Kitabı oxu: «Empires of the Monsoon»

EMPIRES OF
THE MONSOON

A History of the Indian Oceanand its Invaders

RICHARD HALL

COPYRIGHT

William Collins

An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers 1996

Copyright © Richard Hall 1996

Part title decoration from ‘The Fleet of Vasco da Gama’ illustrated in The Portuguese in India, Vol. 1, by Frederick Danvers

Richard Hall asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780006380832

Ebook Edition © APRIL 2016 ISBN: 9780007547043

Version: 2018–10–09

DEDICATION

Dedicated to the memory of Harry A. Logan Jr of Warren, Pennsylvania

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Maps

Foreword

A Note on Spellings

PART ONE: A World Apart

1. Wonders of India, Treasures of China

2. Lure of the African Shore

3. The Mystery of the Waqwaqs

4. Islam Rules in the Land of Zanj

5. On the Silk Route to Cathay

6. A Princess for King Arghon

7. The Wandering Sheikh Goes South

8. Adventures in India and China

9. Armadas of the Three-Jewel Eunuch

10. Ma Huan and the House of God

11. The King of the African Castle

PART TWO: The Cannons of Christendom

12. Prince Henry’s Far Horizons

13. Commanding the Guinea Coast

14. The Shape of the Indies

15. The Lust for Pepper, the Hunt for Prester John

16. The Spy Who Never Came Home

17. Kings and Gods in the City of Victory

18. Da Gama Enters the Tropical Ocean

19. A First Sight of India

20. The Fateful Pride of Ibn Majid

21. Sounds of Europe’s Rage

22. The Vengeance of da Gama

23. The Viceroy in East Africa

24. Defeating the Ottoman Turks at Diu

25. The Great Afonso de Albuquerque

26. Ventures into the African Interior

27. From Massawa to the Mountains

28. At War with the Left-handed Invader

29. Taking Bible and Sword to Monomotapa

30. Turkish Adventurers, Hungry Cannibals

31. The Renegade Sultan

32. The Lost Pride of Lusitania

33. Calvinists, Colonists and Pirates

34. Ethiopia and the Hopes of Rome

35. The Great Siege of Fort Jesus

36. Western Aims, Eastern Influences

PART THREE: An Enforced Tutelage

37. Settlers on India’s Southern Approaches

38. The Seas beyond Napoleon’s Reach

39. The French Redoubt and the Isle of Slaves

40. ‘Literally a Blank in Geography’

41. Two Ways with the Spoils of War

42. The Sultan and the King’s Navy

43. Stepping Back from East Africa

44. The Americans Discover Zanzibar

45. Looking Westwards from the Raj

46. Portents of Change in the ‘English Lake’

47. In the Footsteps of a Missionary

48. Warriors, Hunters and Traders

49. A Proclamation at the Custom House

50. Meeting the Lords of the Interior

51. The Failure of a Philanthropic Scotsman

52. Imperialism Abhors a Vacuum

53. Bismarck and the Gesellschaft

54. Africa Hears the Maxims of Faith and War

55. From Sultan’s Island to Settlers’ Highlands

Epilogue

Index

Index of Personal Names

Acknowledgements

Further Reading

Commentary

About the Author

Also by the Author

About the Publisher

MAPS

Maps by Leslie Robinson

FOREWORD

Turn a map of the world upside down and the Indian Ocean can be seen as a vast, irregularly-shaped bowl, bounded by the shorelines of Africa and Asia, the islands of Indonesia, and the coast of Western Australia.¹ Unlike the Atlantic and Pacific, merging at their extremes into the polar seas, this is an entirely tropical ocean; to mention it calls up a vision of palm-fringed islands and lagoons where rainbow-hued fish dart amid the coral. That is the tourist-brochure image, but behind it lies the Indian Ocean of history – a centre of human progress, a great arena in which many races have mingled, fought and traded for thousands of years.

The earliest civilizations, in Egypt and the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates, had direct access to the Indian Ocean by way of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. At the hub, stretching towards the equator, lay the Indian sub-continent, itself the site of ancient cultures in the Indus valley. Since long before the time of Alexander the Great, travellers had brought back tales of the rich and voluptuous East. The emperor Trajan, arriving triumphantly at the Persian Gulf in A.D. 116, and watching mariners set sail for India, had mourned that he was too old to make the voyage and gaze upon its wonders.²

For almost a thousand years after the fall of the Roman empire the western side of the Indian Ocean, the focus of this book, was as much an entity as the Mediterranean, surpassing it in wealth and power. The arts and scholarship flourished there, in cities to which merchants came from all corners of the known world. There was also much turmoil, as conquering armies spawned in the remote parts of Asia swept down to overthrow old empires and impose new dynasties.

The lives of ordinary people, however, were always ruled more by nature than by great events, by the perpetual monsoons rather than by ephemeral monarchies. The word ‘monsoon’ comes from the Arabic mawsim, ‘season’, and ever since sailors had dared to venture on voyages across the open seas these seasonal winds had borne their ships between India and its distant neighbours. For six months they blow one way, then in the reverse direction during the other half of the year. The summer monsoon, coming from East Africa and the southern seas, is pulled eastwards by the rotation of the earth after passing the equator, so that it sweeps across India and up through the Bay of Bengal. Winds are fiercest between June and August.

The sea-captains of old might not understand why the monsoons happened (how colder air was being sucked northwards over the ocean in summer towards the hot lands of Asia, then southwards from the Himalayas and the Indian plains in winter); for them it was sufficient that the winds came on time, year in and year out, to fill their sails. For the farmers of India it was likewise enough to know that the summer monsoon would bring them rain.³ However, on sea and land, the monsoon was always feared in its times of fury, when no vessel dared set out, when floods swept away villages, and cyclones left devastation.

It might be argued that the inescapable rhythm of this climate induced a certain fatalism among the Indian Ocean peoples. Yet the monsoon has also long been recognized as one of nature’s most benign phenomena – ‘a subject worthy of the thoughts of the greatest philosophers’, in the words of John Ray, a seventeenth-century English scientist.⁴

Until the ‘Age of Discovery’, there had been a thousand years of almost total ignorance in Europe about the Indian Ocean and the lands encompassing it. Once, during the heyday of the Roman empire, a flourishing trade had existed with the East, conducted mainly by Greek mariners who had learned how to use the monsoons.⁵ They brought back jewels, cinnamon, perfumes and incense, as well as silks and diaphanous Indian cloth much sought after by the women of Rome. But with the collapse of classical civilization in Europe, all the knowledge acquired by the Greeks was lost to Europeans.⁶

When medieval Europe started looking for a new route to India, to outflank Islam’s barrier across the Middle East, its navigators were long thwarted by the great bulk of Africa, until the Portuguese finally rounded the Cape of Good Hope. Vasco da Gama’s voyage to India and back in 1497–99 was by far the longest sea journey ever undertaken by Europeans.

This book shows how the European presence from the sixteenth century onwards changed Indian Ocean life irrevocably. Thriving kingdoms were subdued and former relationships between religions and races thrown into disarray. With the advent of western capitalism, ancient patterns of trade soon became as extinct as the dodo (which Dutch sailors had unceremoniously wiped out on the island of Mauritius). Yet although the guns of Europe could create new empires in the East, the populations there were too great to be held down permanently. What happened in the Americas was never going to be repeated in Asia. The record of European intervention and the response to it is made up of violence, depravity and courage.

Through thousands of years of change in the Indian Ocean arena, the African giant forming its long western flank was rarely anything other than a mute bystander. Its interior was terra incognita, its peoples excluded from fruitful dealings with the rest of the world. Since the eighth century, Africa’s contact with the Indian Ocean had come under the sway of scores of Arab-ruled trading ports, strung along two thousand miles of coastline from Somalia to beyond the Zambezi river delta. These settlements looked to the sea; the interior of the continent interested them only as a source of ivory, gold, leopard-skins and slaves. For three hundred years after the arrival of the Europeans, little happened to alter that pattern.

But Africa south of the equator has been twice liberated since the mid-nineteenth century: first from its isolation, then from a colonialism which, although short-lived, seemed to have forged unbreakable bonds with the North, with Europe. Now the monsoons of history are blowing afresh, as the balance of world power swings back to the East. The start of the twenty-first century is seen as ushering in a new ‘Age of Asia’, in which the natural unity of the Indian Ocean can once more assert itself. This is the arena where the full potential of the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa will be put to the test.

A NOTE ON SPELLINGS

Where versions of names converted from non-roman scripts are widely recognized, they are adhered to: for instance, the spelling Mecca is used rather than Makkah, even though the latter is more exact. Likewise, the renowned sultan of Zanzibar in the second half of the nineteenth century should strictly be entitled al-Sayyid Sa’id, but his name was always ‘Europeanised’ as Seyyid Said. For other transliterations from Arabic the Encyclopaedia of Islam is generally followed, but without diacritical marks. With Chinese names the modern pinyin romanization has been adopted – so that the admiral formerly known in English as Cheng Ho appears as Zheng He. Most prefixes to root words in African languages are omitted for simplicity’s sake.

Portuguese monarchs and princes are, in the main, referred to by the familiar anglicized versions of their names. Lesser beings are left in the original.

Geographical terms accord as far as possible with those in use at the times being written about. Thus Ceylon describes the island which became Sri Lanka in 1972. There is often a wide divergence between early European attempts at Indian names and those employed today; an example is Calicut, the once renowned port which appears on modern maps as Kozhikode.

PART ONE

ONE
Wonders of India, Treasures of China

Unmindful of the dangers of ambition and worldly greed, I resolved to set out on another voyage. I provided myself with a great store of goods and, after taking them down the Tigris, set out from Basra, with a band of honest merchants.

—Sinbad, starting his third journey, in The Thousand and One Nights

A THOUSAND YEARS AGO, a Persian sea-captain retired to write his memoirs. They made him famous in his day, although only a single copy of the text now survives, in a mosque in Istanbul. Captain Buzurg ibn Shahriyar called his book The Wonders of India, yet he did not limit himself to describing the civilization of the Hindus. Buzurg presented his readers with a kaleidoscope of life all round the shores of the tropical ocean across which he had sailed throughout his career. His spontaneity brings back to life the people of his time far better than any scholarly reconstruction could achieve: passengers terrified in a storm-tossed ship, merchants angry at being cheated, young men in love, proud monarchs staring down from bejewelled thrones.

He included, for amusement’s sake, many fantastical anecdotes about mermaids, giant snakes which swallowed elephants, two-headed snakes whose bite killed so quickly ‘there is not even time to wink’, and women of immense sexual prowess. ‘Buzurg’ was just a nickname, meaning ‘big’, and he might well have earned it through his love of tall stories, rather than by being large in physique. However, his avowed aim was to take his audience on a tour – entertaining yet instructive – through many lands. Despite similarities between The Wonders of India and The Thousand and One Nights, the distinction is that Sinbad was a fictional hero, while much that Buzurg wrote stands up to historical scrutiny.

References to known characters and recorded events show that he was working on his memoirs in about the year 950 (A.H. 341 by his own Islamic calendar). He lived in the port of Siraf, at the southern end of the Persian Gulf, from whose narrow straits the Indian Ocean opened out like a fan. Just as the Romans had called the Mediterranean mare nostrum (‘our sea’) so the Indian Ocean was for Buzurg and his contemporaries an extension of the Bilad al-Islam, the World of Islam.

Siraf had 300,000 inhabitants, but was hemmed in by mountains. The city became like a cauldron in the summer months, and one of Buzurg’s contemporaries called it the hottest place in Persia. It was also one of the richest. Fountains played constantly in the courtyards of the wealthier merchant families, and after dark the light from scented oil, burning in gilded chandeliers, shone down on divans draped with silk and velvet. Walls of the tall houses were panelled with teak from India, and mangrove poles from Africa supported the flat roofs. The biggest buildings in Siraf were the governor’s palace and the great mosque. Ships in the harbour brought cargoes from many lands, including China; smaller craft took goods further up the Gulf to Basra, where ocean-going vessels often could not unload because of the silt brought down by the Tigris river.¹

Even Siraf could not pretend to compete in luxury or grandeur with Basra – still less with Baghdad, capital of the caliphs. The colossal palaces beside the Tigris, their domes supported on columns of transluscent alabaster, were the wonder of the Arab world. The historian al-Muqaddasi, a contemporary of Buzurg, extolled its splendour: ‘Baghdad, in the heart of Islam, is the city of well-being; in it are the talents of which men speak, and elegance and courtesy. Its winds are balmy and its science penetrating. In it are to be found the best of everything and all that is beautiful … All hearts belong to it, and all wars are against it.’

Although the power of the caliphs, the Commanders of the Faithful, had been fractured by dynastic rivalries, Baghdad still controlled an empire stretching from India to Egypt. Three centuries after its founding, the faith of Islam embraced many more people and far greater territories than Christianity, which was already near the end of its first thousand years. Buzurg’s writings open a window on to this moment, at the ushering in of a new millennium during which the two religions were to be in almost ceaseless conflict.

The cities of Iraq, Persia and India would have astounded the impoverished peoples in the West, had they been aware of them; but Europe’s horizons still scarcely reached beyond the uncertain boundaries of its semi-literate warlords. Western Europe lay on the outer fringes of world civilization, whereas Baghdad could boast of being at its centre, with Constantinople the only rival. The unifying concepts of ‘Europe’ and ‘Christendom’ had yet to take root. Half-pagan, half-Christian raiders from Scandinavia were still able to cause havoc almost everywhere.

