Ottoman Gunpowder and Cannon, 1440-52

Posted on February 10, 2024 by Ruth

During the 1440s, the Ottoman Sultans continued to push back their frontier in Europe. Murad II made his 12 year old son Mehmet king, but he had to be called back in 1444 to confront the Hungarian-Wallachian army at Varna (more about them later). In the Battle of Varna, Murad II won a decisive victory that included the death of the young King of Poland. But the most lasting effect on world history was that, in these battles against Hungary, the Turks observed their first gunpowder firearms in operation.

Gunpowder had been used for very simple cannons, if they can even be called that, as early as the mid 1300s. By the 1440s, soldiers could use the arquebus, a simple gun that we can recognize: wooden stock, long metal barrel. The matchlock trigger wasn’t added until about 1475, but the basic arquebus was an effective personal weapon even without it, as long as the soldier didn’t blow himself up with it.

The Janissary Corps (or Ocak, in Turkish) had been rebuilt after some years of Ottoman civil war. The devşirme resumed once the government was stable again in 1413, so by this time it even had men growing old in its service. Mehmet II had several Grand Viziers who had been devşirme children in the elite Palace school. Until the Turks saw guns in action, their best warriors were still using bows, but they became early adopters in spite of how messy the black powder could make the Janissary’s sharp red uniform.

When young Mehmet II resumed control, he felt a great religious duty to overthrow the Greek Christians of Constantinople. The city was still a very sad place, suffering from low population and depressed economy. It had been paying tribute, but Mehmet decided to make it his new capital. The last Emperor tried to make another tribute-peace deal, but Mehmet rejected it. And through his father’s attempts to conquer the city, he had learned what needed to be done.

Just north of the city, the Turks built a fortress on the European side of the Bosphorus Strait, which is effectively a river, with wooded hills on both sides, leading to the Black Sea. There was an ancient fortress on the Anatolian side, which they seized and rebuilt. Its new twin on the European side went up in record time, less than six months. They called it the Rumeli fortress, since Rum still signified Europe to them. The two fortresses, the Anadolu and the Rumeli, effectively cut the neck of the Strait. The official name of the new fortress, in fact, was the Throat-Cutter.

The fortresses were both armed with the largest cannons Mehmet II could buy. Any ship that did not stop when commanded was shot and sunk. A Venetian ship took the dare soon after the fortress was in operation, and yep, it was sunk. Surviving sailors were beheaded, and the captain’s body set up as a warning scarecrow. With the twin fortresses and cannons, the Turks controlled the Black Sea and could put Constantinople in an effective chokehold.

With the fortresses complete, Mehmet II’s siege of Constantinople began in 1452. The Byzantine Emperor had repaired his formidable walls as well as he could, and even in their decayed state they were able to turn back the Turkish army. Then a rogue Hungarian armorer showed up.

Orban first offered the Emperor that he could cast the largest cannon known to the world. He named his fee and explained how much metal it would require. But the city of Constantinople could no longer afford the best defenses. The Emperor turned him away, probably not realizing that Orban’s loyalties were not strong enough to send him back to serve his European homeland. Instead, Orban crossed over to the Turks.

The bombard technology of the time had been developed in Germany’s iron-working regions. It involved welding long iron bars to iron rings, with the goal of creating one solid round barrel of iron. When it didn’t work, the explosion inside burst the barrel, killing everyone nearby. They could also cast bronze, probably using lost-wax technique also used for bells. Bronze was not as strong, though.

We no longer have the bombard Orban made for Mehmet, but there are surviving bombards from the same period. They are quite different, as you’d expect in a time when each one was its own invention and no standard had emerged. They have names, like ships: Pumhart von Steyr is short and broad, Dulle Griet looks a bit like a spyglass, and the cast-bronze Faule Gret is even shorter and broader. But we do still have an Ottoman bombard made not long after Orban’s work, and based on it. The Dardanelles Gun looks like a very long set of barrels.

Orban’s bombard was manufactured at Edirne, the Ottoman capital on the European side, and transported by a massive oxen train to its position in the siege. It shot large stones at the ancient walls; it could shoot really large stones harder and faster, from out of reach of any defenders’ crossbow bolts. Once it began to bombard the walls, it was only a matter of time.

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Sheikh Bedreddin’s Rebellion, 1413-6

Posted on February 10, 2024 by Ruth

A threat to the young Ottoman state even more serious than Timur’s invasion came in the form of Bedreddin, a Turkish sheikh, judge, and mystic. It was important to the Ottomans to create a unified state by enforcing Sunni Islam as the official religion, even in areas that had traditionally been Christian. Those places could remain Christian, of course, by paying the jizya tribute-tax and sending boys to the devşirme levy for the Janissaries. But it mattered a lot to their strategy and identity that all religions were not equal. We know that this strategy prevailed, and we’ve seen the Middle East as Ottoman strategy shaped it. It’s worth looking at the philosophy that almost derailed it.

Bedreddin was born near Edirne, around the time when the Ottomans began to rule on both sides of the Aegean Sea. His father was the Turkish ghazi, or independent military commander, while his mother was the Greek daughter of the local Byzantine fort commander. Bedreddin’s formative years were the same years when the Ottomans really began to be a small Empire, not just another beylik. It’s interesting that he was equal parts Turkish Muslim and European/Greek, though his own religion was always officially Islam. It clearly shaped his view of the world, which was much less black and white than most of the Muslims he was around.

Bedreddin served as a sort of chaplain/judge, a marching Qadi, to an Ottoman contingent, then studied theology formally in Konya—-you’ll recall that Konya was Rumi’s hometown and had become the center of “whirling dervish” practice. Doubtless, Bedreddin picked up a strongly mystical tone in Konya. After some years of study in Cairo, he went east to Iran, to an area ruled by Timur. In Ardabil, he learned a type of Sufi mysticism and probably unlearned some Ottoman loyalty.

Bedreddin seems to have reconnected with Ottoman politics through one of Bayezid’s warring sons, Musa, the one who was carried off as a prisoner by Timur. Bedreddin may have been his personal sheikh during the years Musa was at times a ruling co-Sultan of southern Turkey, and at other times, a guerrilla war leader. The other guerrillas in the network were ghazis, like Bedreddin’s father, so he was well suited to fit in. As the Qadi, he had some power to distribute land to these ghazi soldiers. Musa’s strategy may have been to gain support of the ghazi network by undoing some of the centralization installed by his father. Bedreddin was a key figure in his efforts.

Bedreddin’s rogue theology had developed in Ardabil to where he was a universalist; he believed that Allah was manifest in nature and all religions could save. A believer just needed to clear away all obstacles to becoming one with God. Social hierarchy and land-based wealth were among the obstacles; Bedreddin was a radical egalitarian and land redistributionist.

When Sultan Mehmet defeated his brother Musa in 1413, Bedreddin was exiled and all of his land gifts were undone. For three years, he lived at the margins of the Ottoman Empire, taught his disciples, and gathered strength within the ghazi independent-military network. In 1416, he and his disciples began preaching a radical doctrine of communal land ownership and equality of Muslims and Christians. Turkish nomads, Christian peasants, dispossessed ghazis, and interested madrasa students joined him.

Bedreddin himself was in Bulgaria, in the region of Dobruja, when the revolt began. His two top disciples were in Turkish cities. They went beyond preaching, to start coordinated attacks on Ottoman government buildings. Sultan Mehmet and his leading pashas had to act quickly. One Turkish revolt was ended fairly easily, with Bedreddin’s disciple killed, but the other put up a lot of resistance. To end Bedreddin’s revolt, the Ottomans had to choose a policy of merciless slaughter. Thousands of peasants and nomads died with Bedreddin and his disciples. In the underground, however, Bedreddin’s ideas were kept alive in Dobruja until at least the 1500s.

After that, the Ottoman strategy of strict Sunni Islam with suppression of dissent had been proven necessary. Mehmet and his successors made no apology about keeping non-Muslims in subjection, and probably the devşirme policy, which allowed officials to track non-Muslim children while removing the strongest ones, became more acceptable. The Ottomans developed the old Arabic idea of the dhimmi, the conquered person living under Muslim protection, into a full legal system. Non-Muslim religious sects declined under Ottoman rule, of course.

