The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (28 page)

This political pattern was radically disrupted in the aftermath of the Mongol invasions. In 1243 the Tatars stormed over the Armenian mountains, flattened the Seljukid army at Kose Dagh, and penetrated deep into the plateau. In 1256 they returned again in a campaign strategically linked to Hulegu’s conquest of Iraq. In the following year Konya, the Seljukid capital, was taken, and by 1260 Mongol garrisons occupied most of the important towns of eastern and central Anatolia. The sultanate was not abolished, however, but propped up as a vassal state paying tribute to the Ilkhanate of Persia. Indeed the invasion was carried off without the usual cataclysm of terror and destruction. Only one city, Kayseri, was sacked, and the conquest never seriously threatened Byzantine territory. Trebizond and Little Armenia continued to endure under the Mongol shadow.

Yet if the military record of the invasion seems a vapid sideshow set against the terrifying drama in Persia, it nonetheless jolted Anatolia into an era of profound political and cultural change by laying it open to more migrations of Central Asian nomads. The first thirteenth-century wave of Turcomans arrived in panicky flight from the Mongol war machine, the second came in its ranks. Throughout the Ilkhanid period, more bands continued to press in. The immediate demographic effects of these movements are obscure, but there is no doubt that in the century after 1243 the ethnically Turkish population of Anatolia rose dramatically. Turkish came to be spoken and written more widely, and the situation of Christian communities, especially in rural villages in the path of migrating flocks and herds, became more and more precarious.

In the west of the peninsula the Turco-Mongol irruption confronted Byzantium with unprecedented nomadic pressure. Giving
way to the new migrants arriving from Azerbaijan, Turcoman groups long established in central Anatolia pushed westward. Moreover, as the Tatar overlords turned their attention to the business of tax collecting and civil order, many of the newcomers preferred to pass on quickly to the mountain peripheries where Mongol-Seljukid authority was safely nominal. Here great leagues of Turcoman warriors led a wild and wooly existence, raiding back into Seljukid territory and battling one another for choice grazing land.

The very shape of Anatolia, a finger between the seas pointing due westward, directed the surge of pastoral movement into the Byzantine marches and the upper reaches of the valleys that ran down to the Aegean. Ever since the ninth century the Muslim – Byzantine frontier had given employment to mounted fighting men, called
ghazis
, who made a vocation of staging raids into Greek territory and living off the booty. Organized in war bands and often operating just beyond the boundaries of the Muslim government whose military interests they served, these volunteer champions of
jihad
lived by a chivalric code of virtue and loyalty founded on the precepts of the Qur’an and the teachings of the early Sufis. Though not all
ghazis
were of Turkish blood, the tactics and traditions of mounted holy war had been elaborately developed on the Muslim frontiers of Central Asia. Turkish warriors led the conquest of eastern and central Anatolia on behalf of the Seljuks, and though the Mongols were not in the beginning Muslims at all, the
ghazi
spirit was already deeply engrained in the Turkish warrior-herdsmen who preceded and followed them. Frontier warfare died down in the high period of the Seljukid sultanate when relations with Byzantium were relatively calm, but it flared up again in the crowded, turbulent conditions of the western marches in the later thirteenth century.

The withering of the great state structures that governed Anatolia encouraged this new phase of roisterous disorder on the frontier. Behind the lines of Turcoman advance, the sultanate was no longer in a position to control or restrain the nomads to its own ends. The Ilkhanid governors, obliged to take an ever-greater share of responsibility for the affairs of the state they themselves had defeated and repressed, were by 1278 running eastern Anatolia as a distant province of Persia with neither the will nor the soldiery to take charge of the Turcoman peripheries. Just beyond the nomad frontier, the Byzantine defenses proved weaker
than expected. In 1204 the Frankish and Venetian leaders of the Fourth Crusade, having decided to capture Constantinople rather than Jerusalem, had forced the Greek emperor to rule in exile from the Anatolian city of Nicaea (Iznik). The traditional capital was restored in 1261, but this Latin interlude seriously weakened Byzantine resources. Preoccupied thereafter with the protection of their European and Aegean territories against Christian rival states, the emperors of the later thirteenth century defended their Asian domain in a spirit of phlegmatic resignation.

