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

by Ross E. Dunn

  In the meantime the drama of the Marinid kings had come to its denouement in the triumph of Abu ’Inan. Late in 1349 Abu l’Hasan had abandoned Tunis and returned to Morocco, determined to reckon with his mutinous son. Reaching Marrakech with a small force of exhausted followers, he had attempted to erect a rival government. But in May 1350 Abu ’Inan defeated his forces outside the city, then pursued him southward into a valley of the High Atlas. Trapped and powerless, the old sultan held out through the ensuing winter, then made formal abdication in favor of his son. When he died of illness and despair in his mountain refuge later in the spring of 1351, Abu ’Inan carried his body to the city of Rabat and had it buried with all the honors of state in the royal necropolis of the dynasty.

  These events occurred while Ibn Battuta was traveling about Spain and northern Morocco. When he arrived in Fez the second time, probably in the early fall of 1351, Abu ’Inan was ruling unrivaled a tranquil Morocco, plotting a new invasion of the eastern Maghrib, and busily constructing the grandest madrasa Fez had yet seen. It was an auspicious moment for Ibn Battuta to settle down, enter the Maliki judiciary, and reflect on his years abroad. Yet there were a few Muslim kings he still had not seen, among them Mansa Sulayman, Emperor of Mali, whose capital lay due south 1,500 miles across the most fearsome wilderness on earth.

  Notes

  1. Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, 2nd edn., trans. F. Rosenthal, 3 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1967), vol. 1, p. 64.

  2. IB’s reckoning of time spent between Quanzhou and Quilon either at sea or in the port of Samudra adds up to 222 days, or almost seven and a half months. Yet if he left China at the start of the fall monsoon in September and arrived at Quilon, as he states in Ramadan 747 (the month began on 16 December 1346), the trip took no longer than about four and a half months. It was indeed feasible, as Arab seamen had demonstrated in Abbasid times, to sail from the South China coast to Malabar in a single monsoon season. George Hourani, Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times (Princeton, N.J., 1951), p. 75. We must assume either that IB failed accurately to remember time spent between stages of the journey or possibly that part of the text is a later addition. IB’s description of his voyage from Quanzhou to Samudra includes an oddly vague report of his ship being lost at sea for 42 days and an uncharacteristically credulous account of a close call with a rukhkh, a creature described in legend as a giant, predatory bird. Henry Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither, 4 vols. (London, 1913–16). vol. 4, p. 146.

  3. In the Rihla IB links the civil war in Hurmuz and his meeting there with Sultan Qutb al-Din Tahamtan with his brief visit there in 1329 (1331). These events clearly occurred, however, in 1347. Jean Aubin, “Les Princes d’Ormuz du XIIIe au XVe siècle,” Journal Asiatique 241 (1953): 102–08; Hr, pp. 447–48; Gb, vol. 2, pp. 402–03. See also Chapter 6, note 41.

  4. He says that he stayed in Damascus until the end of 748 A.H. The last day of that year was 31 March 1348. The precise itinerary of IB’s travels through greater Syria at this time is uncertain. Altogether, he traveled through some parts of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine at least four different times during his career, in 1326, 1330 (1332), 1348, and 1350. The descriptions of numerous cities, towns, and castles he claims to have visited, however, are largely grouped into the account of his 1326 journey, whose chronology does not admit of such an extended, complicated tour. See Chapter 3, note 26. Therefore, a confident sorting out of the several itineraries through this region is hardly possible. The several dates he gives for his travels in Syria, Egypt, and Arabia in 1348 (748–749 A.H.), however, are generally corroborated by independent contemporary reports on the spatial transmission of the Black Death.

  5. Gb, vol. 1, pp. 143–44.

  6. Michael W. Dols, The Black Death in the Middle East (Princeton, N.J., 1977), p. 69.

  7. Ibid., pp. 215, 219.

  8. Ibid., pp. 238 and 236–54 passim.

  9. Ibid., p. 96.

  10. Ibid., pp. 154, 155, 160, 161.

  11. Ibn al-Furat quoted in ibid., p. 277.

  12. Ibid., p. 173.

  13. David Ayalon, “The Plague and its Effects upon the Mamluk Army,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1946): 67–73; and Dols, Black Death, pp. 185–92.

