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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’.
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.
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.
EIGHT (#ulink_939a738d-6186-54c9-863a-9d0b1341bd0f)
Adventures in India and China (#ulink_939a738d-6186-54c9-863a-9d0b1341bd0f)
He who stays at home beside his hearth and is content with the information which he may acquire concerning his own region, cannot be on the same level as one who divides his lifespan between different lands, and spends his days journeying in search of precious and original knowledge.
—Al-Mas’udi, The Meadows of Gold
WHAT DISTINGUISHES the memoirs of Ibn Battuta from many other humdrum travel diaries is not merely his flair for recording what is bizarre, exotic or absurd, but also the way he lays bare his personality: at times he is swashbuckling and boastful, at others vulnerable and indecisive, then ready to laugh at his own folly in inviting misfortune. After six centuries, in translation from the Arabic, his individuality asserts itself. His capacity for self-revelation is closely related to a gift for capturing in one or two sentences the manners and customs of other people.
His description of life aboard the big Chinese trading junks, which were more and more to be seen sailing to Indian Ocean ports, epitomizes his skill. Ibn Battuta writes approvingly, echoing Marco Polo, about the amenities for merchants: ‘Often a man will live in his cabin unknown to any of the others on board until they meet upon reaching some town.’ These cabins, consisting of several rooms and a bathroom, could be locked by the occupants, ‘who would take along with them slave girls and wives’. He adds a glimpse of lower-deck life: ‘The sailors have their children living on board ship, and they grow lettuces, vegetables and ginger in wooden tubs.’
In the Chinese custom, the most important figure in running these behemoths, with their twelve masts and four decks, was not the captain but a superintendent acting for the owner. In Ibn Battuta’s words, the superintendent was ‘like a great emir’, and when he went ashore he was preceded by archers and armed Abyssinians beating drums and blowing trumpets and bugles.
This mention of Abyssinians aboard Chinese ships in the fourteenth century is revealing, for the term always identified a person as coming from somewhere on the eastern side of Africa. Elsewhere, Ibn Battuta says Abyssinians were used throughout the Indian Ocean as armed guards on merchant ships; the presence of merely one was enough to frighten away pirates. He also tells of an Abyssinian slave named Badr, whose prowess in war was so phenomenal that he was made the governor of an Indian town: ‘He was tall and corpulent, and used to eat a whole sheep at a meal, and I was told that after eating he would drink about a pound and a half of ghee [clarified butter], following the custom of the Abyssinians in their own country.’
Many Africans were taken to India in the retinues of the Arab merchants who were settling in its ports during the fourteenth century. Others were transported to serve as palace guards. There was also a human flow in the opposite direction: Hindu merchants from the great port of Cambay, in north-west India, crossed the ocean to live in Kilwa, Zanzibar, Aden and ports on the Red Sea.
When Ibn Battuta reached India the fabric of its ancient culture was being torn to shreds. The entire sub-continent was under threat from the war-loving Turks of central Asia, who had invaded India through the mountain passes and the Afghan valleys of the north. One after another they were destroying the ancient Hindu kingdoms lying in their path. However, since the conquerors were Muslims, many doors were open to Ibn Battuta, and this enabled him to give a unique account of the tyranny with which his co-religionists were ruling amid the splendours of northern India. Since his hosts were not Arabs, he was able to view them fairly dispassionately.
By 1333, when Ibn Battuta arrived in Delhi, the throne was occupied by Sultan Muhammad ibn Tughlaq, who called himself by the grandiose title ‘Master of the World’.
The sultan had murdered his father to gain power, and had his half-brother beheaded when he suspected him of disloyalty. Ibn Battuta’s experiences with the sultan during several years in Delhi were to contain all the menace of being trapped in a cage with a man-eating tiger.
Shortly before Ibn Battuta’s arrival, the sultan had depopulated his capital as a punishment for its citizens’ enmity towards him, made plain in written messages tossed every night into his audience hall. In his rage Muhammad ordered all the people of Delhi to leave at once for a distant region: then he decreed a search for anyone who had not obeyed. As Ibn Battuta tells its, the sultan’s slaves ‘found two men in the streets, one a cripple and the other blind’. The two were brought before the sultan, who ordered that the cripple should be fired to his death from a military catapult and the blind man should be dragged from Delhi to Dawlat Abad, forty days’ journey away. ‘He fell to pieces on the road and all of him that reached Dawlat Abad was his leg.’
