The Adventures of Ibn Battuta: A Muslim Traveler of the Fourteenth Century (9 page)

In setting foot in this town, I wondered whether one would be able to meet any enlightened people or any persons whose erudition
would offer some attraction; but I had the feeling of one looking for a horse that wasn’t hungry or the eggs of a camel.
⁶

Ibn Battuta likely shared al-’Abdari’s opinion since he says nothing in his narrative about what Algiers was like. In any case, he and his merchant companions camped outside the walls of the city for several days, waiting for al-Zubaydi and Abu al-Tayyib to catch up.

As soon as they did, the party set out for the port of Bijaya, the western frontier city of the Hafsid kingdom. The journey took them directly eastward through the heart of the Grand Kabylie Mountains, a region of immense oak and cedar forests, spectacular gorges, and summits reaching higher than 6,500 feet, rougher country than Ibn Battuta had seen since leaving home. Bijaya lay up against the slopes of the mountains near the mouth of the Souman River, which separates the Grand Kabylie range from the Little Kabylie to the east. It was a busy international port and the principal maritime outlet for the dense communities of Berber farmers who inhabited the highland valleys behind it.

Bijaya was the first real city Ibn Battuta had the opportunity to explore since leaving Tlemcen. Nonetheless, he was determined to push on quickly, and this in spite of an attack of fever that left him badly weakened. Al-Zubaydi advised him to stay in Bijaya until he recovered, but the young man was adamant: “If God decrees my death, then my death shall be on the road, with my face set towards the land of the Hijaz.” Relenting before this high sentiment, al-Zubaydi offered to lend him an ass and a tent if he would agree to sell his own donkey and heavy baggage so that they might all travel at a quicker pace. Ibn Battuta agreed, thanked God for His beneficence, and prepared for the departure for Constantine, the next major city on the main pilgrimage route.

Al-Zubaydi’s insistence on traveling fast and light had less to do with his young friend’s illness than with the dangers that lay on the road ahead. Ibn Battuta had had the good fortune to cross Morocco and the ’Abd al-Wadid lands during a period of relative peace. But the Eastern Maghrib in 1325 was in the midst of one of the recurring cycles of political and military crisis that characterized the Hafsid age. Sultan Abu Yahya Abu Bakr, who had acceded to the Hafsid throne in 1318, was yet striving to gain a reasonable measure of control over his domains in the face of a Pandora’s box of plots, betrayals, revolts, and invasions. On one
side were rival members of the Hafsid royal family, who from provincial bases in various parts of the country were organizing movements either to seize the capital city of Tunis or to set up petty kingdoms of their own. On the other side were the ’Abd al-Wadids, who repeatedly invaded Abu Bakr’s western territories and tried almost every year, though never successfully, to force the walls of Bijaya.

As if these enemies were not enough, the sultan had to contend with the turbulent and unpredictable Arab warrior tribes who for more than two centuries had been the dominant political force over large areas of rural Ifriqiya. These nomads were descendants of the great wave of Arabic-speaking, camel-herding migrants, known collectively as the Banu Hilal, who had trekked from Egypt in the eleventh century and then gone on to penetrate the steppes and coastal lowlands of the Maghrib as far west as the Atlantic plains. If over the long run the relationship between these companies of herdsmen and the indigenous Berbers of the towns and villages was described far less by hostility than by mutual commercial and cultural dependence, the migrations were nonetheless a source of persistent trouble for North African rulers, who tried time and again to harness the military power of the Arabs to their own ends, only to find their erstwhile allies putting in with rebels and pretenders. In 1325 Arab bands were politically teamed up with at least two Hafsid rebels as well as with Abu Tashfin, the ’Abd al-Wadid. At the same time that Ibn Battuta was making his way across the Central Maghrib, an ’Abd al-Wadid army was laying siege to Constantine and had Sultan Abu Bakr himself bottled up inside the city. In the meantime, a Hafsid pretender and his Arab cohorts took advantage of the sultan’s helplessness to occupy Tunis. The kingdom was in a state of civil confusion, the roads were unsafe, and roving bands of Arab cavalry plagued the countryside.

