The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (50 page)

Map 11: Ibn Battuta’s Return Itinerary from China to North Africa, 1346–49

When Ibn Battuta had first angered Muhammad Tughluq back in 1340 over the Shihab al-Din affair, he had thought then of making the
hajj
again, if only as a credible excuse for getting out of the sultanate. Now, in the absence of any further prospects for a career in India, Mecca seemed more than ever a sensible destination.

The season for westbound voyages from Malabar was coming to an end, but he managed to secure passage on a ship embarking for Zafar (Dhofar), the South Arabian port he had visited 18 years earlier in connection with his trip to East Africa. He has nothing to say about his spring voyage across the open expanse of the Arabian Sea except that the trip took a normal 28 days and that he reached Zafar in Muharram 748, that is, sometime after 13 April 1347. Possibly because the next
hajj
season was almost a year away or because he would have had to wait in tedious Zafar until September to get a westbound ship to Aden, he decided to make a grand looping tour through Persia, Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, violating once again his quixotic oath never to travel by the same road twice.

From Zafar he sailed on a coasting vessel that was running before the early summer monsoon up to the Gulf of Oman and the Strait of Hurmuz. Arrived at Hurmuz city, he found the elderly Arab ruler of that great emporium locked in a naval war with two of his nephews for control of the family domain, which included all the key ports of the strait. The fighting had severely disrupted the India trade, and the country was gripped by famine. Ibn Battuta stayed there for about two weeks but had only one brief meeting with the old sultan, who was preoccupied fitting out his war galleys.
³

The political and economic troubles Ibn Battuta found at the mouth of the Persian Gulf were echoes of the violent disintegration of the Ilkhanid state, which had occurred twelve years earlier when he was just beginning his career in Delhi. For three-quarters of a century the successors of the Mongol conqueror Hulegu had held greater Persia precariously together, but the finances of the Ilkhanate rested on an agricultural and urban recovery that was too limp to ensure firm, confident central rule over the long term. When the young king Abu Sa’id died suddenly
in 1335 while on campaign in the Caucasus against the Golden Horde, he left a government debilitated by chronic frontier wars and a throne with no obvious successor groomed to mount it. On the instant, an omnivorous mix of Mongol and Turkish commanders leapt into the political void, violently challenging one another for control of the land. By the time Ibn Battuta returned to the region, the great kingdom had been superseded by a cluster of states, ruled by parvenu military dynasties. Thus the Khanate of the Ilkhans was the first of the four Tatar empires to run its course, heralding the last days of the Mongol Age.

Apparently having little urge to discover what any of these petty regimes might offer him, Ibn Battuta hurried through Persia, making his only important stopover at Shiraz. Traveling north to Isfahan, then westward over the Zagros Mountain passes to Basra, he retraced his journey of 1327 up the valley of the Euphrates. In January 1348 (Shawwal 748) he made a brief stop in Baghdad. From there he continued along the valley beyond ’Anah, then crossed the Syrian desert on the camel route through Palmyra (Tadmor). He reached Damascus, second capital of the Mamluk Sultanate, some time in the late winter of 1348.

The first time he had visited Damascus in 1326, he had married a woman of Moroccan origin. But he divorced her when he set out for Mecca, terminating a union that lasted hardly more than a few weeks. Much later in India he learned that after the separation the woman had given birth to a son. Feeling some responsibility for the boy, if not for the mother, he had sent his ex-wife’s father, who lived not in Syria but in Morocco, a gift of 40 gold dinars, presumably through the good offices of a westbound merchant. Now arrived in Damascus again, he soon learned that the son he had never seen had died about 1336 at the age often.

More unhappy news followed. A Moroccan jurist who was affiliated with one of the Damascene colleges informed him that his father had passed away in Tangier some 15 years earlier. His mother, as far as the man knew, was still alive and well.

