Читать книгу Empires of the Monsoon - Richard Hall - Страница 16

The people of Greater India are a little darker in colour than we are, but in Ethiopia they are much darker, and so on until you come to the black negroes, who are at the Equator, which they call the Torrid Zone.

—Nicola de’ Conti, quoted in Travels and Adventures of Pero Tafur, 1435–39

THE YEAR AFTER Marco Polo died, a young Berber lawyer bade farewell to his family and friends in Tangier before setting off on a lifetime of travel. Just as it was claimed for the Venetian merchant in his lifetime that no other man had ‘known or explored so many parts of the world’, so it would be said on Ibn Battuta’s behalf that ‘it must be plain to any man of intelligence that this sheikh is the traveller of the age’. Both men went to China and India, both sailed across the Indian Ocean, but Ibn Battuta went further, by making two visits to Africa. He probably travelled 75,000 miles to Marco Polo’s 60,000; but the cultural dominance by Christian Europe has bestowed fame upon the Venetian merchant, whereas the rumbustious Moroccan judge has fallen into relative obscurity.

As their lives overlapped, so did their routes in many distant corners of the world. Moreover, they have much in common as narrators. Both enjoy telling outlandish anecdotes, although Marco’s tales often have that typically medieval mixture of farce and earthiness found in Chaucer and Boccaccio, whereas Ibn Battuta, as befits his profession and Muslim piety, is more reserved as a story-teller, while never hiding his enthusiasm for life. The most marked difference is that Ibn Battuta uses the first person singular liberally and keeps himself constantly at the centre of the stage. His narrative is a mixture of travelogue and autobiography.

Although both men exaggerated now and then about the populations of faraway cities, the numbers killed in wars or the riches of foreign potentates (which may be the origin of Marco’s nickname ‘Il Milione’), whenever their memoirs can be checked against independent evidence both turn out to be substantially accurate. On occasion their descriptions of places and customs are so similar that it seems almost beyond coincidence.

Ibn Battuta never reveals whether he had heard of Marco Polo, or if he was conscious of so often following closely in his footsteps. Possibly he did know of him, for Ibn Battuta’s own links with Europe were especially strong, and by the time he was planning his first journey the Polo manuscript had already been translated into several European languages. The Moroccan lawyer had been born into a family of the Berber élite, and Berbers had been settled in Spain for six centuries – ever since 711, when they crossed the narrow straits from Africa in the forefront of the all-conquering Arab armies. The intellectual heart of his world lay in Cordoba, an Islamic but cosmopolitan city with seventeen libraries containing 400,000 books; no other place in western Europe rivalled it as a centre of learning. (Academies in the Christian parts of Spain were dedicated to acquiring from Cordoba and other Andalusian cities the Arab manuscripts containing the great works of Greece and Rome, then translating them into Latin.)

Although a renewed struggle to drive the ‘Moors’ from Spain had deepened the cleavage between opposing religions in the Mediterranean region, differences were often still only of degree, even on such a basic human issue as slavery. While Marco Polo never speaks of owning slaves, apart from granting freedom in his will in 1224 to a man identified as Peter the Tartar, his ‘Serene Republic’ had for centuries thrived on the trade. Venice shipped the captives of European wars to Alexandria, where they were exchanged for the silks and spices of the East. There was also an active slave market in Crete, a Venetian colony, and another in Cyprus selling negroes shipped to Spain from North Africa, then brought along the Mediterranean in galleys.¹

For his part, Ibn Battuta talks freely about the slaves who were always in his entourage, including one or more concubines. While travelling in Turkey, he remarks as an afterthought about a city he had passed through: ‘In this town I bought a Greek slave girl called Marguerite.’ Since she was merely a slave, the reader hears no more of Marguerite; however, Ibn Battuta took care of his slaves, for when a ship he is in starts to sink, his first thoughts are for his two concubines.