Ibn Battuta makes a half-hearted attempt in his narrative to excuse the sultan for his savagery, by giving examples of his lavish treatment of strangers. For a time he enjoyed this generosity himself, but then it seems to have gone to his head, because by his own admission he began behaving in a reckless fashion. When the sultan decided to go hunting, he went too, hiring a vast retinue of grooms, bearers, valets and runners. Soon the constant extravagance of the young Moroccan judge became the talk of the court. As Ibn Battuta unashamedly relates, the ‘Master of the World’ eventually sent him three sacks, containing 55,000 gold dinars, to pay off his creditors. This may also have been the sultan’s way of making up for having executed a rebellious court official, the brother of a noblewoman named Hurnasab, whom Ibn Battuta married soon after reaching Delhi.
His volatile friendship with the sultan took a turn for the worse when Ibn Battuta went to stay as a penitent with Kamal al-Din, an ascetic Sufi imam known as the ‘Cave Man’, living underground on the outskirts of Delhi. The sultan distrusted the ‘Cave Man’ and eventually had him tortured and put to the sword. Before doing so he summoned Ibn Battuta and announced: ‘I have sent for you to go as my ambassador to the king of China, because I know your love of travel.’ His difficult guest was quick to accept the proposition; each of them was glad that they would soon be seeing the last of the other.
As a prelude to departure, Ibn Battuta divorced Hurnasab, who had just borne him a daughter. Clearly, domesticity counted for little beside the task of leading an imposing expedition across land and sea. Fifteen envoys had lately arrived from the Great Khan of China, bringing gifts which included 100 slaves, many loads of silk and velvet cloth, jewelled garments and sundry weapons. The sultan was not to be outdone, sending in return 100 white slaves, 100 Hindu dancing girls, 100 horses, fifteen eunuchs, gold and silver candelabra, brocade robes, and numerous other treasures. Ibn Battuta’s fellow-ambassadors were a learned man named Zahir ad-Din and the sultan’s favourite eunuch, Kafur the cupbearer. Until they reached their place of embarkation on the west coast of India they were to have an escort of 1,000 horsemen.
This cavalcade, incorporating the fifteen Chinese emissaries and their servants, travelled for only a few days before reaching a town under attack from ‘infidels’; that is, Hindu enemies of the sultan. Ibn Battuta and his colleagues decided to use their escorting force to mount a surprise counter-attack. Even allowing for some boasting on his part, this was a considerable success. The infidels were cut to pieces. But one important casualty was the eunuch Kafur, whose special responsibility had been to look after the presents for the Chinese ruler. A messenger was sent back to Delhi, telling the sultan what had happened.
Meanwhile, Ibn Battuta became caught up in a series of skirmishes with the enemy, and it was not long before calamity befell him. He became separated from his cavalry troop, was chased by the Hindus, hid in a ravine, lost his horse, and was soon taken prisoner. All his costly clothes and weapons were removed, including a gold-encrusted sword, and he expected at any second to be killed.
At the crucial moment a young man helped him to escape, and from then on Ibn Battuta’s account of his tribulations takes on a dreamlike quality. He wanders through ruined villages, eating berries and looking for water. He hides in cotton fields and abandoned houses. In one house he finds a large jar, used for storing grain, and climbs into it through a hole in the base. There is some straw in the jar, and a stone he uses as a pillow. ‘On the top of the jar there was a bird which kept fluttering its wings most of the night. I suppose it was frightened, so we were a pair of frightened creatures.’
After eight days of wandering, Ibn Battuta found a well with a rope hanging over it. Desperate to relieve his thirst he tied to the rope a piece of cloth used to shield his head from the sun, then lowered this down the well. After pulling up the cloth he sucked the water from it, but thirst still afflicted him. He then tied one of his shoes to the rope, and pulled this up full of water. At the second attempt he lost the shoe, then started to use the other one for the same purpose.
In this dire moment a ‘black-skinned man’ appeared beside him and gave the Muslim greeting, ‘Peace be upon you.’ Salvation was at hand, for the stranger not only produced food from a bag he was carrying and drew up water from the well in a jug, but even carried Ibn Battuta when he collapsed. Then this mysterious figure vanished, having deposited his human burden near a Muslim village.
