From there he rode to Bordeaux to present gifts to Edward I of England. He had some trouble with the names, recording him as ‘King Ilnagtor in Kersonia’; that is, King of Angleterre in Gascony. But Edward was so gratified by the message borne by his Chinese visitor that he wrote a letter promising to fight in the proposed conflict to extirpate the ‘Mohometan heresy’ for good. Back in Rome in February 1288, Sauma met the newly-elected Pope, Nicholas IV, and ‘wept with joy’ when Nicholas gave him the Eucharist.
In the end, Sauma’s diplomatic efforts were as fruidess as all the rest. Although the Mongols had once believed that the sky-god Tenggeri had chosen them to conquer the entire world, when their enthusiasm for the task waned they turned in upon themselves and retreated to the steppes. The Silk Route was closed to Europeans and the Indian Ocean, with all its bustling commerce, remained even less accessible. The wondrous world the Polos had known once again became little more than a tantalizing legend for the Christians of the West.
The Wandering Sheikh Goes South
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