The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (32 page)

Though Tuluktemur, the Muslim Turkish governor of the town, was not feeling well, he received the visitors anyway and presented the
Moroccan with a horse. It was soon learned that this
amir
was preparing to set out for New Saray to see the khan. In Persia Ibn Battuta had been given the unexpected privilege of traveling in the
mahalla
of the Mongol king, and now once again the chance of his itinerary had brought him to al-Qiram just in time to make a 700-mile journey to the Volga under imperial escort with no worries about personal amenities, highwaymen, or malevolent guides. To this purpose he bought three wagons and animals to pull them: one cart for himself and a slave girl (probably one of the young Greek women he acquired in Asia Minor), a second smaller one for al-Tuzari, and a third large one for the rest of his companions.

Up to that point Ibn Battuta had had almost no experience with wagons, for they were largely unknown in the Arab world where, since Roman times, the backs of camels and other beasts had replaced wheeled conveyances as the means of transporting people and goods. This was not, however, the case in Central Asia. Over the next year Ibn Battuta would find himself bumping and swaying over the steppe in the Turkish version of the prairie schooner. Both two and four wheeled carts were used, pulled by teams of horses, camels, or oxen. Mongol and Turkish nomads customarily followed their herds in wagons over which they erected round lath and felt tents (
yurts
). Whenever they halted for a period of time they disassembled these residences, or removed them in one piece, and set them up on the ground. When William of Rubruck, the Flemish Franciscan who compiled a precious description of the steppe peoples during the early Mongol Age, left Sudak in 1253 on his way to the court of the Great Khan, he was advised by Greek merchants to carry his possessions by wagon rather than pack horse. That way he could leave his belongings on board throughout the trip, and if he wanted to ride his own horse he could go along at the relaxed pace of the oxen.
⁶
The felt sides of the wagon covering, Ibn Battuta notes, were fitted with little grilled windows: “The person who is inside the tent can see [other] persons without their seeing him, and he can employ himself in it as he likes, sleeping or eating or reading or writing, while he is still journeying.” A prosperous steppe-dweller might own one or two hundred wagons.

The
ordu
of a rich Moal [Mongol] seems like a large town, though there will be very few men in it. One girl will lead twenty or thirty carts, for the country is flat, and they tie the ox
or camel carts the one after the other, and a girl will sit on the front one driving the ox, and all the others follow after with the same gait.
⁷

Ibn Battuta traveled as an honored member of the wagon train, whose privileged company included not only the
amir
Tuluktemur but also his brother, two sons, the wives of all these men, and a small bureaucracy of Muslim functionaries. He reckons that the first long stage of the journey from al-Qiram to Azak (Tana, now Azov) on the southern side of the delta of the Don took 23 days. He does not mention any known stopping places, so the route is a puzzle. Very likely the caravan crossed the peninsula separating the Crimea from the mainland, then turned eastward over the grassland north of the Sea of Azov and across the esturaries of the Miuss and the Don.
⁸

Since driving the wagons through the shallow fords of the rivers was a muddy, bothersome operation, Tuluktemur had the solicitude to send Ibn Battuta on ahead with one of his officers and a letter of introduction to the governor of Azak. Since European ships could sail directly to the mouth of the Don but no further, this town had become the most distant of the important Frankish establishments, competing actively with Kaffa for the sale of Italian and Flemish textiles.

Ibn Battuta and his party camped in their wagons outside the town, though they were welcomed by the governor and the local religious personalities. In two days’ time Tuluktemur arrived and amid the requisite displays of obeisance and hospitality on the part of the citizenry erected three huge tents, one of silk and two of linen and around them a cloth enclosure with an antechamber in the shape of a tower.