After rejoining his companions and resuming his ambassadorial role, Ibn Battuta learned that the sultan had sent another trusted eunuch to replace the ill-fated Kafur. Then the expedition resumed its journey towards the coast. Progress now being relatively uneventful, there was time for him to study the behaviour of Indian yogis. They are as astounding to Ibn Battuta as they had been to Marco Polo: ‘The men of this class do some marvellous things. One of them will spend months without eating or drinking, and many have holes dug for them in the earth which are then built in on top of them, leaving only a space for air to enter. They stay in there for months, and I heard tell of one of them who stayed thus for a year.’
Progressing from city to city, the expedition reached the coast near the great harbour of Cambay and boarded a fleet of ships.
In these it travelled south, calling at many of the ports Marco Polo had visited half a century before. One was Hili, which Ibn Battuta names as ‘the farthest town reached by ships from China’. He adds that it was on an inlet which could be navigated by large vessels; his Venetian predecessor had described the port as being on ‘a big river with a very fine estuary’.
At the end of this voyage, the sultan’s mission to China, with all its slaves, eunuchs and horses, was to be transferred to junks. These were to sail south-east to Sumatra, then north towards Zayton (Quanzhou), the port in south-east China where most foreign ships unloaded their cargoes. The natural place to switch to the junks was Calicut, a port founded some forty years earlier and already dominant in the export of pepper from the entire Malabar coast. Much of the pepper and other spices traded here were destined for Europe.
Calicut (more accurately, Koli Koddai, the ‘fortress of the cock’) would eventually be destined to play a central role in the history of the Indian Ocean. Its very name was to become a tantalizing challenge, almost a synonym for the wealth of the Indies. As Ibn Battuta’s expedition entered Calicut harbour, he counted thirteen large junks lying at anchor. There were also many smaller Chinese ships, for each junk was accompanied at sea by supply and support vessels. He now had three months to wait before the monsoon winds would blow in the right direction for the voyage, so he passed the time by learning all he could about the place.
The ruler of Calicut was an old man, with a square-cut beard ‘after the manner of the Greeks’, bearing the hereditary title of Zamorin, meaning Sea-King. One explanation for Calicut’s growing popularity with merchants and captains was that when a ship was wrecked on any part of the coast under the Zamorin’s control, its cargo was carefully protected and restored to the owners; almost everywhere else along the coast any goods washed up were simply expropriated by local rulers. The Sea-King was a Hindu, not a Muslim, but he provided houses for all Sultan Muhammad’s emissaries.
When the monsoon was due to start blowing southwards, and the time for the voyage to China was at hand, he saw to it that they were fittingly accommodated in one of the largest junks.
However, a disaster exemplifying the hazards of Indian Ocean travel was about to occur. Ibn Battuta survived it only by chance, through his insistence on his personal comforts. He had told the commander of the junk: ‘I want a cabin to myself because of the slave-girls, for it is my habit never to travel without them.’ The Chinese merchants had taken all the best cabins, however, so he decided to switch with his retinue to one of the support vessels.
The junk, anchored offshore, was about to sail when a violent storm blew up. The great vessel was hurled on to the coast in darkness. Everyone on board was drowned, including the learned Zahir ad-Din and the second eunuch appointed to guard the presents intended for the Chinese ruler.
Ibn Battuta had delayed boarding the support vessel because he had wanted to go to the local mosque for the last time before the journey, so he was one of those who went out after the storm and found the beach strewn with bodies. The support vessel had escaped disaster by reefing its sail and heading off down the coast – leaving Ibn Battuta on land, but carrying away all his slaves and goods (he mentions the goods first in his narrative). He was left with only a former slave whom he had just freed, a carpet to sleep on, and ten dinars. As for the former slave, ‘when he saw what had befallen me he deserted me’.
The expedition to China, which had set off with such pomp, was now in ruins. Ibn Battuta thought first of turning back to Delhi, then decided that the half-crazed sultan might well vent his rage upon him for the disaster. Anxious about his goods and his slaves he set out southwards towards the port of Quilon, having been assured that the support vessel would have called in there. Part of the journey was by river, and he hired a local Muslim to help him on his way. But every night his new servant went ashore ‘to drink wine with the infidels’ and infuriated Ibn Battuta with his brawling.
Despite the plunge in his fortunes, Ibn Battuta managed to pay heed to the passing scene, noting for example that one hilltop town was entirely occupied by Jews.
But when he reached Quilon after ten days there was no trace of the ship he had hoped to find there, so he was driven to live on charity. Some of the Chinese ambassadors who had accompanied him from Delhi turned up in equal straits: they had also been shipwrecked, and were wearing clothes given them by Chinese merchants in the town.