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Samarkand’s Math Emperor, 1405

Posted on January 24, 2024 by Ruth

Timur’s grandson Mohammed, son of Shah Rukh, was a huge nerd. It’s hard to be born into a notorious warlord’s family when you really just want to sit up at night in an observatory measuring the stars, or calculate Pi to a few more places. Mohammed and his mother trailed around following the army while his father acted as one of Timur’s generals. When Timur died in 1405, Shah Rukh took his family back to Samarkand where the boy could finally get a steady education. But only four years later, Shah Rukh was the Great Khan himself, and he left Mohammed in Samarkand as governor while he moved to Herat. The boy was only 16, but in medieval times this was considered fully old enough to govern, with older mentors. He governed the Samarkand region through Shah Rukh’s lifetime……though after his father’s death he kind of went off the rails.

Ruling Samarkand and the Transoxiana region was about right for his geek aptitude, because he really only wanted to set up a university. He had an ample budget for it. He built an impressive physical plant and hired Muslim astronomers and mathematicians from all over. Because he brought Samarkand back from the oblivion it had been in since Genghis Khan destroyed it, he became known as the Great King, Ulugh Beg. He had thirteen wives and many children, so as his sons got old enough, he doled out governing power so that he could avoid most administrative work.

One of the early scholars at Ulugh Beg’s court is credited for the Law of Cosines, which in France is still called al-Jashi’s Theorem. He invented some astronomical calculation devices, which at the time were the cutting-edge of scientific technology by means of mechanical computing. He also wrote some very advanced mathematical works that were not translated into European languages until much later, or not at all. In his Key to Arithmetic, he calculated Pi to some extraordinary degree. (Here, gentle mathematician reader, I must bow out and point you to other summaries of al-Jashi’s work.)

In 1428, the Ulugh Beg Madrasa (Institute) built a very large observatory. At that time, they did not yet have optical telescopes, but their main task was measuring the position of stars, for which they needed a quadrant or sextant. This instrument was a piece of a circle, built very large so that it could be divided into minutes and seconds. Ulugh Beg’s sextant had a radius of 40 meters; it had stairs and observation platforms built along its three-story span.

Ulugh Beg is credited with compiling the most authoritative star chart of his time, in 1437. It remained in use into the 17th and 18th centuries. That same year, he calculated the length of the sidereal year within 58 seconds, a measurement that lasted until Copernicus improved it. He made other precise measurements, such as the Earth’s tilt. But that wasn’t all. In addition, he wrote out trigonometric tables to 8 decimal places and invented a medicine made of alcohol and garlic. I guess that last one isn’t a very good indicator of his love of precision, but it does show his interest in other fields. And he wrote poetry.

Sultan Shah Rukh lived to be pretty old, so when he died, Ulugh Beg was in his 50s. Foolishly, Ulugh Beg took steps to seize power from among the many other sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons, but he was not good at either fighting or politics. Sure, he could order the massacre of the city of Herat in 1448, but that was a very basic Timurid family skill level. Otherwise, he lost battles to nephews and failed to detect plots. His own oldest son ordered a hit on him when Ulugh Beg was traveling on Hajj to Mecca. He really should have stayed in the observatory; he was most suitably honored in 1830 when a Moon crater was named for him.

In 1449, once Ulugh Beg was safely dead, Muslim fanatics who disapproved of his scientific ways destroyed the observatory. In 1500, after the descendants of Shah Rukh had squandered their power by fighting each other, primitive Uzbek nomads overthrew them. They had been known as the Gray Horde and their rulers claimed descent from Genghis Khan through his oldest son Jochi. But their level of culture was far below that of the Persianized Mongols who had rebuilt Samarkand. They moved their capital to Bukhara, and at times, Samarkand was almost deserted.

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Showdown at Ankara: Bayezid v. Timur, 1402

Posted on January 24, 2024 by Ruth

Two empires were expanding during the late 1300s; inevitably, they collided. In 1400, Timur’s Turko-Mongolian army based in Samarkand invaded the region we know as Turkey, and we’re almost to the point where we can call it that, but not quite. It was Ottoman unification that made “Rum” into Türkiye, and Timur’s invasion was the last meaningful check on Ottoman power.

Timur occupied (and destroyed) the city of Sivas in central Anatolia, not far from Ankara. In the next year, Bayezid pulled away from his siege of Constantinople and the armies moved closer until they met at Ankara.

Ankara’s history as a town goes back to 2000 BC, anyway; it is a rich archaeological field with Hittite and Phrygian sites. In Roman times, it was called Ancyra, which came into most European spellings as Angora. It sat at a major crossroads for travel north and east into the Roman hinterlands. We remember it best for its production and export of thick, soft fur in goats, rabbits, and cats.

Bayezid brought to the battle an array of all of the forces the Ottomans had been collecting: Serbian knights, with other conquered Christian forces; infantry and cavalry from the Turkish beyliks he had been conquering, perhaps some who were native to the Ankara region; and Janissaries, at that time numbering several thousand but with elite training and high morale. I couldn’t find an estimate for his overall numbers at this battle. His numbers at Nicopolis were reported at 60,000 by a contemporary, but modern historians guess it was more like 20,000. So perhaps he had 20,ooo to 40,000 at Ankara? Bayezid’s sons were all present, acting as his generals.

Timur’s army was mostly cavalry, according to the Mongol-Tatar tradition. However, since his conquest of Delhi, he had picked up elephant-mounted troops as well. Estimates of his numbers vary; this is a problem with all of the histories of the time. Some sources reported that King Sigismund’s Crusade was as large as 90,000, which seems highly unlikely. In the same way, some estimates of Timur’s strength seem improbably high, like his contemporary historian Ahmad ibn Arabshah’s estimate of 800,000. But Timur’s low estimate is larger than the Crusaders’ highest one: realistically, he may have had 150,000 troops, with his 32 elephants and their herds of horses. He vastly outnumbered Bayezid, in other words. Timur’s men had traveled in a more leisurely way, since the defending forces were tied up in a siege, so by the time he went out to meet Bayezid, his horses and men were well-rested.

Bayezid’s troops, on the other hand, had hurried so they were tired when they arrived. They got no respite but had to give battle immediately on July 20, 1402. There was one last major problem, reminiscent of earlier Crusader battles: the enemy dug some canals to divert streams away from the Ottoman camp. Thirst is an implacable enemy.

The Serbian knights held up the best against Timur, who depended mostly on archers whose arrows did not pierce plate armor. The Janissaries were completely wiped out. Some of the Turkish horse-soldiers on the Ottoman side defected to Timur, whose style of battle probably appealed to them more anyway. Bayezid and one of his sons, with a few hundred horsemen, fled into the mountains, but Timur had the numbers to surround the region. He was captured after 3 months. Some of the Ottoman army fled to Venetian ships (probably left from the Crusade) and made it to safety, preserving a core of Ottoman power.

Timur’s forces kept marching to the Aegean Sea, also destroying Smyrna where the Hospital Knights had a fortress. But he didn’t set up a new capital or otherwise permanently take over Turkey. He left Anatolia very soon because one of his vassals had rebelled by attacking Baghdad.

Timur was making plans to assault China, in an attempt to restore the Yuan Dynasty, when he died. His body was embalmed in rose water and sent back to Samarkand, while his successors started to contest with each other. After several grandsons’ short reigns, the power went to Timur’s youngest son Shah Rukh, then to Rukh’s son Ulug Beg.

It wasn’t nearly as neat for the Ottomans. Bayezid’s death left five sons who all had powerful connections as generals. Their civil war lasted until 1413, spilling into Thrace and Serbia and entangling Constantinople’s poor Emperor Manuel. In the end, Mehmet I crowned himself Sultan and began minting coins with that title. He rebuilt the Janissaries and ruled from the European-side capital of Edirne. From this time, it’s proper to refer to Anatolia as Turkey, and it was never again seriously divided.

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The Crusade of Nicopolis, 1396

Posted on January 24, 2024 by Ruth

While Timur was taking over Central Asia and India, the Ottoman-ruled zone was also growing. In 1389, Sultan Murad died in the Battle of Kosovo, killed by Serbian knights, but his son Bayezid was on hand. Bayezid had his brother killed and married a Serbian princess, thus eliminating two threats very quickly.

During 1390, Bayezid conquered on two fronts: continuing to expand in Serbia (Skopje, 1391) and also in Anatolia. He had a theological problem with his fellow Turks, since they were also good Muslims. There were two solutions: one, get Muslim scholars to issue fatwas justifying his wars; two, make his captured Christian soldiers fight the wars against Turks. He overwhelmed the smaller Turkish beyliks as his forces grew and grew with each victory. In 1394, Bayezid conquered northern Greece and the rest of Bulgaria; he crossed the Danube (though at that time the defenders won), and he began a siege against Constantinople.