Ibn Battuta had left Tangier when he was twenty-one simply to make the pilgrimage to Mecca. He wandered at a leisurely pace through Egypt, the Levant, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Arabia. While crossing the Mediterranean he travelled in a Genoese ship, and praises the captain for his kindness. His trip to Mecca was extended into a stay of more than two years, which served to enhance his prestige as a qadi, or judge of Islamic shar’ia law; this status, proclaimed by his ceremonial cloak and tall hat, was to make travelling much easier for Ibn Battuta, entitling him to respect and hospitality from Muslim rulers or merchants wherever he chose to stop. It also allowed him to offer himself for the post of qadi whenever he reached a town where a judge had died or the incumbent had fallen into disfavour.²

Until the moment when he decided to visit the Land of Zanj he had travelled mainly on land, and only to places that might not have seemed unduly perilous to a young, educated Muslim with some spirit. By his own testimony, Ibn Battuta found it easy to make friends, but had a weakness for political intrigue; he was generous, yet ambitious, and his public piety was balanced by private indulgence. Most of all he was impetuous, always capable of being swept along by sudden enthusiasms, and his decision to go on a long sea voyage to a remote area of the Indian Ocean revealed the true adventurer in him. Despite being African in a strictly geographical sense, he would have regarded his bustling Tangier birthplace as a world away from Zanj, about which there were many dire rumours. Sometimes it was called Sawahil al-Sudan or just Barr al-’Ajam (Land of the Foreigners).³

His first experience of Africa was certainly discouraging. He crossed from the prosperous port of Aden to a town called Zeila, on the Red Sea side of the Horn. ‘It is a big city and has a great market, but it is the dirtiest, most desolate and smelliest town in the world. The reason for its stink is the quantity of fish, and the blood of the camels they butcher in its alleyways. When we arrived there we preferred to pass the night on the sea, although it was rough.’ An additional reason for Ibn Battuta’s distaste was that the people of Zeila were what he called ‘Rejecters’, since they belonged to a heterodox branch of the Shi’a belief. He was a devout Sunni, his loyalty having been strengthened during his long stay in Mecca. The people of Zeila he dismissively described as ‘negroes’ of the ‘Berberah’. (They were certainly not to be confused with his own Berber people, who were fair-skinned and sometimes had blue eyes.) What he did not say about Zeila was that it served as an assembly-point for prisoners taken in the constant wars against the Christian kingdom of Ethiopia, lying to the west; they were shipped from Zeila to Aden as slaves.

The dhow in which Ibn Battuta was a passenger quickly set sail again from Zeila, eastwards into the Indian Ocean, then south along the desert coastline to Mogadishu; it was a fifteen-day voyage. For someone of his background, Mogadishu also seemed a fairly brutish place, where killing camels to supply meat for Arabia was one of the main occupations. (As Marco Polo had said, the camel-slaughtering was so great in Mogadishu that it had to be seen to be believed.)

However, this time the young Moroccan was happier to go ashore. One of his companions on board had shouted to the touts who came out to the boat: ‘This man is not a merchant, but a scholar.’ The news was passed to the local judge, who hurried down to the beach to offer a welcome. As Ibn Battuta stepped on to the beach he was warmly embraced by his fellow-qadi, an Egyptian. The salaams acknowledged his status: ‘In the name of God, let us go to greet the sultan.’

The visitor was at once caught up in an elaborate series of rituals, one of which involved being sprinkled with Damascus rosewater by a eunuch. He was then given hospitality in the ‘scholar’s house’ (merchants staying in Arab ports had quarters known as funduqs). It was not until after Friday prayers in the main mosque that Ibn Battuta came face to face with the sultan, who said with traditional courtliness: ‘You are most welcome. You have honoured our country and given us pleasure.’ Ibn Battuta joined in the formal procession from the mosque, and as a mark of respect was allowed, along with the sultan and the qadi, to keep on his sandals. Drums, trumpets and pipes led the way to the audience chamber. There the formal manner of greeting the sultan was like that in the Yemen, by putting an index finger on the ground, then raising it to the head and declaiming, ‘May Allah preserve your power.’