Some remnants of classical learning had survived within the walls of European monasteries, but these could not compare with the libraries of Arab scholars, who by now had almost all the great works of ancient Greece available to them in translation. These writings would have been more readily available to Buzurg, a sea-captain in Persia, than to the most learned of Christian bishops in Europe.

Outside the boundaries of Islam, which extended along the coast of North Africa and into Spain, direct contacts between East and West were few. Almost the only European Christians who travelled further than Italy were traders going surreptitiously to Alexandria, pilgrims striving to reach Jerusalem, and young girls and boys sold into slavery. The girls were destined to serve in the Arab harems, in company with female slaves from Ethiopia and the remote African lands south of the Red Sea. The boys were eunuchs, castrated at a notorious assembly point at Verdun in France, taken over the Pyrenees into Spain, and shipped from there to the Indian Ocean countries in the charge of Jewish merchants known as the Radhaniyya (‘those who know the route’).

However, there had been a brief time, at the start of the ninth century, when a positive understanding between Christian Europe and Islam seemed possible. Despite their remoteness from one another, the caliph Harun al-Rashid and Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor, several times exchanged ambassadors, bearing messages about a never-fulfilled Arab plan for a concerted war to capture Constantinople, the capital of Byzantium. (The exchange of envoys is mentioned only by Charlemagne’s scribes; Islamic chroniclers probably thought it unworthy of note, since Harun received ambassadors in Baghdad from so many lands and despatched his own in every direction.) In his youth Harun had besieged Constantinople, and now wanted to exploit the divisions between the Catholics and the eastern Christians. He only took this course after vainly despatching envoys to the Byzantine emperor, Constantine VI, urging him to convert to Islam.

The caliph made no such suggestion to Charlemagne, but sent him extravagant presents: jewels, ivory chessmen, embroidered silken gowns, a water clock and a tame white elephant called Abu al-Abbas. Named after the first caliph of the Abbasid dynasty, the animal had once been the property of an Indian rajah. The man who successfully led it home from the Euphrates to the Mediterranean was a Jew named Isaac, sole survivor of a three-man mission to Baghdad. After a hazardous sea crossing to Italy, the elephant was led over the Alps and finally plodded into Charlemagne’s palace in Aix-la-Chapelle on 20 July 802. The emperor soon became devoted to Abu al-Abbas, who withstood the European climate for eight years, until Charlemagne rashly took him to the bleak Luneberg Heath in northern Germany, to intimidate some marauding Danes.²

These contacts between the caliph of Baghdad and the ‘philosopher-king’ of the Franks had proved to be only a brief flicker of light across the religious and cultural divide. Charlemagne had arranged, with Harun’s approval, for the founding of a Christian hostelry in Jerusalem, and this was the basis of a medieval legend that he had been the first crusader, leading a pilgrim army to the Holy Land. However, the Crusades were launched later – by Pope Urban II in 1095 – and the Arabs were then to be stunned by the uncouth ferocity of their religious foes.

Whereas Christian Europe was confined and cut off from Asia, the non-Christian Europeans – the Arabs settled in Spain and the Mediterranean islands – were free to wander across all the known world, even as far as China. It meant travelling first through Egypt and Arabia to reach some port such as Siraf, from where the ‘China ships’ set out on what was then the longest voyage known to mankind. In one of Buzurg’s stories there is a passing mention of a man originally from Cadiz who had been bold enough to stow away on a ship bound for China. This man had crossed the divide between two contrasting maritime traditions. The twisting, creaking vessel destined for China would have been totally unlike the heavy, broad-bottomed craft, held together with massive nails, which he would have remembered seeing in the harbours of Spain.

The use of coconut-fibre cording to sew the timbers of the Indian Ocean ships was often explained away by the myth of the ‘Magnetic Mountain’; that ships built with nails were doomed if they sailed near the mountain, since every scrap of metal in their hulls flew out towards it. In one of the Sinbad tales, a captain ‘hurls his turban on the deck and tears his beard’ when the Magnetic Mountain looms up in front of his ship, for he knows he is doomed: ‘The nails flew from the ship and shot off towards the mountain. The vessel fell to pieces and we were all flung into the raging sea. Most of us were drowned outright.’³

The mundane truth, however, was that Arabia suffered from a shortage of iron, and its swordsmiths always had first call on metal imported from such places as Ceylon and East Africa. On the other hand, it was some consolation that if a ‘sewn’ ship had to be beached for repairs the raw materials were usually to hand, since coconut palms grew almost everywhere beside the Indian Ocean. The ocean also supplied materials for preserving ships’ hulls, which were thickly smeared with oil from the carcasses of sharks and whales (as a ship-building port, Siraf had a factory for treating blubber); the aim was to protect timbers from rotting and keep them flexible, so that ships were less likely to be holed should they strike a coral reef.

These ‘sewn boats’ of the Indian Ocean have a long history. The earliest reference to them is in a nautical guide written by a Greek voyager in about A.D.50. Known as the Periplus [Circuit] of the Erythrean Sea, this survey describes in a practical style the Indian Ocean’s trading conditions and the people to be met with round its shores. It speaks of an East African port named Rhapta (whose site is yet to be discovered) where much ivory and tortoiseshell could be bought and the ‘sewn boats’ were built.⁴

Ships bound from Arabia to China sailed southwards along the coast of India to Ceylon (known as Sirandib, the Isle of Rubies), eastwards to Sumatra, through the Malacca straits at the southernmost tip of Asia, then north into the China Sea. The round voyage took a year and a half. The captains of such vessels often chose to travel in convoys, to be less at the mercy of pirates who were numerous off western India. Sometimes the pirates stationed themselves at intervals across a regular trading route to catch any lone vessel, then extorted goods or money before letting it pass; the overlord of a coastline where the pirates had their havens might even take a share of such proceeds.

However, the lure of China was irresistible, even though the risks of the voyage were so great. Its products were unequalled, its prowess awesome. About China, anything was believed possible.⁵ Buzurg never claims to have sailed there, but relates without a hint of scepticism several pieces of information passed on to him by friends: one describes how a high imperial functionary had made a state entry into Khanfu (Canton) with an escort of 100,000 horsemen; another told Buzurg that a Chinese ruler, giving an audience to an Arab merchant, had been accompanied by some 500 female slaves of all colours, wearing different silks and jewels. While allowance must be made for the exaggerations of travellers’ tales, it is true that the cavalry in oriental armies was numbered in tens of thousands, and that despotic rulers always took pride in their numbers of concubines.

Arabia became entranced by the magnificence of goods from China (porcelain is called ‘Chinese’ in Arabic to this day). Even the Red Sea had been called the ‘Sea of China’, because it was from there in the earliest times that ships began their voyages with cargoes of ivory, incense and gold, to barter for luxuries in that country the Romans, following the Greeks, had called Seres, the ‘land of silk’.

The great Sassanian empire of pre-Islamic Persia had despatched missions to China. Although Persia’s ancient civilization itself had much to offer – the Chinese were happy to imitate its techniques in silverware and blown glass – the rulers of China always took it for granted that every other nation must acknowledge their superiority and come to them; no other race has maintained this trait so rigidly. Although one Chinese scholar is known to have visited Baghdad in the tenth century. Buzurg never mentions any journeys by Chinese merchants to the western side of the Indian Ocean. When monarchs of distant countries sent gifts to the emperor, who was known to Arabs as the Sahib al Sin, these were loftily accepted as tribute, signs of obeisance. In return, Chinese titles were bestowed on the donors.

Despite the perils of ocean travel – or perhaps because of them – voyaging to faraway lands was a prospect that stirred the enthusiasm of the young: expressions of that spirit endure in the outlines of sailing ships, with their crews aboard, scratched into the plaster of excavated houses in ancient Indian Ocean cities. Yet there is no doubt that disasters were frequent. A Chinese official writing in the ninth century noted that ‘white pigeons to act as signals’ were carried by ships coming from the Indian Ocean: ‘Should a ship sink, the pigeons will fly home, even for several thousand miles.’ For sailors, land birds could also be good news, because after weeks on the open sea the first sighting of them confirmed that land must be near. Before the age of charts or precise instruments, a captain had to rely on such signs: a change in the colour of the water or current, drifting debris, even the amount of phosphorescence on the waves at night.

A famous captain who had made the voyage to China seven times is portrayed by Buzurg as a hero; in the end he goes down with his ship. The Indian Ocean vessels, built to carry at most a hundred tons of cargo, and fifty or sixty people, always feared storms, but being becalmed was just as dangerous. Drinking water might run out, or diseases spread from the rat-infested holds. Sometimes the torments of heat and stench drove passengers off their heads. Those who kept their sanity spent much of their time reading holy books, searching through them for auguries of a safe arrival. Everyone yearned for the first cry from the lookout, al-fanjari, standing in the bows, that land was at last in sight.

Often the tales in The Wonders of India display an ironic humour in evoking life at sea. They can also be poignant. When Buzurg writes about how people behave in times of crisis, the intervening centuries suddenly vanish away. He tells of a shipwreck after which the survivors drift for days off the coast of India in a small boat. Among them is a boy whose father had been drowned when the ship went down. Hunger drives the survivors to think of cannibalism, and they decide to kill and eat the boy. ‘He guessed our intentions, and I saw him looking at the sky, and screwing up his eyes and lips in silent prayer. As luck had it, at that moment we saw the first signs of land.’

Not surprisingly, many wandering merchants chose to stay in whichever port most took their fancy, rather than risk a return journey. If there was business to be done, a mosque to pray in, and slaves and concubines to satisfy physical needs, there was little more to be desired. In particular, travellers who reached China safely were often loath to come back. Two centuries before Buzurg was writing, Persians and Arab merchants in the East were already numerous enough to launch a seaborne raid on Canton, presumably to avenge some mistreatment.

One traveller who in Buzurg’s manuscript does return from China is a Jew named Ishaq bin Yahuda. He had begun life in poverty in Sohar, the main port of Oman at the entrance to the Persian Gulf, but after a quarrel with a Jewish colleague decided to seek his fortune abroad. Taking with him his entire wealth, 200 gold dinars, Ishaq goes first to India and later travels on to China.

Only a few years before Ishaq arrived in China there had been upheavals during which more than 100,000 foreign traders and their families were massacred; but he stays and prospers. After thirty years the townspeople of Sohar are astounded to see him come home again, in the year 912. He is no longer travelling as a humble passenger, but in his own ship, packed with treasures such as silk, porcelain, musk, jewels and other precious stones.

Buzurg blandly tells how Ishaq reaches an understanding with the emir of Oman, one Ahmad bin Hilal. ‘To avoid customs and the tax of one-tenth’, they make an ‘arrangement’ worth a million of the silver coins called dirhams. Ishaq also cements their friendship by giving the emir a wonderful gift, a black porcelain vase with a golden lid.

‘What is inside the vase?’ asks the emir.

‘Some fish I cooked for you in China,’ replies the merchant.

‘Fish cooked in China! Two years ago! What a state it must be in!’

The emir lifts the ornate lid and peers inside. The vase contains a golden fish, surrounded by sweet-smelling musk. The fish has eyes made of rubies and the contents of the vase are judged to be worth 50,000 gold dinars.⁶

With his immense wealth Ishaq soon becomes an object of envy. One man who had tried in vain to buy some of his merchandise resolves to seek revenge in Baghdad – a journey of more than 300 parasangs (1,000 miles) from Sohar. Eventually this jealous enemy gains an audience with the caliph al-Muqtadir, and tells him how the Jew has done a secret deal with the emir to avoid paying customs and taxes. He also excites the caliph’s greed with a description of the wonderful goods Ishaq has brought back from China, his silks, porcelains and precious stones. Moreover, the Jew is childless, so if he dies there will be no one to inherit all his property. On hearing this, the caliph calls aside one of his aides, a negro eunuch named Fulful (‘black pepper’), and tells him to go down to Oman with thirty men. Ishaq must be seized at once, and brought to Baghdad. (The subsequent behaviour of the eunuch Fulfill would have seemed entirely in character to a tenth-century Muslim audience. Eunuchs were regarded as villainous and slippery, but in the service of powerful men they often rose high.)

When the emir in Sohar hears about the caliph’s order, he has the Jew arrested, but lets him know that a substantial bribe can win his freedom. The emir then takes another step to keep his rich prisoner out of the caliph’s clutches, and to guard his own position. He spreads the news of what has happened and warns all the other merchants in town that if Ishaq is carried off to Baghdad, none of them will in future be safe from similar treatment. The merchants respond as he has expected, first shutting down the market, then signing petitions, then rioting in the streets. They warn that they will all leave, and tell other merchants to keep away from the coasts of Arabia, where a man’s property is no longer safe.

The emir writes a letter to the caliph, recounting what the merchants have said: ‘We shall be deprived of our living, when ships no longer come here, because Sohar is a town where men get everything from the sea. If small men among us are treated like this, it will be worse for the great. A sultan is like a fire, devouring everything it touches. Since we cannot resist such power, it is better to leave now.’ To drive their message home, the merchants line up their ships at the quayside and prepare them for sailing. Affairs grow so out of hand that the eunuch Fulful and his men decide to flee back to Baghdad. As a parting gesture they seize 2,000 gold dinars belonging to the imprisoned Jew.

After they have gone, Ishaq is freed, but is so possessed by rage that he decides to leave Arabia for ever and settle permanently in China. A ship fitted out, all his possessions are loaded into it, and he sails away. But he never reaches China. When his ship nears Sumatra, on the far side of the Indian Ocean, the ruler of a port there demands a huge sum in transit dues, before allowing him to sail on. When Ishaq refuses to pay, men come at night and murder him. The ruler takes the ship and everything in it.