As the Seljukid dynasty slid gently into oblivion, several small Turcoman principalities, or amirates, emerged along a mountainous arc extending from the border of Little Armenia in the south to the coasts of the Black Sea. Some of these states were tiny and ephemeral, but by the beginning of the fourteenth century about twelve important centers of power, including the Ilkhanid provinces as one of them, dominated the new political map of Anatolia. The princes, or
amirs
, of these states ruled simply by virtue of their fitness as Turcoman war captains, the biggest of the “big men” who succeeded in gathering a larger following of mounted archers than their rivals with promises of booty and land. As the Byzantines fell back to their ships almost everywhere except the fragment of Asian territory opposite the Bosphorus, the Aegean hinterland was partitioned among five principal amirates extending along the curve of the arc: Menteshe in the south, then Aydin, Sarukhan, Karasi, and in the far north facing the remaining Byzantine strongholds the Osmanlis, or state of Osman.

The Muslim conquest of western Anatolia in the first half of the fourteenth century was in the long view only the beginning of a new age of Turkish power. For under the banner of the descendants of Osman, called by Europeans the Ottomans, Turkish cavalry would cross the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles and swarm into the Balkans. Traveling among the Turkish amirates in 1331, two years before his own Moroccan sovereign was preparing a last and utterly futile attempt to retake Spain for Islam, Ibn Battuta may have gained some comfort from the spectacle in Anatolia, where the situation was quite the reverse. By the time he ended his traveling career, the Ottoman armies were advancing on Greece. Barely more than a century and a half after his death they would be attacking the eastern frontiers of Morocco and marching up the Danube to Central Europe.

Though the Anatolia Ibn Battuta saw was nearing the end of the
century of political cracking and straining that marked the transition from the Seljukids and Byzantines to the Ottoman Empire, the continuity of urban and lettered culture was never really broken. Putting up their mosques and palaces in the midst of ancient Greek cities, the Turkish dynasties were naturally profoundly influenced by Byzantine architecture, craftsmanship, and everyday custom. But their model of Muslim civilization was the Persian one they brought with them over the mountains. A literate tradition of their own still in the future, the Turkish rulers and officials who took up residence in the towns encouraged the immigration of Persian scholars, secretaries, and artisans, who helped to make Konya in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries an important international center of belles-lettres, Sufi teaching, and architectural innovation. Then, in the Mongol panics of the 1220s and later, many more educated and affluent Persians arrived in Anatolia, attracted by the prosperous urban culture of the sultanate. Like Cairo and Shiraz, Konya and other Anatolian towns found themselves benefiting unexpectedly from the flight of brains and money from greater Persia. These refugees, as it turned out, did not get far enough away from home by half, but the Mongol invasion was so uncharacteristically mild that city life went on much as before. Indeed, under Ilkhanid sovereignty the high culture of eastern and central Anatolia became more Persia- nized than ever before.

In the west the hard-riding Turcoman chiefs wasted no time forsaking their tents for the urban Byzantine citadels they captured and assembling around themselves Persian-speaking immigrant scholars who would show them proper civilized behavior. At the time of Ibn Battuta’s visit Persianate letters and refinements prevailed in the courtly circles of the amirates. Moreover the Arabic influence at higher levels of society was not entirely missing. Arabic was the accepted language of building and numismatic inscriptions and of legal and fiscal documents. Some Persian scholars could speak the language, and a few notable intellectual figures from Arab lands lived and worked in Asia Minor.
⁸
Though Ibn Battuta did not know Persian at that point in his travels (by his own admission) and would never learn much Turkish (a fact he was loath to admit), he could expect to have no more trouble making himself understood among the learned fraternity of Anatolia than he had had in Iran.
⁹

The spectacular city of Alanya (’Alaya), where Ibn Battuta, al-Tuzari, and apparently other companions stepped onto Anatolian
soil in the early winter of 1330 (1332), was one of the chief south coast ports linking the interior beyond the coastal ridges of the western Taurus with the lands of the Arabs and Latins. The harbor and shipyards lay at the eastern foot of a great Gibraltar-like promontory rising 820 feet above the sea and surmounted by a complex of walls and forts.
¹⁰
The ruler of this bastion was the
amir
of Karaman, one of the most powerful of the Turcoman states to emerge in the later thirteenth century. In the company of the local
qadi
Ibn Battuta prayed the Friday prayer in the mosque of the citadel and the following day rode out ten miles along the shore to pay respects to the Karamanid governor at his seaside residence. There was the usual interview, and the traveler accepted his first present, money in this instance, from an Anatolian dignitary.