Other ceremonies in Mogadishu were unlike anything Ibn Battuta had yet seen in his travels. As the sultan walked along in fine silken robes topped by an embroidered turban, a coloured canopy was held above him, with a golden statuette of a bird at each corner. It was also surprising to a visitor that men in Mogadishu wore no trousers, but wrapped sarong-like cloths around themselves. (Several social customs mentioned by Ibn Battuta suggest there was a strong Indian or Indonesian influence at work.) But most firmly fixed in Ibn Battuta’s mind, when he came to commit his memories to writing more than twenty years later, was the stupendous amount of food consumed in Mogadishu. He was able to recall the typical meals served up to him three times a day in the scholar’s house: ‘Their food is rice cooked in fat and placed on a large wooden dish’, with dishes of chicken, meat, fish and vegetables placed on top. Then there were further courses of green bananas cooked in milk and pickled chillies, lemons, green ginger and mangoes, all eaten with rice. Ibn Battuta estimated that a whole group of people in Morocco would eat no more at a sitting than any man in Mogadishu: ‘They are extremely corpulent and large-stomached.’

Shortly after leaving the desert country of the Horn the ship crossed the equator: in those times an awesome moment for the superstitious, because unfamiliar constellations began appearing in the night sky. Ibn Battuta did not think it worth mentioning: ‘Then I sailed from the city of Mogadishu, going towards the land of the Sawahil, intending to go to Kilwa, which is one of the cities of the Zanj.’ His ship, its lateen sail billowing before the north-east monsoon, passed a succession of ports founded by the immigrants from Arabia. The names of only a few of these places, such as Mombasa and Malindi, had been heard of in the outside world. About this time there were even rumours in Egypt that Mombasa had been taken over by monkeys, who marched up and down like soldiers. The Swahili coast was not on a route to anywhere else, so scholarly visitors were distinctly rare.

Ibn Battuta’s interest in Kilwa, apart from its pre-eminence on the coast at that time, may have been stirred by his more general curiosity about the African gold trade. In 1324, the year before he passed through Cairo, an African emperor, making the pilgrimage to Mecca, had come there with so much gold that amazement had gripped the Arab world. The ruler was Sulaiman, the Mansa Musa, and he arrived in Egypt with 8,000 warriors, 500 slaves bearing golden staffs, and 100 camels carrying a total of 500,000 ounces of gold. Sulaiman’s profligacy with his wealth depressed the price of gold in Egypt for a decade. It was known that he controlled mines somewhere on the southern side of the Sahara desert, but the extent of Africa was such a mystery, and the dimensions of the world so misconceived, that it was easy to think that gold exported from Zanj came from the same source. (The West African mines were, in fact, an immense distance from Zimbabwe, but that would not become clear for almost two centuries.)

Ibn Battuta’s visit to East Africa may also have been in response to an invitation from one of its leading citizens. The sultan of Kilwa, al-Hasan ibn Sulayman, had been to Mecca and spent two years in Arabia studying ‘spiritual science’. There was great prestige attached to having made the pilgrimage from somewhere as remote as Zanj; being able to welcome to one’s own town a learned stranger met while travelling would have been an additional cause for pride for the sultan.

Certainly, by his own account, Ibn Battuta seemed eager to reach Kilwa, for his description of a port where he stopped overnight on the way is perfunctory. He says it was Mombasa, but at once makes this unlikely by describing it as ‘an island two days’ journey from the coast’. This is clearly a confusion with some other place, perhaps Pemba, Zanzibar or Mafia. He remembered that the people of the island lived mainly on bananas and fish, augmented by grain brought from the coast, and that the wooden mosque was expertly built, with wells at each of its doorways, so that everyone who wished to go in could wash his feet, then rub them dry on a strip of matting supplied for the purpose.

His journey further southwards, past a coastline shrouded in mangrove swamps, brought Ibn Battuta at last to Kilwa. He described it as ‘amongst the most beautiful of cities, and elegantly built’.⁴ His first view of it, in early 1331, would have been as the ship entered the channel between the island and the mainland. Here was a superb natural harbour in which vessels of every kind could anchor or be run up on the beaches. Within sight further away were several smaller islands; a large settlement on one of these, called Songo Mnara, was also part of the sultan’s domain.