Without offering any judgements, Buzurg allows the reader to deduce a lot from this story, which he clearly intended to be more than fiction, since historical figures occur in the narrative. Above all, it expounds the unwritten law by which trade was conducted throughout the Indian Ocean: whatever their race or faith, merchants should have the freedom of the seas and be given fair and equal treatment in every port of call. As a shipmaster, Buzurg understood exactly how the merchants shunned places where this rule might be broken. It was later claimed for the port of Hormuz, at the mouth of the Gulf, that it welcomed merchants from all the regions of the world: ‘They bring to Hormuz everything most rare and valuable. There are many people of all religions in this city, and nobody is allowed to insult their religions. That is why this city is called the citadel of security.’

Readers of The Wonders of India would also have discerned a far more personal message in this story. The caliph and his Omani emir were Arabs, but Buzurg and his immediate audience were Persians. Although the Persians had been forcibly Islamicized for more than two centuries (Buzurg wrote in Arabic and prefaced his book with all the correct Muslim sentiments), there were many of his compatriots who looked back nostalgically to the glories of their vanquished empire and even clung to its ancient Zoroastrian religion.⁷ They recalled how their Sassanid cities had been razed, how the Arab conquerors, once the despised nomads of the desert, had set up victory platforms on mounds of Persian dead. The last Sassanid monarch had even sent emissaries to the Chinese to plead for military help, but all in vain.

However, there was no route back to that proud past. While Islam was destined to come under pressure on its western flank from militant Christianity, throughout the Indian Ocean its influence still grew – within India itself, and beyond to Indonesia. Already Islam had taken control of the eastern shores of Africa, to which it looked to meet a perpetual need for human labour.

TWO
Lure of the African Shore

I am being led in Damascus without honour,

as though I am a slave from Zenj.

—from a poem by the historian Abu Makhuaf (d. 774)

EAST AFRICA had been called Azania by the Greeks, but was now known as the Land of Zanj: the Land of the Negroes. The word Zanj (or Zenj) was originally Persian, but had been adopted by other languages. Once simply used to denote colour, the epithet was later applied in particular to Africans or black slaves – almost always one and the same thing if they were unfortunate enough to find themselves on foreign soil.

The prosperous island of Zanzibar took its name from the word Zanj, and was the usual destination of Arab and Persian captains sailing to Africa on the winter monsoon.¹ This voyage meant going beyond the equator, to latitudes where the guiding stars of the northern hemisphere were no longer visible, yet some captains ventured even further south. They went to the very limits of the monsoon, past the mouth of a great river which, it was said, joined up with the Nile in the centre of Africa. Several days sailing beyond the river they reached Sofala, the last big port on the Zanj coast.²

One lure of this remote region was gold, mined somewhere inland by Africans and brought down to Sofala to be bartered for cloth and beads. The gold was taken back to Arabia, where the risks of the long journey to Sofala were well rewarded, because a constant supply of the metal was needed for the minting of dinars, the currency used throughout the Islamic world. (Temples of the conquered religions had long since been stripped of their gold, and so had all the ancient tombs which could be uncovered.)

The Land of Zanj was not for the faint-hearted. Apart from lurid stories of cannibalism, of African warriors whose greatest delight lay in collecting the testicles of unsuspecting travellers, and the tales of tribes who lived on a mixture of milk and blood – drinking blood was most strictly forbidden by the Qu’rān – it was also rumoured that anyone who went to live in Zanj might find all the skin peeling from his body.

Yet what made Zanj distinct from other centres of trade around the Indian Ocean was its principal role as an exporter of pagan (kafir) slaves. Merchants travelled to India to buy embroidered muslins and jewellery, to China for silks and ornate dishes. But anyone sailing to the Land of Zanj would always expect to buy some young and healthy blacks. These slaves earned good prices in the lands along the northern shores of the Indian Ocean: a male labourer purchased with a few lengths of cloth could be sold for thirty gold dinars. If transported as far as the Mediterranean these human chattels brought even more handsome profits; a white slave or a horse would fetch less than thirty gold dinars, but the shortage of black slaves made them worth up to 160 dinars each. Some rulers took pride in having a personal guard of black warriors.³

Another prolific source of slaves was the mountainous country known as Abyssinia, reached from the western side of the Red Sea. This name derives from Habash, the Arabic word for the region. In time, anyone who was black tended to be called an ‘Abyssinian’. Al-Muqaddasi, who had been so lyrical about Baghdad, was more mundane when he listed the goods imported through Aden: ‘leather bucklers, Abyssinian slaves, eunuchs, tiger-skins and other articles.’⁴

Aden stood at the mouth of the Red Sea, so it was well placed to receive captives from raids on the Abyssinians. The Qur’ān was emphatic that Muslims should never be enslaved (although slaves might become believers); however, the Abyssinians were fair game because they were Christians, an offshoot of Byzantium dating back to the fourth century. Legend says that a Christian philosopher from the Levant was shipwrecked in the Red Sea and drowned, but his two pupils, Frumentius and Aedesius, survived and were found by local people, sitting under a tree, studying the Bible. They sowed the seeds of Christianity in the powerful state of Aksum, which had been in contact with the Mediterranean world since classical times and had supplied the Roman empire with ivory. Whatever the truth of the tale of Frumentius and Aedesius, by the fifth century there were certainly Christian missionaries from Syria active in what became known as Abyssinia.

The Abyssinians were also closely related to the people of Aden and its hinterland. Their forebears had crossed over the Red Sea in pre-Christian times, bringing with them from South Arabia an ancient written language they called Ge’ez, meaning ‘traveller’. (With the triumph of Islam that language had been replaced in its homeland by Arabic, just as the old religion – the worship of the sun, the moon and their divine son – had been obliterated.) There was a time when the Christian Abyssinians even invaded South Arabia, to punish the persecution of their co-religionists there; now they were on the defensive, retreating higher into the mountains to avoid the slave-raiders.

In their centuries of expansion the Arabs had needed vast amounts of slave labour to build their cities, tend their plantations, work in mines and dig canals. It was not a system of their own devising, for the economies of Greece and Rome had also relied upon slavery, and the use of forced African labour has a history going back 5,000 years. The first hieroglyphic account of contact between the Egyptians and their black Nubian neighbours beside the Upper Nile was inscribed on a rock by King Zer of Egypt’s first dynasty (before 3000 B.C.). Vividly illustrated, this shows a captive Nubian chief lashed to the prow of an Egyptian ship and the corpses of his defeated followers floating in the river. Five centuries later, the fourth-dynasty king Sneferu recorded that he had raided Nubia and brought back 7,000 blacks and 200,000 head of cattle. Slaves were used to help build the Pyramids.

In his time the Prophet Muhammad had laid down precise rules about the ownership of unbelievers, but the Qur’ān does not explicitly forbid it. The most common fate for the captive Zanj and Abyssinians was transportation across the Indian Ocean to the Persian Gulf and Basra, where they were brought ashore to be sold as labourers. After their long sea journey, during which they were manacled and subdued with whips, they were led from the waterfront between tall houses, past mosques where all men were equal, through streets crowded with donkeys, pack-horses and camels, to the slave market, the suq al-raqiq.

According to the African regions from which they came, the slaves were given group names, mostly no longer identifiable: Kunbula, Land-jawiyya, Naml, Kilab. Those who managed to survive longest learned some Arabic, acquired Arab names, and acted as interpreters, passing on orders to their compatriots. More fortunate were the ones bought to become personal servants, for there was the chance that a kind master might one day make them free. Then colour ceased to matter and they became part of the great community of Islam.

Most pampered of all African slaves were the eunuchs named by al-Muqaddasi as being one of Aden’s main imports. At the time he was writing there were 11,000 eunuchs in Baghdad, 7,000 of whom were Africans. A century earlier the caliph al-Amin had a vast corps of eunuchs; some white, whom he called his ‘locusts’, and some black, whom he called his ‘ravens’. Those who especially gratified the caliphs rose to gain immense power, and the Spanish-born traveller Ibn Jubayr was disgusted when he visited Baghdad to find the army controlled by a young black eunuch named Khalis: ‘We saw him one day going forth, preceded and followed by officers of the army, Turkish, Persians and others, and surrounded by about fifty drawn swords in the hands of the men about him … He has palaces and belvederes beside the Tigris.’ In other ways liberal-minded, Ibn Jubayr despised the blacks, observing: ‘They are a breed of no regard and it is no sin to pour maledictions upon them.’

In his memoirs the Persian sea-captain Buzurg ibn Shahriyar turns repeatedly to tales of adventure in the Land of Zanj (with many hints that he writes from personal experience), and slavery is the subject of the most telling of all his stories. Behind its improbabilities lies a realism which vividly evokes the world in which he lived, and he shows a remarkable sympathy towards the principal character, an African chief. The narrator is a wealthy shipowner called Ismailawayh, who has sailed to every part of the Indian Ocean, but knows Africa especially well. In the year 922 he is on a voyage to Qanbalu (the main town on Pemba island, just north of Zanzibar), but storms drive his ship far to the south, towards Sofala. It is swept on to a notorious stretch of coast where the crew fear they are going to be captured and killed or, worst of all, eaten.⁵

On shore, the reception given to the strangers proves far better than Ismailawayh had dared to hope. The chief of the region, ‘a young negro, handsome and well made’, questions them, and says bluntly that he knows they are lying when they claim it had always been their intention to visit his country. But he promises them that they can trade freely, and will not be harmed. After doing good business the shipowner and his crew return to their vessel; the friendly chief, with several of his men, even comes on board to see them off. At this point Ismailawayh reveals his scheme: he will kidnap the unsuspecting blacks, carry them back to Oman, then sell them into slavery.

So as the ship begins to move and the puzzled chief and his men vainly try to get back into their canoes secured alongside, the Arab traders tell them what their fate is going to be. The chief replies with dignity: ‘Strangers, when you fell upon our beaches, my people wished to eat you and pillage your goods, as they had already done to others like you. But I protected you, and asked nothing from you. As a token of my goodwill I even came down to bid you farewell in your own ship. Treat me as justice demands, and let me return to my own land.’

His pleas are ignored and he is pushed down into the hold of the ship with other prisoners: ‘Then night enfolded us in its shrouds and we reached the open sea.’ During the journey northwards, across the equator and into the Arabian Sea, the kidnapped chief never speaks a word, and behaves as if his captors are totally unknown to him. When the ship reaches port he is led away into a slave market and sold, together with his companions.

That seems like the end of a profitable piece of business for Ismailawayh. But some years later he is once again sailing down the Zanj coast with his regular crew and another storm drives them on to the same stretch of shoreline. The ship is quickly surrounded and the crew are marched away to be paraded before the local chief. To their horrified astonishment, the very man they had sold into slavery long ago is seated there once more on the chief’s chair.

‘Ah!’ he says, ‘here are my old friends.’

Ismailawayh and his sailors throw themselves on the floor, and are afraid to look up. ‘But he showed himself gentle and gracious until we had all lifted up our heads, but without daring to look him in the face, so much were we moved by remorse and fear.’ The chief tells them a remarkable story, of how he had been taken as a slave to Basra, then to Baghdad. From there he had escaped from his Arab master, had gone to Mecca, and finally arrived in Cairo. Seeing the Nile, the chief had asked where it flowed from, and was told: the Land of Zanj. He decides to follow its course, in the hope of reaching his homeland. After many adventures in the interior of Africa he succeeds. The first person he meets is an old woman, who does not recognize him but says the witch-doctors have divined that the country’s lost chief is still alive and in the land of the Arabs. At that the wanderer goes joyfully back and reclaims his throne.

The chief tells his former captors that during his years as a slave he became converted to Islam. That is why he has decided to show magnanimity towards them; indeed, thanking them for being the cause of his conversion. But when they start preparing for their voyage back to Arabia, he lets them know that he cannot trust them too far, even though he is now a fellow-Muslim.

‘As for accompanying you to your ship,’ he says, ‘I have my reasons for not doing that.’

With its pointed ironies, the tale of the black king and his white captives would have amused an Islamic audience. The closing message of brotherly reconciliation fitted well with a popular defence of slavery: that Africans so respected their masters that they bore them no grudges. In reality, however, slaves did not always submit quietly to being dragged from their tribes, their villages and the sheltering African forest. There was an Arabic saying: ‘If you starve a Zanj he steals, if you feed him he becomes violent.’ It reflected the fear that slaves would always seek a chance for revenge.

History reveals that they often did. As early as A.D. 689, less than sixty years after the death of Muhammad, there was an uprising by slaves working in the swamps near Basra, at the mouth of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. It did not last long, and the bodies of the rebels were left hanging from their gallows as a warning. Five years later the slaves rose up again, led by an African called Riyah, ‘The Lion of the Zanj’. This time the defiance was better organized and was not put down until 4,000 troops, also black, were let loose in a campaign of extermination. Ten thousand slaves, including women and children, were massacred.

In the middle of the ninth century a still more ferocious event took place: the third ‘Revolt of the Zanj’. This happened during a period of widespread disorder, when there was a host of military and religious challenges to Islam.

A constant threat came from the radical Shi’ite movement, one of the two great contending forces of Islam. The Abbasid dynasty had chosen the other, the Sunni orthodoxy. The Shi’ites, who had helped to put the Abbasids in power, now felt rejected. They were also hostile to the luxurious habits of the caliphs. Power was fragmented, with the law in the hands of the Arabs and the Persians controlling the administration. The army was run by Turks, who were always prone to mutiny.

