The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (51 page)

Joining up with two gentlemen of North African origin, Ibn Battuta continued on in their company through Judaea to Gaza, which he found mostly deserted in the wake of the Death. Indeed the population of the entire Nile Delta region was declining drastically in the fall months of 1348, when the plague was at its worst.
¹⁰
The travelers passed through Alexandria, where the epidemic may have first entered Egypt in the fall of 1347, to learn that there the daily mortality rate was finally subsiding.

In Cairo, however, the toll was still rising. Urban land and property were being abandoned precipitately, commerce and industry became paralyzed, and, in the words of one chronicler, “the deaths had increased until it had emptied the streets.”
¹¹
The Mamluk Sultan al-Hasan fled from Cairo to a country estate in
September and stayed away from his capital for three months.
¹²
The royal officer corps, living in close quarters in the Citadel and refusing to leave Cairo for fear of losing their power and rank to rival Mamluks, sustained such a high rate of die-off that the army and administration of the sultanate fell into a state of disorder and diminished capacity lasting several decades.
¹³

Ibn Battuta probably stayed in the ravaged city no more than a few days, then continued on up the Nile. Now, happily, he moved ahead of the plague, which did not strike Upper Egypt until about February 1349.
¹⁴
Crossing the Red Sea from ’Aydhab to Jidda as he had done in the reverse direction 18 years earlier, he performed the ceremony of the
tawaf
around the Holy Ka’ba on 16 November 1348 (22 Sha’ban 749), praising God that he had so far been spared. He remained in Mecca for more than four months as the guest of the Maliki
imam
, awaiting the
hajj
of 749. He relates nothing about plague in the city, though other historical sources report that it raged there during the pilgrimage season, introduced by the caravans from Egypt or Syria.
¹⁵

Since returning from India, Ibn Battuta’s wish had been to stand before the Holy House one more time. Now that he had done it, he may have had no further plans in particular. For the time being at least, he decided to go back to Cairo (by a route through Medina, Jerusalem, and the Sinai). The Mamluk capital was hardly the city he had known in 1326. Aside from the ruin and wastage of the plague (which abated only after January 1349), the quality of leadership over the Mamluk state had badly deteriorated since the death of al-Nasir Muhammad ibn Qala’un in 1341. Over the ensuing decade that great builder was succeeded by four different sons and grandsons, all of whom were lusterless or infantile pawns of one quarreling military faction or another.

Perhaps the bleak scene in Cairo quickened the journeyer’s resolve to return at last to his native land. He was 45 years old, he had been abroad for 24 years, and, so far as he knew, his aged mother was alive and still living in Tangier. In his absence Fez, the capital of the Marinid dynasty, had blossomed into the premier city of Maliki religious and legal studies in western Islam. As a former
qadi
of the Sultanate of Delhi, he should, if he wished, have no trouble securing a government post either in Fez or some other Moroccan town. And, ironically enough, Morocco was one of the few corners of the Islamic world he had not yet explored. In the end, however, sentiment and nothing else may have impelled
him to head for that beautiful land of the Far West: “I was moved [to go back] by memories of my homeland, affection for my family and dear friends, who drew me toward my land, which, in my opinion, was better than any other country.”
¹⁶

Leaving Egypt for the last time on a small vessel belonging to a mariner from Tunis, Ibn Battuta sailed along the Cyrenaican and Tripolitanian coasts to the port of Gabès (Kabis) on the south Ifriqiyan mainland where he passed the feast of the Prophet’s birthday on 31 May 1349 (12 Rabi’ I 750) in the company of the local notables. Continuing up the coast by sea, he joined a party of bedouin traveling overland to Tunis, a city then under the command of the Amir of the Muslims and Defender of the Faith Abu l’Hasan, Sultan of Morocco.