Having no compatriots to turn to for succour, Ibn Battuta was at a loss about how to escape from his state of beggary. His credentials as the sultan’s ambassador were gone, and all the presents for the Great Khan of China were either at the bottom of the sea or dispersed. As a qadi, a law-giver, he had the status which put an obligation on Islamic rulers to offer him hospitality, but without the conventional entourage of slaves, or the clothes and other regalia of his profession, it was hard to win much respect. Eventually he decided to try his fortunes with a ruler further up the coast in the port of Hinawr: ‘On reaching Hinawr I went to see the sultan and saluted him; he assigned me a lodging, but without a servant.’
This was a cruel humiliation, but the ruler did ask Ibn Battuta to recite the prayers with him whenever he came to the mosque. ‘I spent most of my time in the mosque, and used to read the Qur’ān through every day, and later twice a day.’ The help of Allah was badly needed.
Matters only began to improve when the sultan decided to start a jihad against the Hindu ruler of Sandabur (later known as Goa). Ibn Battuta opened the Qur’ān at random to find an augury and saw at the head of the page a sentence ending with the words ‘and verily God will aid those who aid him’. Although not by nature a fighting man, he was convinced by this that he should offer his services for the jihad. There was a brisk but brief seaborne assault, then the palace was captured after being attacked with flaming projectiles: ‘God gave victory to the Muslims’.
Ibn Battuta had shown his mettle. His fortunes started to rise again, and on returning to Calicut he was even able to respond with a measure of calm to the news he received from two of his slaves who were aboard the Chinese support ship when it sailed away during the calamitous storm: the ship reached Sumatra safely, but a local ruler had taken his slaves; his goods were likewise stolen. All Ibn Battuta’s surviving companions from the expedition were scattered, some in Sumatra, others in Bengal, and the rest were on their way to China. The wont news was that a slave-girl who was about to have his baby was dead; his child by another slave-girl had died in Delhi.
Following this series of disasters, Ibn Battuta abandoned all thought of going to China for some years. Instead, he travelled aimlessly about southern India and Ceylon, attaching himself as the opportunity arose to various Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist rulers. He was repelled by the lawlessness he encountered on both land and sea, and by the cruelties inflicted upon men, women and children alike. But this way of life offered many possibilities for someone of his experience and with his gift for seizing the opportune moment.
At times the situations he encountered could be almost too demanding, as happened when he visited the Maldive islands, lying several days by sea to the south-west of the Indian mainland. These hundreds of coral outcrops, with their palm-trees and sandy beaches, would have reminded him of the islands off the African coast. The Maldives were prosperous, partly because of a seemingly endless supply of cowrie shells lying in shallow water off the beaches: for many centuries the shells had been exported to northern China to be used as currency, and shiploads were sent in the opposite direction every year to Africa for the same purpose.
Islam’s roots were not deep here, the faith having been introduced by a visitor from Persia in 1153; before that the population had followed a mixture of Hinduism and Buddhism. Ibn Battuta claims that he tried to disguise his identity on arrival, through a fear that the Maldivian rulers might prove loath to let him leave again, because they lacked a qualified Muslim law-giver. He was quickly recognized none the less: ‘Some busybody had written telling them about me and that I had been qadi in Delhi.’ The suspicion that, in truth, he was only too ready to be asked to offer his services is hard to avoid.
Presents were soon being showered upon him by the Maldivian chief minister and other notables: two new slave-girls, silk robes, a casket of jewels, five sheep and 100,000 cowries. Soon the highly-prized Moroccan finds himself being offered wives from among the rival ruling families, and accepts four, the most a good Muslim can have at any one time. In all, during his eight months in the Maldives he had six different wives. This was entirely in accord with the custom of the islanders: ‘When ships arrive, the crews marry wives, and when they are about to sail they divorce them. It is really a sort of temporary marriage.’
Given little option, Ibn Battuta soon donned his robes as the islands’ chief justice and set about his duties with a will. His interpretation of the shari’a law was much stricter than anything the easy-going islanders had been used to. When he sentenced a thief to have his hand cut off, several people fainted in the courtroom. Anyone who was found to have been absent from Friday prayers was beaten and paraded through the streets. Husbands who kept divorced wives with them until they found new husbands were also beaten. Only one edict by the strict new judge came to nothing: he tried to stop the women walking around bare-breasted, ‘but I could not manage that.’
