The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (30 page)

When he started out again sometime in November,
²⁰
now traveling eastward to his rendezvous with the Black Sea, he had in his company, he tells us, three friends (including al-Tuzari), two slave boys, and a slave girl. This is one of the few occasions in the
Rihla
where he reveals precisely the composition of his entourage. He was also trailing, we may surmise, several horses and a large accumulation of baggage. Heading into the last stage of his journey through Asia Minor, it seems clear that a significant change had occurred in both his material welfare and his own sense of his social status as an
’alim
of moderate fortune. He speaks in the
Rihla
of “the prestige enjoyed by doctors of law among the Turks.” Indeed, as a jurist, a pilgrim, and a representative of Arab culture, he was treated with more honor and deference among the Turkish princes, themselves hungry for approval as legitimate and respectable Muslim rulers, than anywhere else in his travels up to that point. In turn he began to assert himself more as a mature and lettered man in the presence of secular power. In Milas at the court of Menteshe he successfully interceded before the sultan on behalf of a jurist who had fallen out of favor owing to a political slip. In Aydin the
amir
Mehmed asked him to write down a number of
hadiths
, or traditions of the Prophet, recalled from memory, then had expositions of them prepared in Turkish. Later, at the palace in Birgi Ibn Battuta loudly denounced a Jewish physician, who had a prominent position at court, for seating himself in a position above the Qur’an readers. The incident was not so much an expression of anti-semitism as a demonstration of his sense of pious propriety and his willingness to stand up for righteous standards as he perceived them, whatever the sultan’s reaction.
²¹

Visiting about twenty princely courts (including seats of governors) in the space of less than a year, he could well support his claim to status as a gentleman of consequence with a growing store of assets in hospitality gifts, not only clothes, horses, and money, but slaves and concubines. For the first time in his travels he speaks of acquiring bonded servants, anticipating the day in India when he would be accompanied by a large retinue of them. The
amir
of Aydin gave him his first slave, a male Greek captive. In Ephesus he purchased for himself a young Greek girl for forty gold dinars. In Izmir the sultan’s son gave him another boy. In Balikesir he bought a second girl. When he left Iznik he had, as he reports, only three slaves (one perhaps having been sold), but he was in any case traveling as a man of substance. The conspicuous evidence of his wealth and prestige would continue to grow during the ensuing journey across Central Asia.

But first he had to get across the Pontic Mountains to the Black Sea in the dead of a bitter Anatolian winter. In stark contrast to his summer promenade through the orchards and vineyards of the lovely Aegean valleys, the final trek out of Asia Minor was a chain of annoyances and near fatal calamities reminiscent of his distastrous march to Qalhat along the South Arabian coast. The trouble began at the Sakarya River several miles east of Iznik when the little party started to follow a Turkish horsewoman and her servant across what they all thought was a ford. Advancing to the middle of the river, the woman suddenly fell from her horse. Reaching out to save her, her servant jumped into the frigid water but both of them were carried away in the swirling current. A group of men on the opposite bank, witnessing the accident, immediately swam into the stream and managed to drag both victims ashore. Half-drowned, the woman eventually revived, but her servant perished. The men then warned Ibn Battuta and his companions that they must go further downstream to cross safely. After heeding this advice, they discovered a primitive wooden raft, loaded themselves and their baggage on it, and were pulled across by rope, their horses swimming behind.

Then at the village of Goynuk (Kainuk), where they lodged in the house of a Greek woman for a night, they encountered heavy snow. A local horseman guided them onward through the drifts as far as a Turcoman village, where another rider was hired to take them to Mudurnu (Muturni), the next important town on the far side of a wooded mountain pass.
²²
After leading them deep into
the hills, the guide suddenly made signs that he wanted money. When he was refused any compensation until he delivered his employers safely into town, he snatched a bow belonging to one of the travelers and threatened to steal it. Ibn Battuta relented then, but the moment the rogue had money in his hand he fled, leaving the startled little band to find their own road in the deep snow. Eventually they came to a hill where the track was marked by stones, but by this time the sun was setting. If they tried to camp in the forest overnight, they were likely to freeze to death; if they continued on they would only lose their way in the dark.