A quarter of a century earlier Ibn Battuta had traveled across the Eastern Maghrib in conditions of military turmoil. Now it might have appeared to him that little had changed. The Arab tribes of the Ifriqiyan plains were up in arms, and Tunis lay under siege. Yet the pattern of North African power politics had altered drastically in his absence. By going abroad for so long he had missed most of the reign of Abu l’Hasan (1331–51), the most illustrious of the Marinid kings. Called the Black Sultan because of the dark visage he inherited from his Ethiopian slave mother, Abu l’Hasan was more than any of his predecessors impassioned by the old Almohad vision of a vast Islamic state embracing the entire western Mediterranean basin. In 1333 he recaptured Gibraltar from King Alfonso XI of Castile and during the ensuing four years seized most of the important towns of the ’Abd al-Wadid kingdom of the central Maghrib, including Tlemcen, the capital. In 1340 he sent 44 war galleys into the Strait of Gibraltar to inflict a calamitous defeat on the Castilian fleet. Six months later he launched an invasion of Spain in alliance with the Sultanate of Granada. This time, however, a combined army of heavily armored knights from Castile, Aragon, and Portugal routed his forces near the Rio Salado.

The Battle of Rio Salado ended once and for all any serious Muslim hopes of reversing the Christian
reconquista
. Indeed, Abu l’Hasan may have been so fearful that the Spanish crusade would now advance on Africa that he redoubled his efforts to bring the entire Maghrib and its resources in commerce and manpower under his control. Taking advantage of a succession crisis within
the ruling Hafsid family, he invaded Ifriqiya by land and sea in September 1347 and drove the Hasfids from Tunis.

The Marinid seizure of Tunis was a remarkable feat of military leadership. Yet Abu l’Hasan’s army was now operating almost 900 miles from Fez, and the Ifriqiyan population remained implacably hostile to his occupation. In the spring of 1348 he ventured to firm up his authority over the plains south of the capital, but an alliance of bedouin tribes met his forces near Kairouan and beat them so badly that he was forced to retreat to Tunis by sea in utter humiliation. As if his human detractors were not troublesome enough, his Ifriqiyan campaign coincided with the arrival of the Black Death. According to the historian Ibn Khaldun, the plague so debilitated his army in the field that it “settled the affair” at the Battle of Kairouan.
¹⁷
When he fell back on Tunis, he found the contagion ravaging the city and killing off his courtiers and officials. Abu ’Inan, the sultan’s son and governor of the central Maghrib, heard reports that his father had died at Kairouan. Fearing rebellion in Morocco, he had himself proclaimed sultan at Tlemcen in June 1348 and quickly marched on Fez.

When Ibn Battuta arrived in Tunis just one year later, the Marinid dream of Mediterranean empire was for the time being dead. Abu l’Hasan was still there, but bottled up within the Hafsid palace and doing nothing to repel the bedouin forces which commanded the countryside beyond the city walls. A large number of Moroccan scholars had accompanied the sultan to Ifriqiya, and Ibn Battuta found lodging with one of them, apparently a cousin of his. He had at least two audiences with his hapless sovereign, giving him the usual information about the countries he had visited.

Ibn Battuta stayed in Tunis for about a month, then decided to continue on to Morocco despite the agitated state of political affairs all across the Maghrib. He left Ifriqiya on a Catalan vessel, hardly a surprising choice since in the mid fourteenth century the merchants and ship masters of Barcelona dominated trade on the sea routes between Spain and the Sicilian Channel. The ship was bound for Tenès on the Algerian coast but on the way put in at Cagliari at the southern end of the island of Sardinia.
¹⁸

The Kingdom of Aragon–Catalonia ruled the coastal regions of Sardinia, giving Ibn Battuta an opportunity to set foot on Latin Christian soil, the only time he would do so in his traveling career. The visit, however, was brief and disagreeable. He left the ship to visit a marketplace inside a chateau-fort in the vicinity of the port. But then he was informed that some piratical residents of the island had in mind to pursue his vessel after it embarked in order to seize the Muslim passengers and presumably hold them for ransom. Swearing that he would fast for two consecutive months if the Almighty saved him from these sea rovers, he reboarded his ship, which, as it happened, continued on its way without incident. After ten days at sea, he reached Tenès.

