The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (17 page)

1
. Arthur J. Arberry,
The Koran Interpreted
(New York, 1955), p. 86.

2
. Theophilus Bellorini and Eugene Hoade, eds. and trans.,
Visit to the Holy Places of Egypt, Sinai, Palestine and Syria in 1384 by Frescobaldi, Gucci and Sigoli
(Jerusalem, 1948), p. 23.

3
. The Syrian caravan normally left Damascus on 10 Shawwal, or 10 September in 1326. ’Abdullah ’Ankawi, “The Pilgrimage to Mecca in Mamluk Times,”
Arabian Studies
1 (1974): 149. Since the
Rihla
is sometimes given to rounding off significant dates at the first day of the month, Ibn Battuta may well have left on or about 10 Shawwal rather than the 1st.

4
. ’Ankawi, “The Pilgrimage to Mecca,” pp. 160–61.

5
. Arberry,
Koran
, pp. 54–55.

6
. IB gives the traveling time from Rabigh to Khulais (a palm grove on the route) as three nights. Ibn Jubayr made the trip from Mecca to Khulais in four days.
The Travels of Ibn Jubayr
, trans. R. J. C. Broadhurst (London, 1952), pp. 188–91.

7
. A pilgrimage prayer translated in Ahmad Kamal,
The Sacred Journey
(London, 1961), p. 35.

8
. Ibn Jubayr,
Travels
, pp. 116–17.

9
. Ibid., p. 117.

10
. C. Snouk Hurgronje,
Mecca in the Latter Part of the Nineteenth Century
(Leiden, 1931), pp. 171–72.

11
. Eldon Rutter,
The Holy Cities of Arabia
, 2 vols. (London, 1928), vol. 1, p. 117.

12
. Ibn Jubayr,
Travels
, p. 80.

13
. Richard Burton,
Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah
, 2 vols. (New York, 1964), vol. 2, p. 161.

14
. IB states in the
Rihla
that when he assumed the
ihram
garments he declared his intention of performing the rites of the Greater Pilgrimage (
hajj
) without the Lesser Pilgrimage (’
umra
, or visit). The latter, comprised essentially of the
tawaf
and the
sa’y
, could be performed at any time of the year. When a Muslim entered Mecca at a time other than the
hajj
season, he could deconsecrate himself following the
tawaf
and the
sa’y
of arrival. He would then be in a state called
tamattu
’, meaning that he could enjoy a normal life and wear everyday clothes until the start of the
hajj
, if in fact he planned to remain in the town until then. IB, however, vowed to perform the
hajj
, which included the
tawaf
and
sa’y
plus the rites of the walk to Arafat, without interrupting the state of
ihram
. Therefore, he was required to wear his white clothes and obey the attendant prohibitions until his
hajj
was completed. See “Hadjdj,” EI
₂
, vol. 3, p. 35.

15
. Gb, vol. 1, p. 203 n. IB counts five minarets, but Ibn Jubayr (
Travels
, p. 87) says there were seven, which agrees with nineteenth-century observers. There are seven today, though the precise locations of the towers have varied over the centuries.

16
. Ibn Jubayr,
Travels
, p. 86.

17
. Burckhardt,
Travels
, vol. 1, p. 273.

He also said: “After us the descendants of our clan will wear gold embroidered garments, eat rich and sweet food, ride fine horses, and embrace beautiful women but they will not say that they owe all this to their fathers and elder brothers, and they will forget us and those great times.”
¹

The Yasa of Chinggis Khan

When Ibn Battuta made his first excursion to Iraq and western Persia, more than a century had passed since the birth of the Mongol world empire. For a Moroccan lad born in 1304 the story of Chinggis Khan and the holocaust he brought down on civilized Eurasia was something to be read about in the Arabic version of Rashid al-Din’s
History of the Mongols
. The Tatar storm blew closer to England than it did to Morocco and had no repercussions on life in the Islamic Far West that Ibn Battuta’s great grandfather was likely to have noticed. For the inhabitants of Egypt and the Levant the Mongol explosion had been a brush with catastrophe, mercifully averted by Mamluk victories but imagined in the dark tales told by fugitives from the dead and flattened cities that were once Bukhara, Merv, and Nishapur. For the Arab and Persian peoples of the lands east of the Euphrates the terrible events of 1220–60 had been a nightmare of violence from which they were still struggling to recover in the fourteenth century.

