The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (52 page)

Ibn Battuta arrived in Fez on 8 November 1349 to find the city in a state of uncertainty and suspense over the fate of the empire.
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The usurper Abu ’Inan was the son of a Christian slave woman and as slender and fair as his father was corpulent and black. He had occupied Fez for more than a year and had made himself master of Morocco. Like his father, he was a pious, cultivated man, given to holding regular study sessions with the leading divines and jurists and to writing belles-lettres and poetry. The elite of Old Fez accommodated to his regime readily enough, but the fact remained that for the moment there were two sultans and no one knew when or if Abu l’Hasan might appear before the walls of Fez at the head of his army. The usual course for the cosmopolitan professional man in such circumstances was to submit to whomever happened to be occupying the royal audience chamber at the time.

Ibn Battuta, having just come from making obeisance to Abu l’Hasan in Tunis, now presented himself at the great palace of Fez Jdid to stand before his “illustrious master” Abu ’Inan. He apparently did not get an opportunity to address the sultan, but a vizier named Abu Ziyan ibn Wadrar offered him gifts and questioned him about Egypt, a country the minister had visited. Ibn Battuta decided not to stay in Fez for very long, however, since he was anxious to return to Tangier. Given the precarious political situation in the capital, it was probably prudent, in any case, to go elsewhere.

Arrived in his natal town some time during the fasting month of Ramadan, he tells us only that he visited his mother’s grave.
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He does not mention his deceased father, suggesting that the man may have died in some other place. Nor does he describe joyous reunions with brothers, sisters, cousins, or old friends. Indeed, the fourteenth-century reader of the
Rihla
would find too much of that sort of information tedious and irrelevant. Yet we can imagine a
homecoming of warm recognition and nights spent in the central mosque or the houses of kinsmen, sharing tales of Muhammad Tughluq and Ozbeg Khan and of those glorious days in the precinct of the Holy House.

Restless again after only a few days among the haunts of his childhood, Ibn Battuta decided to make the short trip overland to Ceuta (Sabta), which in that age was the queen city of the Strait of Gibraltar. Endowed with a fine sheltered harbor and superb natural defenses, Ceuta was the headquarters of the Marinid navy and the chief Moroccan terminus of the West African gold trade. The town was set on a tongue of land jutting eastward into the Mediterranean. The eastern half of this little peninsula was dominated by the heights of Mount Hacho (Jabal al-Musa). From its summit lookouts had a commanding view of the strait and the Iberian shore beyond.
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When Ibn Battuta walked through Ceuta’s western gate, he was in a sense already arriving in Muslim Spain. Located a mere 14 miles from Europe but separated from its own Moroccan hinterland by a chain of mountains, the city was culturally a prolongation of Andalusia. Its leading official and scholarly families had centuries-old ties to the great Muslim intellectual centers of Spain, and as the Christian
reconquista
progressed in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, it was the chief port of entry for skilled and educated refugees fleeing into Africa. From the point of view of a lettered man, Ceuta’s mellow Andalusian sophistication made it a much more interesting place than Tangier. So it is not surprising that Ibn Battuta spent “several months” there, undoubtedly frequenting the new college Abu l’Hasan had built and perhaps making acquaintance with the al-Bushri family, whose scholar kinsman he had met a few years earlier in China. He was, unfortunately, ill during much of his visit. The plague was still raging in the region of the strait, but he says nothing about contracting the bubonic type (from which some did recover). More likely he was suffering from yet another bout of malaria.

At the time he arrived in Ceuta, the city was intently following reports from Gibraltar, 22 miles across the strait. In the previous July Alfonso XI of Castile, taking advantage of the Marinid civil crisis and Abu l’Hasan’s absence in Ifriqiya, had laid siege to the Rock and its mighty fortifications. Since the loss of Algeciras to Castile in 1344, Gibraltar remained the only port on the northern shore of the strait still in Muslim hands. If Alfonso breached its
walls, the immediate consequence would be to cut the main military supply route, not only to the few towns the Moroccans still held in Iberia, but also to their ally, the Nasrid Sultan of Granada. More than that, the loss of Gibraltar would give Castile and its Christian allies such a naval advantage in the strait that both Tangier and Ceuta would be under a greater danger of invasion than ever before.

