The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (54 page)

In the course of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, the
mansas
extended their domains westward to the Atlantic coast, eastward past the great bend of the Niger, and northward to the commercial towns scattered along the Saharan fringe, building an empire that incorporated many non-Malinke peoples. By achieving political domination over a band of steppe and savanna some 1,200 miles long at the peak of the empire, they effectively controlled and taxed the north–south flow of commerce across the Western Sudan.

Indeed, Mali’s high age from the mid thirteenth to the mid fourteenth century corresponded to the period when Europe was exchanging silver for gold as its principal currency, prompting Italian and Catalan merchants to offer higher and higher prices for the little bags of dust and nuggets that were transported across the Sahara and over the Atlas Mountains to Ceuta and other North African ports. The rising European demand for gold, added to the perennial market in the Islamic states, stimulated more gold production in the Sudan, to the enormous fiscal advantage of Mali. In the later medieval period overall, West Africa may have been producing almost two-thirds of the world’s gold supply.
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In addition to gold, north-bound caravans carried numerous products originating either in the grasslands or the tropical forests — ivory, ostrich feathers, kola nuts, gum resins, hides, and slaves. In return for these goods the southbound trade brought many products from North Africa and the Mediterranean basin: textiles, copper, silver, books, paper, swords, iron ware, perfumes, jewelry, spices, wheat, and dried fruits. Horses, which did not prosper in the deep savanna country owing to the lethal bite of the tsetse fly, were imported from the Maghrib to meet the needs of the Malian cavalry. Cowrie shells were used as a form of currency in the Sudan, as they were in India. As Ibn Battuta attests, they were harvested exclusively in the Maldive Islands, then exported
to West Africa by way of Egypt and the Maghrib ports. The single most precious commodity imported to the Sudan was salt, a food essential to the human body that West Africa was unable to produce in sufficient quantity to meet demand. Salt came from mines in the Sahara and was transported southward in the form of giant slabs, two to a camel.

In the fourteenth century that section of the West Africa-to-Europe commercial exchange system extending from the northern edge of the rain forest to the Mediterranean coast was entirely in the hands of Muslims. Indeed from a global perspective the trans-Saharan trade routes were north–south branch lines of the hemispheric Muslim network that extended right across northern Africa and Asia to the ports of the South China Sea. As early as the ninth century, Berber-speaking merchants settled in commercial centers in the Sahel belt, where they acted as hosts and business agents for fellow Muslims who organized caravans in the corresponding entrepôts along the northern rim of the desert. In the time of Ghana, Muslim towns rose up alongside older Sahelian centers. In these new towns merchants of North African Berber or Arab origin were permitted by royal authority to govern their internal affairs according to the standards of the Sacred Law, just as they were beginning to do among non-Muslim peoples in the Indian Ocean basin.

These expatriate merchants did not organize the trade directly to the gold fields or to the towns deep in the savanna. That stretch of the network remained under the control of professional Sudanese traders. Most of them were of the Soninke and, later, Malinke culture groups. These men were among the first West Africans to convert to Islam, thereby linking themselves into the brotherhood of shared norms and trust that encouraged order and routine along the trans-Saharan system.

As in India and Southeast Asia, the founding of new Muslim trading communities created an immediate demand for literate cadres to organize and superintend Islamic worship, education, and law. From the beginning of Islamic expansion into West Africa, Maghribi men of learning were accompanying the merchant caravans across the desert to settle in the towns of the Sahel. These centers supported Islamic education south of the Sahara, and over the course of time gave rise to a class of Muslims grounded in the “normative” traditions of piety and scholarship as preached and practiced in North Africa. In the
period of the Mali empire the communities of ’
ulama
in the Sahelian towns included families of both Arabo-Berber and Sudanese origin, the latter mainly Malinke or Soninke. Deeper in the Sudan, learned families of purely West African origin predominated.

Sudanese chiefs and petty kings are known to have converted to Islam as early as the tenth or eleventh centuries. Whatever purely religious feelings may have motivated such men individually, conversion enhanced their esteem among Muslim merchants, the economically most powerful group in the land, and potentially tied them into a much wider commercial and diplomatic world than they had known before. The origins of Islam among the Malinke are obscure. In their tradition the founder of the empire was Sunjata (or Mari-Jaata), a larger-than-life homeric figure of the early thirteenth century who rose from physical adversity and exile to rid his homeland of an alien tyrant, then rebuilt the Malinke capital and ruled from it for 25 years. The reign of Sunjata is only vaguely associated with Islam, but at some point in the thirteenth century his successors made it the official religion of state, an act certainly linked to the growing importance of the Muslim mercantile communities which inhabited the main towns along the trans-savanna routes.

Yet the military and political success of the
mansas
also depended on the continuing allegiance and cooperation of the mass of their subjects — farming, fishing, and herding people who for the most part adhered to ancient animistic beliefs and rituals, not Islam. Unlike the sultans of Delhi, the
mansas
had not come to power as foreign invaders, prepared to organize a state as formally Islamic as they pleased. The legitimacy of their authority rested to a large extent on satisfying traditional Malinke expectations in their public conventions and ceremonies. Consequently, they were obliged to walk a narrow line between their urban Muslim subjects, who wanted them to behave up to the public standards of their Marinid or Mamluk counterparts, and the vast majority of the tax- and tribute-paying population, which took no notice of Maliki law or proper procedures at Friday prayer.