In the confusion leading up to the third ‘Revolt of the Zanj’ it was a Shi’ite who took advantage of the revolutionary possibilities.⁶ He was a visionary zealot named Ali bin Muhammad – a Persian, but partly of Indian extraction. As a young man he had led an uncertain life, writing poetry and wandering through the deserts with nomadic tribes. Clearly, he had messianic instincts, probably stimulated by his fanatical father, who is reputed to have had a dream, when Ali was still a child, that his son would grow up to destroy Basra, their home-town. As an adult, Ali made it known that he could see writing done by an invisible hand, and could read the thoughts of his enemies. These claims, similar to those being made by ‘holy men’ elsewhere during this time of fanaticism, brought round him a clique of dedicated followers; they included some petty businessmen, including a miller and a lemonade seller.

His verses, of which more than a hundred survive, express his contempt for the self-indulgent rulers of Islam.

How my soul grieves over our palaces in Baghdad and who they contain – every kind of sinner -

And for wines openly drunk there, and for men lusting after sins.

He did not conceal the way his thoughts were moving:

Submissively to adopt a moderate stance is humiliation for God’s servant.

When the spark will not catch, I will fan it;

When some leave the sharp blade in its sheath on the day of battle, others will draw theirs.

Shortly before the Zanj slaves rose in revolt, Ali had been in Bahrain. When he went home to Basra he was, unsurprisingly, viewed by the authorities as a potential troublemaker; although he escaped into hiding in Baghdad, his wife and children were jailed. In August 869, Ali’s moment arrived. There was near-anarchy in Basra, the governor had fled, and prisoners had been freed from the jails.

He returned to Basra and made his way to the workshops where masons prepared materials for restoring and enlarging the canals, and to the sugar plantations in the surrounding marshes. Before him was carried a banner, embroidered with a Qur’ānic verse, calling on the faithful to ‘fight on the road of Allah’. He proclaimed a ‘war to the knife’. His first recruits were 15,000 slave labourers, men condemned to work in heat and dust until death, flogged at the whim of their masters. They had little to lose.

Their new leader boldly went around the camps, ordering the black slaves to rise and beat their masters. They obeyed, giving them 500 lashes each. The Arab historian al-Tabari, living at the time of the revolt, even names some of the black lieutenants gathered around Ali, whom he piously vilifies as the ‘Wicked One’: al-Bulaliya, Abu Hudayd, Zurayq, Abu al-Layth. The greatest of the Zanj commanders was Mohallabi, who would fight to the very end.

For some years the uprising was to threaten the very heartland of Islamic power and ranks as one of the greatest slave uprisings in history, comparable with that led by Spartacus against imperial Rome. Today the event can only be re-created from obscure Arabic chronicles, but parts of it have a remarkably familiar ring after more than ten centuries, for at the same time as rebellion broke out in the marshes around the mouth of the Tigris river, the Kurds were also waging war.

Battle was soon joined by the makeshift army of slaves, against government troops equipped with swords, bows and arrows, and lances. No quarter was given on either side, all captives being put to death. The slaves’ leader himself was a prime executioner, setting the example by decapitating one man just as he was pleading for mercy. The heads of the defeated were borne as trophies from the battlefield on the backs of mules. Once a whole boatload of heads was floated down the river to Basra.

As the slaves advanced through the swamps towards the great city, Ali maintained the trappings of a holy man. He rode a horse with palm leaves as a saddle and a piece of cord as a bridle. Before the battles he made stirring speeches to the Zanj, urging them on to victory. They put their faith in his magical powers.

There were setbacks: after one battle, Ali was forced to flee into the swamps and found himself with only 1,000 remaining followers, men and women. Although this might have seemed like the end of the revolt, the rebels were to win their next fight, with only stones as their weapons. Ali declared that supernatural powers had saved them, and recruits flowed in once more to sustain the revolt. Soon the slave armies became irresistible, spreading out through the whole region at the mouth of the Gulf. They pillaged the homes of the rich, auctioned off thousands of high-born Arab and Persian women as concubines, and cut all links between Baghdad and the Indian Ocean.

Leaders of the ruling Abbasid dynasty now saw that the black Zanj might represent a direct threat to Islam, because they were gathering support from other dissident groups, including Persians, Jews and Christians. It was fortunate for the caliphs that the rebels never formed any effective military alliance with the Kurds or the heretical Carmathians, but by the year 871 the Zanj were strong enough on their own to mount a direct assault on Basra, obeying Ali’s plan for a three-pronged attack. It was led by the general Mohallabi. Two years earlier the citizens had beaten back the Zanj, but now the city was overrun and everybody unable to escape was killed. Some leading citizens were put to the sword as they prayed in the main mosque.

The caliph at Mu’tadid sent south a more powerful army than had ever been assembled, with the aim of dealing out merciless punishment to the Zanj. But once again Ali was victorious. His followers paraded before him, each one holding in his teeth, by the hair, the head of a victim. The slaves had now decisively turned the tables on their masters in Baghdad and Samarra, a new capital higher up the Tigris.

After this, the defeated Arabs decided that for the time being they had had enough. They withdrew northwards, making it their aim to contain the rebels within the two provinces encompassing the marshes and canals. It was the signal for Ali to create his own administration, to build himself a capital and – the ultimate show of treason in Islam – to mint his own coinage. Already famous as the ‘Lord of the Zanj’ or ‘Prince of the Negroes’, he now went on to declare himself to be the Mahdi, the new leader sent by Allah. He became known as al-Burku, the ‘Veiled One’. For ten years he ran his kingdom unchecked, even spreading his revolutionary message right across Arabia to Mecca. In 880 a detachment of Zanj briefly seized control of the holy city. A year earlier they had been within seventy miles of Baghdad.

Then the title of the revolution began to ebb. After three years of preparation an army of overwhelming strength was despatched from Baghdad under the leadership of the regent al-Muwaffaq. The Zanj were smashed in battle after battle, until at last they retreated into Ali’s capital of al-Mukhtara, ‘city of the elect’, north of Basra. From one town abandoned by the rebels 5,000 women were freed and sent home to their families.

All prisoners taken by the government army were decapitated, just as the rebels’ captives had been. One day, the heads of Zanj captives were paraded in boats in front of the besieged citadel. When Ali insisted that the heads were not real, but only the product of witchcraft, the general commanding the army ordered that the heads should be catapulted into the citadel by night. One black leader, cryptically described in contemporary accounts as ‘the son of the king of the Zanj’, was put to death by Ali after rumours that he planned to defect to the enemy.

In the end, in 883, the great slave uprising was finally crushed, although the most resolute of the Zanj fought to the last. Ali had refused an absolute pardon, probably doubting that the promises made to him would be honoured. His head was borne on a flagstaff back to Baghdad by the son of al-Muwaffaq, who had vanquished the Zanj. It became the centrepiece of celebrations. Two years later, when the slaves tried to rise again, five of their leaders held in prison were instantly beheaded.

One consequence of the revolt was an upsurge of fear and anger against the Zanj among the people of Baghdad. During a time of tumult the Arab cavalry in the army took the opportunity to massacre the caliph’s black spear-carriers and bowmen, with the help of the citizens. However, it was not merely hatred of Africans which led to a fall in the numbers of black slaves being transported across the Indian Ocean; the decline of Baghdad and other Iraqi cities meant there was less need for labour to work on grandiose building projects.

After about A.D. 1000, Africa’s ivory and gold became more sought-after than its people. Prisoners taken in wars with the Christians of Abyssinia met most of the needs of the slave trade. Nevertheless, the continent was still cast in a subservient role. The interior remained sealed off, dealing with the outside world through the Muslim intermediaries. Africans came to the coast, to live in the towns or to cross the ocean, usually against their will. They did not go back, to take inland the ideas which could have stimulated change.

The clearest contrast was with India, where coastal cities gave allegiance to powerful inland states whose culture and religion they shared. Watered by the monsoon rains, India grew enough crops on its fertile lands to feed a vast population as well as spices for export and cotton to be made into cloth. Its manufactures were sold throughout the Indian Ocean and beyond, just as the tales from its literature were translated and adapted all across the known world.

THREE
The Mystery of the Waqwaqs

In the same way that the Sea of China ends with the land of Japan, the Sea of Zanj ends with the land of Sofala and the Waqwaq, which produces gold and many other wonderful things. It has a warm climate and is fertile.

—Al-Mas’udi (893–957), The Meadows of Gold

AS OLD AS the monsoon trade between Arabia and East Africa, the contacts across the eastern expanse of the Indian Ocean date back to the time when Buddhism held sway over much of Asia. Two thousand years ago ships were taking merchandise from the powerful Satavahana kingdom of southern India to Sumatra, Java and Bali. It was a two-way trade, with bronze ware from Indonesia being exported to India. These contacts had been known to the Romans on one side of the world and to the Chinese on the other. A much-travelled historian and diplomat, Kang Tai, writing 1,700 years ago, told of ships from a Sumatran kingdom he called Geying sailing 8,000 li (about 2,500 miles) to a busy Indian port where ‘people came from all quarters’.

Indian monks spread Buddhism to the Indonesian islands; it was traders who brought Hinduism. In later centuries, Hinduism was to advance well beyond the Indian Ocean, extending northwards through the China Sea to what is now Kampuchea. The surviving monuments to this expansion are great temples and palaces overgrown by jungle, the best-known being Angkor Wat.

Relations between India and its trading settlements across the ocean to the south-east were not always friendly. Hindu armies were active in Indonesia during the tenth century, and later a warlike Sumatran state, Sri Vijaya, sent its fleets northwards to attack Ceylon. Such events belong to the complex, interwoven history of the Indian Ocean spreading over several thousand years, and it is only in this context, of the sea as a cultural and geographic entity, that the Waqwaq migrations westwards from Indonesia become credible. Even so, the French historian Hubert Deschamps has called them ‘one of the greatest mysteries of mankind’, and only fragments of the story have so far been assembled from archaeology, linguistics and anthropology.

Why the Indonesian seafarers known as Waqwaqs acquired such a curious name is, like much else about them, obscure; it may simply have been a mocking imitation by their enemies of the sound of their speech. More probably the source is waka, the name given in parts of Indonesia to the type of outrigger canoe the Waqwaqs used. The one indisputable fact is that they voyaged 3,500 miles from their homeland to discover and settle in Madagascar, off the coast of Africa.

Their migration to what would prove to be one of the world’s biggest islands, a semi-continent, never until then inhabited by humans, is an astonishing chapter in the annals of ocean travel. The date when the first wave of Waqwaq migrants reached Madagascar is a matter of controversy; one clue is in the language they brought with them (and which still makes up more than nine-tenths of the Malagasy vocabulary, a bond across the ocean). It includes many Sanskrit loan words, and Sanskrit influence was at its strongest in Indonesia in about A.D. 400.¹

The Waqwaqs were setting foot in a land where the animal life had developed in almost total isolation for 150 million years. There were no elephants, giraffes or lions, as on the African mainland 300 miles further west; but species which existed in Africa before Madagascar ‘broke away’ had lived on undisturbed, including the agile, wide-eyed lemurs, from the same stock as apes and humans. There are hundreds of varieties of insects found nowhere else in the world. In the deep seas near Madagascar lives the coelacanth, another survivor from the remote evolutionary past, a clumsy fish with huge scales and fins resembling legs.

Perhaps most remarkable of all the animals there when the Waqwaqs arrived was the Aepyornis maximus, a flightless bird which stood ten feet high and laid eggs more than a foot long. It probably gave rise to the persistent myth of a monstrous eagle, variously called a rukh, peng or gryphon, living in the Indian Ocean and believed capable of picking up an elephant, bearing it to the heavens, dropping it to earth, then devouring it. The Chinese were especially devoted to this fantasy, and described the bird as being able to fly 19,000 li before needing a meal. It must surely be more than a coincidence that the Aepyornis maximus became extinct around the time that the first Waqwaqs reached Madagascar. These awkward, inoffensive creatures would have been easy prey for humans equipped with bows and arrows; tales spread by the Waqwaqs of a bird which laid a huge egg may well have grown into something far more extravagant in the course of a few retellings.

The Waqwaqs’ original landfall was almost certainly the African mainland, rather than Madagascar. They were eventually driven out by the local inhabitants, but left on the coast as reminders of their stay some Indonesian words and maritime techniques, such as outriggers to stabilize canoes. The intrepid newcomers set off again, travelling south for another 1,000 miles before sighting Madagascar. This time, there was nobody to challenge them: it was a long journey’s end. In many places they found the coastline hostile, with sand bars or coral barriers, and parts of the island were dry and infertile; but there were also rich volcanic soils.

Most of the Indonesian boats were probably small and simple – little more than canoes, each carrying five or six men and women – with square sails and the outriggers to help them keep upright during storms. These small vessels may, however, have acted as escorts to larger ships, called kunlun bo by the Chinese. (The ancestors of the Maoris were to migrate to New Zealand in such vessels.) A Chinese account from the third century A.D. claims that these boats, which were also used to take Buddhist pilgrims from Sumatra to India, were large enough to carry hundreds of people and heavy cargoes. They had four sails, so skilfully rigged that the ships could set their course ‘without avoiding strong winds and dashing waves, by the aid of which they can make great speed’.²

The Indonesian fleets undoubtedly travelled fast: from Sumatra, their most likely starting-point, it would have taken little more than a month to Madagascar in the May – October period, when the equatorial trade winds blow towards Africa. The strong east–west Malabar current would also have helped the travellers, carrying them first towards the 1,100 Maldive islands or, on the most direct route, to an uninhabited scattering of fifty coral atolls now called the Chagos archipelago, exactly halfway between Sumatra and Madagascar. Together these two island chains extend more than 1,500 miles from north to south.