Constantinople was a weak state at this time; its royalty were often fighting against each other, and they paid tribute to Murad and Bayezid. Manuel II Palaiologos spent a year as a hostage at Bayezid’s court, where he was forced to join the battle against Philadelphia, the last Greek Byzantine hold-out in Anatolia. That must have really hurt. When his father died, he fled from Bursa to secure Constantinople against other challengers, and Bayezid took it as rebellion.

The siege ran from 1394 to 1402. As it dragged on with no decisive action on either side, Manuel II took the radical step of traveling to western Europe to ask for Crusade help. He went through Germany, France, Aragon, Denmark, and even as far as England, where Henry IV (Shakespeare fans know him as Bolingbroke) held a joust in his honor. Pope Boniface IX preached crusade in 1396; King Charles VI of France sent six ships a few years later, but the main response was in Hungary, where the Ottomans had recently attempted to cross the Danube.

King Sigismund of Hungary led a Crusade of men from all over Europe, including a large French contingent (11,000) of knights and archers under John the Fearless, Count of Burgundy. Hospitaller Knights from Rhodes joined, and individuals came from as far away as Spain and England. The seeds of trouble lay, as usual, in the Crusaders’ disparate experiences and motivations. While the Hungarians were intent on defending their homeland, the French knights were seeking glory. The King of Hungary typically propounded cautious actions that took Bayezid seriously, while the French knights did not believe the Turks could actually challenge them and always sought to travel farther and take greater risks. Attack first, reconnoiter later; march all night, never mind what you’ll do when you arrive. Although Sigismund was the leader, the French knights were more numerous, so the army decided not to wait at Budapest, but to sally into Turkish-held territory.

It took them eight days to cross the Danube River at the Iron Gates, a narrow (but steep) point, with the help of Venetian ships and fishing boats. They easily took one Turkish-held town, and French knights raced ahead to seize the advantage at another fortress. Significantly, that action left them with about a thousand hostages, a mix of Turks and Christians.

The Crusaders set up a siege at Nicopolis, a fort held by Ottomans. The fortress was impregnable, perched on a high hill with steep sides. It was well-stocked for a siege, but the French knights were over-confident that Bayezid would not leave his siege of Constantinople and eventually Nicopolis would surrender; or perhaps they could break in with simple field-built ladders. Their camp did not build its own fortifications or keep an efficient watch on the countryside.

When Bayezid’s main force came near enough that some outriders saw and reported them, the Crusaders hastily made real battle plans but they had only a few hours’ preparation. In what turned out to be their worst mistake, they executed the thousand hostages. When the battle was over and Bayezid’s scouts were looking for dead kings among the bodies, they found the execution remains. Even in a more barbarous time, the slaughter of hostages constituted a war crime, and even in French eyes.

The Turks had taken many prisoners at this point, so Bayezid decided to take revenge. The most important prisoners were kept separately for ransom, while the youngest were sent to be slaves. Then the general mass of them were executed in a public ceremony while the Turkish army and the prisoners watched, like Richard the Lion-heart at Acre.

King Sigismund escaped on the battlefield, with the Master of the Hospital Knights. They got into a fishing boat and were rowed downstream to the Venetian ships. The rest of the Crusade’s energy was spent on ransoming hostages. One French eyewitness account of the battle came from a young man who was sent into slavery and did not return to France for 30 years.

King Sigismund held a number of titles including, eventually, Holy Roman Emperor. He never gave up his hope of driving the Turks away from Eastern Europe. To that end, he founded his own military order: the Order of the Dragon. Apparently, the name of “Dracula,” or Drakul, entered Transylvania naming tradition because of the Order of the Dragon!

However, Sigismund could not raise another Crusade, and the six ships sent by France to Constantinople helped very little. Bayezid resumed his siege. The only real relief for Constantinople was quite accidental: Amir Timur invaded the newly-won Ottoman lands of Turkey.

We shouldn’t be at all surprised by this outcome, even if the Crusaders were. With history’s hindsight clarity, we can see that earlier Crusade victories were heavily dependent on Turkish disunity. It was the onset of Turkish rule in the Holy Land that set off the Crusades in 1095; for the ensuing 300 years, the Turks had spent as much time battling each other and Egypt as the Crusaders. The three-way power split of Latins, Egyptians, and Turks always kept anyone from decisively ruling. As soon as the Muslims became unified, as they did under Saladdin, the Crusaders began to lose badly. Once the northern (Ottoman) Turks of Bithynia started taking over smaller rival Turkish zones, it was only a matter of time until any Crusade attempts would face a unified and much larger Muslim force.

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Amir Timur (Tamerlane) 1370-1400

Posted on January 7, 2024 by Ruth

We know little about the early life of Timur, until he stepped into world history in 1370. That’s when he became the ruler of Balkh, in Afghanistan, and began to prosecute a new “Mongol” war of conquest. He wasn’t a descendant of Genghis Khan, but he seems to have been born in the region that Genghis’ son Chagatai had traditionally ruled. His father was a minor nobleman near the city of Kesh. Timur (or temür) means “iron,” parallel to “Temu” in “Temujin,” the personal name of the Great Khan.

As a child, Timur and his family appear to have been carried off by a raiding party to Samarkand, where he finished growing up. He was somehow wounded in the leg. In one story, he had become a young sheep-stealer and was shot by a shepherd’s arrow, while in another, he was wounded in mercenary battle action in Khorasan. In either version, we get a sense of what young Timur was like. He had that combination of high intelligence and super aggression that often propels a nobody onto the world stage. His aggression trumped his lameness, although he is known to history as “Tamerlane,” from Persian Timur Lang, Timur the Lame.

Timur’s family were Muslims, and in that part of Central Asia, both Mongolian and Turkish were mother tongues. Timur additionally learned Persian and served some Iranian kings before supplanting them. He was a Sunni Muslim, with mixed sympathies toward Shi’ites in Iran.

They were probably much more Turkish than Mongolian, but Mongolian heritage had much higher prestige in Central Asia. When Timur took over the city of Balkh, he married one of the former ruler’s wives who was descended from Genghis. That way, he could claim the Mongolian title of son-in-law, (Gurgan or Jurjen) which had conferred immense prestige in the Great Khan’s time. Usually, though, he was known as the Amir (Emir), which implied that there was a higher king (a figurehead Mongolian).

Although Timur had 18 wives, his Khan-descended wife remained his principal queen. Later, he found a second descendant of Genghis to set up as his second-ranking queen. Neither of these women bore him an heir, but their presence legitimized his power in the region. Sarai, the first, acted as Timur’s regent at times, and was by all accounts a very close friend; she also formally raised the sons who would become his heirs so that they had Mongolian manners and language. Their Mongolian title meaning “a born princess” was “khanum,” which eventually became in Turkish a polite title for any lady, “hanim.”

Timur spent the 1370s consolidating power around Khorasan, Samarkand and Balkh. In 1382, he sent a captain called Tokhtamysh (many variations in the spelling!) against the Golden Horde in Sarai, Russia. Tokhtamysh burned Moscow and made himself Khan of the Golden Horde. A few years later, he turned against Timur’s authority by invading Azerbaijan, and the two forces began a civil war. In the course of their power struggle, the cities of Ryazan, Sarai and Astrakhan were all burnt. The Golden Horde, remnant of Genghis Khan’s first invasions of Russia, was broken. Timur’s lineage continued to rule Russia for a while, but in time, Russian dukes won back independence.

In the early 1380s, Timur invaded and conquered much of Iran. Since the death of the last Mongolian Ilkhan from plague, the region had been fragmented into shifting territories of whichever local rulers could stay on top. Starting with Herat, Timur massacred the people and destroyed the city. It’s in this Iranian campaign that we first start to hear about really horrific war crimes. Nominally, Timur was following Genghis’ principle that surrender meant mercy while fighting meant death, but he added fresh layers of terror. In Isfizar, they say he cemented living men into the city walls. After Isfahan rebelled, he beheaded the citizens and ordered towers to be built with their heads: 28 pyramids of 1500 heads.

In 1398, Timur turned his attention to Delhi, where the descendant of Ibn Battuta’s old friend was ruling. The dynasty had been much weakened by civil war, and the rebellious Hindus of Ibn Battuta’s time had stopped paying their jizya unbeliever tax. So when Timur’s by-now very large army crossed into India, the Delhi dynasty was not equipped to stop it.