  14. Dols, Black Death, p. 161.

  15. Ibid., p. 63.

  16. D&S, vol. 4, p. 326.

  17. Quoted in Dols, Black Death, p. 64.

  18. IB does not mention the name of the port he visited, but there is no real doubt that it was Cagliari. Monteil shares this opinion. D&S, vol. 4, p. 481.

  19. IB says that he reached Fez on a Friday near the end of Sha’ban 750. D&S calculate this date as 8 November 1349. The last Friday in Sha’ban of that year, however, was 6 November.

  20. Chronological clues regarding the length of his subsequent visit to Ceuta and the date of his departure for Spain suggest that if he was in Fez in Sha’ban 750, as he says, he probably went on to Tangier early in the following month of Ramadan.

  21. Derek Latham, “The Strategic Position and Defence of Ceuta in the Later Muslim Period,” Islamic Quarterly 15 (1971): 195.

  22. IB states that he reached Gibraltar shortly after the death of Alfonso XI. That event occurred on 26 March 1350.

  23. Robert S. Gottfried, The Black Death (New York, 1983), p. 51.

  24. Rachel Arié, L’Espagne musulmane au temps des Nasrides, 1232–1492 (Paris, 1973), p. 339.

  25. Derek W. Lomax, The Reconquest of Spain (London, 1978), p. 162.

  26. Washington Irving, The Alhambra (New York, 1926), p. 71.

  27. “Ibn Djuzayy,” EI2, vol. 3, p. 756.

  28. IB offers no specific dates for the period between his arrival in Fez in November 1349 and his departure from southern Morocco to West Africa on 18 February 1352. Therefore, the chronology of his movements from city to city in Andalusia and Morocco during that period is indeterminate.

  13 Mali

  The people of Mali outnumbered the peoples of the Sudan in their neighborhood and dominated the whole region . . . Their authority became mighty and all the peoples of the Sudan stood in awe of them.1

  Ibn Khaldun

  When Ibn Battuta visited Cairo in 1326 on his way to his first hajj, the population was undoubtedly still talking about the extraordinary pilgrim who had passed through the city two years earlier. Mansa Musa, ruler of the West African empire of Mali, had arrived at the Nile in the summer of 1324 after having crossed the Sahara Desert with a retinue of officials, wives, soldiers, and slaves numbering in the thousands and a train of one hundred camels loaded with unworked gold. A handsome young king of piety and noble bearing, he had created a minor sensation among Cairo’s protocol-conscious officials by refusing to kiss the ground before the Mamluk sultan, al-Nasir Muhammad. Yet he “flooded Cairo with his benefactions,” writes the historian al-Umari, and “performed many acts of charity and kindness.”2

  Having come so far from their distant grassland kingdom, the emperor and his gold-heavy entourage spent freely and indiscriminately in the Cairo bazaars, like prosperous and naive tourists from some American prairie state. “The Cairenes,” says al-Umari, “made incalculable profits out of him and his suite in buying and selling and giving and taking. They exchanged gold until they depressed its value in Egypt and caused its price to fall.”3

  Musa was not the first mansa (king, sultan) of Mali to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, but none before had made such a dazzling display of pomp and riches. Well into the next century Egyptian chroniclers wrote about the event and its disturbing short-term effects on the Cairene gold market. In the history of medieval West Africa no single incident has been more celebrated. Indeed the hajj of Mansa Musa sums up Mali’s important place among the kingdoms of Africa and Asia in Ibn Battuta’s time.

  The unworked gold which the mansa showered on Cairo came from three major alluvial deposits in West Africa. The mines of the bilad al-sudan, or simply the Sudan, as the Arab geographers called the steppe and savanna region south of the Sahara,
had been known to the Mediterranean world since Phoenician times. But it was only the introduction of the dromedary to North Africa about the second century A.D. that made feasible in terms of costs and risks regular caravan trade from one rim of the Western Sahara to the other. The one-humped camel is a difficult and disagreeable animal, but he could carry a load of 125–150 kilograms, go without water ten days or more, and travel faster than any other available beast of burden. When Islam reached the Western Maghrib in the seventh century, Berber-speaking merchants were already running camel caravans to commercial settlements on the far side of the desert.

