The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (31 page)

20
. IB states that he was in Bursa for the fast of Ashura (10 Muharram 732 or 13 October 1331). He took two days getting from Bursa to Iznik and remained in the latter city 40 days (probably more or less).

21
. D&S, vol. 2, p. xiii. These authors point out that IB demonstrated considerable tolerance toward non-Muslims. In this instance the Jewish physician did something reprehensible in his eyes.

22
. Charles Wilson (ed.),
Murray’s Handbook for Travellers in Asia Minor
(London, 1895), p. 14.

23
. “Kastamuni,” EI
₂
, vol. 4, pp. 737–39; Wilson,
Murray’s Handbook
, p. 7.

We traveled eastward, seeing nothing but the sky and the earth.
¹

William of Rubruck

If Ibn Battuta had inquired among the merchants of Sinope the most sensible way to get from the northern coast of Anatolia to India, they probably would have told him to go to Tabriz by way of Trebizond, then on to Hurmuz and a ship to the Malabar coast. He chose, on the contrary, to make for the city of al-Qiram (Solgat, or today Stary Krim) in the interior of the Crimean Peninsula on the far side of the Black Sea. Al-Qiram was the seat of the Mongol lord governing the province of Crimea under the authority of Ozbeg, Khan of Kipchak, the kingdom known later to Europeans as the Golden Horde. It was also the chief inland transit center for goods passing from Kaffa and other Italian colonies on the Crimean coast to the towns of the populous Volga River basin, the heart of the khanate.

Ibn Battuta does not explain why he and his companions decided to cross the sea and approach India by the longer, more difficult route across the Central Asian steppe, but it is easy enough to guess. For one thing, he had already seen Tabriz, Hurmuz, and a good bit of Persia, and if he was to honor his extravagant pledge to shun territory already covered, then the northern route, the fabulous silk road of Inner Asia, was his obvious alternative. We may also suspect that by this time he had devised a grand scheme not only to visit all the great cities of the central lands of Islam, but to penetrate the outer fringes of the expanding civilized world as well. He had been to Kilwa, the last outpost of
qadis
and city comforts in the southern tropics. And now he had the opportunity to discover the limits of cultured society in the wilds of the north, where summer nights were so short that intricate theological problems arose as to the hours of prayer and the fast of Ramadan. Moreover, the previous year and a half in Anatolia had taught him all he needed to know about the
satisfaction Turkish princes seemed to derive from entertaining and rewarding visiting
faqihs
. He was certainly well aware that the Kipchak state had become officially Islamic only in his lifetime and that New Saray (al-Sara’), its capital on the Volga, was a flower of cosmopolitan industry and culture that had bloomed overnight in the frigid steppe. If the little
amirs
of Asia Minor could treat him so well and contribute so materially to his personal fortune, what might he expect from Ozbeg Khan, whose territories and wealth were so much greater.

In the
Rihla
he proposes a list of “the seven kings who are the great and mighty kings of the world.” One of them, naturally enough, was the Sultan of Morocco, who commissioned the writing of the book. Another was the Mamluk ruler of Egypt and a third the Sultan of India. The remaining four were Mongols of the House of Genghis: the Yuan emperor of China, the Ilkhan of Persia, and the khans of Chagatay and Kipchak. Though the Mongol world empire no longer existed in the Moroccan’s time except as a political fiction, its four successor kingdoms (plus the White Horde of western Siberia) ruled among them the greater part of the land mass of Eurasia. Admittedly Ibn Battuta did more than justice to Ozbeg and his cousin the Khan of Chagatay to put them on his list at all, for unlike the others (excepting perhaps the Sultan of Morocco, who had to be included anyway) they were not masters of one of the core regions of agrarian civilization. They were heirs rather to the Inner Asian plains, the core of the Turko–Mongol domain where the pastoral way of life still predominated, and where civilization came harder and later owing to the limits of agriculture and to physical distance or isolation from the main Eurasian centers of culture and trade.