After resting in Damascus for several weeks, he decided about the end of March to make a trip up to Aleppo (Haleb), the second ranking city of industry and commerce in Syria and the seat of Mamluk administration on the northern frontier. This journey was to be one of his leisurely diversions, an itinerary to occupy a few months before it was time to travel toward Mecca. Yet even as he rode north, the catastrophe of the fourteenth century descended on Syria behind him.
⁴
While Ibn Battuta was enjoying the company of the
’ulama
of Aleppo in June 1348, travelers reaching the city from the south reported that a virulent disease had been raging at Gaza on the Egyptian frontier and that more than a thousand people had been dying from it every day. Buboes, or inflamed swellings, appeared in the groin, armpits, or neck of the afflicted, and this irruption was typically accompanied by nausea, pain in the head, stomach, and limbs, insomnia, and delirium. If a victim began to spit blood and experience pneumonic symptoms, he usually died within hours.

Amid rumors of this lethal darkness advancing into Syria, Ibn Battuta decided to return south. He got as far as the town of Horns when he suddenly found himself engulfed in the epidemic, 300 people dying the day he arrived there. Continuing on to Damacus, he reached the great oasis in July to find that the plague had already struck. The death toll had risen to 2,000 a day, the population was reeling in shock, and the mundane routines of the city had come to a halt.

The people fasted for three successive days, the last of which was a Thursday. At the end of this period the
amirs, sharifs, qadis
, doctors of the Law, and all other classes of the people in their several degrees, assembled in the great mosque, until it was filled to overflowing with them, and spent Thursday night there in prayers and liturgies and supplications. Then, after performing the dawn prayer . . ., they all went out together on foot carrying Qur’ans in their hands – the
amirs
too barefooted. The entire population of the city joined in the exodus, male and female, small and large, the Jews went out with their book of the law and the Christians with their Gospel, their women and children with them; the whole concourse of them in tears and humble supplications, imploring the favor of God through His Books and His Prophets.
⁵

At the same time that Ibn Battuta had been sailing westward from China to his expectant reunion with the Islamic heartland, so the Black Death, the greatest pandemic disaster since the sixth century, was making its terrible way across the Central Asian grasslands to the shores of the Black Sea. Plague was endemic among ground-burrowing rodent populations of the Inner Asian steppe. It was transmitted from animals to humans by the bite of a
common species of flea. Hatching and living in the fur of plague-afflicted rats, infected fleas found their way to sacks of grain and other foodstuffs or to clothing. The plague appears to have started among pastoral folk of East Central Asia, spreading outward from there along the trade routes both southwest and west, beginning about 1331. Lurking among the merchandise in commercial wagon trains or the storerooms of caravansaries, fleas carried the bacillus
Yersinia pestis
to the bloodstream of humans. The bubonic type of plague, which produced buboes on the body, could be spread only by infected fleas and their rodent hosts. However, pneumonic plague, the deadlier form of the disease, was transmitted directly from one human to another. As the pestilence broke out in one oasis or
khan
after another, survivors hurried onto the next place along the trail, thereby unwittingly carrying the disease throughout the commercial network of the steppe. The same Mongol law and order that made possible a century of intense human interchange between China and the Atlantic coast now quickened the progress of the plague bacillus across Eurasia. The Black Death was the grimly ironic price the world paid for the trans-hemispheric unity of the Pax Mongolica.

In China, where frontier fortifications were no defense whatsoever against the advance of the invader, major outbreaks of plague occurred in 1353 and 1354, producing massive mortality and economic disruption and probably contributing to the collapse of the Yuan dynasty 14 years later. In the west the disease advanced through the Kipchak Khanate to the Black Sea, where it struck the Genoese colony at Kaffa in 1346. From there Italian ships carried infected rats and fleas amongst cargoes of grain, timber, and furs southward to Constantinople, then on to Venice and Genoa. The epidemic appeared about simultaneously in Sicily and Egypt in the autumn of 1347. The Egyptian historian al-Maqrizi tells the ghastly tale of a trading ship, probably from the Black Sea, arriving one day in Alexandria harbor. Out of a total company of 332, all but 40 sailors, 4 merchants, and 1 slave had succumbed to the plague at sea. And all who had survived the voyage presently died in the port.
⁶