The Indonesian voyagers would have found drinking water, to replenish their supplies, by digging shallow trenches on the islands. On beaches lined with coconut palms, takamaka trees, and other Asiatic plants – progeny of seeds borne for vast distances on the ocean current – they could mend the hulls and sails of their boats. When they set off again, out of the lagoons and through the reefs surrounding these lonely islands, navigating was simple: the rising sun was always on their backs, the setting sun in their eyes.

There were other places to pause and hunt for food on this bold journey, for the Indian Ocean is dotted with coral atolls, specks of greenery in an amaranthine sea. Most have never been inhabited by humans, but are alive with animals. Turtles drag themselves on land to breed and giant tortoises march ponderously through the undergrowth. The brightly-coloured birds, unused to being hunted, could also be caught for the pot.

For their great trans-ocean venture the Waqwaqs had unique advantages. They were islanders, seafarers from childhood, and their needs afloat were few. Many Pacific islands were to be populated by similar long-distance voyages into the unknown. The boats carried baskets of rice, dried fruits wrapped in banana leaves, animal skins to hold drinking water, spears and lines for fishing, and live chickens for slaughtering en route. Rice was essential for survival on such voyages, because it did not go rotten; and if food ran out, aromatic leaves were chewed to fend off hunger-pangs.³ How many of the migrants died on their way can not even be guessed at.

At the time when the first Indonesians set off across the Indian Ocean they lacked a written language, so there is no record of why or precisely when their great journeys were undertaken. They appear to have spoken a tongue now long forgotten in Indonesia, known as Old Javanese; it is likened to the language of the Batak people of northern Sumatra.⁴ Some of Madagascar’s religious rituals still retain vestiges of Hinduism, so it is likely that there were later migrations, over several centuries, by communities escaping from wars between rival Indonesian states.

The Indonesians who settled later in Madagascar – some after A.D. 1000 – probably did so because they discovered that people with origins like their own had survived and settled peacefully in a new island home. Such information may have come from China, that great storehouse of knowledge. References to the western flank of the Indian Ocean occur at various places in the records of the Tang dynasty (A.D. 619–906); in 863 the scholar Duan Chengshi was able to describe the Somali people. They were, he said, feuding pastoralists, living on a diet of blood and milk and ‘drawing fresh blood from the veins of their cattle with a needle’. This was an exact description of the habits of the Galla (or Oromo), who inhabited the Somali hinterland at that time. Duan went on to say that the women were ‘clear-skinned and well-behaved’; the people of Africa did not hesitate to ‘make their own countrymen prisoners and sell them to foreigners at prices many times more than they would fetch at home’. The Spanish-born historian Ibn Sa’id, who worked in the thirteenth century for the Mongol warlord Hulagu Khan, knew of Madagascar; he had been told that some Khmer people, driven by the Chinese out of what became Cambodia, managed to find their way to the island.

However, what the faraway Chinese knew could only have been a fraction of the information available in countries to which the Indonesians had sailed for centuries. In India there must have been an awareness of the existence of Madagascar, which the Arabs called al-Qumr. Indian merchants dealt directly with the African mainland, and the glass beads they used for barter can be found in the sites of Zimbabwean villages, among debris dating to A.D. 500. By this date there was a flow of ivory to India, whose own elephants were too valuable to slaughter for their tusks, since they could be tamed and used for work and warfare. African ivory was also more desirable, since the tusks were larger and softer for carving. The herds were so vast that they could be hunted virtually on the seashore.

The Waqwaqs on Madagascar were well placed to compete with Arab traders for the ivory of the mainland, and for its gold. The gold-bearing veins were reached by sinking deep trenches and shafts. The rock was made hot by lighting fires beneath it, then cracked from the top by flinging on cold water. Children carried the baskets of ore to the surface, because they could squeeze more easily through the narrow spaces in the workings. The rock was then ground and washed to extract the metal.

However, the Africans cared little for gold themselves, and the fine dust was poured into porcupine quills for safe-keeping before it was carried down to the coast. As contact with the outside world grew, the African rulers took control, distributing Indian cloth and beads to their subjects as rewards for bringing them gold-dust and elephant tusks, which were passed to the waiting traders.

The Waqwaqs were disliked by other merchants in East Africa. The Arabs resented their piratical ways, while respecting their seamanship. These rivals from the ‘Zabaj islands’ were reputed to have among them ‘men who look like Turks’; they may have been mercenaries from countries close to China, or the Khmer (Qumr) driven from Cambodia.

In A.D. 945 an armada of Waqwaq ships appeared off the East African coast and besieged the town of Qanbalu, on the island of Pemba. Before the newcomers’ warlike aims became clear, the townspeople had asked them what they wanted. The reply was frank: they were after ‘ivory, tortoiseshell, panther-skins and ambergris’ – trade goods needed in their own homeland, and in China. More than that, they wanted to capture Zanj people, ‘for they were strong and easily endured slavery’. By their own admission, the besiegers had been raiding towns and villages up and down the African coast. They were less successful when they tried to subdue Qanbalu, because it was heavily fortified; in the end they were repulsed and sailed away.

Essentially, the Indonesians and the Arabs shared a similar attitude towards the African mainland – one which was predatory. The Waqwaqs brought slaves back to Madagascar to look after domesticated animals and labour in their terraced ricefields (which were built in a style identical to that found as far east as the Philippines).

In time, however, the Waqwaq impact proved beneficial in many ways: the crops they had transported from Asia included rice, bananas, yams, sugar cane, breadfruit, mangoes, lentils and spices.⁵ These food plants enhanced the lives of Africans right across the continent as they spread inland from community to community, starting at the coast around the Zambezi delta, which directly faced the early Waqwaq settlements on the western side of Madagascar. It is possible to re-create some of the routes by which these new crops advanced into Africa: what has been nicknamed the ‘Banana Corridor’ takes in a great swathe of land right up to the equator from near the mouth of the Zambezi. Bananas ultimately became the staple diet in Uganda, among peoples who knew nothing about the Indian Ocean or the origins of this new type of food.

The Waqwaq influence can also be traced in African musical instruments such as the xylophone,⁶ as well as in fishing and farming methods; a mounted file used in Madagascar for opening coconuts, as well as a double-valved bellows for blowing life into fires, are both unmistakably Indonesian.

Although they brought much to Africa that was new, the Waqwaqs became indifferent to their own past. As generations passed, the truth about their origins became merged into mythology and they grew ever more remote from the culture of Indonesia, clinging only to their language and their obsession with death and burial customs; one of these involves digging up corpses after seven years and carrying them in procession through the community, the ‘return of the dead’. As the population in the coastal regions of Madagascar became predominantly African, the Waqwaqs moved further into the mountainous interior of the great island. In the manner of colonizers elsewhere, they abandoned a skill they no longer needed, the ability to cross the open seas. Although they still buried their rulers in silver canoes, they could never go home again.

FOUR
Islam Rules in the Land of Zanj

The Zanj have no ships in which they can voyage, but boats land in their country from Oman, as do others that are going to Zabaj [Indonesia] … The inhabitants of Zabaj call at Zanj in both large and small ships and trade their merchandise with them, as they understand each other’s language.

—Al-Idrisi (1110–65), A Book of Entertainment for One Desirous to go Round the World

UNLIKE THE INDONESIANS, who forgot their original homeland after migrating to Madagascar, the Arab and Persian settlers on the East African coast always looked back to the great cities of the Middle East. They looked back quite literally, bowing towards Mecca in their mosques, where they heard the sermons of imams who read the Qur’ān and sustained their faith. The dhows sailing south to Africa on the winter monsoon brought goods which sustained their cultural links with Islam.

The earliest settlements, dating to A.D. 750 or earlier, had been rudimentary, laid out in an African style, with protective wooden palisades. Such places were too remote to make use of artisans who built in stone in the Arabic manner. Sites of the first mosques are revealed by traces of wooden post-holes in the earth, and these show a curious error: the alignment is not directly towards Mecca, as the Prophet had ruled. This suggests that the newcomers were simple traders who could not ‘read’ the night sky correctly, since their only way of finding a precise bearing was from the stars.

The logical first step for Arab newcomers was simply to install themselves in an established African fishing village, near a bay where boats could be safely run up on the beach at high title for unloading and loading. In such places, nameless and ungoverned, life was ruthless. As well as the threats from within an encampment, there was always the danger – with nobody to call upon for help – of surprise attacks by seaborne raiders. One settlement in the Comoro islands, far to the south, was built on top of a cliff, through fear of the Waqwaqs from nearby Madagascar.

It was not only to protect themselves from one another that the rival settlers tended to live on islands. They had good reason to maintain a safe distance from the Africans of the mainland. Several early communities chose islands more than a day’s sailing out in the ocean, such as Zanzibar, Pembra and Mafia, all big enough to be self-supporting in times of war. African dugout canoes, used for fishing inside the coral reefs, could not reach such islands to retrieve captives, and there was no risk that newly-acquired domestic slaves might try swimming back to shore.

Safe on their islands, the Arabs never wished to venture into Africa. They merely waited for the products of the interior to come to them. At their backs the mainland was a brooding and hostile giant, whom none cared to challenge. Local women taken as wives or concubines, and the slaves working in the gardens, were converted to Islam.¹ But there was no attempt to spread the faith within Africa – its people remained kafirs.

After a few generations the settlements grew more prosperous and secure. Bigger mosques were built, and although still of wood they were now on a true alignment to Mecca. When trading ships came over the horizon from the Gulf and the Red Sea, the settlers could afford to barter for many luxuries. By the ninth century they were eating off Chinese floral-pattern plates, as well as oriental stoneware and opaque white porcelain. These outposts could tap into trade routes reaching all the way, through cities such as Siraf, to the great ports of Tang China.

The settlers also possessed pottery and glass goblets from Persia, phials containing attar of roses, many household ornaments, and brass oil-lamps. Their combs were made of tortoiseshell, cosmetics were kept in carved copper bowls. They stored their water in tall pottery jars, originally used to transport oil and wine from the Persian Gulf.

In exchange for these reminders of a distant splendour, the settlers had more than gold, ivory and slaves to offer. There were leopard-skins used on saddles, rhinoceros horns for making medicines, and the buoyant pale blue ambergris – as valuable, weight for weight, as gold – which the winds and currents swept up on to the sandy beaches. The ambergris was used to ‘fix’ perfumes, and for scenting the oil in lamps: a tenth-century poet writes of the way ‘gilded lamps, fed with ambergris, shine like pearls’.

The Chinese in particular valued this mysterious substance which, apart from its other qualities, was vaunted as an aphrodisiac; yet they did not know exactly where the ambergris came from, and named it ‘dragon’s spittle’. (The Zanj people simply called it ‘treasure of the sea’.) In fact, it was an excretion of solidified fluids, sometimes as big as an ostrich egg, from the stomachs of the sperm whales which in those times abounded in the Indian Ocean.

As the Muslim pioneers grew even richer they began building with coral stone and bricks carried from Persia as ballast. Orange and lemon orchards and vegetable gardens were planted round their homes. The animal enclosures contained sheep, goats and even camels.

The sea itself was a ready supplier of food, although some species were gradually hunted into oblivion along the East African coast. An early victim was the dugong, a large harmless mammal living on sea plants. It was often to be seen basking on coral rocks, and from a distance could look almost human, so that it became the source of many Arabic tales about mermaids. By A.D. 1000 the dugong had vanished for ever from the western side of the Indian Ocean.

Other sea creatures to suffer at the hands of the newcomers were giant tortoises and turtles, valuable for their shells. According to Muslim law, the eating of tortoises was forbidden, and this should have been obeyed not only by the faithful, but also the kafirs working for them as slaves. However, there is evidence from ancient rubbish dumps that tortoises were consumed with gusto in some early settlements. Far in the south, in the Comoro islands, there was an equal readiness to eat lemurs, which would certainly have been prohibited fare for devout Muslims, since these animals live in trees and have monkey-like bodies.

This may suggest that some early settlers on the East African coast were fugitives or outcasts from the Arab world. In their isolation on the remote African shore they would be beyond the reach of enemies, and may have ignored some more inconvenient religious rules. It is hard to be sure, however, because legends about the identity of the Arabs who migrated to the Land of Zanj often contradict one another.

One popular account tells how Abd-al-Malik, an early caliph, gave orders that all of Oman’s independent chiefs should be deposed. This was harsh treatment, for Oman had accepted Islam as early as A.D. 630, during Muhammad’s lifetime. So two brothers, Sulaiman and Sa’id, organized the defence of Oman and drove back a land and sea attack by 40,000 men. Finally, 5,000 cavalry were sent in and the brothers could resist no longer. They decided to flee to Africa, taking with them their families and followers. The date, it is said, was around A.D. 700.

Other events in the expansion of Islam may also have sparked off migrations to East Africa. Most crucial was the overthrow of the original dynasty, the Umayyads, in 750, by the caliph Abu-al-Abbas, the ‘Shedder of Blood’. He had defeated and executed his predecessor, then organized a banquet of conciliation for the dignitaries of the former regime. The guests arrived, sat down to eat, then were murdered to a man before they could start. A carpet of leather was thrown over the bodies, then the host and his followers sat down on it to enjoy a hearty meal. Supporters of the Umayyad dynasty – which re-established itself in Spain – would have been understandably keen to put some distance between themselves and Abu-al-Abbas; an expanse of Indian Ocean might have seemed appropriate.

Some newcomers ventured into little-known waters, far to the south. The Chibuene settlement was several days’ sailing beyond Sofala towards the Cape of Good Hope, and its merchants traded inland along the Limpopo and Sabe river valleys. An eighth-century Islamic burial site has been found at Chibuene, and the town may even have been founded in pre-Islamic times.