Map 12: Ibn Battuta’s Itinerary in North Africa, Spain, and West Africa, 1349–54

From here he traveled overland to Tlemcen, which was then under the authority of the rebellious Abu ’Inan. Here he joined two men of Tangierian origin and continued westward in their company. In the wild hills near the modern day Algero–Moroccan border the little party had a close brush with a band of highwaymen, but they passed on safely to Taza, the little hillside city commanding the high road to Fez. Apparently meeting up with more travelers from Tangier, Ibn Battuta learned that the Black Death had carried off his elderly mother only several months earlier. Had she heard in her last days, perhaps from pilgrims returning from the
hajj
of 749, that her long-departed son had been seen in Mecca and might finally be coming home?

When Ibn Battuta left Morocco in 1325, he may well have intended at the time to return in two or three years to pursue advanced legal studies in Fez. Under the patronage of the Marinid sultans, the city had come to rival Tunis as the premier North African center of Maliki jurisprudence and Arab letters. The war captains of the Banu Marin had rudely seized power in Morocco in 1248 without possessing any religious ideology to justify their authority. Consequently, they moved quickly to assert their distinctive legitimacy by distancing themselves from the idiosyncratic theological doctrines of the Almohads. They moved the dynastic capital from Marrakech to Fez and invited learned exponents of Malikism, whose views had been suppressed during the Almohad century, to take up residence in the city, revitalize orthodox Maliki education, and serve the administrative and judicial needs of the new government.

When the Banu Marin came to power, Fez was already an important Almohad military center and a busy commercial junction linking the trans-Maghrib road with the caravan routes that brought West African gold and ivory to the ports of the Mediterranean. Nestled saucer-like in a lovely valley between the
southern spurs of the Rif and the central plain, Fez had an abundant water supply and a rich agricultural hinterland which animated a profusion of craft industries.

Physically, ancient Fez occupied a remarkably small territory, its growing population of merchants, artisans, civil officials, scholars, laborers, and transients crammed within the circular walls that enclosed the valley. Then in 1276 Abu Yusuf Ya’qub, the second Marinid sultan, built a new urban foundation, called Fez Jdid, or New Fez, to serve as the military and administrative center of the dynasty. Set on a plateau above the old city and enclosed within high double walls, Fez Jdid, like the Mamluk citadel of Cairo, rose up as a conspicuous, fear-inspiring symbol of Marinid power and permanence. It was the exclusive sanctuary of the sultan, his high officials, his accountants and secretaries, and selected units of the royal army.

Fez Jdid nonetheless remained dependent on the teeming, labyrinthine city in the valley below, not only for its food and luxuries, but also for many of the literate men who managed the bureaus of state. As champions of Maliki orthodoxy, the early Marinids sponsored the founding of
madrasas
on the organizational and curricular pattern of the great colleges of the Middle East. Abu Yusuf built the first college sometime before 1285. Sultans Abu Sa’id and Abu l’Hasan founded five more, employing the most talented Moroccan and Andalusian craftsmen to produce buildings of exquisite decorative beauty. Abu l’Hasan also founded
madrasas
in several other Moroccan cities, including Tangier. The colleges of Fez soon attracted the flower of erudition from all across the Maghrib, as well as from Muslim Granada. Some of these luminaries divided their time between the
madrasas
in the depths of the old city and the ministries of Fez Jdid. Others came mainly to teach, thereby attracting to the colleges increasing numbers of bright young people, several hundred of them by the mid fourteenth century, to undertake advanced studies in the religious sciences.

Sufi ideas were only just beginning to penetrate higher education in Fez at the mid point of the fourteenth century. The more rigorous leaders of the Maliki elite opposed any teachings not firmly grounded in scriptural orthodoxy. The Marinids displayed respect for the most celebrated saints of western Islam, but they distrusted the potential political influence of the Sufi holy men who were becoming so popular among the Berber folk of the
countryside. Yet despite the resistance of both the government and the conservative religious establishment to the teachings of a movement they could not satisfactorily control, the Sufi precepts of love, divine grace, and spiritual fulfillment were already by the middle of the century warming the chill corridors of Maliki formalism. An unknown Tangierian scholar just back from the East could expect at least the more liberal-minded within the learned circles of Fez to take a keen interest in his stories of personal meetings with the great mystics of the age.