If Ibn Battuta had set out deliberately to make himself unpopular and stir up rival factions, so easing his departure, then he was successful. The breaking point came when he ordered that an African slave belonging to the sultan should be beaten for adultery; he then publicly rejected the chief minister’s appeal for the order to be rescinded. Even this did not remove all obstacles to his departure, for there was now a suspicion that when he returned to the Indian mainland he might incite potential enemies there to amount an invasion of the islands. (Such fears were justified, for as Ibn Battuta admits – or rather, boasts – he became immersed in intrigue and later came close to mounting just such an attack.) Eventually, he agreed to make a tour of the islands while emotions cooled. Then he went to say farewell to the chief minister: ‘He embraced me, and wept so copiously that his tears dropped on my feet.’
A leisurely voyage through the Maldives gave the embattled qadi time to collect material for the earliest surviving description of the islands. At last he reached an islet where there was only one house, occupied by a weaver:
He had a wife and family, a few coco-palms and a small boat, with which he used to fish and to cross over to any of the islands he wished to visit. His island contained also a few banana trees, but we saw no land birds on it except two ravens, which came out to us on our arrival, and circled above our vessel. And I swear I envied that man, and wished that the island had been mine, that I might have made it my retreat until the inevitable hour should befall me.
Ibn Battuta eventually slipped away from the Maldives after divorcing all his four current wives (one was pregnant). However, he kept his slaves. His ship sailed off-course and put into harbour in Ceylon, instead of reaching the coast of India. So he took the opportunity to collect facts about the island, noting among other things that the most powerful man in the large town of Kalanbu (Colombo) was a pirate named Jalasti, with a force of 500 Abyssinian mercenaries.
The wandering judge was tempted to Adam’s Peak, a place of pilgrimage for Muslims, Buddhists and Christians alike. At the top was a depression claimed to be the footprint of the first man, and to reach it the pilgrims had to go up a steep stairway with the aid of chains fixed to the rock. Marco Polo had also described Adam’s Peak, but Ibn Battuta’s account of struggling to the mountain-top has infinitely more drama. As he stared down from the peak through the clouds to the vivid greenery of Ceylon he remembered that he had been away from his Moroccan homeland for almost twenty years, but he was still little more than halfway to China, the ultimate goal. There was also a lingering sense of duty towards that self-styled ‘Master of the World’, the mad sultan in distant Delhi.
The route Ibn Battuta took to get to China was typically circuitous. First he made his way up the eastern coastline of India, almost being shipwrecked at one point and risking his life to rescue his slave-girls. He even dared to return to the Maldive islands, contemplating taking away his two-year-old son by the senior wife he divorced there, but soon thought better of it and sailed to Bengal – a ‘gloomy’ country where food was cheap. Next he went to Assam to meet a holy man, then arrived in Sumatra, where he stayed with a Muslim ruler and clearly felt far more at ease than Marco Polo had done during his time in the same land. Finally he landed in the port of Zayton and immediately had the luck to meet one of the Chinese ambassadors who had come to Delhi with presents from the Great Khan.
Although Ibn Battuta strives to convey the idea that he was at once elevated to the status of a visiting ambassador, and was taken in magnificent style to see the Great Khan at Peking, this part of Ibn Battuta’s memoirs lacks the vivacity of the rest. He does admit that he never saw the Mongol ruler, saying that this was because of a rebellion spreading disorder throughout north China. For all that, he is able to give a convincing account of the burial of the deposed monarch with a hundred relatives and confidants, ending with a grisly description of horses being slaughtered and suspended on stakes above the graves.
Ibn Battuta was constantly impressed by the wonders of China, but unlike Marco Polo he did not enjoy life there: ‘Whenever I went out of my house I used to see any number of disagreeable things, and that disturbed me so much that I used to keep indoors and go out only in case of necessity. When I met Muslims in China I always felt as though I was meeting my own faith and kin.’ The nub of his unease lay in being totally outside the Bilad al-Islam, and discovering that ‘heathendom had so strong a hold’ in what was plainly the most powerful country in the world.
An emotional moment came when he met in Fuchow (Fuzhou) a Muslim doctor from Ceuta, the Mediterranean port only a few miles from his Tangier birthplace. At this encounter on the far side of the world they both wept. The doctor had prospered greatly in China: ‘He told me that he had about fifty white slaves and as many slave girls, and presented me with two of each, along with many other gifts.’ Some years later Ibn Battuta was to meet the doctor’s brother in West Africa.