Timur’s army, though, was afraid of the exotic elephants that were the backbone of Delhi’s cavalry. He knew enough about elephants to realize that they could be frightened, if not overpowered. So he ordered that a group of camels be loaded with hay, which was set on fire. The poor doomed camels were whipped toward the line of elephants, who panicked on seeing fiery camels running at them. After that, the Delhi army had no chance.

In the conquered city of Delhi, both Muslims and Hindus were against the occupiers. The city’s streets turned to urban warfare, and Timur ordered slaughter. Much of the city’s population was wiped out in street fighting and massacres, with heads and bodies mounted on pikes for the carrion birds. The city of Delhi did not recover economically for at least a century. Eventually, Timur’s great-grandson would invade again and set up the Moghul Empire. “Moghul” was the last variant on “Mongol” and the last reflex of Genghis Khan’s ambition.

Amir Timur’s next wave of invasions to the west were even bloodier than the first ones, perhaps with expectations altered by the massacres in Delhi; the threshold for massacre was set much lower. In 1399, he set out to tackle the Mamluks in Cairo (and all of their holdings to the east) and the Ottomans in Bursa.

Timur slashed and burned his way through Georgia and Armenia in 1400, taking slaves and leaving corpses and rubble. He came to Aleppo and Damascus, where he carried out a large-scale massacre. Perhaps to win points with his Iranian subjects back home, he declared that Damascus had to pay for the deaths of Hasan and Husein, Mohammed’s grandsons. Damascus had been the Umayyad capital, so therefore its population in 1400 had to pay.

In 1401, Timur came to Baghdad. The city had been torn down to foundation stones in 1258 by Hulegu Khan’s army, but it had recovered some regional stature in the 140 years since. Timur sacked it, of course: tore it down, burnt it, massacred its citizens. Ibn Arabshah, a Damascene who observed and wrote about Timur’s invasions, reported that he ordered every soldier to come back with two heads; under this imposed quota, some panicking soldiers began killing captives, women, and even their own family members, when the heads began to run short.

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Sultan Bayezid’s Child Tax, 1362-1402

Posted on January 7, 2024 by Ruth

The Ottoman Empire was growing east and south of Constantinople. It pushed against other Turkish beyliks, absorbing land as they were conquered. Orhan, son of Osman, defeated the Karası beylik and his son Murad married one of the captured widows. Her name was Gülçiçek, which means Rose Flower, though she had been born a Greek-speaking Maria. She bore him two sons, and although he had other wives, her son Bayezid became Murad’s heir. During the reigns of Murad and Bayezid, the Ottomans began a key practice that characterized the Empire for several centuries: a slave army with a few differences.

Murad’s reign began in 1362 with a bang: he crossed into Europe, where his father had taken the Gallipoli Peninsula south of Constantinople. He began campaigns against Bulgarians, Serbs, Albanians, Greeks and Hungarians. His first big win was the capture of Adrianople, the city that now sits on the border of modern Turkey and Bulgaria. He renamed it Edirne, which probably to his Turkish ear sounded just like “Adrian.” It became his European capital.

Murad’s army grew as it captured soldiers to use as slaves and incorporated other Turkish armies. He directly held much of modern Bulgaria and Serbia, while some princes chose to pay him tribute to remain nominally independent. The Greek Emperor of Constantinople (a sad shadow of its former self, and now gutted by the plague) also paid him tribute to stay away.

Using his traditional one-fifth portion of captured men in Bulgaria and Serbia, Murad commissioned a new military corps; “New Soldier” in Old Turkish was Yeni Çeri. When the term became important to Europeans, they transliterated it in Latin letters as “Janissaries.” The Janissaries were to be the Sultan’s Mamluks, loyal only to him; they were known as “servants of the door” (kapıkulları). (The door or gate was the arch where the Sultan’s pronouncements were announced, which came to stand for the whole government. In later times, the Ottoman Empire is often referred to as “the Porte,” which was that symbolic gate.) They were not working for him voluntarily, they were actually slaves. But the Janissaries were to have high status: they were paid salaries. He began with 500 or 1000 as his personal guard.

Murad’s last battle came in Kosovo, where a band of Serbian knights pushed and slashed their way straight to his tent. Some number of them descended on him with sword and knife. One knight, Miloš Obilić, later got the credit. Murad’s heart was buried at the battlefield where he fell, with a tomb shrine raised around it, while his bones went back to Bursa. Bayezid, his son, was on hand to take over and so there was a seamless transfer of power.

During Bayezid’s years, the Janissary Corps grew to several thousand. They were distinctly different from other soldiers; for one thing, they were required to shave all beards. Beards were a sign of devout Islam, so these Christians had to look different. I don’t want to suggest that they remained practicing Christians; most or all of them converted to Islam. But their origin among Christians was the underpinning of the justification for enslaving them in the first place, so they were kept in a special bracket. They also wore metal helmets that were shaped like turbans, with ring-mail shirts under a red coat called the dolama. Their chief weapon was the bow, but with short arrows (crossbow darts were even shorter) and devices to help guide accuracy.

Bayezid seems to have started a new method to recruit Janissaries. Where Murad had captured children in Bulgaria, Serbia and Albania after battles, Bayezid now ruled those same lands. No battles. So he imposed a tax on Christians: the devşirme, the tax on children. Historians estimate that about one in 40 households had a child taken for the corps, several thousand per year. Recruiters preferred simple peasant boys, not street-smart city kids. They took them anywhere between age 8 and age 20, but in earlier years, the children were younger because bow training was much harder than later gun use.

The children were divided into two groups by aptitude. The elite ones began a course of study attached to the Palace, while the common ones were fostered in Turkish farm families to learn the language and culture. The common ones were trained in crafts and general military discipline; they were the infantry. The elite ones, of course, became the officers and could rise very high in government. They were educated in Turkish, Persian and Arabic literature; archery, wrestling and horseback combat; and even music. The best of their class became Palace officials, while the average students were cavalry officers, still elite among the Corps.

At first, the devşirme was levied only in the Balkans, mostly on Bulgarians, Serbs, Armenians and Albanians. Greeks tended to live in cities, so their kids were less often taken. Some places surrendered to the Ottomans with explicit exemptions in their terms, so the devşirme did not take place in Constantinople or Rhodes. Later, the levy extended eastward, too. With that said, apparently the Muslim religious establishment didn’t approve of the child-taking method of raising an army. Naturally, the Eastern Orthodox clergy were very much against it. But it’s surprising that there was opposition from within Islam. I can think of three reasons; the first is the most optimistic: that there was an emerging discomfort with slavery itself. The other two reasons would be that a minority sect of dervishes acted as chaplains to the Janissaries, which gave them more power; and that officials sometimes levied more children than their quotas actually required so that they could ransom them back to their families, which was certainly a pretty bad sort of corruption.

There’s an odd quirk in the Janissary nomenclature, stemming from an early pragmatic plan for how the Palace would feed their new soldiers. The Corps was known as the Ocak (ojak), which means “oven” in Turkish, while its commanding officers were the Soup Masters. Units had brass cooking pots that were displayed in parades, and some Janissaries had wooden spoons on their hats as decoration.

In 1402, the existing Janissaries were killed defending the town of Ankara against the new Mongol invasion. The devşirme child-tax was suspended as the Ottoman kingdom went into defensive confusion. When it picked up again later, the Janissaries grew larger than ever, and from the early 1400s they became masters of artillery and gunpowder. The devşirme system ran until the 1600s, but as the Janissary Ocak turned into a really enviable career path, Muslims were clamoring to have their sons admitted on a voluntary basis. Even Christian families were grooming sons to be chosen by the devşirme officers. So once again, the professional “slave” army turned into a governing class, just as it had in Cairo.

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Ibn Khaldun Asks Tough Questions about History, 1377

Posted on January 7, 2024 by Ruth

The Ibn Khaldun family were descended from a Bedouin, Khaldun, who settled near Seville in the early years of Muslim conquest. Under Reconquista pressure in the 13th century, they moved to Tunis, where they were among the educated governing elite. In 1332, the author we know as “Ibn Khaldun” was born there. He had a typical (and good) Islamic education, but just as he was about grown up, the plague struck Tunis. Both of his parents, and perhaps more of his family, died. Orphaned but with some inherited money, Ibn Khaldun set out on a career as a civil servant at the age of 20.

For twelve years, he held court and secretarial posts in Tunis and Fez. He was always clearly more brilliant and ambitious than the average civil servant, and this frequently got him in trouble. He would be suspected of rebellion and imprisoned; released, he would go to another court and after a few years the same thing happened. At age 32, he crossed to Granada, where he was a close friend of Ibn Khatib, the Vizier and plague documenter. He may have met Ibn Khatib when he, in turn, had displeased the Emir of Granada and fled to Fez. The culture and language on both sides of the Gibraltar Strait were identical.

