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

by Ross E. Dunn

  Learning from his Muslim host that the village they were in was only six or seven miles from Koil, Ibn Battuta immediately sent a message to his comrades. In a day or two a party of them arrived to collect their foot-weary ambassador, astonished and jubilant that he was still alive. He then learned that during his absence the sultan had sent an official named Sumbul to replace the dead Kafur and that the mission was to proceed on its way.

  I also learned that my companions had written to the sultan informing him what had befallen me and that they had regarded the journey as ill-omened on account of the fate which I and Kafur had met in the course of it and that they intended to return. But when I saw the sultan’s injunctions ordering us to prosecute the journey I pressed them to prosecute it and my resolution was made firm.

  Thus undaunted by his ordeal, he led his embassy on to Daulatabad without further incident. The caravan appears to have followed more or less the main government route to the erstwhile southern capital, a road fastidiously kept up to ensure rapid courier and military communication between Delhi and the Deccan. From the fortress city of Gwalior on the southern edge of the Ganges plain, the company trekked southwesterly across the Malwa plateau to Ujjain, the chief commercial entrepôt on the direct route from Delhi to Cambay. From there they crossed the Vindhya Hills, descending the steep southern scarp near Dhar to the Narmada River, the traditional historic dividing line between the cultural worlds of North India and the Deccan. South of the Narmada they crossed the wooded Satpura Range, probably by way of the Burhanpur Gap, the famous pass through which the armies of the Turks had repeatedly invaded South India. The last stretch of the journey took them from the Tapti River through the richly cultivated tableland of northern Maharashtra to Daulatabad.5

  There the mission was the guest of Qutlugh Khan. He had been Muhammad Tughluq’s governor of the Deccan provinces since 1335, commanding his territories from the spectacular citadel of Deogir set atop a granite, cone-shaped rock rising 800 feet above the surrounding plain. Defended by a perpendicular scarp 80 to 120 feet high on all sides, the castle could be reached only by passageways and staircases hewn out of the solid rock. An outer wall two and a half miles around enclosed the city of Daulatabad, which lay to the south and east of the keep. Despite its abandonment as the capital of the empire, the town appears from the Rihla’s brief description to have been prospering from trade and from the tax revenues of the densely populated Maharashtra countryside. Yet not much more than two years after Ibn Battuta’s visit, a band of army officers would rise in rebellion, seize the great fort, and in 1347 found another independent Muslim kingdom, the Bahmani. And so, as the Maghribi traveler made his way out of the Sultanate of Delhi, it progressively collapsed behind him.

  The embassy probably stayed in Daulatabad only a few days, then continued northwesterly through Maharashtra, across the Tapti and Narmada rivers again, and thence along the eastern lowland shore of the Gulf of Cambay into the region of Gujarat.

  The fair city of Cambay stood on the northern shore of the Mahi River estuary where it flows into the head of the gulf. Walking among the bazaars and imposing stone houses of the port, Ibn Battuta found himself for the first time in a decade in the familiar cultural world of the Arabian Sea. The sultanate had ruled Cambay since the early part of the century, but the soul of the city was more kindred to Muscat, Aden, or Mogadishu than to Daulatabad or Delhi. It was indeed one of the great emporia of the Indian Ocean. “Cambay is one of the most beautiful cities as regards the artistic architecture of its houses and the construction of its mosques,” Ibn Battuta recalls. “The reason is that the majority of its inhabitants are foreign merchants, who continually build there beautiful houses and wonderful mosques — an achievement in which they endeavor to surpass each other.” Many of these “foreign merchants” were transient visitors, men of South Arabian and Persian Gulf ports, who migrated in and out of Cambay with the rhythm of the monsoons. But others were men with Arab or Persian patronyms whose families had settled in the town generations, even centuries, earlier, intermarrying with Gujarati women and assimilating everyday customs of the Hindu hinterland. Ibn Battuta visited Cambay just at a time when these dark-skinned, white-shirted Gujarati traders were venturing abroad in increasing numbers, founding mercantile colonies as far away as Indonesia and creating a diaspora of commercial association that would continue on the ascendancy in the Indian Ocean until the time of the Portuguese.6

