The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (53 page)

Ibn Battuta may have presented himself at the palace as soon as he arrived in Granada. But he had no audience with Yusuf I. The sultan, it seemed, was ill and not disposed to receive learned visitors from Morocco. The visitor, to his consternation, never did get to meet Yusuf during his brief sojourn in the city. He does not say in the
Rihla
whether he ever went inside the Alhambra and in fact omits any mention of it. The twentieth-century tourist is so amazed by those splendorous rooms and courts that Ibn Battuta’s failure to take the slightest note of them seems puzzling. Yet the Alhambra is the only Islamic palace of that age to survive down to our own time in all its ornamental delicacy. Ibn Battuta had seen
the royal mansions of far bigger and richer kingdoms than the Nasrid state, and to his eyes and his world the Alhambra may not have seemed so special as it does to us.

He was not on the other hand totally ignored by the royal family. When his arrival in Granada was made known to the authorities, as it routinely would be, the sultan’s mother sent him a purse of gold coins, which he found “very useful” for meeting his expenses. He spent part of his time as the guest of various Maliki notables and the rest visiting a number of Sufi lodges in the Granadine suburbs or the nearby countryside. He even notes that little bands of mendicant Sufis from as far away as Anatolia, Persia, India, and Samarkand were settled in the town.

It was in the home of Abu l’Kasim ibn ’Asim, one of Granada’s eminent jurists, that he made what later proved to be the most fateful acquaintance of his life. Over a period of two days and a night he sat amongst a group of Andalusian gentlemen in Abu l’Kasim’s lovely garden, recounting scenes and episodes of his travels abroad. One of the men present was Abu ’Abdallah Muhammad ibn Juzayy, a 28-or 29-year-old ’
alim
who held a secretarial post in the Nasrid government. He was one of three sons of a noted Granadine jurist and poet who had been killed at the Battle of Rio Salado. The young Ibn Juzayy carried on the family’s distinguished literary tradition, writing poetry and composing respectable works in philology, history, and law.
²⁷

Absorbed by Ibn Battuta’s stories and the sheer breadth of his travels, Ibn Juzayy meticulously copied down the names of famous doctors and
shaykhs
the journeyer had met over the previous quarter of a century. Since Ibn Battuta did not stay in Granada very long, his acquaintance with Ibn Juzayy was probably fleeting. But in another two and a half years the young secretary, in the pattern of roving Andalusian scholars, would leave Granada to take up service with Sultan Abu ’Inan in Fez. He would be there when Ibn Battuta returned from the far side of the Sahara Desert, ready to accept the sultan’s assignment to set down in proper literary form the complete record of the Tangierian’s remarkable career.

Sometime around the end of 1350 Ibn Battuta returned to Ceuta.
²⁸
For the next several months he journeyed about his homeland, spending a few months in the Atlantic port of Asilah, visiting Salé briefly, then riding south across the coastal plains to Marrakech,
late capital of the Almohads. The shift of political power to Fez, and probably the havoc of the Black Death, had caused Marrakech to fall into a dilapidated state, worse, he recalls, than Baghdad. Finding no reason to remain in those surroundings for long, he returned north to the coast and from there to Fez.

In the meantime the drama of the Marinid kings had come to its denouement in the triumph of Abu ’Inan. Late in 1349 Abu l’Hasan had abandoned Tunis and returned to Morocco, determined to reckon with his mutinous son. Reaching Marrakech with a small force of exhausted followers, he had attempted to erect a rival government. But in May 1350 Abu ’Inan defeated his forces outside the city, then pursued him southward into a valley of the High Atlas. Trapped and powerless, the old sultan held out through the ensuing winter, then made formal abdication in favor of his son. When he died of illness and despair in his mountain refuge later in the spring of 1351, Abu ’Inan carried his body to the city of Rabat and had it buried with all the honors of state in the royal necropolis of the dynasty.

These events occurred while Ibn Battuta was traveling about Spain and northern Morocco. When he arrived in Fez the second time, probably in the early fall of 1351, Abu ’Inan was ruling unrivaled a tranquil Morocco, plotting a new invasion of the eastern Maghrib, and busily constructing the grandest
madrasa
Fez had yet seen. It was an auspicious moment for Ibn Battuta to settle down, enter the Maliki judiciary, and reflect on his years abroad. Yet there were a few Muslim kings he still had not seen, among them Mansa Sulayman, Emperor of Mali, whose capital lay due south 1,500 miles across the most fearsome wilderness on earth.