When later communities arrived in Zanj, their leaders were quick to assert independence. Each proudly called himself a sultan and some claimed as their ancestor, real or symbolic, a famous trader named Ahmed bin Isa, who had left Basra for Arabia in the year 930. More importantly, these new rulers were all sharifs, meaning that they claimed descent from the Prophet. Their arrival in East Africa, towards the end of the eleventh century, marked the start of a visibly different era.² New towns, with mosques and palaces built of coral blocks, were established on offshore islands or mainland strongpoints. Soon there was rivalry between the towns over the size of their mosques and palaces and the elegance of their architecture.

The self-confidence of these new rulers was symbolized by the large-scale minting of coins. Although in earlier centuries some simple copper currency had been produced in the Land of Zanj, coins were now also cast in silver, and a few even in gold. They all bore a Qur’ānic inscription on one side and the name of a sultan on the other. The tiny copper coins, made from metal smelted in the African interior, were for buying goods in the local markets; they were intended to replace cowrie shells, the traditional form of currency brought from the Maldive islands.³ The gold was likewise African, but the silver had to be imported – usually in the form of coins, which were then melted down. Foreign money, mainly Arab and Egyptian dinars, was also used. Traders brought home Indian and Chinese coins, but these were merely souvenirs. A pit at the site of one coastal town has yielded up an eleventh-century Hindu statuette; it possibly served as a trader’s weight.⁴

Among the ruling families, at least on the male side, there was a high degree of literacy. This is reflected in the stylized script known as kufic, carved on coral slabs in the mosques and on tombstones; brought to perfection in Siraf, the floriate kufic was admired as far away as Spain. The flat-roofed stone houses of the wealthiest families displayed a regard for orderly comfort not witnessed before in Zanj: they had bathrooms and plumbing, glazed windows and plastered walls. Some buildings were three storeys high, with carved and brass-studded front doors, behind which entrance halls led into receiving rooms. The designs on the Persian carpets spread over the floors and hanging on the walls symbolized Arab society: the centrepiece represented the sultan, with his courtiers surrounding him, and the outer parts of the patterns stood for the villagers, artisans and slaves.

Although the new rulers, as well as their law-makers and courtiers, were certainly literate in Arabic, no contemporary accounts of how these dynasties established themselves have survived. A fragmentary chronicle, written at least four centuries later, tells the history of the island city-state of Kilwa, founded by a Persian named Ali bin al-Hasan. The name Kilwa means ‘fishing place’ and the chronicle says the island was bought from an African chief with enough cloth to stretch right round the island (a distance of about fifteen miles); in truth, the chief was probably given only a few bales.

Kilwa was to grow into the wealthiest city on the entire coast, able to control a nearby part of the mainland known as Muli, where rice and other crops were grown. It had the advantage of being several days’ journey south of Zanzibar, and thus was strategically placed to exact tolls from ships travelling to and from the gold port of Sofala. Although Kilwa was remote, an experienced captain who knew exactly when to set out could sail there from India or Arabia in one monsoon season. It was a terminus of the ocean trade with Africa.

A few of the visitors to the coast took a perceptive interest in the mainland Africans. One was Abu’l Hasan ‘Ali al-Mas’udi, an Arab writer who first sailed to Zanj from Siraf in A.D. 916, when he was in his early twenties. He was the type of traveller, always asking questions, whose enthusiasm never waned. Born in Baghdad, he made journeys to India, Persia, Armenia, the Caspian Sea, Syria and Egypt. While in East Africa he stayed mainly at Qanbalu, whose population he describes as a ‘mixture of Muslims and Zanj infidels’, speaking the ‘Zanjiyya language’. The language was elegant, and the Zanj preachers would often gather a crowd and exhort them to ‘please God in their lives and be obedient to him’. The crowd would then be told to remember their ancestors and ancient kings. Al-Mas’udi’s account goes on: ‘These people have no religious law … every man worships what he pleases, be it a plant, an animal, or a mineral.’ This is the earliest description of the local Swahili (coastal) people of East Africa, and shows that some, at least, still clung to their African religions.⁵ Plainly, the towns had a ruling élite and a black population with which the Arab settlers were more or less integrated.

The villages of the Zanj, according to al-Mas’udi, stretched for 700 parasangs (2,500 miles) along the coast; an accurate estimate of the distance from the entrance of the Red Sea to the mainland facing southern Madagascar. Although he twice visited East Africa, he does not say if he travelled as far south as Sofala, but is quite definite that a king of the Africans ruled in that distant region, and had many lesser chiefs subject to him. This matches what is known from archaeology, that embryonic African states were taking shape at that time in the hinterlands of Mozambique and Zimbabwe. Since merchants travelled regularly up and down the coast, it would have been easy, even in Qanbalu, to learn about the cattle-keeping kingdoms of the distant south.

Horses and camels were unknown there, writes al-Mas’udi, but the people owned great numbers of cattle, which were used as beasts of burden. The king had ‘300,000 horsemen’; this is an odd statement, set alongside his assertion that horses were unknown, until it is recalled that the warriors of southern Africa were the guardians of great herds of cattle, and rode on oxen.

The king of the Zanj, he says in a summary of knowledge on Africa, is called the Waflimi. This is his version of Wafulme, the plural of an African name for a paramount chief. The king is descended from a ‘Great God’ named Mulkendjulu (Mukulunkulu). He asserts that some Africans were cannibals, who filed their teeth to points. The interior of the continent is ‘cut up into valleys, mountains and stony deserts’.

The most common creature of all on the mainland was the giraffe, but the animal most hunted was the elephant. One way of catching elephants, says al Mas’udi, is by laying a bait of leaves containing a poison that completely paralyses them. He drily remarks that most tusks were sold in India, which he had visited, and China. That was why ivory was so scarce in Arabia. The Zanj were also good hunters on the ocean, and he vividly relates how they chased whales and harpooned them.

But voyaging to Africa was perilous. ‘I have sailed on many seas, but I do not know of one more dangerous than that of Zanj.’ He lists the captains with whom he has travelled. All had been drowned, paying the ultimate price for venturing to Africa.⁶ Every successful journey in the flimsy craft of the Indian Ocean (called the Abyssinian Sea by al-Mas’udi) was a gift from God.

Qanbalu was a thriving place which minted its own coinage, although the Arab gold dinar was the main currency used in the Indian Ocean ports. Al-Mas’udi tells of sailing there with a number of Omani shipowners from Sohar. Traders also sailed to Qanbalu from Siraf, home of the story-writer Captain Buzurg. Al Mas’udi knew of Buzurg’s work – they were contemporaries, and had both grown up in or near Basra.

However, al-Mas’udi was to spend his later years in Cairo, a tolerant city where he probably felt safer, since his religious opinions were unorthodox. Only one work survives out of the thirty volumes he is known to have written on geography, medicine and natural history. His world encyclopaedia, Murnj al dhahab, (The Meadows of Gold), exists in a draft form, and his knowledge was at times flimsy: when he describes the Atlantic Ocean he says that ‘Britanya’ is towards its northern end and consists of twelve islands. On the other hand, he is the first Muslim writer to identify Paris, which he called Barisa, as the capital of the ‘Franks’, and is able to assemble an accurate list of French kings. (At that time, in the mid-tenth century, nobody in western Europe could have been remotely as well informed about Arabia or India. When medieval Christian scholars did begin describing the world, they clung to the belief that the three continents were a trinity, with the Holy City in the centre; they knew nothing of China, but said the East was where four great rivers flowed from an Earthly Paradise.)

While al-Mas’udi is the solitary eye-witness of life in the tenth-century Zanj, several of his contemporaries collected what facts they could about it.⁷ The information available to a renowned geographer, Ibn Hawqal, was scanty. The Africans, he had learned, were ‘not much inclined to the cultivation of the arts and sciences’. But also living in ‘Zingbar’ were white people ‘who bring from other places articles of food and clothing’ (undoubtedly a reference to Arab merchants from the Gulf). The anonymous Persian geography, Hudud al-Alam (Regions of the World), written towards the end of the tenth century, could only say that the ‘country of Zangistan’ was opposite India, and full of gold-mines. For the rest, the author relied on hearsay and prejudice. The Zanj people were ‘full-faced, with large bones and curly hair’, and extremely black. The people of Abyssinia were lazy, but obedient to their king.

At the time these accounts were being written, the merchants of southern Arabia were also establishing settlements on the south-west coast of India, which they called Malabar, the Land of Mountains, since the hills rose steeply behind the coastal plains. They were also starting to control the cinnamon exports of Ceylon. Many similarities were to be found between the Muslim communities of East Africa and Malabar, including the creation of a unique locally-based language, written in Arabic. Both traded widely throughout the densely-populated regions of the Indian Ocean, their ships going regularly to China.

Most intriguing of all the Islamic geographers is al-Biruni (sometimes written Alberuni), a learned Persian born in 973 near the Aral Sea. Known as ‘The Master’, he was also a mathematician and astronomer. One of his achievements was to calculate the earth’s circumference with greater accuracy than had ever been achieved before; he was only 70 miles out. Taken to Afghanistan as a prisoner, he spent much of his life there and in the Punjab, compiled a Chronology of Ancient Nations, and travelled through India, of which he wrote a history, Tahqiq al-Hind (An Inquiry into India). Typically, al-Biruni has little favourable to say of the Africans: ‘The Zanj are so uncivilized that they have no notion of a natural death. If a man dies a natural death, they think he was poisoned. Every death is suspicious to them, if a man has not been killed by a weapon.’

Turning to geography he is bold enough to criticize Ptolemy (whose work he had before him in translation) and offers his own assessment of Africa’s shape and size. Looking at the continent from a northern perspective, he had decided that it protruded ‘far into the ocean’, passing beyond the equator and the ‘plains of the negroes in the west’. It went much further than the Mountains of the Moon and the sources of the Nile – ‘in fact, into regions which we do not exactly know’, where winter prevailed during summer in the northern hemisphere. The sea beyond ‘Sofala of the Zanj’ was impossible to navigate, and no ship which ventured there had ever returned to give an account of what it had seen. Elsewhere he seems to contradict himself. ‘This southern ocean is navigable. It does not form the utmost southern limit of the inhabitable world. On the contrary, the latter stretches still more southward.’

One ultimate geographical puzzle – where Africa ended – intrigued al-Biruni. He was not content with the Ptolemaic convention that it swung to the east, joining up with a long sliver of land along the southern limits of the Indian Ocean which eventually reached all the way to China. Instead, he believed there was a sea route round Africa, linking the Atlantic with the Indian Ocean: ‘One has certain proofs of this communication, although one has not been able to confirm it by sight.’

Almost five centuries later, he would be proved right.

FIVE
On the Silk Route to Cathay

Let me tell you next of the personal appearance of the Great Lord of Lords whose name is Kubilai Khan. He is a man of good stature, neither short nor tall but of moderate height. His limbs are well fleshed out and modelled in due proportion. His complexion is fair and ruddy like a rose, the eyes black and handsome, the nose shapely and set squarely in place.

—Marco Polo, Description of the World (1298)

WHILE ARABS and all other Muslims retained a freedom to travel from the western Mediterranean to the Sea of China, the western Christians found their horizons more restricted than ever as the second millennium of their faith advanced. Behind the barriers of hostility raised by the crusades, European ignorance of the geography of the wider world remained almost absolute.

Moreover, notions about the shape or size of countries, even ones close at hand, were vague and confused. Map-making had scant regard for scale, journeys were measured by the time they took rather than the distance covered, and the whole subject was bedevilled by those theological theories about the world having a flat, plate-like shape, with Jerusalem at its centre.

As for the inhabitants of distant lands, any fantasy was believable. Europe’s appetite for the grotesque was sustained by the inclusion in many medieval writings of excerpts from the work of Caius Julius Solinus, who in late Roman times had plagiarized Pliny’s Natural History, assembled many ancient myths about human and animal monsters, then spiced them all up with his own imaginings. Another proponent of the fantastic was Osorius, a fifth-century priest in Spain whose main purpose in his ‘world encyclopaedia’ was to vilify all non-Christians. Through such works, much of Asia, and all of Africa, became peopled with ‘troglodytes’, who lived underground and ‘jibbered like bats’ in an unknown tongue. There were also half-human creatures looking like hyenas, men with four eyes, and others with only half a head, one arm, and one leg upon which they could jump to astounding heights.

All these improbabilities went unchallenged in Europe because there were virtually no eye-witness accounts of the world beyond Egypt and Palestine. Although many Arabic works, such as medical textbooks, had already been translated into Hebrew or Latin, the Arab geographers seem to have been largely ignored. The only non-Muslims able to travel with little hindrance across the boundaries of the two dominant religions were certain Jewish merchants, whose trading networks stretched out to the East from Alexandria and the cities of the Levant. Yet they were intensely secretive about where they went and what they had seen.

One rare exception was a rabbi named Benjamin of Tudela.¹ In the twelfth century he spent twelve years travelling from northern Spain to Baghdad, Basra, the cities of Persia and parts of India. Benjamin writes about Christians with bitterness, but is conspicuously warm towards Muslims: the caliph of Baghdad is called ‘an excellent man, trustworthy and kind-hearted towards everyone’, as well as ‘extremely friendly towards the Jews’. The rabbi’s principal aim was to compile a register of the Jewish communities in as many cities of Asia as he could reach (the results were gratifying to him, because he found them to be numerous and prospering everywhere).

