Empires of the Monsoon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EIGHT

Adventures in India and China

He who stays at home beside his hearth and is content with the information which he may acquire concerning his own region, cannot be on the same level as one who divides his lifespan between different lands, and spends his days journeying in search of precious and original knowledge.

—Al-Mas’udi, The Meadows of Gold

WHAT DISTINGUISHES the memoirs of Ibn Battuta from many other humdrum travel diaries is not merely his flair for recording what is bizarre, exotic or absurd, but also the way he lays bare his personality: at times he is swashbuckling and boastful, at others vulnerable and indecisive, then ready to laugh at his own folly in inviting misfortune. After six centuries, in translation from the Arabic, his individuality asserts itself. His capacity for self-revelation is closely related to a gift for capturing in one or two sentences the manners and customs of other people.

His description of life aboard the big Chinese trading junks, which were more and more to be seen sailing to Indian Ocean ports, epitomizes his skill. Ibn Battuta writes approvingly, echoing Marco Polo, about the amenities for merchants: ‘Often a man will live in his cabin unknown to any of the others on board until they meet upon reaching some town.’ These cabins, consisting of several rooms and a bathroom, could be locked by the occupants, ‘who would take along with them slave girls and wives’. He adds a glimpse of lower-deck life: ‘The sailors have their children living on board ship, and they grow lettuces, vegetables and ginger in wooden tubs.’

In the Chinese custom, the most important figure in running these behemoths, with their twelve masts and four decks, was not the captain but a superintendent acting for the owner. In Ibn Battuta’s words, the superintendent was ‘like a great emir’, and when he went ashore he was preceded by archers and armed Abyssinians beating drums and blowing trumpets and bugles.

This mention of Abyssinians aboard Chinese ships in the fourteenth century is revealing, for the term always identified a person as coming from somewhere on the eastern side of Africa. Elsewhere, Ibn Battuta says Abyssinians were used throughout the Indian Ocean as armed guards on merchant ships; the presence of merely one was enough to frighten away pirates. He also tells of an Abyssinian slave named Badr, whose prowess in war was so phenomenal that he was made the governor of an Indian town: ‘He was tall and corpulent, and used to eat a whole sheep at a meal, and I was told that after eating he would drink about a pound and a half of ghee [clarified butter], following the custom of the Abyssinians in their own country.’

Many Africans were taken to India in the retinues of the Arab merchants who were settling in its ports during the fourteenth century. Others were transported to serve as palace guards. There was also a human flow in the opposite direction: Hindu merchants from the great port of Cambay, in north-west India, crossed the ocean to live in Kilwa, Zanzibar, Aden and ports on the Red Sea.

When Ibn Battuta reached India the fabric of its ancient culture was being torn to shreds. The entire sub-continent was under threat from the war-loving Turks of central Asia, who had invaded India through the mountain passes and the Afghan valleys of the north. One after another they were destroying the ancient Hindu kingdoms lying in their path. However, since the conquerors were Muslims, many doors were open to Ibn Battuta, and this enabled him to give a unique account of the tyranny with which his co-religionists were ruling amid the splendours of northern India. Since his hosts were not Arabs, he was able to view them fairly dispassionately.

By 1333, when Ibn Battuta arrived in Delhi, the throne was occupied by Sultan Muhammad ibn Tughlaq, who called himself by the grandiose title ‘Master of the World’.1 The sultan had murdered his father to gain power, and had his half-brother beheaded when he suspected him of disloyalty. Ibn Battuta’s experiences with the sultan during several years in Delhi were to contain all the menace of being trapped in a cage with a man-eating tiger.

Shortly before Ibn Battuta’s arrival, the sultan had depopulated his capital as a punishment for its citizens’ enmity towards him, made plain in written messages tossed every night into his audience hall. In his rage Muhammad ordered all the people of Delhi to leave at once for a distant region: then he decreed a search for anyone who had not obeyed. As Ibn Battuta tells its, the sultan’s slaves ‘found two men in the streets, one a cripple and the other blind’. The two were brought before the sultan, who ordered that the cripple should be fired to his death from a military catapult and the blind man should be dragged from Delhi to Dawlat Abad, forty days’ journey away. ‘He fell to pieces on the road and all of him that reached Dawlat Abad was his leg.’