  The ambassador spent a few days in the town as the guest of the governor and some of the religious lights, then led his company back along the eastern shore of the gulf to the port of Gandhar (Qandahar) at the mouth of the Narmada. Owing to the shallowness of the upper gulf, Cambay could not accommodate sea-going ships, so it was normal practice for them to put in either at Gandhar or at another port, which lay directly across the gulf.7 Agents of the sultan had apparently made advance arrangements with the local ruler of Gandhar, a Hindu tributary, to provide the delegation with four ships for the voyage down the coast to Malabar. As usual Ibn Battuta has virtually nothing to tell us about the architecture of these vessels. Certainly they were all two-masted “dhows” with stitched hulls, the same general type of ships Ibn Battuta had sailed along the coasts of Africa and Arabia. Three of them were ordinary cargo ships, but large ones, since they had to have room for the Great Khan’s presents, including the 100 horses and 215 slaves and pages. The fourth vessel was a type of war galley. Ibn Battuta’s ship, one of the three merchantmen, carried a force of 100 soliders to defend the mission against the Hindu pirates who habitually lay in wait along the western coast. Fifty of the warriors were archers. The others were black spearmen and bowmen, representatives of a long tradition of African fighting men taking service on the larger trading ships of the Indian Ocean.8

  Embarking from Gandhar, the four ships put in briefly at two other gulf ports. Then, turning due south, the little fleet made for the Arabian Sea. If the time was about December, they ran briskly before the northeast monsoon under clear skies and a placid sea.

  When Ibn Battuta visited the East African coast more than a decade earlier, he had found a series of petty maritime principalities competing with one another for long-distance trade between the sea basin and the uplands of the interior. Along the west coast of India the political pattern was similar. From the southern frontier of Gujarat to Cape Comorin at the tip of the subcontinent, he counted twelve trading states strung out along the narrow coastal lowlands. The Turkish sultans may have claimed suzerainty over some of these little kingdoms, but the peaks and ridges of the Western Ghats, which ran the length of peninsular India 50 to 100 miles inland, effectively prevented Delhi from exerting direct authority on the coast south of Gujarat, excepting sporadic intervention in a few of the more northerly ports.9 From Delhi or Daulatabad, imperial cavalry could reach the northerly coast, called the Konkan, only by squeezing their way through rugged woodland passes usually guarded by belligerent Hindu chieftains. The great ports of Malabar, on the southerly shore, were more easily accessible from the interior but much too far from the centers of Turkish power to make sustained military pressure feasible. No doubt Muhammad Tughluq pined to conquer the coastal territories, but in fact the commercial needs of the empire were better served by leaving the sea towns to carry on their business in peace.

  The summer monsoons, blowing up against the Ghats, emptied heavy rains on the coastal lowlands, producing a lush tropical economy startlingly different from that of the interior plateaus. In medieval times the maritime towns exported rice, coconuts, gemstones, indigo and other dyes, and finished textiles. Among the spice exports, black pepper was king in the overseas trade. The forests of the steep western slopes of the Ghats, the only region of dense woodland anywhere around the rim of the Arabian Sea, produced the teakwood with which most of the oceanic trading ships were built. The major ports all had busy shipbuilding industries, and Indian teak was exported to the Persian Gulf, Arabia, and northeast Africa to meet the general needs of those wood-st
arved regions.

  The natural landfall for ships making the long hauls across the Arabian Sea or the Bay of Bengal was southwest India. The largest and richest west coast towns were in Malabar, partly because of their relatively broad agricultural hinterland, their pepper crop, and their links to the populous interior of South India, but also because they served as the main transshipment centers for goods moving between the western and eastern halves of the Indian Ocean. Trade from the China Seas westward across the Bay of Bengal was carried mainly in Chinese junks. These great ships were structurally capable of sailing safely from one end of the Indian Ocean to the other, but the normal pattern, at least until the early fifteenth century, was for them to go only as far west as Malabar. There, goods in transshipment were carried in lateen-rigged vessels to all the countries of the Arabian Sea. Thus Malabar was the hinge on which turned the inter-regional seaborne trade of virtually the entire Eastern Hemisphere.