Ignoring the tumult, Ibn Battuta and his companions struck out from Bijaya across the Little Kabylie Mountains and arrived at Constantine without encountering trouble. By this time (it must have been August) the approaches to the city were clear. The ’Abd al-Wadid army had precipitously given up its siege some weeks earlier and returned to Tlemcen in failure, leaving Abu Bakr free to restore a degree of order in the region and lead his loyal forces back to Tunis to eject the rebels.
⁷

Although Constantine was the largest city in the interior of the
Eastern Maghrib, Ibn Battuta did not tarry there long. Consequently he has little to recall about it in the
Rihla
— except the one notable fact that he was privileged to make the acquaintance of the governor, a son of Abu Bakr, who came out to the edge of town to welcome al-Zubaydi. The meeting was a memorable one for the young pilgrim because the governor presented him with a gift of alms, the first of many presents he would receive from kings and governors during the course of his travels. In this instance it was two gold dinars and a fine woolen mantle to replace his old one, which by this stage of the journey was in rags. Almsgiving was one of the five sacred pillars of Islam, the duty of princes and peasants alike to share one’s material wealth with others and thus remit it to God. The obligation included voluntary giving (
sadaqa
) to specific classes of people: the poor, orphans, prisoners, slaves (for ransoming), fighters in the holy war, and wayfarers. Falling eminently into this last category, Ibn Battuta would during the next several years see his welfare assured, to one degree or another, by an array of pious individuals who were moved to perform acts of kindness, the more readily so since the recipient was himself an educated gentleman well worthy of such tokens of God’s beneficence.

Leaving Constantine better dressed and richer, he and his friends headed northeast across more mountainous country, reaching the Mediterranean again at the port of Buna (Bone, today Annaba). After resting here for several days in the security of the city walls, he bade farewell to the merchants who had accompanied him half way across the Central Maghrib and continued on toward Tunis with al-Zubaydi and Abu al-Tayyib. Now the little party “traveled light with the utmost speed, pushing on night and day without stopping” for fear of attack by Arab marauders. Ibn Battuta was once again struck by fever and had to tie himself to his saddle with a turban cloth to keep from falling off, since they dared not stop for long. Their route took them parallel to the coast through high cork and oak forests, then gradually downward into the open plain and the expansive wheat lands of central Ifriqiya. From there they had a level road along the fertile Medjerda River valley to the western environs of Tunis.

Of all the North African cities where art and intellect flourished, Tunis was premier during most of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The Almohads had made it their provincial capital in the Eastern Maghrib, and it was under their patronage that it took
on the physical and demographic dimensions of a major city, attaining a population of about 100,000 during peak periods of prosperity.
⁸
The Hafsids, who started out as Almohad governors over Ifriqiya and subsequently represented themselves as the legitimate dynastic heirs of the empire, continued to rule from Tunis and to cultivate the city’s corps of scholars and craftsmen, much as the Marinids, equally driven to identify themselves with the Almohad model of civilized taste, were doing in Fez.

Like other Maghribi cities of that age, Tunis under the Hafsids built its splendid mosques and palaces, laid out its public gardens, and founded its colleges with wealth that came in large measure from long-distance trade. In the early fourteenth century Tunis was the busiest of the ports which lay along the economic frontier between the European seaborne trade of the Mediterranean and the Muslim caravan network of the African interior. The Ifriqiyan hinterland plain was narrow but rich enough to export a wide range of Maghribi products — wool, leather, hides, cloth, wax, olive oil, and grain. Tunis was also a consumer and transit market for goods from sub-Saharan Africa — gold, ivory, slaves, ostrich feathers. What gave the city its special prominence was its strategic position on the southern rim of the Sicilian Channel, which joined (and divided) the maritime complexes of the Western and Eastern Mediterranean. Tunis maintained close commercial ties with Egypt by way of Muslim coastal and overland trade and was well placed to serve as a major emporium for Christian merchants of the Western Mediterranean who found it a convenient place to buy exotic goods of the East without themselves venturing on the voyage to Egypt or the Levant.

What Ibn Battuta recalls about his feelings upon arriving in Tunis is not the elation of a pilgrim who has reached one of the great centers of religious learning along the
hajj
route, but the forlornness of a young man in a strange city:

The townsfolk came out to welcome the
shaykh
Abu ’Abdallah al-Zubaydi and to welcome Abu al-Tayyib, the son of the
qadi
Abu ’Abdallah al-Nafzawi. On all sides they came forward with greetings and questions to one another, but not a soul said a word of greeting to me, since there was none of them that I knew. I felt so sad at heart on account of my loneliness that I could not restrain the tears that started to my eyes, and wept bitterly.