Ibn Battuta makes a half-hearted attempt in his narrative to excuse the sultan for his savagery, by giving examples of his lavish treatment of strangers. For a time he enjoyed this generosity himself, but then it seems to have gone to his head, because by his own admission he began behaving in a reckless fashion. When the sultan decided to go hunting, he went too, hiring a vast retinue of grooms, bearers, valets and runners. Soon the constant extravagance of the young Moroccan judge became the talk of the court. As Ibn Battuta unashamedly relates, the ‘Master of the World’ eventually sent him three sacks, containing 55,000 gold dinars, to pay off his creditors. This may also have been the sultan’s way of making up for having executed a rebellious court official, the brother of a noblewoman named Hurnasab, whom Ibn Battuta married soon after reaching Delhi.

His volatile friendship with the sultan took a turn for the worse when Ibn Battuta went to stay as a penitent with Kamal al-Din, an ascetic Sufi imam known as the ‘Cave Man’, living underground on the outskirts of Delhi. The sultan distrusted the ‘Cave Man’ and eventually had him tortured and put to the sword. Before doing so he summoned Ibn Battuta and announced: ‘I have sent for you to go as my ambassador to the king of China, because I know your love of travel.’ His difficult guest was quick to accept the proposition; each of them was glad that they would soon be seeing the last of the other.

As a prelude to departure, Ibn Battuta divorced Hurnasab, who had just borne him a daughter. Clearly, domesticity counted for little beside the task of leading an imposing expedition across land and sea. Fifteen envoys had lately arrived from the Great Khan of China, bringing gifts which included 100 slaves, many loads of silk and velvet cloth, jewelled garments and sundry weapons. The sultan was not to be outdone, sending in return 100 white slaves, 100 Hindu dancing girls, 100 horses, fifteen eunuchs, gold and silver candelabra, brocade robes, and numerous other treasures. Ibn Battuta’s fellow-ambassadors were a learned man named Zahir ad-Din and the sultan’s favourite eunuch, Kafur the cupbearer. Until they reached their place of embarkation on the west coast of India they were to have an escort of 1,000 horsemen.

This cavalcade, incorporating the fifteen Chinese emissaries and their servants, travelled for only a few days before reaching a town under attack from ‘infidels’; that is, Hindu enemies of the sultan. Ibn Battuta and his colleagues decided to use their escorting force to mount a surprise counter-attack. Even allowing for some boasting on his part, this was a considerable success. The infidels were cut to pieces. But one important casualty was the eunuch Kafur, whose special responsibility had been to look after the presents for the Chinese ruler. A messenger was sent back to Delhi, telling the sultan what had happened.

Meanwhile, Ibn Battuta became caught up in a series of skirmishes with the enemy, and it was not long before calamity befell him. He became separated from his cavalry troop, was chased by the Hindus, hid in a ravine, lost his horse, and was soon taken prisoner. All his costly clothes and weapons were removed, including a gold-encrusted sword, and he expected at any second to be killed.

At the crucial moment a young man helped him to escape, and from then on Ibn Battuta’s account of his tribulations takes on a dreamlike quality. He wanders through ruined villages, eating berries and looking for water. He hides in cotton fields and abandoned houses. In one house he finds a large jar, used for storing grain, and climbs into it through a hole in the base. There is some straw in the jar, and a stone he uses as a pillow. ‘On the top of the jar there was a bird which kept fluttering its wings most of the night. I suppose it was frightened, so we were a pair of frightened creatures.’

After eight days of wandering, Ibn Battuta found a well with a rope hanging over it. Desperate to relieve his thirst he tied to the rope a piece of cloth used to shield his head from the sun, then lowered this down the well. After pulling up the cloth he sucked the water from it, but thirst still afflicted him. He then tied one of his shoes to the rope, and pulled this up full of water. At the second attempt he lost the shoe, then started to use the other one for the same purpose.