He gives a vivid impression of life in Persia, then goes on to explain in detail how merchants arriving in the great South Indian port of Quilon were assured of security by the ruler. His narrative also describes the growing and processing of pepper and other spices in the countryside round Quilon. Although the rabbi did not go as far as Ceylon, which he called Kandy (after one of the kingdoms on the island), he established that even it had 23,000 Jewish settlers. He added: ‘From thence the passage to China takes 40 days.’ It is the earliest known use of this name by a medieval European writer to identify the greatest power of the Orient. Benjamin wrote a level-headed narrative, and monsters have no place in it, apart from the ubiquitous rukh, which he claims swoops down on sailors shipwrecked on the way to China, then flies away with them in its claws to eat them at leisure; some sailors had been clever enough, after being deposited on dry land by the bird, to stab it to death.

On his way home Benjamin took ship across the Indian Ocean to Yemen. There he collected some hearsay information about the source of the Nile, ‘which comes down here from the country of the blacks’. The yearly rise in the level of the river was caused by floods from Abyssinia, also known as Ethiopia:

This country is governed by a king, whom they call Sultan al-Habash, and some of the inhabitants resemble beasts in every way. They eat the herbs which grow on the banks of the Nile, go naked in the fields, and have no notions like other men; for instance, they cohabit with their own sisters and with anybody they may find. The country is excessively hot; and when the people of Aswan invade their country they carry wheat, raisins and figs, which they throw out like bait, thereby alluring the natives. They are made captive, and sold in Egypt and the adjoining countries, where they are known as black slaves, being the descendants of Ham.²

In the terminology of his time, Rabbi Benjamin spoke of Ethiopia as belonging to ‘Middle India’, which extended up to the east bank of the Nile, with Africa starting only on the west bank. The shape and size of India, suspended from the great bulk of Asia, was still a mystery, but the term itself was liberally applied to lands bounding the ocean which took its name. ‘Greater India’ was the south of the sub-continent and lands further east. ‘Lesser India’ lay to the north. ‘Middle India’ included the southern parts of Arabia as well as Ethiopia – a name with Greek origins. ‘India Tertia’ covered East Africa, as far as its existence was known, and sometimes Ethiopia as well, which was imagined to be in the southern hemisphere.

In the century following the travels of Rabbi Benjamin, merchants in Europe had begun to ponder ways of finding some unimpeded route to the wealth of the East. After the defeats inflicted on the crusaders by the armies of Saladin, the great Kurdish leader, all access to the Red Sea was strictly denied to Christian traders. Goods from India and China could be bought from Arab merchants in Alexandria and other ports of the eastern Mediterranean, but prices were high and payment must always be in gold. Moreover, this business was dominated by Venetians, whose Adriatic republic felt strong enough to flout the papal prohibitions about trading with Islam.

So in the spring of 1291, a small flotilla of ships left Genoa, the leading rival of Venice, and headed westwards through the Mediterranean. They were captained by two brothers, Ugolini and Vadino Vivaldi, men with a bold scheme in mind. They intended to sail through the Strait of Gibraltar, follow a southerly course down the coast of Africa, and keep on until they made a landfall at last upon the shores of India or Persia. Considering the meagre geographical knowledge in the Europe of their time, this plan could only have been based upon intuition and reckless courage. Nevertheless, the purpose was practical enough: if they could open such a route, they might break the Venetian stranglehold.

A few Genoese were already living in Persia, which had been conquered seventy years before by the Mongols under Chinghiz Khan. Although these compatriots were on friendly terms with a king named Arghon, who ruled the vast western empire of the Mongols, there was as yet no unimpeded way of sending home merchandise.

The Vivaldis sailed past Gibraltar, and were seen heading south along the Moroccan coast. After that, they were never heard of again. Their frail vessels, propelled by oarsmen and sails rigged for Mediterranean weather, were no match for the Atlantic currents and storms. The doomed Genoese could never have guessed at the African continent’s immense length and the perils to be faced in trying to circumnavigate it.

The Vivaldi brothers were two centuries ahead of their time. For many years after their disappearance, members of their family sought in vain for news of them. There were even rumours, but never any proof, that they had managed to sail round Africa, only to be wrecked at the mouth of the Red Sea.

The much-discussed disappearance of the Vivaldis would have been of more than passing interest to a prosperous Venetian merchant brought to Genoa a few years later, in 1296, and put under guard in a castle overlooking the harbour. His name was Marco Polo, and he had been taken prisoner during a sea battle in the Adriatic, just after returning to Europe from twenty years in the East.

The Venetians made a habit of being condescending about their Genoese enemies, so Marco would almost certainly have dismissed the Vivaldis’ idea of reaching Persia or India by sea as absurd. He knew the straightest route from Europe to those places as well as any man, and it went overland from the Black Sea port of Trebizond. He had twice sailed across the eastern half of the Indian Ocean (and apart from the nameless flotsam of history was perhaps the first European to have done so for many centuries); but he would never have dared to venture into the Torrid Zone’ of Africa.

As he was to assert – with some exaggeration – in his memoirs, ships could not sail to the far south, ‘beyond Madagascar and Zanzibar’, because ‘the currents set so strongly towards the south that they would have little chance of returning’. Marco had heard discouraging tales about the perils of the southern seas of the Indian Ocean, and even less was known about the waters encompassing Africa on its Atlantic side. The Vivaldis had paid with their lives for confronting these mysteries.

Marco’s anecdotes on faraway lands were countless, and fortunately he was to share his two years of imprisonment in Genoa with a companion only too ready to hear them. The man cast by fortune to be Marco’s scribe and literary helpmate was a certain ‘Rustichello of Pisa’, whose slender reputation as a writer rested upon translations of Arthurian romances into Old French. Little is known about Rustichello, why he was in prison, or if he ever came out alive; but he may have travelled earlier in life to Palestine, and even to England, where his patron was reputedly the prince who later became Edward I.

It is thanks to this dauntless scribbler that the fame of his Venetian fellow-prisoner has lived on. The two men were to occupy many idle months in working together on a manuscript, written in Italianate French, which Rustichello boldly entitled A Description of the World.³ Left to himself, Marco might never have written a thing. He came from a family of merchants, joined his father in business at the age of seventeen, and his interests were anything but literary. After parting from Rustichello when he was released by the Genoese, probably in return for ransom money, he lived on for a quarter of a century, without composing another sentence on his travels. (There was, admittedly, scant incentive; before the era of printing an author could hope for few direct rewards.)

Much of what Marco dictated to his scribe about Cathay was well calculated to arouse the envy of other European merchants, as when he describes the port of Zayton:

And I assure you that for one shipload of pepper that goes to Alexandria or elsewhere to be taken to Christian lands, there come a hundred to this port of Zayton. For you must know that it is one of the two great harbours in the world for the amount of its trade. And I assure you that the Great Khan receives enormous revenues from this city and port, for you must know that all the ships that come from India pay ten per cent, namely a tenth part of the value of all the goods, precious stones and pearls they carry. Further, for freight the ships take 30 per cent for light goods, 44 per cent for pepper, and 40 per cent on aloes-wood, sandalwood, and other bulky goods.

And I assure you that if a stranger comes to one of their houses to lodge, the master is exceedingly glad. He orders his wife to do everything the stranger may desire … And the women are beautiful, merry and wanton.’

Such practical information abounds, but is artfully juxtaposed with jocular anecdotes, as when describing his youthful memories of a place in central Asia where husbands offered their wives to guests. The relish with which Rustichello inserted such vignettes into the Description of the World is perceptible, but the raconteur himself remains unmistakably a figure to be viewed with respect.

There was good reason, for although there were many prosperous and well-born Venetian merchants, Marco Polo had always been notably privileged. As a youth of seventeen, in 1270, he had welcomed home his father Nicolo and his uncle Maffeo from their first journey to Cathay. They were bearing a golden tablet of authority from Kubilai Khan, the Mongol ruler. From that moment it counted for a great deal to belong to the Polo family.

Earlier in the thirteenth century, Europe had been terrified of the all-conquering Mongols (generally known as Tartars).⁴ Opinions of them had changed entirely by the time Marco’s father and uncle arrived in Italy from Cathay with Kubilai Khan’s golden tablet. The Mongols were now seen as potential allies, with whom the lost fervour of the Crusades might be rekindled; since the time of Pope Innocent IV (1243–53) hopes had been nurtured of converting the Mongols to the Catholic teaching, for some already had Christian leanings, albeit of an heretical kind. The Great Khan was a figure of almost mystical significance for Europe’s rulers, and the Polo brothers were honoured to be his chosen emissaries in the latest attempt to forge permanent links between East and West against the common enemy: Islam.

Fifteen years before the Polos arrived back from Cathay, a Flemish friar named William of Rubrouck had been sent to Cathay by Louis IX of France. The friar’s mission had been to offer the Mongol emperor a pact with Christendom, and he returned with remarkable stories about people from Europe who had been swept like dust across the world when the Mongols drew back into Asia.

In remote Karakorum, traditional gathering place of the Mongols, the friar encountered a woman called Paquette, from Metz in Lorraine, who had been taken prisoner in Hungary, but was now happily married to a Ukrainian carpenter, and had three children: ‘She found us out and prepared for us a feast of the best she had.’ Also in Karakorum were the Hungarian-born son of an Englishman, a Greek doctor, and a goldsmith from Paris named Buchier, who had made for the Great Khan a silver tree, with an angel on the top blowing a trumpet and at the base four guardian lions whose mouths spouted mare’s milk, a staple item of the Mongolian diet.

Although Friar William had failed in the main aim of his mission, the auguries for an East-West alliance were more promising when the Polo brothers reached Europe. The Great Khan was asking, among other things, for a hundred learned men of the Christian faith to be escorted back to him by the Polo brothers. It might have seemed too good a chance to miss, but at that crucial moment one Pope died and there was a dispute over who should succeed him. When Gregory X was eventually installed he chose only two scholarly friars to go to Cathay. Even these were not up to the task. After setting off with the Venetian merchants, accompanied now by young Marco Polo, the friars turned back after travelling only as far as Armenia, where a war threatened.

The Polos rode on. They still had to deliver Pope Gregory’s message of good-will to Kubilai Khan, and this gave them, by thirteenth-century standards, a sense of urgency. They decided that the sea route through the Indian Ocean would be quicker than a long, exhausting journey across central Asia’s deserts, whose hazards Nicolo and Maffeo knew only too well. So they travelled first to Baghdad (which the Mongols had sacked a few years earlier, massacring all the Muslims but sparing the Christians). From there they crossed into Persia, then rode south to the great port of Hormuz at the mouth of the Gulf. This was Marco Polo’s first sight of the Indian Ocean, but he was not impressed.

Hormuz had an excellent harbour, and it had taken over much of the trade controlled three centuries earlier by Siraf, birthplace of the story-teller Buzurg ibn Shahriyar. Merchants came to Hormuz from ‘the length and breadth of the world’ to deal in pearls, cloth and dried fruits, spices from Malabar and Ceylon, Chinese ceramics and African ivory. Arabian horses were shipped from here to India: steeds chosen for their strength, powerful enough to bear men in full armour. However, as Marco would remember it many years later, the climate of Hormuz was torrid and unhealthy. Sometimes in summer, winds blew from the deserts lying on every side with such unbearable heat that there was only one way to survive: the local people lived outside the city in summer, beside lakes and waterways, so that when the hot winds approached they could ‘plunge neck-deep into the water to escape’.

With his medieval fondness for the gruesome he goes on to tell a story to illustrate the infernal heat of the place:

As the king of Hormuz had not paid his tribute to the king of Kerman, the latter got ready 1,600 horse and 5,000 foot, sending them across the region of Reobar, to attack the others by surprise. This he did at the time when the people of Hormuz were living outside the city in the country. One day, the assailants, being wrongly guided, were unable to reach the place appointed for passing the night, and rested in a wood not very far from Hormuz. When, on the next morning, they were about to set out again, that wind caught them, and suffocated them all … When the people of Hormuz heard this, they went to bury them in order that all those corpses should not infect the air. But the corpses were so baked by the immense heat, that when they took them by the arms to put them in the pits, the arms part from the bodies. It was hence necessary to make the pits next to the bodies and to throw them in.

The Polos stayed some while in Hormuz. According to Marco the people were ‘black’ – darker, he meant, than the northern Persians – and ‘worshipped Muhammad’ (he always used this term, calculated to enrage any Muslim). He described the Hormuzians as living mainly on dates, tunny-fish and onions. They brewed an excellent date wine which purged the bowels.

The Polos’ clear purpose in coming to Hormuz was to take a ship across to Cambay in India, then down the Malabar coast to one of the ports from where convoys sailed straight to China. Instead, they turned back and chose the overland route after all. Marco does not explain why outright, but the reason for this retreat is plain enough. The ‘sewn boats’, the traditional craft of the Indian Ocean, looked too dangerous: ‘Their ships are very bad and many of them are wrecked, because they are not fastened with iron nails but stitched together with thread made of coconut husks … This makes it a risky undertaking to sail in these ships. And you can take my word that many of them sink, because the Indian Ocean is often very stormy.’⁵

Even if a vessel stayed afloat, the voyage would be anything but agreeable: ‘The ships have one mast, one sail and one rudder, but no deck. After they are loaded, however, the cargo is covered with a piece of hide, and on top of the cargo thus covered are placed the horses that are taken to India to be sold.’ Marco notes as a gloomy afterthought that the boats were not caulked with pitch, but ‘greased with a fish oil’.

The sea voyage had seemed impossibly hazardous, yet the Polos barely survived their two-year journey overland to Cathay. After many mishaps they finally bowed before the Great Khan, to be welcomed with all the honour due to emissaries from Christendom. There was little incentive to hasten back to Venice, and Marco began collecting the material which for three centuries was to have an unequalled influence upon Europe’s thinking about other races and continents.