But if mighty kings are to be judged by the size of their kingdoms, the khans of Kipchak and Chagatay were among the awesome, for together their territories covered an expanse of grassland, desert, and mountain more than half the size of the continental United States. From the fertile grain-growing valley of the Volga, Ozbeg Khan dispatched his governors to the Crimea, to the northern Caucasus, to the alluvial delta (called Khwarizm) of the Amu Darya (Oxus) River, and to the immense Ukrainian steppe north of the Black Sea. To the forested uplands in the northwest he sent his cavalry to collect annual tribute from the Christian princes of Russia and orchestrated their dynastic affairs to keep them weak and divided. In the Slavic southwest he intervened
when it suited him in the affairs of the kingdom of Bulgaria. In his foreign policy he exerted an influence of a special sort over the Mamluk sultanate, because his kingdom supplied Cairo with most of its ruling class, the young male slaves who were captured in frontier wars or were purchased or extracted from poor families of the Kipchak steppe.

Ibn Battuta visited the lands of Kipchak just a century after the Mongols launched their invasion of western Eurasia. In six years of cataclysmic violence (1236–41) the Tatar juggernaut under the generalship of Batu and Subedei had devoured cities and towns of Russia, Poland, and Hungary, leaving the Pope and the kings of the Latin West trembling for the future of Christendom. Though the conquerors withdrew from eastern Europe as precipitately as they had come, Batu, son of Jochi and grandson of Genghis Khan, established a camp near the lower Volga which became as Saray, or later Old Saray, the capital of the Khanate of Kipchak. Ibn Battuta knew the state under that name, the Golden Horde being an appellation bestowed by the Russians two centuries later. The adjective “golden” remains open to different explanations, but “horde” came from the Turkish word “ordu,” meaning camp or palace. The name carries a certain irony, for it suggested to the fourteenth century a meaning contrary to the modern image of a throng of wild barbarians riding into battle. The
ordu
of Batu (d. 1256) and his successors was the core of a stable and disciplined government under which, as in Persia, rampant bloodshed and destruction yielded to political conditions favoring revival of agriculture, increased international trade, and the rise of towns, some of them, like Old and New Saray, from the ground up.

Prior to the Mongol invasion Islam was the dominant faith among the settled Bulghar Turks of the middle Volga region but had made little headway in the Crimea or the Ukrainian steppe. The khans of the Golden Horde were for the most part as internationally minded as their cousins in Persia, encouraging the traders of all nations, tolerating confessional diversity, and for the first seventy years of the khanate’s history keeping the promoters of both Islam and Christianity guessing as to what religion the royal court would finally accept. In 1313 Ozbeg ascended the throne and, as Ghazan had done in Persia 18 years earlier, proclaimed Islam the religion of state. His decision was a blow to both the Roman and Byzantine churches, which had until then held sanguine hopes of bringing the khans to Christ.

The victory of Islam was in fact almost certainly inevitable. If Mongol internationalism had from the point of view of European history the effect of “opening” western Asia to Latin priests and Italian merchants, it gave in the long run far greater advantage to Muslim traders and preachers, who had already been pressing into the steppe zone for centuries. The Volga had close historic links with the Muslim Irano–Turkish cities of northern Persia and Transoxiana, that is, the regions east of the Caspian. Those cities offered a much handier and weightier model of civilization to the khanate than either Byzantium or Latin Europe could do. As the new political order in western Asia emerged, the caravans from the southeast brought ever-growing numbers of merchants, scholars, craftsmen, and Sufi brethren, seeking fortunes and converts in the burgeoning towns of the khanate. Whether Christian friars and Italian traders were present or not, these towns assumed from the later thirteenth century an increasingly Muslim character.

Ozbeg’s Islamic policy was in fact recognition of a cultural conversion of the region that was already taking place. The Russian tributary states of the northern forests remained loyal to their Orthodox church, and the Islamization of the steppe was by no means complete when Ibn Battuta passed through, since he himself bears witness to Turkish Christian communities in the Crimea. For him, however, the important development was not the conversion of the countryside; rather, the establishment of Islam as the “official” religion signified that the
shari’a
was to have a larger role in society, superseding local or Mongol custom in matters of devotion and personal status. If the Sacred Law were to be applied in the realm, then
qadis
and jurists had to be imported from the older centers of literacy. Thus in Ibn Battuta’s time the towns of the western steppe were firmly linked to the international network of judges, teachers, and scribes along which he always endeavored to travel.