In this dire moment a ‘black-skinned man’ appeared beside him and gave the Muslim greeting, ‘Peace be upon you.’ Salvation was at hand, for the stranger not only produced food from a bag he was carrying and drew up water from the well in a jug, but even carried Ibn Battuta when he collapsed. Then this mysterious figure vanished, having deposited his human burden near a Muslim village.

After rejoining his companions and resuming his ambassadorial role, Ibn Battuta learned that the sultan had sent another trusted eunuch to replace the ill-fated Kafur. Then the expedition resumed its journey towards the coast. Progress now being relatively uneventful, there was time for him to study the behaviour of Indian yogis. They are as astounding to Ibn Battuta as they had been to Marco Polo: ‘The men of this class do some marvellous things. One of them will spend months without eating or drinking, and many have holes dug for them in the earth which are then built in on top of them, leaving only a space for air to enter. They stay in there for months, and I heard tell of one of them who stayed thus for a year.’

Progressing from city to city, the expedition reached the coast near the great harbour of Cambay and boarded a fleet of ships.2 In these it travelled south, calling at many of the ports Marco Polo had visited half a century before. One was Hili, which Ibn Battuta names as ‘the farthest town reached by ships from China’. He adds that it was on an inlet which could be navigated by large vessels; his Venetian predecessor had described the port as being on ‘a big river with a very fine estuary’.

At the end of this voyage, the sultan’s mission to China, with all its slaves, eunuchs and horses, was to be transferred to junks. These were to sail south-east to Sumatra, then north towards Zayton (Quanzhou), the port in south-east China where most foreign ships unloaded their cargoes. The natural place to switch to the junks was Calicut, a port founded some forty years earlier and already dominant in the export of pepper from the entire Malabar coast. Much of the pepper and other spices traded here were destined for Europe.

Calicut (more accurately, Koli Koddai, the ‘fortress of the cock’) would eventually be destined to play a central role in the history of the Indian Ocean. Its very name was to become a tantalizing challenge, almost a synonym for the wealth of the Indies. As Ibn Battuta’s expedition entered Calicut harbour, he counted thirteen large junks lying at anchor. There were also many smaller Chinese ships, for each junk was accompanied at sea by supply and support vessels. He now had three months to wait before the monsoon winds would blow in the right direction for the voyage, so he passed the time by learning all he could about the place.

The ruler of Calicut was an old man, with a square-cut beard ‘after the manner of the Greeks’, bearing the hereditary title of Zamorin, meaning Sea-King. One explanation for Calicut’s growing popularity with merchants and captains was that when a ship was wrecked on any part of the coast under the Zamorin’s control, its cargo was carefully protected and restored to the owners; almost everywhere else along the coast any goods washed up were simply expropriated by local rulers. The Sea-King was a Hindu, not a Muslim, but he provided houses for all Sultan Muhammad’s emissaries.3 When the monsoon was due to start blowing southwards, and the time for the voyage to China was at hand, he saw to it that they were fittingly accommodated in one of the largest junks.

However, a disaster exemplifying the hazards of Indian Ocean travel was about to occur. Ibn Battuta survived it only by chance, through his insistence on his personal comforts. He had told the commander of the junk: ‘I want a cabin to myself because of the slave-girls, for it is my habit never to travel without them.’ The Chinese merchants had taken all the best cabins, however, so he decided to switch with his retinue to one of the support vessels.

The junk, anchored offshore, was about to sail when a violent storm blew up. The great vessel was hurled on to the coast in darkness. Everyone on board was drowned, including the learned Zahir ad-Din and the second eunuch appointed to guard the presents intended for the Chinese ruler.