I had a good horse, however, a thoroughbred, so I planned a way of escape, saying to myself, “If I reach safety, perhaps I may contrive some means to save my companions,” and it happened so. I commended them to God Most High and set out . . . After the hour of the night prayer I came to some houses and said “O God, grant that they be inhabited.” I found that they were inhabited, and God Most High guided me to the gate of a certain building. I saw by it an old man and spoke to him in Arabic; he replied to me in Turkish and signed me to enter. I told him about my companions, but he did not understand me.

Then, in a thoroughly improbable stroke of providence, Ibn Battuta found that he was at a Sufi hospice and that one of the brethren was a former “acquaintance” of his, an Arabic-speaking chap (from what corner of the world we are not told) who quickly grasped the situation and sent a party to rescue the stranded companions. After a warm night and a hot meal in the lodge, the group continued on to Mudurnu, arriving just in time for the Friday prayer.

Convinced now that they needed an interpreter, Ibn Battuta engaged a local man (who had made the
hajj
and spoke Arabic) to take them to Kastamonu, the largest town in the region, which lay ten days to the northeast. Though the man was prosperous and reasonably well educated, he quickly revealed himself to be a greedy and unscrupulous character, selling anything he could lay his hands on in the village market places, stealing part of the daily expense funds, and appropriating for himself the money the travelers wished to pay a sister of his who fed them in a village along the way. But they still needed the fellow to get them through
the mountains. “The thing went so far that we openly accused him and would say to him at the end of the day ‘Well, Hajji, how much of the expense-money have you stolen today?’ He would reply ‘So much,’ and we would laugh at him and make the best of it.”

On top of all these miseries Ibn Battuta’s slave girl almost drowned crossing another river.

The weary caravaners must have been blessedly relieved to arrive at Kastamonu, capital of the principality of the Jandarids and an island of moderately civilized comfort in the snowy wilderness. Ibn Battuta once again received the sort of treatment to which he was accustomed, feasting with the local scholars, meeting the
amir
in his lofty citadel overlooking the city,
²³
and accepting the usual robes, horse, and money. He remained there some weeks, enjoying his last encounter with a generous Anatolian prince and perhaps waiting for the weather to improve. Then, riding northeastward into the Pontic, now apparently with an entourage of nine, he crossed one of the high passes and descended through the dense forests of the northern slopes, the Black Sea and the land of the Golden Horde before him.

1
. Gb, vol. 2, p. 416.

2
. IB’s reference to a stay of 40 days in Jidda cannot be taken as a precise recollection. As Hrbek points out (Hr, pp. 453, 467) IB repeatedly reports the length of his stopovers in particular places as “forty days” or “about forty days.” The use of this number as a conventional rounded figure was common among Middle Eastern and Muslim peoples. It appears frequently in Islamic ideology and ritual in Morocco. See Edward Westermarck,
Ritual and Belief in Morocco
, 2 vols. (London, 1926), vol. 1, p. 143.

3
. The
Rihla
’s earliest description of travels through Greater Syria appears to be a compilation of four separate journeys, the second one being in 1330 (1332) (see Chapter 3, note 26 and Chapter 6, note 2). Thus it is difficult to know precisely which cities he visited during each of the four tours. He claims, without adding any descriptive material, to have passed through Hebron, Jerusalem, and Ramla on his way from Gaza to Acre in 1330 (1332). Hrbek (Hr, p. 454) is inclined to believe, for reasons of chronology and logic, that these stopovers are out of place and that he went directly up the coast to Latakia without passing into the interior. However, IB could have fitted in a second visit to the holy places of Hebron and Jerusalem and been back on the coast in a matter of a few days. Moreover, he may have visited several towns and castles in far northern Syria in 1330. He mentions them, however, only in connection with the 1326 itinerary.

4
. In the 1330s the Genoese were probably just beginning to frequent Levantine ports after a hiatus of several decades owing to conflict between the Mamluks and the last of the Crusader states. W. Heyd,
Histoire du commerce du Levant au moyen-âge
, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1936), vol. 1, pp. 547–8, vol. 2, pp. 61–62.

