The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (10 page)

Across the breadth of the coastal Libyan countryside Arab herding tribes ruled supreme, and once again Ibn Battuta and his companions courted trouble. Between Gabès and Tripoli a company of archers, no doubt provided by the Hafsid sultan to protect the
hajj
caravan, kept rovers at bay. In Tripoli, however, Ibn Battuta decided to leave the main group, which lingered in the city because of rain and cold, and push on ahead with a small troop of Moroccans, presumably leaving his judgeship, at least temporarily, in the hands of a subordinate. Somewhere near the port town of Surt (Sirte) a band of cameleers tried to attack the little party. But according to the
Rihla
, “the Divine Will diverted them and prevented them from doing us harm that they had intended.” After reaching Cyrenaica in safety, the travelers waited for the rest of the caravan to catch up, then continued, presumably without further incident, toward the Nile.

Crossing Libya, Ibn Battuta had greater reason than ever to be wary of trouble since he no longer had only himself to consider. While the caravan was in Sfax, he entered into a contract of marriage with the daughter of a Tunisian official in the pilgrim company. When they reached Tripoli, the woman was presented to him. The arrangement ended in failure, however, for Ibn Battuta fell into a dispute with his prospective father-in-law while traveling through Cyrenaica and ended up returning the girl. Undaunted, he then wedded the daughter of another pilgrim, this time a scholar from Fez. Apparently with income from his judicial office he put on a marriage feast “at which I detained the caravan for a whole day, and entertained them all.” The
Rihla
tells us nothing whatsoever about the character of either of these women or Ibn Battuta’s relationship with them. Indeed he would marry several times in the course of his travels, yet neither his wives, nor the slave concubines who were frequently in his train during later periods of his travels, would receive anything other than the scantest mention here and there in the
Rihla
. Wives vanish as casually and as inexplicably from the narrative as they enter it. In the Islamic society of that age a man’s intimate family relations were regarded as no one’s business but his own, and married Muslim women, at least in the Arabic-speaking lands, lived out their lives largely in seclusion. Ibn Battuta’s domestic affairs were not a proper subject for a
rihla
, nor would they be for the biography or autobiography of any public man of that time. Consequently we learn much less than we would like about a significant dimension of Ibn Battuta’s traveling life.

Sometime in the late winter or spring of 1326 the caravan reached Alexandria at the western end of the Nile Delta.
¹²
As treks across
northern Africa went, Ibn Battuta managed it in less time than many travelers did, covering the more than 2,000 miles in the space of eight or nine months. If at this point he had been in a hurry to get to the Hijaz, he could have continued across the delta and the Sinai Peninsula, picking up the Egyptian caravan route to Mecca. But the next pilgrimage season was still eight months away, affording him plenty of time to explore the Nile Valley and, and as any serious scholar-pilgrim did, pay his respects to Cairo, which in the first half of the fourteenth century was the reigning intellectual capital of the Arabic-speaking world and the largest city in the hemisphere anywhere west of China.

1
. Ibn Khaldun,
The Muqaddimah
, 2nd edn., trans. F. Rosenthal, 3 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1967), vol. 3, p. 307.

2
. Robert Brunschvig,
La Berbérie orientale sous les Hafsides des origines à la fin du XVe siècle
, 2 vols. (Paris, 1940, 1947), vol. 2, p. 97.

3
. M. Canard, “Les relations entre les Merinides et les Mamelouks au XIVe siècle,”
Annales de l’Institut d’Études Orientales
5 (1939): 43.

4
. Ibn Khaldun,
Histoire des Berbères et des dynasties musulmanes de l’Afrique septentrionale
, trans. Baron de Slane, 4 vols. (Paris, 1925–56), vol. 2, pp. 462–66, vol. 3, pp. 403–05.

5
. Brunschvig (
Berbèrie orientale
, vol. 1, p. 148n) suggests this hypothesis.