1
. Ibn Khaldun,
The Muqaddimah
, 2nd edn., trans. F. Rosenthal, 3 vols. (Princeton, N.J., 1967), vol. 1, p. 64.

2
. IB’s reckoning of time spent between Quanzhou and Quilon either at sea or in the port of Samudra adds up to 222 days, or almost seven and a half months. Yet if he left China at the start of the fall monsoon in September and arrived at Quilon, as he states in Ramadan 747 (the month began on 16 December 1346), the trip took no longer than about four and a half months. It was indeed feasible, as Arab seamen had demonstrated in Abbasid times, to sail from the South China coast to Malabar in a single monsoon season. George Hourani,
Arab Seafaring in the Indian Ocean in Ancient and Early Medieval Times
(Princeton, N.J., 1951), p. 75. We must assume either that IB failed accurately to remember time spent
between stages of the journey or possibly that part of the text is a later addition. IB’s description of his voyage from Quanzhou to Samudra includes an oddly vague report of his ship being lost at sea for 42 days and an uncharacteristically credulous account of a close call with a
rukhkh
, a creature described in legend as a giant, predatory bird. Henry Yule,
Cathay and the Way Thither
, 4 vols. (London, 1913–16). vol. 4, p. 146.

3
. In the
Rihla
IB links the civil war in Hurmuz and his meeting there with Sultan Qutb al-Din Tahamtan with his brief visit there in 1329 (1331). These events clearly occurred, however, in 1347. Jean Aubin, “Les Princes d’Ormuz du XIIIe au XVe siècle,”
Journal Asiatique
241 (1953): 102–08; Hr, pp. 447–48; Gb, vol. 2, pp. 402–03. See also Chapter 6, note 41.

4
. He says that he stayed in Damascus until the end of 748 A.H. The last day of that year was 31 March 1348. The precise itinerary of IB’s travels through greater Syria at this time is uncertain. Altogether, he traveled through some parts of Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine at least four different times during his career, in 1326, 1330 (1332), 1348, and 1350. The descriptions of numerous cities, towns, and castles he claims to have visited, however, are largely grouped into the account of his 1326 journey, whose chronology does not admit of such an extended, complicated tour. See Chapter 3, note 26. Therefore, a confident sorting out of the several itineraries through this region is hardly possible. The several dates he gives for his travels in Syria, Egypt, and Arabia in 1348 (748–749 A.H.), however, are generally corroborated by independent contemporary reports on the spatial transmission of the Black Death.

5
. Gb, vol. 1, pp. 143–44.

6
. Michael W. Dols,
The Black Death in the Middle East
(Princeton, N.J., 1977), p. 69.

7
. Ibid., pp. 215, 219.

8
. Ibid., pp. 238 and 236–54
passim
.

9
. Ibid., p. 96.

10
. Ibid., pp. 154, 155, 160, 161.

11
. Ibn al-Furat quoted in ibid., p. 277.

12
. Ibid., p. 173.

13
. David Ayalon, “The Plague and its Effects upon the Mamluk Army,”
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
(1946): 67–73; and Dols,
Black Death
, pp. 185–92.

14
. Dols,
Black Death
, p. 161.

15
. Ibid., p. 63.

16
. D&S, vol. 4, p. 326.

17
. Quoted in Dols,
Black Death
, p. 64.

18
. IB does not mention the name of the port he visited, but there is no real doubt that it was Cagliari. Monteil shares this opinion. D&S, vol. 4, p. 481.

19
. IB says that he reached Fez on a Friday near the end of Sha’ban 750. D&S calculate this date as 8 November 1349. The last Friday in Sha’ban of that year, however, was 6 November.

20
. Chronological clues regarding the length of his subsequent visit to Ceuta and the date of his departure for Spain suggest that if he was in Fez in Sha’ban 750, as he says, he probably went on to Tangier early in the following month of Ramadan.

21
. Derek Latham, “The Strategic Position and Defence of Ceuta in the Later Muslim Period,”
Islamic Quarterly
15 (1971): 195.

22
. IB states that he reached Gibraltar shortly after the death of Alfonso XI. That event occurred on 26 March 1350.

23
. Robert S. Gottfried,
The Black Death
(New York, 1983), p. 51.

24
. Rachel Arié,
L’Espagne musulmane au temps des Nasrides, 1232–1492
(Paris, 1973), p. 339.

25
. Derek W. Lomax,
The Reconquest of Spain
(London, 1978), p. 162.

26
. Washington Irving,
The Alhambra
(New York, 1926), p. 71.