  Almost all the transit trade of the west coast (as well as that of both Ceylon and the southeastern coast of India, called Coromandel) was in the hands of Muslims. The rulers of nearly all the maritime states, however, were Malayalam- or Tamil-speaking Hindus. The populations of the hinterlands were Hindu as well, or, in the case of Ceylon, Buddhist. Arab and Persian merchants had been settling on those shores since Abbasid times, but by the later medieval period most west coast Muslims were racially Indian, notwithstanding some cherished strain linking them to the prestigious Arabo–Persian center. Moreover, the culture of the towns, like the ports of East Africa, represented a complex, long-simmering synthesizing of native and alien elements, that is, traits and practices responsive to the requirements of the Sacred Law inter-penetrating with local Hindu customs, styles, dress, and cuisine. The Hindu rajas of the coastal states left their Muslim subjects to worship as they wished, indeed encouraged it, since the rulers’ power and wealth depended almost entirely on customs revenues and the profits of their personal transactions in the maritime trade. We may suppose that the government of these cities was nothing less than a working partnership between the rajas and the leading Muslim merchants.

  For three days out of the Gulf of Cambay Ibn Battuta’s four ships made good speed along the Konkan coast, the dark green wall and sheared-off summits of the Western Ghats looming off the port beam. Bypassing Chaul, Sandapur (Goa), and other busy ports which lay on little bays or the estuaries of rivers flowing from the mountains, the fleet finally put in at Honavar (Hinawr), a town on the stretch of coast known as North Kanara.

  In the fourteenth century Honavar was a thriving port with a typical Indo–Muslim coastal culture, its children, according to Ibn Battuta, dutifully attending a choice of 36 Qur’anic schools, its Muslim women wearing colorful saris and golden rings in their nostrils. Jamal al-Din Muhammad, the ruler of the town, was, exceptionally enough, a Muslim, though under vassalage to the Hindu king of the Hoysalas state, whose center was in the interior.10 Ibn Battuta describes Jamal al-Din as one of “the best and most powerful rulers” on the coast, possessing a fleet of ships and a force of cavalry and infantry so impressive that he could command annual tribute from the ports of the West India coast as “protection” against seaborne attack. In the three short days the mission rested up in Honavar and restocked the ships, Jamal al-Din fêted his distinguished visitor in all the correct and predictable ways and introduced him to the local notables. But more than that, a friendship of sorts seems to have been sparked between the two men. At least it was a relationship Ibn Battuta would be eager to draw on a few months later when he returned to the town under drastically different circumstances.

  South of Honavar along the Kanara and Malabar coasts, the towns became progressively larger and more affluent. This was black pepper country and the land where the commercial dominions of the dhow and the junk made their crucial connection. Perhaps because the sailing season to China was still a few months off and the urban scene along the south Kanara and Malabar shores notably worth investigating, the embassy cast anchor and enjoyed the local hospitality at eight different ports, including Mangalore (Manjurur) and Cannanore (Jurfattan).11

  Then, about three weeks out of Honavar, the little convoy arrived off Calicut to a warm official reception. The dignitaries of the city, both Muslim and Hindu, came out to meet the mission, Ibn Battuta says, with “drums, trumpets, horns, and flags on their ships. We entered the harbor amid great ovation and pomp, the like of which I have not seen in these parts.” The ambassador and his associates were given houses as guests of the zamorin, or prince, of Calicut and settled in for three months of leisure, since no ships would embark for East Asia until March, that is, near the end of the northeast monsoon season.12 In the meantime the zamorin made advance arrangements for the delegation to travel to China on a large ocean-going junk and one smaller vessel (or possibly more) that would accompany it. The Chinese envoys, who had been travelling with Ibn Battuta up to this point, were to make plans to return home on a separate ship.