It’s not clear if Ibn Khaldun was actually conspiring against his Emirs and Viziers. What we do know is that in his career, he crossed the Strait more than once and worked in every government in the region. In 1375, weary of the constant political fighting, he withdrew to the shelter of some Berber tribesmen in western Algeria. With his family, he lived in a desert fortress called Qalat ibn Salamah. There, he began to write a memoir that became a history of the world. Unfortunately, the Berbers were lacking a decent library, so after 3 years he went back to Tunis to complete his book. Wouldn’t you know, the Sultan of Tlemcen felt he was rebellious…and it all started again.

On pretext of going to Mecca, Ibn Khaldun went east to Cairo. Barquq, the first Burji (Circassian) Mamluk king, invited him to teach at al-Azhar School/University. Ibn Khaldun became the chief Qadi (Judge) of Maliki Islam. But personal tragedy struck: his family, who had safely followed him through his many political moves, were all lost on the ship that carried them to Egypt to meet him. Stricken, he completed his Hajj to Mecca. With a few more adventures, he finished his life in Cairo, teaching Maliki law and serving the Burji Mamluk. During his last years, he was arrested for political activism (say it ain’t so).

The reason we still know about Ibn Khaldun, who was only one of thousands of similar civil servants and judges in 14th century Islam, is that the books he wrote in Tunis were among the most original, philosophical, thoughtful works of the Middle Ages, and still holds up well today. When he began to write the history of the Berbers, he started by thinking carefully about what it means to study and write history:

[The study of history] is dependent on studying numerous sources, understanding diverse subjects, having the best insight and analysis, and being able to verify the truth of sources as they can deviate and be filled with mistakes. Historical research must not be dependent on bare copying of all reports. It should instead be based on an understanding of local customs, politics, the nature of civilization, and the local conditions of where humans live. You must also be able to compare primary and secondary sources, as they can help you differentiate between the truth and falsehood, helping derive conclusions that are believable and honest. (tr. Firas Alkhateeb )

The Prologue, or Muqaddimah, lays out principles of history, political science, sociology and economics. After this first book, he went on to tell the history of “the world” in four books, and of the Berbers in the last two. Ibn Khaldun’s experience of the plague visitation shaped how he thought about writing a book. He recalled reading a book about the peoples of Europe written in the 10th century, and how that world had passed away.

When there is a general change of conditions, it is as if the entire creation had changed and the whole world been altered, as if it were a new and repeated creation, a world brought into existence anew. Therefore, there is need at this time that someone should systematically set down the situation of the world among all regions and races, as well as the customs and sectarian beliefs that have changed for their adherents, doing for this age what al-Mas’udi did for his. This should be a model for future historians to follow. In this book of mine, I shall discuss as much of that as will be possible for me here in the Maghrib. (tr. Franz Rosenthal)

Ibn Khaldun’s prologue lays out the errors that historians must avoid. They must be well-informed about the region and time, and the customs of the people, so that they don’t make ignorant errors. For example, we know that Ibn Khaldun was a judge, a Qadi, but if we read into that American norms of what a judge does, we’d probably completely misunderstand what he did in Cairo. Cultural understanding is the only way to avoid this kind of error.

He also questioned the way numbers are reported in many accounts of the past. He pointed out that numbers may be inflated according to someone’s hopes, such as overstating the size of an army. We need to take what we know about probability in the present, and apply it to the past: how likely is it that this size army could be raised from that size of a kingdom? How possible would it be for the King of Yemen to invade Morocco, as one legend claimed, given the amount of food and water he’d have needed to cross North Africa?

Ibn Khaldun applied his questioning not just to numbers, but to other claims. When we see a story about some historical figure, we must ask if it’s consistent with the customs of the time, what else we know about the person, and how human psychology generally runs. What is likely, what is probable? What is even possible? “For,” he said, “the past is more like the future than two drops of water.” His own past roles in so many kingdoms and Emirships made him highly aware of human political psychology.

He also criticized past legends that didn’t accord with observable natural science. We can hear echoes of his friend and rival, Ibn Khatib, who suggested that if a disease was obviously contagious, we must challenge hadiths that deny it. This may have been a leading topic among the intellectuals of the Spanish-Moroccan culture. They sought to apply what they could see and know, to work out natural and logical explanations.

Now it might seem, at this point, that Ibn Khaldun’s outlook was pretty modern. In his view, it certainly was: he was part of the post-plague new world. There are still some jarring points in which he isn’t in line with the modern world we know. In particular, he had a very strong sense of tribal and personal identity that trumped all of his other concerns.

When he evaluated Moses’ claim of his army’s size, he judged the possibility of such numbers against the timeline of Moses’ given genealogy. He knew of four generations from Jacob, so four it must have been, and no more. We’d never do this now, we’d assume that it was a truncated list that skips the forgettable names. But to Ibn Khaldun, the one non-negotiable was that you must never question someone’s claims of identity. It was almost a religious principle: “people are to be believed regarding the descent they claim for themselves.” (tr. Rosenthal)

It’s not hard to find the Ibn Khaldun family’s story traced in his principles. His family had been the nobility of Sevilla before it fell to Christians. If he made a claim about his descent, he was not able to prove it, because they had left Spain as refugees. He wanted to be trusted, so he set it out as a principle. Further, his family had been upper class, rulers; they expected to be such in Tunis, too. And they were. He felt it was only right, and he resented social climbers. In degenerate Spain, ever since they had lost their dynastic traditions,  “professional men and artisans are to be found pursuing power and authority and eager to obtain them.” They did not understand “group feeling.”

By contrast, he saw his social class as best able to understand history and perhaps the world. They had retained the “group feeling” of tribal solidarity as Arabs and, in Spain, as Umayyads.

…those who have experience with tribal conditions, group feeling, and dynasties along the western shore, and who know how superiority is achieved among nations and tribal groups, will rarely make mistakes or give erroneous interpretations in this respect.

It’s clear that Ibn Khaldun had an ambitiously thoughtful mind and a clear sense of his role in history. He was right, too. In 1377 when his book was published times had begun to change rapidly and the speed would only pick up. His record of Muslim history in the Maghreb cannot be valued. But he went beyond this: applying what he’d observed in his many political posts, he worked out principles of economics and sociology (we see a bit of this in his “group feeling” comments).

He saw cycles of history, in particular the same cycles we’ve observed in Muslim history: the influx and taming of nomads. Living among Berbers and Bedouins, and also in developed cities like Granada, Ibn Khaldun saw very plainly the tension between the two lifestyles. Nomads had a super-efficient lifestyle that made their religion burn intensely hot. They were the ideal practitioners of Mohammed’s faith, because their lifestyle still fitted his prescriptions precisely. So they would swarm a city, only to gradually adopt its ways, until another way of nomads came along who were still pure and hot. It was a novel way to look at history, to abstract a general plot from specific instances. It was moralistic but not in the old way. He was observing a natural explanation in customs and “group feeling,” rather than just saying that each losing group had been wicked.

After Ibn Khaldun’s death, no serious imitators arose. We know less about the region’s history after his time simply because he did his work so well. Probably everything I’ve ever blogged about Morocco and the Berbers, and Spain and Cordoba, traces back to Ibn Khaldun’s hand. So here’s a big hat tip to Wali al-Din abu Zayd Abd ar-Rahman ibn Muhammed ibn Muhammed  ibn Abī Bakr Muḥammad ibn al-Ḥasan ibn Khaldun.

Posted in Black Death, Islam History F: the Ottomans, Literature | Comments Off on Ibn Khaldun Asks Tough Questions about History, 1377

Ibn Battuta Sees the World, 1325-55

Posted on January 7, 2024 by Ruth

The Muslim world had grown so large that it was very hard for them to know all parts of their own lands, let alone the rest of the world. Around 1355, a Moroccan named Ibn Battuta dictated and published his travel notes, titled A Gift to Those Who Contemplate the Wonders of Cities and the Marvels of Traveling (in short, “Travels,” Arabic Rihla). He had made three long journeys through the Muslim lands, reaching as far as Indonesia to the east and Mali to the southwest. He became the Marco Polo of the Arabic world.