Here the
amir
entertained his retinue and Azak’s dignitaries with titanic quantities of the rude cuisine the upper classes of Inner Asia normally consumed — millet gruel, macaroni, boiled meat of horse and sheep, and fermented mare’s milk, called
qumizz
. Carried in hide bags on the wagons,
qumizz
was the nutritious staple of the Turko–Mongol diet. William of Rubruck, tasting it for the first time, “broke out in a sweat with horror and surprise,” though later he decided it was “very palatable . . ., makes the inner man most joyful and . . . intoxicates weak heads.”
⁹
He also liked the millet beer which flowed freely at Mongol banquets. The House of Genghis was notorious for its bibulousness, a family
attribute scarcely affected by conversion to Islam, since the Hanafi doctors conveniently took the position that this particular potation was not expressly prohibited by the Qur’an. Ibn Battuta found
qumizz
“disagreeable” and, being a strait-laced Maliki, would have nothing to do with liquor. But he had no other cause to complain about Tuluktemur’s hospitality. He got the usual robe and horse and indeed reports somewhat smugly that as they entered the audience tent the
amir
“made me precede him, in order that the governor of Azak should see the high esteem he had for me.”

At this time Ozbeg Khan was not in residence at New Saray but camped about 280 miles southeast of Azak in the region known in modern times as the Stavropol Plateau, a rugged upland jutting northward from the main mass of the Caucasus Mountains. Since the founding of the Ilkhanate of Persia, these mountains had been the de facto frontier between the two states, but the grazing land was too good and the trade routes running between the Black Sea and the Caspian too important to allow the region any peace. In 1262 Berke and Hulegu, first cousins though they were, had gone to war for control of the Caucasus, and in the ensuing century the two dynasties hurled armies at one another time and time again. It is conceivable that Ozbeg perhaps led his
ordu
south in 1332 to see to frontier defenses or plan an operation against Abu Sa’id.
¹⁰
But the
Rihla
says nothing of such a purpose. Possibly, the khan went south to take the waters, for he was camped at Bish Dagh (Pyatigorsk), celebrated than as now for its mineral spas.

Tuluktemur soon left Azak to join the khan, but Ibn Battuta and his associates stayed behind for three days waiting for the governor to provide him with new equipment for the next leg of his journey. Perhaps attaching himself to a military column, he then set out southeasterly across the Kuban–Azov lowland. Arriving at Bish Dagh, he found that the khan had already decamped. Traveling eight more days, he finally caught up with the
ordu
in the vicinity of al-Machar (Burgomadzhary). It was the early days of Ramadan, May 1332 (1334).
¹¹

I set up my tent on a low hill thereabouts, fixed my flat in front of the tent, and drew up my horses and wagons behind, then the
mahalla
came up . . . and we saw a vast city on the move with its inhabitants, with mosques and bazaars in it, the smoke of the kitchens rising in the air (for they cook while on the march), and horse-drawn wagons transporting the people.

On the morrow of his arrival in the camp he presented himself before the khan on recommendation of two of the sovereign’s religious dignitaries. He found Ozbeg seated upon a silver gilded throne in the midst of an enormous tent whose exterior was covered, after the fashion of all the Kipchak rulers, with a layer of bright golden tiles. The Khan’s daughter, his two sons, other royal kinsmen, and the chief
amirs
and officers were assembled below the throne, but his four
khatuns
, or wives, sat on either side of him. Ibn Battuta has a good deal to say in the
Rihla
about the freedom, respect, and near equality enjoyed by Mongol and Turkish women in startling contrast to the custom in his own land and the other Arab countries. (When a well-dressed and unveiled Turkish woman comes into the bazaar in the company of her husband, he remarks derisively, “anyone seeing him would take him to be one of her servants.”) If wives and mothers often influenced politics in the palaces of the Moroccan Marinids, as we may assume they did, counsel was given in the confines of the
harim
. But in the Mongol states the women of the court shared openly and energetically in the governing of the realm. Princesses of the blood, like their brothers, were awarded apanages, or landed properties, which they ruled and taxed as private fiefs quite apart from the state domain. The
khatuns
sometimes signed decrees and made major administrative decisions independently of the khan. The prim Moroccan
faqih
, in whose own country the notion of a wife of the sultan appearing publicly at his side would have seemed unimaginable, could only grimace in amazement at the Kipchak ceremonial. He relates that when the senior
khatun
and queen of the khanate enters the golden tent, the ruler “advances to the entrance of the pavilion to meet her, salutes her, takes her by the hand, and only after she has mounted to the couch and taken her seat does the sultan himself sit down. All this is done in full view of those present, and without any use of veils.”