In the calamitous year of 1348 ships of death coursed westward throughout the Mediterranean basin, inflicting their grim lading on one port after another. From the ports, mule trains and camel caravans transmitted the disease to the interior regions of Europe, northern Africa, and the Middle East. Paris and Bordeaux,
Barcelona and Valencia, Tunis and Cairo, Damascus and Aleppo all suffered massive plague mortality in the spring and summer of 1348. By the following year the contagion was moving up the valley of the Nile and crossing the English Channel to the British Isles. By the end of 1350, when the first assault of the disease was playing itself out, Europe may have lost as much as one-third of its population. Mortality rates in the Islamic lands were probably comparable. Cairo’s pre-plague population of perhaps half a million may have been reduced by 200,000. The population of Damascus may have diminished from 80,000 to less than 50,000.
⁷

The Black Death struck the cities and towns of Islam with the suddenness and surprise of a Mongol attack. The usual patterns of quotidian life were abandoned, and communities gave themselves to prayers of supplication and to the overwhelming task of washing, shrouding, and burying the proliferating dead. Funeral processions moved through the streets in a never-ending parade of grief. Stocks of burial garments ran out, and gravediggers who managed to survive commanded exorbitant fees for their work. Mosques closed when all the officials and caretakers died. Many who fled the plague in vain hope of evading it fell dead along the road with their horses and camels. A scholar witnessing the scene in Egypt writes of “these dead who are laid out on the highway like an ambush for others.”
⁸

Both Muslims and Christians struggled to fit this unprecedented disaster into a framework of spiritual meaning. Christian doctrine invited the conclusion that the sins of mankind had accumulated to the point where God was obliged to teach his creation a lesson it would never forget. Amid the horrors of the plague, many believed this lesson was to be the final one, the end of the world. A mood of impending apocalypse seized Europe, producing obsessive preoccupation with images of death, furious self-flagellating movements to expiate sins, and massacres of Jews, the traditional target of hostility and fear. In Islam, by contrast, no doctrine of original sin pervaded theology. All events affecting the community of believers were to be understood as the continuing revealing of God’s will. Despite social trauma in the midst of the plague, Muslims mostly accepted it as a manifestation of God’s unknowable plan for His creation. Mass public supplications to God to lift the scourge probably occurred in most cities and towns of the Middle East, but expiation crusades, messianism, or persecution of minorities were not in evidence.

Neither Muslims nor Christians in that age had the faintest notion of the medical pathology of the disease, which was not discovered until the late nineteenth century. In both Europe and the Islamic world the epidemic was generally attributed to a miasma, that is, a corruption of the air. Some authorities linked it to a polluted wind, a mysterious “impoisoned blast” blowing out of Central Asia or from the open sea.
⁹
Prophylactic advice abounded. Muslims were recommended to live in fresh air, sprinkle one’s house with rose water and vinegar, sit as motionless as possible, and eat plenty of pickled onions and fresh fruit. Those who fell victim to the disease were advised to have their blood drawn, apply egg yolk to the plague buboes, wear magical amulets, or have their sick bed strewn with fresh flowers. Above all, God’s creatures were urged to spend their nights in the mosque and beg divine mercy.

Ibn Battuta says nothing of any personal measures he may have taken to keep from falling ill, but he left Damascus sometime after July 1348 in good health, even as the pestilence raged around him. He does not seem to have taken to the road to escape the plague but only to continue on his way to Mecca by way of Egypt, where the sickness was as bad as it was in Syria, if not worse. Traveling southward into Palestine through one depopulated village after another, their water wheels idle and their fields abandoned, he arrived at Jerusalem to find that the contagion had abated there. In fact, the preacher of the grand mosque invited him to a feast in fulfillment of an oath to give special thanks to God as soon as a day passed on which no one perished.