For a long time, his book was not available to Europeans. It was only translated even partially into German in 1819, and English in 1829. (I’m working from the 1829 translation.) Since this was an era of expanding European horizons, too, there was great interest in his book. Like Marco Polo’s book, it existed in multiple versions that had been hand-copied and translated, so they had to compare texts and create one authoritative version, which came out in French in 1853. The final authoritative unabridged volume did not appear in English until 1994!

I’m going to take the time to tell his stories, since we’re coming to the end of the Middle Ages and these are the last close-up pictures of many places we’ve touched on.

Ibn Battuta’s journeys were originally conceived as pilgrimages; his first trip at age 21 was intended to be a Hajj. He did go to Mecca, perhaps more than once, and he may have stayed there for some time. But he also wanted to visit Muslim saints, living and dead. His readers wanted to hear about the holy men (sheikhs) and shrines, so that’s a lot of what he documented. Then, on every trip, some opportunity would present itself, and he’d go off on long, sometimes dangerous jaunts—-still managing to catch any available Muslim saints.

EAST AFRICA

Leaving North Africa, he traveled through Syria and Iraq, visiting many Shi’ite shrines to Ali and his family, and he saw many ruins caused, probably, by the Mongol invasions. Turning south, he toured Yemen and crossed into Africa. The highlight of his visit to Mogadishu was its strange food (roast plantains, pickled peppers, and green ginger) and fat people, each of whom ate “as much as a congregation.” Ibn Battuta claims to have seen “the island of Mombasa” and perhaps Zanzibar, but scholars doubt him: he probably just wrote what people told him. But if he even went around the Horn of Africa to Mogadishu, that’s pretty impressive.

Ibn Battuta returned through Yemen and wrote that he saw two great wonders in the town of Zafar: the people there fed fish to their sheep and goats (there was no grass); further they never injured anyone unless he hurt them first, a custom the North African traveler could scarcely believe. However, their town stank terribly and was filled with flies, on account of their sole food products, fish and dates. It’s details like this that give the work charm beyond the simple catalog of towns, sheikhs, and tombs.

Going toward the Indian Sea, Ibn Battuta saw the betel-nut and the coconut, both unfamiliar to westerners like himself. He was amazed at how many products were made from the coconut: rope, milk, “olive” oil, and honey. He also described the customs of Arab pearl-divers around Bahrain, noting that the Persian merchants gave 1/5 of the pearls to the king, but after they took their own cut, little was left and the actual divers, who risked their lives, lived in a state of chronic debt.

WESTERN CENTRAL ASIA

When he traveled through Anatolia among Turks, Ibn Battuta was shown a “stone that fell from heaven.” It was black and smooth, and so hard that four smiths hammering on it made no impression. In Konya, he heard a twisted version of the life of Rumi: This man was an esteemed teacher, they told him, but one day a candy-vendor sold him a piece that he ate in the classroom. Then he grew agitated and walked out. He was found wandering the countryside in a demented state, reciting Persian verses. Following him around, his students copied out the verses, and that’s how we got Rumi’s book Masnavi. It was all from candy laced with LSD or something. Um, yeah.

Ibn Battuta was generally treated like a high dignitary, close to royalty. He met the last Ilkhan of Persia, Abu Said Bahadur Khan, and also the King of the Golden Horde, Öz Beg (or Uzbek). Öz Beg’s Golden Horde territory in Russia fielded one of the largest armies of the time and left Ibn Battuta very impressed with his grandeur. Also, this Sultan’s wives went about unveiled! It was disturbing.

In Astrakhan and Sarai, the traveler heard tales about the “lands of darkness” where there was nothing but snow and people had to travel in sledges pulled by dogs, since other animals slipped on the ice. They described to him how there was a certain place forty days’ journey north, where a merchant could leave his trade goods overnight and the locals would take what they wanted, leaving furs in their place. The implication was that they never met the mysterious trappers. Ibn Battuta says wished to see this, and he did go as far north as the city of Bulghar on the Volga River; but scholars don’t believe him. He’d probably be more believable if he told some quirky detail he’d seen at Bulghar.

CONSTANTINOPLE

Then Ibn Battuta heard that King Öz Beg was planning a trip to Constantinople for one of his wives. She was the (illegitimate) daughter of Emperor Andronikos, and she kept begging to give birth to her baby back home in Constantinople with better medical care. Reluctantly, Öz Beg hired Ibn Battuta to lead her expedition, which gave him an expenses-paid trip to Constantinople.

Mrs. Öz Beg and Ibn Battuta began a three-week journey with a large retinue. At a halfway point, her escort changed from her husband’s Emir to her father’s General. Ibn Battuta was shocked to see that she stopped bothering with her traveling mosque, no more muezzin calls. She started drinking wine and even—if it can be believed—eating swine’s flesh! There was nothing the good Moroccan trip leader could do about it, since they were now trailed by 5000 Byzantine troops in armor. At their destination, he reported that the Byzantine Emperor asked him a lot of questions about the Holy Land and let him tour the city, including Hagia Sofia (from the outside; he could not go in without passing a big cross that he’d have to bow to). Mrs. Öz Beg now made it clear that she was not going back to Sarai with the baby. She sent the Turkish servants home, with Ibn Battuta again as leader.

CENTRAL ASIA AND NORTH INDIA

The traveler went on to Khwarezm, where he saw a watermelon: hard green shell, bright red inside, “perfectly sweet.” He said they cut it into oblongs and dried it, sending cases of dried melon as gifts for kings in China and India.

Traveling in 1333, Ibn Battuta heard stories about the “Tartar” conquest as though a century had not passed. He saw ruined cities still not rebuilt, including Bokhara and Balkh. They were still telling legends about Genghis Khan. But Balkh still had a Muslim saint’s tomb, so it was all good. Ibn Battuta crossed into Afghanistan, and over the Hindu Kush passes to India. Guides told him that the mountains’ name meant Hindu-killer, since slaves brought from India generally died. He met many hermits and saw many exotic fruits, which he happily described. Then he arrived in Delhi, the capital, and unfortunately he met the current Sultan, Mohammed bin Tugluk.

DELHI

That was a turning-point in his journey, because the Sultan appointed him to be the chief Islamic judge, the Qadi, in Delhi. He was stuck in this job for six years, and he found it frustrating. He had Maliki Sharia-law training among Hanafis, and he could not speak the language. Delhi’s court had limited influence, since it was a Muslim island in a Hindu sea. But he was a trophy for the Delhi Sultan: an Arabic-speaker, trained in Islamic law, from the other side of the Muslim world. He was a real celebrity and Mohammed bin Tugluk was not giving that up.

Delhi under Mohammed bin Tugluk was a sorry place. Like King Philip in France, the Sultan had decided to mix base metals into gold and silver coins without altering their face value. One result had been an eruption of counterfeiting, since now a half-copper coin was already in legal circulation. People lost trust in all coins and the economy collapsed. There were famines in northern India, and much of Delhi’s population fled. Ibn Battuta found a city with eerily vacant streets.

Worse, the Sultan had a terrible temper and no patience. There were many rebellions and attempted assassination, but he suspected even more, sometimes including Ibn Battuta. It was very dangerous. Ibn Battuta tells that he witnessed the execution of some would-be assassins: they were tossed and trampled by elephants who had been shod with sharp iron shoe-knives. Sometimes the victim was cut in pieces, sometimes flayed and then fed to dogs.

In Delhi, he witnessed miracles done by Yogis. They were not Muslims, of course, but the Sultan was on very good terms with them and asked them to demonstrate their powers. Ibn Battuta says that one yogi turned himself into a cube and floated in the air, which astonished him so much that he fainted and later suffered heart palpitations. After that demonstration, he believed whatever he heard about yogis who could take the shape of animals or kill someone with just a look. Battuta loved them anyway; they were holy men, object of his governing passion.

Ibn Battuta’s habit of visiting holy men in huts and caves was his near undoing. The Sultan suddenly mistrusted his favorite cave-living hermit; he arrested the sheikh and everyone who had visited him. Ibn Battuta waited for four days to know his sentence, fasting and repeating the Koran. In the end, he was the only person not executed. This narrow escape persuaded him that he had to leave Delhi.

SOUTH INDIA

He finally got away by leading a high-profile embassy to China, loaded down with extremely expensive and large gifts: 100 horses, 1oo Mamluks, 100 slave-girls, and a vast number of silk and jeweled garments. He set off with a very large party that included soldiers and Chinese officials. On the way to the western coast, to take ship from southern India, he met with some pretty bad setbacks.