He remembers spending more than a month and a half in Sinope in the early spring of 1332 (1334), the last eleven days waiting for a favorable wind after he, al-Tuzari, and other companions booked passage on a ship bound for the Crimea. He remarks that the vessel belonged to some “Rumi,” probably in this case Genoese rather than Greek.
²
Italian shipping had invaded the Black Sea in force following the fall of Constantinople to Frankish Crusaders in 1204. Both the Genoese and the Venetians held mercantile colonies
in the Crimea and along the shore of the Sea of Azov. In Ibn Battuta’s time these two powers competed murderously for the trade of the Black Sea, but they had virtually no commercial competition from either Muslims or Greeks.

When captains of the Black Sea were under sail, they usually preferred to hug the coast because of the tempests that might suddenly come blasting off the northern steppe. Though we have no clue whether Ibn Battuta’s ship was a big one, his pilot seemed confident enough to launch into the open sea and make a straight course for the Crimea. But three nights out of Sinope a violent storm blew up. In his Indian Ocean travels Ibn Battuta had seen nothing like it.

We were in sore straits and destruction visibly before our eyes. I was in the cabin, along with a man from the Maghrib named Abu Bakr, and I bade him go up on deck to observe the state of the sea. He did so and came back to me in the cabin saying to me “I commend you to God.”

The vessel could make no headway against the furious wind and was blown back nearly to Sinope. The storm subsided for a time, then returned as savagely as before, and the ship was again driven back. Finally the wind swung round to the stern and after several days of panic and near-catastrophe the Crimean mountains loomed ahead. The captain made for Kerch on the western bank of the strait leading into the Sea of Azov. But as he approached the port he sighted people on the shore apparently trying to signal him off. Fearing enemy war galleys in the harbor (Venetians? Turkish pirates?), he turned westward along the coast, probably heading for either Kaffa or Sudak.

Then, for reasons unexplained, Ibn Battuta asked the captain to put him and his companions ashore, not in a port but at a roadstead somewhere along the rural Crimean coast. The party disembarked and, after spending the night in a church, negotiated with some local Christian Turks for the hire of horses and a wagon. Within a day or so they reached Kaffa, chief colony of the Genoese merchantry.

Ibn Battuta counted about 200 ships in Kaffa harbor. Some of them would carry away the cloths and other luxury wares that had come along the silk road from Persia or China. Others would load their decks with war captives and the sad children of impoverished
steppe folk, consigning some to the slave market of Cairo, others to the sugar plantations of Cyprus or the rich households of Italy. But mainly, ships’ holds would be filled with the raw products of the steppe and forest: grain from the Volga, timber from the mountains of southern Crimea, furs from Russia and Siberia, salt, wax, and honey. Though the Franks built their houses and conducted their business in Kaffa at the pleasure of the Khan of the Golden Horde and though good relations between them sometimes broke down, this city was the most profoundly Latinized of all the Black Sea ports. Probably a large minority of the population was Genoese, the rest a heterogeneous crowd of Turkish soldiers and nomads, Russian fur traders, Egyptian slave agents, Greeks, Circassians and Alans, not to mention Florentines, Venetians and Provençals.
³

Ibn Battuta, in any case, was not to feel at home in Kaffa. When he and his friends arrived there they went to lodge in the mosque. While they were resting inside, the Catholic churches of the town suddenly began ringing their bells. Pious Muslims in general regarded church bells as one of the more odious manifestations of Christian sacrilege. Ibn Battuta for one had never heard such a satanic clamor. Reacting with more bravado than sense, he and his companions bounded to the top of the minaret and began chanting out the Qur’an and the call to prayer. Soon the local
qadi
rushed to the scene, weapon in hand, fearing the visitors would be in danger for provoking the hostility of Europeans. What the Christians in the streets below might have done in response to this comic opera gesture we will never know, but the incident ended with no sectarian violence.

Leaving Kaffa within a day or two, Ibn Battuta and his party continued on by wagon to their immediate destination al-Qiram, the provincial capital and main staging point for the trans-Asian caravans. Traveling now in the company of an officer of state on his way to see the governor, their route presumably took them westward along the coast as far as the port of Sudak (Surdak or Soldaia), then inland over the steep southern scarp of the Crimean mountains.
⁴
Al-Qiram lay beyond the hills at the edge of the flat grassy plain that was ecologically the vestibule of the great Kipchak steppe. Though a Genoese consul was sometimes in residence, al-Qiram was a decidedly Muslim town in its economy and culture (a mosque carrying Ozbeg Khan’s inscription on it still stands).
⁵
Ibn Battuta met several scholars, including the Hanafi and Shafi’i judges, and stayed in a Sufi hospice.