Cairo stands today just as it did in 1433. The fortified city has withstood invaders for five centuries. During the Mongol wars, Saladin’s fortifications provided a refuge for all of Islam, making Cairo a haven not only for the caliph but for phi losophers, artists, craftsmen, and teachers as well as hundreds of thousands of ordinary people fleeing Genghis Khan and his successors. Enormous wealth flowed into the city and was deployed on a sumptuous array of mosques, madrassahs, mausoleums, and hospitals. This is the domed medieval Cairo that Zheng He would have found.9
At first sight, Islamic towns and cities appear chaotic to Western eyes, with their elaborate, twisting streets leading higgledy-piggledy in all directions. They had, however, a master plan. At “the centre of the Islamic city stands the Friday Mosque; to it and from it everything flows as if it were a heart.”10 Next to the mosque stands the madrassah, where Islamic law and theology are taught, the forerunner of the Western university. Around mosque and madrassah sprawls the bazaar with its khans and caravanserais where merchants rest, feed their camels, and store their goods in safety.
Trade and religion go hand in hand under Islam, which affords merchants great prestige (Muhammad was one). The status of the merchant was evidenced by the distance of his shop from the Friday mosque: perfume, spice, and incense shops were nearest, followed by gold merchants and silversmiths. Cobblers were farthest away. Mosque and market were both within easy reach of the caravanserais.
The central square played host to all manner of entertainment, resounding with the cries of snake charmers, bears, dancers, and storytellers. Radiating outward beyond the bazaar was a jumbled assortment of residential districts divided by race and religion. Surrounding them was a defensive wall (in Cairo it was Saladin’s) to keep out Mongols and robbers.
At the center of medieval Cairo was the city’s Friday mosque, Al-Azhar, founded in 970, as soon as the enclosure walls of Al-Qahira were completed. It is perhaps the most prestigious mosque in the world and is connected to the world’s oldest university. For more than a thousand years Al-Azhar University has provided Muslim students from around the world with free board and a theological education focused on the Koran and Islamic law, logic, grammar, rhetoric, astronomy, and science.
For centuries, the mosque on Fridays has been packed. As it overflows, men lay their mats outside on the pavement. They pray in uniform lines, rich and poor side by side, old men and young, golden cloaks next to dirty kashmaks. All men are equal in Islam; no boxes are reserved for the gentry. Inside, Al-Azhar resembles London’s Southwark Cathedral, though it is not quite as tall and rather more austere. Gowned students, seated between gray marble columns, are taught by a wizened imam perched in a high chair. (The gowns of Oxford and Cambridge were copied from those worn by Islamic students, just as our university “chair” is derived from the imam’s perch.)
The Al-Azhar competes with the mosques of Sayyid Hasan, al-Ghoury, and Sultan al-Ashraf Barsbay—all within a stone’s throw. The Egyptian president worships at the Mosque of Al-Azhar. Their muezzins call the faithful to prayer five times a day. Traditionally, muezzins are chosen from the blind, who cannot see down into the houses where unveiled women are dressing.
In the square, Cairo’s festivals, the moulids, are held and the Sufibrotherhood prays with banners and drums; music blasts all night long. Vast crowds come up from the delta for the holiday of Eid, congregating at the cafés around the square, each one favored by a par ticular delta village.
One can readily understand why Cairo would have been a magnet for all peoples of Islam, including Zheng He and his fellow Muslims returning from Mecca. In broad terms, foreigners lived in Cairo, white native Egyptians, the fellahin, lived on the delta and in the Nile Valley. With the holiest mosque in the world situated next to the largest market in the world, the city had everything. Here they could study the Koran, sell their goods, and enjoy the city’s storied evening delights.
Today, as in the Middle Ages, Cairo is a city of good-natured people living in close quarters, bustling and jostling from one corner to the next. To motorists and pedestrians making headway through the crowds, a few hundred yards can seem like a mile. Cairo’s population is polyglot, full of the offspring of Sudanese, Armenian, Jewish, Georgian, Persian, North African, and Indian merchants. Indeed, Egyptians intermarried with the descendants of conquerors and merchants to such an extent that today it is difficult to find a “pure” Egyptian.
Zheng He’s sailors would have seen, alongside Al-Azhar Mosque, two imposing complexes: the madrassah and the Wikala of al-Ghouri, named after one of the later Mamluk sultans. Wikala is the Egyptian name for a caravanserai. Both caravanserai and madrassah complemented the mosque and were frequently funded by a charity, or wakf, set up by the sultan or a wealthy merchant.
Cairo’s madrassah, typical of an early Islamic university, is a large, rectangular building with an open courtyard at its center, surrounded by broad cloisters. In the cloisters, small groups of students debate with teachers; great importance is placed on mental agility. While Europe stumbled through the Dark Ages, Cairo safeguarded the world’s largest library. Here, the great books of the ancients, including Aristotle and Plato, were stored before at last being summoned to aid the Enlightenment.
In the caravanserai of al-Ghoury, merchants from China laden with gold, silk, and ceramics could rest in simple, clean surroundings, a stone’s throw from the cool mosque. In Zheng He’s time, there were eleven caravanserais in Cairo, twenty-three markets for international trade, fifty smaller markets (souks) for local trade, and eleven race courses.
Al-Madkrizi gave a vivid account of life in the caravanserais in the 1420s. Every sort of spice was for sale, along with all manner of silks and more mundane goods—fruits, nuts, and jams galore. Merchants carried with them their chests of gold and silver, all their worldly wealth. Theft was common. The punishment (still enforced in Saudi Arabia) was severing of the right hand.
In the late Middle Ages, Cairo was the world’s leading emporium for three of the most important commodities of international trade—gold, spice, and perfume. Cairo had become bullion capital of the world as a result of Islam’s expansion. Arab caliphs, needing ever more gold to lubricate trade, initially adopted Byzantine coins, overstamping them with the caliph’s head. After Arab armies overran North Africa, they captured the gold trade from Mali and Guinea, which had by far the largest gold seams.
Arabs’ domination of the gold trade led to the gold dinar becoming the currency of Mediterranean trade. The rulers of Castile, Aragon, and León copied Almoravid dinars, which they called morbetinos.
Cairo’s spice bazaar, the Khan el-Khalili, faces the Al-Azhar Mosque. It was built by a wealthy Mamluk of that name in 1382 and still teems with business six hundred years later. The most prestigious part of the bazaar, nearest the mosque, is where the fabled incense is found. Brought from the wadis of southern Arabia, these concentrated essences are sold by the ounce, diluted with alcohol one part to nine for perfume, one to twenty for eau de toilette, one to thirty for eau de cologne. Cairo’s shops still maintain the medieval tradition of selling perfumes in large bottles alongside herbs and spices, and Egypt remains a source for many of the essences used by French couture houses.
In the Middle Ages perfume and spice were equally valuable. The spice trade with the East, transacted through Cairo, was the cornerstone of Venetian wealth.
Europeans devoured spices, the better to make palatable their salted meat and dried fish. In addition to enlivening food, spices were extensively used by apothecaries. Purges were accomplished by cassia or rhubarb; theriac, made of an assortment of herbs and spices, was a panacea for ills ranging from constipation to fever and even the plague. Ginger jams were said to encourage the flow of urine. Cinnamon assisted menstruation and was valuable for windy colic; nutmeg relieved coughs and asthma. As Iris Origo points out in The Merchant of Predo, there was hardly an Eastern spice, however rare or expensive, that did not reach the cooking pots or medicine chests of Italian bankers and merchants.