In one city, there was a Hindu uprising against the Muslim rulers, and Ibn Battuta’s large, well-armed party joined the fray. Several key men were killed, and Battuta himself got lost for a week, captured then abandoned in the countryside. Somehow they pulled through all this and kept going, by land and sea.

Absolute disaster awaited him when he finally arrived at the Malabar Coast port where he was to sail for China. First, he saw that the largest ships in port were the Chinese junks that had woven-reed sails and looked, to him, like they were carrying whole towns on board. Second, they had to wait three months before anyone consider making shipping arrangements. Finally, when they started to board, even the huge junks appointed for them were not enough to fit the 100 slave-girls, so Ibn Battuta had to overnight on shore, waiting to see if another smaller ship could be sent. A storm blew into the harbor during the night. Several ships were smashed up against the shore, and sank; some Chinese and Indian officials drowned. The ship carrying most of the expensive gifts (including the horses and Mamluks?) disappeared, perhaps sailed out of port to avoid foundering. Ibn Battuta never saw any of it again, and just like that, his embassy had failed. He was terrified to go back to the unreasonable Sultan.

Ibn Battuta stayed on in southern India until Hindu revolts caught up with his host and he had to leave fast. All through India, this was the case: chronic local wars between “infidels” and Muslims. In places where some famous Muslim holy man had worked miracles, more had converted; and in some places they had reinforcements from the stronger outside Muslim world. In other places, the Hindus were stronger (and nearly always more numerous), and sometimes Muslim rulers bought peace with tribute to them. The pattern of religious conflict that continues today was already well-established.

His next stop was in the Maldives Islands, south of Sri Lanka. But the Muslim Sultan of the Maldives pressed him into service, again, as a Qadi. Think, though, about what you know about Moroccan Maliki Muslims, and what you know about the Buddhist-Hindu cultures of places like Sri Lanka and Indonesia. It was a really bad fit for Battuta: he had been shocked at the Golden Horde’s unveiled women, but these Indian women bared a lot of skin! He was supposed to make them into good Muslims? Sadly, they didn’t want to hear it. He lasted nearly a year and found a way to leave.

After leaving the Maldives, he traveled more in India because there were still more Muslim hermits to meet. One hermit made a huge impression by predicting the future in uncanny detail. He was wearing a goat-hair robe that Ibn Battuta admired, wishing it were his but saying nothing. The hermit immediately took it off and put it on Ibn Battuta, with a prediction: the robe was actually a gift for another holy man in China, but an infidel Indian king would take it from Ibn Battuta and give it to the holy man. When it all came true, Battuta was more astonished than ever. The last chapter of the goat’s hair coat, he said, happened in Khanbalik (Beijing)! There he met the new and final owner of the coat in a hermit’s cell.

EAST ASIA AND CHINA

Finally, he decided to go on to China. He sailed to Sumatra, where there was a coastal Muslim Sultanate. As he crossed the island to take another ship at an infidel port, he carefully observed all of the trees and shrubs famous in the west for their spices. Moroccans would want to know that the clove was the blossom on the nutmeg fruit, and that camphor only forms inside a reed if an animal is sacrificed at the roots.

Ships carried him mostly safely with a stopover in Vietnam, where he met a ruling princess who greeted him in Turkish, then to China. In every major Yuan Chinese city there was a community of Muslim traders. Ibn Battuta found people from Egypt and Persia; he stayed with them, visited their mosques, and of course inquired after their local holy men and tombs. He was up for visiting Buddhist hermits and touring all kinds of temples. Going north to Beijing, he presented himself as the ambassador of Delhi. It’s difficult to know exactly where Ibn Battuta went in China, because he transcribed place names that he heard in Arabic. Few of the places match with any modern city or even river names. In 1340, the Khan’s capital city was called Khanbalik by the Mongols and Dadu by the Chinese; it may have been called something else by the Muslim merchants.

Ibn Battuta was very surprised at some Chinese customs. Even in the 14th century, the Chinese were notable for their rich men dressing in simple colors, looking much like poor men. Their wealth was shown only in gold rings that specified their net worth. Further, the rich men dressed in cotton, because silk was so cheap that the poor could wear it. In a different vein, he got the shock of his life when he saw a portrait of himself hanging on a city wall. It had been drawn without his knowledge and served as a sort of hostage in case he broke some law, they could issue a Wanted poster. Personal property had to be accounted for to the smallest item: anything found on a ship that had not been listed in the ship’s manifest became the king’s. But there was no theft; merchants could travel anywhere with any sums and find no danger, because at each town, a magistrate made property lists and locked up foreigners overnight for safekeeping.

At Guangzhou (Canton), he met a 200 year old holy man who never ate, and who could make himself disappear. Everyone said he was a Muslim, but nobody saw him pray. Spooky! Hangzhou, the city of canals, was presented to him as the Emperor’s capital city. Ibn Battuta tells us that it was larger than any other city he’d seen on his travels. He got to see a magic show in which a boy climbed a rope hanging in mid-air, and was then cut to pieces with a knife and reassembled, perfectly alive. Ibn Battuta had heart palpitations, but his host, a Qadi (Islamic judge), whispered that nobody had been cut up, it was all just tricks.

His Chinese stories and names become tangled at this point: There was a short civil war, with the Khan’s death and burial. But the details better match the story of a high-ranking official, Bayan, who was replaced by his nephew in 1340. In any case, it became too dangerous to remain. A few years later, in 1351, a major rebellion would break out that would lead to the Mongol Yuan Dynasty’s replacement with the native-Chinese Ming Dynasty.

Ibn Battuta left in 1346. He saw Mecca again, and then went straight to Morocco. He managed to be in the Middle East in 1348, the heart of the plague season. However, perhaps he had been exposed to similar germs in other places—-he had been very sick any number of times, in his travels. He did not get the plague, and he got home to Fez.

WEST AFRICA

Ibn Battuta crossed part of the Sahara Desert and went to Sudan. He was shocked by the behavior of the sub-Saharan Africans and nearly packed up to leave. Black men frightened him; he felt they were hostile to “white men,” of whom he was one. He traveled along the Niger River in Mali, at one point meeting the great Mansa who controlled the gold market. After even minor kings had showered him with expensive gifts all over Asia, he was surprised that the Mansa gave him a simple meal and no more. He was even more shocked at the undress of the women: worse than in India, these girls went naked until they were married! And yet the society was very devout in their Muslim faith; every boy was forced to memorize the Koran.

In the Niger River, Ibn Battuta saw a hippopotamus herd. He thought at first they were elephants in size, but then they looked more like horses, only much larger. He was told they were “sea horses,” which is the literal meaning of their Greek name: river horses. Also in the Niger area, they warned him of cannibals who only ate black men, thinking men with paler skin were not ripe. The farthest south Ibn Battuta claims to have reached was the town we call Gao, which he knew as Kawkaw. Then he circled back up through Sijilmassa, and home.

FAMILY

Ibn Battuta had been traveling for 30 years. His parents had died while he was away, and he was now about 50. He probably married and fathered a few children in Fez. All through his travel notes, though, we hear of wives and children. Each time he stayed somewhere for more than a month, he took a concubine or married a local woman. In Delhi, his wife was related to the Sultan’s family; in the Maldive Islands, he also married into the king’s family. He may have married as many as four girls in the Maldives, all of them from the richest families. The king’s Vizier began to suspect him of plotting to overthrow the government, but he’d had his fill of drama in Delhi. He divorced all of the women except one who had given him a baby during his 9 months’ stay. He went back later to visit the child, leaving the mother with money. He had several more children, all left behind with their mothers when he moved on.

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The Plague on the Silk Road

Posted on November 3, 2023 by Ruth

Some time during a world history survey course in high school, or perhaps in a good documentary on the History Channel, you learned that medieval Europeans didn’t realize that rats carried fleas that carried Yersinia pestis bacteria. They were used to rat infestations and flea bites, so when they all got sick, they were puzzled and believed it was “bad air.” I’ve seen so many pictures of the rats (who scurried off ships and swam to shore, infecting the rats of each passing city) and jokes about the rats…it’s weird to find that there’s little evidence that rats had much to do with it.

The deadliest infectious diseases are those that jump from animals to humans; they may not be serious to the animal, and in theory, they can’t survive in a human body. But they do. Just as some common human foods are actually lethal to your cat or dog, these mild animal infections slay millions of people. Y. pestis is an infection of rodents, but different strains live in rats or in groundhogs—or to use the formal name for the ones in Asia, marmots. Marmots are the prairie dogs of the steppes. They live all across Asia and into Northern China; their habitat is the arid grassland. And marmots, not rats, are the primary carriers of the deadliest plagues.