6
. A. Cherbonneau, “Notice et extraits du voyage d’El-Abdary à travers l’Afrique septentrionale, au VIIe siècle de l’Hegire,”
Journal Asiatique
, 5th ser., 4 (1854): 158. My translation from the French.

7
. The events of this period are described in Ibn Khaldun,
Histoire des Berberes
, vol. 2, pp. 457–66; and Brunschvig,
Berbèrie orientale
, vol. 1, pp. 144–50.

8
. Brunschvig,
Berbèrie orientale
, vol. 1, pp. 356–57.

9
. Ibid., vol. 1, p. 146n.

10
. Ibid., vol. 2, pp. 301–02; Gb, vol. 1, p. 13n.

11
. Robert Brunschvig, “Quelques remarques historiques sur les medersas de Tunisie,”
Revue Tunisienne
6 (1931): 261–85. The college of the Booksellers was known in Arabic as the Ma’ridiyya.

12
. In the
Rihla
IB remembers arriving in Alexandria on 5 April 1326 (1 Jumada I 726). Hrbek (Hr, pp. 417–18) argues that the date was more likely mid February (Rabi’ I 726) on the grounds that the trip from Tripoli to Alexandria should not have taken the three months Ibn Battuta allots to it, considering that no major delays are noted. Hrbek suggests that the journey probably took 40 to 45 days and that acceptance of an earlier arrival date in Alexandria helps to solve chronological problems that arise later on.

As for the dynasties of our time, the greatest of them is that of the Turks in Egypt.
¹

Ibn Khaldun

Of the dozens of international ports Ibn Battuta visited in the course of his travels, Alexandria impressed him as among the five most magnificent. There was not one harbor but two, the eastern reserved for Christian ships, the western for Muslim. They were divided by Pharos Island and the colossal lighthouse which loomed over the port and could be seen several miles out to sea. Alexandria handled a great variety of Egyptian products, including the woven silk, cotton, and linen from its own thriving textile shops. But more important, it was the most westerly situated of the arc of Middle Eastern cities which funneled trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean.

From the beginning of the Islamic age the flow of goods across the Middle East had followed a number of different routes, the relative importance of each depending on the prevailing configurations of political power and social stability. Ibn Battuta had the good fortune to make his first and lengthiest visit to Egypt at a time of high prosperity on the spice route running from the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea and hence down the Nile to the ports of the delta.

Contributing to Egypt’s affluence was the firm rule of the Bahri Mamluks, the Turkish-speaking warrior caste who had governed that country and Syria as a united kingdom since 1260. Over the second half of the thirteenth century the Mamluks had been obliged to go to war several times to prevent the Mongol armies of Persia from overruning Syria and advancing to the Nile. It is to the credit of Mamluk cavalry that they stopped the Tatars and saved Egypt from catastrophe by the skin of its teeth. Thus the cities of the Nile were spared the fate of Baghdad, which the Mongols laid waste in 1258 and reduced to the status of a provincial market town.

Map 4: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Egypt, Syria, and Arabia, 1326

Although the Mongol threat to Syria did not end until about 1315, Egypt entered the fourteenth century with a firm government, a generally stable social order, and bright opportunities to exploit the commercial potential of its geographical position. Under the meticulous supervision of Mamluk soldiers and customs officers, the products of Asia were unloaded at the port of ’Aydhab half way up the Red Sea, moved overland by camel train to the Nile, then carried down the river on lateen-rigged vessels to Alexandria and the warehouses of Italian, French, and Catalan traders. Symon Semeonis, an Irish cleric who visited Alexandria in 1323 on his way to the Holy land, experienced the Mamluk customs bureaucracy at work:

On our arrival in the port, the [European] vessel, as is the custom, was immediately boarded by a number of Saracen [Muslim] harbor officials, who hauled down the sail, and wrote down the names of everybody on board. Having examined all the merchandise and goods in the ship, and having made a careful list of everything, they returned to the city taking the passengers with them . . . They quartered us within the first and second gates, and went off to report what they had done to the Admiral of the city, without whose presence and permission no foreigner is allowed either to enter or leave the city, and no goods can be imported.
²