5
. Eugene H. Byrne,
Genoese Shipping in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries
(Cambridge, Mass., 1930), pp. 5–9.

6
. IB claims to have taken ten nights to get from Latakia to Alanya, but if the wind was favorable, as he says, the trip could have been made in two or three days. Hr, pp. 454–55.

7
. Claude Cahen,
Pre-Ottoman Turkey
(London, 1968), p. 153.

8
. Ibid., pp. 227, 256, 349–50.

9
. IB gives an oblique impression that he learned Turkish at some point in his career, but, as Gibb points out (Gb, vol. 2, p. 420n), there is no evidence that he did.

10
. Seton Lloyd and D. S. Rice,
Alanya
(
Ala’iyya
) (London, 1958).

11
. Where Gibb has translated IB’s term
al-fata akhi
as “Young Akhi,” I have made it simply “Akhi.” The leaders of the
fityan
were seldom young.

12
. Speros Vryonis,
The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1971), pp. 396–402. The author lists 26 places where IB speaks of being entertained by a
fityan
club. I count 27 or possibly 28.

13
. The main difficulty with the journey through Anatolia is that the trip from Konya to Erzurum is arbitrarily inserted in the narrative between his stops at Milas and Birgi, both cities in the far west of the peninsula. IB says nothing of how he got from Milas to Konya or from Erzurum to Birgi. The journey through eastern Anatolia seems obviously misplaced, but there are no internal clues to help sort out the actual itinerary. Hrbek (Hr, pp. 455–64) suggests that if IB’s movements were reasonably logical, he is likely to have gone from Antalya to Egridir, then turned eastward at that point and traveled on to Konya and Erzurum. He would have returned to Egridir by a fairly direct route and arrived there in time for Ramadan (8 June 1331 or 16 May 1333). He states that he was in that city for the start of the fast. Such a pattern of movement would fit in well with the chronology of the Anatolian travels taken as a whole. That is, arriving on the south coast in late 1330 (1332), he would have spent the first five months or so going to Egridir, Konya, Erzurum, and back again. He would then have continued westward to Milas, Birgi, and the Aegean coast, traveling through that region, as he states several times, during the summer. There is at least one annoying snag in this hypothetical reconstruction. IB places himself in Egridir for the start of Ramadan, but during a single visit to that town. Hrbek’s speculative solution hangs on the assertion that IB probably visited Egridir twice and that the Ramadan visit in May occurred following his return from the eastern region. There are of course several examples in the
Rihla
of his collapsing descriptions connected with two or more visits to a place into a single, first visit. I believe Hrbek’s reconstruction remains plausible for want of anything better. P. Wittek thinks that owing to the chronological and geographical problems of the Konya–Erzurum trip, IB made it up on hearsay.
Das Fürstentum Mentesche
(Amsterdam, 1967), p. 66. However, IB’s eastern Anatolian detour presents numerous details of personal experience.

14
. “Konya,” EI
₂
, vol. 5, pp. 253–56; J. Bergeret, “Konya,”
Archéologia
96 (July 1976): 30–37.

15
. Halil Inalcik,
The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600
, trans. Norman Itzkowitz and Colin Imber (London, 1973), pp. 53, 108–09.

16
. IB’s precise itinerary in eastern Anatolia is impossible to fathom. The
Rihla
has him going directly from Sunisa to Gumushane, but no direct route existed owing to the high mountains. Hrbek speculates on alternative roads he could have taken (Hr, pp. 458–59).

17
. See note 13.

18
. In contrast to the standard historiography I have not closely identified the early Ottoman conquests with the holy war of
ghazis
. A recent essay convincingly argues that the ideology of tribal solidarity and the shared adventure of “nomad
predation” unified Osman’s and Orkhan’s military enterprises, not
jihad
against the Greeks. See Rudi Paul Lindner,
Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia
(Bloomington, Ind., 1983).

19
. Inalcik,
Ottoman Empire
, p. 8.