Much of what we think we know about Bubonic plague comes from a modern pandemic. Alexandre Yersin, a Swiss-French doctor, isolated the bacteria at the root of an epidemic in Hong Kong in 1894. This plague is known as the Third Pandemic; it began in 1855 in China. It was during this 19th century pandemic that dead rats were observed, and the linkage between fleas and Y. pestis was made. But it’s also clear that the Y. pestis strain was much weaker during the modern Third Pandemic than it had been in the past. After trying out the idea that medieval writers exaggerated, we’ve mostly settled on the realization that Bubonic plague is at its weakest if you have to be bitten by a flea. When you really worry is when it goes airborne. “Bad air” indeed.

There had been two infamous ancient plagues, the Plagues of Athens and of Justinian, and we don’t know if they were caused by Y. pestis. We can guess, but it’s only with the 14th century one that we can know by digging up bones to test. Most of our information about the medieval plague comes from Europe, where it shocked the population into trauma that lasted for centuries. We know a lot less about its ground zero history in China, perhaps because it was just one of many diseases. We also know less about its history in the Middle East, but we do know a little. Let’s look now at the plague as it affected the Mongolian domains of China, the Silk Road, and the Middle East.

The first outbreak of the bacteria from the marmot population in northern China probably came around 1330. Yuan Dynasty China had not been doing as well under Kublai’s successors, but there was also a lot of severe weather in the early 1300s. It was severe in Northern Europe, too, but both trends are generally seen as regional. As part of a larger pattern, they were early signs of massive global cooling that we call the Little Ice Age. It’s arguable that we’re only now emerging from the Little Ice Age; it’s also possible that during times of climate change, microscopic populations go through shifts that we don’t understand.

The effect was that in both northern Europe and northern China, there were terrible famines that lasted for multiple years, and more routine epidemics of things like typhoid that left the population thinned by about 10% and weakened by malnutrition. When the marmot infection crossed over, perhaps through some hunters who killed a sick animal, it met the weakened immune systems of adults who had starved as children. Between 1330 and 1350, there may have been three separate waves of plague infection in China, in various regions, each recorded at the time as slaying over half the population. Modern estimates suggest as many as 25 million deaths in the vicinity of China. We have no detailed medical descriptions from the Chinese outbreaks, perhaps because it was mistaken for other common epidemics.

We’re pretty sure that the plague came to Europe along the Silk Road. It may not have been carried by infected travelers; it may have jumped from marmots again in the steppes of Afghanistan or Iran. We don’t know. We do have signs of early plague deaths along the Silk Road as early as 1345. Over the next two years, the infections came closer to Europe and at last some Tatars who were besieging a Black Sea port began to die. Then their corpses were used as weapons, perhaps with no understanding that these corpses were much more dangerous than the usual.

The siege wasn’t very effective; ships could and did leave. Some unknown number of ships set out for Alexandria, Constantinople, and Genoa. They tried to make provision stops along the way. But somewhere between the Silk Road and the ships, the infection became airborne. And the airborne form of Y. pestis is very rapidly lethal; death can come within 8 hours of infection. This rapidity may have helped it spread slowly at first, as whole families in isolation died out without spreading it. This could be why there’s no record of the plague spreading to India, although the Silk Road ran across its northern edge. But on ships, even two hours of asymptomatic infection were enough to infect ten more people.

Within a few stops, it was clear to every harbor that the ships had plague. Probably, a boat with a few “healthy” people met to discuss the situation, and that was enough to transfer the plague ashore even if nobody was allowed to land. By the time the Genoa-bound ship had gone around the boot of Italy, everyone knew; ports shot fire arrows at the plague ships to drive them off. But it was too late.

The plague hit Alexandria, Constantinople, and port cities of Italy within the same months of 1347. It spread rapidly through Turkey and Syria, and from Alexandria, it fanned out into Egypt and North Africa. It raged through the ancient cities, devastating economies that had already been suffering from repeated conquest. Baghdad was rebuilt after its utter sacking in 1258 and was now a dirty market town: want to catch the plague there? What about depressed, crowded Constantinople or Alexandria? Damietta, anyone? Ashkelon? Oh, I know, how about Jerusalem, which had been depopulated, burned, wrecked, and repopulated in cycles for the last few centuries?

In each city, the plague stayed in a highly infectious stage for a little over a year, then new infections and deaths began to slow. About two years after the first cases, there were no new ones. So in Italy, Alexandria, and Constantinople, the hot years were 1347 to 1348, while in Germany, there were places that saw no plague cases until 1349, and it lasted into 1350.

Christian and Muslim medical science was very similar at that time, since both were based on Greek texts translated into Arabic or Latin. If you went to medical school in Pisa, you’d read works by Avicenna, a great Muslim doctor. But cultural attitudes to the epidemic were very different.

Christian societies believed the plague was punishment for sin. They tried to fight it with repentance, both with parades of relics and with flagellation to demonstrate remorse. Those who could afford to flee from the “bad air” did so, and some survived for that reason (one Italian family sealed up their house and didn’t come out for two months, while the Pope at Avignon stayed very isolated near a fire). They saw the plague as coming from God, but also as something that the saints could stop if they chose. Doctors did their best to understand the disease process, but the problem was that so many people died so fast. A man might make a last will and call in a notary to see it witnessed, only to find the notary dead, and a few hours later, his witnesses dead. When his heirs tried to bury him, they couldn’t execute the will because they began to sicken and die, and there was no time to make a proper new will. You can imagine how chaotic medical observation was, in those conditions.

The Muslim world saw the plague as a God’s will, not to be changed or fled. Death could be a merciful release from this life, and hadiths said that plague deaths were a special kind of martyrdom. Their doctors observed and treated as they could, but they may not even have been called in for most cases. While individuals might flee the epidemic, their culture did not encourage their attitudes; one hadith of Mohammed specifically says “do not flee from the plague.” Instead, their leaders encouraged greater exercise of personal piety and prayer. They probably recited the hadiths (Sahih Bukhari 622-631) about the blessed state of death from plague more often than before. On the whole, they made their wills and waited to see if they would die or live. They attended weekly public funerals for large number of the dead, instead of keeping track of individual funerals.

Lisad al-Din ibn Khatib, Vizier to the Emir of Granada, wrote a book about his plague observations. Squarely facing the hadith tradition that plague was only an expression of God’s will, he stated that so many accounts of transmission by garments, earrings, eating/drinking vessels, and direct human contact just couldn’t be ignored. He stated that the hadith tradition must be modified if it’s in such “manifest contradiction with the evidence of the perception of senses.” In 1374, about 12 years after his book was published, he was executed for heresy in Fez, possibly for his medical opinions among others.

Ibn Khaldun, whose parents died in Tunis’s plague, saw the plague as a watershed in history. Everything was going along the same each century, until the plague hit:

It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out. It overtook the dynasties at the time of their senility, when they had reached the limit of their duration. It lessened their power and curtailed their influence. It weakened their authority. Their situation approached the point of annihilation and dissolution. Civilization decreased with the decrease of mankind. Cities and buildings were laid waste, roads and way signs were obliterated, settlements and mansions became empty, dynasties and tribes grew weak. The entire inhabited world changed.

There’s no way to measure the devastating effect of the plague on the cities left behind. Whole houses were left empty, whole professions stripped of masters and teachers. In England, the routine teaching of French at school came to an end. Some large buildings lost their architects and had to be completed in simpler ways. So many priests died in Europe that the old apprenticeship training system fell apart; they had to found seminaries to train young men in larger groups. There were chaotic population transfers between farms and towns, as vacancies got filled. Within two generations and about four plague episodes, Europe’s feudal system was mostly dead and peasants began uprisings to demand wages.

Constantinople was gutted. The plague was the last blow to this city that was once the capital of its region, with the best of everything. After the Fourth Crusade burned much of it, and then the Byzantines spent 50 years battling back into power, there was much to recover from. In 1347, the recovery shut down. There’s a direct link between the plague and the city’s humiliation in having to pay tribute to the Turks around 1360. By 1371, when peasant revolutions began to roil Europe, Constantinople was officially a vassal state.

The last Ilkhan descended from Hulegu died of plague during early Silk Road outbreaks in the 1330s. His heirs all died with him, leaving a complete vacancy, which led to the break-up of the Ilkhanate into warring, impoverished cities. The new Mamluk Sultan, a 12 year old boy, survived but the city was weakened, which must have affected Mamluk politics.

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