Either in Tangier or Ceuta, Ibn Battuta learned that volunteers were urgently wanted to aid the Moroccan army in the defense of Gibraltar. Recovering from his illness in Ceuta and thanking God for it, he decided to respond to the call. He had taken up arms a time or two in his career, and he was certainly susceptible to the high esteem Islam paid to those who served spontaneously in the
jihad
. He set sail for the Rock on a small Moroccan vessel in March or April 1350.
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By this time, however, the immediate military crisis had completely dissipated. During the months of the Castilian siege, the Black Death had made war on both armies with scrupulous impartiality. On 26 March 1350, it took the life of King Alfonso, distinguishing him as the only monarch of Christian Europe to die in the epidemic of mid century.
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The loss of their valiant warrior king obliged the Castilian forces to abandon the siege, leaving the promontory and the isthmus of Gibraltar under Muslim control, a state of affairs that would endure, as it turned out, for another 112 years.

Whether to his disgruntlement or relief, Ibn Battuta was discharged of any military duty when he arrived in Gibraltar port and so was free to see the sights. He made a thorough inspection of the promontory and its ramparts, climbing up to the Calahorra, a massive stone tower Abu l’Hasan had constructed at the summit of the citadel to serve as the pivot of the town’s defenses. The
qadi
of Gibraltar accompanied him on his tour and hosted him in his house on one of the streets of the town, which lay up against the western face of the Rock. “I desired to be, until the end of my life, among those who guarded and defended this place,” Ibn Battuta recalls in the
Rihla
with perhaps a hint of bravado. But since at the moment there was no serious defending to be done, he was soon on the road again, crossing the sandy neck of land that linked Gibraltar to the highlands of Andalusia. He mentions no companions and may well have been traveling with only a servant or two.

With the withdrawal of the Christian siege, it was relatively safe
for Muslim travelers to venture along the overland routes to Granada. This Ibn Battuta now proposed to do, probably with the hope of adding the Nasrid sultan Abu l’Hajjaj Yusuf ibn Isma’il to the list of Muslim rulers who had invited him to their table. The direct route from Gibraltar to Granada City ran along the Mediterranean coast to Malaga. Typically, he decided to go a different way, traveling northward through the rich vineyards and fruit orchards of the Rio Guadiaro valley, then up into the forests of the Sierra de Ronda. The city of Ronda, which occupied a spectacular site straddling the deep gorge of the Tajo River, was still a possession of the Marinids in 1350. Ibn Battuta may have gone there partly to see a paternal first cousin of his, who was the
qadi
of the town. After five days he returned to the coast again by the treacherous mountain road over the Sierra Bermeja to the little port of Marbella.

Here he made the acquaintance of twelve men who were just then setting out for Malaga along the coast road through Suhayl (Fuengirola), a fortress at the western frontier of the Nasrid kingdom. He intended to join up with them, but for some unexplained reason they left Marbella without him. He found another party of travelers, however, and was soon on his way.

Moving eastward along the narrow plain between the sea and the Sierra de Mijas, Ibn Battuta had a mind at one point to ride out ahead of his companions. All along this shore the Nasrid sultans, and other Muslim rulers before them, had constructed stone watchtowers at regular intervals to guard against coastal raiders and to survey the movements of foreign navies. As he was nearing one of these towers, he suddenly came upon a dead horse lying by the side of the road. Suspicious of trouble but moving along a little further, he came upon another horse recently slain. Then, hearing shouts behind him, he returned to his fellows to find them in the company of the Nasrid commander of Suhayl fort. The twelve horsemen who had left Ibn Battuta behind in Marbella, it seemed, had run into a band of Christian corsairs. The marauders had approached the coast in four galleys. Finding no one on guard at the watchtower to sound the alarm, a party of them had gone ashore and ambushed the first travelers who happened by. One of the horsemen had been murdered and one escaped. The remaining ten had been taken prisoner to be held for ransom. Thanking God for delivering him from infidel pirates for the second time in his life, Ibn Battuta accepted the invitation of the commander of
Suhayl to spend the night in the castle. The next day the officer escorted the travelers safely on to Malaga, chief port of the Nasrid realm.