“With one stroke,” wrote the Persian historian Juvaini of the Mongol invasion of Khurasan, “a world which billowed with fertility was laid desolate, and the regions thereof became a desert, and the greater part of the living dead, and their skin and bones crumbling dust; and the mighty were humbled and immersed in the calamities of perdition.”
²
The Mongols wreaked death and devastation wherever they rode from China to the plains of Hungary but nowhere more so than in Persia, where most of the great cities of the northern region of Khurasan were demolished and their inhabitants annihilated. A modern historian estimates that the total population of Khurasan, Iraq, and Azerbaijan may have dropped temporarily from 2,500,000 to 250,000 as a result of mass extermination and famine.
³
The thirteenth-century chronicler Ibn al-Athir estimated that the Mongols killed 700,000 people in Merv alone.
⁴
That figure is probably a wild exaggeration, but it suggests the contemporary perception of those calamitous events.

Map 5: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in Persia and Iraq, 1326–27

The Mongol terror did not proceed from some Nazi-like ideological design to perpetrate genocide. Nor was it a spontaneous barbarian rampage. Rather it was one of the cooly devised elements of the greater Chinggis Khanid strategy for world conquest, a fiendishly efficient combination of military field tactics and psychological warfare designed to crush even the possibility of resistance to Mongol rule and to demoralize whole cities into surrendering without a fight. Once the armies had overrun Persia and set up garrison governments, wholesale carnage on the whole came to an end. Even the most rapacious Tatar general understood that the country could not be systematically bled over the long term if there were no more people left. After about 1260, and in some regions much earlier, trade resumed, fields were planted, towns dug themselves out, and remnants of the educated and artisan classes plodded back to their homes. Some cities, such as Tabriz, opened their gates to the invaders, and so were spared destruction. Others, Kerman and Shiraz for example, were in regions far enough to the south to be out of the path of the storm; they later acquiesced to Mongol overlordship while preserving a degree of political autonomy.

And yet for the mass of Arabic- or Persian-speaking farmers, on whose productive labor the civilization of Mesopotamia and the Iranian plateau had always rested, the disaster was chronic. Over the long run the military crisis was not so much an invasion of Mongol armies at it was the last great trek of Turkish steppe nomads from Central Asia into the Islamic heartland, a re-enactment and indeed a continuation of the eleventh-century migrations that had populated parts of the Middle East with Turkish tribes and put their captains in political control of almost all of it. Chinggis Khan could never have done more than found some unremarkable tribal state in Inner Asia were it not for his success at incorporating into his war machine numerous Turkish clans inhabiting the grasslands between Mongolia and the Caspian Sea. Turkish warriors trooped to the flag of Genghis by the tens of thousands, partly because the Mongols had defeated them, partly
for the military adventure, partly because rain fell more often and grass grew taller progressively as one moved west and south. Turks far outnumbered ethnic Mongols in the mounted armies that attacked Persia, and they brought with them their wagons, their families, and their enormous herds of horses and sheep, which fed their way through Khurasan and westward along the flanks of the Alburz Mountains to the thick pastures of Azerbaijan.

Although many of the Turkish invaders had themselves been converted to Sunni Islam in the preceding centuries as a result of contact with urban merchants and missionaries from Khurasan, they joined eagerly in the violent dismembering of Persian society, ridding the land of the farms, crops, irrigation works, and cities that obstructed the free movement of their herds. Over several decades thousands of Iranian peasants were killed, enslaved, and chased off their land. To make matters worse, the early Mongol rulers, beginning with Genghis Khan’s grandson Hulegu in 1256, could not quite make up their minds whether to carry through policies designed to reconstruct the country and revive agriculture or to treat the land as permanent enemy territory by taxing the peasants unbearably and permitting commanders, tribal chiefs, and state “messengers” to devour the countryside at the slightest sign of agrarian health.