In the following days Ibn Battuta went round to visit the
khatuns
, each of whom occupied her own
mahalla
.

The horses that draw her wagon are caparisoned with cloths of silk gilt . . . In front of [the wagon of] the
khatun
are ten or fifteen pages, Greeks and Indians, who are dressed in robes of silk gilt, encrusted with jewels, and each of whom carries in his hand a mace of gold or silver, or maybe of wood veneered with them. Behind the
khatun
’s wagon there are about a hundred
wagons, in each of which there are four slave girls full-grown and young . . . Behind these wagons [again] are about three hundred wagons, drawn by camels and oxen, carrying the
khatun
’s chests, moneys, robes, furnishings, and food.

Ibn Battuta had to sleep in his own wagon because the ruling class of Central Asia had the exasperating habit of not giving lodging to their distinguished visitors. But he dined a number of times in the presence of the khan and thankfully accepted horses, sheep, foodstuffs, and robes from the
khatuns
after regaling them (through interpreters) with his earlier adventures. He probably stayed in the camp throughout Ramadan.
¹²
He was there to celebrate the ’Id al-Fitr, the Breaking of the Fast, an occasion of public feasting during which Ozbeg Khan, notwithstanding his contribution to the enduring triumph of Islam in the western steppe, made himself helplessly drunk and arrived late and staggering at the afternoon prayer.

A short time after this festival the khan and his retinue set out for the city of Astrakhan, which lay about 80 miles across the North Caspian lowlands on the left bank of the Volga.

When Ibn Battuta visited Princess Bayalun, Ozbeg’s third ranking wife, and told her of the great distance he had journeyed from his native land, he reports that “she wept in pity and compassion and wiped her face with a handkerchief that lay before her.” She knew how it felt to live in an alien country far from the familiar society of her childhood, for she was a daughter of Andronicus III, Emperor of Byzantium.
¹³
Several times in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries dynastic marriages took place between daughters of Greek emperors and Mongol or Turkish rulers. These alliances were ultimately of small help in checking the expansion of the Ottomans (Orkhan married a Byzantine princess in 1346), but relations between Constantinople and the court of the Golden Horde were generally good. The emperors knew that Kipchak power was an effective counterweight to their Balkan rivals, the Christian kingdoms of Serbia and Bulgaria; they also endeavored to defend the interests of the Byzantine church in the Mongol protectorates of Christian Russia. The khans, for their part, wanted the Bosphorus (which ran under the walls of Constantinople) open to the trade and diplomatic exchanges on which the vitality of their alliance with the Mamluks of Cairo depended.

When the royal
ordu
reached Astrakhan, it was learned that Princess Bayalun had received permission from her husband to return temporarily to Constantinople to give birth to a child in the palace of her father. As we should not be surprised to learn, Ibn Battuta immediately applied to the khan for authorization to go along. Here was an unexpected opportunity to venture beyond the Dar al-Islam for the first time in his career and to see one of the great cities of the world, renowned among Muslims for its spectacular setting, its fabulous bazaars, its splendid buildings, and the fact that it had held out against the relentless expansion of Islam over the previous 700 years. There was nothing extraordinary about a Muslim visiting Constantinople in the fourteenth century. Merchants and envoys from Turkish or Arab lands went there when business required it, and in the previous century the Emperor Michael VIII had sponsored reconstruction of a mosque in the heart of the city.
¹⁴
A Muslim gentleman would not have been advised to wander overland through Christian territory as a purely private adventure, but he might do so in the train of an embassy from one ruler to another. At first Ozbeg refused the Moroccan’s request, fearing the risk.

But I solicited him tactfully and said to him “it is under your protection and patronage that I shall visit it, so I shall have nothing to fear from anyone.” He then gave me permission, and when we took leave of him he presented me with 1,500 dinars, a robe, and a large number of horses, and each of the
khatuns
gave me ingots of silver . . . The sultan’s daughter gave me more than they did, along with a robe and a horse, and altogether I had a large collection of horses, robes, and furs of miniver and sable.