Ibn Battuta returned safely by sea from China to Calicut, and there faced a delicate decision. At one moment he felt duty-bound to return to Delhi to report to the sultan all that had happened, then the idea grew too alarming: ‘on second thoughts I had some fears about doing so, so I re-embarked and twenty-eight days later reached Dhofar.’ This was in the familiar territory of Arabia. From there he began making his way home to Tangier by way of Hormuz, Baghdad and Damascus (with a detour for one more pilgrimage to Mecca).
Shortly before he reached Tangier his mother, long a widow, died from the Black Death.
Much had changed in Morocco during the quarter of a century he had been away and little attention was spared for a weatherbeaten qadi whom most people had forgotten. Anxieties were running deep about events across the Strait of Gibraltar, because after almost 700 years Islam was yielding its control, step by step, of southern Spain.
Seemingly at a loss as to what he should do next, Ibn Battuta crossed to the European side of the Mediterranean and joined briefly in the jihad against the advancing Spaniards. His experiences there were far from happy: in one incident, Christian bandits almost took him prisoner near ‘a pretty little town’ called Marbella. He soon returned to the safety of Morocco and decided on one last adventure. He headed southwards across the Sahara desert, along trade routes pioneered by his Berber ancestors in Roman times.
He travelled for another two years (1352–53), covering thousands of miles by camel, donkey and on foot, visiting Mali and other powerful West African kingdoms. It was the region from which the fabulous Mansa Musa had emerged twenty-five years earlier to astound Egypt with his wealth. This part of Africa had been won for Islam, but it was strikingly different from the cities Ibn Battuta had visited two decades before on the Indian Ocean side of the continent. There the rulers were Arabs, controlling an African population but holding firm to a non-African culture. In West Africa the culture was indigenous, and the rulers had adapted Islam to fit their own traditions.
He was astonished by the riches of West Africa, at that time the world’s greatest gold producer, and by the scholarship he found in Timbuktu, on the bend of the Niger river.
He commented: ‘The Negroes possess some admirable qualities. They are seldom unjust and possess a greater abhorrence of injustice than any other people … There is complete security in their country. Neither traveller nor inhabitant in it has anything to fear from robbers or violent men.’
Sadly, his conclusions about the geography of Africa were wildly astray, because he believed that the Niger, flowing eastwards at Timbuktu, later became the Nile, which he had seen flowing northwards in Egypt. (In this error he was following the theory of the twelfth-century writer al-Idrisi, and many other Arab geographers, that there was a ‘western Nile’ flowing from the direction of the Atlantic.) Ibn Battuta may even have thought that the Nile was also joined to the Zambezi. Recalling his experiences in East Africa he said that Sofala was a month’s journey from the gold-producing land of Yufi. When he came to describe what he believed to be the course of the Nile he declared: ‘It continues from Muli to Yufi, one of the greatest countries of the black people, whose ruler is the most considerable of kings of the whole region.’
He went on: ‘Yufi cannot be visited by any white man, because they would kill him before he got there.’ Since Ibn Battuta regarded himself as ‘white’ in both colour and culture this was simply a way of explaining why he had failed to make a trip to see the gold-mines, the subject of so much speculation.
When Ibn Battuta finally returned from West Africa to Fez, the Moroccan capital, he was able to claim that he had visited every region of the world where Muslims either ruled or had settled. Many people in the court insisted that it was impossible for one man to have travelled so far and survived so many dangers. These arguments were silenced by the sultan’s chief minister, who gave Ibn Battuta several scribes to whom he could dictate as he pleased, as well as a young court secretary, Muhammad ibn Juzayy. It was Ibn Juzayy, proud of his own modest journeys abroad, who wrote in admiration of his elderly charge: ‘It must be plain to any man of intelligence that this sheikh is the traveller of the age.’
The old adventurer took his time, living near the palace, sifting through his memories and dictating to the scribes. These labours seem to have been stretched out over almost three years. At times he faltered in remembering the names of people and places, but could still recall vividly those parts of India where the women were especially beautiful and ‘famous for their charms in intercourse’. Ibn Battuta was eventually despatched to be the law-giver in an unidentified Moroccan town. No more is on record about him, except that he is thought to have died in 1377 in the ancient city of Marrakesh, aged seventy-three.
By that time a momentous change had overtaken those distant lands through which he and Marco Polo had travelled. The Great Khan was no more, for Mongol rule in China had ended as swiftly as it began. The people whose mounted armies had swept irresistibly across Asia and much of Europe in the middle of the thirteenth century now vanished from the world stage. The Ming dynasty had taken power in the ‘Central Country’ and would hold it for the next 300 years.
