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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.