The main town of Kilwa, with its defensive bastions, stood well above the sea, directly facing the mainland. Many of its houses were closely packed together, but others were surrounded by gardens and orchards. In the gardens were grown all kinds of vegetables, as well as bananas, pomegranates and figs. The surrounding orchards provided oranges, mangoes and breadfruit. Almost the only foodstuff brought over from the mainland was honey.

When Ibn Battuta arrived, in February, there would have been no lack of lush vegetation, for it was the middle of the wet season, whose ferocious downpours are not easily forgotten. ‘The rains are great,’ he recalled. Yet at moments his memory utterly fails him, for he says that the city was entirely built of wood. That certainly was not the case by the time of his arrival, since the first stone mosque had been built on the island two centuries earlier. That mosque was later replaced by a much grander building with five aisles and a domed roof supported on stone pillars; it would have been the envy of all neighbouring ports, which had nothing to compare with it.

There was also a huge palace, to the north of the town, with many rooms and open courtyards.⁵ One of its features was a circular swimming pool. This building, superbly designed, followed the gentle fall of the ground to the edge of a cliff, below which boats could anchor. It was the home of the sultan and Ibn Battuta must have been received there. He would have dined off Chinese tableware, green celadon and blue-and-white porcelain adorned with chrysanthemums, peonies and lotus flowers: oriental ware was being imported in such quantities that many wealthier residents of Kilwa had taken to cementing them into the walls of their buildings as ornaments.

Kilwa would have needed vast amounts of African labour to build and maintain it. Many of the inhabitants were Zanj, ‘jet black in colour’ and with tribal incisions on their faces; most were slaves. There were also people of other nationalities to be seen in the busy streets, including visiting merchants and their servants. Lodgings with rooms for trading were provided close to the mosque for the merchants. But not all the merchants were Muslims: some were Hindus, who had sailed directly across the ocean from India with the north-east winter monsoon. They came from the great Gujarat port of Cambay and other trading centres further south along the Malabar coast. Apart from cloth and other manufactures, their ships carried rice, on which the profits were high.

According to Ibn Battuta, the sultan of Kilwa was constantly engaged in a ‘holy war’ with the Muli, the people of the mainland: ‘He was much given to armed sweeps through the lands of the Zanj. He raided them and captured booty.’ Put more bluntly, Sultan al-Hasan ibn Sulayman was busy with slave-raiding, but this did not seem in the least shocking in an age when slavery was an integral part of life. In Ibn Battuta’s eyes, the sultan, also known as Abu-al-Mawahib (Father of Gifts), was a man true to his beliefs, for he always set aside a fifth of the booty from his raids on the Zanj, and gave this to visiting sharifs, descendants of the Prophet. Confident of the sultan’s generosity, the sharifs came to visit him from as far away as Iraq. ‘This sultan is a very humble man,’ concluded Ibn Battuta. ‘He sits with poor people and eats with them, and gives respect to people of religion and Prophetic descent.’

The young Moroccan lawyer chose not to venture as far as Sofala, which a merchant told him was several weeks’ sailing further south. The uncertainties of the weather between Sofala and Madagascar, the land of the heathen Waqwaqs, meant that he risked being unable to sail back across the equator with the arrival of the south-west monsoon. There was also the danger of cyclones in the southern part of the ocean. So when the monsoon changed, Ibn Battuta did not linger, because in the middle months of the year there was a likelihood of violent storms. He boarded another ship, which headed across the open sea to Arabia; from there he went on by a roundabout route to India.

Ibn Battuta’s journey to East Africa in 1331, his first venture into the arena of Indian Ocean civilization, provides an eye-witness account of the coast after a gap of several centuries. For him it was the turning point of his career. From now on his lifelong urge to find out what lay beyond the next mountain, past the next town, across the next sea, was to make him, in Islamic eyes, the doyen of adventurers in pre-modern times.