Entering the city’s central mosque, a magnificent building whose interior court bloomed with orange trees, Ibn Battuta found the ’
ulama
and other notables of the town gathered to collect ransom money for the captured men, who were no doubt citizens of Malaga. He told the assembled group his story of having barely escaped death or capture himself. They were all astonished at his good fortune, and the
qadi
and preacher both gave him hospitality. If he ever learned how the negotiations with the pirates turned out, he does not report it.

From Malaga he continued eastward to Velez Malaga (Ballish), then turned into the mountains. He passed through Alhama, a town famous for its hot spring baths, then continued on northeastward to the Vega, the upper valley of the Genii River, whose fertile highland plain sustained Granada City’s 50,000 inhabitants.
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Two decades earlier Ibn Battuta had visited Christian Byzantium at a time of military retreat before the triumphant Turks. Yet in the same period Constantinople was the scene of brilliant erudition in Greek science and philosophy, as if to make a final, defiant statement of a thousand years of creativity before surrendering to an ineluctable fate. At the opposite end of the Mediterranean the Sultanate of Granada was displaying a similar contradiction of trends. Like the three kingdoms of the Maghrib, the Nasrid state had been founded in the aftermath of the Almohad collapse. By 1348 it was, with the exception of the enclaves the Marinids held on the coast, the only remaining stronghold of Muslim power in Iberia. Pressed into its mountainous corner of the peninsula by Castile and Aragon—Catalonia, Granada struggled to survive by building up its frontier defenses and pursuing a policy of pragmatic diplomacy with Christian and Muslim neighbours alike.

The Sultanate had a population of perhaps a million people in the fourteenth century,
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a fervently Muslim population ready to defend valley by valley what remained of its Iberian patrimony. Inescapably, time was on the side of the Christian states. But while Granada endured, its people dedicated themselves, perhaps consciously so, to the mission of summing up six centuries of Andalusian civilization. The Nasrid cultural achievement was not intellectually or aesthetically innovative. Rather it was a final exquisite reaffirmation of the literary and artistic heritage of Islamic Spain.

Outer walls of the Alhambra, Granada, Spain

Photo by the Author

A view of Old Fez.

Photo by the Author.

Demonstrating once again his remarkable ability to visit Muslim kingdoms at their efflorescent best, Ibn Battuta saw Granada in the reign of Abu l’Hajjaj Yusuf, or Yusuf I (1333–54). Together with his successor Muhammad V (1354–59, 1369–91), Yusuf was the most successful ruler in a dynastic line of 23 largely undistinguished men. Following the débâcle of the Battle of Rio Salado, in which Granada had fought on the side of the Marinids, Yusuf succeeded in arranging what proved to be long-term military truces with both Castile and Aragon. Free for the time being from the threat of invasion, he and his circle of brilliant ministers and secretaries devoted themselves to perpetuating Andalusia’s legendary tradition of urbane learning and taste. It was Yusuf (and later Muhammad) who constructed the most beautiful courtyards and portals of the Alhambra, “the red fort” which stands on a spur of the Sierra Nevada overlooking the city of Granada and the fertile valley of the Genil River beyond. The Alhambra was the seat of Nasrid government and court life. From the outside it was a forbidding, mysterious complex of stone ramparts, but within a buoyant, gossamer composition of exquisitely decorated halls and courts, juxtaposed one to another in a symphony of light, shadow, and flowing water. “The peculiar charm of this old dreamy palace,” Washington Irving wrote in the nineteenth century, “is its power of calling up vague reveries and picturings of the past, and thus clothing naked realities with the illusions of the memory and the imagination.”
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