After a presumably short stay in Alanya, Ibn Battuta and his friends continued westward along the coast, probably on the same Genoese ship, to Antalya, the next major port. Like Alanya, it had been a Seljukid town until taken over by a Turcoman war lord who subsequently founded a local dynasty called the Teke. Ibn Battuta spent his first night in the local
madrasa
as the guest of its
shaykh
. But the next day a man dressed in frowzy-looking clothes and wearing a felt cap on his head came to the college and, addressing the visitors in Turkish, invited them to come to dinner. The invitation was translated and Ibn Battuta politely accepted. But after the man had gone away he protested to his host that the fellow was obviously poverty-sticken and should not be imposed upon to provide a meal.

Whereupon the
shaykh
burst out laughing and said to me “He is one of the
shaykhs
of the . . . Akhis. He is a cobbler, and a man of generous disposition. His associates number about two hundred men of different trades, who have elected him as their leader and have built a hospice to entertain guests in, and all that they earn by day they spend at night.”
¹¹

And so, following the sunset prayer the puzzled visitor and his host went off with the shabby cobbler to his lodge.

We found it to be a fine building, carpeted with beautiful Rumi rugs, and with a large number of lustres of Iraqi glass . . . Standing in rows in the chamber were a number of young men wearing long cloaks, and with boots on their feet. Each one of
them had a knife about two cubits long attached to a girdle round his waist, and on their heads were white bonnets of wool with a piece of stuff about a cubit long and two fingers broad attached to the peak of each bonnet . . . When we had taken our places among them, they brought in a great banquet, with fruits and sweetmeats, after which they began their singing and dancing.

Thus Ibn Battuta had his introduction to the
fityan
associations of Anatolia, the institution that would subsequently see him through more than 25 different towns and cities with displays of hospitality more lavish and enthusiastic than he would experience anywhere else in the Muslim world.
¹²
The
fityan
organizations, also called the
akhis
(originally a Turkish word meaning “generous”), were corporations of unmarried young men representing generally the artisan classes of Anatolian towns. Their purpose was essentially the social one of providing a structure of solidarity and mutual aid in the urban environment. The code of conduct and initiation ceremonies of the
fityan
were founded on a set of standards and values that went by the name of
futuwwa
, both words coming from the same Arabic root and referring in concept to the Muslim ideal of the “youth” (
fata
) as the exemplary expression of the qualities of nobility, honesty, loyalty, and courage. The brothers of the
fityan
were expected to lead lives approaching these ideal qualities, which included demonstrations of generous hospitality to visiting strangers. The leaders of the associations were usually prestigious local personages of mature years who held the honorific title of “Akhi.”

Known from Abbasid times in varying forms of organization and purpose, the precepts of the
futuwwa
appear to have entered Asia Minor from Iran where
fityan
corporations had long been established (though Ibn Battuta barely mentions them in connection with his travels there). By the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries associations existed in probably every Anatolian town of any size. In the era of political upheaval and fragmentation extending from the Mongol invasion to the rise of the Ottoman Empire, the
fityan
were filling a crucial civic function of helping to maintain urban cohesiveness and defense. Each association had its distinctive costume, which normally included a white cap and special trousers, and the members met regularly in their lodges or the homes of their Akhis for sport, food, and fellowship. Drawing
their initiates from young workers and craftsmen, the clubs were organized to some degree along occupational lines, though they were not synonymous with trade guilds, which also existed. Meetings and initiation rites incorporated prayers and mystical observances, the religious dimension reinforcing the secular bonds of common interest and civic idealism.