SIX
A Princess for King Arghon

Gold and silver to fill my storehouse year by year;

Corn and rice to crowd my sheds at every harvest.

Chinese slaves to take charge of treasury and barn.

Foreign slaves to take care of my cattle and sheep.

Strong-legged slaves to run by saddle and stirrup when I ride,

Powerful slaves to till the fields with might and main.

Handsome slaves to play the harp and hand the wine;

Slim-waisted slaves to sing me songs, and dance …

—a bridegroom’s dream, in Ballads and Stories from Tim-Huang (c. A.D. 750 trans. Arthur Waley)

THERE ARE too few guidelines in his book to tell precisely where Marco Polo travelled during his twenty years in the East, yet he certainly saw much of China, and journeyed beyond its borders, apparently to carry out diplomatic tasks for the Great Khan.¹ One mission took him to India by sea, but the ship in which he was a passenger seems to have reached Sumatra too late to catch the summer monsoon. He had to wait on the island for five months, until the wind began blowing again towards the north.

Marco filled his time by learning all he could about this unfamiliar part of the world. He describes the woods and spices produced in the region of Sumatra and ‘Malayur’, for he is always thinking of the trading possibilities. (At one point he steps outside his narrative to mention having brought a particular variety of seed back to Venice in the hope of cultivating it there; but the climate had defeated him.)

On the other hand, Marco – doubtless encouraged by his scribe Rustichello – never misses a chance to dwell upon the macabre. He denounces as fraudulent several embalmed specimens of tiny ‘pygmies’ which had reached Europe from the East and caused much amazement. Having been where they were made, he knows they are nothing but small monkeys with faces like humans. The Sumatrans were experts at ‘doctoring’ the monkey corpses to make them look more convincing.

He goes on to tell of a kingdom called Dagroian, where the people had one ‘particularly bad’ custom. When a sick patient was considered unlikely to recover he was suffocated and cooked: ‘Then all his kinsfolk assemble and eat him whole. I assure you that they even devour all the marrow in his bones.’ He discerned a religious purpose here, for if any flesh were left it would breed worms, the worms would die of hunger and the dead man’s soul would suffer torment because so many souls ‘generated by his substance’ had met their deaths.

When Marco was finally able to sail on from Sumatra he showed none of his earlier fear of the Indian Ocean, doubtless because he was now on board a large Chinese junk, markedly different from the filthy horse-boats of Hormuz. It was from his narrative that Europe was to gain the first detailed description of these oriental ships, by far the world’s most advanced sea-going vessels at that time. They carried crews of up to four hundred, were propelled by sails made of split bamboo cane on as many as four masts, and the hulls had strong watertight bulkheads to limit the flooding if the sides were pierced by reefs. Unlike the Arab and Persian ships, in which passengers had a wretched time, the junks were described by Marco as planned for comfort, ‘with at least sixty cabins, each of which can comfortably accommodate one merchant’.

The young Venetian travelled up both sides of India, going from port to port and giving a precise account of the trading prospects there. Since the old fantasies about monstrous beasts and bizarre humans still fascinated Europe, the lack of them in Marco’s memoirs may have been a disappointment to some of his readers; on the other hand, this first coherent account of India’s exotic richness was destined to arouse much excitement among both monarchs and merchants.

His first stopping-place had been Ceylon, and what impressed him there was the abundance of rubies, sapphires, topazes and other gems. One ruby, the length of a palm and as thick as a man’s arm, was so famous that the Great Khan sent emissaries to buy it; but the king of Ceylon turned them away. Marco’s detailed account implies that he may have been among these emissaries.

As he voyaged up the west side of India, along the Malabar coast, Marco marvelled at the immense production of pepper, cinnamon, ginger and other spices. Some regions produced cotton, and everywhere it was possible to buy beautiful buckram, as delicate as linen, and fine leather, stitched with gold and embossed with birds and beasts. The merchants of India, known as banians, from an old Sanskrit word, were scrupulous in their trading, and goods could be left with them in complete safety; so it was not surprising that ships came to Malabar from many lands. Towards the end of his journey Marco visited the great Gujarati port of Cambay, the terminus for much of the trade across the western half of the Indian Ocean. The merchants of Cambay regularly travelled as far as Egypt, and many of their goods were sold on to the Mediterranean countries.²

About the time when Marco was in India, the ruler of Ceylon, named Buvanekabahu, had sent an envoy to Cairo in a bid to win a share of this trade. His message to the Mamluke rulers said: ‘I have a prodigious quantity of pearls and precious stones of every kind. I have vessels, elephants, muslins and other cloths, wood, cinnamon, and all the objects of commerce which are brought to you by the banian merchants.’³ However, the Indian monopoly was to prove far too strong for him to break, although the discovery of Ceylonese coins near Mogadishu, in the Horn of Africa, suggests that Buvanekabahu may have had some success in expanding his island’s trade.

Marco was impressed by India’s exports of cotton and imports of gold; one of the shipping routes took merchants directly across the ocean, to exchange brightly-coloured cloth for the gold of southern Africa. A trade which continued to fascinate him was the traffic in horses from Arabia and Persia. ‘You may take it for a fact that the merchants of Hormuz and Kais, of Dhofar and Shihr and Aden, all of which provinces produce large numbers of battle chargers and other horses, buy up the best horses and load them on ships and export them.’ Some were sold for as much as 500 saggi (about 2,500 grams) of gold, and one kingdom alone on the Coromandel coast imported about 6,000 horses a year. By the end of the year no more than 100 would still be alive, because the Indians had no idea of how to care for them. According to Marco, the merchants who sold the horses did not allow any veterinarian to go with the animals, because they were ‘only too glad for many of the horses to die’.

The social customs of India are also recounted in the Description of the World, including the practice of suttee, by which widows flung themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Marco notes how Hindu superstitions governed business deals; the appearance of poisonous spiders or the length of shadows were taken as omens. He tells of the behaviour of yogis in great detail, and while their beliefs seemed bewildering at times – even green leaves had souls, so it was a sin to eat off them – he had come across many strange things on his travels and was usually too broad-minded to scoff.

The Indian people were ‘idolators’, and the inquisitive Venetian soon discovered what went on at Hindu festivals. True to form, he took a particular interest in the temple maidens, who did a great deal of dancing to conciliate the gods and goddesses: ‘Moreover, these maidens, as long as they are maidens, have such firm flesh, that no one can in any way grasp or pinch them in any part of their bodies. And, for the price of a small coin, they will let a man try and pinch them as hard as he likes. When they are married, their flesh remains firm, but not quite so much. On account of this firmness, their breasts do not hang down, but always remain stiff and erect.

Amid such diverting ribaldry there was ample proof that the riches of the East were indeed beyond compare. What had Marco said about Beijing? ‘It is a fact that every day more than 1,000 cartloads of silk enter the city; for much cloth of gold and silk is woven here.’ Almost anywhere in the East, it seemed, a few groats would purchase treasures worth a fortune, if they could be brought back to Europe.

Marco never set foot in Africa, but he had collected a hotchpotch of facts and falsehoods about it during his travels. He begins his description of the continent by giving an accurate account of Socotra island, with its population of Nestorian Christians. However, he is far from clear about Socotra’s position, putting it ‘about 500 miles’ to the south of two completely mythical places, about which absurdities had been written for centuries: the Male and Female islands, whose inhabitants met once a year for sexual congress.

He next tells how whales are hunted in the Indian Ocean, with so much detail that the account reads more like recollected experience than hearsay. One part tells what the hunters do after drugging a whale with a concoction of tunny fish:

Then some of the men climb on to it. They have an iron rod, barbed at one end in such wise that, once it has been driven in, it cannot be pulled out again … One of the hunters holds the rod over the whale’s head, while another, armed with a wooden mallet, strikes the rod, straightway driving it into the whale’s head. For, on account of its being drunk, the whale hardly notices the men on its back, so that they can do what they will. To the upper end of the rod is tied a thick rope, quite 300 paces long, and every fifty paces along the rope, a little cask and a plant are lashed. This plank is fixed to the cask in the manner of a mast …

Marco goes on to remark upon the amount of ambergris found in that part of the Indian Ocean, rightly saying that it comes from the whale’s belly.

He calls Madagascar ‘one of the biggest and best islands in the whole world’, about 4,000 miles in circumference. This almost doubles Madagascar’s true size, but is a geographical revelation, considering the time when he was writing. He could have collected such details only from Indian or Arab captains who had sailed to the island. Marco then goes on to air that persistent myth of the rukh, living in Madagascar. Calling it a gryphon, Marco rejects reports that it is a cross between a lion and an eagle, asserting that ‘actual eye-witnesses’ describe it as like an ‘eagle of colossal size’. He then adds a brief, intriguing aside, saying that the Mongol emperor had despatched emissaries to Madagascar and Zanzibar to ‘learn about the marvels of these strange islands’. The first was imprisoned, so a second was sent to have him freed.

One of Marco’s worst errors was to mix up Madagascar and Mogadishu in the Horn of Africa: ‘The meat eaten here is only camel-flesh. The number of camels slaughtered here every day is so great that no one who has not seen it for himself could credit the report of it.’ This is exactly true to Mogadishu, but certainly not of the great island 2,000 miles to its south. (It is testimony to the influence of Marco Polo that the name Madagascar, taken directly from his writings, has survived despite being based upon a total confusion.)

When he goes on to talk of Zanzibar island, he seems to confuse it with the entire Zanj region, claiming that it is 2,000 miles in circumference. Of the Africans he says: ‘They are a big-built race, and though their height is not proportionate to their girth they are so stout and so large-limbed that they have the appearance of giants. I can assure you that they are also abnormally strong, for one of them can carry a load big enough for four normal men. And no wonder, when I tell you that they eat enough food for five.’ Their hair was ‘as black as pepper’ and they ‘went entirely naked except for covering their private parts’.

His description of their physical features leaves no doubt that Marco had met and studied Africans, for many were held in slavery in India, and others employed as mercenaries. He may also have encountered them in China, where by the thirteenth century it was not uncommon for the rich to have black ‘devil-slaves’. They were, he says, good fighters who ‘acquit themselves very manfully in battle’.

His narrative turns next to Abyssinia, ‘Middle India’, whose king is correctly identified as a Christian, with six vassal monarchs within his empire. The Muslims lived ‘over in the direction of Aden’, and Marco relates how the sultan of Aden (‘one of the richest rulers in the world’) enraged the king of Abyssinia in 1288 by seizing one of his bishops and having him forcibly circumcized ‘in the fashion of the Saracens’. As a result, the Abyssinian Christians declared war and won a momentous victory, ‘for Christians are far more valiant than Saracens’. The story ends with a description of the lands laid waste to avenge the mutilated bishop, then is rounded off with a flourish which has a ring of the scribe Rustichello: ‘And no wonder; for it is not fitting that Saracen dogs should lord it over Christians.’

In the closing decade of the thirteenth century, when his long stay in the East neared its end, Marco sailed once more across the Indian Ocean, with his now elderly father and uncle. They were travelling in great style and comfort, in a fleet of fourteen junks fitted out to the orders of Kubilai Khan, and were on their way to Persia, to the court of King Arghon.

The task given to the Venetians was to present Arghon, whose Christian wife had died, with a new bride selected by Kubilai Khan; she was a seventeen-year-old princess ‘of great beauty and charm’ named Kokachin. However, for some unexplained reason the fleet took almost two years to deliver the princess to Persia, by which time Arghon had died in battle. His brother Gaykhatu, now ruling in his place, told her escorts that Kokachin should instead become the bride of Arghon’s young son Ghazan, who happened to be away at the time fighting a war at the head of 60,000 troops. This instant solution seems to have satisfied everyone, including the princess. The Polos set off again towards the west, to Europe and home, their duty done.

It was a misfortune for them that they had reached Persia just too late to meet Arghon, for no Mongol ruler had ever been keener to unite with European Christianity in a great war to vanquish Islam (which was, at that moment, temptingly weak and disunited). In the course of his seven-year reign Arghon sent four missions to Europe, vainly appealing for a commitment to a simultaneous assault on both flanks. One mission was led by a Genoese named Buscarel, who arrived in his home city a year before the Vivaldi brothers set out to circumnavigate Africa. His stories of the riches of the East may well have encouraged the Vivaldis to embark upon their ill-fated voyage.

The most eminent of Arghon’s envoys was Rabban (‘Master’) Sauma, a Chinese Christian of the Nestorian faith.⁴ His formidable journey illustrates how contacts between Asia and Europe flourished during the brief outward-looking interlude of Mongol power towards the end of the thirteenth century. Sauma had been born in Canbaluc (later called Beijing), and after long years of religious study travelled to Persia. His companion was a prominent fellow-Christian named Yaballaha, who was a Mongol. They had reached Baghdad, religious capital of the Nestorian sect to which they belonged, just as their patriarch was dying; Yaballaha was chosen to replace him.

The new patriarch fervently supported Arghon’s plans for a combined onslaught on Islam, so he put forward his friend Sauma as the best person to go to Europe to advance this cause. Helped on his way by King Arghon’s gifts of gold and thirty horses, Sauma rode the well-used route to the Black Sea port of Trebizond, then to Constantinople and on to Italy and Rome. Wherever he went he noted down everything of interest: the eruption of Etna as his ship sailed up the coast of Sicily, a sea battle off Naples, the beauties of the country round Genoa (‘a garden like Paradise, where the winter is not cold, nor the summer hot’). The northernmost point of his itinerary was Paris, where he met Philippe IV and was impressed to learn that the University of Paris had 30,000 students.

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.

SEVEN
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 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.