NINE (#ulink_d7534436-f119-5cbb-a296-9cdb5be91ce7)
Armadas of the Three-Jewel Eunuch (#ulink_d7534436-f119-5cbb-a296-9cdb5be91ce7)
Your Master the Lord of China greets you and counsels you to act justly to your subjects.
—Chinese envoy, addressing the Sultan of Aden, 1420
THE DRIVING FORCE behind China’s most dramatic display of sea-power in its history was a singular figure, the Grand Admiral Zheng He. Described by contemporaries as handsome, tall and burly, with fierce eyes, long earlobes, and a voice ‘as loud as a bell’, Zheng was also a eunuch. They called him the Three-Jewel Eunuch (or, more formally, the Eunuch of the Three Treasures, a title derived from Buddhism which is literally translated as ‘the Three Jewels of Pious Ejaculation’). Yet he was not a Buddhist, his original surname was not Zheng, and ethnically he was not of Chinese descent.
He was born in 1371 in the south-western Kunyang county, in the province of Yunnan. Kunyang is remote from the sea, but his family is thought to have originated even further away, beyond the Great Wall in a distant part of central Asia, and to have come to Yunnan with the Mongols. At all events, they were Muslims, both his father and grandfather having made pilgrimages to Mecca – a great achievement at that time. The family name was Ma, a common one among Muslims in China, and the boy had an elder brother and four sisters. When he was born the Mongols were still holding Yunnan, but were finally driven out by the armies of the Ming emperor Hongwu in 1382.
This was to be the turning-point in the life of the Ma family’s eleven-year-old son. A visiting general chose him, for his looks and his intelligence, to be taken to Nanjing, then the Chinese capital. Once in Nanjing, he was made a page to the prince of Yan, the future emperor Yongle. He was given the new surname of Zheng, and castrated.
The creation of eunuchs to be the personal attendants of China’s rulers was a tradition, dating back to the earliest empires. At first only criminals were castrated, and were then sent to serve in the palace; this was called gongxing, palace punishment. Gradually the stigma was removed. Eunuchs were found to be unwaveringly loyal, never liable to suspicion of plotting to found dynasties of their own; all their energies were dedicated to whatever tasks were set for them. The most obvious role for a eunuch of a menial type was as ‘guardians of the harem’. Sometimes courtiers and confidants of much higher status chose to be castrated, to rule out any danger of being accused of sexual misconduct.
The Yongle period was the heyday of the eunuchs, who had played a decisive role in the intrigues which helped the emperor to seize the throne in 1403. They came to have far more say in palace circles than the traditional wielders of power, the Confucian bureaucrats, and none was more influential than Zheng He. While still in his mid-thirties he became a senior officer in the army garrison at Nanjing, on the Yangtze river, after putting down a rebellion in his home province.
When the new emperor decided to implement the long-discussed plans for a naval venture into the Indian Ocean, he turned to Zheng whose religion made him a natural choice since so many of the ‘barbarian’ lands round the ocean were reputed to follow the rites of the ‘Heavenly Square’ (the Ka’ba in Mecca). There had been a pretence at first that Zheng He was merely being sent to look for Huidi, the deposed emperor, but this was soon abandoned. The Chinese were primarily looking for markets for the surpluses of their great factories.
There is no knowing whether Zheng was ever a naval commander before being appointed to lead the first expedition. Perhaps he had seen action in sea fights with Japanese pirates (wokou), who wreaked havoc among Chinese merchant shipping; the junks of the coastal defence fleet carried warriors trained to board the pirate ships and slaughter their crews. Even if Zheng was no seafarer he must have been well acquainted with naval activity, since Nanjing was near the ocean. Stupendous efforts had been made there for several decades to build up China’s fleets.
A previous emperor, Taizu, had ordered the planting on mountainsides inland from Nanjing of millions of trees, to provide wood suitable for ships. By the time of Yongle, the imperial navy consisted of 400 vessels stationed at Nanjing, 2,800 coastal-defence ships, a 3,000-strong transport fleet, and 250 ‘treasure ships’, showpieces of Chinese technology. Although the Mongol rulers had been able to assemble 4,400 ships for a failed attack on Japan a century earlier, and 1,000 for a punitive expedition to Java, most of these would have looked puny alongside the vessels now put at the disposal of the ‘Three-Jewel Eunuch’.