  Ibn Battuta saw 13 junks wintering at Calicut, their corpulent hulls and multiple soaring masts dwarfing even the largest lateen-rigged vessels in the harbor. These were the ocean liners of the medieval age, artifacts of the great technological leap forward achieved in China between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Not only Ibn Battuta, but other travelers of the time, including Marco Polo, made clear their preference for sailing on junks over the creaky, sewn-together ships of the Arabian Sea. The shell of a junk was built of double-superimposed timbers attached with iron nails to several transverse bulkheads, dividing the hull into a series of watertight compartments that prevented the ship from sinking even if it were pierced below the water line in more than one place. A large junk might step five masts or more. The lug-type fore-and-aft sails were aerodynamically more efficient and far easier to maneuver than the lateen type. They were made of bamboo matting stiffened with battens, or laths, which gave them their characteristic ribbed appearance. Unlike lateen sails, they could be reefed and furled with ease by means of a complex arrangement of sheets. The tautness, variety, and adjustability of the sails permitted a junk to make headway under almost any wind condition. Medieval junks were all equipped with stern rudders, the efficient way of steering a ship that was becoming known in the Mediterranean world only near the end of the thirteenth century.

  Ibn Battuta was so impressed with Chinese ships that he even rouses himself in the Rihla to offer a word or two about their nautical design. He was most interested, naturally, in the comforts they offered traveling notables like himself. The dhows of the western sea were only partially decked or not decked at all, and if some vessels had a rudimentary cabin or two, most of the passengers were expected to brave the elements the whole time they were at sea. Owing to bulkhead construction, which distributed weight evenly on the hull, ocean-going junks could support as many as five decks, as well as numerous enclosed cabins for the convenience of the more affluent passengers. Some of the rooms even had private lavatories, a convenience far superior to the little seat hooked over the side of a dhow. Fire-fighting equipment, steward service, lifeboats, and common rooms for the passengers added to the comfort and safety of a voyage across the eastern sea. Ibn Battuta, man of private pleasures that he was, informs us that

  a good cabin has a door which can be bolted by the occupant, who may take with him his female slaves and women. Sometimes it so happens that a passenger is in the aforesaid residential quarters and nobody on board knows of him until he is met on arriving at a town.

  He also claims that the crew of a sizable junk might number 1,000 men, counting both sailors and fighting marines. He may exaggerate, but within tolerable limits since Odoric of Pordenone, the Latin monk who traveled through South Asia earlier in the century, reports that he sailed out of Malabar on a junk with “seven hundred souls, what with sailors and merchants.”13 Ibn Battuta says that in his time junks were built exclusively in the southern Chinese ports of Guangzhou (Canton) or Quanzhou (Zaitun). Owing to the Yuan policy of en
couraging foreign participation in the sea trade, however, the owners and captains of the ships, as well as the big merchants, were more often than not Muslims of Indian, Arab, or Persian descent.

  Astonishing as they were in cargo capacity and technical efficiency, these “whales” of the sea, as the Chinese called them, could be simply too big and too rigid for their own safety if they chanced to blow into shallows or reef-infested waters. There was some truth in Ibn Battuta’s remark that “if a ship nailed together with iron nails collides with rocks, it would surely be wrecked; but a ship whose beams are sewn together with ropes is made wet and is not shattered.”

  And so he discovered as his grand embassy to China was suddenly aborted in tragedy off Calicut harbor. What exactly happened the Rihla does not make entirely clear. As the day for the mission to embark arrived, probably sometime in Feburary 1342,14 a minor difficulty arose over accommodations. Chinese merchants, it seems, had reserved in advance all the best cabins on the large junk the embassy was to board, and the Sultan of India’s ambassador was going to have to settle for a more modest room, one with no lavatory. Ibn Battuta had his luggage and entourage put aboard but then decided the following morning that the cabin was simply unsuitable and far too small. The ship’s agent, a Syrian gentleman, suggested that the best solution might be for the envoy and his personal retinue to travel on the kakam. This was a somewhat smaller junk-type vessel that would accompany the larger ship, but it had good cabins available.15 Ibn Battuta thought this compromise was all right and so ordered his servants, concubines, personal friends, and belongings to be transferred. However, Zahir al-Din and Sumbul, the other officers of the mission, remained on the larger vessel along with the slaves, horses, and presents destined for Peking. Meanwhile Ibn Battuta spent the day in Calicut attending Friday prayer.