In no time at all, however things were looking up:

One of the pilgrims, realizing the cause of my distress, came up to me with a greeting and friendly welcome, and continued to comfort me with friendly talk until I entered the city, where I lodged in the college of the Booksellers.

After dodging tribal marauders all along the road from Bijaya, Ibn Battuta managed to arrive in Tunis during a period of relative political calm. The harried Abu Bakr, who had found himself shut out of the citadel of Tunis by rebels three different times since 1321, returned from Constantine and recaptured the city perhaps only a few days ahead of Ibn Battuta’s arrival there.
⁹
Indeed Abu Bakr probably resumed authority just in time for the ’Id al-Fitr, the feast celebrating the end of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting during daylight hours. Ibn Battuta was on hand to witness the sultan fulfill his customary duty of leading “a magnificent procession” of officials, courtiers, and soldiers from the citadel to a special outdoor praying ground (
musalla
) that accommodated the crowds gathered for the prayers marking the Breaking of the Fast.
¹⁰

Ibn Battuta spent about two months in Tunis, arriving some days before 10 September 1325 and leaving in early November. It was common for educated travelers or pilgrims to take lodging temporarily in a college, even though they were not regularly attending lectures. The
madrasa
of the Booksellers where he stayed was one of three colleges in existence in Tunis at that time.
¹¹
His recollections of his first visit to the city are slight, but we might be sure that he spent most of his time in the company of the gentlemen-scholars of the city. He may indeed have had exposure to some of the eminent Maliki
’ulama
of the century. Since the demise of the Almohads, the Maliki school was enjoying as much of a resurgence in Ifriqiya as it was in Morocco. The Hafsid rulers were appointing Maliki scholars to high positions of state and patronizing the
madrasas
, where Maliki juridical texts were the heart of the curriculum.

If the Tunis elite held out an estimable model of erudition, they were also masters of refined taste and that union of piety and restrained wordliness that Ibn Battuta would exemplify in adulthood. During the previous century Tunis had been a distant refuge for successive waves of Muslims emigrating from Andalusia in the
wake of the
reconquista
. Of all the North African cities with populations of Iberian descent, Tunis had the liveliest and most productive. The Andalusians, coming from a civilized tradition that was more polished than that of North Africa, were leaders in the fields of architecture, craftsmanship, horticulture, music, belle-lettres, and the niceties of diplomatic and courtly protocol. An Andalusian strain seems evident in Ibn Battuta’s own mannerly character, and we can wonder what seasoning effect two months in Tunis among such people may have had.

That he was already showing promise as an intelligent Maliki scholar was evident in the circumstances of his departure from Tunis in November 1325. He had left home a lonely journeyer eager to join up with whoever might tolerate his company. He left Tunis as the appointed
qadi
of a caravan of pilgrims. This was his first official post as an aspiring jurist. Perhaps the honor went to him because no better qualified lawyer was present in the group or because, as he tells us in the narrative, most of the people in the company were Moroccan Berbers. In any case, a
hajj
caravan was a sort of community and required formal leadership: a chief (
amir
) who had all the powers of the captain of a ship, and a
qadi
, who adjudicated disputes and thereby kept peace and order among the travelers.

The main caravan route led southward along Tunisia’s rich littoral of olive and fruit groves and through a succession of busy maritime cities — Sousse, Sfax, Gabès. Some miles south of Gabès the road turned abruptly eastward with the coast, running between the island of Djerba on one side, the fringe of the Sahara on the other. The next major stop was Tripoli, the last urban outpost of the Hafsid domain.

The province of Tripolitania, today part of Libya, marked geographically the eastern extremity of the island Maghrib. From here the coastline ran southeastward for more than 400 miles, cutting further and further into the climatic zone of the Sahara until desert and water came together, obliterating entirely the narrow coastal band of fertility. Further on the land juts suddenly northward again into latitudes of higher rainfall. Here was the well-populated region of Cyrenaica with its forests and pasturelands and fallen Roman towns. If Tripolitania was historically and culturally the end of the Maghrib, Cyrenaica was the beginning of the Middle East, the two halves of Libya divided one from the other by several hundred miles of sand and sea.