Armed with the emperor’s edict, Zheng prepared the first of his seven expeditions with a bravura that was to be characteristic of his entire career. The fleet assembled at Dragon River Pass (Liujiajiang) near the mouth of the Yangtze in 1405; this was to be the pattern for the next quarter of a century. The stately ‘treasure ships’, each weighing more than 500 tons, borne along by the wind in their twelve sails, and carrying hundreds of men, had names such as Pure Harmony, Lasting Tranquillity and Peaceful Crossing.
Under full sail they were likened to ‘swimming dragons’. These were the floating fortresses of the fleet, their crews armed with ‘fire arrows’ charged with gunpowder, as well as rockets and blunderbusses firing stones. By 1350 the Chinese had also invented bombards, known as ‘wonder-working long-range awe-inspiring cannon’, although these were not highly valued for naval use.
The number of big junks sailing in each of the expeditions varied from about forty to more than a hundred, and each had several support vessels. These armadas of the Xia Xiyang (‘Going Down to the Western Ocean’) were the wonders of the age. The ships carried doctors, accountants, interpreters, scholars, holy men, astrologers, traders and artisans of every sort: on most of his seven expeditions Zheng had as many as 30,000 men under his command, in up to 300 ships of varying types. Flags, drums and lanterns were used to send messages within the fleet. To work out positions and routes the heavens were studied with the use of calibrated ‘star plates’, carved in ebony.
As with all convoys, the slowest vessels dictated the speed, and this was often no more than fifty miles a day, despite the use of huge oars when winds were slack.
Enough rice and other foodstuffs to last for a year were in the holds, lest provisions were lacking in the barbarian lands. Fresh water was stored in large tanks deep in the hulls. As a matter of pride, the Chinese never cared to feel at a disadvantage in foreign parts.
At first the Three-Jewel Eunuch ventured no further than Ceylon and the Malabar and Coromandel coasts of southern India, sending his huge fleets into such ports as Calicut and Quilon, with which Chinese merchants had been familiar for a century. By this time the South Indian pepper port of Calicut (called Kuli by the Chinese) was recognized as the most important emporium in the ‘Western Ocean’; when Calicut’s emissaries went to Nanjing in 1405 its ruler, the Zamorin, was rewarded with an elevated Chinese title. The attention Zheng’s fleets paid to this thriving city proves the commercial purpose behind his expeditions.
There were also less mundane reasons for visiting local rulers. In 1409 the Chinese invaded Ceylon, penetrated the country as far as the mountain capital of Kandy, and captured the Sinhalese king, Vira Alakesvara, together with his queen and members of the court. This was a direct punishment for the king’s refusal, several years before, to hand over to the Chinese emperor a precious relic, the tooth of the Buddha. In his time the Mongol ruler Kubilai Khan had also tried to acquire the tooth, but in vain. The king and the other captives were taken back to China as hostages and kept there for five years (although Zheng never did manage to lay hands on the holy tooth). As a reminder of this violent interlude the expedition left behind at the port of Galle a tablet inscribed in three languages, Chinese, Tamil and Persian, respectively praising Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam.
News of this hostage-taking must soon have spread along the trade routes of the Indian Ocean, ensuring that other rulers would be suitably submissive and hand over tribute, thus in effect conceding that they recognized the Chinese emperor as supreme ruler of the universe. When dealing with foreigners, the envoys from Beijing sometimes failed to hide the superiority they felt. One who went ashore in Aden could not bring himself to kiss the ground, as was customary, at the start of his audience with the sultan. This was taken by the Arabs as an insult; for their part, the Chinese thought the people of Aden ‘overbearing’.
However, the rewards were great for foreign monarchs willing to pay tribute to the emperor and acknowledge him as their ultimate overlord and mentor. They would be invited to send emissaries to China aboard one of the great treasure ships; in due course the emissaries would return with gifts more valuable than any they had taken with them, to press home the fact of Chinese superiority. An imperial edict explained: ‘They come here out of respect for our civilizing ways.’ The gifts they brought with them were seen as tribute, a proof of submission.
Yet if this was imperialism, it was of a curiously impermanent nature. Although Zheng sometimes sent punitive parties ashore – one was landed at Mogadishu in Somalia to teach its truculent sultan a lesson – he never installed a permanent garrison anywhere.
When each expedition was finished, the entire fleet would turn away eastwards, sail back through the straits of Malacca, head north through the more familiar waters of East Asia, and finally drop anchor in the home port of Nanjing.