Ghazan (1295–1304), the seventh Ilkhan (or “deputy” of the Great Khan, as the Mongol rulers of Persia were called), made a determined effort to improve the administrative and fiscal system in ways that would lighten the peasants’ tax load, relieve them of indiscriminate extortion on the part of state officials, and restore their will to produce. The reforms had modest success, but they did not drive the economy decisively upward, owing to the petulant resistance of officials and war lords and the failure of Ghazan’s successors to persevere with sufficient energy. The strength and well-being of any civilized society depended on the prosperity of its agriculture, and in this respect Persia and Iraq entered the fourteenth century still dragging the chains of the Mongol invasion. “There can be no doubt,” wrote the Persian historian Mustawfi in 1340, “that even if for a thousand years to come no evil befalls the country, yet will it not be possible completely to repair the damage, and bring back the land to the state in which it was formerly.”
⁵

Yet if the understructure of the Persian economy was weak, the Mongols succeeded remarkably well at paving over their own work
of mass contamination with a new urban culture shiny enough to make an educated visitor forget all about the horrors of Merv. Like the Marinids, the Mamluks, and other crude conquerors fresh from the steppe, the Ilkhans were quick to surrender to the sophisticated civilization that enveloped them. Indeed the mind of the Mongol warrior was so culturally deprived that it presented a vast blank on which all sorts of refined and humane influences could be written. In the earlier phase of the conquest the Tatar leaders turned for guidance to their Turkish subordinates, some of whom were Muslims with literate skills gained as a result of two or three centuries of contact with the cities of Khurasan on the fringe of the steppe. These allies supplied the Mongol language with a written script (Uigur Turkish) and a corps of clerks and officials who did much of the initial work of installing Tatar government throughout the Genghis Khanid empire. Even as the invasion of Persia was still going forward, the people of distinctly Mongol origin in the forces, a minority group almost from the beginning, were intermarrying with Turks, taking up their language and ways, and rapidly disappearing into the great migrating crowd. By the end of the thirteenth century, purely Mongol cultural influences on Persia, excepting in matters of warfare and military pomp, had all but vanished.

The Turkish model, however, was only half-way civilized and in the end no match for the Persian one at the elevated levels of literate culture. The Mongol invaders inherited proprietorship of an edifice of civilization far more complex and luxurious than anything they had ever experienced. The cultural Persianization of the Ilkhanid regime was getting under way even while the smoke still hung over Baghdad. Hulegu (1256–65) was in theory subordinate to the Great Khan of the Mongols (Kublai Khan in China after 1260), but in fact he was the founder of an Iraqo–Persian kingdom, one of the four major successor states to the monolithic empire of Genghis. Orderly government and efficient taxation of the population in a realm that extended from the Oxus to Anatolia absolutely required, as in Mongol China, the help of the native elite. Though thousands of educated people had been killed in the invasions, the remnants soon emerged from the wreckage and presented themselves for public service. Even the early Ilkhans, who favored Buddhism or Christianity rather than Islam, had no choice but to put administration and finance in the hands of the same families of native Muslim scribes and officials who had been running Persia before the invasion.

In fact the Mongol leaders were transformed into Persians, or at
least Turco–Persians, to a degree that the Mamluks never were in their relation to literate Egypt. The explanation is that the Mongol governing class was not a permanently alien elite continuously recruited fresh from the steppe. And it did not maintain itself by erecting a political system that depended on the maintenance of sharp cultural separations between rulers and subjects. Rather, the Turco–Mongol soldiery came to Persia to stay and became progressively identified with Persian ways. The dynasty, moreover, was founded on conventional principles of hereditary kingship over the Persian and Iraqi people, a relationship which gradually splintered the connections of sentiment and culture between the Ilkhans and their kinsmen of Inner Asia.
⁶