  The founding of the Arab Empire and later the High Caliphate created an ever-growing demand in the Islamic heartland for West African gold to make coins and finery. This demand impelled Muslim merchants and cameliers of the Maghrib and the North Sahara to organize trans-desert business and transport operations to an unprecedented level of sophistication. About the same time, the Kingdom of Ghana emerged in the steppe region of West Africa known as the Sahel (Sahal), the transitional climatic zone between the southern desert and the savanna lands. The appearance of Ghana as an imperial state was undoubtedly linked to the gold trade, which encouraged the rise of military leaders aggressive enough to seize monopolistic authority over the commercial routes and settlements leading from the gold fields deep in the Sudan to the “ports” at the edge of the desert where the North African caravans arrived. The empire declined in the eleventh century, perhaps in connection with a prolonged drought, and eventually withered away.

  Yet the pattern of imperial state-building in the Sudan continued with the rise of Mali early in the thirteenth century. The founders of this kingdom were Malinke-speaking people whose homeland was the region between the upper valleys of the Senegal and the Niger Rivers. This region was in the heart of the savanna and much nearer to the two gold-bearing areas, known as Bambuk and Bure, than the center of Ghana had been. The early kings of Mali, members of a chiefly clan of the Malinke known as the Keita, succeeded in taking control of territory between the gold fields and the Sahel, thereby positioning themselves to exact tribute in gold from the producing populations. In this way the cycle of expansion began. The gold revenues of the mansas permitted heavier expenditures on the army, which was comprised mainly of infantry bowmen and armored cavalry. As the royal forces were deployed across the fertile grasslands both east and west, greater numbers of farming and herding folk were subdued and taxed, expanding the wealth and military energies of the state even more.

  In the course of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the mansas extended their domains westward to the Atlantic coast, eastward past the great bend of the Niger, and northward to the commercial towns scattered along the Saharan fringe, building an empire that incorporated many non-Malinke peoples. By achieving political domination over a band of steppe and savanna some 1,200 miles long at the peak of the empire, they effectively controlled and taxed the north–south flow of commerce across the Western Sudan.

  Indeed, Mali’s high age from the mid thirteenth to the mid fourteenth century corresponded to the period when Europe was exchanging silver for gold as its principal currency, prompting Italian and Catalan merchants to offer higher and higher prices for the little bags of dust and nuggets that were transported across the Sahara and over the Atlas Mountains to Ceuta and other North African ports. The rising European demand for gold, added to the perennial market in the Islamic states, stimulated more gold production in the Sudan, to the enormous fiscal advantage of Mali. In the later medieval period overall, West Africa may have been producing almost two-thirds of the world’s gold supply.4

  In addition to gold, north-bound caravans carried numerous products originating either in the grasslands or the tropical forests — ivory, ostrich feathers, kola nuts, gum resins, hides, and slaves. In return for these goods the southbound trade brought many products from North Africa and the Mediterranean basin: textiles, copper, silver, books, paper, swords, iron ware, perfumes, jewelry, spices, wheat, and dried fruits. Horses, which did not prosper in the deep savanna country owing to the lethal bite of the tsetse fly, were imported from the Maghrib to meet the needs of the Malian cavalry. Cowrie shells were used as a form of currency in the Sudan, as they were in India. As Ibn Battuta attests, they were harvested exclusively in the Maldive Islands, then exported to West Africa by way of Egypt and the Maghrib ports. The single most precious commodity imported to the Sudan was salt, a food essential to the human body that West Africa was unable to produce in sufficient quantity to meet demand. Salt came from mines in the Sahara and was transported southward in the form of giant slabs, two to a camel.