The character of official ritual and administration as more or less Islamic probably depended on the ruler’s perception of the relative importance of his Muslim and non-Muslim subjects from one period to the next. Mansa Musa was naturally a great favorite of Muslim opinion, both in Mali and the wider Islamic world. His
prestige resulted not only from his sensational pilgrimage, but also, writes al-Umari, because

he built ordinary and cathedral mosques and minarets, and established the Friday observances, and prayers in congregation, and the muezzin’s call. He brought jurists of the Malikite school to his country and there continued as sultan of the Muslims and became a student of religious sciences.
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Yet Mansa Musa also reigned during a period when relations with the Muslim merchants and with the states of North Africa were particularly important owing to the strong market for gold.

This expansive period in the trans-Saharan trade continued into the reign of Musa’s brother Sulayman, who came to the throne about 1341. Sulayman came close to matching his brother’s reputation for Islamic leadership and piety. Moreover, he ruled Mali in prosperity and peace. He was the sort of king from whom Ibn Battuta had come to expect an honorable and large-hearted reception.

In the autumn of 1351 the relentless traveler set out from Fez to visit Mali. He says nothing in the
Rihla
to explain why he felt impelled to cross the Sahara Desert. We may suppose he had the usual private plans to seek favor from yet another Muslim court. Obsessive traveler that he was, he may even have been urged on by the knowledge that the Sudan was the one important corner of the Dar al-Islam he had not yet seen.
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Some modern historians have suggested that Sultan Abu ’Inan appointed him as a state envoy to the emperor. Both Mansa Musa and Mansa Sulayman had initiated diplomatic exchanges with Abu l’Hasan, Abu ’Inan’s father. Because of the Marinid campaign to conquer all of North Africa and thereby control the northern termini of the trans-Saharan trade from the Atlantic to Ifriqiya, the rulers of Mali had abundant reason to cultivate good relations with their northern neighbor. Abu ’Inan certainly knew that Ibn Battuta was making the journey and expected him to report in detail upon his return to Fez. Yet there is no convincing evidence that this Tangierian
faqih
, who was little known in Morocco’s official circles, had anything like the ambassadorial status he had enjoyed (with such disastrous results) under Muhammad Tughluq.
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Traveling due south from Fez across the ranges of the Middle and High Atlas Mountains, he arrived in Sijilmasa, the pre-eminent desert port of the Western Maghrib, after a journey of eight or nine days. Sijilmasa lay in the midst of an immense oasis called Tafilalt, the last important outpost of sedentary life at the northern edge of the void. Today nothing remains of the city except an agglomeration of unremarkable ruins strewn among the palm groves. In the fourteenth century it was, according to al-Umari, a place “of imposing palaces, high buildings, and tall gates.”
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Tafilalt’s rich agriculture, fed by a river flowing down out of the Atlas 50 miles to the north, supported the urban population, including a large resident community of Berber and Arab merchants. From the perspective of Mali, Sijilmasa was the chief northern terminus of the trans-Saharan gold caravans. Here the products of the savanna and forest were off-loaded, stored in warehouses, and finally carried by camel, mule and donkey trains over the mountains to Fez, Marrakesh, Tlemcen, and the Mediterranean ports.

Ibn Battuta spent about four months in Sijilmasa, waiting for the winter season, when the big caravans set out for Walata, their destination at the far side of the desert. During this time he purchased camels of his own and fattened them up. When he was in Ceuta some months earlier, he may have become acquainted with the al-Bushri family, whose kinsman he had met in China. For he lodged during his entire stay in Sijilmasa with one Muhammad al-Bushri, a legal scholar and brother of the al-Bushri of Qanjanfu. “How far apart they are,” he remarks blandly in the
Rihla
.

In February 1352 (beginning of Muharram 753) he set out from Tafilalt with a caravan of “merchants of Sijilmasa and others.” The leader was a fellow of the Masufa Berbers, a herding people of the Western Sahara who appear to have had something close to a monopoly on the supply of guards, guides, and drivers on the entire route between Tafilalt and the Sahel. The twelfth-century geographer al-Idrisi describes the normal routines for traveling safely across “the empty waste” that yawned for a thousand miles south of Sijilmasa:

They load their camels at late dawn, and march until the sun has risen, its light has become bright in the air, and the heat on the ground has become severe. Then they put their loads down, hobble their camels, unfasten their baggage and stretch awnings to give some shade from the scorching heat and the hot winds of midday . . . When the sun begins to decline and sink in the west, they set off. They march for the rest of the day, and keep going until nightfall, when they encamp at whatever place they have reached . . . Thus the traveling of the merchants who enter the country of the Sudan is according to this pattern. They do not deviate from it, because the sun kills with its heat those who run the risk of marching at midday.
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A market in Tafilalt near the site of Old Sijilmasa.

Photo by the Author.

Ruins of Old Sijilmasa in the Tafilalt oasis.

Photo by the Author.