Ibn Battuta had delayed boarding the support vessel because he had wanted to go to the local mosque for the last time before the journey, so he was one of those who went out after the storm and found the beach strewn with bodies. The support vessel had escaped disaster by reefing its sail and heading off down the coast – leaving Ibn Battuta on land, but carrying away all his slaves and goods (he mentions the goods first in his narrative). He was left with only a former slave whom he had just freed, a carpet to sleep on, and ten dinars. As for the former slave, ‘when he saw what had befallen me he deserted me’.

The expedition to China, which had set off with such pomp, was now in ruins. Ibn Battuta thought first of turning back to Delhi, then decided that the half-crazed sultan might well vent his rage upon him for the disaster. Anxious about his goods and his slaves he set out southwards towards the port of Quilon, having been assured that the support vessel would have called in there. Part of the journey was by river, and he hired a local Muslim to help him on his way. But every night his new servant went ashore ‘to drink wine with the infidels’ and infuriated Ibn Battuta with his brawling.

Despite the plunge in his fortunes, Ibn Battuta managed to pay heed to the passing scene, noting for example that one hilltop town was entirely occupied by Jews.4 But when he reached Quilon after ten days there was no trace of the ship he had hoped to find there, so he was driven to live on charity. Some of the Chinese ambassadors who had accompanied him from Delhi turned up in equal straits: they had also been shipwrecked, and were wearing clothes given them by Chinese merchants in the town.

Having no compatriots to turn to for succour, Ibn Battuta was at a loss about how to escape from his state of beggary. His credentials as the sultan’s ambassador were gone, and all the presents for the Great Khan of China were either at the bottom of the sea or dispersed. As a qadi, a law-giver, he had the status which put an obligation on Islamic rulers to offer him hospitality, but without the conventional entourage of slaves, or the clothes and other regalia of his profession, it was hard to win much respect. Eventually he decided to try his fortunes with a ruler further up the coast in the port of Hinawr: ‘On reaching Hinawr I went to see the sultan and saluted him; he assigned me a lodging, but without a servant.’

This was a cruel humiliation, but the ruler did ask Ibn Battuta to recite the prayers with him whenever he came to the mosque. ‘I spent most of my time in the mosque, and used to read the Qur’ān through every day, and later twice a day.’ The help of Allah was badly needed.

Matters only began to improve when the sultan decided to start a jihad against the Hindu ruler of Sandabur (later known as Goa). Ibn Battuta opened the Qur’ān at random to find an augury and saw at the head of the page a sentence ending with the words ‘and verily God will aid those who aid him’. Although not by nature a fighting man, he was convinced by this that he should offer his services for the jihad. There was a brisk but brief seaborne assault, then the palace was captured after being attacked with flaming projectiles: ‘God gave victory to the Muslims’.

Ibn Battuta had shown his mettle. His fortunes started to rise again, and on returning to Calicut he was even able to respond with a measure of calm to the news he received from two of his slaves who were aboard the Chinese support ship when it sailed away during the calamitous storm: the ship reached Sumatra safely, but a local ruler had taken his slaves; his goods were likewise stolen. All Ibn Battuta’s surviving companions from the expedition were scattered, some in Sumatra, others in Bengal, and the rest were on their way to China. The wont news was that a slave-girl who was about to have his baby was dead; his child by another slave-girl had died in Delhi.

Following this series of disasters, Ibn Battuta abandoned all thought of going to China for some years. Instead, he travelled aimlessly about southern India and Ceylon, attaching himself as the opportunity arose to various Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist rulers. He was repelled by the lawlessness he encountered on both land and sea, and by the cruelties inflicted upon men, women and children alike. But this way of life offered many possibilities for someone of his experience and with his gift for seizing the opportune moment.

At times the situations he encountered could be almost too demanding, as happened when he visited the Maldive islands, lying several days by sea to the south-west of the Indian mainland. These hundreds of coral outcrops, with their palm-trees and sandy beaches, would have reminded him of the islands off the African coast. The Maldives were prosperous, partly because of a seemingly endless supply of cowrie shells lying in shallow water off the beaches: for many centuries the shells had been exported to northern China to be used as currency, and shiploads were sent in the opposite direction every year to Africa for the same purpose.5