  In the fourteenth century that section of the West Africa-to-Europe commercial exchange system extending from the northern edge of the rain forest to the Mediterranean coast was entirely in the hands of Muslims. Indeed from a global perspective the trans-Saharan trade routes were north–south branch lines of the hemispheric Muslim network that extended right across northern Africa and Asia to the ports of the South China Sea. As early as the ninth century, Berber-speaking merchants settled in commercial centers in the Sahel belt, where they acted as hosts and business agents for fellow Muslims who organized caravans in the corresponding entrepôts along the northern rim of the desert. In the time of Ghana, Muslim towns rose up alongside older Sahelian centers. In these new towns merchants of North African Berber or Arab origin were permitted by royal authority to govern their internal affairs according to the standards of the Sacred Law, just as they were beginning to do among non-Muslim peoples in the Indian Ocean basin.

  These expatriate merchants did not organize the trade directly to the gold fields or to the towns deep in the savanna. That stretch of the network remained under the control of professional Sudanese traders. Most of them were of the Soninke and, later, Malinke culture groups. These men were among the first West Africans to convert to Islam, thereby linking themselves into the brotherhood of shared norms and trust that encouraged order and routine along the trans-Saharan system.

  As in India and Southeast Asia, the founding of new Muslim trading communities created an immediate demand for literate cadres to organize and superintend Islamic worship, education, and law. From the beginning of Islamic expansion into West Africa, Maghribi men of learning were accompanying the merchant caravans across the desert to settle in the towns of the Sahel. These centers supported Islamic education south of the Sahara, and over the course of time gave rise to a class of Muslims grounded in the “normative” traditions of piety and scholarship as preached and practiced in North Africa. In the period of the Mali empire the communities of ’ulama in the Sahelian towns included families of both Arabo-Berber and Sudanese origin, the latter mainly Malinke or Soninke. Deeper in the Sudan, learned families of purely West African origin predominated.

  Sudanese chiefs and petty kings are known to have converted to Islam as early as the tenth or eleventh centuries. Whatever purely religious feelings may have motivated such men individually, conversion enhanced their esteem among Muslim merchants, the economically most powerful group in the land, and potentially tied them into a much wider commercial and diplomatic world than they had known before. The origins of Islam among the Malinke are obscure. In their tradition the founder of the empire was Sunjata (or Mari-Jaata), a larger-than-life homeric figure of the early thirteenth century who rose from physical adversity and exile to rid his homeland of an alien tyrant, then rebuilt the Malinke capital and ruled from it for 25 years. The reign of Sunjata is only vaguely associated with Islam, but at some point in the thirteenth century his successors made it the official religion of state, an act certainly linked to the growing importance of the Muslim mercantile communities which inhabited the main towns along the trans-savanna routes.

  Yet the military and political success of the mansas also depended on the continuing allegiance and cooperation of the mass of their subjects — farming, fishing, and herding people who for the most part adhered to ancient animistic be
liefs and rituals, not Islam. Unlike the sultans of Delhi, the mansas had not come to power as foreign invaders, prepared to organize a state as formally Islamic as they pleased. The legitimacy of their authority rested to a large extent on satisfying traditional Malinke expectations in their public conventions and ceremonies. Consequently, they were obliged to walk a narrow line between their urban Muslim subjects, who wanted them to behave up to the public standards of their Marinid or Mamluk counterparts, and the vast majority of the tax- and tribute-paying population, which took no notice of Maliki law or proper procedures at Friday prayer.

  The character of official ritual and administration as more or less Islamic probably depended on the ruler’s perception of the relative importance of his Muslim and non-Muslim subjects from one period to the next. Mansa Musa was naturally a great favorite of Muslim opinion, both in Mali and the wider Islamic world. His prestige resulted not only from his sensational pilgrimage, but also, writes al-Umari, because

  he built ordinary and cathedral mosques and minarets, and established the Friday observances, and prayers in congregation, and the muezzin’s call. He brought jurists of the Malikite school to his country and there continued as sultan of the Muslims and became a student of religious sciences.5

  Yet Mansa Musa also reigned during a period when relations with the Muslim merchants and with the states of North Africa were particularly important owing to the strong market for gold.

  This expansive period in the trans-Saharan trade continued into the reign of Musa’s brother Sulayman, who came to the throne about 1341. Sulayman came close to matching his brother’s reputation for Islamic leadership and piety. Moreover, he ruled Mali in prosperity and peace. He was the sort of king from whom Ibn Battuta had come to expect an honorable and large-hearted reception.