27
. “Ibn Djuzayy,” EI
₂
, vol. 3, p. 756.

28
. IB offers no specific dates for the period between his arrival in Fez in November 1349 and his departure from southern Morocco to West Africa on 18 February 1352. Therefore, the chronology of his movements from city to city in Andalusia and Morocco during that period is indeterminate.

The people of Mali outnumbered the peoples of the Sudan in their neighborhood and dominated the whole region . . . Their authority became mighty and all the peoples of the Sudan stood in awe of them.
¹

Ibn Khaldun

When Ibn Battuta visited Cairo in 1326 on his way to his first
hajj
, the population was undoubtedly still talking about the extraordinary pilgrim who had passed through the city two years earlier. Mansa Musa, ruler of the West African empire of Mali, had arrived at the Nile in the summer of 1324 after having crossed the Sahara Desert with a retinue of officials, wives, soldiers, and slaves numbering in the thousands and a train of one hundred camels loaded with unworked gold. A handsome young king of piety and noble bearing, he had created a minor sensation among Cairo’s protocol-conscious officials by refusing to kiss the ground before the Mamluk sultan, al-Nasir Muhammad. Yet he “flooded Cairo with his benefactions,” writes the historian al-Umari, and “performed many acts of charity and kindness.”
²

Having come so far from their distant grassland kingdom, the emperor and his gold-heavy entourage spent freely and indiscriminately in the Cairo bazaars, like prosperous and naive tourists from some American prairie state. “The Cairenes,” says al-Umari, “made incalculable profits out of him and his suite in buying and selling and giving and taking. They exchanged gold until they depressed its value in Egypt and caused its price to fall.”
³

Musa was not the first
mansa
(king, sultan) of Mali to go on pilgrimage to Mecca, but none before had made such a dazzling display of pomp and riches. Well into the next century Egyptian chroniclers wrote about the event and its disturbing short-term effects on the Cairene gold market. In the history of medieval West Africa no single incident has been more celebrated. Indeed the
hajj
of Mansa Musa sums up Mali’s important place among the kingdoms of Africa and Asia in Ibn Battuta’s time.

The unworked gold which the
mansa
showered on Cairo came from three major alluvial deposits in West Africa. The mines of the
bilad al-sudan
, or simply the Sudan, as the Arab geographers called the steppe and savanna region south of the Sahara, had been known to the Mediterranean world since Phoenician times. But it was only the introduction of the dromedary to North Africa about the second century A.D. that made feasible in terms of costs and risks regular caravan trade from one rim of the Western Sahara to the other. The one-humped camel is a difficult and disagreeable animal, but he could carry a load of 125–150 kilograms, go without water ten days or more, and travel faster than any other available beast of burden. When Islam reached the Western Maghrib in the seventh century, Berber-speaking merchants were already running camel caravans to commercial settlements on the far side of the desert.

The founding of the Arab Empire and later the High Caliphate created an ever-growing demand in the Islamic heartland for West African gold to make coins and finery. This demand impelled Muslim merchants and cameliers of the Maghrib and the North Sahara to organize trans-desert business and transport operations to an unprecedented level of sophistication. About the same time, the Kingdom of Ghana emerged in the steppe region of West Africa known as the Sahel (Sahal), the transitional climatic zone between the southern desert and the savanna lands. The appearance of Ghana as an imperial state was undoubtedly linked to the gold trade, which encouraged the rise of military leaders aggressive enough to seize monopolistic authority over the commercial routes and settlements leading from the gold fields deep in the Sudan to the “ports” at the edge of the desert where the North African caravans arrived. The empire declined in the eleventh century, perhaps in connection with a prolonged drought, and eventually withered away.

Yet the pattern of imperial state-building in the Sudan continued with the rise of Mali early in the thirteenth century. The founders of this kingdom were Malinke-speaking people whose homeland was the region between the upper valleys of the Senegal and the Niger Rivers. This region was in the heart of the savanna and much nearer to the two gold-bearing areas, known as Bambuk and Bure, than the center of Ghana had been. The early kings of Mali, members of a chiefly clan of the Malinke known as the Keita, succeeded in taking control of territory between the gold
fields and the Sahel, thereby positioning themselves to exact tribute in gold from the producing populations. In this way the cycle of expansion began. The gold revenues of the
mansas
permitted heavier expenditures on the army, which was comprised mainly of infantry bowmen and armored cavalry. As the royal forces were deployed across the fertile grasslands both east and west, greater numbers of farming and herding folk were subdued and taxed, expanding the wealth and military energies of the state even more.