an attitude brought on partly by Islam’s precarious dominance in an overwhelmingly infidel land. Consequently, the sultan’s continuing flirtations with unacceptable, even pagan, philosophies, his strange reform ideas, and finally his failure to hold on to all the territory won for the faith in South India produced a swell of outrage, private mutterings, and secret resistance. Muhammad was undeterred. “My remedy for rebels, opponents, disobedient persons and evil-wishers is the sword,” he says in a hypothetical conversation with the chronicler Barani. “I will continue punishing and striking with my sword till it either cuts or misses. The more the people oppose me, the greater will be my punishments.”19 Ibn Battuta indeed bears witness to a desperate crescendo of brutality far worse than anything he had seen in other lands.

  In spite of all that we have related of his humility, his sense of fairness, his compassion for the needy, and his extraordinary liberality, the sultan was far too free in shedding blood . . . [He] used to punish small faults and great, without respect of persons, whether men of learning or piety or noble descent. Every day there are brought to the audience-hall hundreds of people, chained, pinioned, and fettered, and those who are for execution are executed, those for torture tortured, and those for beating beaten.

  Open-hearted, eager to please, and far too gregarious for his own good, the young qadi soon found himself enmeshed in the morbid, dangerous politics of the imperial court. The sultan remained in Delhi only about seven months — from June 1334 to the following January. During this period neither Ibn Battuta nor his two “substitutes” got around to hearing any legal cases. Rather he occupied his time attending at court or accompanying his master on the great gaudy hunting expeditions for which all Turkish and Mongol warrior kings were known. These colossal promenades in the Delhi hinterl
and required the participation of almost the entire ruling establishment. Courtiers and high officials were expected to purchase their own outing equipment, as it were, in diminutive imitation of the sultan’s splendid encampment. Like everyone worthy of esteem, Ibn Battuta felt obliged to buy a large tent with a white fabric enclosure, together with food, utensils, clothing, carpets, animals, and a corps of servants sufficient to haul and supervise all this matériel. A team of eight men had to be hired to carry the dula, or decorated palanquin, in which a notable rode when not preferring his horse or elephant. In the Rihla Ibn Battuta makes much of the “vigor and energy” he showed in always being ready to leave Delhi the same day the sultan did and how he was honored during these excursions with invitations to sit or ride in close proximity to the Shadow of God.

  Keeping up with the ruling class of India, however, was frighteningly expensive. Like the Turko–Mongol states, the sultanate was an extremely personal system of power. Bonds of loyalty and respect between social groups were maintained through a chain of favor starting with the sultan and extending downward through the political ranks to the lowliest servant. What the ruler expended in gifts and stipends his officeholders were expected to give back in future presents to him or redistribute to their own servants, clients, and suppliers. This medieval version of “trickle down theory” kept the political system reasonably stable, but it also put tremendous pressure on men of position to spend freely. Spectacular donations and purchases strengthened a man’s authority over those below him and his prestige among those above. Caution and frugality invited scorn. Any temptation to invest in long-term capital enterprise or save for a rainy day was easily resisted, for the state could part a man from his riches with devastating suddenness. Everyone in the elite circles, and especially the governors and senior military officers, were thus encouraged to compete feverishly with one another in stupendous, ceaseless spending. “If one of the nobles bestowed fifty horses in his wine party and gave robes to two hundred persons,” says Barani, “another noble hearing this would feel jealous, and would try to give away a hundred horses and to bestow robes on five hundred persons.”20