Ibn Battuta spent several weeks in the busy port, seeing the sights (including the Pharos lighthouse and the third-century marble column known as Pompey’s Pillar) and fraternizing with the men of letters in the mosques and colleges. In Egypt the Maliki school of law was not nearly so widedly used as the Shafi’i code, but Malikism was dominant in Alexandria owing to the large representation of North Africans and Andalusian refugees among the educated population.
³
In the
Rihla
Ibn Battuta recounts the achievements and miracles of several scholars and mystics of the city, most of them of Maghribi origin.

At one point during these weeks he spent a few days as the guest of one Burhan al-Din the Lame, a locally venerated Sufi ascetic. Among the special talents of more enlightened Muslim divines was the gift of foretelling the future. It was in the company of Burhan al-Din that the young pilgrim got a first inkling of his destiny. The holy man, perceiving that Ibn Battuta had in his heart a passion for
travel, suggested that he visit three of his fellow Sufis, two of them in India, the third in China. Ibn Battuta recalls the incident: “I was amazed at his prediction, and the idea of going to these countries having been cast into my mind, my wanderings never ceased until I had met these three that he named and conveyed his greeting to them.”

For the moment, however, Ibn Battuta was content to wander in the valley of the Nile. Alexandria was not located on the river but linked to it by a canal, constructed a few years before his arrival, which ran eastward to the Rosetta Branch at the town of Fuwwa. Most commercial traffic to the interior went by river vessel through the canal and from there upstream to Cairo, which lay about 140 miles inland at the apex of the delta, a journey of five to seven days with the usual favorable northerly winds.

Ibn Battuta was in no particular hurry at this point, however, since the next season of the
hajj
was still about seven months off. Where most young scholars might have made a beeline for Cairo, the great metropolis, this pilgrim, already displaying his characteristic zeal to see everything, spent about three weeks, probably during April 1326, wandering through the rich commercial and textile-producing towns of the delta — Damanhur, Fuwwa, Ibyar, Damietta, Samannud, and others.
⁴
Along the way he sought out and lodged in the houses of numerous judges, savants, and Sufi
shaykhs
, including a celebrated saint of Fuwwa who also prophesied that the young man would one day wind up in India. He continued to support himself with the gifts and hospitality of the pious, not the least of his benefactors being the Mamluk governor of Damietta, who befriended him and sent him several coins. It might be presumed that Ibn Battuta was traveling in the Delta in the company of the woman he had married in Libya, except that she is never mentioned in the
Rihla
again.

At Samannud on the Damietta branch of the river he boarded one of the high-masted ships which thronged the river and sailed directly upstream toward Cairo. Numerous Christian and Jewish travelers — merchants, ambassadors, Holy Land pilgrims — sailed the Nile between the coast and Cairo during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and few of them (in the narratives they later wrote) failed to marvel at the crowded, colorful, ever-blooming life of the river. Symon Semeonis extolled its natural wonders:

This river is most pleasant for navigating, most beautiful in aspect, most productive in fishes, abounding in birds, and its
water is most wholesome and pleasant to drink, never harmful or offensive, but well suited to man’s needs. Many other excellent things might be said about it were it not the retreat of a highly noxious animal, resembling the dragon, which devours both horses and men if it catches them in the water or on the banks.
⁵

Ibn Battuta, a minority among travelers in his failure to mention the crocodiles, was impressed by the sheer crush of humanity along the banks, a density of habitation in startling contrast to what he had seen crossing North Africa:

There is no need for a traveler on the Nile to take any provision with him, because whenever he wishes to descend on the bank he may do so, for ablutions, prayers, purchasing provisions, or any other purpose. There is a continuous series of bazaars from the city of Alexandria to Cairo . . . Cities and villages succeed one another along its banks without interruption and have no equal in the inhabited world, nor is any river known whose basin is so intensively cultivated as that of the Nile. There is no river on earth but it which is called a sea.